So here are a few little tales I found on Reddit that sound like they were directed by M. Night Shyamalan ; you’ll want to read them until their ends, as that’s where the real magic happens.
First, a 4chan anon turns a rom-com into a horror movie.
This kind fellow worked so hard, didn’t even get a handjob out of it.
This helpful and reassuring fellow has an unexpected question.
Well, maybe not THAT unexpected.
Anyway, ladies feel free to email this guy anytime.
This one quickly descends into chaos:
BuT GIrLs hAvE iT So EasY oN DaTing SiTeS!
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Now Squawk can go back to his other sociopathic “friends”* and brag about how his ranting hateful nonsense got called out for what it is. Or whatever, I don’t care.
What does anyone know about crows (western US version)? There have been more of them hanging around my house since lockdown started way back centuries ago. They’re very cool, sitting around all black and shiny. And they’re crows, not ravens, I have looked it up. The smaller birds sure get scarce when they’re around. What do they want me to do? (either biologically or mythologically)
*Quotes because, do sociopaths actually have friends or merely co-conspirators?
@Allandrel
Glad you’re okay, and also ouch. And yeah, I had a lot of similar feelings back when I was a guy, and haven’t lost them completely either. It’s so easy to internalize society’s fear and hatred of us.
Re autie monologues, I happen to love when my friends or partners dive into those. Esp. about STEM and social sciences stuff. It’s always a learning experience… And also kinda hot IMO. I love the combination of analytic brilliance and wide-eyed, innocent fascination.
(IDK if you watch Dr. Who, but IMO there’s this certain autistic facial expression that Jodie Whittaker just *nails*. The first time I watched her as the 13th Doctor I was shocked how much she reminded me of one of my exes.)
@Alan
I didn’t get to mention it before Squack went berserk, but just want to voice my absolute horror at the Daniel Tosh story. That’s… Not only evil and indefensible, I have to wonder if it’s legal. It reads like a threat or even incitement, esp. with context of an audience that could easily become a mob. And I can’t imagine he didn’t notice that possibility.
Also, it really should have been an early tell how one of the stand-ups coming to his defense was Louis CK. 😐
@Alan: LOL! I’ll be sure to tell you if one of ours does that — so far they just sit on the wires normally. Loooooming. The cat doesn’t seem to recognize them as birds, but then he’s the most intellectually-challenged feline I’ve ever known. Maybe he’s just scared of them.
I once witnessed a crow and a large tabby eyeing each other across a vacant lot near my house. Kitty was sitting full upright maybe 15 yards away, not about to stalk. I could hear Western shootout music.
Sociopaths at least have people they like to hang with. Dan Davies’s biography of Jimmy Savile emphasized that he was a very social person. Some people, like politicians and police officers, he hung with because he was using them to get himself out of trouble and aid in the cover-up of his behavior. The were others he kept around to have fun abusing kids together with him. But there were definitely plenty of people he just enjoyed interacting with. He never shared anything emotionally or told anything about himself that wasn’t the same boasting half-lie he had told 50 million times before, but he did derive pleasure from company. So I guess it depends on the definition of friends, but it at least is a good idea to remind ourselves that the stereotype of these guys as loners is not entirely true.
@ cyborgette
Indeed. As it happens I gave a talk recently that covered incitement (or as it’s now called here Ss 39-41 Serious Crime Act 2007). There is meant to be a video of that, so if/when it goes up I’ll put the link here. Ironically, as it’s a talk to activists, they’re having to edit to make sure I don’t commit any of the offences myself.
But in essence, in English law, the test is now whether the statement or actions would be likely to actually lead to a real risk of someone acting on them. So in law, ‘its only a joke’ can be a defence. Although not always. You can’t couch a genuine threat as a joke and expect immunity.
It used to be that the courts just looked at the words used; regardless of outcome. But there were a couple of cases here; a comment about blowing up an inefficient airport and a ‘kill all men’ hashtag where the courts decided that there had to be a genuine and proximate threat.
But each case will turn on its own facts. We’ll probably hear a lot of discussion about this after the report of the 6 January inquiry.
GSS ex-noob: I know that crows are among the most intelligent animals around, can recognise faces, communicate those to a degree that crows you never met can recognise you based on that, have more advanced tool use than primates, and memorize the schedule of the local garbage trucks for snacks.
I added the last bit because I was writing this I realised ‘oh, shit, this might make it look like they are scheming something sinister when I’m just gushing about one of my favorite animals’. They also use traffic to crack nuts because they figured out that cars can crack stuff and they can eat their noms when people are crossing the road.
@Battering Lamb
Crows seem super intelligent to me. I used to have a job that was near an urban jogging trail. I would take that trail in the morning (sometimes before dawn) and afternoon. Crows would hang out on the wires above that trail, and they scared me to death, especially in the wee hours. Unlike wrens and sparrows and robins and even pigeons, they seemed menacing. But I would mentally say, “You stay there and I’ll stay here, and we’ll get along just fine.” It worked.
I just read a book where all of the main characters are most definitely autistic, and I’m pretty sure the author isn’t aware that’s what she was doing. More often it’s only one or a few characters who are.blatantly coded as autistic by authors who don’t seem to be aware of it; I suspect this is because I read a lot of speculative fiction, and authors and fans of those genres have always included a disproportionate percentage of autistic people. Many of the writers are themselves autistic, usually undiagnosed, and absolutely everyone who’s spent any time in fandom has many autistic friends and associates.
@GSS Ex-noob
They want you to kill something. Leaving bits of something that’s already dead will also satisfy them.
@Battering Lamb
To be fair to crows, they probably are scheming something sinister. They like pranks and have a nasty sense of humor.
@ dali
Indeed they do.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/crows-arene28099t-just-smart-theye28099re-also-jokers/
Crows also definitely have a theory of mind. If they know other crows are watching they’ll hide food in a particular place. Then when the other crows go away, they’ll move the food somewhere else.
One crow got into the habit of tricking her associates into looking for food in empty containers, whilst she snuck off and scarfed all the full ones.
Don’t know how jays compare with other corvids (that’s the Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) that is, as opposed to any other kind of jay I wot not of) but there’s at least one who’s been watching us hand-feed the local robins lately … (it still only comes to the bird feeding setup when we’re out of the way, but it hangs out a bit closer than it used to). Living in hope here 🙂
My favourite crow story was about the researcher who built a vending machine for crows. (Don’t remember the name, sadly.)
First it would dispense food whenever a crow landed on the perch. Soon enough he had crows coming from quite a distance around to get food there.
Then he changed it so it wouldn’t dispense food right away, but needed a coin dropped into a receptacle first. He’d leave a coin balanced on the edge near the perch so it could easily be accidentally knocked off and land in the right place. Crows would show up, bounce on the perch a few times in annoyance when they didn’t get their food right away, and accidentally knock the coin in. Before too long, crows would show up and deliberately push the coin over to get their food.
Then he stopped putting coins there. And the crows started collecting loose change like dropped pennies from the surrounding area in order to drop them in the receptacle and get their food.
So yeah, crows are certainly smart enough to put two and two together.
@ jenora
Might it have been these people?
http://www.thecrowbox.com
“Once we’ve got the system optimized for teaching coin collection we can move to seeing how flexibly they can learn other tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The idea isn’t to get rich off found coins – we want to change the world through learning how to cooperate with other species.”
Of course, once the crows learn to nick credit cards, this project becomes self funding.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-44650148
Speaking of animals. In a rather less cute experiment, I’ve just received the papers in that Elon Musk monkey vivisection case. I’m not sure though how I could upload a file here (It’s a Word document; which will be handy for plagiarising)
@Dalilama
I have definitely had the experience where a work has enough characters that come across as autistic, often without necessarily falling into the “autistic coding” tropes, that I start wondering about the author.
Re: crows
One of my favorite stories is this kid who feeds crows, so they started bringing her gifts:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
@Allandrel:
One of my favorite stories is this kid who feeds crows, so they started bringing her gifts:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
I wonder if, from the crows’ perspective, they’re lavishing their adorable pet with toys?
@Alan:
It might have been those guys, or might have been some earlier research that inspired that more generic project. I don’t remember the details of what I first heard enough to be able to say for sure.
I also note that the animal visible in the freeze frame of the ‘Official Crowbox Introduction’ video there is pretty clearly a Steller’s Jay, which admittedly are also corvids. My parents living out in British Columbia get Steller’s Jays pretty often in their yard, and my mother often leaves peanuts out for them specifically, mostly so the jays will grab the peanuts and leave, and the other smaller birds like the juncos can get at the seeds without being chased away.
Also, with regards to Musk and Neuralink, I remember this post from PZ Myers a couple of months ago when it all started to hit the fan, written from the point of view of a biologist who had been responsible for doing animal experimentation work 40 years ago, and had this to say on his own experience:
He also went on to describe how his own experience compared to what he was hearing from various reports led him to believe that Neuralink was running a very sloppy operation, pretty much to the point of ‘if this had been happening anyplace where I had worked, it would have been seen as evidence of gross incompetence and used as an argument for dismissal, if only because the University wants to keep grants that rely on the appearance of things being done properly’.
Sometimes it helps to have someone who knows specifically what to look for.
@ jenora
Yeah. I’ve gone through the claim form now. What the physicians are seeking is disclosure of records, videos, and photographs.
Freedom of Information requests like this are a growing weapon in activists’ arsenals. They complement the surreptitiously obtained undercover footage.
But once you get stuff like this in the public domain, the public then do all the lobbying and pressurising for you.
The defence is that they don’t have any CCTV or Photos, and the records have to be kept confidential for academic reasons.
The counter to that is that the material must exist as they keep tweeting and putting on their website videos and photos of monkeys playing video games and eating bananas. And they release all the bits of the records that show successes. Albeit heavily sanitised.
The material that has been released so far seems to suggest this. Various examples of staff negligence. Like accidentally injecting animals with air, dropping them, trapping them in doors etc. But what I find especially upsetting is how many animals have been killed or injured ‘whilst trying to escape”.
@Alan:
I know someone who has been working as an assistant to someone else who has been doing primate brain research.
One of the things he’s been pointing out is that, quite frankly, their researchers want the monkeys to be happy, and have the environment set up to keep them happy and entertained as much as possible. Because even from a non-empathic perspective, they quite simply get more useful results if the monkeys are happy and co-operative with the research, and even more so the longer the monkeys survive. These people know what they’re doing is problematic to put it mildly, and are doing their best to make it less so for their own good as well as the animals’.
So, yes, the fact that many of the monkeys died while trying to escape is a red flag all on its own.
(I haven’t dared ask him his opinion on Neuralink yet, because I expect I would end up receiving a rather extensive rant. From what I’ve heard most people who do any sort of research like this have an opinion of Neuralink that’s pretty much ‘you idiots are making this more difficult for everybody else while doing nothing useful yourselves’.)
@ jenora
This is what they’ve been willing to release so far about their ‘enrichment’ programme.
And this is the Plaintiff’s response.
The Regents withheld information about enrichment efforts in animal cages, food provisions, and social relations, as well as boilerplate portions providing examples of experimental procedures an animal might undergo. Releasing these records would inform the public of the Regents’ compliance with ethical and legal constraints regarding animals. The freedom of academic inquiry does not necessitate complete secrecy, as demonstrated by Neuralink’s publicity campaign. The Regents, a public entity, may not disclose only information that increases the brand value of a private company.
I remember going to a lecture decades ago, must have been in my 20s. It was about animal research. I remember the presenter, himself a scientist, saying something like:
“Imagine you’re a rat. You meet up with your rat mates every day. You have a whole sewer network to play in. You can run around pipes, float on stuff, take in all the wonderful smells. Forage for all the weird foods the humans have dropped. Maybe pop up to the surface once in a while to scare the shit out of someone. You’ve got all that going on. Then one day we grab you, stick you in a plastic box with a cardboard tube, and call it an enriched environment.”
We used to have Steller’s jays, now we have crows. Climate change or just the smarter, larger birds winning out?
There’s a very tall evergreen that’s 2 house lots and a 2-lane street away. The crows perch atop it and are thus able to survey for quite a distance around
The crows definitely like to hang out more on garbage day; so do the raccoons, who come up out of the storm drains, which are of course in the curbs that the trash bins are parked against. If you leave food out for stray cats, you will have raccoons. They love kibble. And possums eat anything they find as they trundle along.
The crows are elsewhere today, so the finches have returned. Cheep.