The Terra-tory

Based on my own original story and world, which I will not elaborate upon here for fear of bots coming and scraping everything. Notes on details and concepts below.

Or, I think straight cis men should be more like birds.

There is a certain species of bird-of-paradise called the parotia, or six-plumed bird-of-paradise. These birds perform very elaborate dances on their very own beak-made dance floors, with a little branch going over the whole thing that’s meant for their single audience member, any female willing to give them the time of day. The dances can last hours at a time and have specific choreography that the males endlessly rehearse when no females are around. It is a serious investment and life-long pursuit for these birds.

What’s interesting to me is what juvenile males do. After all, they can’t master these dances in a day. What they end up doing is team up with another juvenile male and they’ll find older males’ dance floors to practice on. One male sits on the branch while the other does his stuff and, one presumes, somehow offers feedback on the dances (possibly by flying off when it sucks). They’ll switch off repeatedly so they know both roles well.

Now we come to my title: I think straight cis men should take their bros on practice dates.

I was originally gonna write this for just dodging shitty men but no. This can apply to everyone. So to everyone it shall apply!

I’m a massive cheapskate who only gets the cheaper mid-grade components that are the minimum of what I need to do what I want, which in this case was play FFXIV + BG3 as well as glaze my art. With that in mind, here are the parts I ended up with.

And I wish this WP editor was more appealing…

Anyway, I keep thinking of Mor Bakehouse along the Royal Mile and their chunky chicken pie. So good. Flaky and full of chicken and cheese and creamy white sauce.

I also miss the total lack of racism. Good lord. Not two minutes after getting to my seat on my return flight, the American woman from Denver turned to me and asked, “Are you really from America?” And that just reminded me that everywhere I go here, there’s that godawful undercurrent of racism. I just want to be free. I am not my ethnicity. Eat shit, racists.

it’s breast cancer awareness month so shoutout to the lovely receptionist who detected my immense discomfort with an ultrasound tech one time and instantly switched me to someone else for the followup biopsy

wasn’t cancer that time but thank you for looking out for me

I have obsessively watched Pasta Grannies so much that I actually tried to make my own pasta a few days ago. It turned out great and seems like it’s a bit more nutritious in some ways than dried pasta, especially factory-made.

Here’s what I’ve learned!

mice caught: 5
mice uncaught but spotted: 1

5 thousand thunderstorms and ants everywhere

let’s go

Grumpy about everything

Grumpy about everything

Deyani, red-tailed hawklet, from the cover photo of this video

Barn swallows are funny little guys. They’ve lived in human dwellings for forever and ever, sometimes to the annoyance of both species, and they know how to take advantage of our presence to get bugs. Speaking of bugs, they really like the flying kind and are specially evolved to be acrobats!

In the past few years here in the Denver, CO area, I’ve observed some interesting behavior that I don’t remember from other places I’ve lived. Here at the intersections, it’s surprisingly common for 5 or so little barn swallows to be swooping around above the cars, chasing insects. On rainy days they fly low, since that’s where the bugs are. Other days they fly a bit higher. Perhaps it’s safer and they observe traffic carefully to see which side is stopped or slow. I can’t say I see the bugs they’re after half as easily as the little birds themselves, but that’s because the birds come within feet of my windshield and distract me.

I find it remarkable and interesting. It’s true that cars hitting birds has resulted in a rapid burst of evolution, the shortening of wings and so on to aid in midair mobility to avoid collisions. This is just the only time I’ve seen birds clearly taking advantage of something inherent to traffic. Dust, bugs, air currents…barn swallows live dangerous lives on the edge but I can see why they do it.

On other topics, I finally witnessed chickadees flying away with the mealworms I’ve been putting out. The female Bullock’s Oriole who has been visiting came, rejected the soggy lemons and peanuts, and flew at the feeder cam to really let me know how displeased she was. Alas. A female hummingbird also visited today! I think she may have been a broad-tailed hummingbird. I’m very pleased Hummer Cam is working well now. Unfortunate that the previous version had to break down so suddenly.