Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

me: i like this friend just as that, a friend
also me: if we got married would we hyphenate our last name

 

(Hmm emoji)

 

An email from Etsy put a bone folder under my recommended items and all I could think about was mbmbam.

 

So is that a folder to hold bones, or a folder to fold bones, or a folder made of bones?

 

It's an implement to put sharp creases in paper. Probably not always made of bone anymore. I've got one somewhere that I used when making a bound book of blank pages.

 

This mashup where All I Want For Christmas Is You merges with Welcome To The Black Parade is weirdly amazing.

 

Getting the urge to rearrange my room again. I want a bookshelf and a bigger desk and all kinds of stuff I don’t have room for. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take a walk and see if the antique store in town has book shelves and/or desks. Something to store my crafting supplies in would be nice too, preferably if it has wheels.

 

There’s a welcome to night vale tarot deck and I want it.

 

its hella nice

 

'Es geht alles so wie ich es wunsche'

Less true words have not been spoken so far in this film :P

(Watching a proper Christmas classic)

 

I can't believe American Idiot came out in 2004.

What is time even

 

There’s some nice stuff on red bubble and society 6. Can’t believe I’ve never browsed either of these sites before.

 

o fuck i was listening to that on my cd player in grade seven, oof

 

I yelled about Gull identification in the Hatoful Boyfriend thread, but now I want to keep going without derailing the thread so I guess it can go here?

Spoiler: GULLS ARE THE WORST

Seriously who designed goddamn gulls? I just got a Sibley's Guide to birds of North America and the Gull section is trying its best. The Yellow-footed Gull is nearly indistinguishable from the Western Gull. You can tell them apart best by the fact that the Yellow-footed Gull has bright yellow legs. The Western Gull has pink legs, except for when it also has has yellow legs, which just happens sometimes in the spring. The other distinguishing feature is that the skin directly around the eye (the orbital ring) is yellow in one bird and orange-yellow in the other. Do you know how close to a Sea Gull you need to be to see an orbital ring? Close enough for it to steal your hecking camera.

Then there's situations where, for example, the Glaucous Gull and the Herring Gull can interbreed, and the resulting hybrids can backcross, and whatever comes out looks sorta like one parent, and sorta like the other parent, but is "indistinguishable from [a] Thayer's Gull" and maybe the Thayer's is just the darker variant of the Iceland Gull. Did I mention that these assholes travel in mixed flocks and have four year growth cycles (by which I mean it takes four years for a hatchling to reach adult plumage so that's like eight molts. A juvenile Gull can be basically anything. Anyone who claims they can tell gulls apart from the different patterns of brown but they're liars. I can see three separate entries where a Gull is distinguished by a specific feature (leg colour, iris colour, etc) except in 10% of the cases where it doesn't have that feature and it just randomly looks like a different bird instead. The Yellow-footed Gull, with its yellow legs, should never be mistaken for the Yellow-legged Gull, which also has yellow legs, but different. Also if you see an Iceland Gull, it may just be a Herring Gull with albinism.

In conclusion, if you see a large seagull (small gulls have similar issues but don't crossbreed nearly as much and are, on the whole, much less of a hassle) call it whatever the fuck you like. Nobody is possibly qualified to correct you.

I actually really like birds and birdwatching, gulls specifically are absolute nonsense.

 

I got attacked by a seagull once. It sucked.

 

Presumably whoever designed gulls did not expect you to care what flavor of gull you're looking at. :::PPP (See also: one of the major NA bird guides has a section titled "Confusing Fall Warblers," but those at least sing nice. Unlike gulls.)

 

Oh man oh man I could go on about warblers too, but they are (at least) quite lovely in the spring. I think most of the infighting right now is about the Golden-winged Warbler, the Blue-Winged Warbler, and whether or not they're actually the same dang bird.

Spoiler: OH GOD MORE BIRDS

The official word is a confused shrug? Right now the Golden-winged is officially endangered because its territory is being taken over by the Blue-winged, but they interbreed and backcross freely and are 99.97% genetically identical. That's smaller than the genetic differences between a freckled human and an unfreckled human. And you can't ID by songs because birdsong is learned and birds just learn the wrong song sometimes. So if they become the same bird than we just let the Golden-winged kinda... Die out? But it's the same bird, so it's more like letting the fashion die out? Like we don't get to set up protection because one is prettier than the other.

Spoiler: CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP

Also people who name birds are the worst: Orange-crowned Warbler, has no orange and no crown; Red-bellied Woodpecker, has no visible red on belly; Ring-necked Duck, no goddamn ring on its neck; Whistling Duck, not a duck; Semipalmated Sandpiper, not only does nobody know what 'semipalmated' means (it's like, webbed feet but not all the way webbed) but it applies to all Sandpipers and Plovers and most birds in that general shorebird category, so it's like literally the least effective way to identify a sandpiper. It's like naming something an egg-laying sparrow. Like, congrats, that's All Of Them.

Okay I'm actually done now.

 

I used to call those "misnomerpeckers."

 

Haha, I was just gonna mention Confusing Fall Warblers!

 

I don't want to make light of your seagull experience, but this Bad Lip Reading song is just so good: