i write, short stories mostly existential horror, and "essays" about anything i find interesting (that really just means i ramble about things i find interesting for several hundred-1000+ words on tumblr); also i made and maintain a personal website, i make mods and themes for things other people make cuz i don't code enough to make anything of my own; sometimes i make videos but i'm generally too shy to do that regularly; i play video games; i collect plushies; and i recentlyish picked up making pixel art

i also want to get into crochet, cooking, and gardening but my time with those has so far mostly just been using social media to see what other people do. i mean i cook but wouldn't classify how i do cooking as a hobby lol

i have adhd too, also i'm agoraphobic, and in addition to ideally being able to orbit around several hobbies i also just need things to fill in my time since i don't get outside very often

it was me using simpler phrasing in part because i couldn't remember the details very well

but i was referencing an experiment where researchers wearing "threatening" and "non-threatening" masks interacted with and marked crows, and other crows in that area who they had not interacted with recognized them later. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347209005806 (however that crows tell stories is, as far as i know, only a popular interpretation, their official conclusion, at least of this experiment, is that crows are capable of long term memory retention and fine-feature discrimination)

and simple observations suggesting prairie dogs may have a very advanced language - which went viral in my online circles with people joking that they gossip about us, which probably just stuck with me because i think it would be very cute

i personally believe that animals most likely do communicate among each other and the complexities of their languages just varies, even if most are not obviously very complex. my personal beliefs are that communication is complicated and can happen through more than verbal/vocal language, animals are clearly capable of feeling complex emotions and pain which is enough for me personally to consider them sentient, and (again this is just my personal belief) i believe it's probably better to treat them as if they are sentient until proven otherwise than the opposite. and just to be upfront and honest with others and myself about my possible biases, i believe in the Buddhist concept of Saṃsāra, and believe that that we're all a part of the same cycle of death and rebirth

edit found some more info:

prairie dogs: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/prairie-dogs-language-decoded-by-scientists-1.1322230

Researchers noticed that the animals made slightly different calls when different individuals of the same species went by. ... so they conducted experiments where they paraded dogs of different colours and sizes and various humans wearing different clothes past the colony. They recorded the prairie dogs' calls, analyzed them with a computer, and were astonished by the results.

"They're (prairie dogs) able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they're able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun," Slobodchikoff said. The animals can even describe abstract shapes such as circles and triangles.

Also remarkable was the amount of information crammed into a single chirp lasting a 10th of a second. "In one 10th of a second, they say 'Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'"

crows: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-interesting-thing-that-crows-do-when-they-see-one-of-their-own-dead/2016/03/18/78d97a9e-ec48-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html

“They know your body type. The way you walk,” Dyer said. “They’ll take their young down and say: ‘You want to get to know this guy. He’s got the food.’ ”

Scientists have known for years that crows have great memories, that they can recognize a human face and behavior, that they can pass that information on to their offspring.

that article also mentions that crows have been observed to make and use tools, which is something i knew but forgot to mention and is interesting and feels relevant to this conversation

i edited my comment a few times because i didn't feel like i was making sense and being too rambly, it's 6am (well 6:30am) and i haven't slept (and cuz after i initially posted i read other comments and realized other people had said what i had said but better x3)

i didn't mean to imply i thought you were saying genocide is worse than bullying a robot, it's just that i was thinking about things that could be comparable or worse to me than torturing someone for millions of years and came up with genocide

i took crime to mean something morally bad

i mean i think this is a fun conversation, it's something i think about a lot, i'm glad to talk about it with other people, sorry if i came across obtuse or pedantic or negative/hostile or anything

lol i honestly never thought about that

we went to a really small school (when i was in middle school there were like 15 students in the middle school and high school grades all combined, by the time i was in 12th there were 4 high school students all in different grades) so if i had to guess and give him the benefit of the doubt i'd guess that because we lived in such a small community and probably had a lot of mutual friends and connections, he probably just knew enough about me to know that i was into video games and my family was too poor to buy consoles/computers so i was still playing on a PS1 that my older siblings got for Christmas once while everyone else my age were on or moving to PS4 and (i think) Xbox One

ikr im with zeke that's gross!

I don't remember where I found it though x3, probably Reddit. If I remember right it's a screenshot from a game I've never played lol, but I liked the colors and I like space and I like the sort of surreal spaceman aesthetics

:3

For me it's just astigmatism

https://zapier.com/blog/dark-mode-bad-productivity/

https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-accessibility-issues-than-it-solves-d2f8359bb46a

I get headaches if I read white text on a dark background for too long, and my understanding is that about half of the population of the planet has astigmatism to some degree or other

i like the way dark mode looks but if i use it too long it gets physically painful in the form of headaches, i generally don't use apps that only have dark modes as a result, unless i can make a custom theme for it, then i will more often than not make a light theme for it. or i'll make a theme that automatically updates the colors based on what i choose in my system settings, which is something i've done for Lemmy and a few other things, but yeah

edit: sorry, when i originally saved that medium article a couple of years ago there was no paywall, now there is, so here's the same article archived https://archive.is/20220807164035/https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-accessibility-issues-than-it-solves-d2f8359bb46a

Oh cool, that's interesting! Thanks!

That also explains why drinking cold water almost hurts after having a mint lol

omg yes, it's so much more fun for me to figure out how it works on my own from trial and error

is it possible for multiple people to use one youtube premium subscription other than the family plan? we checked the family plan but there's no way we can justify paying for it, far too expensive for us considering all our other expenses

🙂 😡