Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird in right-wing circles, keeping promises is very much a one-way street; keeping promises made to those higher up in the hierarchy is required, but for those high up in the hierarchy, the freedom to break promises to underlings for the most trivial of whims is the entire point of having power; a right-winger who can't burn his underlings for the silliest of reasons does not have a place in the hierarchy, by definition.

@futurebird
but will you title the sequel "_Psammofive_" and the prequel "_Psammothree_" ?

@futurebird @lienrag when I play it at half speed, it does look like there's some variation in the velocity of the marker. Not sure what kind of variation, but it might be sinusoidal , which is what would make sense to me as well.

@futurebird I'd call it an OpSec failure.

@futurebird yeah - I can't think of any wildlife local to me that make sounds as muppet-like as a domestic cat, although feral cats do, and sometimes coyote come close. Wapiti will also make some very strange "bugling" calls, but they're not especially local to me. (Same state, different counties)

@futurebird
there are foxes is my neighborhood, and at night, sometimes one will hear a fox scream, and it sounds like a human in horrible pain and fear.

@aud @futurebird

personally, I won't touch right macaroni; it has broken chirality.

Left macaroni is the only good macaroni. Just a personal opinion.

@futurebird in an era where catgirls with four ears are normal, how many is a lot?

@futurebird only muppets are allowed to go caroling.

@futurebird Would taking the express force you to get off the train at a different stop that is further from you destination? If so, don't take the express. Otherwise, the express is probably better, and probably no more than about 4-5 minutes later at worst.

@futurebird I think this has been much researched, though proper experiment design and how it affects interpretation of results is still very much a live issue, in part because animal behavior scientists rarely get the funding they need, and must compromise experiment design with limited resources. But cats play close attention to the ear positions of other mammals. However, those positions have much more to do with emotional state than with direction of sounds being listened to.

@futurebird uh, yeah, a great design idea, but ...

@futurebird

is that Felis sockraptor or Felis laundryensis?

@futurebird why am I allowed to pick only one?

@futurebird reminds me of "turn the thermostat down at night" type advice. It makes sense if you assume everyone spends all night in a bed loaded up with wool blankets and other domestic creatures, but now all that has been replaced by much less insulating bedding and people who work late, do evening chores, etc, etc.

@futurebird @Bubotomy an item to consider: Due to the low latitude of the Sahara, prevailing winds blow across it from east to west. These winds regularly pick up dust and even sand, and transport it across the Atlantic, where it falls on the Carribean islands and northern S. America. I would think this regular removal of material would tend to reduce the depth of sand in the sahara.

@futurebird ah yes, Lance, Knight of the Strong Arm, who won time and time again ... assisted by performance-enhancing drugs, we now know ...

@futurebird to me, it's not ethical to use the LLM-detectors, for the same reasons it isn't ethical to use the LLMs to generate the fiction. Both uphold the same hideous power structure. But I have no idea whether the author did use an LLM, or what "ought" to happen to them, and I also don't know what people are likely to do.

@futurebird I know the popular LLM-detector and the LLMs are effectively created by entities of the same ilk, and yet, I don't know the answer to either question.

@futurebird @alexwild @MyrmecolNews I remain convinced the author of the mirror test for ants paper intended to be mockery of the whole concept of mirror test.