five things: seeing birds, wrong on the internet, task initiation, writing tgcf, dealing with things

[sophia_sol]

one

amazing to think that when I got into birds a few years ago, I had to work hard to train my eyes to learn to notice and see birds. and it was so effective that now I genuinely have trouble believing how oblivious I was to the birds around me for all the years of my life before that!

I am now that xkcd comic about experts overestimating what the average person knows, lol


two

sometimes people are Wrong on the internet and you have to step away without engaging in trying to argue with them about it and it's just like. I'm so strong and powerful actually, for succeeding at that.


three

reading endless useless articles with the same three pieces of advice on how to handle task initiation when you have adhd is ALMOST the same thing as initiating the task you need to do, right???


four

writing tgcf fic just has endless space for exploring Gender and it's so good


five

sometimes you just gotta sew 1.5 alteration projects and then reread a known-fave fic about it*

*it being "your feelings"

Comments

[pauraque]

Ahh, those are good examples! Especially the cars, because that's one I am very much blind to. I don't see the field marks that car people are looking for to tell one car from another except in the broadest categories. If I tried to describe a car I saw to a car person they would have to be very patient with me.

[sophia_sol]

hahaha yes exactly! I don't know the field marks to pay attention to, and would have NO idea how to describe a car in a useful way! I definitely notice this with the way other people come to me with birds they saw to ask for ID, with the kinds of things they do or don't notice. Some are just bird-adjacent enough to be able to provide useful details but some....oh boy! It's a fun challenge though, trying to distill the essence of the bird from the description someone's able to give me.

[pauraque]

And then sometimes people hit on exactly the right thing to convey the essence of the bird. There was a recent one on r/whatsthisbird where someone posted a pencil sketch of a vague American football shape with legs, and the Green Heron ID came in about five seconds. OP was astonished!

[sophia_sol]

lolll yes, sometimes the true essence of the bird just shines through! I recently had one from someone on mastodon, where the person said they saw the bird walking upside-down, down a trunk of a tree, and I was like. Right! given where you're located there are exactly three species of bird it could be and it WILL be one of those three! (they didn't understand at first how serious I was about it HAVING to be one of those three, though. but like. a bird needs very specially adapted feet to be able to do that! it's going to be a black-and-white warbler or some kind of nuthatch! I'm very confident they saw a black-and-white warbler but I'm not sure they believed me lol.)

[pauraque]

That's funny because very recently I was walking with sdk and she saw a bird I missed, and said it had an all white face and was walking directly down a tree trunk. I pulled up White-breasted Nuthatch on my phone and asked if that was the bird, and she said yes, definitely, and I had to explain that my ID was really not impressive because her description had eliminated every bird but one!

[sophia_sol]

lollll yes that is a pretty easy ID!