5 things: crop milk, website excitement, pterosaurs, fic ideas, name gender

[sophia_sol]

one

recently I was telling someone about crop milk and it is such a delightfully cursed bird fact that I have to share it here too!

did you know that mammals aren't the only living things to produce milk? a select few bird species have independently evolved it too! pigeons, flamingos, and emperor penguins all secrete milk from their crop to feed their young! lactation is even stimulated by prolactin, the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals!

crop milk has fat and proteins, like mammal milk, but no carbohydrates. it's also got the various immune boosting stuff and other similar intangibles

In pigeons, crop milk is....not quite a liquid. it's a pale yellow semi-solid that has been compared to cottage cheese.

flamingos have liquid crop milk! but it's bright red that looks like blood!!

(the colour fades over time though, it only looks like blood for the first week or so after hatching)

all I've been able to determine about penguin crop milk is that it is "thick"


two

I love being able to just go into the css stylesheet for my website and alter a detail about how lists are formatted....and then that change is automatically enacted for every list on every page of my site! it's so cool. coding is cool!


three

just finishing up listening to a podcast episode about pterosaurs and *dreamy sigh* pterosaurs are just so cool you guys


four

me spitballing funny fic ideas with a friend, and oh shit now I really want to write one of them!

it's amazing to me now that I used to struggle so much with coming up with fic ideas to write...these days I have far more than I can actually get to!


five

something I learned recently: it does not matter WHAT name I changed my irl name to, a certain type of cis people will find a way to hear a feminine name no matter what your name is, if they read you as female

I thought I had just insufficiently considered what my name could be misheard as! but no the problem is not with me.


posting about pterosaurs DOES mean I had to update my dinosaur tag. bc pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and I needed my tag to be actually inclusive!

Comments

[ivyfic]

Given that I have known cis women named Ryan and John, let alone the Lindsey’s, Leslie’s, and Meredith’s… There is an ongoing trend of giving girls boys names and then those names becoming tainted with femininity and ceasing to be boys names. But I had not considered the challenge that presented for trans people. (Also, having just named a human, I thought I had considered the ways people could mangle the name, but no, no I had no idea.)

[pauraque]

5. I think Kate Bornstein talked about this in one of their books, possibly in the context of the subconscious "gender makeover" cis people will mentally give to gender nonconforming people. The ingrained urge to fit people into a binary gender box is so strong that their brains will actually stop perceiving cues that conflict with the box they have already decided this person goes in.

In the case of names specifically, I'm also reminded of linguistic research reveaing how little of comprehension is actually based on the words that are heard, and how much on contextual cues. The percentage of spoken phonemes that are heard by the addressee is surprisingly small, especially in real-life situations with background noise and distractions! Normally this is barely noticeable because we are so good at filling in the blanks with what we expect to hear, but when the spoken message conflicts with expectations, the system breaks down.

[jesse_the_k]

Mmmm, appreciate this linguistic insight into the refusal to acknowledge gender complexities

[pauraque]

I should have added that of course none of this excuses the behavior or makes it less frustrating! It just describes some of the things people need to overcome to start acting right. Which you and I and sophia_sol all know, I just wanted to name it.

[chestnut_pod]

Flamingoes are so metal. I did know about crop milk, having heard that physical limitations on how much one little pigeon crop can produce may be one reason why large clutches are rare among the doves-and-pigeons. I, for one, am so glad we don't have to vomit AND throat-lactate to feed our young. But good for the birds, I guess.

[silverflight8]

The origins of mammal milk is likely sweat, so we don't have much of a dignified origin either 🤣 there's no dignity in biology. That said I think I prefer the current form of milk over the whole crop milk (and really the whole storing things in the crop for later/your children in general...)