Demand-Side Sheepdog

DO NOT BE ALARMED, CITIZEN

This weekend, please take a few seconds to remind yourself: no matter how hard it seems, and no matter how overwhelming the task first appears, you *can* fit so much food in your mouth that your jaw won’t close. Live to inspire others <3

It's a Sunday morning and I'm being attacked :|

Anyway what I’ve actually made is a fidget spinner for coyotes, but it is very satisfying (Don't worry, yes, I will lubricate the train :p I have been testing fit and ratios) (frankly four gears, 16 bearings, two springs, and a lead counterweight seems if anything like underengineering for crows)

I love coyotes, while acknowledging that realistic anthro coyotes would live on isolated compounds in the Mountain West, accumulating derelict machinery and taking potshots at linemen and Amazon drivers who wander too close from an arsenal with a half-dozen calibers and zero serial numbers :P

…ask me about rural Oregon :D ………I love coyotes.

…apparently this was not the answer but can you blame me?

!!!! The newest puzzle-solver came back half an hour later with my very first Gift From Crows! It’s, uh… …uh, it’s a chicken bone—but with some meat still on it! …Just what I always wanted! (I think that is worth a cashew, right?)

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

This hooded crow has not solved the feeder before but *has* been around the two crows who solve it regularly, and I think learned from them? At least enough to know “it’s around here somewhere………” Corvids are so cool <3

I thought we were maybe just upending the sunflower seeds to Cause Problems but *actually* we were finally taking one of the shiny coins I put out, like, six weeks ago! Yay! I have successfully paid a crow real-world money to be my friend :D

Also! If you ever want to learn to polish things, may I recommend macro photography as a good way to disabuse yourself of “oh that’s so shiny, it’s perfect” and recognize ”…this is as ugly and alien to me as the surface of the moon, I reject this rank, slapdash amateurism”?

I feel like Gebel’s team went to the designer, the brief said “we’re the Greens—make us a poster” and nothing else, and everyone involved already pictured a coloring book where a bear in a cargo bike and his polycule cycle back from the farmer's market past a rainbow flag and some wind turbines :P

15 Sept

Good morning, fuzzies and fuzzy associates. I think it is important to bring to your attention: a Blessed Dog. The dog’s mood is basically my own mood, but it seems I don’t have a choice about getting through Tuesday so here we are. I hope you are all doing well, though <3

Demand-Side Sheepdog reposted

blackle mori

@blackle.bsky.social

13 Sept

I just wrote a paranormal story in the form of a fictional forum thread! A young woman discovers a video captured from inside a recurring dream. Read here: suricrasia.online/unfiction/sp...

Demand-Side Sheepdog reposted

SpotGideon

@shepf.art

12 Sept

thought I was the coolest dog at this farmer’s market, but I stand corrected

his greed sickens me

If I am not supposed to befriend and anthropomorphize the local crows and magpies, then please explain the way my camera auto-classifies them. That’s right, you can’t >:3

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

Pulling the game camera footage, it seems that earlier—before learning the new technique—we got a bit frustrated, and I love how the crow then seems to stop and look around to see if anyone noticed them crashing out. Corvids are so cool <3

6 Sept

The intended strategy is to pull the string, upending the cylinder. I have redesigned this several times now. Anyway it turns out you can also just flip it violently enough with your beak to fling some nuts out :P (Hooded crow: “we call this ‘beak skip’”)

gardening is hard when you are short >.>

Maya🦦🏳️‍⚧️🎨🔞(Comms open!)@petsoftthings.bsky.social

finished commission for @writing.dog !

Demand-Side Sheepdog reposted

Welcome to Bluesky.

hildegard of bingen: as you know, magpies are not unlike satan also hildegard of bingen: the parrot is not useful, “and is defective because of its diverse nature” like idk lady maybe calm down a bit before boycotting parrots for being too woke

However old you are is a good age to learn—if needed—that maps are not objective. Like dictionaries or encyclopedias, they wrap the creative process in a cloak of impartiality, but mapping is inherently political and contextual. *All* maps tell one story or another. *All* maps have a point of view.

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

For any mapping company that wants to internationally. At my company (I work in mapping) we have dozens of these “political views.” Being able to doublethink about Kashmir, Crimea, Cyprus, (…the Falklands, Taiwan, Kosovo, Palestine, Sahrawi, Georgia, the Spratlys…) etc. is a cost of doing business.

(Mapping, as in collecting+processing+publishing your own data is a huge investment, and there are very few map companies. Mapquest was one, though as far as I know they are now an OpenStreetMap skin with a cool marketing team and without $100s of millions of capex at risk if they get sanctioned)

Well. A huge investment if you want to do it right, e.g. back when Mapbox inadvertently let the wisdom of crowds rename New York “Jewtropolis.” (This is at least one area where “can’t you just use AI?” is a hard sell; at the moment EMS dispatchers still have zero tolerance for hallucinated roads)

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

Yes: pavement, as a physical object, has objective bounds. But what paths are mapped? Which are shown? Named? Colored to stand out? Why does a map have low-functional-class roads but not pedestrian desire paths? What landmarks appear first as you zoom in? Cartography is design, and design is human.

This is not to say I think idiotic stunts like “Mount McKinley” or “Lake America” are clever, or adopting trolling misnomers is a “good idea.” Just that it is nothing new, surprising, or unique, although USians are perhaps only now realizing that different countries have always had different maps.

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

Borders and names are only the most obvious example. Part of my job was user research, and I remember vividly seeing a sharp drop in net promoter score, looking into it, and seeing that it was entirely due to our maps being “wrong”—Crimea was not listed as being part of Russia.

29 Aug

—but do they call us “FBI the Wife Murderer”? No! Or how about that time we tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into killing himself? Do they call us “FBI the Civil Rights Opponent”? No! But you let in one guy who screws goats………

28 Aug

What the Python 3 docs mean when they say this, is “%Z” matches the string literals ”GMT” and ”UTC,” and whatever the name of *your current time zone* is. So “MDT” worked fine when I was in Denver, and throws a “does not match format” error now that I’m home in CEST. *Why does this even exist*.

28 Aug

I mean, I understand why this exists. But I need you Python people to know that the next time you make fun of Javascript truth tables, I will *slap you*.

28 Aug

Try these German immigration lifehacks! 1. Book an early appointment! 2. Show up on time! 3. Have your papers in order! 4. Get assigned the cute twinky guy who probably doesn't remember 9/11 and is in training and too nervous about making mistakes himself to yell at you! 5. A smile always helps!

Demand-Side Sheepdog@writing.dog

Back at immigration for an appointment that will either take 5 minutes or I will be arrested XD Either way, looking forward to being condescendingly gaslit about how something the Polizei told me to do, and that others have said they do, is in fact “never” done and completely unacceptable here :'3

I think the best part of being my friend is that I am a very normal person and we can have very normal conversations about very normal things to do in the bedroom