Blue Saturday

xps, mostly to self: love to see coots too, common on this bit of river when I started here and now I hardly see them, alas

the tree by my flat was often home to young wood pigeons and one year some young collared doves, but now I see mainly street pigeons/rock doves in the area and daydream of tracking the ebb & flow of these things, which stretches of river are Greylag territory and which Canada geese

(there is a mixed greylag/Canada family here, don't think it's a crossbreed but I guess just a couple of goslings that ended up following the wrong family one day when two big clans of geese were sprawled out and squabbling across a grassy bank somewhere; that makes me happy too)

blackheath which i am passing through right now by bus is covered in warring clans of geese, i will enumerate as we go:

shooters hill end - nothing

urgh there are loads of teens necking behind me this is putting me off my goose watching stride ffs

princess of wales pub - three different flocks of canada geese and a smattering of egyptian geese

at this point I received a phone call cancelling my lesson so I got out in central Blackheath and haven't seen if all the greylags are on the western side of the heath, you'll have to trust me that there usually are some

this thrilling content brought to you by the overpriced bakery I'm about to visit

Who tf says “necking” in this day & age? Fped.

ok I'm at a loose end so I'll do some walking

hare & billet pond - a pair of egyptian geese, moving their necks around a lot, wish there was a verb for this

fwiw the best thing about coots is how radge they get, and when they get very low in the water as they prepare an attack

There used to be loads of pied wagtails I assume they're another victim of ecosystem fuckery

mounts pond corner - no geese

ranger's house - no geese, BUT A PIED WAGTAIL oh em gee, lookit go

It depends where you live maybe? I don’t see any down here but when I was up in Derby I did and I still see them at home all the time.

Yeah maybe, grew up Midlands so that could be it

there were two pied wagtails in the end, and a call from thames water to pick up their big pink barrier they left in our garden three months ago

into central blackheath now

I found the greylags! God-fearing and pious, beside All Saints Church

https://i.ibb.co/9r8MSTz/IMAG4140.jpg

*honk*
!

clipped the top of the church there. the intentional act of a dissident and in no way the cack-handed camerawork of someone who actually likes photographing old churches, oh no

'clipping the church' of course a venerable quasi-pagan custom god I'm full of it today

Geese know no gods and no masters

maybe shitting in the church's presence is their way

Geese are pretty unfussy about where they shit afaik

took a bus back through the heath and as if they knew, the greylags all took flight and paraded alongside us :)

...and a greater spotted woodpecker to round things off!

I know they’re unglamorous but I admire London pigeons, no matter how scabby. Esp when you see them roosting on anti-bird spikes, even if they injure their feet by doing so. You see some really interesting looking ones as well.

Breed some e-pigeons here

(it's a game that the University of Utah has put up to teach genetics 101 or something, but it's quite nicely animated)

I haven’t clicked that as in work but as far as I’m concerned pigeon gaming topped out at Hatoful Boyfriend

oh I still haven't played that! you're almost certainly right that it can't compete, it is just a rather sedate "educational" clicky-thing rather than a real game, but still, I liked knowing what different pigeon patterns were called (and then forgetting again a day later)

I enjoyed HB screenshots very much, maybe so much that I didn't want to play it and have it not be as good as the imaginary version in my head

HB is so aligned to my interests I dunno why I haven't played it yet, but I've had Doki Doki Lit Club on the computer for months and not been brave enough to do more than 10 mins of it

hatoful boyfriend is the best-written computer game of all time

xp oh my god that game is incredible but dark as fuck. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s not in a great place.

HB definitely Goes Places and I recommend it 100% (but again! Dark!)

Today is the first day in years I’ve missed my tumblr, just for being years worth of essential shite - screenshots from games, fashion edits/ads, weird text posts and the rest - that it was. Was like throwing away my old school notebooks - objectively worthless, but years of it!

There's a lass from Wolverhampton doing a Carlsberg promotion in my local, today has been crazy good

Gyac, why did you decide to delete your tumblr?

Loads of reasons - didn’t use it like i used to, people I knew had had theirs deleted, changes from yahoo, increasingly unusable interface etc

Big ups NV <3

I live in the country side, by the sea. There's a derelict school building (closed since the 70s, it would make for a great artist in residence place or something) next to my house. It attracts all sorts of birds, but just now I've stood watching first the swallows dancing around the garden behind the school and my garden (love swallows), and seeing them being replaced now by bats. It's not completely dark yet, and seeing them fly around is a delight. All is not well, this Blue Tuesday, but that certainly is.

Yeah I can see that. True to form I just left tumblr one day and never logged back on :) Just checked and it's still there lol. Haven't been on there for five years or so?! So odd to see the same people posting the same stuff they did years ago!

Supposedly we have bats out this way but I’ve never seen them. I haven’t seen a single squirrel since we left London, and foxes are fewer and far between. On the other hand our garden attracts roads and SV’s mother has a garden full of frogs. Swallows are beautiful, we used to have some that nested in the eaves of my national school.

Ahhh I cannot wax lyrical about the beauty of swallows enough! There's a small river on one side of my house, and in summer around 5pm there are dozens of swallows diving over it, catching little flies and whatnot, for dinner. I have literally stood out watching them for an hour almost daily, it's such a beautiful acrobat spectacle!

Getting melancholy now because as of January 1st I'm leaving this place, shacking up w/ the missus. I thought about buying this (renting now) and renting it out, but I'd be the world's worst landlord, it's just not for me. Gonna miss this place dearly.

I haven’t seen a single squirrel since we left London, and foxes are fewer and far between.

I wrote a story about the leading flora and fauna organisation yesterday (they track and register all the plants that grow in every square km here) and the person I spoke to told me that, contrary to belief, both flora and wildlife (this includes insects etc) are way, way more diverse in cities than in the country side! That was news to me (she reassured me saying it's news to most) but it does make sense. They'll count and find 120 plant species here, where they'll find up to 200 in a square km in a city!

I have bats flying around our garden in the evening. added a certain something when we were watching What We Do In The Shadows; they were flapping around out the window.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=90&v=hk4tGTZ6TfY

kinda lol but mostly lol

i dressed up for the pub but luckily my laziness and my creaking bones have decided against

my line manager sent me a "how you doing?" text on Monday and the rambling nature of my response appears to have shut him down

i dressed up for the pub

spider-man or batman?

Trousers

kinky

Charlton Heston mansplaining maps to Donna Reed pretending to be native American

Trousers
― Goose Witherspeen (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 9 October 2019 13:32 (two minutes ago)

what is this 'real life' you speak of? sounds intriguing.
― oops (Oops), Wednesday, 4 June 2003 23:21 (sixteen years ago) link

it involves 1 part sunshine, 1 part pants, and 2 parts will to live
― jess (dubplatestyle), Wednesday, 4 June 2003 23:23 (sixteen years ago) link

(RF interference from "Old ILX Posts Which Continue To Haunt Your Thoughts" thread)

jess otm

oh yeah, well done on not going to the pub, even if only for reasons of laziness and bone-creaking.

bats are cool too, my birthday present this year was to feed the bats at the local zoo, which was good fun but best avoided if you don't want bats to wee on your head a lot - though I can't say I had that down as a thing I wanted, but still had fun

there's a convenient walking route near me which goes behind some housing estates alongside a grassy area lined by woods and not many streetlights, and if you go out there at dusk (say, just past what humans regard as still well enough lit to go walking) in late summer when there are lots of insects, there are also lots of bats. no idea what kind

we got a "bat detector" kit off the internet and went to listen to them a few times this August/Sept, good fun to unnerve last-minute dogwalkers by standing still in the not-quite-dark in the middle of a clearing, staring into nothing, twiddling knobs on a small, crudely assembled box of hissing and squealing electronics

xps
who needs a stairway to the stars when you can ride a tron-bike to the moon?

if I had a teleporter I'd be in the pub by now

bats fucking rule

my wife texted earlier today to ask if i wanted to dress my daughter and both of us up as bats for halloween and i was like 'i def married the right person'