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Today at work a little crow fledgling was just having the worst damn day. The little goober kept trying to shove its way into the door and screaming at its reflection while I was helping a lady look at a bed.

I pointed it out to her and together we regarded the infant screaming.

After she left my coworker came up and informed me there was a bird on her car. I went out to look and lo, the fledgling had scrambled up onto her windshield and was pecking forlornly at its reflection.

It stayed perched there in the hot sun, trying to move higher up the car with no success but too scared to fly down. She was agitated that it was on her car since she didn’t know if it would leave on its own.

“It’s a baby,” I told her, “It’s still learning how to fly.”

“That’s a baby?! It’s so big!”

“Yeah, it’s just a little guy.”

I went out to investigate. The parents began screaming and swooping. I placated them with crackers which they accepted without relenting their screaming. My coworker said she could now see that the creature on her car was indeed a baby with the sleek black parents swooshing angrily around in the air.

We regarded the baby together. After a while I started noticing it was showing signs of fatigue and distress. Mouth gaping but not begging for food, wings drooping. I went back out to check on it.

I was debating moving the baby; the day kept getting hotter and it didn’t have the energy or skill to relocate itself. My coworker also wanted the bird to stop pooping on her car. So eventually I announced, “I’m gonna move the bird.”

“Your gonna grab it? Aren’t you scared?”

I looked at her in bafflement. I grew up around every imaginable kind of fowl. The only bird I’d be scared of would be some of the big flightless ones. Even geese/swans are manageable if you just grab their necks before they really get flapping. The parents were not gonna go for my eyes like magpies and in general crows tend to recognize when you’re trying to help. “It’s just a little baby guy. It’s fine.”

I approached the baby amidst its parents shrieking crow obscenities down upon me. I scooped it gently like the burger.

I cannot begin to convey how soft that baby crow felt. It was the downiest most pleasant tactile thing that I’ve maybe ever held and the experience was only slightly marred by the goober trying ineffectually to bite me. It was stymied by the fact that it ain’t my first rodeo.

I brought it ten feet away to a nice shady tree. I held the baby gently so it could get its feet under it on the branch. It seemed a bit confused at this point but eventually gripped the branch and I stepped back and threw peanuts in self defense while the angry parents swooped showily around at me.

It stayed there pretty much the rest of the day. Its parents both checked in to make sure I hadn’t murdered it then flew back to where we could see a nest. So best theory is that this dingus was the first to start fledging and couldn’t actually return to the nest after launching.

I told my wife afterward and they went, “You. You touched the bird?!” My coworkers husband was also flabbergasted that I’d been brave enough to grab it. My coworker said she was just gonna shove it off her car with a broom.

As if they didn’t know who they married. As if I am not someone who would confidently help a stray cat or wrangle a chicken.

I informed them that barring gloves I had thoroughly washed my hands twice and it was worth it to get the silly infant off a slippery car and into the shade.

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i will never complain about a book seeming like a fanfic with the serial numbers filed off because that means the author had the invaluable ability to tell when their au had diverged enough that these were just straight-up different characters now

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person making AI sound awesome:

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"because the ai generated gay sex cats killed my grandma, okay?"

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tumblr users’ obsession with self-reporting (especially as a weird form of penance) needs to be studied

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you should not be using adobe products legally to begin with, but every few months a platform updates their terms of service and every time it comes back to "we need license to reproduce to legally run our platform where we reproduce your images" and everyone flips the fuck out, not realizing it's actually pretty normal legalese for running a platform in which your images are reproduced for others. discord did the same thing a while ago, and people flipped out since it was timed with the release of clyde, their doomed ai bot which died, and people got all antsy about discord clyde learning about their group chat called some shit like "butt city bitches" where you post about your day and memes that arent funny to no response

it says as much right there in the text of the TOS, "For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate as intended, such as enabling you to share photos with others." and that is like. as point blank, "we're doing this because we are building an image-sharing platform and are doing so legally" as it gets

and you could ask like, hey, why is adobe doing that, that seems dumb. and providing people with offramps for adobe software that can meaningfully be offramped is a noble goal. but like. its pretty normal for platforms to do this. youre on a platform that does this right now

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you have to reblog asinine ai posts sometimes. to keep the rent low

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(Source)

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$1600 a month w/o utilities

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they're holding my fucking thang hostage for $6

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find it really funny that one of discord's loading quotes is "back in the day, discord used to be a browser app! can you imagine?" like. getting a little big for your britches aren't you, electron app

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Woman at the zoo: Why do they look so sad? 😔

Sign literally 10 feet away:

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every time you use generative AI an electromagnetic pulse goes off that shuts off the entire power grid and sends us back to the stone age. everyone on life support dies instantly, planes fall out of the sky, killing everyone on board and whoever's in the crash radius, cars stop, stranding anyone who may have been travelling and causing untold numbers of pileups because brakes don't work anymore, and it's your fault and you should feel bad

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I'm sorry google ai can you repeat that

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"ai text generation is useless, it can only produce slop" said the Fool, unaware that the global economy depends entirely on the consistent production and exchange of slop

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"Using AI because you don't have a budget is like if I said I couldn't afford a union worker to do a job so I hired my buddy with some tools"

. . . . . yes? That's literally fine and people do that constantly?

Listen I'm sorry artists are late to the party here but every other industry on earth has already had to reckon with automation and the internet taking our jobs. You're not special, I don't know what to tell you.