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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The bin chickens are my kin, I’m in the small minority here who appreciate them.

    And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They’re also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they’re just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It’s a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they’re not dangerous.

    People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It’s understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you’re someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.


  • If you want to see a croc, just go walking near the shallow water of the top half of the country’s coast. You won’t see the croc for long, and it will be the last thing you ever see, but it will be up close and very personal.

    Seriously though, you don’t go to see salt water crocodiles in the wild or even go near any body of water on the northern coast. If you can see one with the naked eye in the wild, you’re already too close. They’re extremely fast, extremely aggressive, and the males get up to 6m / 20ft long and 1000kg / 2200lb. They are very much a zoo only thing.


  • I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.

    When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You’ll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.

    But if you’re headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you’ll spot the almighty and much maligned “bin chicken”, our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you’ll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that’s not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.




  • Dennett taught me how to find common ground with very different people in discussions which might otherwise be heated arguments. I was lucky enough to see one of his talks some years ago, and his work and methods are something I frequently think about even today. His writing style was playful and accessible, but it paled in comparison to his presentation which really demonstrated his abundant charisma. His passing is truly a huge loss in a world that increasingly needs his teachings. My condolences to his family and the communities he fostered.

    Vale, Daniel C. Dennett. I hope I can continue to do even a shred of justice to your contributions.

    Edit with link: Dennett (somewhat accidentally) created a community for interdenominational Christian clergy who are also secret atheists. It started with a research paper with interviews and some analysis of their similar/different experiences. Ignore the abstract if academic language isn’t your thing, the rest of the paper is a much easier and interesting read:

    Dennett, D. C., & LaScola, L. (2010). Preachers Who are Not Believers. Evolutionary Psychology, 8(1), 122-150



  • Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They’re truly awful and Tokkie’s documentary is worth watching.

    Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can’t listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there’s plenty more musicians out there worth my time.


  • so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.

    This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of “distribution” precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.

    But even if you didn’t actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It’s not something I would recommend going into casually.

    https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It’s one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.