Reference Photos Adoptable Dogs

Deer Me

I like to draw quickly from reference photos. Photos help because it turns off the narrative. Speed helps because it prevents thoughts and voices from the other room from getting traction. Anyway, here’s around 500 reference photos for images scraped from online where some description, or alt text, or automatic image tagging, resulted in their return.

Adoptable Dogs reference Photos

Abandoned Dogs Reference Photos

Mangy Dog Reference Photos

Dingo Reference Photos

Cat Reference Photos

Shelter Cat Reference Photos

Adoptable Cats Reference Photos

Files have been deduplicated and then numbered.

This is for sure already a thing, I just don’t know where to find smarter people talking about it.

Deer Me

I read this book about hearing. And from there I wondered about hearing in animals for whom it is a primary sense, like sight is in humans. Which made put me in the position of needing to know how those animals which have been with us the longest are different, so I read this other book about what thirty thousand years can do. Go figure, domesticated animals are demonstrably different and I don’t mean different like a pampered pet dog and a semi-feral village dog. I mean the new facial muscles they developed, the gaze following, recognition of self and aid rendered to conspecifics. That made me worried about dogs.

And then I had to read this book about laboratory dogs. There are things that are done on a terrible scale which are worse than heartless. There is a culture to keep it in place. There are people who literally abduct dogs and sell them to labs for “important testing” where they are prized for being more docile and trusting than the less socialized purpose-bred beagles. Naturally, I needed to read about the opposite sort of thing, which was this book about rendering aid as well as can be done.

Of course this meant I needed to know about pet keeping and I read this book with a very Eurocentric high-society type view of it. There was a good deal in there about grief for pets passed on from primary sources. From that I was obligated to read this book about the perception of death for a pet. And now I’m stuck. This isn’t a dead end, I just don’t know the path.

There’s a good explanation in the book about death and the understanding of it in different animals. There’s a field of study, comparative thanatology, that deals with that. There’s a frequent representation that science is unwilling to bestow upon animals the highest level of understanding death. Primates and cetaceans carrying the dead. Virginia possums feigning death where it is argued that the possum doesn’t understand what they are doing as playacting death, but that predators do understand it as death. It’s a rabbit hole, but if possums know genetically how to play possum, why should we ascribe predators a higher understanding of death and not also biologically mandated behavior.

Anyway, where I’m stuck. Do we understand death completely? There’s no reasonable expectation that we understand death at the most objective level. Alien race number one comes along, or if you like a dog blessed with speech, and witness sobbing over a coffin. Do they think it odd because our accepted representation of death is that it’s permanent absolute? Do they think it clearly wrong that the dead can not interact or do work because they see something we don’t? It’s a thing and I don’t know where to take it. Certainly not panpsychism.

Maybe I’ll read about bears.

Hearing is Odd

Deer Me

I have read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. You should read it too, it’s fantastic. I am now qualified to state: sound is weird. Hearing sound is stranger still. A florescent bulb sounds like a chainsaw to a fly. The sun would sound like a jackhammer but for the vacuum of space. This is surprising in the way that affects those people who haven’t thought about it before. There’s a line in the introduction where it’s said that to a frog, the sound of street traffic would be equivalent to a mid-range earthquake. Extended out to other animals, it’s worth considering that humanity and all the sounds our terrible machines produce are geological scale disaster volume-wise. After all, there’s been very little time for evolution to adjust to our roar. This becomes stranger when one considers the way a mammals ear works.

Sound occurs at the level f molecules. This bit of nitrogen bumps into this other bit and then oxygen and argon and whatever else is in the air between a source of noise and the apparatus that hears it. This is why it’s “silent” in space, too few molecules, at least for our ears. Think about how sound works for dolphins or whales, they hear well under water; there anatomy is adapted to it. We hear well in the atmosphere; our anatomy is adapted to it. Surely some Lovecraftian horror can hear well in space, with a hypothetical anatomy adapted to it. Consider Venice. It’s limestone buildings and low traffic streets conspire to absorb the vibrations the way that foam egg-carton stuff does in recording booths. It’s all physical, environment affecting sound at least as much as anatomy.

Technology can actively manipulate both, and that’s interesting. Sound itself can manipulate sound. If we have an audible thing and it’s particular waveform looks like peak, we hear that. If we add an audible thing to it and that things particular waveform look like a valley, an inverse of the peak, we hear nothing. That’s real, that’s how active noise cancelling works in headphones.

Now, I’m starting to conceive that anatomically someone could be missing the mechanical anatomy to hear the valley everyone else hears. Such a person wouldn’t hear silence like everyone else, they would hear something. I hope to hear nothing.

How Not to Hear Voices

Deer Me

Things who speak, have a voice. Things who listen have ears, commonly two. A human head doesn’t seem particularly wide, though it’s wide enough for direction finding. Eyes are even closer together and still provide depth perception, after all. Somehow I have found myself in the position of needing to read about hearing. I seem to recall that I’ve gotten here by reading about perception and consciousness. There is something that it is like to be a blank,  that sort of thing. From that ultrasound and infrasound, and moths with impaired hearing being more commonly predated by bats. Hunters and hunted evolved their capacities. Human people gained capacity via technological advancement. This compressed time. Now I need to know more about where we are. If it’s different from where we would be if we did things the natural way.

Unfortunately this borders on the wrong kind of field, the sort in which I want to cut no trails.

Safe routes should always be taken. Stick to the coastline. Keep it rooted in mechanics. Think about how physical it is. Focus on the externalities. Reject that which is perceived with one sense alone. Touch the wall for reassurance. Have a plan. Overwhelm the input and leave no room for the unwelcome. Denial is food for it. Inattention is the best response. Don’t flinch. Don’t look. Hug the ground and abhor the deep and unsoft dome of sky. Avoid distance. Stick to chamber music, made in small rooms, without speaking.

Well, time to read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. It’s already terribly frightening. Still, everyone should buy it, I need this sort of book to exist

Broken Airports

Deer Me

Airports used to be a 1. I don’t know how it happened but now airports are a 3. This doesn’t make sense. Drugs are generally at a therapeutic peak at the airport, this is on purpose, and should keep fluttering butterflies off the wheel and see them safe behind the glass walls of a benzodiazepine bell jar. No more. Now airports are full of people who are even less real than what is generally referred to by that term. It’s profoundly upsetting, being surrounded by ghost-like philosophical zombies. Even seeing them physically hurts. It’s nearly as bad as dollar stores.

If everything happens at once temporally, so that they may both be there and not, but the 3, being discreet creates a touchstone, it’s ridiculous to expect me to cope with this in a way that could be decreased normative. I can’t change the order in which things happen. I can’t tell what’s about to happen, that’s been dead for years, a personal failure. I can try and push and prod all to maybe move the needle just a little, enough to get to the other side of security. And security, inscrutable. Signs describing requirements are smudged hieroglyphs. Standards from a federal agency are inconsistent whims. There’s no way to adapt, no way prepare for alligator wrestling, not when it’s a different alligator every time. I hate it there. They broke it.

Something has changed the utilitarian, earnestly navigable airport as a 1 into the worst sort of 3. With enough β-blockers it shouldn’t be possible to get constant high heart rate alerts. It’s a good thing though in theory, proof of life, at least. I think this is all related to a personal problem. Without being able to put a date to it, though it’s been months now, sketchbooks and watercolor blocks and pallets and pens have been abandoning me. That’s maybe inside, it’s my faltering regime of maintenance that’s the root of the problem. That might be good to write about later-for now tides.

Build upon a beach, or among the dunes, and in time be overtaken. Have you ever been to Kittyhawk? There’s a mini gulf there swallowed by dunes. It’s more meaningful than any corps of engineers flooded village. What to do about disappearing cotton paper and fake sable brushes, pages of effort suddenly gone forever? Cheap. Become cheap. Throw out the pretense and use the worst paper. Use a gel rollerball. I can’t pretend to have it figured out yet, they just seem far more forgiving when I suffer a lapse.

Yeah, of course I know, this is just filler, prologue. The next one will be at least a little practical, I promise. For now a poor attempt at presenting things in narrative form. It was described to me once what it was like to take a day off from school in the middle of the week. Car on the road and things on the sidewalks were all surprising. It’s a dissonance. Should be on school, so seeing the everything that still exists is strange. It’s how shallow graves and tarp-wrapped corpses are found; the depositor takes for granted that the out of the way corner of the field, the scrubby tree line, is remote. The solopists oversight.