An Apology To Winter

“Everything is leafless (except those guys),” I understood of winter as a child, and I believe I mistook that for “so nothing interesting is happening (except snow days).” And that is patently unfair.

The first snowfall of this winter came with a veritable army of songbirds hanging out in the neighbor’s hedge, darting out to perch on our mulberry and partake of our bird feeder, and I’m fully appreciating how much easier they are to watch when they’re the only burst of color, the only movement, and some of the only sound happening outdoors right now.

The trees I planted in the spring are deciduous and dormant, and for the first time I’m paying attention to the buds – on some plants they’re understated, on others there are hints of red, and our peach tree’s are so visible I’m half-expecting flowers! It’s young yet, so we’ll see, and I have my fingers crossed.

And of course, the leaves: the fallen leaves, no longer for jumping in, and so to a younger Cassandra just there. I brought another neighbor’s leaves over when they were piling them to be cleared, this fall, intent on compost and the ideal substrate for fireflies and gleeful about burying the lawn in fading colors. I hadn’t realized how much I’d appreciate the texture. Frost clings to them when the snow starts to melt. The snow collects in odd divots on top of them, also, and into mid-December we still had the occasional leaf landing on top of that otherwise white winterscape.

Everything is leafless, except those guys – and isn’t it beautiful?

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The Default

When your attention is committed and a task still needs to be done, how do you approach it? When you’re too tired for the challenging and still looking for something fun, where do you look first?

I play a lot of games when I’m not thinking; the ones with which I’m so familiar that it’s more pattern recognition than active thought. (I play a lot of games when I’m thinking, too, about anything else. Strategy games make good fidgets.) At the moment, my most in use and so most easy-to-default-to game is Yi Xian.

My most default of kitchen processes, meanwhile, is definitely the hummus wrap. When in doubt, grab four ready-to-use ingredients, chop a sweet pepper, and roll. Nice system, right? It’s certainly practical. I’m curious about the patterns, more so – the way that I fall into a normal, and stay there awhile, and then wander to something new and adventurous, and then stay there, and so on. Is that universal? I expect that it would be, and you know what they say about assume.

If it is – how do you address the normal-that-was? I used to write whole essays to the backdrop of Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I used to bake chicken like clockwork. As a very small child, I could recite by heart most if not all of my Mo Willem’s books.

How do you go about carrying what something meant when you’re not actively holding it?

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Enter To Win: The Sequel

I don’t usually come back to topics on this blog, which is… absurd, considering how often one comes back to topics in life. And one of the topics I’ve come back to recently is sweepstakes.

It’s lost some of its novelty since the last time I wrote about it – I’m definitely less excited about free paper towels – but it’s still neat to peruse. I’ve been using a different aggregator, too, Sweepstakes Fanatics, which is laid out so that it’s way easier to tell what each giveaway is for, at a glance, and it marks the items that have been added in the last day. (They take weekends off, so there won’t be any of those right now.) The added convenience has definitely been helpful, as someone who prefers to casually scroll through sweepstakes when I bored.

Casual or not, I continue to have opinions. Last time, I talked about website experiences and travel daydreams, which are still my preferred subset of the bunch, and recently I’ve been thinking more about the actual mechanics of each of them. Some companies exclusively offer the cruise – you’re on the hook for actually getting to it, shore excursions, etc. etc. Some offer the cruise, the airfare, a hotel room the night before embarking, ground transfers… And they all have their own terms and conditions for by when the trip should be. Of course, the targeted trips are way more specific – there’s not a lot of flexibility when it comes to music festivals or sports.

“What does it look like to believe you can win?” was my topic last time. The delight of raw possibility. “What does it look like to win?” I’d like to ask. Do you want to spend a week in the Caribbean enough to pay for airfare? Do you want to spend two nights in California, where just about everything is covered and your itinerary is pre-planned? Do you want to spend specifically February 12-15 in Milan, Italy, to watch hockey? The options are pretty endless.

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Do You Recognize This Bird(le)?

I was playing Metazooa recently – a taxonomy game – and excited about the different species at our bird feeder, and I figured, “There has to be a bird identification game out there, right?” And, shock of shocks, there is that!

Birdle is, as the name would imply, Wordle-esque, in that there’s a daily target and six guesses for the user, with indicators for partial success. Of course, Birdle has slightly different objectives than Wordle, being an identification game – that is to say, each daily bird comes with photos of it and possibly a range map. Your goal is to guess its name – its common name – with a dropdown to help, so if you type in “yellow” it will offer you every bird with “yellow” in its name, applicable to that area.

Area-applicable is, of course, only important because of another feature – not only is there a bird-of-the-day for the world, but there are also birds for each of the continents! Excepting Antarctica, because Antarctica, but including Central America and, as a treat, the contiguous US. I have a guess as to where most of their user base is.

Once you’ve guessed, the screen will display that bird’s order, family, genus, and species, grey for wrong and green for the ones that you’ve gotten correct. For some birds this is more useful than others – songbirds are now the bane of my existence, even though I love them and they’re adorable – but in all cases, after your third guess, it will offer to tell you what the correct family is, and then after the next guess the genus, and after guess five it will offer you the first three letters of the bird’s common name. Depending on how expansive the genus is – and whether or not you’re using Wikipedia – this can still leave some room for error, but its clear that the true objective is for you to learn. And check out some gorgeous bird photography. And if nine birds-of-the-day aren’t for either of those enough, there’s also a practice function, where you can plug in geography and/or family of birds and get photos with multiple choice!

The pictures are from eBird and the range maps are from Birds of the World, both of which are comprehensive. And the game aspect adds a certain motive-to-process, as it were. Why else would I remember that some ducks are called pintails? (And why are some hummingbirds called hermits?)

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Oh, The Joys of Spam

Generally, I have the great privilege to be left to my own devices. I’m on few enough email lists that it’s rare something comes in that I don’t recognize, and apparently few enough unofficial email lists that I only get true spam… maybe once a month. I can’t remember the last time a spam caller left a voicemail, and I don’t think I get junk mail at all.

On this website, I haven’t emptied my marked-as-spam folder in ages, so I can tell you truly that one 20-item page starts in September of 2018 and covers clear into mid-2024.

…so you can imagine my bafflement last week when I logged on to over two hundred comments, almost certainly all spam – and if not, there are maybe two actual people hidden in there, somewhere. They’ll make up a statistically significant amount of the full sentences. What is this? Why is this? And… no, I don’t think I want an answer. Just suffice it to say that I’ve read enough generic compliments to last the rest of the year, and enough Adult Comic advertisements to be glad I never got this kind of spam when I was a minor. Yeesh.

Happy first major snow of the season, all those who celebrate. It’s a much more beautiful kind of inundation.

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Y’all, Touch Grass

Maybe not literally, depending on your snow situation and urban planning, but I’ve been spending more time just kind of… hanging out in a physical space. Smelling the candle I never light. Curling up on my giant plush penguin with a cup of tea. Watching the bird feeder while I eat. There was just a hawk on the neighbor’s fence! And it’s nice to stop and look at the wall art, you know? That’s why I put it up.

Take a second (or maybe two or three) to just exist. It helps, I promise.

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Onwards and Downwards

…a catchphrase which only really makes sense in a handful of contexts. Habitually hanging out on an upper floor. Living at high altitudes. And ocean exploration, where most everything interesting is down.

Such is the case for the program the catchphrase belongs to, Fathomverse, an app dedicated to all life oceanic. Mechanically, it’s a lot like what I’ve already said about Zooniverse: the objective is classifying scientific data, and the mechanism is strangers on the internet.

Of course, Fathomverse has the benefit of being one big project with its own dedicated workspace, so it’s a little bit more specialized. Its participants, also – you train in a given group of organisms before working with new data, so you have plenty of practice in what to look for! I’ve delighted in learning about critters I didn’t know exist. Especially brittle stars. Turns out, they’re everywhere!

Training done, and depending on how much training you’ve done, there are a few ways to classify. There are games, for starters, or perhaps the digital equivalent of moving meditations, by which one finds photos, pockets them, and then sorts them out once the seeking is done. At a certain point, you also unlock the ability to just classify directly! Which is nice for when you just want to see a bunch of fish. Or coral, or…

Regardless. One can also do the Spot-The-Lifeforms puzzle of Bound, in which one puts little boxes around all organisms in an image. I get way too detail-obsessive on this one and have recused myself, because it impacts my user experience, but if that level of detail-obsessive and/or making little boxes will delight you, it exists! And it both teaches their software how to pinpoint where an organism is, and indicates for us classifiers which animal in an image with multiples is being ID’d. If you’ve ever stopped and really stared at one of those nice, dramatic coral reef photos, you can appreciate just How Much is Happening. Even in less photogenic environments.

For more information on Fathomverse and its related Ocean Stuff, there are both in-app rewards the more you contribute (community consensus gives you points) with videos on all sorts of stuff, and a community Discord, which I joined for the data analysis and stuck around in for #marine-memes. Priorities. If you’re curious about where in the world the images come from, which categories they currently have more of, or how to tell some of the trickier critters apart – or, you know, marine memes – it’s worth checking out!

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What Do You Keep In Reach?

I was wondering recently about the things I keep easy access to, and what they say about me. I almost never wear pants without pockets anymore – I’ve gotten used to carrying two hands’ worth of objects and my phone. It feels really weird on the occasion I do wear them and have to juggle stuff.

On the other hand, I no longer keep access to a portable charger. I have a charger – it’s not as though my phone would work if I didn’t – but it’s on my desk, a solid kind meant to have my phone standing up, and plugged into one of those outlets you don’t really want to get to to take it out of. I used to have a much more portable charger on hand on the daily – I had to, going from place to place as I was. But I live a lot more of my life around a central location, and now my portable charger is in an obnoxiously crinkly plastic bag, in a drawer, under other bits and bobs, where it only gets excavated a handful of times a year. (My mouse’s charger, on the other hand, is on the shortlist, and in easy reach of my mouse.)

And this is in everything, isn’t it? The fact that I carry Lactaid and Kleenex on the regular but have long since stopped carrying a mechanical pencil. The fact that the muffin tins are easier to get to than the ice cream maker – a year-round affair, not just approaching winter. The fact that I deliberately put the guac in the back of the fridge because I knew I’d still reach for that if I couldn’t see it, but maybe not for the things that are now in front.

And I wonder – if this is what my life says about me… what does yours say about you?

How do you organize yourself?

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