Sahara offered murder as an option today for the grave crime of touching the left side of her face while I stood on her right; it took several minutes and some carrot slices before she would even let me back into her left eye and touch her face, but she came round to the notion that there were better responses than threats of homicide and was quite personable as long as I didn't press the face issue.
The oak trees have been shaped by the strong winds here, but alas, they are both very dead after a Percheron and her WBxQH friend ringbarked them three or four years ago. The big one is also full of bees and barbed wire, with the bees making it difficult to extract the wire.
Re Sahara, the murder reflex I think is from her sire's side; his damline is known to produce horses with sharp tempers, which often seem to be exacerbated when bred to Egyptian lines. But the startle reflex and persistent lapses into head shyness I suspect have to do with how she was brought up.
She comes from the Free State, and the big studs there seem to run their horses in herds on the veld, with relatively little handling, so Sahara was presumably effectively feral until she was four, when she was brought in and given a course in ground manners, stabling and boxing. It did the job, and she loaded beautifully and without hesitation when I first met her. Just straight up and onto any horse box, and she reversed out quietly and right down the centre of the ramp. Nicest loader I have personally seen.
But she, and the small sample of Free State horses I know with similar upbringings, have a history of reactivity and headshy behaviours. I don't think they were abused or roughly handled: I do think that they were allowed to grow up uncivilised and then had a rude awakening as young adults with a well-developed sense of how their world worked, when they discovered that humans were going to make demands of them. To quote from My Friend Flicka:
[T]hey learned a world in which there are no human beings - just horses, grass, running water, trees, perhaps the strangeness of a wooden fence post and a wire fence - nothing more. And now they've got to change their minds about the world. It's different from what they've learned. It's a world where humans take the first place. Human beings master them. They have to obey.
And a horse which has spent four or five years doing largely what it wants to do can take some convincing that it can't have its own way in everything any longer, particularly when it is as smart and sensitive as an Arabian.
The brains on Arabian horses are so different from any other horses I have worked with: they are more attuned to humans than other horses, will strategise and out-think you, and have a great sense of humour. Over a century of breeding by westerners has not yet been able to eradicate the unique temperament and mind bred by the Bedouin over centuries of treating their mares as family and raising their foals in the tents. Time and again, I have read pieces by European travellers who talk about the sweetness of the Arab horses and their devotion to their people, but then go on to say that the same horses handled by Europeans would likely be considered hot, unmanageable or even vicious, due to the roughness apparently common in European stables at the time, compared to the Bedouin, who did not punish their horses.
Arabians want to work with you, if you are kind and give them time when they are worried or uncertain. Abba has put herself knowingly in harm's way and been bitten by another horse, to save me from being trampled, and that was when she had known me just over a year and did not have many reasons to think people were worth saving. But if you push them beyond what they feel is reasonable, they remember that too, and will stand up for themselves if they feel they must. Sahara, for whatever reason, has a low threshold for asks she deems unreasonable, but she has improved hugely over time. She's allowed a little regression every so often, because the more carrots she gets, the more positive associations she'll have with doing things she didn't want to.
On the same day that Ring announced this partnership, 404 Media reported that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy had access to Flock’s network of cameras. By partnering with Ring, Flock could potentially access footage from millions more cameras.
pokemon has given us a lot of fun takes on mundane life in the pokemon world over the years but "work-from-home pokemon trainer" has gotta be up there as one of my absolute favorites. sorry can you come in to the office today deborah from finance says she's supposed to battle you. yeah she says it's important.
signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy
The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.
i think the single most unrealistic part of superman 2025 was when it was announced that superman's kryptonian parents told him to have a harem and it was exclusively met with fear and disgust. I KNOW there would've been at least five dedicated subreddits that would have thousands being like HOW TO GET INTO SUPERMAN'S HAREM PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ONE SHOT BIG BLUE THAT'S ALL I'M ASKING
And then there would be people on Tumblr who also want to be in Superman's harem, but the difference is that they would be trying to get Superman pregnant.
My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that
Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass
It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE
After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.
Once you are aware of an unreachable blind spot it nags at you constantly and you can feel it like a hard little lump under your skin you need to poke and scratch at and it’s ardghgguychgghhbhhhbhhh
And on top of that, having operated CCTV at multiple locations now- my favourite and most comfortable one having excess of 60 cameras- it can be REALLY hard to suddenly jump to a different operating interface and display configuration, because all the muscle memory is wrong
On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.
Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet
The closest I imagine I can equate it to is like. Getting really really good at painting with a pair of prosthetic hands, and then suddenly having them swapped out with someone else’s
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ALT