Man, Im Kind Of Bummed Out That The Best Resources For Deer Anatomy And Body Language Are All On Hunting

Man, I’m kind of bummed out that the best resources for deer anatomy and body language are all on hunting sites. I mean, it makes sense, but it’s still kind of disorienting to be reading along and then have a description end with like, “…so if you see the buck’s ears do that, stay still and keep your gear from making noise”. I’m not crouching in the grass with a compound bow, I’m just an artist! I just want to draw a bunch of fake fictional deer and deer-adjacent creatures, not put on some forest camo and hunt me a Big Antler Boy or w/e in real life!! 

Yeesh, I bet I’m going to get targeted ads about hunting equipment now. Just another way that the Research Struggle can be really real sometimes.

real

for science: what was the first song you heard by taylor swift? mine was our song

Proud to say I’m the one who started this whole mess. Flash forward a week and Shino is a war criminal.

a funny little thing that happened in the campaign

It's not an "abandoned" WIP, I didn't intentionally leave it in the forest to die and forget about it, it is a lost wip who wandered into the forest despite my pleas not to. I sit at the edge of the forest every day and hear it calling for help but there is nothing I can do. It is a haunting wip

I’m currently taking ASL at my school and we just talked about this the other day.

Babies develop their fine motor skills MONTHS before they start talking verbally, which makes ASL a great first language. A lot of hearing parents have started teaching their hearing infants sign language to better communicate with them before they become verbal. This is a beautiful thing, however, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of these hearing parents likely wouldn’t do the same if they had a deaf child. So many deaf babies are given hearing aids and taught how to speak English simply because it’s easier for the parents. Not all hearing parents with deaf children are like that, there are certainly some who learn sign language alongside their children, but many don’t because learning a new language requires too much effort.

These cases of nonverbal hearing babies being able to pick up ASL quicker than English is proof that it’s not nearly as difficult as some parents seem to think. Even dogs can learn sign commands rather than verbal ones. There’s no excuse for not making an effort to immerse your child in their culture and learning to communicate with them in whatever way is best for them.

Quick fun fact I learned in ASL class:

Babies can begin signing as early as a few months old. You don’t have to wait until they’re 9-12 months to start communicating verbally; the parts of the brain that process and use language develop before a baby is able to speak intelligibly with their mouth. Teaching your kid sign language early means that they can communicate effectively months ahead of schedule, when compared to peers that only speak a spoken language.

Additional fun fact: this jumpstart in language is thought to be a possible way to avoid the “Terrible Twos”; that phase of a toddler’s life is thought to be largely due to a toddler being unable to effectively communicate their needs. If a two year old has already been speaking for a year and a half, they’re far more able to communicate to you what’s wrong. Heck, they might also start reading earlier; languages with a fingerspelling component, like ASL, mean that any speaker needs to be able to spell unfamiliar words and ask about them. This can jumpstart a toddler’s ability to recognize letters as components of a word, and teach them to spell, read, and eventually write these letters to communicate.

Which, of course, lends absolutely zero credence to the theory that ASL will inherently stunt someone’s spoken language skills. If anything, sign language fluency makes acquiring any language, spoken or not, easier rather than harder.