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::: spoiler Transcription A Bluesky post from "Slippy", @damnslippy.slippy.me, with a profile picture of a woman with short, purple hair holding a knife: Sincerely delighted to discover, 45 minutes into this nearly-wordless three-hour documentary about French monks who take vows of silence, that among the reasons they \*can\* talk is "to make sure the monastery cats know when it's mealtime by making little kitty-calling noises at them." :::
They do it for themselves, not the cats. The cats know when it's mealtime, unless mealtime happens at a new random time every day.
Do something your cat enjoys at a specific time every day for a couple days, and you've got yourself a furry alarm clock that will make sure to remind you of the time if you forget.
Not just cats. That's the Pavlovian response. Even YOU and I can be similarly trained.
I accidently train myself to eat snacks at specific times of day like that all the time. Then I realise what I did and it's too late.
It’s no longer your fault.
Yes, but cats love routine, and follow it as much as possible, like a clock.
You can train a dog to respond a certain ways to certain signals, but you can't train it to wake you up every day at a certain specific time, unless it can recognise some signal. But cats will train themselves to do that, if they get something out of it, and are by nature well aware of the time of day, with surprising precision.
Of course, if you train your cat to wake you up for work, better be ready to be woken up at the same time on weekends, unless there's some noticeable enough difference (like traffic noise on the street outside) between workdays and holidays and you're lucky to have a sufficiently smart cat who can notice the difference. Cats might be quite adequate clocks, but they're not calendars.
you can't train [a dog] to wake you up every day at a certain specific time, unless it can recognise some signal.
My dog always woke me up at a consistent time every morning. I didn't train her to do that, and I don't know what the signal was (other than the position of the sun, I guess). I used to hate it, because it was always too early, but I eventually got used to it.
Maybe I was the trainee, in this case 😆
I'm not allowed to sleep past 9am without feeding the cat. She dose not give up.
My cats remind me every few minutes that it's mealtime. I don't even feed them manually; I have an auto-feeder.
I have an auto-feeder.
It's not the same, though. It tastes better when you do it.
(Bonus points if you "cook" it in the kitchen like you would your food; they're part of the family, after all, they'll appreciate being treated like equals. Or betters.)
Throw up in my own shoes at the same time every day, got it!
My cat will lock in on that stuff if you do it just once! I have to be really careful not to feed her early even if she's being a pain about it, because if she gets fed ten minutes early once, that's the new time forever lol.
One time she was being bonkers at 5am so I gave her some treats to keep the peace, it took about 2 weeks to get her out of the "I get treats at 5am every day now" mode.
Yeah cats can tell time somehow. Not just meal times but things like when I'm coming home or my bedtime. I've read that they like to stick to routines and find change threatening. Probably why they panic when I move a piece of furniture or organize the closet.
This is so wholesome :-)
The image is even compatible with scrolling using dark mode, I could ask for nothing more.
I could ask for nothing more.
I honestly wouldn't have bothered commenting if not to reply to this, but since this was there, I'll add that there is something one could ask for: alt text/transcription, for the sake of accessibility for blind and visually impaired users. It's something I see a lot more on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit, but we could still be a lot better at it. I always try to do it with my own image posts, and often on images in comments, but unfortunately a couple of the most prolific posters of text-based images rarely do it.
Transcription (so my post isn't just whinging)
A Bluesky post from "Slippy", @damnslippy.slippy.me, with a profile picture of a woman with short, purple hair holding a knife:
Sincerely delighted to discover, 45 minutes into this nearly-wordless three-hour documentary about French monks who take vows of silence, that among the reasons they *can* talk is "to make sure the monastery cats know when it's mealtime by making little kitty-calling noises at them."
edit: here's the bluesky post
I blame the tools. On Lemmy, unless you are using Tesseract, you typically cannot see the alt text unless the image fails to load or you have a specific tool to do so like an actual reader for the blind. For at least the past year I have always put alternative text onto every image I have posted, but using Firefox on Android and I have no easy way to even know if that text is there, e.g. to check spelling. In PieFed this is an active area of development, and e.g. alt text was added 9 months ago to the post creation page (roadmap) but I don't know if Lemmy has any plans to ever show alt text to someone who is not blind (or has some other means to view that text).
And even if it did, not all apps may make use of it. Therefore if these prolific posters can't even see it themselves after they post something, I can well understand why they would feel like it is not worth the bother. The incentivization structure is just all wrong: it's all cost to them and virtually no benefit, at least none that they can see for themselves, immediately. Someone would need to put in the requisite time and effort to make better tools, if we truly wanted this to change. However, I personally have given up on Lemmy every getting better at a reasonable rather than snail's pace.
And similarly Firefox as well. If the developers choose not to care about such issues, it sends a strong message to the users of those tools that the concept is unimportant.
Something that people could do regardless that is an even better workaround than writing up alt text into image posts would be to copy and paste text rather than use screenshots. This offers so many advantages, including the ability to change font sizes and match whatever dark/light mode the user prefers at that moment, and be represented in whatever font face the user chooses, etc.
How do I do it on Voyager?
Like I told the other user, I actually very frequently don't do true alt text, but instead write a transcription in the body of the post. I do it using the Lemmy spoiler syntax:
Transcription
[the transcription here]
But one could also just write the transcription directly, especially if it's relatively short and unlikely to obstruct sighted users' experience too much.
It's unfortunate that some apps (including the official one, Jerboa) don't support the official "alt text" field, and they definitely should, but even the web's alt text field is rather limited to use for full transcriptions.
One of my favorite bumper stickers says "Tell your cat I said pspspsps"
My cat can distinguish the sound of the cat food bag from the sound of any other packaging in my kitchen. I just have to touch it ...
Imagine if the roles were reversed. Every day you're forced to the brink of starvation, practically three paws already in the grave. Then, and only then, does your caretaker finally announce your salvation for yet another day by opening the bag.
If the cat couldn't differentiate the bag by sound, they'd have long starved - either they'd have expended too much energy by walking to the kitchen when no food was coming, or they wouldn't have reached the bowl in time to fend off their untimely demise.
The life of a house cat is a daily struggle against fate itself.
i've been feeding my dog chicken thighs after her last hungerstrike. She recognizes the difference in between my knifework on sausage/veggies and chicken.
My cats tell me when it's dinner time, not the other way around :)
My dogs have learned that the sound of a knife on the cutting board means there's a chance food of some kind might make it to the floor, so they come running.
Based on my Duck search, I assume the documentary is called Into Great Silence.
It's a great film that is worth a watch. (They also have someone read during meals.)
Only it was probably not "pspspsp" because as a French speaker, I've never understood that English onomatopoeia. It doesn't make that sound in French. When I try to get the attention of a cat or another animal, it's usually more of a "dzkdzkdzk" or "tzktzk" sound. A bit like the sound of a kiss but made with tapping the tongue on the roof of the mouth instead of with the lips.
Pspsps is like how a cartoon calls a cat, from my American perspective. As a kid we called cats with a tsktsk sound, clicking tongue against the roof of the mouth behind the front top teeth, as you say. But I hear people use pspsps more now irl so it bled into reality.
How cruel is it to not drop the name?
It's Into Great Silence
Gröning proposed the idea for the film to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. They responded to him 16 years later
[message left on read]
... 16 years later
"yo. u up?"
I really love the idea that the monks spent 16 years in silence contemplating Grönings proposal until they finally came to a conclusion. This is Jedi Master level of weirdness.
In reality they probably forgot about it and he brought it up again after all that time.
Or the guy that hated it finally died lol
they make this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) one of the best fuckin things ever made
Pavlov already demonstrated this exception was entirely unnesscarry.
I'd like to find this documentary. Anyone know it?
Die große Stille (Le grand silence), it's from Arte, like many interesting things are.
Fun fact: Just rubbing your thumb and middle and fore fingers together will draw some cats. It doesn't work on all of them, though.
I wish the billionaries would take vows of silence and fuck off to a monestary somewhere, and leave the rest of us alone...
There was a movie with one of the Mighty Boosh folks that featured characters communicating exclusively like apes - it's called AAAAARGGHH or something like that. It's technically a regular british screwball kitchen sink dramedy but with a gimmick
I just saw a video, and apparently "ma-AH!" means "Come here!" in feline language. I have not personally confirmed this, but saw several examples in the video.