Baby Horse Diaries - Baby Horses Are Stupid
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Baby horses are really neat. When you get them they are stupid. You know they’re stupid, any rational human being can expect them to be stupid, and they don’t know they’re stupid because they don’t know anything. Because they’re stupid.
Polo The Weirdo asks, have you ever?
1. Tried to teach a small child with a bucket of jellybeans how to do math?
2. Tried to program a smart device to correctly do everything you want it to do without any clear knowledge of the internal workings of smart devices or the associated apps?
3. Tried to play with a yoyo when you have no coordination or skill or honestly any business trying to yoyo in the first place?
If you answered YES to any of these questions then CONGRATULATIONS! You might just be a candidate for training baby horses! Then you start training them, and because horses (even stupid ones) are clever and workable animals, they start learning how to do stuff. Maybe on day 1 they learn that they probably shouldn’t stand on your foot too hard if they don’t want the ambulance to drag you off before they get their carrots. And then on day 6, after the hospital, they learn that sometimes people sit on their backs, and that’s cool, because suddenly there are so many more directions that carrots could potentially come from. Then maybe by day 20 they are learning how to trot and canter in circles, and transition off seat aids, and really they are being quite clever and learning a lot like the precious blank slates that they are and then BAM! They forget everything, stand on your foot, and go back to being 100% stupid. And you cry into a bag of rotten carrots that you were going to give your clever baby as a reward for being so clever because you’re right back where you started.
So you teach them everything again. And they’re learning well.
The transitions are improving slowly, you’re jumping small jumps, your horse understands that the resident chicken is not a dinosaur, and BAM! It spooks at a stationary butterfly on a leaf and is too traumatized to enter the arena for the next week. And you’re back to square one, and your car still smells like rotten carrots.
But you persevere, because you love your baby horse, and even though it’s still about 98% as stupid as it was when you got it, sometimes it does learn new things, and each time it gets stupid again it gets marginally less stupid than the last time, so maybe you’re getting somewhere. The transitions are still aggressively average at best, but you can jump two or three jumps in a row now, and for a couple of strides you could have sworn you felt your horse go ‘on the bit’ (or somewhere acceptably bit-adjacent anyway). Then you jump two jumps and your horse forgets what transitions are and carries on all the way to Jupiter, and progress has to halt for a while (like your horse was supposed to) while you take a spaceship back to earth. And then BAM!
Suddenly your horse is winning small jumping classes, and it can do leg yields and flying changes, and rein backs, and you never taught it any of this! Did it go to some big ‘sport horse seminar’ in space? Did you finally figure out all your smart device apps and somehow install an update to baby_horse.exe? Is your horse secretly possessed by the spirit of a deceased Grand Prix dressage horse? You have NO idea, but you’re certainly not complaining. You do have questions though. Like, what the freakitydeakity? And how? And why? Can you get a refund for the walk/trot test you entered at that practice show and enter Advanced instead? How do you make it happen again? Is there a ‘save’ button, so next time it gets stupid you can revert back to the last known settings that made it function correctly?
Check out another Polo The Weirdo Article Baby Horses are kind of like Farts. If you have a baby horse, you must understand that these devices are known to regularly format their hard drives without user permission, and for that reason you must always keep backups handy of all apps that you wish to keep installed. It is also necessary to run regular debugs and antivirus checks to make sure that your baby horse doesn’t have to be rebooted due to auto-installing unwanted software (like the ‘buck after every jump’ app). But most importantly, if your baby horse suddenly appears with expensive, professional-grade software installed (like leg_yield.exe or obedient_jumping.app) that you didn’t pay for, don’t question it. Just sit quietly, enjoy the ride, and pray to god almighty that another unexpected format is not on the horizon. |
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