To learn more about earth-eating in animals and humans, check out the Wikipedia page on geophagia.

I feel like I had what wasn’t quite a stroke, but perhaps a minor brain bleed while reading that.

leminal.space

Can I take a second to swoon over your instance name?

I’m pretty sure this is a typo, but something about “just deserts for Trump” feels more appropriate.

Do you mean “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”?

This was my favorite strip on the comics page when I was a child. Significantly better kid-humor to Boomer-humor ratio than the legacy strips that often dominated newspapers. You could definitely tell the author was on the younger side (basically the only places to find video game related strips that side of the webcomic revolution). Still had the stereotypical golfer dad that was inexplicably universal in the late 20th century comic strip world, though (yet another reason why Calvin and Hobbes is the GOAT). Zits was another strip actually geared toward children/youth.

For whatever reason Twitter chuds ignore all animated shows.

Velma

I have heard that bee hotels can spread disease (can anyone verify?). Any thoughts/plans on cleaning or refreshing the rooms?

Accidentally leaving an appliance running sure hits differently when you’re a farmer

Yes, but with many more sorting options. (What does “newbie-friendly” even mean?)

Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.

I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, moderate, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.

Otherwise you’re either forcing users to do this research on their own (“ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks”) or they’re going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don’t like.

A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don’t know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine the bugs turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won’t be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.

For Japanese cooking the resource I’ve been very happy with is https://www.justonecookbook.com/

But I’ll have to check yours out too!

You got newts and salamanders (somewhat) backward:

From Wikipedia: Unlike other members of the family Salamandridae, newts are semiaquatic, alternating between aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Not all aquatic salamanders are considered newts, however.

Not to take away from your experience (seriously, I’m glad you enjoyed the episode), however I recently rewatched the first few episodes of Voyager, and I thought Janeway’s character (or at least the portrayal of her) had aged really poorly.

For example, there’s a scene between her and B’Elanna where they’re manically finishing each other’s thoughts on some technobabble, and all I could think was “the writers felt this conversation was necessary to show the audience that both these characters are more than qualified for their positions in spite of their gender.” It felt performative rather than empowering. I get a vibe from Janeway that’s more “this is a woman trying to be a male captain” than “this is a female captain” or even “this is a captain who happens to be female.”

Granted it’s not like the other main characters are necessarily much better (Star Trek, why you always gotta start off so rough?), but Janeway feels like she’s trying too hard to prove something, which would be fine if that were part of the plot/character description, but this is Starfleet, they’re supposed to be past gender issues. There are a lot of things that date the show, but I think Janeway is possibly the biggest example. Which is frustrating, because I really want to like her.

the free and open source office suite trusted by millions of users around the world.

Do I use Libre office? Yes. Do I trust it? Absolutely not (in the sense that I don’t think they’re stealing my data, but holy wow is the user experience a buggy mess)

Bamigboye also said that he has PTSD from being kidnapped in his native Nigeria.

Bingo

According to the affidavit, Bamigboye also said that he has PTSD from being kidnapped in his native Nigeria.

I don’t have PTSD from being previously kidnapped, but probably would have likely done the same thing.

Switching accounts over is a big issue for sure, but even bigger is when entire communities are lost. Those are much harder to switch over, both due to scale and moderation concerns.

I don’t disagree with the sentiments behind these statements, but you’re basically asking a fish to leave their large school to join a smaller school because it will benefit the species as a whole if the species is divided into multiple schools rather than one giant school. While it might be true that the species is safer that way, it’s much more dangerous for the individual fish to be in a smaller school than to stay in the large school.

In other words, it’s safer for the fediverse for users to diversify, but is safer for the individual to join a “too large to fail” instance. If a user’s instance goes belly up and they lose their account and everything associated with it, it’s functionally similar to the entirety of Lemmy going down as far as that individual user is concerned, because unless you’re a serial lurker (in which case it doesn’t even matter what instance you’re on if you’re not contributing) who wants to invest years in a social media site just to lose your account? Most folks are going to leave rather than start all over. And most folks are going to make the decision that is in their best interests over those of some website. I know every time I see another instance get shut down or defederated, I’m relieved I decided to sign up via .world, even if it’s sluggish at times.

“Joining the fediverse isn’t hard bro, your instance doesn’t matter, just pick one.”

“Stop using Lemmy.world, we need to redistribute to smaller instances.”

The number of times I’ve heard these fucking lines when people discuss why Lemmy/the Fediverse isn’t growing like corp-owned alternatives…