You hear about the dwarf psychic that escaped prison?

He’s a small medium at large

I can’t wait to develop my natural immunity to polio! Or smallpox!

The flu, why, without the vaccine you can develop a natural immunity every year, twice a year if you really want to!

Legit dude, what the fuck do you think “natural” immunity is? It’s catching whatever it is, being sick, and surviving it. You specifically chose colds and the flu as examples, and they’re the worst possible examples because they mutate so fast you never actually achieve immunity to anything; the version you have resistance to might come around again, or it might not, but you damn sure will eventually run across a strain that your body isn’t equipped for.

Like, I get that vaccines are confusing to someone with little education, but this is the internet age, you can look up the terms you’re using and make sure you aren’t fucking up your entire point. Like, the time it took you to type the post up, you could have looked up what vaccines actually do, and why they are/were the single greatest achievement of the human species.

You can go and get a shot of something stable enough and never get sick from it, ever in some cases. In others, you might get sick but it’ll be a few bad days instead of a week or more of misery (as is sometimes how the flu vaccines end up because of the aforementioned mutations, but other viruses are just a bit harder to stop entirely).

So, nah, fuck your natural “immunity”, that’s just a recipe for lost health and time better spent on something like reading up on why vaccines are fucking awesome, even in the rare cases of allergies or bad reactions.

Much appreciated!

I almost get this one, but I’m not sure why LOGe would be In

Just don’t speak enough maths lol

My own lol.

Any of them

Well, of course there’s a benefit.

To anyone selling the ivermectin or whatever to people that don’t need it.

Seriously. That’s it. There’s zero benefit to taking medications like that if you don’t have symptoms.

Shit, I’m hostile now.

Legit, I’m usually nice to people, even though I hate people at large. But I don’t trust any motherfucker at my back until they’ve proven they can be trusted.

That’s how I would handle things in a crisis like that. Short term, low trust, mutually understood cooperation, but with safety valves.

No more or less flawless than windows, Android, or the iOS stuff.

It’s different flaws.

In a pinch, some superglue liberally applied can either block reception or muffle it so much that anything it could send would be largely useless. Or you can open it up and remove it and hope nothing else breaks in the process.

Eh, any time someone ascribes motivations to animals, my butthole spasms.

The best that should be said is that the behaviors they exhibit are similar to the behaviors they exhibit for kittens or sometimes sick cats.

Somehow, somebody decided that meant they think we’re bad hunters, and the idea took off because it’s funny, but you can’t know what goes on inside the thoughts of other humans reliably, much less other animals.

There’s competing possibilities that the cats are showing off their kills to their social group, which is not only a common behavior when cats are young, but when they’re mated, but you don’t see people crowing about them bringing us food to get in our pants.

Overall, cats seem to treat us like other cats. Not exactly the same, but with less distinction than other domesticated animals. Horses, as an example, have a much wider distinction, for equally unprovable reasons.

My personal pet idea is that any sufficiently social animal, including humans, is instinctively going to seek out groups. They/we will negotiate the lack of a unifying language as best as possible, but with plenty of misunderstandings. It isn’t so much that other animals see us as being the same as them. It’s that they don’t really have the need for the distinction; there’s the in group (pride, pack, clan, whatever you want to call it) and out groups. When dealing with the family group, any animal will perform the same basic behaviors that their instincts tell them to.

Domestication just means that a given type of animal has developed or been bred to have, a stronger instinct for social bonding than wild animals, to the degree that they’ll accept other species as family easier.

Sync on my main tablet, because it has the best 2 column layout for my needs.

Connect on my phone where 2 column isn’t really a big factor, with summit as an alternative on there because I never have decided which of the two I prefer.

I don’t use lemmy on laptop/desktop because I dislike the experience via browser. It would be fine for passive scrolling I guess, but even with the various front end options, I run into more hassles than it’s worth when even the meh apps handle lemmy better and I just don’t need anything that could be gained via browser.

Kinda. Twice, depending on how you look at it. I did one of those “you can’t fire me, I already quit” things. The boss was just clueless and didn’t comprehend that when someone walks out at end of shift and says they’re not coming back, that’s quitting.

The other time was due to a switch in managers at a fast food joint when I was a kid.

One manager took a vacation, the fill in didn’t like long haired guys and looked for any excuse. He kinda got one, when I was late for a shift. Took the opportunity to say i was fired. Didn’t actually have the authority to do it, so it wouldn’t have counted even if the actual manager hadn’t come back and reversed it, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I had the Dying Fetus song “wrong one to fuck with” pop in my head as soon as I saw the image.

Ngl, while it is definitely weird as hell, it has a surreal beauty because of it.

It’s also like what you’d get if a kid only had brown crayons, drew a snake, and then developed the power to bring their drawings to life.

Damn… I missed that on first read. I had down voted for it being off topic until I saw this one.

Which is both a sign of a great joke and a bad one lol. But excellent word play!

Our old pong console. I don’t know if it still works because it’s been boxed up for over a decade at this point.

Oldest in use? Probably my old texas instruments graphing calculator, but it’s dying. I got it back in the early nineties for college, and my kid was using it last year with homework, but the screen is failing and it sometimes just freezes until you pull and replace the batteries. So only kinds in use, and barely hanging on.

My VCR is newer and still sees use rarely, but was used daily for a few years in the early naughties.

Wait! The phonograph! It’s still functional and my dad got it in the early eighties, so it’s older than the pong console, but I think calling it electronics is dubious, so I dunno if it counts. But it’s the oldest functional electric powered thing we have that I know of.

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.