I was walking towards the grocery store and noticed a man approaching people in the parking lot. Some days I feel like my resting bitch face is impervious, but that was not one of those days. The guy caught up with me, at least got close enough to yell, “Can you help me?”

I’m in a rural area with a surprisingly vibrant charity scene that does an admirable job of keeping people in poverty fed and housed, so it’s basically unheard of to see homeless folks begging and very rare to be approached like this in the grocery store parking lot. All that is to say, when someone asks for my help, it’s hard to pretend I didn’t hear the plea.

It started out normal enough, the guy was down on his luck asking for money. I told him, truthfully, I don’t have any cash on me but I could buy him something if he needs me to.

He agreed and asked for one thing: Soap. Didn’t matter what kind.

Fortunately, he did not give it back to me and suggest that I needed to use it so I couldn’t have smelled too bad.

A while back I was standing in line behind a few people when one of the people at the head of the line mentioned something about a “bum leg”.

The smooth brain behind them immediately seized on the opportunity to start a super sarcastic to the point of being aggressive spiel about how “you can’t say that anymore, that’s not politically correct” and then continued his butt hurt tirade calling out “liberal snowflakes”.

However, the grand finale and pièce de résistance of his rambling was a comment along the lines of “there’s only 2 pronouns, male and female”.

Anyway, this comic from 1994 kinda reminded me of that hilarious but also horrific little nugget.

NEW USER: “I came to Lemmy because Reddit permabanned me for saying puppies and kittens are cute.”

Then I find myself looking at their comment/post history because that doesn’t really sound like a normal thing anybody would get banned for. And after seeing what they post/comment here, I think to myself “I disagree with permabanning people, but I think I understand why it might’ve been done.”

If I had to guess, it’s probably less about pissing people off and more about your use of common logical fallacies (ex: straw man) and/or the click-baity title. If only there were an eye roll button you’d have been spared some of these folks’ opinions and down votes. But then I presume that’s the point – engagement.

The lizards he’s wearing look like at least a couple different species of Basillisk (I’m thinking it’s a mix of Green and Brown Basilisks). They don’t make great pets, but they do show up in the pet trade (at least in the USA). I wanted one soooo bad back in the day.

We didn’t say AVERAGE HUMAN BITES. As I’m sure you are aware, ants bite, too.

If you think YOU’RE feeling bad, how do you think the beetle felt?

When I got my first (bb) gun as a kid, it did not take long for me to make my first kill. There were some sparrows hopping around in a tree in my backyard while I was out there shootin’ mah gun unsupervised (as was the style at the time). I pointed, I pulled the trigger. I shot and killed one of the birds.

And then I walked up to have a glance at the poor bird. Fortunately it was dead. It had a little bullet hole and a bit of blood spilled out. But it was limp when I picked it up.

I felt terrible about it. I think I might’ve even cried. My dad told me not to do that again, and offered the helpful observation “at least it died quickly”.

So along those lines, I hope your former beetle at least died quickly. In truth, a quick passing is almost a blessing. So many organisms linger at the end, humans included. You might’ve spared this one creature.

And back to the sparrow, I have mostly absolved myself of my avian murder since now as an adult I’ve come to realize that the bird I shot was an invasive European Sparrow.

So along those lines, I hope if your former beetle didn’t die quickly then perhaps it was an otherwise ecologically devastating invasive species and you actually did the right thing by murdering it.

Denise - it’s French

For potato salad: I have several secret ingredients. I don’t necessarily use them all at the same time, but hard boiled eggs, yellow American mustard, and relish made from home-made sweet pickles.

On the topic of pickles: This is particularly true for sweet pickled veggies (like cukes & peppers), I’ll add some fresh cut ginger. Pairs extremely well with more the more traditional pickling spices used in my part of the world.

For most anything savory: A bit of celery seed. This one falls into the “with great power comes great responsibility” category, though. Use just enough that you, the cook, can detect it but not so much that other people can easily pick it up in the flavor profile. Also, it works best with dishes that pair sweet and salty profile with herbs, such as soups and marinades.

For dishes that need a bit of extra fat: I’ll sometimes add some bacon grease if I know that everybody having the dish is fine with pork products. It’s a quick way to add saltiness, meaty/umami, and smoke flavoring to things like various greens, various bean dishes, and stuff like that.

Did he say that this former president was actually a former president of the United States of America or could his hallucination been a former presidential candidate, president of some other country, or president of some random company?

That was an honest question there. I haven’t watched, read, or heard the actual comment he made in this specific instance and my first assumption is that he’s crooked lawyering his way out of this dementia riddled statement so I figure I’d see if that might be what’s happening here.

I’d already heard of Mastodon and based on poking around there, I learned about Lemmy, so I explored it as a Reddit alternative. Initially, my early exposure to lemmy was mostly a curiosity thing.

Also during that time, my resentment and distaste for Reddit’s policies and general culture was building up. The place had changed so much over the years, just slowly enough that it took awhile to notice that it was no longer the same place it was when I first arrived.

I ended up coming to Lemmy in the months ahead of the Reddit API fiasco, but would still peek over there from time to time. Then post API fiasco, I just stopped even peeking.

In those days, Lemmy was a largely KIND place, so that really helped the transition. The culture here was different from Reddit, and seemed much more positive and supportive at that time, so that made it easier to look past the flaws. It was a regular occurrence to see folks call out users who were being abusive or overly abrasive in their replies, and folks would often talk out or joke about their differences. It was a nice, refreshing change of pace most of the time.

That’s almost all gone now or perhaps hidden on some private or unbeknownst to me server somewhere in the Fediverse. But for me, for now, I’m still here. I just had to adapt. Basically I mostly stopped reading replies to my comments and just block people I see being abusive to others, but this also means Lemmy is now a sad, dead echo of its not too distant past and more of an opportunity to fart into the winds of oblivion.

I can hear the chirping, assuming they’re anything like the ones around my part of the world.

Sad as it is, if I could go back to the day Carrie Fischer died, I think I could change the whole trajectory of the universe. But at a minimum, I could go back to a time when life still sort of made a bit of sense to me, so there’s that.

Simple: People, in general, are terrible at coming up with dialog. And the machines are imitating us.

College in the USA. I’ve gone several days without food, simply because I could not afford to buy anything to eat nor did I have transport (or money for transport) to buy/procure any.

I’ve also gone several days without food while sick. For me, these two things were QUITE different. Being too sick to eat sucks because I was sick and feeling so bad that hunger didn’t register. But being otherwise healthy, but having no access to food is something else entirely.

It was like a day before my every waking thought somehow revolved around eating and food, almost feels like being mentally ill. Every thing you think about turns into a tangent, memory, feeling about food. Hard to describe and it’s been so long, that fortunately it’s a foggy, distant trace of a memory. Just still remember that I couldn’t focus on anything worth a shit because any semblance of a thought process would devolve into food and eating.

No, but yes. I was laid off. But, it was because my employer was a federal contractor in the USA who suffered at the hands of DOGE. We were doing good stuff, actively helping others, so I was quite proud of it. It was also important, important enough that people could literally be dying – other than the fact that the people who managed to stay behind and are now doing the job of 3 or more folks are managing to barely keep things going.

Cholesterol, perhaps.

Traveling to cities.

These days I can’t think of a time I haven’t gone into a city and seen people begging at intersections, signs with sad stories, etc. Really wish there was more I could do to help them get back on their feet but also have to be weary of the fact that some of them are just posing and scamming.

I agree. Those true crime documentary-style shows are probably the closest thing to traumatizing. All this other fake, fictional stuff other people are posting? That crap made me laugh.

But something about knowing that some lady got murdered near the lake we used to go swimming at? Yes, that would scare me.

Completely off topic, so apologies. I’m sorry.

What causes some of these posted images to show up as an external link versus just being a photo I can click? I use the web UI with Lemmy.zip if that makes a difference. Just weird that like 5% of meme/images posted are a link that doesn’t open in a new tab or an image that just expands when I click the button.