The animal with the most correct plural forms on earth!

Octopuses, octopi, octopodes, octopus.

Vastly superior to that lowly beast that doesn’t even have a plural form, the moose.

Overall? Dogs.

They’re the most perfect animal for companions. They’ve evolved and been bred to work with us, read us, and be as close to part of human life as possible. Nothing else on this planet is as in sync with us, to the degree that you have to go out of your way to make a dog hate you. Anyone wanting to whine about why they don’t like dogs, or be snide, expect to be ridiculed and insulted. Just a warning.

But that’s not the answer you likely want.

Tigers. Tigers are majestic as fuck. Beautiful, interesting, alien, massive animals. They’re what you would expect to see in the dictionary beside “predator”.

You ever play any of those games where a bunch of idiots are sitting around asking increasingly dumb “what if” questions until someone passes out? One that always seems to come up is “what animal would you fuck if you had to?”

My answer is always “tigers”. And it’s plural. Why plural? Because once you do it once and survive, why would you stop?

Why tigers? Tigers are majestic as fuck. Beautiful, interesting, alien, massive animals. They’re what you would expect to see in the dictionary beside “predator”.

We have a tautology here.

I’m also absurdly fond of chickens now.

I do not, and would not, fuck a chicken.

However, they are endlessly entertaining, and you can eat some of the things that come out of them. That alone is worth some affection.

But then they make noises. Trills and bawks and growls and clucks and little content beak clacks while they nestle into your side as they get ready to nap

They will also rip food not only from your hands, but your mouth if you aren’t careful.

They are dinosaurs you can give offerings to. And you must bring offerings to our dino-chicken overlords, lest they deem you unworthy. Biscuits are preferred, but they will accept almost anything until they find a favorite. Once they find a favorite, you will be scolded if you offer anything else. They will still eat the less preferred offerings, but they will do it with contempt.

Also, no touch. No touch, only look. Touch gets pecks. No touch, only biscuits.

Chickens are apex predators too small to be the apex of anything but a yard. But within that yard, they are as gods!

Unless you have a weedeater, in which case, they will wait in the shrubbery, thank you very much. Weedeaters are straight out.

Absolutely deadly and beautiful creatures, chickens.

As a chronic vegan troll, if you troll vegans in their own colleges communities, expect bans.

You are most definitely the asshole.

Not only for doing something stupid, but then posting a whiny complaint about it in a community that isn’t for this kind of whining.

My dude, if you can’t be bothered to fuck with people inside the rules of the C/ you’re on, just don’t do it at all.

You shut your dirty mouth!

Spider hole memes are a vital part of the interwebs!

Knives.

About as low tech as it gets, even for modern knives that are pretty high tech in how they’re made.

But it’s entirely possible for a person to make a knife with nothing but tools they can make by hand, with no need for anything other than rocks as tools. I’ve done it, and it isn’t like I’m some kind of super genius.

You can make slightly more high tech tools if you want, and make metal knives. The caveat to that is that you have to know how to identify sources for the metal in the first place, unlike stone tools where you can figure it out by banging rocks together until you find some that make sharp edges. But making an oven that can turn out low-grade materials is realistic for a single person to do.

But a knife, in its essence is just an inclined plane done to a very fine degree. Doesn’t get any more low tech than that. Mind you, there’s plenty of complexity involved in all of the basic machines like inclined planes, but that’s more about understanding them than using them or making them.

Knives are mankind’s most important tool. They were among our first tools, and it can be argued that they were our first manufactured tools. And we still use them regularly. Some of us use them every day, multiple times a day.

That’s a lasting technology in every degree of refinement.

Freshness?

That’s a giant no. All of the stuff that makes a fart smell like a fart are too volatile to store.

Yeah, the main constituents are stable enough, but methane alone does not a fart make. Besides, not all farts contain methane.

The stuff that smells is what matters for freshness. Hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg), methanethiole (cabbage-like), scatole & indole (poop smell), dimethyl sulfide (garlicky) are the ones that are less than pleasant.

But there’s stuff like lemonine and pinene as well. They don’t smell unpleasant to most people, but in the wrong proportions, they can contribute to unpleasantness alongside others.

And all that’s just the main, common ones. You get traces of stuff like cadaverine sometimes.

The thing most (actually all, but I want to give leeway for the internet) of that have in common isn that they react with other things to some degree or another. They interact with each other in an enclosed space. Hydrogen sulfide is (iirc), the most stable of them, but it isn’t exactly going to sit unchanged in a container forever with the other ones.

There’s actually a decent amount of research into the digestive processes that involve gasses because they’re a big indicator of how things are working in the gut. There’s patterns of flatulence contents that vary between people with various digestive issues (like IBS, and IBD in terms of chronic conditions). Active infections change the patterns during infection, and may cause long term changes as well.

An interesting side note is that the chemicals that make farts is that they’re also found in rotting bodies, and rotting vegetation, though the proportions and exact chemicals vary between all of those. Digestion is controlled decay, if you want a pithy little phrase to piss off pedants :)

It isn’t even an inaccurate phrase; a lot of what happens in decomposition of animals (including humans) is driven by enzymes and bacteria, including the same ones found in our gut. But it’ll piss off pedants anyway, because it isn’t exactly the same thing.

There’s a reason that feces, flatulence, rot, bad breath, and even burning things can share smells in common. There’s a reason skunk spray, or musk, or even stale sweat have similarities that our noses can detect. Chemistry, chemical reactions.

They’re also partially done by itty bitty critters crawling on and in everything. Those smells in our farts, poop, and rotting flesh are all germ farts. They’re the waste products of bacteria (and fungi) eating our waste, the waste of everything. Those microbes are chemical factories.

It’s pretty fucking cool.

Typing this on sync. No issues at all currently

Text is never going to need the tag. To the contrary, if you’re at work reading text posts, and it’s tagged NSFW, it draws the eye more.

Tagging text posts would defeat the entire purpose of the tag in its useful purpose.

Drug use isn’t NSFW anyway, not in images or text.

Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina

Well, it mostly depends on why you’re missing them.

Believe it or not, sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Some people will sleep through any noises at all, though it’s really unusual.

Most likely, your brain is telling you that you aren’t sleeping enough by refusing to react to the stimulus.

So you gotta fix what’s wrong. If you’re staying up late, begin rest earlier, even if you don’t sleep earlier (which can be the case for some types of insomnia). Just being in dark/low light with as little external stimulus as possible can help your brain and body “recharge” a little even when you don’t sleep enough. That’s a short term fix, you’ll eventually need to figure out what to do to address the insomnia directly.

If you’re not staying asleep it’s harder to address without outside help. Tbh, it isn’t usually something that you can crowd source an answer for just because there’s too many possibilities. A sleep study tends to end up being the real answer. But you can try various meditative methods when you wake up to help drop back out faster, if you’re waking up enough to do so.

The major problem comes in when you can’t tell you’re waking up, or are just sleeping so poorly that it amounts to the same thing. Apnea is a bitch like that, so you’d want to rule it out one way or another.

All of that being said, you can also try vibration based alarms, like the kind that go under the mattress or pillow. There’s also wrist and headband based ones. Sometimes, especially if your brain is just inviting the alarms because it’s pissy about ignoring sounds, tactile stimulation gets the job done because our brains process it differently, and it’s harder to filter out past a point.

I would try getting more and better sleep as the primary fix though. Get to bed earlier, make sure you minimize light and noise, and learn some techniques like progressive relaxation and deep, controlled breathing. If you need background sound, err on the side of “white noise” over music, but music will do in a pinch as long as it’s on a timer so it doesn’t interfere with the sound of the alarm later.

Make sure you aren’t snoring heavy, and if you are, address that. The problem is that it often takes a ton of experimentation to figure out what actually helps you. Snoring isn’t the same as apnea, necessarily, but it does disturb your sleep sometimes.

Avoid stimulants at least 4 hours before bed. No caffeine, no tobacco, no meth (the last is mostly a joke, but check that any prescription meds or OTC meds aren’t stimulants).

And, obviously, if you can, talk to your doctor about a sleep study.

Eh, imagine how the nurse’s assistants feel. A lot of that tier of medical care end up on disability before retirement age, after years of dealing with literally being shit on.

We’re all trapped in a capitalist hell. It doesn’t do any good for us (as in the individual) to dwell on whether or not other workers make more or less than we do. And doctors in industrialized healthcare are labor, not management or the owners. Only the ones that break free of things and open their own practice that’s independent are partially outside of labor.

But, if you look at the system as it is, doctors get extra rewards once they’re fully allowed to practice because they spend a major amount of their life and youth in specific studying and training instead of making income. They’re usually so deep into student debt that it won’t be paid off for decades. Their specialist level of training means that they have to preserve their energy and time to be able to work later in life than they might otherwise.

Nursing is kind of in between blue and white collar work. Doctors are almost always white collar. Low physical demands, but high energy/time demands, with high consequences for minor errors at times.

It isn’t that they don’t deserve the pay they get. It’s that everyone should be getting paid very well in a high risk job. If capitalism is in place, that isn’t going to happen; we’re treated like a resource instead of people. But within that framework, someone with extensive skill and education is a more valuable, and more scarce resource.

My advice? Unionize. Nurses have more power than they think. It’s a skilled profession that takes large numbers of people to keep the machine grinding along. Don’t worry about the doctor, worry about making your job more respected and valued. Be pissed at the system, and work to change it. It’s the only way that profit driven industries will realize they can only be parasites to an acceptable degree.

But, yeah, it’s always going to help if you increase your education, and thus your value to the machine. If it’s a low cost add-on to your degree/license, even better.

Well, let’s be real, pizza isn’t some kind of holy thing that is only Italian.

It’s not like they’re the only people to ever put things on flat dough and bake it.

But ignoring that, food is a living thing, just like most languages, like music, like fashion and art. You can try to stick a pin in it, but you kill the thing by doing so.

It reaches a point where it’s ludicrous to try and claim a thing is possessed in its entirety by the place that first named something.

Once a cultural idea spreads far enough, you can only specify one type of the thing. It’s why we have champagne, and sparkling wine. It’s a way of putting a pin in something but recognizing that there’s still living versions out there.

Or, look at it like the difference between formal and colloquial language.

Pizza may have started in Italy as a term, but it’s like kleenex and qtips. Pizza is now the generic term for stuff cooked on flat dough. It can even be applied to stuff being placed on flat bread, and then cooked, though I don’t know why you’d not call it one of the other words for that idea other than being unaware of those words.

Put whatever you want on your dough, call it pizza, and enjoy ;)

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However, you get very different responses from people if you use a hammer on them.

Hey! A YouTube guy I’ve actually heard of!

Remember please, this is opinion, and was asked for.

I ain’t mad, but I wish he/they wouldn’t. I’m not even a fan of tv based invasive encounters with wildlife. Even Steve Irwin often pushed past what I consider acceptable interference for education, but I’m on the strict end of things with that.

Here’s why.

Cameras. It was extremely rare for Irwin to show us something that couldn’t have been achieved with a good camera from a reasonable distance that not only got good images, but showed more natural behaviors. I still love Irwin, and think his enthusiasm and love of animals balances things out in terms of benefits.

We’re at a point with camera technologies that direct interaction with wildlife is unnecessary. We can use any number of tools to see the glory of nature without putting our thumbs up their butt to see what happens (not that he ever did, but I love that episode of South Park lol, and it fits how I view that kind of thing).

We have zoos, we have education centers, we have captive bred examples, so we don’t need multiple people out there repeating the same thing over and over. I get the desire, I get the interest in such filming, and as long as the wildlife isn’t harmed, I don’t care enough to raise any hell. I just wish we would collectively stop. Film from a distance or use tools to get close, use old footage of invasive interactions instead of new ones.

Peterson is no worse than anyone else, and better than most. I dig his enthusiasm. It just isn’t necessary, and its value for education is lower than it should be, in order to be acceptable to me.

But, again, I ain’t mad. No hate, no call to arms, I just wish he’d stop and do other things instead.

Edit: https://youtu.be/YdmJq4Lhv1Y

An example of the worst kind of thing he does. It’s nothing to be mad at, but totally unnecessary. It interferes with the spider for no good reason. We learn nothing from disturbing the spider that a voiceover couldn’t provide, along with some footage of a captive bred spider being handled to show that we needn’t fear spiders (but shouldn’t mess with them in the wild). This particular video exemplifies what I object to, and why better than any others I could recall.

I really appreciate that.

Gotta be honest though, I have my flaws and asshole moments too. I’ve had them on lemmy for sure, though I’ve been working to have less of them over time.

And I’d for sure have a cold one with you :)

Well, what you’re describing is probably more about where you’re connecting rather than the fact that they’re dealing weed illegally.

The illegal drug trade is always a risky one. This means that it runs high to people that are desperate enough to take that risk in order to gain the benefits.

This, in turn, means that when it’s an illegal drug that also runs high to users that are desperate as well, there’s kind of an amplifying effect. The dealers end up not really caring about much other than the money and what it represents. They don’t need a clean house because it’s temporary. They rent knowing they won’t be there long, and will leave as soon as there’s too much heat.

By not keeping their crash neat and full of things that would be desirable, they don’t have to worry about clientele or rivals targeting them as much. They’ll hide their cash as well as they can, and let everything else go to hell.

Now, that is going to vary in percentages depending on the types of drugs they’re selling, and the location. Someone that’s dealing coke, weed, and hallucinogens around a college don’t have the same problems as someone dealing pills and meth near gang turf. But even dealers in nice areas can let things stay trashy, and the ones dealing out of their trailer on the edge of town can keep nice homes (though those tend not to deal out of their crib tbh).

It’s a fairly complicated thing tbh. You’ve got conflicting socioeconomic strata, goals, sources, clientele, and individual background.

As an example, while I can’t smoke weed, I’m an advocate for legalization (and have been since the 90). I’m not shy about talking about it, so I’ve had stoner friends, and dealer friends. Some of those used/sold other things. But the weed only dealers tended to be neater than multi-substance dealers.

One of the dealers dated a family member for a while, and this guy was trailer people. Now, that’s not trailer trash, not up here. We have both. We’ve got folks that live in trailers by choice or economic circumstances, and then there’s the folks that live in trailer parks because it’s cheap and easy to be forgotten while doing whatever you want.

But some of those folks raised in trailers want out and that’s how this guy was, and why he was a dealer. He’d sell weed, some ecstasy, and some acid, move the cash through his mechanic shop, and ended up doing very well. His single wide was spotless. He wasn’t there much, but it stayed nice when he was.

But he was honestly the exception.

When I’d have to go to dealer’s places in the same area, it was never nice. I kinda had a degree of immunity to the bullshit because I was a home health worker, and one of the few that would go to those kinds of places, but it’s just an ugly fact that poverty and a degree of not giving a shit go together. When some is also ignoring social mores to deal drugs, they’re more likely to ignore other social rules like not pissing in a sink full of dirty dishes. And know that because of finding bowls full of piss in sinks. Which is a whole nuther story lol.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that with you being itinerant, the people willing to sell you weed are most likely the ones that will sell pretty casually. Most of the time, that’s the folks that are dealing out of desperation/need rather than a belief in the free market or against drug laws. This means you’ll see more of the ones that just DNGAF about anything.

If you settled down for a year or two, I think you’d eventually run into dealers that either won’t deal out of their homes, or it’s their actual home, so they treat it better.

Btw, Don, you ask some awesome fucking questions. No bullshit, I think I’ve seen more of your questions that make me think, or draw me in, in other ways, than anyone else. This one may seem a little limited at first glance, but you’ve noticed something that’s a fucking deep indicator of social structures, social norms, and how they’re thought about and portrayed. I dunno if it’s on purpose or not, but I’ve noticed that about your questions here.

Fucking weebs.

If they do it that way, I’d watch it, and I’ve never played Minecraft.

I’m taking a turn here, off the original topic a little, but not a true subject change or tangent.

There’s a ton of history behind all the terminology around terms like this. And they’re all inherently racist. They aren’t, however slurs (currently, one could debate the past) in the few places they are used. They’re too archaic to be slurs in English, they just aren’t used.

Griffe, in specific was more of a French colonies thing, with other terms being used elsewhere.

Now, the point of all this is to get back to why the term is racist in the first place.

All the terms, mulatto, quateron (or quadroon), octoroon, metis, mamelouk, whatever; they are all about how much black is in the person, how much African heritage they have. Kinda obvious, but it’s never about how much white they have. The French colonies has specific terminology for someone that’s 1/64 black. Think about that. Out of all their ancestors, one is black, and that makes them black, with some white blood, separate from people that looked exactly the same.

That whole “one drop” mentality is why they’re all racist, horrible terminology, even though they aren’t used as insults in English. They weren’t really used as insults back in the slave era either, just as yet another way to keep the boot on necks. The terms were used among free people of color too, which shows just how effective that boot of language really was.

Now, the terminology varied a lot because it came from multiple languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. Where you were determined what terms were in use, originally, but as colonies shifted hands, slavers intermingled,and borders moved, things got mixed around some. Here in the American southeast, you see even more mingling of the terms, with the dominant ones shifting over time in various locations.

But, and this is actually relevant, the U.S. isn’t the only place this kind of thinking existed, and some of the terms are slurs in other places and languages.

Griffe isn’t a slur anywhere I’m aware of, but “sambo” is, and it was another word for the same 3/4 African ancestry. Afaik, it isn’t a common slur, big there are places in South and Central America where it’s used as one.

However, there are also places in South and Central America where mulatto, or mulatta are used with pride.

Now, why am I writing this? It’s not just a historical curiosity, some vestigial words lingering in dictionaries. There was an entire set of jargon used as a tool of dominance and oppression. The thinking behind it still lingers everywhere that European imperialism existed (so, essentially everywhere across the world). Australia even had the same or similar terms for people with aboriginal ancestry.

The stain of slavery, specifically the African slave trade, is embedded across the world. We forget sometimes, because the terminology of oppression changed, that we still think that way. It takes effort for some of us to first realize that we default to thinking of anyone with mixed African heritage as black first, as the black being mixed into the other “race”. And eliminating that way of thinking is even more work.

But it’s work we need to do. As individuals, as nations, as a species, we need to understand that the systemic racism isn’t just about laws and official biases. It’s about the lingering, pernicious taint in how people think about race as a whole.