• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • 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.











  • 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.


  • As I’ve been discovering what I strongly suspect is adhd within my own brain (undiagnosed, and likely will never pursue such), I think my analogy is that my cpu is over clocked and running hot. Plenty of ram usually, and the storage is plentiful but in need of a defragging; but that CPU is always churning, even when there’s no tasks assigned to it.

    I’m also discovering that what I thought the H in adhd meant isn’t what it really means in practice. I always thought of it is translating to a physical expression, but it doesn’t, at least not for me. It’s pretty much exclusively internal for me.




  • 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.





  • 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.