Can confirm, their mom carried me to school often, and only required infrequent lubrication. Wasn’t great up hills though

Damn, that’s that’s bonkers. I’d jump all over a local opportunity like that, just to have something to piddle around with trying linux distros for entertainment. Even a crappy laptop at that price is a fun thing

Wise choice!

It was about ants having different smells, caused when either threatened or injured for the most part.

Specifically, as an example I remembered because I’ve smelled it, the most common upper of ant you’ll find in houses (here in the US anyway) smells cheesy. It’s even called the odorous house ant. That’s because of a type of chemical called methyl ketones. Ketones are basically really volatile organic compounds; acetone is a ketone.

Now, regarding what some people can’t smell vs those that can, reports were mixed. But, it does seem that formic acid can’t be smelled by everyone, and some ketones can’t be smelled by everyone. You either have the right genes active or you don’t. But, apparently, tiktok has yet again caused problems with inaccurate info spread, so people think that you either smell ants, or you don’t, which isn’t the case, it comes down to the chemicals they produce, and those vary.

That being said, there is still the possibility that the reason any given individual hasn’t smelled ants is because they’ve never gotten close enough, or run across large numbers of the little ladies in one place. Most people aren’t going to get close to a bunch of crushed ants, and if ants are alive chances are you aren’t getting close enough to take a sniff unless you’re a real weirdo.

And yes, I’m one of those weirdos that has gotten up close to both living and dead ants. Not to sniff them, but out of curiosity. Hence why I have smelled them in small numbers as well as larger groups. Some ants are really unconcerned about something the size of a human, particularly when it moves slowly enough not to seem like an insectivore coming in for a meal. So you can, if you’re careful, get up close enough to use a magnifying glass to get better looks at them doing their thing (and don’t burn them, it’s not at all okay).

When you get that close, even though there’s no alarm pheromones, every ant type I ever got close to had that pungent, acrid smell of formic acid. It’s similar to vinegar or other acids that you might use around the house, but definitely not the same. Like I said elsewhere, it’s earthier and more pungent.

My area has some red ants, and if enough of those die, they smell like pepper. As in standard table pepper.

I went and read up on it, was going to edit in , but I’ll just do it here.

Apparently it isn’t the formic acid, it’s other chemicals, and not all ants produce them. I have smelled what they’re talking about, or at least three descriptions of one kind of ant smelling like funky cheese is something I have run into.

So you’re totally right, and my assumption was wrong.

But damn, formic acid, even dilute, really is pungent. Nose wrinkling, sneeze inducing for me.

Edit: after a nap, I read more, and apparently, being able to smell formic acid is a genetic thing. But wading through llm generated bullshit to find more reliable info buried the real lede. As an aside, that’s the original word for the phrase; it wasn’t lead, it was a newspaper jargon thing, even though lead works just as well as lede.

The title is misleading

was not enough evidence to federally charge these individuals, so the cases were referred to local law enforcement.”

That’s different from saying he didn’t do it.

Yeah, it’s pretty fucking obvious to everyone exactly what was going on, but we’re currently dealing with the kind of insanity that comes from ignoring things like due process and evidence based prosecution.

Epstein was a slimeball, and all it means is that he covered his ass spectacularly well, but if there’s not enough evidence, you don’t just go ahead anyway.

This is totally separate from any likelihood that the finding of not enough evidence was bullshit or not, forced into being by power brokers or not, and I personally would believe both of those were in play. But that’s not the same thing as what the title of the article says.

Those are different things, and I think it important to say that because your question reads like you’re conflating them, when you aren’t; you’re asking how far it does stretch, not saying that locker rooms are the same as a social club.

Which isn’t directed at you, but any passersby that didn’t catch it

As far as that goes, I’m actually okay with shared lockers/showers/bathrooms, so long as you can find privacy as an individual. Stalls with good isolation for them what care in other words. I don’t, however, think it would be okay to enforce that at this point in time

Sure, of course they are.

I’ll even go so far as to say that even more fine grained groups are okay. What becomes a problem is when every group excludes people that really shouldn’t be.

You get a chess club, why the fuck can’t a woman join? Right? Calling it a men’s club is just exclusionary for no purpose. Even the girl/boy Scout divide was pointless in any real sense, and was a missed opportunity for those scouts to have guidance on how a scout is supposed to treat others.

Hell, when it comes right down to it, even a specific cis organization is fine, just the way trans specific ones are. The problem, again, is when a club is exclusionary just for the sake of it.

We all have aspects of our lives that aren’t shared by people with other genders and/or types of genitals. There’s struggles and discrete experiences that a trans man can have that I never will, and vice versa.

But, again, once it ceases to be about that kind of specificity, it starts being bigotry in disguise and needs to fuck right off. Ain’t no good reason women shouldn’t be allowed into things like community action groups. A gender division there is just pointless and stupid. If they also exclude trans men, it’s as bad (maybe even worse).

Hell, the masons are full of shit in that regard. Fraternal orders are hypothetically okay, but since when have the masons actually been about men sharing the unique aspects of life that men share? It’s just exclusionary bullshit (and I’ve seen it from the inside, so I know it’s utter bullshit). They’re the best example of how not to be a gender based organization.

I’m not saying that men shouldn’t be able to gather and just hang out. We should, as should women. There really is a different vibe, and there’s no way around that. But once you start organizing that on a bigger scale, you have a different threshold to meet.

Since, historically, most of the men’s organizations not only excluded women, but actively served to continue oppression of women, being a de facto patriarchal enforcement group, those groups get the worst attention. They weren’t really men’s groups, they were power control groups that men only could use to gain, maintain, and exploit control. That’s why there’s pushback on them, not the fact that they were/are gendered.

Has to be, it’s got that same “bite” that other acids have, only a little more earthy

I had no idea it was a genetic thing that not everyone has. It’s pretty awesome that after fifty years slogging through life, I still run across cool new shit like this

Oh, I agree that he’s batshit crazy to have told that story in those circumstances.

Haven’t popped into one of these in a long while, life kinda reduced my lemmy time.

So, generally, the birds are birding.

We lost a hen to some kind of raptor ( based on the remains), so we’re back down to our original two, with no plans on getting more since I’m already at the limit of the work I can do to take care of them, and they’re both behaving in a stable, usually happy, way.

That being said, we got visited by Elsa like most of the south, and holy hell has it been brutal with and for the chickens.

Big boy is spending most of his time in his crate, or the back porch. Partly because it’s just that bloody cold, but mostly because his precious feet are too dainty to set down on ice or snow, which still lingers on the ground here. It’s only been the last two days I could get him to go outside while I cleaned his crate. Which, damn. What with him being in it more, the poo factor is high.

He is, however, becoming more cuddly the more time he’s with me. He’s never going to be the cuddle bug the hen is, but when I pick him up and sit down with him, he settles in fast and does his happy tuk-tuk sounds usually reserved for peanuts. Then he melts while I pet him under his neck feathers.

Baby girl has been fully inside even on warmer days because the coop is still iced up enough I can’t get the door open.

So she’s a mess generator in her own right.

Poo on all the things!

Well, we keep pads down, so it isn’t really on things, but when she’s inside more, she tends to be less concerned about finding a pad. So there’s that.

Since its been winter, and she hald an extra long molt (where they shed and grow new feathers), she hadn’t laid an egg since late October (hens lay less, or stop entirely during a molt). Which was fine, she’s not a working girl. Her eggs are amazeballs, but far from the best thing about her.

However, two days ago, she laid the worst egg she’s ever made. It was barely held together, no proper shell at all. Just a glop with some membrane really. But today! Ah, today, she dropped this lovely, dark brown, perfect large egg. So I suspect she’s past the winter egg stoppage. She’s also sassier than usual the last couple of days, which was an aspect of laying that I missed more than I realized. She’s spunkier when she’s laying.

So, they’re doing much better than I would have hoped considering the shit storm life had been, and the winter chaos.

My chicken, Sesame, would like a word with you.

I don’t think they approach necessity tbh. At best, they’re a bandaid, and a crutch for parents.

But the drawbacks of the laws that have been implemented so far, and are trying to be, as vast overreaches that give a false sense of security with no real benefit. They also do that by placing even more information into the hands of the very companies causing the problem in the first place.

That’s where regulations would focus in an ideal world, limiting the companies from causing the problems in the first place, not slapping bad patches over them.

You don’t ignite the sacrifice, you place it on a pyre.

Those can burn hot when well constructed. Not quite the kind of heat a modern crematorium can produce, so it is slower. But it wouldn’t have been a full day of burning.

Cooking can take longer than burning. If you threw your steak directly into fire, it would be inedible in the same amount of time it would be medium rare on the grill above the fire (as a rough example, don’t expect precision here), and burnt into a brick in maybe fifteen minutes at most. I’ve lost meat in just coals before, and that’s about all it took, so an open fire would likely be even faster.

Waaay back in the day, to the best I’ve ever read, most sacrifices that were burnt weren’t single sacrifices. This means the fires were also bigger, more intense, than what you might have in your home fireplace. So, once the sacrifice was on the heat, it would ignite relatively quickly. Then, you’ve got fats rendering and burning, which burns pretty damn hot; hot enough that you’d only need an hour or two for the bones to fragment.

Think about it (or look it up if you have a strong stomach), people and animals caught in house fires aren’t in them for massive amounts of time, but they’re essentially carbonized well down towards the bones, and sometimes the bones are “falling apart” (there’s fancy terms for that, but I can’t be arsed to pull them from memory) in the time it takes for the structure to collapse.

Anyway, the rules of sacrifice really varied. In some cases, they weren’t actually burnt, they were cooked. It was the taking of the life that was the sacrifice, so burning wasn’t always part of it. Iirc, it was mostly sun, fire, and similar gods that fire sacrifice to destruction weres the norm. But general purpose sacrificed animals were sometimes cooked and eaten. It really varied a lot over the millennia across the world.

One aspect was though, the burning of the sacrifice was so that it could “rise” to the god/s. A form of transubstantiation, destroying the earthly form and sending it to the divine in its constituent essence. In other aspects, the fire was the god or gods consuming the sacrifice.

Fwiw, if you stack the pyre right, with enough fuel, a human body is reduced to ask and bone fragments in maybe six to eight hours. Something with less mass (a lamb as an example) will be faster.

Plus, some of the really big sacrifices were done en masse in huge fires. Literally tons of wood, often resinous woods that burn hot enough to damage stone at that scale. Can’t recall where, but there’s sacrifice spots that had stone show some melting, which is fucking hot.

To sum up, I guess the answer is that it depends on when and where the sacrifice happened, and why.

Yeah, and that’s how you get shitty age verification laws.

It’s a double edged sword

Being real, the only weird part of the story is that he told it where and when he did. It’s otherwise a boring and common thing that people do talk about, even including the dumb joke about “doing what he loved” about a rabbit having a heart attack post mating.

Doesn’t change that he’s a douche, and an ignorant one at that. But it isn’t like he was fucking rabbits himself

Mark my territory

There’s an art to small talk. A language barrier makes it a challenge.

And that’s what it seems your mom is looking for as the foundation of conversation on your end. But, I suspect she’s more wanting you to listen than necessarily talk. If you start by asking about her, I suspect that it’ll go smoother because you’ll input what topics she’s thinking of the most and be able to adapt better.

And yes, that does seem a bit narcissistic. But sometimes parents just want us to show we care, in ways that they can grasp easily. I can’t call it narcissism in terms of it being bad though. It’s just part of the human condition. Parents often want updates on their grown kids, but they’ve also spent decades worrying about and focused on the kids, so there’s an assumption that the degree of interest will point back at some point.

And, up to a point, it should. As we age up, there should come a point when we start looking at our parents as full people, taking an interest in them as more than our support network.

So keep it simple. Ask more questions about what she’s doing. See if that helps. If it doesn’t, then there’s other stuff you can try

Man, the long earth series is so fucking good. It isn’t as well known as his discworld stuff, obviously, and it isn’t fantasy based in the usual sense, but the story arc over the series is just so well built, and the world building is a delight.