Ugh, this was the case when I worked at a nursing home. There were bird feeders placed in spots near windows, so the residents could watch the birds. The residents noticed no birds ever showed up, and when I learned that, I went out to the feeders to inspect them. Mold, mold everywhere.

I took them in, cleaned them out, sanitized them, and refilled them… but I think the birds in the area were too smart to bother with those feeders anymore. It was obvious they were neglected all the time, and I imagine the birds were well aware that the feeders weren’t worth the trouble.

Sorry birds, sorry residents. I tried.

“Nothing” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that milestones pretty much stop happening for much of adulthood. I’ve traveled, I’ve dated, I’ve moved and changed jobs. But I don’t want to fall into a rut, so I’ve been working to give myself a new “milestone” every year. Last year I achieved a key certification for work. The year before, I learned to identify every country on a map. The year before that, I learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube. Other things have been learning to knit, identifying every nation’s flag, and learning to fly an airplane.

I’m not sure what to aim for this year, but I’m open to suggestions.

I keep forgetting that I’m 37. I could swear I was 27, like, yesterday.

I’ve got a coworker in his young-20s who admitted to being “ageist.” When he heard my age he reacted weird, saying something along the lines of not caring about people 30+.

I wasn’t offended. I simply told him, “You’ll be there before you know it.” My other coworkers (also 30+ years old) backed me up. Dude can enjoy his time now, though from his response I suspect he might have a fear of aging that he’s not fully come to terms with yet.

I’m usually asked this at work, so my go-to response is, “Well, I’m here.” Which most seem to understand.

Why did you put this in our brains. Why.

Synergize? Mult? Sorry, I don’t speak corporate.

Thank you for saying something. I didn’t know anything about this guy.

It also provides yet another reason why it’s important to keep artists’ names in their work. It’s not only for giving credit where it’s due, but for providing context when the artist has questionable leanings.

Not all of them do. I work with autistic kids, and sometimes we have to modify how we teach echoics (repeating what someone else said) because of it.

We may have a kid that we’re trying to teach to ask for help when they need it. So say, for example, we see them unable to open their lunch box. For some kids, we’d go, “Say, ‘help’.” The kid replies, “Help,” and we help them open the box.

But some kids will repeat exactly what we say, which means they end up going, “Say help.” So we have to change the way we make the suggestion. In this case we’d omit the “say” part, and just say “Help.” That way the kid will repeat just the important part, enabling them to communicate more functionally to get their needs met.

[Velvet ants] can be found worldwide with about 230 genera or subgenera and around 8,000 species worldwide. Over 400 species occur in the North American Southwest.

Velvet Ant Wikipedia page

Ah yes, r strategists, a classic of mice and cults alike.

Came here wondering the same thing.

What is this image from? Is there context to explain his pants being open?

This question reminds me of an exercise my elementary school class did once. We were told to pick an idiom and draw it literally.

I don’t remember what I picked, but my friend drew her mom’s favorite saying, “You drive me up the wall!” I can still vividly see the drawing of a lady with her eyes bugging out, driving vertically up a living room wall.

On a related note, the idea that all it takes is a simple line on the ground for a lot of disaster not to happen. Sometimes when another car passes in the opposite direction, I think of how freaking close we are, at the relative speeds we’re going, and I’m amazed/frightened that a line dividing our lanes, an imaginary border, is all that’s keeping us apart.

The bathrooms outside the lobby in my work building take this automatic crap a step further, with automatic soap machines. It’s hit or miss if any given one will have soap at all. (Thankfully, we have another sink inside my work itself that employees can use, but guests are fucked.)

Then when they do dispense soap, it’s the foam shit. So it looks like the sink just spit into my hands. Lovely.

Even if the vehicle traffic didn’t meet some imaginary quota, that says nothing of the pedestrian traffic. Just another signal of our car-centric society.

I know a 5 year old that came in proudly telling everyone, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a dwarf!” He then held his hand lower than his current height and said, “I’ll be this tall!” He’s short, sure, but he’s not in the little person height range.

I think somewhere between him talking about dwarf planets, and his short height, somebody probably said it as a joke and he took it seriously.

Or as slang for a tab of LSD

Sure, I’ll bite. My parents recently bought a new house. Every bedroom ceiling fan has a pattern etched into the plaster above it. This one’s my favorite.

Your stomach microbiome is plants

Which is why I spend a solid 3 hours a day facing the sun with my mouth held wide open. Gotta let my tummy plants photosynthesize somehow.

Yep. I left Reddit during the initial API crisis. I’ve left jobs because of my principles, even without backup jobs ready. There are tons of places I won’t shop (including Amazon), and it makes finding things I need difficult sometimes. I’ve also been vegan for over 20 years.

My mom’s the opposite. I grew up seeing her hypocrisy, and it upset me. She’d outright tell me, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Such a rich lesson for a young mind! I realized that a lot of people become hypocrites by repeating what others say without critical thought, and it turned me into a skeptic. So many people jump on the emotional bandwagon (see any hot button political topic for reference), but then later after hearing someone else confidently spout an opinion on it, they will stand with the opposite conclusion. If they’d stopped and thought the first time they heard about it, before opening their mouths about it, they wouldn’t come off hypocritical later on. But the distressing part is less that they changed their opinion, but that they still haven’t put any critical thought into why they hold it - it’s all just repeating others’ words. Which is why if a topic is brand new to me, I will refuse to take a side in it until I research it and come to my own conclusions. There are enough parrots repeating propaganda thoughtlessly, we have to be very careful with whom we trust.

My principles uphold the person I am. I came to them on my own, often going against the tide I grew up in. To me, the hardest part about having principles isn’t upholding them, but in dealing with those that can’t believe you actually have them. So many people seem to float on seemingly without a real sense of self, swayed more by those around them than by any sort of inner compass. I can’t fathom being like that, and those people apparently can’t fathom being like me.

All the more reason Lemmy is such a good place to be. We might not all hold the same principles, but at least many of us seem to have them.

I’d also like to note the seeming overlap of Lemmy’s populace with neurodivergence, which can coincide with, well, being a principled weirdo like me. ;)