Catoblepas
@Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Urine Luck 16 hours ago:
That’s terrifying, I hope it was worth the literal pain and that you’re doing better now!
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
Do you know the phrase that you can’t get blood from a stone? Someone who can’t even afford the car has a worse quality of life in places without good public transit, that’s why for the most part everyone who can afford it chooses to drive in those areas. I blame the state and the federal governments for improper funding, not transit agencies. Someone who can choose to spend money on driving a car instead of rent is not somehow worse off than their neighbor who can’t afford a car but still has to get to their job with an added 1-2 hours tacked on to their commute each way.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
That sounds nice for you, but that’s not how public transit works in most American cities. I’ve been stuck in standstill traffic in a bus, and in a lot of areas here dedicated bus lanes are rare.
When that’s the state you’re stuck in as a poor person, it doesn’t matter that there are all these negatives attached to taking a hollowed out public transit system; if you don’t have the money for a car you either take it (and spend an extra hour or two commuting each way due to delays or wait times) or you don’t go anywhere. Someone with the money to buy and maintain a car is objectively not more impoverished than the person who is scrounging for $1.75 to pay fare.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
If you can afford a car to begin with you are already at a different level of broke than people stuck taking the bus even when transit is shitty and comes once an hour. Waiting an hour for a bus each way for your daily commute is nothing like spending a few minutes in a traffic jam (which the bus would also be subject to!) or looking for a parking spot.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
Sorry, what?? Taking the bus is cheaper than owning a car.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
I’ve known people to be on hold for 6-8 hours for multiple days with the local food stamp office without being able to get in touch with anyone. At one point the automatic message when you called was ‘too many people are calling, hang up.’
- Comment on O hi 4 days ago:
Early might not be the right word, I think I’m mixing it up with pre-agricultural hunter gatherers (I think I’m forgetting a term here, but it’s hot and I’m tired).
- Comment on O hi 4 days ago:
It’s been a while since I’ve studied it, but IIRC skeletons of early humans show in general more traits we view as masculine, like stronger chins and a more jutting brow line, even in female skeletons. It was even more pronounced in male skeletons, but this is still pretty mild sexual dimorphism even among great apes (think male vs female gorillas, for example).
- Comment on Zebra!! 4 days ago:
Neat, a lot of the time you just see pictures of zebras with funky coats as foals and not as adults, but this one looks pretty grown.
- Comment on good idea, no downsides 5 days ago:
My dishwasher does as well, it’s a model on wheels and for the first couple of weeks it left flakes of concrete everywhere when I moved it.
- Comment on Fingies 1 week ago:
I assume it’s that leg healing reduces their speed or endurance
Basically this, part of how they get their speed (legs being mostly tendon and cartilage) is what makes healing so difficult. Both tendons and cartilage have far less blood supply compared to muscle or skin, which heal much more quickly. So if a horse developed legs with more tissue and muscle (and thus an increased blood supply, improving healing), they would have been slower than their skinnier legged cousins and had no competitive advantage.
- Comment on Fingies 1 week ago:
Re: why didn’t horses evolve better leg healing, if you’re a proto horse and injure your leg you’re probably not living to heal it, because you can no longer run. So there is no evolutionary pressure to spread those genes through the population, even if a horse did randomly get born with genes that let it heal its legs better than other horses, because no selection mechanism would exist.
- Comment on Happy Birthday guys, gals, and other pals! 1 week ago:
Innocent Europeans would NEVER do a fascism without a wicked Other forcing them to do it!
- Comment on I read somewhere a while back that most or at least half of California wildfires are cause by faulty electrical company equipment. Is this true? And how come no one has ever reported it? 1 week ago:
Fire isn’t needed at any intensity at any time of year, every year. Fire adapted plants can be and are getting over-burned by fires that are getting more intense (less rain, more heat). This is exacerbated by non-native plants (especially grasses and eucalyptus) that outcompete the native plants and are then extra vulnerable to fire.
- Comment on I read somewhere a while back that most or at least half of California wildfires are cause by faulty electrical company equipment. Is this true? And how come no one has ever reported it? 1 week ago:
I’m not sure about that particular statistic (half of the total number of fires, regardless of size? Half of acres burned?), but utility lines definitely cause a lot of fires. This can be mitigated by burying lines, which IIRC is what San Diego does, but it’s expensive so companies don’t want to do it unless their arms are twisted.
- Comment on This has gotten out of hand and I demand satisfaction. 2 weeks ago:
Looks like a tiled counter to me. In southern California (and I’m sure other places but that’s where I first encountered it) in the 60s and 70s a lot of kitchens started being made with tiled counters. Think small bathroom wall tiles put on the counter surface rather than floor tiles. I don’t know why it caught on, because they’re uneven and impossible to keep clean. But a lot of old rentals/homes still have them if they haven’t remodeled since then.
- Comment on This has gotten out of hand and I demand satisfaction. 2 weeks ago:
No rice, no beans, beef with red sauce. wtf why isn’t my burrito with one ingredient huge??
- Comment on So wise. 2 weeks ago:
I tip because I’ve been reliant on tips before, and I know that expecting someone who is working for tips to single-handedly solve tipping culture is unreasonable. I don’t believe in solutions that punish the poorest person in the equation, especially for a luxury like dining out.
You can already eat at places that pay a real wage to servers if you don’t want to tip.
- Comment on So wise. 2 weeks ago:
I always just do 10% (easy because you move the decimal one place) and then either double that or add half of it to itself for a 15-20% tip.
- Comment on I need a job *blub* *blub* 🐟🐟 3 weeks ago:
I’m helping them evolve!
- Comment on I need a job *blub* *blub* 🐟🐟 3 weeks ago:
Aquarium rant: if you have a home aquarium slightly smaller in size than the reflecting pool’s 6.8 million gallons, plecos are a terrible choice for algae control. They get way too big and introduce way too much ammonia. Snails and neocardinia shrimp are a much better choice and can actually live off algae and crud on the bottom to a large extent.
- Comment on Troof 3 weeks ago:
Give him a perm did he looks exactly the way my friend’s mom looked in the 90s 😭 And she did give us alcohol under 21, lmao. It worked because she gave us the nastiest, cheapest premixed mudslide possible and it repelled us from alcohol for a few more years.
- Comment on Why can't this happen to me? 3 weeks ago:
Incredible, someone managed to create an image I wish was AI generated
- Comment on Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion 3 weeks ago:
A whole lot of people are about to have a precipitous drop in their apparent writing skills.
- Comment on Having a bad day? 3 weeks ago:
Depends on the con, but the ones I’ve been to have all been fine, except in the headless lounges that are specifically set up to let sweaty people take their suits off and cool down. And that just smells like gym. They sell all kinds of scented sanitizing sprays for fursuits, nobody wants to be stuck in a smelly suit.
- Comment on The ole Morning Constitutional 4 weeks ago:
Possibly? I thought I had only talked about it with my husband, but maybe not
- Comment on The ole Morning Constitutional 4 weeks ago:
A while back I saw a local post about a guy with donkeys walking through town. There’s picture and a URL on the packs of one of his donkeys, I look it up, and he apparently just walks from southern to central California and back each year with his donkeys every spring and fall, and has been doing it for over a decade. He sleeps outside and eats mostly lentils and rice. It takes all sorts. Honestly, living under a bridge or outside with donkeys sounds preferable to the pictures posted by OP.
- Comment on The ole Morning Constitutional 4 weeks ago:
Normal is what you’re used to.
- Comment on My Arrakis 4 weeks ago:
Listen, there may be a drug at the gas station called spice, but do NOT smoke it!
- Comment on ngl kinda hoping people start arguing over this 4 weeks ago:
My husband and I had a cat for nearly a decade and she never so much as looked at the TP roll. Our current gremlin has sprinted at top speed into the bathroom because he heard me open the cabinet where we started hiding the TP when he wouldn’t leave it alone. He actually tried to grab it out of my hands, and I had to play tug of war with him! I’ve never encountered any other cat as hellbound on destroying TP, but lives for it. Shreds it like he’s plucking a bird.