https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_sheep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur

I had no idea there was a name for it. Cool!

There’s another treatment on the horizon though that grows entirely new teeth. There’s an article with a pic of a ferret showing an entirely new tooth that was grown. I think it’s a research group in Japan that managed it?

These techs together mean some pretty exciting things coming in a decade or two for shitty teeth when the technologies mature.

And they’re all grey.

My friend had a grey SUV that for the life of me I could not find in a parking lot. So many gray SUVs that all look the same…

I hate the vehicle color trend of Depression Grey. And blue. And mold green.

I admit I only know what a Stigmata is because the commercial with the guy with the bleeding hands was cool. Killer ad campaign to release them on Halloween too!

Dairy has that effect on me. It’s not as nice as it sounds. You strain and it comes out with blood.

I was a full grown adult before I learned maybe I’m allergic to dairy protein, after I was poor and went without milk or cheese for two weeks and for the first time in my life I didn’t have painful rabbit poo.

Manul.

So, I don’t know your ex, and I’m not commenting on her. I don’t know your circumstances.

I do know old fandom people who chose Slytherin as their house.

The choice of Slytherin in fandom is more complicated than it sounds, esp. since when the books were at their height of popularity, the wizard/white supremacy undertones of the books were taken more in a “oh, here’s yet another basic black and white symbol from the author of why the bag guys are extra bad” rather than the actual problem we have on our hands 25 years later. (And fuck the assholes who decided to make it a problem relevant to current events. Fuck them with a rusty saw.)

People who actually have a pretty strong moral compass that’s compassionate and inclusive often ended up self-catagorizing as Slytherin back in the day, because in real life what happens is that if you’re gay/bi/trans/whatever growing up in a conservative household, or an intellectual, or dealing with ADHD or autism or the like, and living in a conservative household, you’re basically turned into the black sheep of the family through family presure.

Like, you’re pressured to not be a smarty pants, pressured to be neurotypical, pressured to not be a “sinner” that is “choosing” to be gay or trans or whatever. And in that era (late 90s, early 2000s) you’d often also be bullied at school for the same things, by the local popular/jock type people. And that type in the books is Gryffindor. And Rowling even has Harry’s parent’s generation bullying Snape as canon.

(Rowling is actually a pretty good MIMIC of human behavior, but from her words and actions recently I can see she doesn’t actually understand much of what she writes about. She’s like a lyrebird, adeptly matching a sound she heard without being able to understand what’s going on on the human side of things. So she writes characters that are vivid, but she sucks donkey balls when trying to get the psychology underneath and the morality beneath right.)

Anyway. So Snape (or Draco) and Slytherin was sometimes more comfortable for people actually already being outcast in real life. Because growing up poor in a shit home with an abusive dad and being bullied in school too was something a number of fans lived themselves.

The thing is, conservative households happily persecute the smarter/more empathic members in their family and drive them away. And thus some of those people end up as goths or punks or involved in similar communities, and Slytherin is closest to that. So you end up with people dressing in black, but still being more accepting of people who are different or strange than the people trotting around with crosses on their chest or wearing more traditional styles.

Interestingly, I’ve recently had some experiences which had me mingling with a different social class than I usually do, and I realized there’s two types of tatted up people. There’s the nerdy, arty intellectual types–band kids, librarians, writers, etc–and there’s folks with criminal or addiction histories. But “normal” people see tats or whatever and throw both types into the same bucket.

But because Harry Potter was a nerd fandom, I always assumed any fan I interacted with was probably an intellectual (because why would people not into books get into a book fandom?) and thus them picking Slytherin probably meant they went through some sort of shit at home.

But maybe the fandom got big enough to break boundaries and get enough non-book fans that that’s no longer a great assumption. I haven’t been in the fandom for at least 15 years, closer to 20, so ::shrug:: I would be suspicious of a NEW fan selecting Slytherin, but not an old-school fan unless they had other behavior that was off.

I’ve tried so many times to switch to LibreOffice, but as far as I can tell it’s just not made for novelists. It regularly shits itself when dealing with a 300k manuscript that Word has never given me problems with.

I genuinely tried using it for a full year, using it on Linux even, to see if it was just me being cranky about changes to my writing routine…and maybe it’s still just me, but I eventually went back to Windows and my old copy of Microsoft Word 2010.

As far as I can tell, using Libre Office (or Open Office) as an actual writer seems to be a niche enough use case that developers don’t fix some of the issues that crop up that are specific to the needs of a novelist. It also gets laggy and unreliable for long word counts.

But if you need to make a basic sign to be printed out, or letters, or use it for short things like so many people use Word for in an office setting, it probably is ok.

I just had trouble with it behaving poorly with my long-format works in ways that MS Word never crapped out on me for.

Not exactly hacking, but other people made me remember it…

If you ran early software like a forum, often passwords/DMs/etc. weren’t encrypted in the database, so you could just look in your own database (or in the case of the perl-based forum I ran, the text files) and get people’s passwords and private messages. I remember my shock at seeing that when I was poking around the back end of my own forum, lol. Luckily for my users, I’m not an asshat, so I never got up to mischief with that. But I absolutely could have, and I know plenty of dudebros in IT who would/did.

I still operate today on the idea that once you interact with an online system, the admins of that system basically have everything you give them and there’s no privacy.

(Also, often if you, the user, “delete” something, usually what the system does is check a box for that data that is more or less a binary, “Is deleted? Y/N?”, and then shows/hides the data based on that flag being set. This is due to corporate customers crying if they delete something by their own fat fingers, but it means if you do intend to delete something, you should assume it’s not actually deleted, it’s just hidden from the view you, the user, have permissions to view. Of course this all depends on the specifics of the system you are interacting with, but I still default to assuming the “delete” function is just a flag that alters the view you see, not a true delete feature.)

Nothing. If I eat breakfast I’m hungry by 10 and that sucks.

If I don’t have a choice about eating breakfast, but I do get to select what to eat, eggs and hashbrowns.

But I also eat those for lunch and dinner because they are yummy.

There is a genetic link…some of us carry Neanderthal genes that predispose us to certain patterns.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/neanderthal-dna-may-help-explain-why-some-people-are-early-risers-180983438/

Purrmaid

It’s actually really fun to do interior design and architecture with it.

I’m half convinced the folks who mod in new furniture and decor are already architects…

I block individuals pretty freely, and it generally improves my experience online.

The reason I block is because I’ve lived through bullies and a shitty family, and I am familiar with the techniques bad people use to eat up my time/overwhelm me.

These days, I am also secure in myself and my emotional responses in such a way that I no longer feel bad or guilty (as I was conditioned to growing up) when I remove these people from my life. They are not owed my time or eyeballs.

I figure that if they behave in such a way that other people (such as me) decide it’s better to remove them from their life and block them–that’s their fault, not mine.

I also know my intellect well enough to understand that I’m not losing something irreplaceable intellectually if I block. I actually am better at learning and improving myself in a form that is NOT debate, or live, or putting pressure on me in the moment, because stepping away from the immediacy of something gives me the tools and breathing room to actually think.

So folks yapping and fretting about echo chambers forming if you block and curate your experience is weird to me…even pre-internet I went out of my way to learn new things. If you’re in an echo chamber, you chose to be there, it doesn’t happen on its own. And blocking asshats won’t magically put you in an echo chamber unless you’ve chosen to be in one already.

Live debate with unpleasant people who often in this day and age have ulterior motives, including a desire to provoke an emotional response that will hinder one’s thinking ability, is a technique used to manipulate others. By blocking and opting out of such things online, I can keep my temper more easily and use my brain instead.

So yeah. I block freely, whenever I feel like, and I’ve stopped feeling bad about it because I have quite a bit of experience on the internet now, and have seen the patterns in which people engage, and a handy block button is basically the only effective tool to manage it with.

I also block communities, but that’s mostly just so I can browse Lemmy in public without looking like a degenerate with all the porn subs hanging out in the open.