Catoblepas @ Catoblepas @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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45

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2,570

Joined

2 yr. ago

It was so bad that the PC software that came with the camera often had a red eye removal feature. I remember being fascinated when I figured out you could use it on things other than eyes and it just took the red out of anything.

I have a friend (my age) whose dad was about your age when she was born. He did die when she was fairly young, under 30. But my parents had me young, and I lost one of them only a few years after my friend’s dad died, despite being decades younger. You can never guarantee you’re going to be there ‘long enough’ for your kid, no matter what age you have them at.

Mindlessly shoving a paywall on every page on the site is both lazy and indicative of their priorities. Nobody has to do it purposefully for it to still be shitty and revealing.

I’m not saying “ding dong the witch is dead” wasn’t a perfect capture of the sentiment, but it’s also really hard to improve on “Lizzie’s in a box” for the sheer ability to send the most insufferable people on the planet into a frothing rage.

I’m so glad I left completely (minus the random search result with no other leads, but no browsing) when the API fuckery started, corporate social media sounds like an absolute hellscape now.

Reddit has streaks now??

If you’ve never sneezed and thrown your back out, count your blessings.

I already don’t eat meat, but it’s something important to know for people who do.

If you don’t have a food thermometer, get one now. Salmonella can be easily killed by cooking at the proper temperature.

I really enjoyed Kaiba! Time to go relisten to the opening theme.

Was anyone in particular banned for disagreeing with defederating, or are we just making up things to be mad about?

Hey guys, it’s a really good sign when judges are getting arrested, right? Very normal and functioning country? 😬

Living in a place where a tornado hit doesn’t actually reveal how you, personally, voted.

Have we backslid so far that people forgot that collective punishment is supposed to be bad?

You also don’t have to gerrymander when you’re aggressively weeding out who can vote, both by fucking with voter rolls through purges and by overpolicing (felons can’t vote in Arkansas without meeting specific conditions).

All of which is besides the main point: celebrating natural disasters hitting people is deranged.

No need to apologize for genuine questions! TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It’s a very, very specific subtype of transphobe that started using the phrase as a dog whistle, and it eventually leaked out into the broader transphobe sphere. All TERFs are transphobes, but not all transphobes are TERFs.

Adult human female is a dog whistle used by TERFs (and transphobes more broadly) to make it clear that they are specifically excluding trans women from the definition of womanhood; that is, it’s shorthand for saying that ‘adult human females’ are the only category of person that can be called a woman.

I want to preface that I’m not trying to be argumentative about it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it after spending a month hoping rain would wash the goddamned ash away soon. The measures you’re talking about absolutely help, in normal circumstances. The fires we had were extremely abnormal. We have fire season here, we’re used to the threat of fires and anyone who lives in an interface zone and isn’t a fool will add fire hardening measures to their home. But these weren’t just homes on and in the hills that caught on fire.

Look at Altadena, so many of the homes there were nowhere near a wildland-urban interface zone. When places a mile away from the hills are are getting torched, that’s not what went wrong. The hills were dried to a crisp after 8 months of nearly no rain; climate change caused the lack of rain, and climate change caused the Santa Ana winds to blow at hurricane force. What could anyone have done to stop a spark from happening anywhere? Once a spark happened, that was it. That’s why we had something like 6 fires burning at once in LA county during that, it might have been more.

Part of the problem is that homes outside what is considered the interface zone, whose owners had no reason to believe it was urgent to take those measures, were getting showered with cinders from a mile or more away while subjected to high winds. They were basically living in the middle of town, not on the hillside.

I want to emphasize that fire hardening is absolutely something everyone should do, but that was considered kind of paranoid re: wildfires until now.

But I might want to not use this doctor for my yearly specialty visits for the first time in over a decade!

Every building could have been surrounded by concrete (and some were!) without significantly impacting the spread, which was primarily wind driven. Seriously, listen to what the firefighters and other experts have said about this.

Once the houses caught on fire they became the fuel, not dry grass. Combined with the water pressure dropping from 10,000 houses going up in flames practically simultaneously, it was impossible to control. The planes they normally fly in to drop retardant couldn’t even fly in the wind, because the water they dropped would just fucking float in the air before getting scattered. Nobody can stop that until the winds die down.

Which is getting somewhat off topic, but my overall point is that these climate disasters can happen anywhere. Blue states and red states are both going to suffer, and it’s deranged to pump your fist when people in a red state get hit just because they might have voted Trump. It’s not less deranged than it is when MAGAs celebrate the fires in California.

I’m sorry but whoever told you that dry plants around houses caused it was either misinformed or a liar. Hurricane force winds carried cinders for miles to start new fires, and every fire truck in the state lining up to fight it wouldn’t have stopped it.

This is kind of a sore subject for me since I spent a week breathing in the smoke from these fires.

So maybe we can not do the same, since climate disasters don’t pick and choose who to hit.