Casual Conversation

What was your latest bad idea?

I drink a cold brew this morning, because it was sitting on my desk from yesterday... Cold brew concentrate. Then after finishing my drink I went to the sauna.... This was not a good decision.

The sauna exercises the cardiovascular system

Coffee stimulates the cardiovascular system (in a different way)

I did not feel good! I only lasted half my normal time. I wont be mixing coffee and extreme heat again.

So character, characteristic and why.

So I found a little line of ants a few days ago. I didn't know they went this far off the ground, but I found a little cluster of them mobbing a forgotten piece of breakfast cereal that was under the couch, so maybe it was my fault and they were highly motivated by whatever else is under there.

Anyway, I don't want ants. I tried a couple of different things. I don't want to poison them or anything like that, I just don't want them in my house. Eventually, what I arrived at that seemed like it worked was this:

• Smush a bunch of the ants. It doesn't actually take that many, I think I did 10-15.
• Leave the corpses in place. They won't really react all that much to them, they'll just keep doing their thing and periodically getting smushed. And then, at some point, they seem like they specifically switch over as a team, and start gathering up the corpses and taking them away.
• Ever since I did that (and specifically since I let them gather up the corpses and let them take them), I haven't seen any ants.

I know that ants have a specific way they operate by laying down scent trails: They wander around at random, laying down a trail of "this is the way back to the nest", and if they find a bunch of food they will return along the same trail laying down a "this way to the food" trail. So it kind of makes sense that they would also have a function to lay down a new trail "this is we found all those bodies so let's not go there anymore." I don't know that that is what's happening but that's what it seems like.

Anyway, ever since the described operation, I haven't seen any ants. I share this in case my logic is sound and it is a good solution and one that is useful for you.

I've been driving the first car I ever bought for almost 15 years now. I love love love that car, but it's time for an upgrade, so yippee!

Before it gets asked and I forget to reply, Mazda 2 -> hybrid Honda Civic hatchback

Feel free to have a look at

!movies@piefed.social !television@piefed.social
!animation@piefed.social

Where else are you a lot?

I have been particularly miserable lately, just quit using nicotine altogether, and also been moving away from subscriptions. I need distractions that aren't gum and Altoids. I've been into these songs lately: Whatever You Want - Sports, Zen Automaton - Pond, Bicep - TR/ST, People in the Streets - MGMT, and We Control - Hyper.

it seems like lemmy has a thing for fireflies (aka lightning bugs). It's sad to think of them being driven away by our actions, or not even just us not being able to see them again.

Well my yard/neighborhood is covered in them. Literally hundreds dancing in the grass of every yard, every evening and night. Like they cast light into my home with their blinking by my windows, making me look for a coming car or something. At least one gets into my home every day, much to the delight of my cats.

I get it. I love them. These things have always been special to me, and I spent 10+ yrs living in places w/o them. So now being in an area with a healthy Fire Fly population feels like such a blessing to me.

I figured it'd be cool to share some of that with those of you who miss them. I'm trying to take some pictures and video, get some good closeups, etc. I got one video of two fireflies fucking. Just gotta figure out how to organize the media I guess.

But is there anything else you'd want? Requests or something? I dunno where this is going, look, I'm just saying: you all seem to like Fire Flies. I got Fire Flies. What's next?

Weather dotcom has premium gatekeeping and Accuweather just kinda sucks

EDIT: i just remembered not everyone is ND and doesn't get really super into every topic enough to care about things like meteorology :[

Good evening, everyone. It's 18:36 here, and the sun is down right now, but the weather was very clear. My activity helping my mum was not interrupted and was successful. I helped them drive the car and lift weights for processing gardening materials for sale, the family business. I created, deleted, and recreated Lemmy accounts because I wanted to try firsthand installing self-hosting front-ends like YunoHost, Coolify, Runtipi, Cloudron, and so on. I found that YunoHost and Runtipi are the easiest for me to try as an IT student who is currently stuck in semester 2 of college diploma studies, mainly for financial reasons. How was your day?

Edit: I am not sure why I am not allowed to choose English or even Interlingua for this English post. I'll find out what the exact problem is, and whether this is only applicable to this post or a larger issue.

I’m not Netflix or a struggling screenwriter. I just read an offhand prophecy of how the year pans out and thought it would make a good chat.

Pitch this years Christmas movie to me based on the the crazy year we have had and how it’s going to impact the lead up to Christmas. For simplicity state the genre and maybe around 300 words. Go as crazy as you fancy, the world is a bit bizarre at the moment and Christmas does not have to always be sickly sweet.

Gonna be stuck on a train for the next 3 hours so I'm looking for something to pass the time. Books, articles, comics, all is welcome!

EDIT: thanks y'all! looks like i won't be bored in the train tonight!

Sooo... yeah! I don't really have IRL friends to chat about this so I figured I'd make this post. Didn't want this to be super consequential like hosting an AMA or anything since it's just me going back to where I was born but yeah

A few funny observations and maybe conversation starters:

• Everything I read in the US seems to talk about how China is simultaneously a futuristic paradise and an authoritarian hellscape... both seem fairly overblown. There are a lot of public transit and the food is amazing though
• The rumors are true, in China they really use Wechat for everything. Wechat is used for payment (almost no one uses credit cards or cash), booking tickets, ... and all of these are tied to your national ID and your face recognition. It's a bit terrifying
• There are sooooo many ads everywhere! Heck my parents' apartment building has an ad billboard right in the elevator, and this is apparently the norm. On the app store the Microsoft Edge browser literally got a 5-star rating and was praised for not running ads... it's that bad.
• My god the internet is atrocious compared to the US, and having to do half of the stuff I need to with a VPN doesn't really help. It's so bad that I was missing my Gentoo days of compiling packages from source...
• I thought there would be a ton of anime stuff, especially since I had the impression that Mihoyo games (the company that developed Genshin Impact, Honkai series, etc) is a topic of national pride... I think I have made a mistake. I have met three cosplayers just walking on the street so far though, so the culture definitely is there
• I like rhythm games and I'm delighted to find out there are maimai DX cabs everywhere, this thing is impossible to find in the US. Haven't found SDVX or IIDX cabs, or even CHUNITHM cabs though... Also China apparently has their own Pump It Up clone (not DDR, PIU) with four more outer arrows. Imagine the five PIU step keys and four more outside...
• Lemmy.world is somehow not blocked by the Chinese internet firewall. Not that I feel safe browsing Lemmy with the type of posts I make... On that topic, my own little web domain isn't blocked lmao I can still use SearXNG as usual

But I haven't tweeted since 2014, and I logged out a few years ago and deleted the app. I just left my account behind so nobody took my name, but Twitter says I'm banned for inauthentic behaviour. Is Space Karen a little bored without his orange rapist bestie?