• 0 Posts
  • 163 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • For some it kind of is, the leather subculture is a thing, and needless to say leather is a pretty important part of it.

    I am not at all qualified to really go into it too much beyond just pointing out that it exists.

    I do have a little anecdote about it though. I know someone who is an all-around very kinky person, into all kinds of fairly extreme bondage stuff. She entered and won some sort of “Ms Leather [city we live in]” competition/pageant thing a few years back but there was a bit of controversy about it because she wasn’t part of the leather subculture, even though there was a pretty decent amount of overlap between her own kinky interests and the leather community, and so she decided to resign her title and apologize over it.



  • I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

    And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

    AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

    Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

    And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.


  • When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.

    To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.

    Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.

    EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.




  • Totally anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch, so I have a bit of insight on people involving themselves in emergencies

    It’s really hit or miss.

    Fires, gunshots, medical emergencies, fights, things blowing up, car accidents, noise complaints, aircraft crashes, I’ve probably taken a call about it, and those calls have come in from the person involved, a neighbor , a random passerby, their grandmother who lives in another state, or some random follower on tiktok.

    And sometimes we get a hundred calls about the same thing. There are times I can just about answer the phone with “911, if you’re calling about the [thing] in [place] we’re already aware, help is on the way.” And be right about 90% of the time while that thing is going on. (To be clear I don’t do that, because almost every time I crack a joke about my job or vent about stupid shit our callers do, some self-righteous dipshit comes at me with a whole “if that’s how you talk to your callers maybe you’re not cut out for this job” spiel as if no one ever vents about the idiots they have to deal with at work.)

    And there are other times where we get exactly one call about something serious happening in a very public place and we’re left wondering if it was a prank call until our police/fire/EMS get out there and confirm that yes, everything is exactly as described or even worse, it’s a total shit-show and all hell’s breaking loose.

    Sometimes it seems like a whole town is turning out to help people with a minor fender-bender, and sometimes hundreds of people are driving right by an overturned vehicle.

    Usually, of course, it’s somewhere in-between. We got a handful of calls about something but our phones aren’t ringing off the hook about it.

    Moral of my rant is, a lot of times people will step in to help or at least call 911 in an emergency, but you can’t always count on that. The idea of the bystander effect is exaggerated and misinterpreted, but the core takeaway about it is solid. You can’t always take it for granted that someone else is going to do something to help, so if you find yourself in a position where you can be the one who helps, you should do so.


  • I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

    Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

    Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

    And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.



  • I’m personally very much a fan of both the comic and the movie

    The overall plots are largely the same, the comic of course has a little more space to flesh things out.

    Which does actually work against it at times, there’s a point where V just kind of goes off on a lecture about anarchy for a couple pages, which is interesting but maybe not the most exciting comic book reading you’ll ever do, and certainly wouldn’t have translated particularly well to the screen, so overall I don’t mind most of the changes they made of

    Both the comic and movie are very much a product of their times and places. The comic is very much a reaction to Thatcherism in the UK, the movie more to post-911 Bush-era America.

    The movie probably resonates more with me personally, but I’m also a product of that time and place. The comic strikes me as a little more timeless.


  • Even more appropriately, it’s V for Vendetta

    Spoilers, I guess, for a 40 year old comic (the plot in the movie is a bit different)

    spoiler

    In the comic, Lewis Prothero (played by Roger Alam in the movie) is one of central figur of the ruling Norsefire party. He is responsible for the “Voice of Fate” radio broadcasts (although the party propaganda is that it is the Fate supercomputer making the broadcasts itself) and was formerly the commander of a concentration camp.

    He collects dolls, and is kidnapped by V placed in a mock-up of the camp with his doll collection dressed as prisoners, and tortured by V burning his dolls in front of him.

    I believe in the movie you can catch a glimpse of his doll collection in the background of a couple scenes, but that plotline is changed quite a bit.



  • I know that when police in my area need to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed (and can’t just be disposed of in normal waste streams, or sold or what have you) they normally take it to a local garbage incineration plant.

    There was also a steel mill in the area at one point and their furnace was occasionally been put to use for similar purposes (tangential - there was at least one instance I’ve heard of where the US mint used that furnace to dispose of a batch of coins they were testing a new alloy or process or something on)



  • The type of ice cream definitely makes a difference, more premium brands tend to be a lot stiffer than cheaper brands. And I admittedly tend to buy just some basic vanilla ice cream because I like to go crazy with toppings.

    My brain defaults to fahrenheit, and that probably shapes how I look at temperatures a bit, but those temperature differences between our different freezers feels pretty significant to me. In warmer temperatures, for example, that amount of temperature difference could be the difference between shorts & t shirt weather and needing a jacket.

    Also, for what it’s worth, my family once acquired a full container of Ben & Jerry’s that would have been served at one of their stores. The instructions on the box were to store it at or below -20f/-29c, and bring it up to 10f/-12c in the serving cabinet.



  • It of course varies a lot depending on where you are but I live in the suburbs, and they’re pretty common around me. Not necessarily an “everyone has one” kind of thing, but definitely something that you know a good handful of people who have them.

    https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/pdf/State Appliances.pdf

    According to the EIA, about 33% of households overall, state by state it’s as low as 19% in California, and as high as 65% in south dakota. So even in states like California, Nevada, or New Jersey where 94+% of people live in an area that’s considered urban, if you assume 100% of the rural residents have freezers, that’s still about 13% of those city dwellers with a dedicated freezer.

    I feel like the biggest deciding factor is probably whether or not you own a house, which is going to have a lot of correlation to being urban/rural. They take up space, so not conducive to apartment living, and they’re kind of a bitch to move so you probably want to make sure you’re going to be able to stay in a house for a while before buying a freezer so that you don’t have to deal with moving it every few years if your landlord jacks up the rent and forces you out.


  • Do most refrigerators in the world not have a freezer?

    Because I’m pretty sure that’s what they mean by “fridge freezer” as opposed to a separate “deep freezer” like a chest or an upright freezer with no refrigerator.

    Not sure how common having a separate freezer is in other parts of the world, but it’s fairly common in the US.

    I know my basement freezer is really fucking cold, it’s actually kind of painful to handle things I pull out of it sometimes because they’re so cold. The freezer on my fridge upstairs is a bit warmer (still well below freezing of course) I can usually manage to scoop ice cream out of my upstairs freezer without too much trouble, but out of my downstairs freezer it would be kind of like chiseling at a rock with a spoon.


  • The in-universe science behind Cyclops’ optic blasts have been very inconsistent over the years.

    The explanation that I’m personally familiar with is that his eyes themselves are portals to a dimension of pure concussive energy that doesn’t produce heat, and that energy is also conveniently blocked by ruby lenses in his glasses and visor, and also his own body is immune to it.

    Which doesn’t really make any sense from a real world physics perspective, but that’s comic books for you.

    And of course depending on what timeline/reboot/alternate universe you’re dealing with, who’s writing it, and what’s convenient for the plot, any of that can go right out the window, I’ve definitely seen him melt things and start fires with his blasts in some versions.

    I think another explanation that gets used sometimes is that his body absorbs sunlight to power them.


  • I really hate the term gun show loophole

    Maybe the situation and laws are different in other parts of the country, but at every gun show I’ve ever been to all of those people with stands set up selling guns are dealers, so to buy a gun through them you have to go through all the legal hoops as if you were buying from a regular gun store.

    I suppose there’s a lot of randos wandering around there who own guns who might be convinced to do a private sale, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with them being at a gun show except it’s a convenient networking opportunity. You could just as easily hang around outside of a shooting range trying to find a private seller.