You are right, I completely forgot about Book Club! Shame on me. 😮

Thanks for reminding me of this! With having reached my limits with US politics, I’ve dropped all my podcasts for the last few months so I haven’t heard Margaret for a while now.

Margaret is great on every topic she covers, but as someone who isn’t trans, I feel she’s really helped me to have a better understanding about the internal and external pressures surrounding the subject matter. I’m sorry I still can’t really verbalize any of my feelings on it, but I’d say to anyone thinking that writing about trans people is written only for trans people, I don’t find this to be the case with any of Margaret’s work. I’ve never had the physical sensation of someone unlocking parts of my mind so frequently to things it couldn’t grasp before.

I’ve been wanting to find something to break up my power run of reading Discworld for the first time, and I think this would be a great book to do that with.

The Critic was amazing.

Most hoots will be them guarding their territory. Owls have a home range of a few miles they will defend. They will allow a mate and first year offspring in that area, but anyone else is typically unwelcome, as they need to protect their food supply and safe resting areas. Both are limited and crucial for their survival.

Owls can identify each other by their hoots. They are unique just as you can tell other humans’ voices apart.

They have a vocabulary of around 2 or 3 dozen sounds, but owls are capable of all kinds of noises and non verbal cues as well.

While not helping people directly, wild animal rescues usually only require one 4 hour shift a week. I do weekends and we have plenty of openings where we could use more help. You can’t just come and go as you please, you pick a shift at the start of the season (March/April to Sept/Oct) and stick to it so we can know we at least have minimal staff. Our shifts are split 8-noon, noon-4, and 4-8.

You will meet a ton of great people, see some truly amazing sights, experience the strength and delicateness of nature, and provide a valuable service to your local ecosystem.

And don’t feel bad “just donating money!”. We can’t do anything without cash. Wildlife rescue doesn’t receive any public money anywhere in the world I’m aware of, and I’m sure many causes are the same way. Yes, groups need people’s time, but we could do a thing without supplies or just plain paying utilities and all the boring overhead costs.

Everyone in this story is just so brazen about their shitty actions. Like the other comment said, they are all getting the frustration and dissatisfaction they deserve. Except the actual guy that partook of the actual physical theft that probably still got a cut of the take, a free ride almost home, and possibly that stupid self-deportation bonus check the government was offering as an additional parting gift.

He took a quick drag off the stinger before he tossed it. 😄

It really just got blasted in the face with some flashlight bigger than it is. Their pupils adjust much faster than ours, but I’m sure it’s still unpleasant.

I started with guitar, then bass, then piano.

Guitar over only really played for fun with other people. I’ve played bass in 3 bands, 2 of those publicly. Piano I’ve played solo at recitals and publicly a few times as part of an ensemble group. Guitar and bass were self taught, so I plateaued early on, but I take piano lessons now. I also have a sampler/drum machine I play around with and use to make backing tracks to practice the other instruments.

I’m not very good at any of them in my own opinion, but it doesn’t take much to have fun. I think it’s harder to be good alone than playing with other people, though as an introvert, it’s hard to get over the initial hump of getting together with people.

From the article:

While the victims reported more than $100m in losses, Brink’s said the stolen items were worth less than $10m.

From the Wiki entry on the robbery:

Some of the jewelers have sued the company. They have admitted in depositions that they, like many of their colleagues, routinely understated the value of the jewelry being transported on manifests they filed with Brink’s, in order to keep their insurance costs down to a level where their businesses can be profitable.

Brink’s in turn has sued to limit the payout to the declared value of the jewelry, accusing the jewelers of breach of contract.

It is believed, due to the amount of jewelry stolen in such a short time, that there were several people involved. Some of the jewelers believe that the theft was an inside job, or at least that Brink’s may know more than it has publicly disclosed.

Crooks all the way down! 😵

Even the tiny Elf Owl, the smallest of all 250ish owls, at 5 inches/13 cm, loves to snack on scorpions.

Owls are beasts!

Owl is a doll.

Here’s a baby Saw Whet Owl, one of my fav owl babies.

It’s really tough anymore to post positive content here. It feels like spitting on a fire to put it out.

I’m from the US, but I’ve always tried to include everyone in my posts, at the price of looking ignorant every now and then when I get things wrong, but it’s nice when I’ve had people from across the world remark how they’re pleasantly surprised to see something local to them being covered by a non-local. I’ve learned so much in return from just having brief interactions with users from other countries, just by showing some genuine interest in them, their languages, and their home countries. But outside of my own posts, it’s hard to find a place on Lemmy where there doesn’t seem to be things looking to drive a wedge between us.

I used to be able to jump into random posts, even if it was something I wasn’t very familiar with, to try to get conversations going, but so many news/political posts just feel rigged to get people riled up, and I’ll scroll through and not find anything to interact with a lot now.

Plenty of people tell me that I’m doing something important by doing positive stuff here. I really like the small community we’ve got of people that regularly interact. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any kind of difference though. I’m going to show up as long as people are talking to me, but there’s plenty of times I ask myself why I don’t just devote this time back into music or my volunteer work. I’ve dropped all my news and politics podcasts at this point because I’m sick of hearing it all. I censor myself on discussing animal rights issues because I don’t want to add to the pile of negative stuff to worry about. I’ll keep at it the best I can, but a lot of people here are sure making it an exhausting effort some days.

No problem!

Get to the feed setting from the menu here

And then the settings all the way at the bottom

Or from here

Then

And scroll to the bottom for filters

Note: it will block other words, so if you block trump and musk, you won’t see things about trumpets or muskrats, at least as of a while back. It was blocking one of my own posts, and I bug reported it, but then was told it’s a pretty basic filter.

I also try to avoid staying directly behind them so I’m not in too much of a blind spot, and if there’s the opportunity to purposefully cast a shadow I’ll do that as well.

I don’t take offense to it. If someone that was built like me was the only other person around, I’d keep an eye on them also. It doesn’t have to be prejudice against them like people always imply in these posts, it’s just common sense.

One…two…thick Freddy’s coming for you… 😂

It was a blast. We went to grab breakfast on our way out of town and this place popped up as I was looking for the best breakfast along the way. It intrigued me that a pharmacy was the number 1 rated breakfast spot.

It’s Lincoln’s P&G. Half the place is a regular pharmacy, and the other is a diner/soda fountain. This is the menu with the soda specials and they have a bunch of old photos of the place on this page.

They advertised top notch pancakes, which I’m usually meh about, but these were light and had a nice crispy outside that seemed to set them apart. Good stuff if ever anyone is ever passing through there.

You are correct. I just reeducated myself. They just have a record if you voted or not. Apologies.

One could look at that as more suspicious in the context of why they may be trying to collect this data. This is the guy that wanted Georgia to “find more votes” and a registered Republican voting for a Democrat sounds like one of those things that is “obviously a mistake” as you surely intended to vote R.

A registered Democrat voting for a Democratic candidate would be largely assumed, but if all your votes are going to another party, this may be the so far undiscovered “evidence” of the Dems stealing votes or doing fraudulent mail in or drop off ballots.

I don’t disagree with what you do, I just think it would stand out more if I were to be looking for statistical anomalies.

I like the olde tyme medicine / cocktail bitters type taste!

I had a fun time last year outside of Pittsburgh there was a diner that had the original soda fountain in it, and I ended up talking with the soda jerk about a lot of the oddball ingredients and he gave me some of the phosphates and I was tasting them straight up and mixing them with flavors in different proportions and such.

A-Treat has an online store now, with the brown and white birch beers both available, as well as the pumpkin cream and cranberry ginger ale holiday flavors, which I also love. There’s a few other Pennsylvania birch beers, the PA Dutch red version and the clear Kutztown ones are on Amazon I saw, but the A-Treat is the most local to where I live.