I think part of the trick is more just growing what already grows well in your area. I have a cherry tomato plant that I didn’t buy seeds for—I just tossed a few old tomatoes in the garden and it popped up subsisting off excess water from the lawn sprinklers. These last couple of months I’ve been able to step out every morning and pick a few to go with my breakfast. I haven’t had to spray for bugs because the local lizards keep them clear. I think more passive gardens like that might be the way to go.

I love it Can I have the artist so I can follow them? It’s cute

Oh—yeah, I probably don’t know much. Admittedly I think I’m a lot less tech savvy than most of the people I interact with here, I don’t even get most of the Linux memes. I just know it’s less toxic than Reddit (not a high bar admittedly) and there seem to be fewer bots. I have an app called “Mlem” on my phone that I got when I was trying to get off Reddit and that’s as much as I know about how I got here >.> I know there’s some related recommended lists but I haven’t converted over to any of them yet. Always open to suggestions though if there’s something you’d particularly like me to check out!

I don’t regret switching This app has been significantly healthier for my mental health. No infinite scroll, just what’s important.

This is oddly soothing to think about.

I haven’t tried a terrarium without springtails. I can tell you that I struggle to keep moss alive without a very humid enclosed terrarium. You can always give it a shot if you’re really certain you don’t want springtails.

The ideal behind terrariums with springtails is that they should be mostly self-sustaining (minus having to trim back plants when they get too big). So if it’s set up right, you can secure a tight lid that will keep springtails and moisture in. If you don’t add extra food in there they should self-regulate their population. I don’t think I get any springtail escapees. I also keep isopods, and they do escape, so definitely avoid those guys.

Can always give it a shot and then post how it’s going.

You’re forgetting our first land ancestor, the fish that decided to come up on land. By certain definitions, all land animals that descended from that ancestor are fish.

It’s an obscure biology joke. Doesn’t play into day-to-day conversations. It is the same logic that causes biologists to say that birds are dinosaurs though—because they descended from dinosaurs. But by the same logic, birds also evolved from lizards, and before that amphibians, and from before that fish, etc. This definition is more like putting all of life into nested boxes. Or perhaps it’s more like the saying “all tigers are felines, but not all felines are tigers”.

This definition is helpful for evolutionary biologists to talk about evolution at grand scale and how we might share certain genes with fish. But it’s admittedly not very helpful for day-to-day conversations that say humans are pretty distant from fish and don’t resemble them much at all now. (Though I admittedly love little biology facts like how our middle ear bones evolved from gills.)

Anyway. I get silly excited about this stuff. Random nerdy rant done.

I’m a trombone fan myself

But when someone can play a good French horn to a melancholy tune, it hits right.

Ya know. A lot of people working in laboratory science can’t find jobs in the US right now. That’s MAGA’s fault. Now MAGA’s complaining about China pulling ahead in some areas of medical science, like they can’t figure out cause and effect. It’s very painful.

I think that gives me more thalassophobia than any animal I could find in open ocean.

Firefighter. Willing to bet AI won’t touch it anytime soon.

Windows and all Google apps keep doing it. Been slowly trying to wean off Google and on to Protonmail, but I should probably speed up the timeline. I have to jump through a lot of hoops to keep Windows from backing up all my data externally on Onedrive. Then, I have copilot turned off, but they put it in Notepad without telling me and I was using it for months :c I was able to find an alternative, but I feel like AI keeps getting secretly shoved onto the background of Google, outlook, every social media site, any browser that’s not Brave or Vivaldi. Been trying to use other search engines than Google when I can, but sometimes Google is just the best at finding helpful results. I haven’t been able to use a navigation app in a while, and that’s caused some headache. And of course I need to find a Discord alternative, though I’m sure that’s not something the EU could offer any advice on.

I think what I would like most is some sort of comprehensive “black list” that lists compromised software and some alternatives, as well as a sort of alert letting me know if someone (like Google) puts out an update that quietly turned AI on again in the background. At some point I should probably switch to Linux, but in the mean time I wouldn’t mind knowing what policies the EU puts in place for its employees to ensure privacy while using Windows products.

As someone who is constantly fighting tooth and nail against AI being shoved into all of my software, wouldn’t mind knowing how the EU is doing it. What alternatives are being used or how they’re turning it off.

Why did no one ever teach me this?? Did I miss this day in class? I feel so silly. This is really useful.