This is the photographic equivalent of Lewis Black’s “if it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

It doesn’t make sense at first, but your brain has to rationalize it so it comes up with a plausible explanation. It doesn’t have the context to know if that’s the right explanation, so while you’re driving to work and going about your day it’s still trying to process this in the background, quietly pushing you toward an aneurism years later.

In Islam, there is an apocryphal story of the prophet Muhammad doing this for his cat Muezza.

They are warning the kibble in Sto-bowl-kor that a great meal is about to arrive. The food in the bowl is only an empty shell now; the humans should treat it as such and dispose of it.

“Subscribe and save” is a scam.

They advertise that you will save 5% by using subscribe and save, but then the price of the item you are buying just happens to go up by 30% on the day they decide to use as the basis for your order, which is not the day you ordered it or the day they pulled it off the shelf. It will occasionally go back down to a normal-ish price, but there will also be random months where it goes up 50% or 100%. I’ve seen $15 case of paper towels go up to $45 some months.

Then they keep prodding you to add more items to get 10% off your entire subscribe and save. I added some items a few weeks ago, got the extra discount percentage, but when they priced my order a few weeks later, the cat food I’ve been getting from them at a pretty stable price suddenly went up in price by the exact amount the extra discount was saving me.

Amazon essentially took the “four square” concept that car dealers use to shift higher costs to an area of the transaction where you are less likely to notice it.

If one was from France and the other was from Portugal, they missed an opportunity to meet in the middle and speak Andorian/Andorran. He could still read her poetry but without all the ducking involved in Klingon courtship.

Those Dubliner jokes are awfully cheesy, unlike the munster comedygold coming out of Kerry.

France has ordered the empire to issue a software fix for elevated radiation levels detected from the dStar 12 or face a nationwide death star recall. The empire responded with a link to an article on its EmpireNews app that states the radiation levels are fine.

Members of the local Force Usergroup say they are hopeful this latest revelation will prompt citizens to migrate to the Pine Moon of Endor, but many people are not in a financial position to abandon the dStar 12.

Finally ditching Apple’s “Music” player for MOC after watching Apple dismantle/bury basic features over the last decade.

Merlin is amazing. I heard birds outside my new apartment and thought of them as nice background noise. Within days of installing Merlin, I could tell sparrows, cardinals and robins apart without seeing them. Whenever I heard a new bird, I’d grab my phone and open Merlin.

One day it sounded like a robin and a cardinal were having and argument while both simultaneously having a stroke. Merlin figured out it was a catbird, a relative of the mockingbird that learns the songs of other birds then strings pieces of them together in a disorganized song to impress the ladies. Basically, the male catbird who can sing the weirdest songs using the most species signals that he has “been around” for enough seasons to learn all those songs and therefore must have good genes the females want to pass on. It’s mind blowing to learn all this about things that are going on outside your window.

It seems to me that we need some software that intercepts the data being sent to Google, replaces all proper nouns with “Sundar Pichai,” all numbers with a 10 followed by 100 zeroes, and randomizes everything else before sending. The data they receive would look like it was smuggled out of a Being John Malkovich parallel universe.

Or we could just use Firefox. Or Lynx.

And you don’t want to do the chainsaw dance of contrition after failing to pay your host the courtesy of synchronizing your chronometers with their planet’s capital city.

Uno, dos, meow, meow, tres, cuatro!

Pretty little kitty chased a thing she saw.

Had a pouch of catnip and a feather boa

Furry purry, furry purry.

The Washington Post talked to the studio and the city this week and established some important key points.

NBCUniversal acknowledged they trimmed the trees, but they claim they trim these trees annually and it just happened to coincide with the strike:

A spokesperson for NBCUniversal confirmed to The Post that the company had pruned the trees. Universal’s confirmation was first reported by Deadline.

“We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “That was not our intention.”

NBCUniversal is working to offer picketers shade coverage, pop-up tents and water, according to the spokesperson. The company has maintained the trees for years and prunes them annually in partnership with arborists for safety ahead of the “high-wind season,” the spokesperson said.

The city confirmed the trees are supposed to be managed by the city, the studio did not have a permit to trim them for the city, and that no permits had been issued to trim those trees in the last three years:

L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a tweet Tuesday evening that his office is investigating the trimmings. The pruned trees are managed by the city, though businesses can obtain permits to trim trees from the city’s Bureau of Street Services, Mejia said. He added that they should be trimmed every five years.

On Wednesday morning, Mejia said the city had not issued permits for the ficus trees to be trimmed and had not issued any tree trimming permits for the location over the last three years.

The NBCUniversal spokesperson declined to comment on the controller’s statement.

I’ve been to three state fairs, a Trump speech, and a rodeo and I can’t believe that’s the first debate I’ve heard about appropriate usage of butter.

I was walking around the Iowa State Fair for an hour last summer before I realized I was whistling the theme to the Millennial Fair.

https://piped.video/watch?v=atFJWwdr6x4

As someone who worked at a major U.S. newspaper in the late 90s, I think the world needs more people who think the way you have just expressed… valuing local information, empathizing with people outside your circle, and considering how your words will be received. I hope you find Lemmy to be a place where you feel comfortable contributing.

I’m going to miss r/datasets, r/selfhosted and other subreddits that allowed me to tap into accessible niche knowledge. I’m sure there are subs I had not yet discovered, but a lot of the information they collected over the years may be gone. I hope those communities will find their way to Lemmy and rebuild.

FWIW, selfhosted does have a sort of “best of” list on GitHub at: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted