christian

joined 5 years ago
[–] christian@lemmy.ml 13 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I'd have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I'm eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you're doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can't play with getting her accustomed again, I've got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn't get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 55 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (3 children)

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don't care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn't move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I'm about to cry just from writing this.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

I think we can all agree that Trump should respond to this baseless libel by unsealing every inch of dirt he has on Elon.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn't aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It's especially weird because I don't think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I'm not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago

And an AOC candidacy would really, really excite me if I didn't know that Democrats rig their primaries.

Yeah at this point I think you could take a person from my own life that I have literal love and respect for and I would still be more inclined to interpret surviving a primary as a character indictment than as reason for optimism.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It is kind of depressing to be honest. I'm antifascist, I just happen to also be a loser.

When in a healthy relationship it doesn't bother me, but now that I'm single again and will be looking at revisiting the whole dating thing at some point it's uncomfortable to think too much about.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there's a huge incentive to risking injury.

He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I'd give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with "Proud New Dad" and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, I think someone deciding they don't want to take a review seriously if it's by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you're poor and paying for games, you can't get something new every day so you'd often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.

I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It's still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone's knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said "no" and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently "it's 1 minus the null set". I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A "null set" is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using "the" here implies there's just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That's whatever. But we're not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we're not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he's given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it's would be one thing if we're early on and he'll discover he's in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they'll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's borderline inspirational. It almost makes me want to make a linkedin account just to riff on this for every mundane aspect of my life. I mean I don't have anything as impressive as a top-25 spot on a Clash of Clans leaderboard, but just because I can't compete with this guy doesn't mean I'm unhirable.

First draft for a pitch:

Hey hiring managers, have you ever had to deal with ungrateful employees who incessantly whine about needing "sick time" for imaginary problems like "food poisoning"? We've all been there. What you need is a guy who is still in sepsis recovery and can barely function day to day to help them realize how good they have it.

Due to supply-and-demand, you should be ready to make a highly competitive offer. Hourly wages are acceptable with overtime pay over forty hours, and under the agreement that I will be on-the-clock for every hour which I spend recovering from sepsis, which is all of them.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Most were the type you see on lemmy that would rather not vote if there isn't a perfect candidate on the ballot, even if there was one candidate that they agreed with the majority of items.

Okay, I thought we were discussing something wholly different. I worked in Dearborn and we all had friends who lost relatives as our country refused to stop sending arms. One of my best students completely fell off after losing a lot of her extended family and it was painful to watch.

But you don't need to have personal experience with someone affected to be outraged. It's a line some people are unwilling to cross. I am one of them. Downplaying that as they "would rather not vote if there isn't a perfect candidate on the ballot" is either wholly disingenuous or a complete absence of empathy. A candidate I have "agreed with the majority of items" but disagreed on the morality of supplying weapons used to commit a genocide is one I will not vote for.

If the president is aware that he is sending weapons killing innocents and still signs off to send more, and one of those bombs kills someone I love, would you blame me for not voting for him? If not, why would you blame someone who empathizes with me for making the same decision?

The democrats did not have to support this, and would have won the election if not for this complete moral bankruptcy. Blaming nonvoters is shifting blame from the powerful to the powerless.

 

Ovi really did grow into the leadership role, but there's something to be said for the knowledge that someone else would have been the NHL's best leader if opposing goalies had stopped four more of his shots than they actually did over the course of his career.

(Also Messier is enough of a blowhard that receiving his endorsement feels like a character attack.)

 

I'm an aspiring screenwriter and need some constructive criticism. Please go easy on me, I've poured my heart into these.

Only five unique ideas so far, could stay that way for a long while or maybe not. Inspiration comes when it comes.

 

I mean on the one hand, I could take the two minutes right now. On the other hand, I could lie awake for another half an hour thinking about this thing I could easily take care of immediately, and then later on take time out of my day to actually do it. It's an easy choice which is a better management of time, I'll be back in bed in a minute.

Alright, now that I've had a full minute back and comfy and tucked in again I've thought up another task that's even less time-consuming than the last one.

 

Had to check online to be 100% sure the superPAC that mailed it was Trump-linked. I've never heard of Elissa Slotkin before, but apparently she's a US rep for another district in Michigan. Our rep is Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian descent, so I'm guessing the PAC's thought process in designing this was they don't want to link Harris to our actual representative so just pick some other random rep nearby.

As someone who does not want Trump to be re-elected, it's at least relieving to know how easy it will be for the democrats to counter these dirty tricks. All they need to do is have their candidate make clear public statements to clarify that she doesn't want this linked to her campaign. Of course, she'll have to clearly point out which specific parts are offensive, so people don't just think she fine with antisemitism. Explaining that being anti-apartheid is not the same as being antisemitic is pretty straightforward though, so this should be no big deal.

 

We've had my cat Roto-Borola (pictured here) for over two years, we got him when he was maybe five months. A couple months back I discovered he really enjoys having his head massaged. He likes me to put a good bit more pressure on his head than I would expect him to be comfortable with.

He's still a very playful cat at times, and I try to engage with that as best I can but I don't always love being play-bitten. At some point a while back, if I'm petting his head and move my hand somewhere else near him, including petting his back or somewhere else on him, it sets off a timer of 15-20 seconds typically (usually around 10-15 seconds with no reaction, when he opens his mouth just a hint it means he is about five seconds away) for him to play bite me. If he's laying on top of me the timer it sets off is just for exiting the ride. I've been playing with him pretty rough by squeezing his head or giving him a little noogie, but it just hit me that this has really been him training me in how he wants to be pet.

So I'll give him a pretty rough noogie and he acts like "oh no, I'm really trying to bite you but I can't when your hand is right there", but he's definitely able to outspeed me. And I'm realizing now in retrospect, I started going for the back of his head because he left me one spot to find where he would pretend that he can't get to me. And he gradually trained me I needed to be more and more violent if I wanted to not get bitten.

So yeah, I put my entire hand around his skull and squeeze a bit tight and somehow he loves this. Realized a few months ago that this is his thing, realized today that this is something he taught me.

 
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) deepin-icon-theme-2024.06.21-1

Total Installed Size:  138.93 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:        5.96 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] Y
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                     [########################] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                   [########################] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                        [########################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                  [########################] 100%
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
deepin-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/bloom/icon-theme.cache exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Running a search for the error I didn't find one for deepin-icon-theme, but the same error for other packages in arch updates show up and the other ones I saw laid the blame on improper packaging. Given that this is the one from the arch repositories and not some AUR package, I'm nowhere near confident enough in myself to jump to the conclusion that this is someone else's fault, so I'm asking here.

 
 

Hear me out: a "Wild West" ditto, which looks like a regular ditto but with a moustache and cowboy hat, and when it transforms it looks just like the target pokemon, except with a moustache and a cowboy hat added on.

Unfortunately I have no artistic talent so cannot provide sketches at this moment, but I intend to start a gofundme to commission the concept art sooner or later.

 

I need some relationship advice. I suggested 125% but my wife won't budge from 10%. Is this normal? How did it go when you had this conversation with your romantic partner?

 
 

Roto-Borola usually likes to hang out with me when I'm working at my desk. Earlier today my wife snapped this photo of him chilling by me. Every so often he sits like this, but I think this is the first time we've seen him nap in this position. I laughed a little and it woke him up, he looked at me and did a loud meow and then got up.

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