Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Lemmings of Lemmy, what is the scariest situation in the outdoors that you have experienced?

Probably not the type of answer you're looking for, but I've got a few that happened outdoors.

The first was when me, my brother, and some friends hiked up some train tracks to go to a ghost town at the top of a mountain near where we'd recently moved. About a 6 hour hike in. My brother was ahead of us, around 100 feet/30 meters ahead. He suddenly turns around, yells "TRAIN!" and the next thing we know, there's a fuggin train coming around the bend. There's only around 6-7 feet/2 meters of space between a rock wall and the tracks. We jump off the tracks and push up against the wall. With our packs on our backs (we were going to be camping for a week, so they were large packs), it felt like I could have stuck out my tongue and touched the train. The scariest part was that none of us saw if my brother had been hit. It happened too fast. The train took forever to pass, it felt like an eternity. I just knew my brother was dead, I was terrified. When the train finally passed, we rushed to where he'd been, and found that when he jumped off the tracks, he wasn't against the wall, he was in a sort of spring/small pond, 10 feet/3 meters lower than the tracks, soaking wet. Terrified we'd been hit. First words out of his mouth were "cigarette. Now!" He was unharmed.

Next scariest thing was when me and some friends went driving in a national forest near us, and her car broke down. We walked up what we thought was the road, but turned out to be a trail. Someone started shooting at us. We ran like crazy and made it back to the car. Tbh, I don't remember how we got her car home...

Comment on

whats your family's wee inside jokes or names for things that other folk (or better - your kids) find weird and annoying?

Super weird one. Produce bags from the grocery store are called "gnome bags."

Years ago, we found out that Walmart does not mind if you just take a whole roll of those bags. We use them instead of zip locks, sandwich baggies, Saran wrap, and dog poo bags. They became "gnome" bags because we had an old toilet paper roll holder in the shape of a gnome that we hung up to hold the roll of bags, and we all just started calling them gnome bags until it got to the point where we'll occasionally say it in public accidently. Lol.

support

Comment on

How to unblock a user on Lemmy?

Piggy backing on this, and I know it's probably not high on the to do list, considering... But can we get some "not interested" option for communities? I've been blocking communities because I'm not interested, and they're clogging up the all feed (not really enough in my subbed feed to keep things going). But I don't necessarily want to block a community all the time. There are things I might want to seek out from time to time, but don't necessarily want showing me all their new posts, either.

Comment on

With how common human-exposure to radiation is becoming, the primary base system might not be base-10 anymore.

That's not how radiation exposure works. The types of mutations in DNA it causes is generally things like cancer, not birth defects that transfer into future generations. In order for the number of fingers human-wide to change, there would need to be a specific mutation for that, and that mutation would have to be beneficial enough that the 11+ or 9- fingered folks would be more likely to breed than us 10 fingered folks.

On top of that, while base 10 is convenient because of our fingers, it's unlikely to change due to how ingrained it is in our culture at this point. It's also hardly the only system we've used. The Babylonians used a base 60. Many cultures have used base 12. Base 12 is actually very convenient for our fingers already.

Hold your left thumb against the first segment of your left pinky and count 1, move up one segment, count two. Count each of the segments on your left fingers. You're now at 12. Move your right thumb to the first segment on your right pinky, and then start over on your left. Each time you count 12 on the left, move your right thumb up one. You can now count to 144 on your fingers.

Comment on

Are humans the only great apes that can be "holy", or could, for example, an Orangutan be divine?

Reply in thread

Edit: my network is being just, like, absolute crap. I don't know why it posted multiple times. Such is the life of rural America, living with a 4g hotspot for home internet. Lol. Apologies!

I'm a sort of hodge podge of different traditions, philosophies and religions, and this is absolutely my view. In Hinduism, one of the reasons humans are at the "top" of the reincarnation cycle is because we have the intellect to understand things like karma, and are able to achieve liberation through that understanding. In my view, while we may be the only ones able to achieve liberation, we are also the only ones building up negative karma. It's a double edged sword. Animals, plants, bacteria, they don't do wrong things, they don't engage in wrong thinking. They act on impulse, on intuition, on instinct, and as such, they're pure spirited. Humans on the other hand are capable of evil, and as such we are the only species on earth that must struggle towards divinity. We just also happen to be the only species that can understand the nature of divinity. You don't think the universe be like it is but it do, y'know?

Comment on

"Block The Rich" is like an ad-blocker, but for obscenely wealthy people with overinflated egos.

I absolutely love this! God, I need it. There are several websites I have to use for school that have bullshit articles on the side bar that I would love to block these assholes from. And for the people talking about blocking them being ignoring the problem, you don't have to keep it turned on all the time. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to scroll through something without having to know what the fuck warren buffet thinks, or how the emerald heir is going to cure cancer with the power of a truck that looks like a PS1 asset.

OP, I love this. Please tell me there's a way to do to this from Android?

Comment on

Lemmings of Lemmy, what is the scariest situation in the outdoors that you have experienced?

Reply in thread

Thankfully! One of the ex marines thought it wasn't important to bring a firestarter log (creosol log), "I ain't no pussy." Left it at the truck, without telling anyone. When we got there, it had snowed for so long, thick, wet snow, that we couldn't get a fire started. He was an idiot. Same marine, once we finally got the fire started on day 3 was on night watch. While we all slept he pulled a tarp over top of where the fire was to "trap the heat." Somehow, known only to God, it didn't catch fire when he FELL ASLEEP ON GUARD, but it did trap the smoke enough that we all woke up coughing. Thankfully we didn't all die of inhalation. The snow prevented us from making it to lost cove, and we ended up going home without seeing it. Horrible, cursed trip. Lol.

Comment on

whats your family's wee inside jokes or names for things that other folk (or better - your kids) find weird and annoying?

Reply in thread

Oh, remembered another, too. To irritate people me and my brother both, whenever we hear someone arguing how to pronounce "gif," we insist it should be pronounced Zsif. Like zsa zsa Gabor's first name. If you're familiar with Linux, there's a thing about whether the DE gnome should be pronounced guh-nome or nome. I'll pronounce it with a glottal stop at the beginning instead, and it drives people insane. (If you're unfamiliar with glottal stop, think of the way some northern England accents pronounce the t in water. "wa?er")