This is horrible and obnoxious tree trimming. Bad for the trees, bad for urban tree canopy, bad for urban heat management, bad for carbon sequestration, and done as an insult to labor.

Yep. I heard they're actually being fined, sadly only for $250 because old city laws limit how much they can be fined.

If any of these trees dies, I hope Universal is on the hook for replacing it.

Oh dang this is on Mastodon? Gotta follow this account now.

Wasn't done by the city. Universal is getting fined for this.

A local park ranger I know likes to remark that our state tree is a grass. (I'm in Florida.)

But I'd say that's also inaccurate. IMO, grasses are in the family Poaceae, and palms are in the family Arecaceae. I guess one could remark that our state tree is a commelinid...but I don't think tourists would get as much of a kick out of that.

Math majors: "Duh."

Non-math majors: "And then a miracle occurs..."

Yeah I saw this and while I'm not a tree management expert I'm like "they basically left no leaves on these poor things". With the insane heat we've been seeing, this can't be good.

If I had a nickel for every time I saw this chart in the past 24 hours, I'd have two nickels, which isn't much, but it is funny that it happened twice.

The other time, it was being used to describe politics. So this one is a lot less stress-inducing, thankfully.

"Frickin' beautiful."

How many social credit points do I lose if I refer to bamboo products as "wood" outside of botany nerd circles?

Thank you so much to you for making this happen, thanks to the other contributors and mods for helping to keep things running, and to all the participants!

then write the year before the month before the day 😈

thinks back to college chem lab classes and MSDSes why would anyone put benzene in sunscreen

Anyway, for reference here's the paragraph from the article about the harmful substance:

When people say chemical sunscreens are unsafe or “toxic,” they generally point to a 2001 study that found some risks associated with oxybenzone after scientists put high levels of the ingredient in drinking water for rats. But a followup study in 2016 found that for humans to get to similar risky exposure levels they’d have to apply full-body daily sunscreen for 227 years.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that mineral sunscreens (zinc oxide and titanium dioxide) are reportedly considered "reef safe": https://savethereef.org/about-reef-save-sunscreen.html

And they aren't the substances that are cited for toxicity/carcinogenicity. So, based on the available information (correct me if I'm wrong, of course!), it seems that they're the best choice.

Also I've heard that mineral sunscreens work by reflecting sunlight rather than absorbing it and dissipating it as a different form of energy (I forget whether that's heat or chemical change) so that might also be useful in other ways. But I am not an expert.

EDIT: see later replies to this post for more information to consider

I forgot about Lemmy for months...this has gotten me to show back up!

I've heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter...uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, "it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use". At least, that's what I've heard. Never verified this myself.

Tusky is definitely decent though.

Um

The second wrong.

Or...only one

Dimension

Time to post one of my favorite songs:

https://youtu.be/PKQPey6L42M

("Da Coconut Nut", by Ryan Cayabyab. This version is probably the one performed by his group, Smokey Mountain.)

This song reminds us that the coconut is not a nut; it is the fruit of the cocopalm.

...I guess the toast is getting eaten? 😆

I knew of the stellar reputation the old Thief games have, so I bought them a while back, but have yet to play them. And I have yet to play basically any of the modern games shown. However, this video make a surprising lot of sense.

For instance, I've had experiences in games where I can tell that the game is visually pretty but I'm just not paying attention to it -- and ironically missing out on some neat visual features -- because it's just not important to the gameplay. This may be more appropriate when I'm revisiting game areas I've already been to, but it can be a problem when I'm missing the awe of my surroundings because I'm too focused on making my way through the obvious walkable area and clearing out generic mooks.

Maps in games are an interesting thing. I play a lot of so-called "metroidvania" games and their ilk (heck, most of my gaming is 2D), and I don't really like it if I'm frequently consulting my map to find my way from place to place. The best level designs in such games, in my opinion, are the cases where I end up learning to navigate the world without (or with minimal) consultation of my map. I think this generally means having sufficiently varied level design that there are memorable visual cues for where I am. A "maze of twisty passages, all alike" can be appropriate in some situations, but I find that it's often more "organic" -- especially when it comes to things like the interiors of buildings -- to have recognizable details differentiating things like different hallways that would otherwise look similar. While the game might still effectively be a bunch of corridors to run through, anything from more varied theming (even just different paint colors and lighting on walls in similar parts of the same area) to architectural details that directly affect gameplay (a broken stairwell that must be jumped across vs. an intact stairwell that can just be walked up). People in real life design buildings to be easily navigable (usually) and leave environmental markers in natural spaces because this makes navigation smoother in real life.

And yes, there's so much to be said about the value of integrating story into gameplay. In general, I feel that there's something to be said about how videogames shouldn't (in general) aim to be "cinematic". A film is a medium of passive experience, but a game is a medium of active experience. Cutscenes aren't bad per se, and even cinematic cutscenes aren't bad per se, but care should be taken in their use. Sometimes, a fight scene rendered in-engine -- even if this means 2D pixel art sprites beating each other up -- can be much more immersive than a high-quality video with panning shots of the characters as they're throwing punches and wrestling. The latter takes the player's consciousness out of the game world, reminding them that they are merely the audience, while the former can be presented seamlessly without changing the player's perspective (as surely the player has already gotten used to mentally processing the game world in a way that feels comfortable to them).

Thanks for sharing this video! I boosted it over on Mastodon too.

Hey, welcome to the threadiverse! I'm also a newbie, whose only prior experience with this sort of site has been Reddit (as well as internet forums but they're not quite the same type of thing), so here's what I've figured out so far. (The "threadiverse" is the informal name for the realm of Reddit-like websites linked by federation.)

Apologies for another long post for you to read, but I'll try to make this an easy read. (Feel free to tell me I suck in if you think I wrote this badly or if it was stuff you already knew.)

On Reddit, you have one site, which has a ton of subreddits, each of which is like a little forum and is independently moderated (within the limits of the larger site's policies, of course). Lemmy and /kbin are, basically, like many little "reddits", with a twist: they can talk to each other and so you can be a member of one "reddit" and post/comment on another. Also, subreddits are called "communities" on Lemmy and "magazines" on /kbin but they basically work the same way. You can subscribe to them and see posts from them and post to them, even if they're on other "reddits".

So, yes, you can have your account on lemmy.world, but also subscribe to (for example) /c/patientgamers at sh.itjust.works (which is sometimes written as ![email protected]). Meanwhile, what if you're also interested in the content at /c/patientgamers on lemmy.ml? Well, you can subscribe to that too! (Think of it like being subscribed to two slightly-differently-named subreddits.)

While there's only one actual Reddit which has all the many many subreddits, in the threadiverse there are many "reddits", each of which has some "subreddits". There may be some duplication of more general topics, like memes, but you'll also often find that more specialized "subreddits" are only on certain "reddits" -- for example, my instance, mander.xyz, has a lot of nature and science related communities, not found on other instances. And each of those "reddits" has its own rules, and each of those "subreddits" has its own rules within the instance that hosts it. You'll want to check each out to get a feel for the vibes in each place.

And now for the nitty gritty.

The way this all works is that you basically have two ways to see everything on the threadiverse: (1) on the site where the thing is, and (2) on your home instance. For example, you posted your message on lemmy.world. I can go to lemmy.world to read your post, but I can't reply there, unless I have a lemmy.world account. So how am I commenting? I'm typing this reply to you on mander.xyz. That's because I'm viewing your post on my home instance. I saw your post on the feed of another instance (acutally a /kbin instance, located at fedia.io), and I wanted to reply, so on that page, I got the link to your post ( https://lemmy.world/post/928037 ), copied it and pasted it into my own instance's search bar, and pulled it up on my instance (Mander), and here I am, typing my reply.

Now, I did this only because my instance doesn't already know about your post. I'm not subscribed to ![email protected], which is where you posted this. If I were subscribed, then your post would have appeared in my subscribed feed, on my instance, already. And I'd just view your post and type my reply just like it were a post on my own instance. I'm subscribed to ![email protected], so new posts there will show up on my subscribed feed.

The first thing I did when I wanted to join Lemmy was that I needed to pick an instance to join. But the second thing I did, almost concurrently, was that I started noticing all the different places that had content I wanted to see. I made a quick list of all those different communities/magazines. So once I joined, I just went and subscribed to all of them.

You can see what communities are on a given instance by clicking "communities" at the top of the page. (Or "Magazines" if you're on a /kbin site.) So I basically just went through the communities lists of a bunch of instances, and checked out what people were posting about, and asked myself, "hey, do I wanna hang out here?".

How do I subscribe? I go to the webpage for the community, like going to the subreddit, and I hit subscribe. What if it's on another instance? I just take its URL, copy it, and paste it in my instance's search bar. Wait a few seconds, then there's a link to the community via my instance. Click subscribe. (Sometimes it's a little buggy and have to go into a post to subscribe. Or it says "subscribe pending" after I click. But, really, I actually am subscribed, and I can tell because those posts start showing up on my subscribed feed.)

Where are my subscribed posts? I just go to my instance's home page (mander.xyz for me, lemmy.world for you) and I can click "Subscribed". Or "Local", which shows posts on my instance. Or "All", which is a feed of all the posts my instance knows about (local and remote). And I can sort them in different ways too.

The search box is surprisingly useful on fediverse platforms, I've found. On Lemmy and /kbin, I can copy the address of any community/magazine or post or comment and stick it in my instance's search box. Wait a few seconds, and it'll find it, and I click on it and do my thing. Sometimes I find posts that my instance didn't know about at all before I pulled them up, so they're "missing" comments that I can see on the post's actual address, but I don't need to see them all on my instance, I just need to pull up the one I want to reply to and post my reply. By the way, these links are that colorful little fediverse star you see beneath your posts. (On /kbin it's in "more" -> "copy URL to fediverse".) Everything has an address and every address is searchable, it seems.

So here's basically how I'm using Lemmy now:

• load up mander.xyz (my homepage)
• check my notifications (which i'll get when people reply to me)
• check my Subscribed feed, and optionally, the Local feed, or even the All feed (if I'm extra bored). anything my instance already knows about is something I can post on like it were local.
• if I want to check out extra stuff on other instances, I can easily just go to those instances and read stuff. If I want to comment/etc., I find a link from there, go back to my instance, paste it in the search box, and do my thing.

Hope this helps!