Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

House plants. Sure a few mass-market plants are dirt cheap, but soon you get into unusual plants, plants with special needs, hundreds/thousands of plants, grow lights, grow racks, terrariums, automated watering systems…

I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)

Culture wise I’d say that Bluesky feels a lot more like Twitter immediately before Musk took over - there’s lots of shitposting & also a lot of “look at me I’m so irreverent so please follow me” vibe to it. It’s easier to find people to follow but harder to find interesting content (on mastodon you can rely on hashtags). It’s also a lot harder to get engagement if you’re not a Twitter big name, there’s a lot more parasociality going on, with more focus on individual posters than on the actual content, which IMO is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.

Mastodon users tend to feel very earnest to a fault. The whole “you forgot to add a CW to your food pic you bastard” thing is unfortunately real, but I’ve mostly stopped seeing this since I put a warning on what I will and will not CW on my timeline. On the bright side, there’s a lot more friendly engagement from strangers. Politically, mastodon users as a whole lean left with a lot of socialists/anarchists but you can curate what you see. It also depends on what circles you follow, for example, I (as a Chinese speaker) stumbled on a huge community of Chinese users who are feminist and anti-CCP, but will probably not consider themselves leftists.

As a whole, I’ve mostly abandoned Bluesky in favor of Mastodon but that’s a personal preference - both are unlikely to completely replace Twitter & the landscape will likely remain fractured for a very long time so just choose the one that vibes with you.

Nah from the articles it’s more like Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple and Apple wasn’t interested

Buddhists do end up recreating many of the features of mainstream religions anyway. No sin? You still end up getting punished for negative karma. No self/soul? Enter Buddha nature. No heaven/hell? You get reincarnated in suspiciously Heaven/hell-like realms instead.

Have faith. Coming from a country that jails our ex prime minister, I’ll say that it takes quite a lot of time.

You see, during one of his earlier appointments, he found himself wrapped up in some intriguing circumstances with a lady client, and now he's running late for everything else.

Oops! I stand corrected.

Sigur Ros’s ex drummer was accused of rape and the band itself was accused of tax evasion.

Will be hilarious if religious fanatics die and discover that God is a lizard person who devours our souls after our deaths. That’ll be so much more satisfying than eternal oblivion and therefore no moment of realization.

I’m tempted to tell them “it’s nun of your business” to the nuns above but the there’s a good deal of societal pressure for Muslim women to wear a headscarf too. Women are seldom the ones making the choices.

This looks lovely. What’s the growing conditions like? I’ve been thinking of getting one of these.

It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.

If you’ve decent light, Phyllanthus mirabilis might be a lovely option.

在這方面大馬人的思維是需要革新下的，每次去到有很多人去的地方，全部人非得把車停得越靠近越好，結果就是一大堆的違法泊車導致阻塞，彷彿走五分鐘的路會死。又不是每輛車都有老人家。在我們走慣路的人眼裡很靠近的距離，在習慣開車的人眼裡，走起來就好像跋山涉水一樣。

Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.

I live in a country where the majority of people are pretty much born into their religion and forbidden to leave. But closeted or semi-closeted atheists are everywhere. They may not openly profess atheism but will often drop hints here and there.

Agree with the list view not feeling iOS native. I also find that the bottom tab bar being solid in color while the top navigation bar being translucent a bit weird - I prefer both to be translucent. Of course, I get that the devs and designers have made these design choices for a reason/because of their preferences so I’m not really complaining!

For a beautiful Lemmy app that looks 100% iOS native, just take a look at Bean.

In Indian/southeast Asian cultures people have rules for that - you only use your left hand to wash your butt and only use your right hand for food.