anon6789

That is great to hear! I wouldn’t assume they are all monolithic, but the last part of that sounds better than I’d have pictured.

I’m also a noob with tech anymore. My old faithful router started dropping this year, replaced it with the Flint 2 earlier this year because I also wanted OpenWRT. It comes with OpenWRT installed, but I don’t think it’s the plain old vanilla OpenWRT, so when I hooked it up and started setting it up, it needs a firmware update anyway, so I installed the actual OpenWRT from their site. It’s been great since, totally happy with it.

I read this story somewhere else yesterday and saw in the comments someone trying to justify it by saying “the media is keepin it a secret these people were Amish to spread their pro vaxx lies” like that would make it any better. I imagine part of the reason of having mandatory vaccines is try to and protect the innocent children of religious extremists from dying needlessly for being part of a sect they had no choice in joining.

Haven’t seen any confirmation the victims were Amish, but given the location, it wouldn’t shock me. I think if that is the case, it still highlights we have 2 problems instead of just 1.

Yayyyyy!

This title update is available on both consoles and PC, but only for the current-gen versions (PS5, Xbox Series X|S). We checked the PS4 version, and it seems it hasn’t gotten the patch, and we doubt it ever will.

Nooooo!

Casual gamer…only have PS4 🥺

Those are good examples. I’ve never known serious addicts, but seeing how my grammom dealt with grandpa getting Alzheimer’s was very difficult, as they’d been married 70 years, so it’s not even like she could remember life without him, and then he was physically there, but mentally lost 99% of the time. She was relieved after he was finally at piece, but by then, so much of her felt taken away from her, she basically decided she wanted to not be here if he wasn’t and she essentially said her goodbyes to us and said she was going to stop her meds so she could be with him again. She was my fav relative, and was one of the few loving people I had growing up. But I knew for years she was miserable watching pop suffer and be lost and afraid. I told her she didn’t owe anyone anything and if she wasn’t old enough to make her own decisions, who the heck was? I miss her every day, but I think she was right to feel relief when pop was at peace, and it was right for her to decide she didn’t want to be in a world with half of herself missing.

My lifelong best friend just went through the same thing with his mother and a long bout of dementia. It was so physically and mentally demanding on him, his mom seemed very lost and upset almost all the time, and his dad was having all kinds of mental challenges coping with the situation and taking it out on my friend and the caregiver they hired, and as sad as it was to lose her eventually, everyone living’s life was in many ways, much calmer and stable and they were able to start healing. I miss her too, as I knew her since I was around 6, so almost 40 years. But much of her was lost to illness and was never coming back.

We also lost both my wife’s parents withing the last few years, and I was horrified at how terrible it is to be there while actively losing someone. I was at the hospital with my wife for both of them, and they both were essentially past the point of no return, but we all were there 12+ hours waiting for the physical process to be over. It seemed very demeaning to the person that was dying, and very cruel to the family to just have to sit there and wait for everything to stop instead of giving a loved one the peaceful and graceful end that we give to animals. I think I was more angry than sad, and I felt closer to them than to my own parents. It just seemed needlessly prolonged for all parties involved, and the family is getting mad at the poor nurses, because their hands are tied, so I felt bad for them too. Like, if there is no way they are going to recover, where is the humanity in making everyone sit there and watch that final suffering? It was just baffling to me how we can say that is cruel to let an animal linger like that, but we make families do that every day.

I tried not to go on so off topic for so long, but I get frustrated so many people refuse to talk about death until it’s right in front of their face. Some people act like I’m morbid or something, but it is an inevitability, and I think being mentally prepared for it is helpful because you won’t be in the right state of mind to think through anything when you’re on the spot facing it. It also leads to not having wills, insurance, and plans for many important things the surviving parties will need to deal with that also delays people healing from the experience.

Your family gave that dog a second chance at life for a long time. Someone just permanently damaged him before you guys met each other. Even if he never became a friend, you still gave him more moments of comfort and safety than he would have seen had you guys not taken him in. It’s sad he couldn’t recover, but if giving him up was the end of his story, you still gave him all you could before that.

Working in animal rescue, I think a lot about animals that can’t be saved, and sometimes a calm and peaceful end isn’t the worst outcome. You probably know all this, as your story makes you seem very compassionate, but just in case, you shouldn’t feel guilty. You guys went above and beyond what most would have done for that poor dog. ❤️

None of us wanted to have to grow up, but this crazy bastard actually stuck with it! Live your best life, Tad!

I’m always down for sharing animal facts and stories!

Don’t tell anyone…but I was too! I just googled to verify it was all rodents, not just some, and saw that it’s a pretty new (2024) discovery. I accidentally saved us both some mild embarassment, and we got a TIL. Win-win!

Some more interesting squirrel info:

Red squirrels like these are much softer than grey squirrels! Very noticeably so, closer to a tiny kitten or even a chinchilla. I was very surprised with the first red squirrels I handled and we all tried to be the ones to get to work with them instead of the more regular grey squirrels we get in our area.

Also, while it is commonly thought that rodents like squirrels have orange teeth because they have iron deposited in the enamel, that has been proven to not be the case. While they do have deposits of iron-containing ferrihydrite-like material for strength, a recent study shows the orange coloration comes from certain amino acids and other minerals, not the ferrites.

Glad to spread the word! Nature doesn’t need help from us to be amazing.

Believe me, I hate being the spoiler, but we don’t need to have only negative takeaways.

They still are real photos in a sense. Overabundance of resources is what is being exploited here, so these are still real animals doing real things, just in a way that is unnatural. The wolf and bear are still beautiful animals.

We can use this same “trick” to help us keep extra predators in our rehab clinic. Many of our birds of prey, for example, would live solitary lives and fight off strangers, but we can often share aviaries (of the same species) since with us, food is calculated and delivered so it cuts down that natural competitiveness while they are recovering. We’re bending nature’s rules to allow us to rehab more animals, not for likes online though.

And now that you know about some of these practices, you can better gauge what is natural behavior and be more critical (as in judging what is ethical vs questionable vs outright faked). Being empowered to make your own choices is a good thing. I see this with owls, as are some countries they can be kept as “pets.”

I see photos of Bell, a very rare and beautiful melanistic barn Owl quite often. She is someone’s legal “pet” and her photos are beautiful glimpses of a creature we’d rarely ever see. But I don’t think owls should be pets, so I enjoy seeing her in my feed, but I won’t like the photos or share them with you guys. It’s legal, so I would criticize anyone outright for enjoying them, but I would like you to know that she’s not a free bird.

Another classic is this Little Owl. She’s the “pet” of a German lady. She stages many cute photos with her owl and dog. Again, legal, but unnatural behavior, and I like my wild animals to be wild.

With the gray areas out of the way, we have a toooooon of unbelievably talented wildlife photographers in the world who are amazing at finding animals without disturbing them or causing them to do unnatural things. I try to reasonably vet people before I share them, and I am always finding new people whose work I love.

Most people in this hobby (sport?) are dedicated to doing things ethically. They will call out bad photographers, and explain how they do their thing while being good friends to their subjects. So I wouldn’t go full-on jaded. The majority of wildlife photos are still going to be harmless. But like with many things, when something looks too good to be true, maybe put a little bit of that critical eye on it. If you don’t see other animal photos of the same behavior, then something might be amiss.

It sucks we have to vet every dang aspect of life, but I think the reality was we always did, were just better today at outting con artists and frauds because we have more info and examples at our fingertips to check against. And while it stinks finding out something cool is a fake or misrepresentation, me, personally, I’d always prefer to know the truth.

I tried to leave a big comment with more background on this here, but perhaps the comment was too long, but it kept getting rejected.

I was able to repost it on c/animals here.

It’s not a positive story in my opinion, but I think it’s important to be aware how these photos are taken so you can make an informed decision about the practice.

It’s honestly hard to tell if it’s just Trump waffling, wanting to claim success for something he had nothing to do with, forgetting about this project, getting fooled by the switch in wording, or if they bribed or flattered him before it got cancelled. When so much ego and corruption is involved, it could really be anything.

Happened last year, still spite over the COVID vaccine. As referenced in the article:

As such, Moderna and Merck call their mRNA cancer vaccine a type of “neoantigen therapy.”

The term avoids both “mRNA” and “vaccine,” which draw hostility from Trump’s anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition to his concerted efforts to undermine lifesaving vaccines, Kennedy has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for the development of mRNA vaccine technology.

Not sure if this keyword strategy is what saved the program or if this was one of the ones allowed despite the cuts due to so much taxpayer money already invested.

It was spring 2025 where the red state leaders were trying to ban mRNA vaccines, but that never went anywhere to my knowledge, hence the funding being cut to research instead.

I use Summit on mobile because the dev included all my feature requests, so it’s an app built for me, at least for the features I use. They’re a very active developer, and it will hopefully stick around for a long time. On a real computer, I just use the plain website. I do most of my stuff on mobile so I can save drafts. I prep most of my posts ahead of time and I tend to write long things.

I’ve stuck with lemmy.world because they’re big. I don’t want my stuff to just up and disappear one day. I’ve got a lot invested here, content wise, and the .world admin have been really nice to me in the handful of times I’ve interacted with them and they’ve supported me in my real life activities pertaining to wildlife.

I’m primarily here to post owl related educational content and animal rehab stories. It started out of curiosity and now thanks to regularly posting here, I became a rehab volunteer last year.

I’ll also post to news and politics posts if I feel I have something useful to add, but with world events getting worse, those communities get a bit too angry sometimes and I stay out.

When I don’t have owl questions to answer, I scroll by Top 6 Hours so there’s a chance people will still reply to my comments. I ignore the ragebait and find I still get juuuust enough content I don’t feel oversaturated.