SaraFimm

@chrisstIawrence @MbtHawk @giveashitnature I agree with the "no cats outdoors" issue, but we can't control other people and their choices to let their cats out or just release weaned kittens out into the world to make it on their own.

@MbtHawk @FimmSara @giveashitnature feral/outdoor cats still kill wild birds even with subsidized food sources. cats should not be kept outdoors

If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box. The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year. A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease. Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk." One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks. If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you. The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

@FinalCausation @chrisstIawrence @MbtHawk @giveashitnature That's why I said they'll still "sport" with some prey species, but they won't be so hungry as to be hunting multiple times every day. Well fed outdoor cats will spend a lot of time grooming and sleeping the day away.

@chrisstIawrence @MbtHawk @FimmSara @giveashitnature It is not true that well-fed stray cats are not a problem for the ecosystem. Cats prey by instinct and habit and do not just stop doing so as a function of how hungry they are.

@FightWithMemes I can appreciate the "see how easy it is" using mostly tools from before 1800s. I also wonder about the African communities that STILL have to walk miles just to fill up 5 gallon jugs of water and WHY they don't have wells. "Cultural Issues" I guess.

Multiple societies in the world still can't do this.

@MbtHawk @giveashitnature I think, as long as your neighbor is actually putting out cat food, most of the animals cats go after will be safe other than as occasional "sport" for the cats. It's when humans stop feeding a cat colony that issues begin.

@giveashitnature Where we live there are unfortunately a lot of stray cats. I have a neighbor that just takes them all in when people dump them and he’s got probably 30 now that roam around. Our Byrd population seems to be OK but I’m sure they eat a lot.

@MarioNawfal The Googly Eyes are worth the money. Put them on EVERYTHING and make the world a funnier place!

Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) had a budget of $180 million. This had a budget of $180 😂

@Ric_RTP This reminds me of the article I read where Indian executives would import more Indians as Tech employees. These imported Indians had either falsified their backgrounds or paid higher ups to get them into the USA. They were worthless as IT workers and used AI to do their job.

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI. The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace. They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up: Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it. Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived. Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead. The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much. Uber's story is even worse... Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April. Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems. Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session. The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money. Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans. Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative. Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing: AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs. The stock market rewarded every company that said it. Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up. But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools. Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible. Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone. And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control. The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP. This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in. $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work. What do you think?

@LangmanVince "Not that I'm MAGA or anything", but the whole state's gone to Hell in a Handbasket!

Spencer Pratt puts out another banger! I'm not MAGA or anything 😂 Whoever is putting together his commercials should be hired by every Republican running for office in the midterms!

@MarioNawfal Needs to be put in a church and rung!

A Lithuanian farmer discovered a church bell buried for 82 years while working his field. Cast in 1908, locals buried it in 1942 to protect it from Soviet forces who melted church bells into weapons. It came out of the ground perfectly preserved.

@drinkonsaturday Honestly, Sincere Props to the men and women who go the "totally authentic" route, but for those of us who just want to have fun without the fuss, 3D plastic seems to be the route most are heading. I have multiple hobbies sinking $$$$ into a hobby isn't something I can do.

3D printed chainmail might not be historically accurate, but for LARP-ing and cosplay it’s pure gold. Super lightweight, quick to reprint if you break a link, zero maintenance, no rust, and those tightly interlocked rings actually perform surprisingly well against foam weapons and light impacts. You can customize colors, patterns, and even scale it perfectly to your body in software before hitting print. No more heavy, sweaty, expensive metal that takes weeks to assemble by hand. Historically speaking? Total anachronism. Medieval armorers punched and riveted thousands of real metal rings one by one—no FDM printers or resin tanks in 14th-century Europe. But that’s not the point for most players. How many purists will this piss off? Plenty. The hardcore historical reenactment crowd—the ones who hand-forge their own rivets, tan hides with brain matter, and spend years researching dye recipes—will lose their minds. Expect furious forum posts calling it “plastic trash,” “larp heresy,” and “the death of the hobby.” Gatekeeping Reddit threads, angry comments at events, and at least one bearded knight in full authentic harness muttering about “modern degeneracy ruining everything.” Yet the vast majority of LARP and cosplay folks will quietly love it. Comfort wins over authenticity when you’re running around a field all day. Print on, warriors—your back and wallet will thank you. The purists can keep their authentic misery.

@kyronis_talks I think I learned something similar to this my last year of high school. I wish I had learned this in grammar school! In Speech class, we picked a subject, researched it, told the rest of the class about it, and then other students could ask questions about it.

A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views. He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because no one had taught them how their brain actually works when learning something difficult. The lecture, “Study Less Study Smart,” contains a powerful framework. Your brain cannot sustain focus the way most people believe. Studies show the average learner hits a wall between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency collapses. You’re still sitting there, but almost nothing is being absorbed. Lobdell told the story of a student who planned to study 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week. Thirty hours total. She failed every class. She was not lacking effort. She was confusing time near books with actual learning. The fix is simple: when focus drops, stop, take a 5 minute rewarding break, then return. That reset makes a massive difference. He also destroyed the myth of highlighting and re reading. Recognition is not the same as recall. To prove it, he read 13 random letters. Almost no one remembered them. Then he turned them into “Happy Thursday.” The entire room recalled them instantly. The brain stores meaning, not repetition. This is why elaborative encoding works so well. Finally, he shared the most important principle: 80 percent of study time should be active recitation. Close the book and explain the material in your own words. Teach it to someone else or an empty chair. Retrieval is where real learning happens. His closing line stuck with me: If this information does not change your behaviour, you have not actually learned it. The best students do not study more hours. They stop confusing the feeling of studying with the reality of learning.

@KathleenWinche3 This is something the Manager or Assistant Manager of these gas stations should be doing regularly. Ensuring no one is using their machines to swipe card info. It would ensure only 24 hours worth of people were scammed instead of weeks or months worth.

Yet another Scam was exposed by a man using a Credit Card 💳 and he noticed a weird sticker hanging out and alerted the police! SMH nothing is safe anymore!

@SorenOfAsgard Are there Centaur rules?

Unrelated to my usual stuff, I spun up a #dnd5e #Umamusume resource! I've had this sitting on the back burner for a while. I haven't play tested the racing rules but it seems like it'd be a fun game of chance for players to me at least. Link to the Homebrewery below.

@ihtesham2005 Have they done similar studies on knitters and crocheters?

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@HustleBitch_ They need to track where these came from.

🚨 MAN DISCOVERS “RADIOACTIVE BEADS” BEING SOLD AT MICHAELS — AND THE GEIGER COUNTER FOOTAGE IS FREAKING PEOPLE OUT A man is going viral after walking into Michaels with a Geiger counter… and allegedly finding radioactive beads sitting on the shelf with no warning label. At first, he says he thought the entire thing was fake. Then he hit the beads with a UV light. One container immediately started glowing. Seconds later, his Geiger counter reportedly spiked from around 40 CPM to over 500 CPM right there in the aisle. According to him, the beads appear to contain uranium glass, a material historically made with small amounts of uranium that reacts under UV light. He claims nowhere on the packaging did it say uranium. Now the video is exploding online as people debate whether this is harmless vintage-style glass… or something that never should’ve been sitting on a craft store shelf to begin with. The internet reactions are even crazier: • “Why are radioactive beads in a craft store???” • “We’re casually buying uranium at Michaels now?” • “Imagine kids making bracelets with this.” If true… how the hell did “radioactive beads” end up on a Michaels shelf with no warning label? 📹: TikTok/dawsonsradcollection

@hipearlrose The real question is who KNEW about it and WHEN did they inform their superior all the way up the chain of command. WHEN did they know, WHEN did they pass upwards the info? WHO delayed getting it taken care of/Action Plan?

the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the US! its watershed spans NY, PA, WV, MD, DE, VA, and DC!!! this travesty leeched toxic chemicals into the food, water and land for millions of Americans and the US GOVT HID IT FROM US FOR MONTHS!!!!!!

@Kairho71 Such a great series! Hubby's been keeping up with every book release, but I got lost along the way because I have a tendency to forget stuff. I also prefer ebook over physical because of font size.

Starting from book one. For the eighth time. This series doesn't get enough love, IMO.

@SandyofCthulhu I think this would be great if you use specific cities or locations repeatedly. Same city, but several different campaigns over the years. Members of our group have been playing since 1984.

Here’s a tip on how to have a stable of useful NPCs for your tabletop roleplaying game. I’ve been running such games since 1974, so I’ve made just about every mistake possible. And blundered into lots of useful tips.

@MichaelARothman And then they began floating over to Europe in rafts AND YOU LET THEM TAKE OVER!!!!

𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝟒𝟔𝟑 𝐘𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐒 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒. 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐂𝐄𝐈𝐏𝐓𝐒. Every time someone trots out the Crusades to lecture Christians or the West, they leave out four centuries of history. I'm putting it back on the record. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐁𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐧 𝐈𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 Muhammad died in 632. Within three years, Muslim armies had taken Damascus (635). The next year, Antioch (636). The year after that, the entire Holy Land (637) — the spiritual center of Christendom, gone. Armenia became the first Christian nation fully conquered (639). Egypt, the Coptic Christian power, fell two years later (641). By 650, Muslim forces had reached southern Italy and Cyprus, taking thousands of captives as "𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴" and "𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘶𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴." Then came Spain — Muslim armies crossed from North Africa in 711 and overran most of Iberia by 715. In roughly 80 years, Christianity lost the Middle East, North Africa, and most of the Iberian Peninsula. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞 — 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐲 This was not exploration. This was conquest. In 717, Muslim forces besieged Constantinople itself — the capital of Eastern Christendom. The siege lasted a year before they were repelled. Had it succeeded, the path into Europe would have been wide open. In 730, they invaded France. Charles Martel stopped them at Tours. In 792, the ruler of Al-Andalus called for a second invasion of France. Repelled. In 848, a third invasion of France. Repelled again. In 827, Muslims invaded Sicily and Italy, persecuting monks and pillaging Christian communities. Sicily would remain under Islamic rule for 250 years. In 846, they invaded Rome itself and forced the Pope to pay tribute. By 909, they had taken Sardinia. This was relentless, coordinated, and existential. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 In 937, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher — built over the site Christians believe is the tomb of Christ — was burned to the ground. More churches in Jerusalem were torched alongside it. In 1009, the Church of the Resurrection was destroyed. By 1012, Al-Hakim's oppressive decrees against Christians had begun in earnest. Christian pilgrims could no longer safely visit the sites of Christ's ministry. The holiest city in Christendom was ruled by a hostile power systematically destroying the faith itself. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐩 In 1071, Muslim Turkish forces shattered the Byzantine army at Manzikert and occupied most of Anatolia. Constantinople was now directly threatened. In 1094, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent envoys to Rome begging Western Christendom for military aid. In 1095, Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade. 𝟒𝟔𝟑 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞. 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞. 𝟐𝟓𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐲. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐥𝐲 𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧'𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐲.

@Justin_Nunley You have a nice place! Love the laundry machines!

Now that’s cool!

@Nerdcognito 11. If something doesn't seem right, Disbelieve.

What are we adding as number eleven?