The Lily Pad

and filled with lgiht humor, legit cooking, and charming life stories

You can find the full video of the Plinko segment on facebook if you google it, it’s well worth watching.

last night I was thinking about bees and how dumb it is that science hasn’t given us genetically modified pet bees yet

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

And that’s SO MUCH of the rhetoric around the EC. People talk about how they don’t want “Urban” or “City” people making choices, and 99% of the time, that’s just code for “black” and “brown” and “Jewish” and “Gay” because you bigots think that 1. Only minorities live in cities and minorities ONLY live in cities and 2. You don’t want anyone who isn’t a WASP-y Farmer voting apparently. 

Like, you’re argument is literally “cities have more poor brown people, and I don’t think their votes should count.” So FUCK YOU.

Also, cities WOULDN’T dominate in the popular vote.

Really? What about the BIG CITIES?

#1 New York City. 8,601,186

#2LosAngelesCalifornia 4,057,841

#3Chicago,Illinois 2,679,044

#4Houston,Texas 2,359,480

#5Phoenix,Arizona 1,711,356

#6 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania 1,576,596

Those 6 cities, combined, have less than 22 million people. The US has 327 million.

And this is my point- the US is not made of a small handful of huge cities. The vast majority of the country lives in SMALL cities and towns, under a million people each, and their suburbs.

So, no, with the Popular Vote, you could not pander just to the biggest cities and be done with it. If you add up EVERY SINGLE CITY with more than 100,000 people in it (Which is 311 cities), that’s still only 94 million. 28% of the US population.

Even if ALL the ~poor brown people~ that you want to stop from voting lived EXCLUSIVELY in cities (which they don’t, you fucking racist), the popular vote DOESN’T actually empower cities. 

The EC ALSO doesn’t actually help rural (”white land owning”) populations (you fucking racist, you don’t even know the racial or economic breakdown of the rural areas you claim to care about). In fact, the EC makes things worse for rural areas. 46 states have an urban majority, and  “winner-take-all” laws that have been enacted by state legislatures in 48 states. So if there is a stark divide between rural and urban populations, in 46 states, the urban votes will win and 100% of the electoral points will go to the urban side (Where YOU think all the poor brown people live, again, you fucking racist).

However, in a popular vote system, no one’s vote would get thrown away like that, and everyone’s vote would be counted equally in the final tally.The popular vote would actually give MORE voice to rural populations that are all but completely erased in our current system.

And it is important to remember that in reality cities do not vote in perfect blocks. Neither do states. Even the most liberal city has conservative voters and even the deepest rural hellholes in Texas has progressives (I was one of them until I moved for college!) Those people matter. Those people should count.

Why not have a system where CITIZENS elect the president? Why does it matter which state someone lives in, if all votes should count equally? (I mean, I know YOU think that POOR BROWN PEOPLE shouldn’t be voting, you fucking racist, but ya know, for the rest of us who actually value the idea of a democracy) 

This speech-language pathologist taught her dog 29 words, and he can even form full sentences.

They do understand our words. This is not true of all domesticated animals (horses, for example, can only manage to distinguish a relatively small number of spoken commands…but boy do they know what you’re really saying).

They don’t understand “just your tone of voice” as a lot of people think.

As of 2016 the record vocabulary for a dog demonstrating understanding of words is over 1,000.

So if you give them a way to talk back, they’re going to use it.

The development of language skills is probably a side effect of domestication and of being kept in close contact with humans. A dog that was a better hunting partner would be kept and bred and over time they developed a better understanding of language.

In other words, dogs are pretty dang smart because we need them to understand us.

Check out the owner Christina’s Instagram: one of the first things I saw was a video where the dog started barking and, when prompted by the owner, said “outside, look look look look look look look, come outside.” Which is basically exactly how one would expect a dog to speak. 

The owner described bringing an unknown package into the house, and the dog ran away to push the buttons for “help no no help help” which is also about what I expect goes on in a scared pup’s mind.

In another video, the dog tried to push a button, and the button wasn’t working. The dog paused and then pushed the buttons for “No. Help.” 

In yet another (which the owner seemed impressed by), Stella said “come eat come play.” The owner asked the dog which she wanted to do, to eat or to play? And the dog clarified “come eat.” After eating, then the dog tried to instigate play. So the dog may have been able to understand a short spoken question, and how “questions and answers” work, and also understands sequences, even if she can’t express them (”I want to eat, THEN I want to play”)

Stella can even recount short-term memories, like when her family returned from the beach for dinner and she said “water good, no eat, play”

By the way, the owner uses the buttons as well, which probably really helps reinforce their meaning. She uses them to say things like “Stella all done eat” or “Stella and Christina go outside, bye!”

Who’s this being? Why are they a god/the only god? Why does that mean I should listen to them, even if true? How do I know they’re not just a dick? Why is this one book over here holier than the source text of my favorite fandom? What even is this?

If it’s “your compassion muscle needs working out just like your legs and arms. Here’s a weekly routine!” I get it.

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Have an iPhone and are in need of repairs

Have a friend with that problem

Hate Apple and are more than happy to spite them in some way

So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.

So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.

These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.