A disappointingly large proportion of the general population appears to be unable to tell the difference between centipedes and millipedes. Is it possible that the “centipedes” you saw were actually millipedes? If so, they may have been “fucking”, or at least the millipede equivalent of it.

Additionally, it appears that this “fact” is actually wrong (big surprise, huh?). Many species of centipede do have courtship strategies that involve males and females meeting up. The sexes may even employ various forms of physical touch as part of the process. So, it’s certainly possible that the critters you saw where centipedes courting each other.

I was just talking about this recently on here I think. I actually had a chance to dispel this myth a bit with a family member who came to stay with me recently.

They are convinced that their news feeds and ads constantly come up with topics that would be too coincidental to explain any other way than their smart devices are constantly recording their verbal conversations. Conveniently enough, it happened several times during their visit!

As examples, the family member and I talked about how we like okra and they mentioned it had been a long time since they had good okra. Afterwards, stories and recipes for okra started showing up in their news feed. We also chatted for a bit about a specific actor that used to be in a bunch of movies, but that we don’t really see them in much of anything anymore. Then they started getting ads for that actor’s movies. This happened with a couple more things as well.

In the end, it was all completely explainable.

After the okra conversation, I looked up okra recipes because I intended to make some as part of meal for us since we both enjoy it and hadn’t had it for awhile. Since we’re both on the same wifi (and thus have the same IP address externally), those news items were almost certainly triggered by my recipe search.

For the famous actor, my family member had been watching some of his old movies on one of our streaming services that they don’t have at home, so they were trying to catch up on things they’d like to see while they were visiting. It’s not hard to imagine if you watch a couple Tom Hanks movies on Hulu (no that’s not the actual actor or service), then you might start seeing ads for related movies that he may also have starred in, again, given that your smart devices are on the same wifi and have the same IP as mine.

I know these types. Grocery prices supposedly quadrupled a year or few back. Having experienced quite a bit of inflation myself but knowing quite well that my grocery bill wasn’t even double pre-Covid era prices, I inquired further. The only example at the time of anything that had even remotely quadrupled in price was eggs. And that was a temporary thing at the time blamed on bird flu but later also revealed to be also due to corporate greed.

I don’t bother. 99.55912432140001521439566917234% of the time it says “Fuck the colorblind” or some variation thereof.

error “unknown” message "Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image/process.webp?src=a4254337-0e3c-495f-8e1b-12f990e33a7b.jpeg&thumbnail=256): operation timed out

Apologize. What else?

He’s a bitch. He’s a lover. He’s a child. He’s a zombie. He’s a sinner. He’s a saint.

How self-centered of you to assume that only psychos could relax there.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII just want a fly. Put your arms around me baby. Put your arms around me baby.

The answer is “it depends”. There are so many hoops and loopholes and gotchas built into the system that 2 identical people with the exact same background and ailment(s) could go see the exact same medical staff and yet still end up having to pay 2 completely different amounts for their care. But it’s more complicated than that, because there are a myriad factors that come into play (insurance versus none, location/state of residence, etc) so there’s no one concise and accurate answer to these types of questions.

Most non-wealthy people who don’t have insurance, but who don’t qualify for government/public medical care, simply go without care. Or they use the emergency room loophole to get some kind of treatment. The loophole, with lots of nuance and caveats, is that the emergency room has to at least give you enough treatment to temporarily stabilize your condition, regardless of your ability to pay.

For check-ups and counseling - In a lot of places that sort of stuff requires you to pay up front. You can sometimes haggle or work out a payment plan. If you’re poor enough to qualify for government aid, it may be free. Otherwise, you’re expected to have insurance and pay the co-pay. If that doesn’t apply, these places usually have a “cash” price that’s slightly more affordable, but still usually require payment ahead of time.

For meds, you basically always pay up front. There’s really no concept of pharmacies providing medications in a manner where you can pay later. No money means no meds. It’s also ridiculous to even ask how much a person would expect to pay for meds, it could be as little as a few USD to thousands, really depends on the meds, quantity needed, location, etc.

Xrays - This is where debt might actually come into play. You usually pay for these after the fact. If you go to the doctor, you might have to pay the standard fee (or copay) up front, but all the other services/tests/etc are charged after the fact. So you’ll end up getting a bill after you’ve gotten the xray and consultation. To be honest, I don’t know the average out of pocket cost for an x-ray if you don’t have insurance, but it would differ from location to location and region to region. If you don’t pay that bill, you’ll get harassed and most likely you’ll have to change doctors because the office you owe money to won’t see you again until your debt is paid or you’ve worked out a payment plan.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance. Again there are nuances and caveats. And the maximum out of pocket varies by insurance policy, number of people insured, etc, but $8,000 - $20,000 are not uncommon amounts. To be honest, I don’t even know what mine is, I’ve never actually reached it. Not everything is covered by the maximum out of pocket, though.

$27,000 medical debt could possibly be from someone who was uninsured or it may be several years of medical debt.

To give you an idea of how crazy the system is: I had a hairline fracture several years ago and what was deemed as “good” insurance. By the time everything was done, it ended up costing me around $3,000 out of pocket. That’s for co-pays, x-rays, medication, etc over the course of months.

On the other hand: A family member of mine had a heart attack, required emergency surgery, had no insurance, and had no money to pay for anything. In the end cost them less than a few hundred USD out of pocket. Hospital wiped the debt clean. Government programs and drug company programs paid for meds. Eventually disability stuff kicked in and took care of everything else.

Yeah, the world changes. Old stagnant ideas that don’t keep up tend to mostly die out. It’s not a particularly shocking conclusion to arrive at.

No dead animal pics for me, but lots of random bugs, flowers, mushrooms, leaves, rocks, and sunsets.

I remember that site, but 80s and 90s horror movies had already inoculated me against the gore aspects of it. There were quite a few fictional and non-fictional gore clips movies popping up in video rental stores back in those days. Some of it was pretty grotesque and horrific, perhaps even more so than a lot of stuff you might have seen on rotten.com.

fark

Fark is still around, but it’s barely a glimmer of what it used to be before it went downhill. I certainly understand if someone wasn’t aware it was still around, it’s been almost 20 years since the case could be made that it was an important player in the news aggregation category of websites.

I’ll drink to that. It’s never anything interesting anyway. Always something mundane like evil “booing” or scraping noises from the basement. I ain’t got time to stress with the devil’s mess.

In all my adult life, I can only think of one friend of mine who would absolutely be down for going out and hunting for bugs. Fortunately, some of my friends have young kids, and young kids love to go bug hunting.

Still wish I knew how to find more adults who would be enthusiastic about going on a bug hunting adventure rather than just being weirded out by it.

1. Sperm is not an animal.

2. Sperm will drown in lotion, tissue paper, toilets, mouths, assholes, various fruit, couches apparently, condoms, and probably an order of magnitude or few more places than just this small list I’ve constructed.

3. Sperm don’t have a mouth and thus cannot bite.

Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

Never have I ever intentionally shoplifted anything from a store.

Looking like that, all the ladies are going to want to play with Homer’s d’oh maker.