Fly screens (Unrealistic solution but I wanted to mention it)
Get a Pet Frog that eats them
Get lots of Spiders making Webs. Be aware that the Pet frog might eat the spiders
Flood one of your rooms and make a little swamp where you can plant canivourus plants. The issue is that the swamp will breed more mosquito than it kills but the frog will feel right at home
Make a small campfire in your bedroom before you go to sleep. It is known that smoke scares them away. Make sure to keep the windows and door closed so no new mosquito get inside. This is probably the most effective as you won’t get stung for the rest of you life
Catch some mosquitos and suck the blood out of them. The other mosquitos will see their wrongdoings and change their ways
Fly screens (Unrealistic solution but I wanted to mention it)
Can I ask why you consider that an unrealistic solution? In my experience the plant based products (lotions/patches etc) are ineffective but I haven’t tried fly screens yet.
It more of a joke because its the only real solution in my list. They are limited to your house but from my experience there’s no way normal mosquitos can go through them. I think mosquitos don’t really give a fuck about smells (at least not enough) and the problem is that they dont spread that well.
My addiction to World of Warcraft and obsession over getting a certain mount may have lead to the death of an elderly man.
Way back in the ancient times, I was super addicted to WoW and really wanted this super rare mount. I would stay up super late trying to farm for it with no luck and eventually started setting an alarm for when it was supposed to spawn and waking up every hour or something all night to log in and try and get it. After a few days of this, I was fried and couldn’t function at all.
At the time I worked at a soft serve ice cream place and had to be there early to open the store which was inside a mall food court. My main opening job was to clean out the soft serve machines and get them ready for the day. Well, these machines are under a fair bit of pressure and your supposed to drain off all the left over soft serve and depressurize the machine before you open it up to clean it.
I didn’t depressurize it.
In my sleep deprived, deep-fried state, I walked through the mall food court filled with the early morning elderly mall walkers making their rounds. Got to work and immediately started unscrewing the face plate of the soft serve machine to start cleaning it. It sounded like a bomb went off. I was covered head to toe, literally every square inch of the front of my body was covered in ice cream mix and when I scraped the ice cream out of my eyes and looked around to survey the damage, I was horrified. There was chocolate ice cream splattered from one corner of the food court to the other, floor to ceiling. Everyone in the food court had at least a little ice cream on them, most more than a little. But then, A man who had to be in his upper 80s collapsed, grasping at his chest. The sound of the explosion and the shock of freezing ice cream sprayed all over him gave him a heart attack.
The paramedics were loading him up on a stretcher when my boss told me to go home and change. To my surprise, I wasn’t fired but when I came back later that morning, no one could give me an update on the man. I never found out if he made it or not, but my gut tells me he probably didn’t. He was a regular mall walker and I would see him quite often before that day, but never did after that.
I never did end up getting that mount. I can’t even remember what it was anymore which makes the whole story even worse imo. I quit WoW shortly after that incident and never really played another MMO after. I think about that man anytime I get the urge to stay up late and grind another game or finish another episode or whatever it is.
That was exactly what it was. I had to look it up but as soon as i opened that wiki page, this surge of anxiety and ptsd washed over me. That was it for sure.
I’m not saying that you didn’t mess up, but he was in his 80s. Try not to beat yourself up too much. An outlook I’ve had after a few close deaths is to live a better healthier life for those not here. Mall walker man can be you driving force to help better the world one mall walker at a time.
I was into WOW for a long time and I know the addiction tendencies that creep up playing that game. These are companies (gaming and social media) that spend countless time, money, and energy to try to get as many people addicted to their services as possible. The average teenager trying to kill time between classes or jobs don’t really stand a chance.
Does working as a security guard and having the company that contracted your company trying to get you to basically be their own personal police force count? I worked for a security company hired by Longs and the loss prevention manager of the Longs kept trying to get us to do things that, in California anyway, are illegal as a security guard. Such as digging through someone’s personal belongings. We can ask to look inside, but not touch, and we really can’t force them to comply. We could not arrest people. We couldn’t have weapons (not even allowed to carry a pocket knife while on duty with our guard cards). Little Napoleonic complex motherfucker didn’t care. He would insist that it was legal and we would just tell him to talk to our boss because he isn’t our supervisor, manager or even part of our company.
I used to work retail loss prevention and had several of the exact opposite- we’d get contract security to supplement our staff as a visual deterrent and they would then think they were given carte blanche to hassle whoever the fuck they wanted. It really didn’t take long to realize that as long as I treated shoplifters with respect, more often than not they would come with, take care of the paperwork, get their ticket from the real cops and then be on their way unless the jurisdiction required they get booked. But there would always be that one fuckhead trying to steal thousands of dollars worth of shit and then act like we had no right to stop or detain them . I know it varies by where you live, but we were fully allowed to make citizens arrests and would do so daily. In 21 years I got subpoenaed four times and testified once. Never lost one case.
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
That would force you to selectively use it since often times reality is somewhere between our personal view of it and other opposing views.
Chose the wrong situation and you'll both be crying in the corner with shatter worlds. Chose the ones where the people are truly disconnected from reality and perhaps you'll change their lives - hopefully for the better.
At around 10pm one night I realized I’d forgotten to walk the dog and should probably do so before going to bed. As I step out onto the street I notice a woman leaning against a car with a weird look on her face, like a grimace. It’s a big city and I’ve seen lots of weird people around here so I don’t think much of it and start walking away when I hear her whimper. I turn around and ask her if she’s ok and she assures me she’s fine, her “husband is coming”. At this point I notice she’s heavily pregnant and there’s also a toddler in her car, but she insists she’s fine so I start walking away again.
I get 20 or 30 paces down the street and the woman lets out this blood-curdling howl. I run back to her and ask her what’s going on and she just says “I need to sit down”. I lead her to the steps outside my apartment building where she sits down and I fetch her a glass of water and put the dog back inside. I’ll always regret not inviting her in to my place for what comes next but I’ve been jaded by so many con-artists and burglars trying to get into my building that I didn’t feel like it was an option.
She starts breathing super heavily and stops responding to me completely. Like I’m not even there. I’m freaking out and her husband is nowhere in sight. I have no idea what to do so I rush into the hotel next door to find a “real adult” (I was early 20s) and come out with a few other 20-somethings that “knew first aid”. We immediately call an ambulance.
The ambulance guys tell me they’ll be here in 5mins but to go and get towels just in-case she’s about to give birth. I run in and get all my towels. As I come out the woman gets off the step and kneels on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. I place towels all around her on the floor and she screams in pain. By this point a small crowd has gathered to see what all the fuss is about and some dude tries to convince her to get on her back and starts pulling her around. She fucking screams at him to stop and he backs off. She then drops her leggings down to her knees and screams “CATCH THE BABY” at which point me and one of the guys from the hotel reach down and see a newborn baby dangling in her leggings. Ambulance guys are still on the phone and tell us to wrap the baby in clean towels and, I kid you not, not even 30 seconds later the ambulance and husband both arrive.
Apparently they had rented a place a few doors down from me for the birth but there was a problem with the keys or something. The husband thanks us and they all go into the ambulance. I’m in shock and the only thing I can think is that I need to clean all this blood and poop off the sidewalk so I clean it all off. The guys from the hotel crack open a bottle of wine and we all just stand around in shock at what just happened.
So that’s the story of how I delivered a baby on the street outside my apartment. I can’t watch any birth scenes on TV or movies anymore either because of what I think is probably mild PTSD and it makes me feel instantly sick to my stomach and panicked.
TLDR: delivered a stranger’s baby on the street outside my apartment with zero prior experience
I think it’s totally understandable to be freaked out by that, it must have been totally surreal. Its not so much that you reacted badly to childbirth, you reacted that way because it was completely unexpected, and you were on your guard a bit because it was night time and strangers, and because something quite huge and momentous (for them I mean) and potentially incredibly tragic if something had gone wrong, was happening right on your doorstep, out of the blue. I think you can give yourself a break over that one. And a pat on the back.
Just think, there’s a kid out there that’ll tell people about the story of how they were born, and how glad their parents were that random strangers came to their aid and helped bring them into the world.
Yet another vote for Bitwarden. I love that you can access your stuff through a browser without installing anything, I need that sometimes on my work pc where I cannot install anything.
It’ll happen if Lemmy gets big enough. I only worry about search engines getting tangled in the natural duplication of Lemmy posts.
Like, if a web crawler sees a Beehaw post, and then seees Lemmy.ml’s mirrored page of that same post, could it just show up as two different results? Could it work against the SEO in that it gets marked as “duplicate” or “spam” content in some way?
If/When Lemmy and other federated services grow to the point that’s an issue in major search engines, said search engines should be smart enough to group and/or suppress mirrored results.
You can see that sort of thing in Google now for major sites like Reddit and StackOverflow, though it’s more along the lines of “the same question in a different post”.
You can also, in the interim, just pick an instance and add, site:lemm.world or whatever instead of just “lemmy”.
Like, if a web crawler sees a Beehaw post, and then seees Lemmy.ml’s mirrored page of that same post, could it just show up as two different results? Could it work against the SEO in that it gets marked as “duplicate” or “spam” content in some way?
The ideal solution is that the page has a canonical tag, telling search engines what the main URL for the content is: ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/. I don’t know if Lemmy already does this, nor do I know how well canonical tags work cross-domain as I’ve only ever used them for content on the same domain.
The ideal solution is that the page has a canonical tag, telling search engines what the main URL for the content is: ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/. I don’t know if Lemmy already does this […]
I would think it’s because users only interact with their own instance. They would need to post it to their instance first before it can be forwarded to the appropriate community’s instance.
You can federate with whoever you want and not be at the whim of other system admins.
You have your data and won’t lose it if your instance suddenly shuts down.
Downsides:
Your instance won’t be federated very well at first. You may need to use some tricks like Lemmony to get broad federated content to show up in your instance.
Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.
But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.
These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.
Additionally it’s going to cause you headaches if your server is low spec. The federation queue is not well optimized for GIGANTIC subscription counts like this. There is an active draft PR working on it, but using that script is still a bad idea.
Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you.
To be frank, this liability risk exists even in well-moderated communities as it only takes one rogue poster/commenter to “contaminate” your own instance…
Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.
Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.
Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.
It’s just endlessly quotable, on top of being an absolute delight to watch! I still sneak in a few phrases from the movie in daily life, such as “negative, I am a meat popsicle” and “Aziz, light!”
It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.
Now we're at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can't let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.
It's not just OPs strange and mysterious predicament that has made this thread epic, but also the genuine efforts of some of us to help OP in the midst of wild, off the wall, guessing.
And then there's the misplaced reply that ended up in the perfect place.
asklemmy
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