Ophy

I live on a fault line along the pacific ring of fire, and so building with wood was an absolute necessity for us so long, as they were structurally more lenient to the constant earthquakes. Even now I believe our old government building is the largest wooden building in the Southern hemisphere (and it’s only 4 stories tall). These days as construction techniques have changed, we’ve obviously built things with concrete, steel, brick, etc., but the wooden tradition remains strong, with a huge majority of modern houses here still being built like this.

That aside, wood was also just a much cheaper material to build with, so it was the most economical material to use for a long time for much of the “new world”.

pickled children

Well there’s a phrase I didn’t expect to hear, well, ever

Linguist here, if I may share my 2¢.

We do know that even over a thousand years ago, speakers of Old English were still calling these kinds of fruits berries, such as strawberries and blackberries (although pronunciation differed somewhat, of course). A word for strawberry as “earth berry” is even reconstructed for the proto Germanic language around 1500 to 2500 years ago. Beyond that, it becomes difficult to trace the word berry any further.

The Botanical sense of the word berry seems to come largely from at earliest the 1500s, from the writings of Caesalpinus, although the definitions were inconsistent and later writings on the matter constantly redefined things and added new terms. Although, largely, these writings all used Latinate terms for their botanical concepts, such as bacca (the closest to the modern botanical berry), and also words like pomum (pome/pomme), drupe, etc. for the other categories of fruit.

So, somewhere since all of that, some English-speaking botanist decided it would be a good idea to use the word berry to describe this concept of a bacca (even though berries had been used for distinctly different things from what that concept described), and now we end up in our current silly predicament where strawberries aren’t berries but pumpkins are.

I’d propose we call botanical berries “bayes” or “bayfruit”, the word bay/baye being an alternate word for berry that ultimately derived from the Latin word bacca, via Old French.

I’ll be honest, I had to channel an American accent in my head to make sense of this one, I was quite confused for a moment.

Didn’t expect to see something like this pop up! I’m really curious to see if he’s recognisable to people in other countries!

Or you could just use Firefox? Mozilla has stated that it opposes this stuff.

This implies the existence of a Kirb that is just a pink sphere.

It’s pretty rubbish in many other countries as well. Consistent in that regard, too!

Down here in NZ my city used to have these too! Apparently it was the last commercial trolleybus network in Oceania. But as a mostly suburban kind of city environment (not quite American suburbia but still low density), their utility definitely was quite limited by the predefined routes. Eventually more and more routes weren’t even using them. But they were still servicing the old main road high frequency routes, so they were still very useful in those instances. Much better than the diesel buses, too, which were so loud you could hear them coming from several stops away! Eventually they phased the trolleys out in 2017, citing all the usual rubbish like maintenance costs and such. But we hadn’t yet electrified our bus fleet, so for a while we had to borrow a bunch more diesel buses. Still on the road to having a fully electric fleet, and I imagine it will be a good while yet before that happens.

Absolutely get a filter! My local tap water tastes a little weird to me, too, but a filter is great for that, and is so much better than getting bottled. It also wastes less plastic!

Sure, It’s a good number for room temperature, but not for body temperature.

The Ioniqs are absolutely sexy vehicles, they’re at the top of my list too!

What is the major difference between something like Lemmy vs Kbin, etc., compared to just two different Lemmy “planets”?

Also, how do other platforms in the fediverse fit into this analogy? Something like Mastodon, would that be considered another galaxy? Is there any travel between these or do they require the birth of a new fedinaut within that galaxy to interact with those worlds?

Why is that a thing? I mean hisssss