I’ve also done the 'sup head jerk with cats around the neighborhood, they start in surprise the first few times, then do it back.

It’s apparently an acknowledgement/greeting between cats.

And yes, heed the advice to “ignore” cats until they approach. Sit calmly, do your thing, let eachother know you’re there, and then wait. Often doesn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Getting a cat to come to you is easy, you give it food and pets, and then stay calm when it’s eating/enjoying.

Repeat until you’ve built trust, a sick or hurt cat will typically take longer to trust. Count on several days of repeating this without hitches (no sudden loud noise while you’re doing it, etc).

Sometimes cats are desperate and everything turns up in a magical, calm way without bloodshed. But more commonly the next part is trickier, the cat will resist you picking it up (especially if hurt) or shutting it in.

Trick here is to be decisive and clear in your body language. Prepare a cat carry box with hard sides, feel free to prepare it with some textile smelling of you, be mindful that it will almost certainly be pissed on. Also bring a towel.

You will have to, in a calm manner, put the folded towel over the cat, and with it lift the cat into the carry. The towel is to trap legs so you won’t be scratched, and if you manage to have it snugly around the cat, there’s also a way to calm cats by gently pressing them down.

If you are unsure, slow, nervous, or hesitate in your movement, the cat will bolt. If you’re too fast, loud, or big in movements, it will as well. Relax and do it in a deliberate motion.

If you release the cat from the carry, it will take considerable time to rebuild trust. Consider either going with it to the vet at once, or let it out in a quiet spare room with food, water, and litter box, and giving it a day or three to get accustomed to the room before letting it explore the rest of the place.

Don’t get scratched by the cat, they can have some pretty nasty stuff on the paws, and some transmittable pathogens if anything draws blood or gets in your face/eyes.

Good luck!

Cats do pant, but also run hotter and enjoy higher temperatures than humans (24-26 °C depending on race).

Also, cats have lots of ways to release heat, cats can arrange their fur to release more heat (or burr it to trap more), they lay on cool ground, they can lick themselves for evaporative cooling, and of course seek shade when it gets hot.

We had a hot summer with temperatures of over 30 °C indoors and I got worried my European shorthair would overheat, got them a gel pad that wicks away heat when laid upon, but they thought it was ridiculous and just laid on the concrete floor in the shade whenever too hot and was super comfy and lazy.

That’s actually a very cool idea.

Do a proper SS leather jacket but with a defiled swastika all over the back (so no one can mistake it) and reclaim it?

I’d probably not use the red band.

And would this become problematic in a decade when the jackets get normalised and mainstream (probably without the punk defiling)?

I’ve used Spotify with subscription on android for years and never had any issue with it. The Web and desktop apps have also worked well for the last decade or so.

Deezer, Newpipe, YouTube have all had their places, but Spotify does it’s thing the best.

That’s probably exactly what I was thinking of.

I mostly see them in US media, and they always seem so thick. But then again, the Russian vest doesn’t, so I guess they’re for different uses.

Interesting, I learnt something new today.

Seems delightfully medieval as a solution. What does the Kevlar do? Mostly anti-spalling?

Maybe I just don’t know how bulletproof vests work, but shouldn’t there be some layers of energy dispersing material on top of that plate?

Is it a fair comparison without?

Dozens!

That’s almost an hour of soldiers at the current casualty rate

A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

(As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.

What is this thread but people yelling at clouds?

Board games have been nearly ruined by kickstarter.

Instead of buying a well reviewed and recommended game from a store, you have to back a hyped up sales pitch, and then wait 4 months for delivery, if the producers don’t just bail with your money or go “oops, we couldn’t finish what we promised, and we already spent all your money…”.

And if you don’t back it to later read the reviews, the game is out of print and still waiting for the first wave of deliveries, meaning a second print is still at least a year off.

Also, the ratings are heavily skewed by people rating on the hype or early/review copies, meaning the rankings are heavily amazonified.

EtA: Also games are heavily bloated with social media candy: heavy and fragile minis, box stands, blingy crap periferals (branded dice holding toucan) and still needing organisers, player aids and mods from third parties who’ve gotten review copies to make said supplements…

Oh, and the stretch goal extras (get another 150 vanity minis/3D printed scoring tokens) for only $150 and an 18 month wait!

Are you suggesting that being atheist is unnatural?

Of course it is unnatural or do you believe apes have strong opinions about theism? Same goes for theism. Naturality is mostly irrelevant for complex sociocultural views, IMO. I find atheism beneficial, though.

I think this puts a point on your confusion with the descriptor.

Do you believe ducks are convinced a god exists? If not, they’re atheist.

Are rocks convinced a god exists? I’d argue they aren’t sentient and thus not able to - they’re atheist.

Atheism doesn’t require an act of will, isn’t an identity, it only describes one particular thing (which we have a need to describe as religious people get all tizzy about it), just like “blue”, “tall” or “dizzy”. And to belabour the point, it actually describes the absence of a thing, and thus covers all options but one.

An analogous term for someone not believing in aliens could be analienist, you can be analienist regardless if there are aliens or not (as it only addresses the belief). It doesn’t also mean you’re anything else (like tall, handsome, or mysterious). It doesn’t require you to campaign against aliens, throw rocks at the sky, or go to analienist meetings.

As long as you don’t believe in aliens, you’re analienist.

At least once you can

The 20% survive at least twice as long, it seems KN has some positive effect.

It’s not like there’s no attrition after the first 5 years. Also, the show started 15 years ago, so the stats are even better.

That’s good numbers, normally 80% of restaurants die in 5 years.

Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren’t.

With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.

All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p

Which is inherently anarchist :P

As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn’t have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.

That’s one form of it, but there are plenty other schools of thought that overlap quite significantly with the Federation, check out the primer on Wikipedia.

Anarchist doesn’t need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.