Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird I hesitate to call them liars, because they might be honestly reporting a different experience from mine. But it *is* a different experience from mine; I find that I get *less* efficient with anything under a 60%. More importantly - for me, it's less *comfortable*.

(I made some firmware tricks in my current 66% that makes LaTeX a bit more pleasant to work with: I have layers for Greek letters and for some commonly-used mathematical symbols; both can output either my own custom Compose sequences, ibus-compatible sequences or LaTeX commands. )

@david_chisnall @futurebird This is also what I do. I never buy anything from them anymore (family members sometimes do), but I'll occasionally use their website to find a product that I'll then buy elsewhere.

Book shopping I've entirely transitioned to two nearby (very good) brick-and-mortar bookstores and one online retailer I'll use if I can't get what I want from either of those two.

@llewelly @leguinian_utopia And here's the aforementioned lizard (a pic a week or so old; he's sleeping now and I don't want to disturb him for a photoshoot.)

@leguinian_utopia They've just gone to sleep. Apparently, they like sleeping in train formation.

(They're leopard tortoises; 5 and 7 years old. Sex unknown; they're still too young to tell for sure. I'm looking after them for two weeks while their owner is off on vacation.

The "vacation home" box is just below my pet lizard's terrarium, and he watches them with great interest. I'm going to lift one of them up so he can see one up close through the glass, and if both animals seem to feel comfortable about the situation I might arrange a supervised meeting.)

@noricenolife @futurebird (I paid an actual artist to make it! She's apparently no longer on fedi, though.

I also make pixel art myself, but I'm nowhere near that good at it - I especially can't draw faces very well! Here is a tortoiseshell butterfly I drew.)

@futurebird @noricenolife I mean, a turtle is kind of a weird halfway between what you'd usually consider an exo- and endoskeleton. The shell is part of the skeleton and the muscles are inside it, which makes it basically an exoskeletal part on an animal that otherwise has an endoskeleton.

(BTW, there's a weird misconceptions that turtles can't feel their shells, but they definitely can - they're not *as* sensitive as the skin, but they're full of live nerve endings and very clearly register touch. And if you'll excuse me, I need to go pat one of the two tortoises I'm currently being tortoisesitter for! )

@noricenolife @futurebird It's a pixel art portrait of me.

@noricenolife @futurebird The clade of Testudines (what we usually call "turtles" today, encompassing tortoises, sea turtles and freshwater turtles) is monophyletic - in fact, they branched off the reptilian family tree *before even lizards*. The basic turtle body plan is just such a great adaptation that it keeps getting reinvented, by animals only very distantly related to them! (I personally think glyptodonts look a bit more armadillo-like than turtle-like ... but you could make the point that an armadillo is *very* turtle-like for a mammal!).

Another "design" that keeps coming up is the sabre-toothed cat. There have been at least three distinct species that developed independently from each other ... but they also keep going extinct again.

Fun fact: Before the first crocodilians, there were amphibians that occupied the same niche: Ambush predators who lurk in bodies of freshwater other animals need to drink. And they looked *very* crocodile-like, too - here's an artist's impression of a prionosuchus.

@futurebird A related (*drumroll*) dubiously-useful trivia piece:

A saltwater crocodile and a house sparrow are more closely related to each other than either of them are to a lizard.

(Crocodilians and birds are the only living archosaurs, the clade that also once encompassed all the dinosaurs. Crocodilians branched off at some point before dinosaurs arose, birds *are* dinosaurs. And lizards had branched off well before that.)

@futurebird One of my favourite dubiously-useful trivia pieces is this: Not only aren't fungi plants; animals and fungi are more closely related to each other than either of them are to plants!