Agree with everyone else that this isn’t normal for someone your age and get a second opinion.

However addressing your other questions: you’re at an age where lifestyle starts to really matter. Diet, exercise, ergonomics, environmental exposure to pollution/toxins, alcohol/drug use, sleep habits: these are all things that many healthy young adults can avoid having to worry about… until suddenly they can’t anymore. It is common, especially starting around age 30, to find there’s unhealthy behaviors from your teens and 20s that you just can’t do or do to excess anymore. It’s different for everyone; for some people it’s that they can’t sleep on a crappy mattress anymore, or drink certain types of liquor, or pull all nighters, or eat garbage, etc etc.

So while it sounds like you have some personal health issues outside of what’s “normal,” you still are at an age where the cumulative effects of a poor lifestyle can start to catch up to you. I think a lot of people greatly underestimate how sedentary their lifestyles are in particular, and of all the behaviors to change for the better as you age, going from sedentary to active is probably the hardest, given that our world is built to keep us sitting: sitting in our cars, sitting at our desks, sitting on our couches, basically sitting from the moment we wake until we go to sleep. Humans never lived like this until very recently: basically every decade since the personal automobile became the standard mode of transportation it’s steadily gotten worse. So yes, definitely do some doctor shopping, but now is also a great age to take stock in your lifestyle and how you’re treating your body. Because yes, it does get a little harder each year, but the speed of which it gets harder is at least partially up to you.

Not a paleontologist, but these renditions seem shockingly consistent for a dinosaur. T-Rex for example went from full upright to balanced to covered in feathers in half this timeframe. And let’s not even talk about poor iguanodon…

Feeders are okay, but the real joy comes from watching hummingbirds feed at flowers. In my experience they’re big fans of fuchsias, and I’ve also seen them at fireweed.

Edit: dropped an h, misplaced an s

Sooo are centipedes like fruit flies and not engage in any real form of sexual selection, or is the female going around judging the fuck out of every jizz pile she encounters?

“Mmm-mm, look at that poor viscosity, obviously from a low-quality male. This one on the other hand: deep color, firm texture, nice and sticky… clearly produced by a male with the superior genes I want to pass along to my offspring.”

Okay but if Arizona and New Mexico’s mountain regions get forest cutouts, central Washington needs a grasslands cutout to represent its shrub-steppe habitat.

Obligatory “wet food is much better for cats if for no other reason than the moisture content”

Cats are apparently one of those species that’s used to getting most of their fluids via their prey, and can be bad at drinking enough water when fed a dry food diet (in my experience this is highly dependent on the individual cat: some are “picky drinkers”).

This appears to be a case of “best practices” that’s perhaps so good it’s excessive when put together. I’ll try to explain as succinctly as I can.

As you can see in these two examples, having the pedestrian crosswalk to a bus stop raised where it crosses the bike lane is a standard design. The floating bus island reduces bus-bike conflict and speeds up bus time by removing the need to merge in and out of the travel lane. Meanwhile it also preserves the protected bike lane and, depending on design, gives folks waiting for the bus a nice space not immediately next to automotive traffic to sit/stand. However this design introduces potential pedestrian-bike conflict, especially in urban contexts where road space is cramped, visibility is poor, and/or people exiting the bus or moving from the sidewalk to the bus island do not have a lot of space and may unexpectedly (from the perspective of bike riders) enter the bike lane. Rushing to catch a bus that’s about to depart especially can cause people to have blinders and suddenly enter into the bike lane without looking because they’re too focused on the bus. For accessibility reasons it’s best to have the path across the bike lane raised to sidewalk level but only for the duration of the crossing (otherwise you end up with people walking or even standing around waiting in the bike lane).

Finally there’s the fragile political alignment of people on foot and people on bicycles; these two groups should be allies in the fight against car dominance but our road and even recreational systems have often pitted the two against each other: it’s very common to hear pedestrians especially complain about near-misses with bicycles, particularly on shared paths (“I was walking my dog and this speeding cyclist appeared out of nowhere and almost ran us over!” “I was riding my bike and this inattentive pedestrian’s dog abruptly jumped into my path and I had to swerve to avoid them both!”). Reducing conflict between these two groups of road users to keep them allied is critical for political reasons in many places, and this means slowing cycling speed near the conflict zone (via the speed bump) while also keeping the conflict zone reduced to just one or maybe two specific crossing areas (indicated by the elevated crossing).

All the above seems like overkill in the example cited above because these “best practices” were designed for cramped urban environments, such as major automotive corridors with multiple lanes through city centers that recently had a lane or two converted to bike/bus/ped infrastructure via a major “road diet” or bus enhancement project. But here there’s a huge bus island, an extra wide bike lane (because it’s for two-way use), great visibility, the waiting area is on the bus island rather than the sidewalk, etc. so while these best practices probably are still effective, they aren’t as necessary for reducing bike-ped conflict as in other contexts. As to why there’s no speed bump in the automotive lanes, the bus island itself may provide sufficient traffic calming by breaking up the monotony of the roadway, and most importantly, a speed bump would greatly reduce comfort of bus riders. Speed bumps are not meant as “punishment” to one form of transportation or another; they’re a tool that’s only rolled out to solve a specific issue.

I hope this helps explain why this spot is designed as it is, and why this is a poor example of “unfair” road design.

Millennial here. My impression is we’re the largest generation on this platform, but I could be wrong.

A major turning point in one’s academic journey is when you go from struggling to compose a lengthy and impressive essay to struggling to compose a concise and accessible essay (otherwise known as the “too-short-and-basic to too-long-and-pompous shift”). Sometimes this takes leaving academia and realizing that your masterpiece work doesn’t mean shit if no one bothered to read it.

You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

This is one reason why I love my native lupine plants. They occasionally get honeybee visitors, but I’ve noticed honeybees struggle with getting the flowers open to access the nectar. Bumblebee lands and his big fat body causes the flower to open right up. Gee it’s almost like they co-evolved!

Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.

I thought this was going to be about turmeric’s lead contamination problem…

Basically all the media.

There is (or at least was) a special kind of joy in discovering a new piece of media (movie, TV, book, video game, comic, etc), getting to the end, and hopping over to the relevant subreddit to sort by “top of all time.” Bonus points if you loved the series and would get to essentially relive it all over again through the sub, but even media that you hated or were neutral about could be fun subs to peruse; maybe you would get to revel in seeing something you hated turned into a meme highlighting how stupid it was, or get to feel justified in your negative assessment upon reading an epic rant from another user; maybe instead you’d find hidden details or explanations pointed out by other users that made you reassess the work (“huh, I though that was a stupid plothole but it actually was perfectly explained by that one scene that apparently went over my head”). The ATLA subs especially were treasure troves of tiny details and “holy shit I just noticed on my fifth rewatch” posts that really elevated my opinion (and thereby enjoyment) of a series I was initially kind of “meh” on.

When I think about what it would take to feel like Lemmy had sufficiently replaced Reddit for me, the number one practical answer is for comprehensive news (political, world, cultural, meme, etc… Reddit really did at one point feel like “the front page of the Internet” if there ever was one), and the second is to have the critical mass to be able to ask a question and get a good recommendation for any specific product or service, via regional subs, hobby subs, etc (although thanks to LLMs and corporate astroturfing that may simply be a bygone part of the Internet). But the “fun” answer is to have the critical mass for a wide range of specific fandoms.

The replier doesn’t even know the plural for “company”

Why are we elevating this anti-intellectual drivel?

Hedgehogs of the sea. Their babies even look the same!

“Hoshi-zuna no Hama” (星砂の浜) literally means “Star-sand Beach”

Oh shit, is that why nobody attended the 2009 Time Travelers party? No one wanted to be the person who killed the great Steven Hawking

I would love to see increased standardization in the food industry limiting the possible sizes and shapes of containers (such as glass) making them easier to wash and reuse as-is. On the home front, for example, it’s ridiculous that I have to go out and purchase brand-new Mason jars for canning instead of being able to reuse a store-bought salsa jar. But more importantly on the commercially-processed food front, standardization would make reuse easier by ensuring that containers do not have to return all the way to their original company; that way a jar used by a raspberry jam company in the Pacific Northwest bought by a customer in Florida could go to a local orange marmalade company for reuse rather than having to travel all the way back to the PNW.

I think should also start seeing a lot more compostable products. We’re already getting there somewhat with paper replacing plastic in shipping, but more products need to be explicitly labeled as compostable, and more municipalities need dedicated compost pickup and processing facilities. It’s insane that we’ve created a soil-to-landfill pipeline for nutrients.

Eh, I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Parking is a huge thorn in the side of transportation reform, and ensuring parking turnover is actually pretty crucial to a functional transportation system. On-street parking is public right-of-way that could be a bike lane, enhanced bus stop, street seating for restaurants/cafes, parklets, drainage swales, large medians for trees, wider sidewalks, the list goes on. However we don’t get these nice things because “wE NeEd ThE pArKiNg SuPpLy.” Except often you’ll find that there would be sufficient supply to remove the parking on even just one side of the street if turnover were higher, and turnover is not higher because people are abusing the parking. Things like store employees parking all day in spots meant for customers, people using on-street parking to avoid more expensive lots at the destinations they’re actually visiting (like entertainment venues), etc. Have you ever encountered a parking meter that would only let you put in 2 hours of money even though you need the spot for much longer, and you had to run out mid-way through whatever you were doing to feed the meter? That means you were probably not the intended user for that space and you should have found longer-term parking elsewhere. Maybe that store manager that runs outside every other hour to feed the meter rather than use an all-day parking lot (but that’s a three-block walk away and this parking is right here!!1) or taking public transportation (because that’s beneath them) would rethink this behavior after an expensive ticket. Point is, I’m not sure helping people skirt parking regulations is fighting the system or standing up for the little guy.