Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it’s only recently that they’ve been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn’t there to pull it off.

Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They’re reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that’s mostly because it’s pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.

I’d say that’s more of the excuse/rationale for it. The underlying reason is hot much not expensive it would have been to do otherwise.

Aluminum foil is fine in an air fryer. I don’t know about that black paint on the outside though.

Getting married at 73 and staying together for your 25th anniversary is pretty impressive.

When I do bcc to a big list, I describe the distribution in the email header. Like “To: all users of the xxx application” or “To: All Engineering employees at the yyy site.”

There’s a huge contingent, even here, who loves both those guys, but maybe more importantly, they’re supposed to be on our side. Hell, Trump is the president! Putin is the dictatorial ruler of an enemy country, we expect that he’s going to do and say stuff that’s terrible.

That’s only after the electoral college votes.

Farting as you relax and when you bring your knees up towards your chest (common when you sleep on your side) is pretty normal. It might also be a timing thing based on when you go to bed relative to when you’ve eaten.

You might look into why you fart so much if it’s excessive. For instance, I have an odd food intolerance called fructose malabsorption - excess fructose doesn’t get digested, so it just ferments in my intestines. If I eat a lot of it, I’ll get massively painful diarrhea, but usually I just get some gas.

The same thing happens with people who are lactose intolerant: they can usually have some amount of lactose and they just get gassy, so some people don’t even realize they have it.

Other things can also cause unusual amounts of gas.

Why without you think I didn’t?

For people who have 401Ks or other investments, the likely deregulation pushes up stock prices (which is why the stock market had a big bump this week). Oh, sure, those regulations help protect the environment, workers rights, worker health and safety, etc., but:

This is a very cool and interesting list. Interesting enough to read from top to bottom, but in bite-sized chunks for people with limited time or short attention spans. Thanks for sharing!

Ugh, I started in the middle of June last year and I have over 3K. Apparently I have no life.

That sounds really neat.

My family rescued a tiny baby squirrel that had been chewed up by a cat when I was little. My parents didn’t think it would live, but also couldn’t see not trying. It did live, and when it was fully back to health they insisted that we let it go in the yard, but it stuck around - lived in our walnut trees - and was very tame. It would come in the house, play fetch with a wiffle ball, hang out on our shoulders, etc. It was amazingly cute.

That’s the same thing racists say when they get to know a minority.

The way people talk about boomers here is pretty awful, and it wouldn’t be tolerated for any other group.

We don’t? Boomer with bird feeder who loves squirrels.

I don’t think it’s age related.

Yeah, seems like a bad idea all the way around. Not sure Reddit would want it either.

That’s a really strange “or.” .world has only existed for about a year, since the big reddit exodus, and it’s just an instance, running Lemmy software on a server. The Lemmy software was first released five years ago, but that wasn’t the beginning of the fediverse. Like all fediverse apps, Lemmy makes use of the Activity Pub protocol, which came out like a year earlier.

But if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly one party, your states votes are going to go to that candidate. I live in California, and there not much chance that any California delegates are going to go to Trump. True, the districts didn’t matter for the EC votes, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s vote counts the same.

Also worth mentioning that the number of votes each state gets is based on very outdated logic.

It would be different if there were no EC and it was decided based on the national popular vote.

From a more flattering angle

I had an assembly class in college. I didn’t love of at all. Got my first job after graduating and it was writing space shuttle engine control software, which was in assembly. I was kind of surprised at how fast it became natural after dealing with it full time. Still, it felt luxurious when we upgraded the controller and could do the software in C.