There are fig wasps, of course. And other species, yes, that aren’t quite as good as bees at pollinating, but neither are butterflies, but no one has a problem with labeling them as pollinators. Plus there are the wasps that eradicate pests. The year I had a paper wasp family move in near my garden was a bumper year for my brassicas, because they absolutely annihilated the cabbage white caterpillar population. Basically, wasps aren’t just useless enemies.

Yes (but maybe you shouldn’t). See: https://lemmy.world/post/45251643/23076623

You can (very, very carefully!) pet the top of their thorax when they’re not flying, such as when preoccupied with feeding at a flower, although as TheTechnician27 outlined, it’s probably not good for them. Better is if you can find one that’s struggling to fly (semi-common this time of year, when things are still warming up) and then you can warm the little guy in your hands if they’re cold or chauffeur them from flower to flower if they’re hungry. Often this will help them regain the strength to keep flying, but sometimes they never do; I assume in these cases they’re dying, but at least I gave them some hospice care. It’s very strange to deposit a struggling bee on a flower, watch it feed, and then see it wiggle its little feet in the air like it’s calling the magic carpet back for another lift.

Asia, where they belong (and stay there!)

Edit: oops, still had wasps on the mind from another comment and was thinking of “killer hornets” (aka the Asian giant hornet), which thankfully has not naturalized in the Americas despite recent attempts. Killer bees, yeah, they here.

Wasps are pollinators too 🥺

Human life spans do increase substantially (although not to 300) in the Star Trek universe. From Memory Alpha:

The average Human life span had gradually increased during their history. The average life spans during the 22nd century was about one hundred years. (ENT: “Observer Effect”) This average age was still roughly the same during the 2250, but had risen to 120 by the mid-24th century. (citation needed • edit) However, at some point in history the average life span for Humans was only 35, and by 1999 it had become higher than a millennium earlier. (ENT: “Similitude”; VOY: “11:59”) Leonard McCoy had by 2364 reached the age of 137. (TNG: “Encounter at Farpoint”)

Nearly every isekai I’ve watched/read has involved a lot of brushes with death and/or having to repeatedly pull yourself out of near-impossible situations. Not sure it’s worth the magic and elf-girl harems…

Conundrum: STNG overlaps in time with DS9 (even if they didn’t, they’re both part of the same “universe” as posed by the question), so by selecting the universe of STNG, does that mean having to live through the Dominion war? Not sure that makes it a deal breaker either way but definitely takes some of the utopian edge off.

Interesting, did not know it was a bank holiday. (Schools and such are still open.)

I feel like OP is on edge waiting for someone to question them on this assertion so they have an airtight excuse to engage in horny posting “for science”

For as much as the US acts like a Christian theocracy, somehow Easter is just a regular weekend for us.

Obligatory “who remembers the children’s book, Dogzilla (and Kat Kong)?”

The spaces around the slashes prompted me to read your comment like surreal poetry:

is email

emails like fish

fishes or grass

grasses?

Lemmy? Celebrating a “vibe coder”? On April 1?

I’m curious what about this is “mildly” infuriating to OP?

*Jimmies rustled (not “Jimmy’s”)

There’s actually a Wikipedia page dedicated to the phrase!

Relevant section:

While the earliest documented use of the expression remains somewhat nebulous, it is generally regarded as having been coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Published in 1825, Coleridge’s first verse in the poem “Work Without Hope” refers to both bees and birds in reference to the coming fecundity of spring:

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!

One scholar notes an earlier reference to “birds and bees” on columns in St. Peter’s Basilica from a 1644 entry in the diary of English writer John Evelyn. By the late 19th century, the phrase was common enough to appear in such works as essays by John Burroughs and publications explaining reproduction to children.

The sources for the entry go into further detail: https://web.archive.org/web/20210510050626/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-04-cl-15141-story.html and https://www.livescience.com/39316-birds-and-the-bees.html

Yes, but with many more sorting options. (What does “newbie-friendly” even mean?)

Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.

I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, moderate, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.

Otherwise you’re either forcing users to do this research on their own (“ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks”) or they’re going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don’t like.

A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don’t know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine the bugs turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won’t be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.

I’ve also seen it recommended for breaking “death grip” habits.