Ininewcrow

I'm Ojibway / Cree from northern Ontario and in our language we distinguish foxes according to colour

Mahkehshoo ... the word for 'red' - mookoowak - is derived from the word for blood 'mookoo' ... and adding the 'shoo' at the end notes that it is in reference to an individual or being ... so you get 'Mahkehshoo' - 'the red one'

Mahkahtehshoo .... the word for black or darkness is 'mah-kah-teh-oo' and again, adding the 'shoo' at the end is in reference to it being applied to a individual or being ... so you get 'Mahkahtehshoo' - 'the black one'

Wahpahkehshoo ... the word for white is 'wahpack' and like the others, adding 'shoo' means you are talking about an individual or being ... so you get 'wahpahkehshoo' - 'the white one'

I have a bunch of family and friends from Six Nations in southern Ontario ... a Mohawk community. Most of the people I know there are part of the turtle clan and all their houses are filled with turtle memorabilia ... at one friends house, I literally trip on turtles because he has several large heavy door stoppers in the shape of turtles.

Cute ... but I'm deathly afraid of bats now

About 7-8 years ago I woke up in my cottage in the wilderness in the dark to find a bat inside the house. I turned on the lights and got it out a window. Later I discovered that they were nesting in our wood stove that we hadn't been using all that summer.

A couple years later, I read a news story of how someone got infected by rabies from a bat bite they didn't know they got in their sleep. ... and this was in Canada where rabies is rare!

Then I read up on what rabies was, infection rates, incubation time, etc

I've been worried ever since that some day, I'll start developing the late stages of a rabies infection

they look like they've seen some shit

Lock ourselves in our bunker for all of December ... we still have a bit of food stocking to do but not much ... after the next grocery haul, we're not planning on seeing another human in person until 2026

lol .... thanks ... I too have now found my spirit animal

I love VPNs for this .... I get to see advertising from around the world ... Japanese noodles, Nordic furniture, some weird German food, Turkish real estate, Australian drinks ... and all of it delivered in languages I don't understand.

The longer I spend on the Fediverse, the more I learn about an entirely new corner of the wider open internet. I've drifted over in multiple accounts over the years from Lemmy, Mbin, Kbin, Mastodon .... I've even tried Bluesky (although I know it's not fully accepted as part of the open fediverse) ... and recently have been learning about and diving into Piefed.

And in learning about all of them, I keep discovering that there are dozens more projects that are growing everywhere in the fediverse ... Pixelfed, Matrix, Friendica, Peertube, Misskey ... and many more!

It's a hopeful learning experience because I often feel like any one of these platforms feels small and not that many users ... but when you add them all up, they number to about 12 - 13 million accounts with billions of status updates ... and because it is the fediverse, all of them are able to connect to each other! ... it might not seem like much compared to corporate social media but this is what the start of the early social media internet looked like and felt like 20 years ago.

I'm looking forward to what the fediverse will look like in the years to come

I've lost many people at this point in my life and one of the most memorable words of wisdom that someone gave me a long time ago was that ....

when you lose someone, it punches a great big hole in your soul, the opening heals over time and grows smaller, but it never goes away.

lol ... I was confusing Sejm for Smegma

I just had this talk with my wife ... we were talking about a bunch of other things but a highlight that came out of it was this nugget

'The world is mostly full of good people ... it's only a minority of loud, ugly stupid idiots that make it seem terrible'