• AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    112
    ·
    9 months ago

    Creepy. And I learned something. Reminds me of another comic strip that cracked me up. The gist:

    God said to the insects “you may each pick three traits.” The millipede said, “I want legs!” The centipede agreed. God nodded. “And for your second trait?” The millipede smiled brightly and said “More legs!” The centipede request the same. God asked for their final request. “More legs!” The millipede shouted smiling even brighter The centipede gave a sinister grin and growled. “Teeth.”

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    65
    ·
    9 months ago

    Makes me wonder if we ever do meet intelligent aliens will we instantly try to kill them not because we’re a tribe based war loving species, but if it’s simply because we’re so absolutely and deeply repulsed by something so different than us on an instinctual level.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Or, as various sci fi stories have laid out, will they immediately try to kill us, because they are an insect based race and we are dealing with drones that only follow basic instinct, and we’d need to commune with the queen or some such to get them to understand that each of our species has a consciousness and free will, and we don’t exist in a hive mind

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          9 months ago

          I just want to state on the record that the book is a short read and extremely better than the movie and that anyone here who hasn’t read Enders Game, should do so.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            I thought the movie did a pretty good job tbh. It’s just that Ender’s internal monologue is so important to the novel that it’s hard to translate that into a film.

            Of course, I also blame Ender’s Game for every shitty YA series having a War Academy arc, so I just don’t care about its legacy that much.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        9 months ago

        the one huge and quite funny flaw with that idea is that queens have absolutely jackshit power over a colony, if anything the queen of a colony is basically a slave that gets constantly pampered and directed by the workers with no free will whatsoever.

        If we met an alien hive-mind species it’d probably be much like interacting with a military, just much more tightly integrated and profoundly devoid of corruption, imagine HAL 9000 but made up of a million people working together to run the computations.

        So they’d likely work tirelessly to figure out what precisely we are, if they determine we’re a threat they’d attack without mercy, and if they determine they can benefit from cooperation with us they’d be the best ally we could ever imagine albeit extremely manipulative.

        • Naz@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          Interesting deduction. After analyzing all of the data, we have decided to expend zero effort and go around.

          Not our problem, sorry, fly-past planet.

          • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 months ago

            the borg are artificial and have the goal of assimilating as many people as possible, a realistic alien hive species wouldn’t particularly care about that beyond the inherent benefits of diversity and a higher population.

            Their goal would, much like ours and that of any species, be to proliferate but primarily ensure they don’t get wiped out, which requires a lot more nuance than “resistence is futile”.

            They would also inherently have a decent amount of independence, because that’s specifically how hives operate: it’s a large group of individuals operating on similar logic and working together to create what is effectively a superorganism. Bees and ants aren’t controlled by some hive mind, every individual makes small decisions and as influenced by the other individuals, and eventually one or two decisions become the most popular and are acted upon.

            Hives are basically anarchic democracy taken to its absolute extreme.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 months ago

      nah, people work with deep sea creatures all day and just find them cool.

      it’d just make international relations with them extremely difficult, honestly district 9 is probably the most realistic take on how we’d treat aliens. We’d be sufficiently unable to empathize with them that we’d treat them like shit, but there’s no real reason to actively try to wipe them out.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        The District 9 aliens are a direct and extremely obvious metaphor for apartheid. The lack of empathy had nothing to do with capability, just a cultural hatred of the other, and it will, and did, like all apartheids, end with genocide.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    62
    ·
    9 months ago

    Creepiest house bug ever. I let them be because they eat other bugs.

    If you ever see a lot of them you’ve got another problem, that means they have a lot to eat. Could be an infestation of other bugs like roaches or a dead animal in the walls.

    • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      9 months ago

      If you ever see a lot of them you’ve got another problem, that means they have a lot to eat.

      But… not for long, so problem solved soon, right? Right?

      • Landsharkgun@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        9 months ago

        According to a random comment I saw once, these things will happily eat each other if there’s no other bugs to eat. So basically yes… unless your house has a continuous influx of new bugs.

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          This is also why they aren’t actually great at pest control. They are pretty territorial so their populations never get big enough to make a serious dent. It’s perfectly fine to kill them.

  • LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    these mfs are usually a canary in a coal mine. if you start seeing these everywhere in your house, chances are you have roaches.

  • affiliate@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    57
    ·
    9 months ago

    Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number. (wikipedia)

    wtf is going on with these guys

  • jaschen@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 months ago

    I got bitten by this hell spawn. I was sleeping and I guess I was stretching my leg and laid my leg on top of this thing.

    I have never felt so much pain in my life. It felt like my skin was melting and burning at the same time. For the next few weeks, the bite mark would randomly start to puss and random shots of pain.

    I’d rather have roaches. At least with roaches, they don’t bite.

  • 1024_Kibibytes@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    What kind of insect is that? I can’t think of anything with that many legs that eats cockroaches.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I got stung/bit by one of those little bastards once in the shower. Usually they don’t bother humans and their mouth stingers(kind of like legs that are turned into venomous fangs for killing other bugs) can’t really go deep enough, but I guess this one got motivated once he started drowning and crawled up my leg.

      • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        I developed a theory because of these fuckers, which is that the scale of a things creepiness is based on how many legs it has and how fast they are.

        I used to get them in my last apartment and when I saw one I literally couldn’t sleep until I knew it was dead

        • MrBusiness@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          Imagine you go to the washroom to grab some toilet paper to blow your nose and when when you pull on the paper this asshole jumps up at you, like a buggy over the dunes, at full speed up your hand. Then the asshole disappeared just as fast when flung off.

          • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            I had never seen one before, and was just settling in after moving into my new apartment when my turn gf just screams and comes running into the kitchen saying, “there’s a horrible monster bug in the sink, ITS HUGE”

            And unprepared for the Lovecraftian little horror waiting for me, expecting some kind of beetle or something, I was pretty shook up. Legitimately was scared to go into the kitchen at night after that.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    9 months ago

    The reality is that these guys won’t actually make a big dent in a roach infestation. They are pretty territorial and their population will always scale in proportion to the food supply, so if you have a lot of centipedes, you’ll have a fuck ton of roaches.

    • cordlesslamp@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      9 months ago

      Spider is arguably less effective in terms of big-bug-eating, but I would choose spiders over that nightmare fuel any day.

      Have you ever seen that thing dead in your sink, all soaked wet? I swear that’s can’t be something originate from earth.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        ·
        9 months ago

        My theory is that when you have too many nightmares in one night and the horror doesn’t have anywhere to go, the nightmare takes shape and one of these crawls out of you

    • SirDankbud@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      Do you like reptiles? One of the reasons I got a lizard was so the occasional escaped feeder cricket could ravage the cockroach population in my shitty apartment. That mixed with diatomaceous earth has nearly elimated all roach sightings.

    • No_@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      9 months ago

      You might need a toad for the bigger bugs eventually

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      9 months ago

      Continuously use the roach gel.

      That’s stuff (of any brand, really) will help a ton, but since you live in an apartment, you’ll never be able to keep all the roaches away unless everyone in the complex starts doing something about it.

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        Yup, even if you have the place sprayed, unless they do every apartment at the same time they’ll just run to a non-sprayed one and wait it out.

  • degen@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I swear one of my cats can smell these fuckers.

    Or they’re just noisy on some level, and I don’t wanna think about that.