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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.”
That’s a great joke. The millipede’s enthusiasm is oddly endearing
Neither centipedes nor millipedes are insects.
You have them backwards. Centipedes are the ones with more legs
Google tells me you’re the one who has them backwards. Here’s an article from Carnegie Natural History Museum explaining the difference.
it’s extremely obvious that you’re incorrect if you simply look at the words, “centi” means “hundred” and is smaller than “milli” which means “thousand”.
centipedes look like they have a hundred legs, millipedes look like they have a thousand legs.
Ah, but millimeters are 1/1000 of a meter, which means millipedes actually have 1/1000 of a leg /s
#kilopede
“Centipede” means 100 feet.
“Millipede” means 1000 feet.
Pede means feet. So does the pie in piedmont.
You’re right, I meant feet. Fixed!
Phew because essentially* I was like
* essentially in no way whatsoever
It bothers me more than you that it was wrong, so I appreciate the correction!
Don’t tell me how I feel 🙅😂
I am aware of how prefixes work
In this case it’s what the prefixes mean that’s relevant.
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.
Have you ever met a Belgian? Same thing
There’s two things I can’t stand. Intolerance, and Belgians.
But have you had Belgian beer ortheir fast food. No wonder everyone goes there for a fight.
Moules-Frites and Hoegaarden.
I prefer La Chouffe, you get to laugh at the gnome on the bottle too 😄
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
It’s fine, we’ll train a ten year old prodigy to kill their entire race.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you met the Borg?
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.
Speak for yourself, I exist in a hive mind.
Bold of you to assume there won’t be humans trying to fuck them.
Porque no los dos?
Didn’t feel the need to state the obvious lol
That’s the plot of Starship Troopers.
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.
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.
Embrace the framling, study the ramen, kill the varelse.
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.
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?
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.
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.
these mfs are usually a canary in a coal mine. if you start seeing these everywhere in your house, chances are you have roaches.
If you start seeing canaries everywhere in your coal mine, chances are you have a lethal gas leak. wait what?
canaries are gases’ natural predator
If you start seeing canaries in your living room, get a CO monitor.
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
I mean, I have an odd number of leg pairs. You probably do too?
i mean, our arms are just fucked up legs, so technically we have an even pair of legs.
Woah
Four legs good, two legs bad.
This sentence took me multiple attempts to parse.
yeah but the range of leg pairs for humans is (comparatively) much more tame. this would be like if humans had 1-12.3 leg pairs. and crazier still, humans were named something like “6 legged beings”
Even stranger, the OP shows a millipede, not a centipede
That’s very clearly a house centipede
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.
Standard house centipedes (I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in this comic) aren’t supposed to have a very painful bite. You may have been bitten by a different kind of centipede, or maybe had an allergic reaction, for your pain to be so severe.
I live in Taiwan.
This might have something to do with it. Different type of centipede.
yea the other type of centipedes are nearly the worst kind of bite you can get. the giant ones that catch bats and eat mice.
Where are they native so I can potentially live the remainder of my life in irrational fear?
They’re native to Vietnam and live in most of the tropics, including Hawaii.
Those bites are rare and barely noticeable
I live on a tropical island.
Home centipedes are the same everywhere. What you encountered was something else
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scolopendra_alcyona
It’s not the same. They are significantly bigger here and much more venomous.
The ones found in America are Scutigera coleoptrata.
Yes, as I said it’s a didferent specie
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.
Removed by mod
What kind of insect is that? I can’t think of anything with that many legs that eats cockroaches.
Insects have 6 legs. If I had to guess its a centipede drawn with too many legs per segment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata
Commonly known as a house or carpet centipede.
The drawing is pretty accurate.
I’ve encountered these guys all my life. They are mostly small skittering puffy-stretches at a glance, but sometimes they can look like their red headed larger and snake-eating relatives at 4-5cm lengths.
They are extremely soft to the touch, as if a very light breeze just brushed off your arm hair. What I didn’t know is that they are like cats in this behaviour:
House centipedes have been observed to groom their legs by curling around and grooming them with their forcipules.
Forcipules are the modified, pincer-like, front legs of centipedes that are used to inject venom into prey. They are the only known examples of front legs acting as venom injectors.
Thank goodness
Also the image is
cursed:
They are extremely soft to the touch W H A T?
Its small forcipules have difficulty penetrating
Aww it’s okay, lil Scucoleo
Thems “silverfish” or naw?
Naw, silverfish look like this.
Silverfish?
Nope, house centipede, as they’re commonly known
Seems like those are what my roommates incorrectly call silverfish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverfish are also pests. They eat books.
Are there silverfish big enough to eat roaches?
There should be a fifth panel that’s says:
“Your chances are worse when you look like that.”
Then there should also be a sixth panel with the “I’m fast as fuck boyyy” meme
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
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.
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.
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.
They also eat jumping spiders, which is why I kill them.
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.
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
I hate you for this
Neither of them will actually put a dent in a serious infestation.
“If it’s more than 8, it’s has sealed it’s fate.”
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.
You can hear them run on tile.
I wish I didn’t learn this information first hand while trying to be nice and catch one to put it outside.
You’re a nice person. You’d probably do great in a first contact situation
Or get humanity eaten
I wish I had a couple of these guys. Nothing else I’ve done has gotten rid of the roaches in this shit-ass apartment. Might as well try more bugs.
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.
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.
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.
You might need a toad for the bigger bugs eventually
I say just get a hippopotamus. It’s the only way to be sure.
House hippos look pretty cute!
Leggy boi
