I’m pretty sure you can’t even do that with traditional service dogs. I think vet and food expenses for a service dog can be deducted from taxes as a medical expense (not financial advice!) but not charged to human health insurance.
Man, physical web directories! I wasn't "around" for them but it's wild to think the web was that small once. I was born in the mid 80s but didn't even hear the word internet until around 1996.
I do remember webrings though. That was one way to discover new websites before algorithms took over. Not great for research probably but a fun way to explore.
Guide dog user here. My life and those of other guide and service dog handlers have been made much more inconvenient by the abuse of the "emotional support animal" label. I don't want to dismiss the concept wholesale, as my guide dog has been a tremendous emotional anchor in addition to a mobility aid, and I wouldn't want to deny others that benefit.
However, as wonderful a dog as Brownie surely is, can he traverse a grocery store without sticking his nose in the produce? Can he tolerate walking inches away from cars going past at 30 MPH? Will he get back on track if distracted by other animals? Can he board and ride an elevator, escalator, bus, or plane without panicking? Will he tolerate a fixed bathroom schedule and can he hold it for hours if that schedule cannot be met? Can he ignore others trying to pet or feed him? Will he lie still and quiet in an unfamiliar place? Traditional service dogs are bred and trained to handle these things, and not every dog is cut out for service work. I have trained with three guide dogs, and every time someone in my class has had to swap dogs because the dog they were first given showed resource guarding behavior, or raised its hackles at another dog, or was too flighty around cars, etc. And this was after selective breeding, puppy screening, a year's worth of socialization with a puppy raiser, and months of professional training.
Talk about the weather
A wild meteorologist appears.
I messed with Esperanto and Lojban in high school, but when someone says they're a conlanger they usually mean they make their own languages. This is my most developed conlang, and I'm working on another one used in the same setting.
Constructed languages. It’s a profoundly lonely hobby. I would love to randomly meet another conlanger IRL
Not much has changed. I might move to Piefed.
Related rant: it doesn’t have to be perfect to be unironically enjoyable. 15 years of cynical YouTube reviewers have conditioned us to think otherwise.
Not a movie, but I’ve learned to love amateur sci fi stories because I love seeing someone’s raw imagination unfiltered by editors and focus groups, even if I have to slog through some bad prose. Sure it’s a different kind of enjoyment than I get out of more polished fare, but it is genuine appreciation.
The gingerbread man
This is the correct answer. Even Pizza the Hutt seems to agree.
Post image: a human artist's impression of the Claravian afterlife, the Empyrean, depicting a blessed soul immersed in the Uncreated Light. The Empyrean is sometimes derisively called "The farm" by irreverent humans.
Pious spacers will assume this posture while in torpor. The palms of the forepaws are raised, with the inner and outer thumbs pressed against the palm. The palms of the rear paws are pressed together. Yinrih are not unconscious during torpor, and often use the time to meditate.
One of the few anatomical differences between yinrih and tree dwellers is the arrangement of the so-called "writing tract", the system including the writing claw, the ink duct, and the ink sac or bulb. In tree dwellers, the ink bulb and duct are located directly ventral to the phalanges, meaning each footfall applies pressure to the ink causing some to flow out passively onto the surrounding surface as the tree dweller walks or climbs. In yinrih, the ink duct and bulb have migrated slightly to the side, thus applying less pressure with each step, reducing or eliminating passive ink excretion. Presapient yinrih had to actively smear their ink onto surfaces in order to mark them, encouraging the development of the yinrih's primordial written language.
Yinrih have conscious control of the muscles that cause the ink bulb to contract, and ink flow relies more on the pressure applied by the contracting ink bulb than to gravity. This allows yinrih to write in zero-G.
Stormburg, also Stormboro or Stormborough, is the capital of Moonlitter. It is a floating city located on the planet itself. It is not open to the air like the cities on Welkinstead, since the atmosphere is not breathable. It is located in the eye of a perpetual cyclonic storm. No sunlight penetrates the deep clouds around it. The only natural light comes from the constant lightning from the surrounding storm clouds.
Why the capital was placed in such an inhospitable location has been lost to history. Unlike Welkinstead, Moonlitter itself has few exploitable resources, and the bulk of the population lives on the planet’s many moons. The location may have been chosen precisely because it did not favor any one moon, or perhaps to make life miserable for the politicians who have to live there.
This is Pascal from one of the stories I posted a while ago.
More cringy lore time!
Stormburg, also Stormboro or Stormborough, is the capital of the ice giant planet Moonlitter. It is an archology floating in the planet's atmosphere. It is not open to the air like the cities on Welkinstead[^1], since the atmosphere is not breathable. It is located in the eye of a perpetual cyclonic storm. No sunlight penetrates the deep clouds around it. The only natural light comes from the constant lightning from the surrounding storm clouds.
Why the capital was placed in such an inhospitable location has been lost to history. Unlike Welkinstead, Moonlitter itself has few exploitable resources, and the bulk of the population lives on the planet's many moons. The location may have been chosen precisely because it did not favor any one moon, or perhaps to make life miserable for the politicians who have to live there.
[^1]: The ~~gas~~ ice giant referenced in a previous post
No cringy lore with this one, but a bit of IRL inspiration. I have one of those strangely vivid yet inconsequential memories, specifically of me in kindergarten lying on the floor of the classroom at the end of the day waiting for the teacher to take us to the bus. I was staring up at this fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling, the ones with four tubes. The two outer tubes were dim and flickering and there was a gap between the two inner tubes. It gave me the impression of looking at a distant shore across a glassy smooth body of water reflecting the steel gray sky, with a break in the clouds near the horizon letting sunlight through.
How good could I expect to get with just a mouse? I can't use a drawing tablet for various reasons.
And here's another monkey fox I'll probably never finish.
This is the transit (motion across the sun) of an orbital monastery of the Knights of the Sun (related to the mech pilot I posted a while back)
And here's a colonized gas giant (OK it's an ice giant, but I'm a 90s kid so any planet made primarily of gas is a gas giant regardless of what those gasses are.)
An orbital colony. As arboreal critters monkey foxes take to microgravity like a duck to water. The local economy is supported by mining the asteroid.
As quadrupeds, monkey foxes use wearable tech extensively to free up their paws for walking or climbing. This is a pair of HUD specs.
And here's a paw keyer used for input. Monkey foxes walk on their palms like baboons when on level ground, but can knuckle walk for short periods while holding an object. Keyers are designed to be held in a forepaw while walking.
This is all part of a worldbuilding project I work on for fun.
I don't know you or your roommate's current financial situation, but if they're struggling to buy dog food there may be assistance programs, perhaps not for the dog, but for his own expenses, that can free up money for the dog.