She came home with her ear hanging off, and gave her head a big shake, and the tip just flew off!

eek! 😱

It’s a very clean cut for a cat fight cut

I have seen cats with equally clean cuts on their ears that were definitely from fighting - although maybe not as much of the ear missing as she’s got! Clipping ears to indicate a cat is spayed sounds kinda brutal and old-fashioned, I hope no one really does that anywhere!

Copying my comment to OP below - it might be worth checking:

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

That ear says she’s been in a fight or two! I wonder if they even notice when they lose a big chunk of ear like that

lol no German would call their railways reliable! Bashing Deutsche Bahn is a bit of a national pastime over there.

turnstile

Haven’t heard of it before, looks to be made by Cloudflare. Cloudflare don’t seem to be a totally awful company, but that’s always just one CEO-change away.

Their web site sounds promising, saying “Turnstile can generate multiple types of non-intrusive challenges to verify users are human, all without showing visitors a puzzle.” and “Unlike CAPTCHA options, Turnstile never harvests data for ad retargeting.”

So how do they make money from this?

If you’re exerting yourself at all, you pretty much have to mouth breathe. The way I avoid gobbling up any flying insects is to keep my head down while breathing in. It’s surprisingly effective.

Slightly related, my son once had a bee go up his nose while we were out cycling. I say only slightly related because he wasn’t actually going that fast; he was only about 8. He stopped suddenly, complaining about something going up his nose. Neither of us realised what had actually happened until he coughed up a still-squirming bee in a pool of phlegm.