#not even modern country

[yourheartinyourmouth]

Spotify’s “trending for you” selections are so completely bizarre. “Here’s a bunch of bands you have never once played, from genres you don’t listen to.”

like wow thanks, spotify

I have nothing against Tenacious D or classic punk but what could I have possibly listened to that gave you the impression that i want to be recommended those things…..

[halorvic]

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from. Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies. Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID. Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.

[...]

LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising. PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%. LP: What role might COVID play? PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple. Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.

[...]

LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne. PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.

[...]

LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic? PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.

[...]

LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows. PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.

[...]

PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Check out. The fully-sexual charged cinematic movement design.

Cnetizens: How did the director come up with the idea to have him kneel on a playing card, adding so much aesthetic energy, is that some kind of genius?

[duahauuoplanh]

Son Sukku in chemise A killer paradox (2024)

[incorrect-maraudersaandco-quotes]

Petunia: Lily likes to win. When she was 12, a little Girl Guides friend of her bragged she could sell the most biscuits. Petunia: Damned if Lily didn't walk the neighborhood till she got blisters on her feet, and won by 10 boxes. Petunia: Best part is, Lily wasn't even a Girl Guides

[inumbrapugnabimus-maybe]

Making decisions after 2 am is a great idea *posts all of my oc art with no context*

[egberts]

I'm just gonna start blocking people who send me essay length asks trying to argue about stupid shit because their personal experience was different

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[rogue205]

Oh my god. What is with Disney these days? No one wants a “woke” Princess and it’s like they don’t even understand the word anyway.

Pixar does because look at Merida. She still got help from “a man” even if they were her little brothers. It was still “female empowerment” because her mother is actually the one who killed the bad guy anyway and it was because he was about to kill Merida. It wasn’t just “women strong!”. Hell, Merida refuses to get married and actually ends the movie that way but she never comes across as “ew, men” but that she simply doesn’t want to. I can relate.

But back to Disney. They changed Little Mermaid so Ariel literally did EVERYTHING including killing Ursula despite the fact that she shouldn’t even know how to drive a damn ship. 🙄 There was nothing wrong with Eric doing it!

And now we’re getting “woke” Snow White who is named as such because her skin is WHITE AS SNOW! But noooooo… she has to be a person of color too so Disney can have lazy writing and call everyone racist when we call them out on this BS. POC are just shields for them now although Rachel Zegler tried to accuse everyone of hate already. Lady, that’s not going to get people to see your point. And frankly, it’s not even about her. It’s about Disney and what they’re doing.

Also they’re apparently planning to change the Prince coming in to wake her up at the end. Like, what? And most of the seven dwarves are gone too. I think there’s only one now while the others are “normal”. They thought(and Zegler said) that the Prince was “acting stalker-ish” so that’s why they wanted to change him. Hah. They clearly didn’t watch “Once Upon a Time”. Now THAT is a live-action Snow White.

Plus there is a “deleted scene” comic which explains how the Prince even knew to come looking for Snow White. He was captured and locked up by the Evil Queen and witnessed her transform into the hag and poison the apple. He immediately went to find Snow when he managed to escape. All the live-action had to do was include something like this and then he isn’t “stalkerish”. 🙄

Frankly, their movie is not even Snow White anymore and I can tell already that it’s going to flop with all these unneeded and unnecessary changes. All it shares in common now is the name. Nothing else.

This is just my opinion. You don’t have to agree.

[hylianane]

Found out via twitter that Jayce is meant to be latino coded, which in terms of design makes sense I would have at least thought he was mixed, but Arcane, maybe part of the reason a good junk of your fanbase didn’t pick up on that is that you gave him such a hilariously non-hispanic name. Jayce. Neither syllable is pronounced how its supposed to be in Spanish.

Now I’m wondering in a modern AU in which he was born in Latam, if his parents would have spelled his name Yeis or named him Jayce, only for the teacher doing roll call to always pronounce it Hai-seh.

[storywestistrash]

i am actually so tired of the way westerners treat eastern europeans

[fluffalpenguin]

rest in peace cross duel, here are my fanmade cross duel gijinkas i did donkey months ago (these two are based off kraken and penguin, my favourite fluffal and frightfur!)

the dimensional dragons are all girls because i wanted them to match odd-eyes and i even cooked up a fantasy plot for them to be actors in (more in tags)

i had a vision of green hair girl to be a harem queen a la gudako so bad

[socialprawn]

Baby steps towards learning more about greek music, i think it will take me all summer 💪😎 Found so many guud nuggets

Vangelis is in this band (the ost composer of blade runner)

i am excited \o/

[bnnuy-wabbit]

this entire Music Taste debate thing re:rap is getting annoying really fast. Im not USian enough for this.

[distinguishedstudentfishalien]

One thing that absolutely kills me about the argument of "Judea belongs to the Zionist Jews because we were here before" is that if that's how they want to play it, we should apply it everywhere else.

You know what that means. Goodbye U.S. of A.

You need to give back the half of the country you stole from Mexico.

Wait, actually, you have to give back all the land you stole from First Nations.

And Mexico, mestizaje is pretty much a lie, send back the oppressors to Spain and Europe, and give back the land to the original cultures.

Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Australia, New Zealand etc, etc, etc. You know the deal, give it back.

And STILL, Israhell would have to give Palestinians their land back because Palestinians are descendants of the Canaanites. So by their own logic, Palestinians have as much right (if not more) to be there.

[juniepops]

Remember when fallout 76 got announced and the corniest people on earth got mad that the trailer used take me home country roads because it was released in the 70s instead of the 50s? As if like, government-enforced cultural stagnation would just mean no new art was made for over a hundred years?