#obviously not directed to everyone

[poopydroopt]

sturniolo fans dont complain challenge, go! 🤐🤐

[ailithnight]

DPxDC Prompt #10

Danny; baby Ancient of Space, Ward of Time, Infinite Prince, Dream Coda; as if he wasn't OP enough, has begun having prophetic dreams.

Sometimes they're about imminent deaths, sometimes it's deep secrets never intended to see the light of day, sometimes it's spoilers to various popular media, and a lot of times just random crap like 'it's gonna start raining at 2:23pm' or 'there will be a friendly cat on the way to school.'

Fortunately for Danny, he doesn't really remember most of his dreams. He just carries on with his life as usual and possibly doesn't even know these dreams are happening. He doesn't have to deal with the normal trauma or anxiety most prophets live with.

Unfortunately for the people around him, he's prone to sleep walking and sleep talking.

It's more than a little unnerving when you wake up in the middle of the night and your newest brother is just there. You didn't hear him come in. Which should be impossible, and yet he did it literally in his sleep. He says "He doesn't have enough eggs for pancakes." Then faceplants into your bed to return to deep slumber.

[eerna]

why is Arcane so GOOD. what the HECK.

[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.

[saudrag]

this movie felt like a fever dream. so much touching

[rockethorse]

The basegame wedding dress has a pregnancy morph??

[dykedvonte]

Something something Curly being confined to the gurney and being unable to talk makes it so he has to see the little things since he literally can not see the bigger things himself anymore.

However, it also makes the little things become big because his inability to talk and break the bigger things down into smaller things gives him glimpses into the cracks he couldn’t see before.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

shoutout to Frank, he's gonna fall for / has fallen for the most suspicious puppet in the neighborhood

[jackawful]

If you can directly damage the enemy or their profits, do so.

If you can't directly damage the enemy, go to a protest or event.

If you can't go to a protest or event, support those who do by providing food, transportation, and/or other needs.

If you can't directly support protesters, donate to those who do.

If you can't donate, get to know the people around you, and talk with them about building a better world.

Ask yourself: what is one more thing I can do to help fight back? Then, do that thing.

[st4rstudent]

As a reminder, I want to let everyone know I do NOT want anyone who ships Spruce and Chip following or interacting with me. I thought it was kind of obvious but I suppose writing it out directly is needed.

[elminster-big-naturals]

this may be controversial but maybe the "astarion and halsin are SO sexually traumatised that you should literally cut your own dick off before thinking abt them romantically you disgusting freaks" goon squad should consider the ramifications of essentially insisting assault survivors be permanently excluded from any kind of sex and romance bc they are too broken and stupid to be trusted to know their own desires and boundaries or have the capacity to want to explore/push them.

you know real survivors (not pixel men but real ppl like me!) can read that shit? do you think pushing the lie that encountering one (1) Genital Wielded With Intent will invariably cause us to crumble to a miserably weepy heap of dust and blow away in the breeze is appreciated or helpful? or implying the people that love or desire us are selfish at best and outright predators at worst?

i'm begging ppl to just be 2% normal about abuse survivors PLEASE. the characters aren't real but the attitude you drag from fandom back into the real world are.

[batsplat]

Not to want to get you into hot waters but one of the blogs on here shared Marc’s onboard from the 2015 sepang kick incident and I’m a bit unsure how anyone could watch that and not consider it a deliberate kick? Really don’t want anyone to get mad because I’m no expert so maybe there’s something about Valentino’s movements that allows for the “accidental” kick option but if so, what is it? Because as a layman, watching it… I wish it were possible to show that video to Valentino and make him explain exactly how that kick was not on purpose…

I think it's genuinely ambiguous! this is what's interesting about it, right - if you look at the onboards and the helicopter shots there's a decent chance that depending on what you watch you'll end up with a pretty different view on it, and it's inarguable that from certain angles it looks incredibly like a kick. it's also inarguable that whether valentino kicked marc or not, he did deliberately attempt to run him wide, which you can see was intentional by how he looks behind him just before they make contact. it's still not clean riding whichever way you look at it, which is why he got the penalty

I'm going to defer to someone else's opinion here myself (you'll find I link back to this site a lot and broadly consider it trustworthy), from a bloke who does very much believe valentino was in the wrong that weekend. this is in the aftermath of the fim requesting that honda doesn't release data which would have 'proven' valentino kicked marc in an entirely futile attempt to make the controversy die down. the piece talks first about what data like this even involves, including this bit:

the main point here is that the data isn't going to tell you whether valentino kicked him or not, because that's not something you can actually read in data. I have another ask that's vaguely related to this sitting in my drafts, but it's always been one of the most interesting elements of all the controversy in late 2015 - both sides attempting to definitively prove the unprovable with a few numbers. let's quickly bring in what arguments both sides as well as race direction made in the immediate aftermath from the post-race piece by the same author:

that's valentino's explanation, right, marc's handlebar hit valentino's knee, which caused the leg movement as well as the crash. a little more from the immediate post-race write-up:

basically, the view here is that the two bikes make contact - and as a result of where marc hits valentino, valentino's foot is dislodged from the foot peg, catching marc's handlebars in the process. again, none of this actually exonerates valentino. whether there was a kick or no kick, you are NOT allowed to run another rider off-track! whether valentino literally wanted marc to crash or not, this was always going to be a possible consequence of his actions - which he would have known was the case! it is obviously worse to kick someone, partly because it just feels like a particularly egregious offence, but there is no version of this story where valentino comes out with a clean scorecard

as the 'post-honda promising to release conclusive evidence' piece goes on to say:

of course, all this is just one bloke's view. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that valentino did kick marc. but I also struggle to see how it's a clear cut case for the prosecution. again, however, it really is important to stress that valentino by his own admission was engaging in an extremely dubious move. the kick would be the cherry on the icing, if you will, but running another rider so wide that you are probably trying to force them to leave the track is generally not considered acceptable behaviour. the kick question is very much something everyone has to decide for themselves - or not! I still think it's the ambiguity that helps make the whole thing so interesting, that every single clash between the two of them that year still has so many unanswered questions. that both sides have their own unshakeable views of events - sometimes close to 'reality' and sometimes a little less so, sometimes reasonable and sometimes anything but. it's the subjectivity and the fallibility of the human capacity to understand events that we ourselves have experienced - it's this lack of knowability for both outsiders and insiders that makes it so endlessly fascinating and rewarding to analyse. even the two men themselves cannot completely understand what happened that day, what happened in those few seconds, and they never will. we're all in the dark, in the end

[moonstandardtime]

yknow i kinda think u guys just think ppl who use tiktok are stupid

[winepresswrath]

hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?

I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.

So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?

for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.

[every-sanji]