#sorry i have no idea about the rating

[albino-parakeet]

Who is she talking about? Literally any of the people who tried to harm the camp fam.

[napping-sapphic]

Rate nap arrangements? I'll start:

Big spoon: excellent. I am grabbing you so tightly sorry. 10/10

Little spoon:👁👁 Someone Is Behind Me. Also, wtf do I do with my arms. kinda hurts my shitty shoulders. 3/10

Head on her chest: I am so comfy cozy :3 but also worried about crushing her. 9/10

Her head on my chest: yay comfy cozy have a kissy on the forehead also No Harm Shall Befall You. I Would Fight God To Allow You This Comfort Forever. Who said that. 100/10

What are your most notable/favorite ones and how do you rate them?

I feel like i’m about to disappoint yall so bad but to be completely honest my favorite way to nap is alone🙃😭

Most of these positions or just being trapped in any one position for too long in general would cause the devil himself to try and sneak into my bones and kill me via joint pain so it makes that kind of thing a little complicated😅

I also don’t like being touched unless i’m really very close to and comfortable with the person so i honestly haven’t done much pair napping and it usually ends up being the other person falling asleep on me while i just sorta stay awake🤷‍♀️ in those cases it’s usually:

8/10 mentally i appreciate so much that they trust me enough to do that

But also

2/10 physically oof ouch ow

Idk though will have to find more people capable of jumping my ridiculously high emotional hurdles to help me find better nap positions🤔

[bloobydabloob]

You give the vibes of a guy who makes excel sheets in preparation for their farm on stardew valley. and I respect that.

I gotta be honest I’ve never played that game in my entire life, but I was literally taking photos of this one guy from the game this morning and overlaying them in varying opacities. Weird coincidence.

Glad you respect my non-existent grind though.

[sonknuxadow]

jesus christttt im not surprised at all to hear that the knuckles series focuses on wade and other human characters a lot i saw this coming a mile away with how almost all the news we were getting before the trailer came out was about the human characters/actors and not about knuckles (or sonic or tails or any other animated characters) but the fact that somebody calculated how many minutes of screentime knuckles has and it came out as LESS THAN HALF OF THE ENTIRE SERIES' RUNTIME when the series is NAMED after him is ridiculous. after this show comes out wade will likely have more screentime and overall plot relevance in the entire scu than tails does. did they actually think wade is a popular enough character for people to be down with this. what the fuck

[fridayyy-13th]

i really need to stop staying up late when my intrusive thoughts come up again, they always get worse at night. i wanted to do some writing, but i procrastinated too long and now i feel too bad and when i tried, i couldn't focus. so i'm gonna try and go to bed.

[whimsicaltwine]

gahhhh argh I'm a history student for a reason man, I'm working ahead and reading up on pre modern city structure and it's so much more interesting and easy to understand,,,,, the author is giving me new databases to explore,,,,,, ohhhhh my god I cannot wait to be done with the geography

[wlw-cryptid]

related to the posts on your butch gently assisting with your personal grooming at the end of the day................there's a criminal minds episode (yes i know etc.) about a skilled seamstress and carer whose abuse and trauma somehow lead her to abduct and drug beautiful women so she can carefully dress them up and have tea parties. i have watched it a totally normal number of times hahaha

My mom was Obsessed w criminal minds for like a few years so im pretty sure ive seen every episode in my peripheral vision twice over. i know the exact one youre talking about . Drugging and abduction are very much not. what i was shooting for. i was kind of very focused on a realistic romantic fantasy full stop. your mind is great and i promise youre fine but intox kink, especially forced intox kink, dollification, and just. generally "forced to be [disabled, basically]" vibes are things i want nothing to do with so i dont really. know how to respond to this other than saying that.

in any case keep it up soldier i wish you fun sexy fantasies 👍

[apricotsandcandles]

dude i’m so mad with myself bc i’ve reverted back to 11yo me who was convinced newnham college at cambridge was the place for me, and now i want to go so badly but the chances of me even getting an offer are so low, especially bc i’m taking media as an a level which is ‘not recommended’ at cambridge 😭

[leezuhh]

the xenophobia in genshin is crazyyy 😭

[princekirijo]

I gotta say I was not expecting to enjoy Devil May Cry as a series as much as I am, I'm kinda surprised it took me this long to get in to.

[kelseachan]

[1] Shake the hips for Power! | Mischief Makers (Ft RadioYorick)

[zenithpng]

.

[arc-archernar]

Also reminder that BetterHelp preys on both their consumers and their therapists alike (not alike but i like this turn of phrase) by enforcing a culture where it's incentivised for the therapists on BetterHelp to diagnose as many disorders as possible, for as long as possible, to get them coming for treatment so the company can keep making money off of the suffering of people who NEED this kind of help.

You can argue the 'but the only way to spread awareness in this economy is to MAKE mental disorders an industry so it becomes relevant to the economy by being profitable' thing as much as you want. Keep being willfully ignorant to the fact that people working their asses off that need psychological healthcare aren't already part of the economy, and thus, by your own logic, 'generates profits' (im cringing at this so hard). (the 'you' im referring to in this is the 1%)

How many people they've hurt I do not know, but I do know that every single one of them is worth so more than whatever sum of money you pocketed from them with a shrug and a 'it can't be helped'. ('you' in this referring to BetterHelp)

just a reminder that BetterHelp is selling your fucking data and that they themselves have said at industry meetings that they're a data-driven company more than a people-driven company

It feels like for a while in there that people were dropping them as a sponsor but now that the controversy has slightly dimmed there are so many ads for them again; do not give them your information, do not give them your money

I know insurance is a pain in the ass and mental health treatments cost too much out of pocket for most people. So do they, that's why they're making this little bait and switch operation. Helping people is, at best, a side product of their data harvesting, and at worst just a trick to lure people in.

[boogiewoogieweeb]

looking at a wip you've worked really hard on and knowing that you're going to have to abandon it because things just aren't working out no matter how hard you try feels like throwing one of your beloved, trusting children down a well to drown so that their siblings can have a chance at survival at least

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[aberooski]

In trying to work on what was supposed to be the last chapter of my FFXV fic I haven't updated in 3 years, I have accidentally added 2 extra chapters to the plan....