#these are all roughly from april/may 2023

[housecow]

Do you have any topless photos/videos from when you were... Less heavy(?) because it'd be really hot to see how the hang has changed as you've expanded

looking back i really don’t have many pics braless/topless omg… when i was smaller, i much preferred wearing bras when i could (even while sleeping) but. now that im huge it’s impossible to find comfy bras so… i let them hang out n do their thing 🫣

but here are the pics i do have!! i forgot they sat so pretty without a bra omg

[sgiandubh]

Oh, hello

The Sibyl of Tydavnet was supposedly back home, and we finally have something to speculate upon, after a week-end with no news from both of Them (go figure). So much so that it's been very, very quiet in here:

This is, of course, a latergram, When being the important question, here. I have to say I was a bit surprised, after two hours of research (and cooking, but that is a separate story).

Let's unpack:

From 1974 to 2023, the Monaghan County Museum has been open and free to visit. Until 1981, in the old Courthouse building of Monaghan Town, then temporarily hosted by the Christian Brothers Secondary School, and since 1986 in this building on Hill Street:

I am not inventing anything, this info comes straight from their official website:

On May 18th, 2023 (on International Museum Day), the venue was closed and the collections were planned to be moved at the new Monaghan Peace Campus:

The Peace Campus is a very important local initiative, funded by the City Council, the Irish Department of Rural and Community Development and the EU, via the Irish SEUPB (Special EU Programs Body - ironically, the counterpart of my new job, starting next Friday, LOL). It was inaugurated on May 10, 2024:

Where was C, in this clip, posted today and suggesting a recent trip to Ireland?

In the old building, of course, exactly as it was on May 18, 2023:

Apparently taken on an extensive private tour that included the storage area, where this pic was taken:

How do I know it? I simply combed the meager social media accounts of the Museum, that's all. See and compare for yourself, with this screenshot of the moving operations, from the old Hill Street to the new premises (posted on Facebook, on June 14th, 2024, but very likely shot slightly before):

In April 2023, the new Peace Campus looked roughly like this. There is no way that clip would have been shot there. Not then...

...and not later, because the new display in the new venue looks totally different:

And it was completed around May 10th 2024, when this picture was taken, separately from the rest of the released info:

The pic was taken by Laura Hogan, the North East Correspondent for RTE News, a subsidiary of the Irish public TV and Radio broadcasting company:

But perhaps even more interestingly, the Museum shot several clips of people featured, like C, in the new inaugural exhibition. Such as this guy, back in June 2023, on their old premises:

Ardal O'Hanlon, Irish stand-up comedian and actor, based in Ireland and London:

This is a very, very, VERY late latergram. My best guess would be anytime between May 2023 and most probably around June 2023. Simply because it would be logical that the clip shooting be completed with all the people involved at the same time, for logistical reasons, and before the packing of the exhibits would have started in earnest.

As always, I could be wrong. As always, people will bitch around, especially the divas and those who know strictly nothing. But I'll be damned if C were in Ireland anytime near this last week-end!

[probablyasocialecologist]

In the context of what we’ve learned from our investigations into opt-in polls, we took particular notice of a recent online opt-in survey that had a startling finding about Holocaust denial among young Americans. The survey, fielded in December 2023, reported that 20% of U.S. adults under 30 agree with the statement, “The Holocaust is a myth.” This alarming finding received widespread attention from the news media and on social networks. From a survey science perspective, the finding deserved a closer look. It raised both of the red flags in the research literature about bogus respondents: It focused on a rare attitude (Holocaust denial), and it involved a subgroup frequently “infiltrated” by bogus respondents (young adults). Other questions asked in that December opt-in poll also pointed to a need for scrutiny. In the same poll, about half of adults under 30 (48%) expressed opposition to legal abortion. This result is dramatically at odds with rigorous polling from multiple survey organizations that consistently finds the rate of opposition among young adults to be much lower. In an April 2023 Pew Research Center survey, for instance, 26% of U.S. adults under 30 said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. This was 13 points lower than the share among older Americans (39%). Our estimate for young adults was similar to ones from other, more recent probability-based surveys, such as an AP-NORC survey from June 2023 (27%) and a KFF survey from November 2023 (28%). We attempted to replicate the opt-in poll’s findings in our own survey, fielded in mid-January 2024 on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. Unlike the December opt-in survey, our survey panel is recruited by mail – rather than online – using probability-based sampling. And in fact, our findings were quite different. Rather than 20%, we found that 3% of adults under 30 agree with the statement “The Holocaust is a myth.” (This percentage is the same for every other age group as well.) Had this been the original result, it is unlikely that it would have generated the same kind of media attention on one of the most sensitive possible topics. Likewise, our survey found substantial differences from the December poll on support for legal abortion. In the opt-in survey, roughly half of young adults (48%) said abortion should always be illegal or should only be legal in special circumstances, such as when the life of the mother is in danger. In our survey, 23% said so. These differences in estimates for young adults are what we would expect to see – based on past studies – if there were a large number of bogus respondents in the opt-in poll claiming to be under the age of 30. These respondents likely were not answering the questions based on their true opinions. The takeaway from our recent survey experiment is not that Holocaust denial in the United States is nonexistent or that younger and older Americans all have the same opinions when it comes to antisemitism or the Middle East. For example, our survey experiment found that young adults in the U.S. are less likely than older ones to say the state of Israel has the right to exist. This is broadly consistent with other rigorous polling showing that young people are somewhat less supportive of Israel – and more supportive of Palestinians – than older Americans. Rather, the takeaway is that reporting on complex and sensitive matters such as these requires the use of rigorous survey methods to avoid inadvertently misleading the public, particularly when studying the attitudes of young people.

[girderednerve]

The French capital faces an unprecedented emergency housing crisis. Paris’ homelessness hotline — the 115 — receives roughly 13,500 calls every day, but only 10 percent of callers are able to get emergency housing. Every evening at 6 p.m., dozens of unhoused people flock to the Hôtel de Ville in central Paris, where the charity Utopia 56 helps match them with Parisians who have a spare bed — but the association is overwhelmed by demand. Meanwhile, evictions of informal living spaces in the Île-de-France region — which includes Paris and its suburbs — doubled over the past four years. The number of unhoused people increased by about 500 in the past year.

The approach of the Olympic Games has exacerbated these trends. Statistics from civil rights groups show a troubling rise in evictions over the past year as the city has prepared for the global event that will bring 14 million tourists to Paris starting in late July. While official numbers on displacement are hard to come by, the Observatory on Evictions from Informal Living Spaces, a research group, counted 138 expulsions in the Île-de-France between April 2023 and May 2024, affecting roughly 12,545 people, an increase of about 40 percent compared with two years prior. A government spokesperson, Christophe Noël du Payrat, told the New York Times that authorities had evicted roughly 5,000 people in the past year, most of them single men.

For this story, I spoke with more than a dozen unhoused or precariously housed Paris residents, as well as charity workers, researchers and public officials. The upcoming Olympics, they all suggested, have provided Paris a neat deadline for accelerating processes of urban renewal — and displacement — that were already underway in an effort to sanitize the city for tourists. The Games, which the International Olympic Committee have hailed as a “new model” that is at once “ambitious, spectacular, open to all, but also more responsible, more sustainable, more supportive and more inclusive,” could have been an opportunity to address chronic homelessness, they lamented. Instead, the city started ramping up evictions.

[redstoneglitch]

Explicit Hermitcraft fic, throughout the years

In July 2022, I set out to collect some data, hoping to figure out when explicit Hermitcraft fics really started to take off. I had heard stories of how people were against anything that didn't fit into the neat bounds of canon, which included shipping, among other things.

This made me curious though. When did it start getting posted? Where has it taken us? ...is there really a disproportionate amount of Omegaverse fics? Well, TL;DR... January 2019, over 1,400 fics being posted, and no.

However, I hope you stick around a bit longer! My analysis of the graph I made is posted below. The blank version, plus the text from the analysis, is under the cut.

This version of the graph includes everything from January 2019 – April 2023. Fics may've been counted twice, due to collecting two batches of data (one in July 2022, and another at the end of April 2023)

Funnily enough, the third fic posted to the Hermitcraft tag is explicit, and the first three are all shippy. (And yes, I checked to see if the works were backdated, which they're not! The first Hermitcraft fic was actually posted in 2015)

Since July '22, there's been a decrease in the percentage of explicit fics! Just one percent, sure, but it really shows just how popular Hermitcraft is as a whole. There were 8.9k fics back then, only 920 of those being explicit. Now there's over 15k, and 1.4k explicit fics! That's over 6,000 fics added since July '22! Not to mention all the ones that may've been deleted, which appears to be over 40 in total.

Finally, I'd like to point out the obvious: between a season start and end, there's a massive jump in explicit fics being posted. And subsequently, when the season ends, or a new series begins (like the Life Series), there's a substantial dip in fics being posted to the tag.

Now that the important stuff is out of the way, feel free to look below the cut if you'd like, for the text from the image + the blank version of the chart.

Notes:

There are roughly 1,400 explicit, and 15,000 total fics at this point (This means there’s around 13,600 non-explicit fics. Alternatively, about 9.3% of fics are explicit – a 1% decrease since July ‘22)

Due to the fact that this data was gathered both during July ‘22 and April ’23, there may be some discrepancies (At least 40 fics have been removed since July ‘22. Since fics may’ve been counted twice, this number is likely more)

The shipping war was from 2019 to 2020* (*Unknown end date)

January 2019: Half a year (about 6 months) after the start of Hermitcraft S6

June 2019: 3 Grumbo fics are posted, likely due to Grian and Mumbo’s popularity (According to archive.org, Mumbo and Grian were at 2.7M subscribers at the start of 2019… and only grew from there)

March 2020: Start of Hermitcraft S7… and then the pandemic hit, and lockdown started

April 2021: 3rd life started, and Flower Husbands helped normalize shipping

June 2021: Start of Hermitcraft S8

September 2021: Last life started

October 2021: Kinktober (69 fics… nice)

December 2021: End of Season 8 (The dip is probably due to no videos on Hermitcraft)

March 2022: Start of Hermitcraft S9

June 2022: Double life started

March 2023: Limited life started

[Image ID: a chart, spanning from January 2019, to April 2023, regarding explicit fanfiction for Hermitcraft. The main growth periods are from March 2020 to March 2021, October 2021, and from March 2022 to January 2023. /End ID]

[felinedetached]

The April/May 2023 MCSR Cheating Scandal Saga

(or, as much of it that I can explain as of May 3rd, considering we keep getting new info)

So, it all starts back in April of 2019 — 27 April 2019 exactly, when NikocraftHD posted his 3:59 Set Seed Glitchless Peaceful (SSGP) pre-1.9 WR. At 11 million views, it’s one of the most well known speedruns ever, and unquestionably the most well known run of its type. And four years later, on 30 April 2023, Eliotex dropped a video: NikocraftHD spliced his speedruns and nobody noticed.

Two of NikocraftHD’s runs were cheated: the 3:59, and a later 2:49 (26 March 2022). Both had evidence of a cheating method called ‘splicing’, or cutting videos of two attempts together. In this case, he additionally used a recreated world file and a NBT Editor to manually copy the previous world “level.dat” values for getting good End Towers. 

The 2:49′s evidence is, in retrospect, relatively obvious: Nikocraft had placed blocks during his run that should have been visible from spawn, but when he loaded back into spawn after going through the end portal, those blocks weren’t there anymore.

The 3:59 was harder to prove — until Crafterdark noticed something odd about Nikocraft’s hunger bar. If you’ve ever played Minecraft in peaceful, you’ll know that your hunger bar will never deplete. However, there’s two aspects of the hunger bar: the food level, and the saturation level. In peaceful, your saturation level does decrease, and when it reaches 0, your hunger bar starts to ‘bounce’ or ‘jitter’ every 3-ish seconds. Saturation level persists even between dimensions, meaning even when you load into a new dimension, if you have zero saturation, your hunger bar will continue to make that constant movement. 

When Nikocraft enters the end at 2:54, his hunger bar doesn’t start moving again until 3:30. That’s over 30 seconds without the periodical 3-second jitters. In the 2:49, after he enters the end at 1:50, his hunger bar doesn’t start moving again until 2:14 — roughly 23 seconds without movement. That second run, with a 23 second section without movement — the chance of that happening legitimately is 3.9E-34. That’s 0.00000000000000000000000000000000039.

Sources for this section: Eliotex’s video | Cheating Doc | NikocraftHD’s runs (3:59) (2:49)

Cool. So NikocraftHD cheated, twice, but you may be wondering: all of this was uncovered on April 30th. Why is this the April-May cheating scandal?

That would be because ten hours later, at 8am on May 1st for me, a runner who was incredibly popular and well liked at the time, Lide — who is a huge part of MCSR history — admitted to cheating his world records.

Lide got so many people into running. He was the first to use tower strats in a world record, he worked with so many of the legendary runners of that era. I need to emphasise: that this runner cheated, and sees it as a joke, has been heartbreaking for the community. I think Cscuile explained it best:

Sources for this section: Falco’s tweet | Cscuile’s tweet

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the end of it: around the same time, Loth realised something interesting about a 4:41 pre-1.9 SSGP run by bruono1st — who would have had world record if not for NikocraftHD’s cheated 3:59. bruonost’s run also showed evidence of a splice — the hunger bar once again stopped moving after he entered the end. Unfortunately, upon being called out bruono1st privated his run, and we can no longer watch it, but here are the tweets about it: eliotex tweet | poisonousskely tweet 

As of May 3rd, this is all that’s come out in total, but I hope this was an understandable and informative explanation of what’s going on for those curious!

[zvaigzdelasas]

The closest international airport that doesn’t require Raneem to make the dangerous and expensive journey from the Houthi-controlled areas where she lives to those under the authority of the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) is in the city of Sana’a. A Saudi-led military coalition, which includes the United States, bombed that airport multiple times during the war, and closed it to commercial flights. In April 2022, Saudi Arabia entered into a truce with the Houthis and, working with the United Arab Emirates, another country on the Saudi side of the war, established the PLC. This eight-member council came to power without an election, replacing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The United States now considers this the “internationally recognized government” of Yemen. The truce was supposed to reopen Sana’a airport to commercial air travel, a development that has been touted by the Biden administration as proof of progress in a humanitarian crisis for which the US bears considerable responsibility. But there are so few flights that the truce hasn’t changed anything for Raneem’s family. The PLC permits only three round-trip flights a week from Sana’a airport (down from six in June). They are all operated by a single airline, Yemenia Airways, which charges around $720 for a round-trip ticket to Jordan. (Yemenia is partially owned by the Saudi government.) [...] Of Yemen’s 30 million people, an estimated 80 percent “require some form of humanitarian or protection assistance,” according to the United Nations. [...] The PLC obtains its legitimacy and firepower from the Saudi-led military coalition that bombed Yemen for eight years, and imposed an aerial and naval blockade on the country. The Biden administration says that this blockade does not exist. “For one year, Yemenis have benefitted from a halt to airstrikes, regular civilian flights from Sana’a airport, enhanced and unrestricted humanitarian and food assistance, and the increased flow of fuel to northern Yemen,” said Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, in an April 2023 statement marking the first anniversary of the truce. And while some incremental improvements have been made, particularly with respect to fuel and food imports, they fall far short of meeting the needs of a country devastated by a war in which the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure like mosques, schools, hospitals, and markets. Today, Yemen is the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises: 21.6 million people need humanitarian assistance; 17 million are food insecure; and 2.2 million children under 5 need treatment for acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme.[...] According to the Health Ministry of Sana’a (where the Houthis are the dominant power), some 71,000 cancer patients and 8,000 kidney-failure patients need care outside of Yemen. In August 2019, the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian organization, reported that in the three years since Sana’a airport was closed to commercial flights (starting August 9, 2016), “as many as 32,000 people may have died prematurely because they were unable to travel abroad for treatment, according to the Ministry of Health in Sana’a.” The extremely limited United Nations mercy flights permitted to leave Sana’a airport in 2020 barely began to meet these needs. [...] There are other airports in Yemen that have international flights, but these are in areas that are under the control of the PLC. The biggest such airport is in Aden, but distances are far and expensive to traverse, and the travel comes with risk and hardship. For those who live in Houthi-controlled areas, which account for roughly two-thirds of Yemen’s population, traveling to airports in PLC territory may not be an option.[...]

Throughout the war, the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly bombed hospitals. (The United States provided arms, intelligence, training, maintenance, and political support for the coalition. While the Biden administration said it suspended support for “offensive” operations in 2021, the United States continued to send arms.) In November 2015, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that it was aware of “close to a hundred” incidents where the Saudi-led coalition attacked health-care facilities over an eight month period. In January 2016, an MSF-supported hospital in Razeh, in northern Yemen, was hit with a coalition projectile, killing six people. Another bombing of an MSF-operated hospital in Hajja province in August 2016 killed at least 11 people.[…]

“The health system in Yemen has completely collapsed,” he said. “Very few public hospitals are operational.”[…] Key materials used to treat cancer are either unavailable or in extremely limited supply. For example, Dr. Alhadi said radioactive iodine, commonly used to treat thyroid cancer, “is not widely available in Yemen due to the ongoing conflict and blockade.”[...]

The Health Ministry of Sana’a told us that radioactive iodine has been banned from import into Houthi-controlled areas.When we reached out to the State Department to confirm this ban and to request a full list of items that are prohibited from import, a spokesperson referred us to the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) for Yemen.

UNVIM, which did not respond to a request for comment, is the UN inspection body tasked with facilitating the transport of non-humanitarian goods into Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen, by verifying that these goods do not violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 2216. That resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia, places an arms embargo on the Houthis. Once UNVIM grants clearance, the “internationally recognized government of Yemen,” now the PLC, gets the final say over which goods can enter ports in Houthi-controlled areas.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have exerted considerable influence over the “internationally recognized government of Yemen” since this resolution was implemented at the start of the war. The resolution has been a key means these countries have used to impose the blockade, alongside the bombing of airports and ports, and the placement of Saudi warships in Yemeni waters.

Shireen Al-Adeimi is an academic and nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute who has campaigned to end US support for the Saudi-led war and blockade. She said that, given the role of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in influencing the PLC, and given past coalition action to block humanitarian aid, this amounts to foreign control over what goes into and out of Yemen’s ports in these areas. “A blockade is an act of war,” she said.[...]

The war has been defined by a lack of accountability and transparency, including from the United States, a fact acknowledged by the US government’s own internal watchdog. A June 2022 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the departments of Defense and State “have not fully determined the extent to which US military support has contributed to civilian harm in Yemen.”[...]

There have been some reports that the United States may be “slow-walking” peace negotiations by introducing conditions for a deal. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has signaled that it remains a partner of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and in August 2022 approved $5 billion in total arms sales to both countries. This comes on top of at least $54.6 billion in military support to these countries from 2015 to 2021, according to the GAO.[...]

With a presidential campaign ramping up, Biden has an incentive to emphasize relief and openness in Yemen; the US role in the humanitarian crisis—including rolling out the red carpet for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last year, and ongoing weapons sales—goes against the president’s claims to embrace human rights as a foreign policy principle.

27 Jul 23

[the-l-is-silent-yall]

My full chapter title list (in theory) for book 10 of my Mihaly series!

Subject to change as it's not posted yet, chapter 10 might get split into a two-parter depending on how the length is looking compared to the other chapters when I get there

I'd also like to reveal that the book title is called...drumroll please...

Pitching In

Summary: Night Swan stepped to a new low - using Mihaly and Liza's kids as bait, and then using Mihaly and Liza themselves as bait, she captured ALL the Just Dancers, her own son included! With one of their closest, most powerful companions taken as well, no one's left to save them. Except, of course, their old friends from all around, willing to do whatever they can to help, no matter how small. Can they take the lead and save the Just Dancers?

Note that while the description sounds a LOT like a JD24 story mode inspired thing, this idea has been in the works since roughly late April/early May of 2023. Even though it ended up being kiiinda close to Swan Lake/Tainted Love, I decided to roll with it anyway, because why let a cool angst idea go to waste?

[h1nds]

Ran the statistics a couple of days ago on Gavi/Pedri and who is bottom/top.

Gavi (bottom): 111 fics, 18.7% of the total.

Pedri (bottom): 65 fics, 10.9% of the total.

In three fics, both of them top and bottom.

these are not exact numbers, because I think I counted a couple where it wasn’t explicit. I also did not investigate the Chinese language fics unless it was explicitly listed in the tags because those are way too difficult to understand through google translate.

Bottom Gavi is from a variety of authors, many of which tend to overtly feminize him to the point of character slander and aggressify Pedri, also to the point of character slander. (I say this as an enthusiastic bottom gavi fan). Bottom Pedri is almost all from about 7-9 authors, which are better written than most of the bottom gavi fics but which (imo) are still written in a suffocating manner focusing mostly on vague emotions that I don’t enjoy either and which also don’t feel well characterized (as much as RPF can be).

(Having disclaimed my bottom gavi fan status, there are bottom Pedri fics that are good (itsjustthat is one such author), so it is not just because it is bottom Pedri).

Timeline: originally Gavi was always the bottom. By around April-May 2023 that changed and there was a surge in bottom Pedri fics. Around August-September 2023 there was another surge in bottom Gavi fics. Since then, bottom Pedri has continued to grow and the current trend seems to be (roughly) around 55-60% bottom Gavi and 40-45% bottom Pedri in new fics.

More controversial opinions from me: would prefer there to be more better written bottom Gavi fics (gold standard is Strawberry Swing by itsjustthat) and more switch fics for them, as imo both are bottoms, tho ofc I feel that Gavi is more bottom. I also heavily dislike reading either of them being asshole tops (which at least one of them is in almost all their smut fics).

holy shit ���

we thank you for your service anon this was actually really interesting to read

[cindylouwho-2]

Etsy Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Report: Sales Still Down, But Not As Much

Above: Slide 8 from Etsy's Q2 Financial Results Call, © Etsy.

The company is doubling down on gifts, AI, and "the quality, diversity, and differentiation of our sellers' most unique inventory"

While sales were still down in Etsy's second quarter, the trend is slowly changing, and the number of sellers is dropping as well, hinting that the site clean-up may be working a bit.

We also got some key information on recent Etsy search changes, more on specific ways engineers are using AI, and some interesting details on the new Etsy Insider program announced the same day. This is definitely a report you don't want to miss!

First, here are the official sources:

the press release

transcript of the conference call

slides from the conference call

video of the call (click on “Webcast”)

my summaries of the second quarter 2023, and the first quarter 2024 for comparison

And the key numbers (covering April to June 2024, compared to the same period in 2023):

Sales on Etsy were $2.5 billion, down 3.2% year over year

Total sales for all 3 marketplaces (Etsy, Reverb, and Depop) were $2.9 billion, down 2.1%. [Elo7 was officially sold in mid-August 2023, so its numbers were included in the comparison totals]

Etsy’s revenue (including all 3 sites) was $647.8 million, up 3.0%

Seller service revenue was up 0.9% , while marketplace revenue was up 3.8% across all 3 sites

Net income was $53.0 million, down 14.4% “reflecting a $7.2 million retroactive non-income tax expense” that Canada is to blame for [note that Canadian sellers will now be paying a ~10% increase in fees starting August 15, with a 1.15% regulatory operating fee almost certainly related to this tax change]

Active buyers on Etsy alone stand at 91.5 million, up 1%

Active sellers on Etsy alone are at 6.6 million, up 300,000 from the second quarter 2023 but down 400,000 from the first quarter 2024. [Note that “active” means one charge or transaction in the past 12 months; many “active” shops currently have nothing for sale]

Etsy sales where the buyer and/or the seller was not in the United States were 48%, although across all three sites that is only 45%

What Sellers Need To Know About Search

As you already know, from previous quarterly results calls and other presentations, Etsy is moving away from serving up the most relevant search results - which often might be very similar in nature - and is instead focussing on the quality of the listings now. CEO Josh Silverman now revealed that they are trying to reduce repetition of items and of individual shops in the search results, as a push to show the wide variety of products and styles available on the marketplace. This part regarding recent search tests is worth reading in full:

"In the past, our search algorithms ranked each listing individually based on likelihood to convert, which often resulted in buyers seeing far too many similar items rather than a more holistic set. Here's some powerful data. We roughly cut in half the percentage of searches where a high percentage of listings seen on page one are from a single seller. We reduced the percentage of searches that have two or more listings that may appear identical by over 70%. We're incredibly excited about what this might mean for future visitation, as buyers see a more diverse and higher quality set of listings each time they visit Etsy. In addition to helping buyers, these initiatives also support our sellers, given how important it is that we nurture the best of Etsy across our seller base. Our latest search experiments resulted in approximately 70% of shops having more visibility in search, with the share of search impressions from small and medium shops increasing by nearly 30%." [my emphasis]

That's right: almost out of nowhere, Etsy is suddenly worried about giving visibility to smaller-volume shops with (possibly) fewer items. They were not only cutting down the number of times a shop can appear on page 1, but are also reducing the number of listings that look very similar. If they adopt some version of these tests in the future, this has the potential to harm resellers, shops that only personalize common finished goods, and shops using print-on-demand (POD) services. I know some sellers are upset that POD shops can still use mock-ups - I wrote more about that here - but if looking the same as other merchants may be a huge drawback later this year, suddenly original photos sound like a great advantage.

They didn't mention when they tested this, but we should assume that search changes will keep coming in this area. Given that Silverman also repeated the promise to soon provide better information about how our listings are ranked in search, definitely expect more volatility in the near future. For bigger businesses with tons of listings, you may want to think about how to get your lines into a broader array of searches instead of depending on competing with yourself in a smaller number of large queries.

AI: It Knows Better

Silverman's ideal world is apparently one where the corporation ignores sellers' own descriptions of their wares and instead lets a machine figure it out for us.

His own words are perhaps the best description of what I mean:

"...to better curate merchandise to improve the buyer experience and drive GMS, we're making it easier for buyers to find quality listings for mid-price jewelry, known as demifine, by having human experts determine what jewelry attributes are most important to a buyer's search, think material, gold purity, or hot trends, then utilizing GenAI to infer those attributes to create new search discovery modules and pathways, and incorporate this into on-site experiences such as landing pages. While this search is very much in progress, these better on-site shopping experiences, combined with targeted marketing initiatives, such as tailored social media content, CRM efforts, and improved data feed curation for paid and organic search, contributed to a 9% year-over-year increase in GMS for demifine jewelry in the quarter." [my emphasis]

To summarize: human merchandising experts figure out what the average shopper wants in jewellery in the $100-$200 range, then AI looks at listings and figures out which have those elements. [Sadly, that means that shops making less trendy items could have even less visibility in generic searches, which kind of goes against the diversity thing he was pushing when discussing search earlier.]

Given that Etsy's AIs currently tell me that my pendants are a completely different size than the actual measurements I've already written into the listing, and still sometimes think that something turquoise-coloured is a turquoise gemstone, I'm not looking forward to more of this. [I am intrigued by the fact they are trying to push sales of jewellery in that price range, though, so that's something.]

The New Creativity Standards

No real news here. As promised in previous calls, the July 9th announcement was about ditching the broad concept of handmade - which both buyers and sellers could find confusing - for different levels of contribution by the shop owner. The accompanying ad campaigns are about changing the public perception of Etsy and focussing on the shop owners themselves. Silverman thinks that emphasizing that Etsy has artisan goods may lead to sellers feeling better able to raise their prices.

Etsy isn't expecting the new standards to increase conversion, but instead to bring people who already know Etsy back to shop more often. Silverman also linked this to the search testing discussed above; showing buyers more variety should also encourage more repeat visitors.

Being a Gift Hub Is Still A Big Goal

Some sellers seem to think Etsy is going to give up on being a gift destination any time now, but that seems really unlikely, given that the proportion of orders marked as gifts went up 4% in the quarter while overall marketplace sales were down 3.2%. Furthermore, "we're utilizing monthly US buyer surveys to gauge the impact of our gifting strategies, and this data shows a significant year-over-year increase in prompted consideration of Etsy for gifts." The press release even mentions selling Etsy gift cards through third parties, although that hasn't otherwise been announced or discussed just yet.

As the company keeps adding new gift features - such as video gift teasers and gift purchase reminders - it's clear this is a long-term plan. If you haven't already, look at how your shop can innovate for the gift buyers Etsy is going after, because the focus on gifting is not going away.

"Etsy Insider" Is A Test; It Might Disappear, Or Change

While some sellers are upset about the new Etsy Insider program that will be offered to US buyers via invite only in September, there are a few facts you need to know:

It's a test. It may not go beyond beta, although they are hopeful.

Silverman is really excited about seeing if offering free US shipping will bring people back in more shopping situations. [Since shipping costs have skyrocketed but Etsy hasn't raised the US free shipping minimum set before the pandemic, this point does not bode well for sellers.]

The target Insider members are not Etsy's best buyers, but "people who shop only occasionally on Etsy. Think people who shop three or four times a year...We're targeting more occasional shoppers and seeing if we can upgrade them."

Miscellaneous

Expect even more pressure to use the buyer app, as 42% of sales now come from it. They are even running paid ads for the app, because shoppers who download it come back more and spend more on Etsy in the long term.

Chief Financial Officer Rachel Glaser is retiring, but not until they find a replacement for her, and she will be staying on as a consultant into 2025.

Offsite Ads are up, in part because they are expanding where they are shown, with way more social media ads. Those tend to bring existing buyers back sooner rather than attracting new buyers as Google Shopping does.

While Offsite Ads spending was up, brand spending was down, because they spent so much on hyping Gift Mode in the first quarter.

98% of sales now go through Etsy Payments [while that led to more income this quarter, it also means there isn't much real growth to come, with only 2% of sales going to other payment processors today.]

The new shop fee is cutting down on fraud and also the number of new sellers. Fraud tends to go way up in the fourth quarter, and they feel they are much better prepared to prevent it this year.

Sales were up at Depop, and Reverb continues to do better than the average musical instrument business.

The economy is still volatile.

Finally, while all of Etsy's top 6 categories were down in the first quarter, 3 were down less in the second, paper and party supplies were about even, and toys and games actually increased.

My Thoughts

It would be easy to criticize Etsy for not managing to increase sales again this quarter, and for expecting to be slightly down in the third quarter as well, but the truth is lots of non-essential ecommerce is still down or struggling. Ecommerce stocks were down this week after several other companies such as Wayfair reported poor numbers. Amazon's online sales were only up 5% in the quarter, which is a bad result for them, especially given that they sell a lot of essentials and grocery items. Amazon revenue missed projections as well.

On the other hand, it would also be understandable if some people fell for the "increasing impressions for small shops/marketing true artisan goods/reducing scammy sellers" rhetoric. It sounds great, but to me it's all a bit too good to be true, especially given that the site just allowed AI art, and 100% commercial gift baskets and commercially-made holiday decor to be sold, competing with genuine handmade artisan creations. We'll have to see how much visibility wreath and pillow resellers get once they realize they are allowed now.

More importantly, Etsy might have tried pivoting a lot earlier instead of losing so much goodwill over the past several years with the increasing quality decline of the site's offerings. I guess someone at head office finally noticed all the articles and social media posts about how Etsy is just AliExpress-lite with a veneer of handmade now. The time to retain core buyers instead of disappointing them arrived well before 2024. What took them so long?

In other news, it's looking there will not just be new insights for Etsy search coming soon, but also actual new changes to search. Silverman discussed the search tests as if they were the plan going forward, while still calling them tests. The increased use of AI to identify attributes for listings is disturbing, given how horrid Etsy has been at this for years now, but no one should be surprised. Expect a lot more of this, and expect it to disrupt traffic for some.

Wanting more diverse search results is actually great if it works and shows people what they are searching for. That doesn't always happen right now, of course. Getting rid of some mock-ups is also a strong idea, as long as Etsy follows through and makes the correct creativity standards very evident to shoppers, thereby elevating items sellers truly made by hand over simple POD. Right now, though, the creativity standards are frequently applied incorrectly, and way too many handmade shops are having items removed when they have done nothing wrong. Without an effective way to appeal bad image bot decisions, many of the proposals might harm more legitimate shop owners than they help.

I wish I felt like Etsy could truly pull this out of the fire, but we should not be surprised if the final 5 months of this year give us buckets of chaos randomly tossed about various features on the site, and even more instability for many sellers. Plan for major disruptions while still hoping for improvements.

[pandemic-info]

As Recommendations for Isolation End, How Common is Long COVID? | KFF

April 2024

rates of long COVID remain steady and 7% of all adults—roughly 17 million people—reported currently having long COVID in March 2024. The latest data show that rates of long COVID have remained relatively consistent for the last year, suggesting they may persist indefinitely unless new forms of prevention or treatment are discovered.

...

This issue brief describes the most recent trends in how many people have long COVID, rates of activity limitations among people with long COVID, and which groups have the highest rates of long COVID.

An estimated 17 million adults currently have long COVID. There are roughly 250 million adults in the U.S. population, 43 million of whom report ever having had long COVID and 27 million of whom report having had it in the past but not having it currently. Those numbers are on par with the number of people who have cancer (17 million in 2020) and almost as many as the number with coronary artery disease (over 20 million in 2023).

Those numbers are all based on self-reported data from the Household Pulse Survey, as reported by the CDC. The Pulse survey is an experimental survey providing information about how the COVID pandemic is affecting households from social and economic perspectives. Its primary advantage is the short turn-around time, but the data may not meet all Census Bureau quality standards. The percentage of people who self-report having had COVID in the survey may differ from rates of COVID from other data sources.

Among adults with long COVID, 79% report having any activity limitations from long COVID and 25% report that long COVID limits their activities ��a lot”.

Most Adults with Long COVID Report that it Limits Their Activities at Least a Little.

—

Addendum (commentary/opinion; anecdotal):

Worthwhile to note that these numbers are likely an under-count:

A lot of people don't know what Long COVID is, thus would not know they have it.

COVID cases are no longer being tracked (only wastewater data is up to date at this time; hospitalizations are a lagging indicator and even many of those go unreported as COVID), and it's possible to have an asymptomatic acute case (therefore unreported) but still end up with chronic symptoms long after.

Either group may feel that something is off (brain "fog" (aka damage, leaking blood vessels), fatigue, heart issues, etc.) without knowing about or understanding the link with acute COVID.

Furthermore, anecdotally, even people who have some understanding of the risk of Long COVID can be interested solely in the worst outcomes: those where activities are limited "a lot". So you don't get cautious behavior because this group thinks (or prefers to think) that such an outcome is a low risk for themselves. People in this group who have strong social and/or financial safety nets and believe they would receive care even in the worst circumstances are additionally mentally bolstered against taking precautions.

[idleglowingpixels]

October-December 2024 Updates - XXY, Monster High & More!

Me when I remember I have a Tumblr & AO3 I wanted to run on a regular basis, but haven't done anything with either for roughly 3 months:

ANYWAY hi, I am back on Tumblr (and soon, AO3) to drop some MAJOR updates regarding what I've been up to in my absence, my WIP fanfics, upcoming fandom stuff (mainly art but also some general theory/headcanon/etc. posts), and generally what I'm up to for the rest of this year!

Lin! Where Have You Been, Loca?!

I've been doing a lot behind the scenes! During the spring and summer, I've been working on a script for a personal project of mine. All of my writing time had been committed to it -- I've got over 400 pages of script done since March 2023! I met some new friends and reconnected with old friends too, this summer was very social for me.

I'm currently attending my first semester of college (FINALLY), and it's going well! The adjustment period was very long and tiresome, but I feel a lot better about being on top of my schoolwork and keeping things balanced. Now if only my sleep could enter the equation...

Since August started, I haven't written much at all because I was taking part in a college summer program. I wanted to have at least one chapter and/or oneshot fic completed by October, and thankfully I've manage to achieve that! It's been genuinely refreshing to return to my fanfics, and they make me wish I didn't have to be away from them for as long as I did. There's also just been so many different franchises that I've re-entered obsessions with, and would love to share with all of you. So without further ado, let's get to it!

XXY - Chapters 8-14

I have officially completed the first drafts of all 7 upcoming chapters! Editing doesn't take me very long to do, and now that I'm better adjusted to my school/work/life balance, I've been able to manage my time a little better.

To all of you who have been waiting for new chapters since Chapter 7 released, I'm so sorry for making you wait! I honestly don't know how the time from last August to now went by so fast. I still check my email regularly and seeing support from old & new fans of the fic during its extended hiatus has really helped me get back into the swing of things.

To celebrate the occasion, I wanted to provide the names of the next batch of chapters, as well as their release dates. These release dates are final, and will only be changed under extreme circumstances (WHICH WON'T HAPPEN WORLD ISTG--!!!) or if I accidentally forget what day it is (which has happened before), and in that case it'll be posted within 1-2 days after the release dates I've listed below.

Chapter 8: Gladiolus - December 7th, 2024 Chapter 9: Hyacinth - January 7th, 2025 Chapter 10: Spearmint - February 7th, 2025 Chapter 11: Coriander - March 7th, 2025 Chapter 12: Hibiscus - April 8th, 2025 Chapter 13: Violet - May 7th, 2025 Chapter 14: Jasmine Tobacco (INTERMISSION) - June 7th, 2025

Per my Monster High fics, I will also be releasing cover art for Chapters 1-7 (since I didn't get to before) throughout November, leading up to Chapter 8's release. From Ch. 8 onward, cover art for the chapters will be released the same day & on the same update posts as their respective chapters. I hope you'll be looking forward to what I have in store!

Monster High AU Updates

My Monster High AU is back from the dead with plenty of goodies this October! This year I was planning to write, draw & release a lot more for the AU, but since I haven't been able to, I wanted to make up for it during Spooky Month.

I don't have definitive release dates for this, but I have plenty of stuff I want to share, so here's a list of everything I plan on releasing throughout the next few months:

Updated Character Art & Bios: Frankie, Draculaura, Clawdeen, Cleo & Lagoona (Fun fact, I'd had everyone but Cleo done all the way back in 2022, which is why the art style differed so much from more recent drawings I'd posted!)

NEW Character Art & Bios: Clawd Wolf, Howleen Wolf, the Timberwolfs (3 characters), & a surprise character!

NEW One-Shot (With Cover Art): Taking A Lycan To New Salem

NEW Art -- Two pictures from the text conversations in Trapped By The Rain

My original plan after the main 5 ghouls was to create & release the bios of the main mansters (Deuce, Heath, Jackson/Holt, etc.), but in light of the upcoming fic release, I wanted to shift my attention to Clawdeen's siblings and the rest of their pack first. I've spent a lot of time developing them, and a couple of these characters are from G2 & G3 who I've altered to fit into my AU as seamlessly as possible! After these bios release, I do intend on returning to my versions of the mansters, as well as rounding out the rest of the lead ghouls in the ensemble cast (Including (but not limited to) Ghoulia, Abbey, Twyla and Torelai).

Since my scripts are wrapped up for the most part, I do plan on having more frequent fanfic updates for the AU in the forseeable future. How frequent? I have no idea! But I'm absolutely making this AU update much more than once a year.

Gravity Falls -- Billtober & Upcoming Fanfiction!

That's right, one of my all-time favorite TV series has re-entered my mind and I cannot contain it! Believe it or not, before XXY AND my Monster High AU, I had been planning to debut on AO3 with a Gravity Falls fanfiction.

With all that The Book Of Bill & thisisnotawebsite.com have given us lore-wise, I've had a new and revitalized version of that old fanfic idea (Name TBD). Unfortunately, due to the lack of attention I've been giving the aforementioned stories I've been working on over the last couple of years -- and because I want to release chapters once the fic is completed -- I don't (and won't) have much, if anything, to report on it in the upcoming months.

To satiate my need to make something for the show, I decided to take up the Billtober challenge created by @dailybill-cipher ! I'll be working on my sketches sporadically over the next month or so, and will post 7-8 doodles for every week that I finish. Again, this will be sporadic, so I will post whenever I have completed my personal quota!

I also have an old OC for the series I made back in high school who was in DESPERATE need for some upgrades, and whenever I finish a drawing for him, I can't wait to share his design! He'll be in my fic, but only really at the beginning and end, with an appearance here or there as the plot demands it (which is not much).

Miscellaneous

I have a Miraculous Ladybug rewrite fic in the works, whose notes have been collecting dust on my cork board, but it's something I intend to begin working on again in the next year or so. I despised S5's ending, and therefore, will not be continuing to view the series proper. I stopped at S5, so anything that has released for it after S5's finale, excluding the movie (I forgot if it released before or after the finale), I haven't seen. And I don't intend to see (I'm allowing exceptions for what I've seen already, because I need to research for my fic). But I'm really looking forward to returning to this old draft and rejuvenating it!

I may do some art for Five Nights At Freddy's in the near future? Nothing guaranteed, but I do love the franchise, so it's not like I won't talk about it ever lol. Also, I was gifted a copy of The Week Before, which besides my movie poster is my only FNAF merchandise, and OOOOOOOOOOH BOY AM I EXCITED TO RAMBLE ABOUT IT AND EVENTUALLY LET MY RAMBLES ESCAPE MY DRAFTS.

Sonic The Hedgehog 3 is dropping in December...And I will make it everyone's problem (/j). I'm highly anticipating this one, the trailers make it look great!

Ending Notes

For now, these are the main projects that I'm working on. I'm be working really hard to be better at consistent updates and such, so hopefully I won't be away as long as I was unannounced.

As always, thank you to my readers, old and new, for being patient with me. It really is appreciated and helps me continue these stories!

[tomorrowusa]

A news story which has not gotten the attention it deserves here in North America this week is the intense heatwave in South and Southeast Asia. While Trump chants "drill drill drill" what's really needed is to get the planet to chill chill chill.

Thailand is reeling under the grip of a severe heatwave with temperatures soaring to record highs in some areas and authorities warned of harsher weather in the coming days. More than three dozen districts across Thailand’s 77 provinces have seen record temperatures in April, generally the hottest month of the year, with new highs beating records held as far back as 1958, according to data from the Thai Meteorological Department. Temperatures have topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in 26 provinces this month, according to the agency. The northern province of Lampang has seen the highest temperature so far this year at 44.2 degrees, just shy of the highest temperature ever recorded in Thailand – 44.6 degrees – that was last seen in 2016 and 2023.

Thailand is roughly in the center of the affected area.

The Philippines, at the eastern end of the heatwave, is seeing a strain on its power supply.

Meanwhile, parts of the Philippines face potential disruption to electricity supplies as an intense heatwave fuels cooling demand and leaves power systems “overloaded”, according to President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr.

Schools in the Philippines have suspended in person sessions. There is talk of returning to an academic calendar which sees the school year end in March.

Students suffer in wilting heat, thwarting education efforts

In this audio report from ABC Australia, we hear how the current heatwave is closing in on the limit of human survivability in some areas.

Dangerous heatwave sweeps south east Asia

Any politician preaching increased use of fossil fuels is a danger to the planet.

The transition to sustainability may occasionally be bumpy but any other road leads to climate dystopia.

NOTE: For all you Fahrenheit fans, here's a quick way to convert temperatures mentioned in some of the links.

Celsius to Fahrenheit Conversion | (°C to °F)

BTW, Asia won't be the only place hit with adverse climate incidents this year. The 2024 Atlantic Basin hurricane season is predicted to be well above average in number of storms.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ellen Ioanes at Vox:

The UK is again preparing to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda after Parliament created a workaround to enact a policy the high court declared unlawful.

Authorities have begun detaining migrants to deport to Rwanda under the revamped plan. But the policy faces major logistical issues, humanitarian concerns, and the likelihood that a future Labour government will scrap it. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel initially proposed the controversial law in 2022 as a way to reduce irregular migration, particularly via small boats across the English Channel, which is on the rise in the UK. Her successor, Suella Braverman, also advocated for the plan until she was fired in 2023; Prime Minister Rishi Sunak then vowed to “stop the boats” and promised that the policy would become law. Sunak succeeded on the latter front. Following legal challenges that saw the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights declare the proposal unlawful, a bill declaring Rwanda safe for migrants and that limits the courts’ ability to adjudicate the country’s safety was approved as law by King Charles in late April, despite heavy opposition from the House of Lords. The government published a video on May 1 showing law enforcement authorities detaining people to send to the East African country as soon as July.

The law has been resoundingly criticized by human rights advocates, immigration lawyers, and Labour politicians who say it violates international law and is, to quote shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, “an expensive gimmick.” The law is part of a broader effort by Sunak and his Conservative Party to burnish their image as their government struggles to maintain support in the lead-up to a national election. Irregular migration has increased in recent years, but it’s not the driver of the problems that the UK is facing, including ongoing cost-of-living and housing crises. However, it is among voters’ top concerns, making the extreme anti-immigration law an appealing policy for a dysfunctional party struggling to maintain power.

[...]

The UK’s Rwanda deportation policy, briefly explained

The Rwanda plan has been a policy priority for two years now, and it’s outlived two prime ministers and two home secretaries. The ostensible goal? To deter irregular migrations via the English Channel and other routes, ostensibly for the migrants’ own safety, and to disrupt human trafficking operations.

Though the government has declared Rwanda a safe country through its recent legislation, it is the threat of being sent there instead of potentially receiving asylum in the UK that is meant to deter people from entering the country. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame claimed that his country was simply trying to help out with “a very complicated problem all over the world” when Rwanda and the UK struck their initial agreement in 2022. But Rwanda will be well compensated by the British government for its purported generosity (more on that later). And critics say it also benefits Rwanda reputationally despite Kagame’s autocratic tendencies (which include threatening or jailing political rivals, repression of the media, and changing the constitution to extend his rule), not to mention the UK government’s own concerns that Rwanda is not a safe place for LGBTQ refugees.

But immigration has become a key policy pillar for the conservative government post-Brexit. Former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, along with Sunak, all touted their tough stance on immigration, hoping to appeal to socially conservative party members who see immigration as a key issue. Sunak and Truss backed the Rwanda plan, which was first proposed by controversial former Home Secretary Priti Patel. The policy was deeply controversial from the start. It applies to the roughly 52,000 asylum seekers the government deems to have entered the UK illegally after January 2022. Under international law, everyone has the right to seek asylum, and countries are obligated to protect people in their territory seeking asylum under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UK was one of the original signatories to that convention.

But under the new rule, regardless of whether their claims are valid, asylum seekers can now be detained, and forced to fly to Rwanda, where their asylum claims will ostensibly be processed and they will be resettled. The plan “is effectively removing the UK from the asylum convention, because it removes the right to asylum which is explicitly guaranteed,” Peter William Walsh, senior researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox in an interview. It also could change the UK’s legal structure: the UK has threatened to withdraw from the court’s jurisdiction should it rule against the Rwanda plan.

[...]

Costs are already adding up; though no one has been sent to Rwanda and just a handful detained, the UK has already paid Rwanda 220 million pounds (about $270 million) to create infrastructure for asylum seeker processing. That number could skyrocket to more than half a billion pounds total (about $627 million) to send just 300 people to the East African country, according to a UK government watchdog.

Because of objections from advocacy groups, the UK Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), no migrant in the UK has ever been transferred to Rwanda under the plan. (One migrant has been sent to Rwanda voluntarily under a separate policy that pays eligible migrants 3,000 pounds if they volunteer to be sent to the country.) As seven people awaited deportation to Rwanda in June of 2022, the ECHR intervened and issued injunctions stopping the migrants’ removal and pausing the controversial policy. Though the UK left the European Union in 2020, it is still part of the Council of Europe, which the ECHR has jurisdiction over, making the court’s decision legally binding. And in November 2023, the UK’s highest court ruled the scheme unlawful.

Sunak, however, doubled down on the Rwanda policy, introducing emergency legislation to have Parliament declare Rwanda a safe country, as well as working on a new treaty with Rwanda to address the court’s concerns that asylum-seekers might be sent back to their home countries. That legislation, the Safety of Rwanda Act, passed Parliament in late April and unilaterally declared Rwanda to be a safe place to resettle migrants, paving the way for King Charles’s approval and the Home Office’s moves to detain some migrants who arrived by irregular routes.

The United Kingdom’s highly controversial Rwanda deportation plan proposed in a bid to curb unauthorized immigration to the nation has already ignited controversy.

The UK cannot wait for the Tories to be gone.

[mariacallous]

The synthetic opioid fentanyl was first synthesized in Belgium around 1960. With effects similar to those of morphine but a potency 100 times higher, it became widely used in surgeries and the treatment of chronic painful diseases. Meanwhile in the United States, unregulated and unprescribed fentanyl became a highly addictive and dangerous illegal drug—one that is 50 times stronger than heroin, with even a 2 milligram dose proving to be lethal to most people. But drug policy experts and government officials agree that there has not been a fentanyl crisis in Europe, its place of origin—at least, not until now.

In 2022, more than 70,000 people died in the U.S. of synthetic drug overdose, according to estimates made by the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By contrast, in Europe, the latest data from the European Union’s drug monitoring agency shows that 137 people died of drugs of fentanyl’s ilk in 2021, with most of those deaths coming from diverted fentanyl medicines rather than illicitly manufactured substances. Last year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reported that it seized more than 79.5 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. Such confiscations in Europe, although rising recently, have been sporadic.

But European governments are increasingly fretting that fentanyl and similar synthetic opioids may grip the continent and plunge it into a U.S.-style crisis. Late last year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his European counterparts that they either have an undiscovered problem with fentanyl or may have one soon. And scattered signs that the lethal drugs may be starting to spread into the continent are now prompting governments to act.

There are several reasons for the rising fears about fentanyl in Europe. The European Union estimates that most of the roughly 1 million European consumers of illicit opioids use heroin. So far, almost all of that supply has come from Afghanistan. But beginning in April 2022, the Taliban banned “poppy cultivation and all types of narcotics,” and as a result, the area where poppy flowers—from which opium is produced—are grown in the country shrank by 95 percent last year, according to a November 2023 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This has drastically reduced the supply of quality heroin coming out of last year’s harvest.

Facing the shortage, criminal groups are expected to either start supplying heroin mixed with other synthetic opioids such as fentanyl to increase its strength, or to replace it altogether with fentanyl.

“The experience in North America with fentanyl overtaking heroin in major drug markets is illustrative of how a cheaper and readily available synthetic opioid can easily displace heroin,” wrote researchers in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report.

European authorities are already seeing signs that organized crime groups are eyeing the trade of these opioids in Europe. The Italian secret services found that the powerful Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta mafia, which has been flooding Europe with cocaine over the past decades, is testing the fentanyl market in the continent, senior Italian government official Alfredo Mantovano said in March.

Another major concern is that Europe has an existing lab capacity to produce synthetic drugs on its soil. Europol, the European Union’s police agency, said this month that synthetic drug production and trafficking has expanded from mainly Belgium and the Netherlands to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. In 2021, European authorities dismantled 434 laboratories producing illicit synthetic drugs, according to the latest data published by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Officials conclude that if criminals wanted to produce fentanyl in Europe, they would have the capacity to do it��and, consequently, to trigger a crisis very quickly.

“To be frank, I don’t see how we can avoid it in Europe. I don’t see why criminal networks would avoid selling fentanyl in Europe. The question for me is not if it’s going to touch Europe; it’s when and how big the wave or the hurricane will be. European governments are fully aware of it,” said Pierre Lapaque, a board member of the International Narcotics Control Board, in an interview with Foreign Policy.

The European effort to prevent a potential outbreak of addiction to these drugs has happened on two levels. On the one hand, the continent is reinforcing and adapting its fight against producers and traffickers, including precursors (the substances used as ingredients in drugs). On the other, it is preparing on the health care front to prevent overdose deaths.

One key measure has been the creation of a new drug agency for the bloc, turning the EMCDDA into a full-fledged agency called the European Union Drugs Agency. This new EU-wide body, which becomes operational in July, will carry out health and security assessments on synthetic drugs, closely monitoring any developments across the bloc and helping with the adoption of countermeasures. The new agency will also monitor drug precursors and set up a network of laboratories to identify new substances and define possible trends in the synthetic drug market.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, also plans to speed up and broaden the way that drug precursors are scheduled in order to prevent criminal networks from finding new ways to get the chemical substances needed to produce illicit drugs. It is also seeking to improve checks at European ports. To this end, it has earmarked more than 200 million euros (about $214 million) to fund modern kits for scanning containers for hidden drugs or precursors.

“We are seeing what is happening in the U.S., and we are monitoring any development in the EU to make sure we can anticipate and disrupt any production or trafficking activities of these drugs,” said Claire Georges, Europol’s deputy spokeswoman. The EU police agency is working with the United States to get a better intelligence picture of which criminal groups may be involved.

“Those are the right responses,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This is in striking contrast with what, until several months ago, was the attitude of many European drug policy experts, who would often say ‘Look, we are not going to have a fentanyl problem because we didn’t have the same initiation through pharmaceutical opioids.’ I was always very uncomfortable with that answer.”

The EU is also seeking to boost cooperation with China, a major producer of fentanyl and its precursors. Chinese representatives held talks in Brussels on April 23 on illegal drug production as well as the diversion and trafficking of precursors and other chemical substances needed to manufacture synthetic drugs.

Collaboration with China is crucial for both the United States and Europe. A 64-page report issued in mid-April by the U.S. House of Representatives’ select committee on China defined the country as “the ultimate geographic source of the fentanyl crisis.” The committee has further argued that China encourages the manufacturing and export of illicit fentanyl chemicals and other narcotics through tax rebates and holds ownership interest in local companies tied to drug trafficking. Additionally, its security services have failed to cooperate with the United States when law enforcement officials requested assistance, according to the report.

European countries are also taking measures at the national level. For instance, Italy has started to monitor the import and export flows of medicines containing fentanyl and the chemical precursors of synthetic drugs, as well as the retail market—including on the web—as part of a national plan against the deadly drug that Rome unveiled last month. At the same time, it plans to equip police officers with portable mass spectrometers to spot synthetic drugs and precursors, both during custom checks and while patrolling the streets.

The Italian Ministry of Health has instructed hospitals and pharmacies to strengthen the protection measures against the theft of fentanyl and similar opioids. It also instructed doctors assisting patients displaying a range of specific symptoms—such as respiratory depression, nausea, vomiting, and vertigo—to consider that they could be intoxicated by fentanyl and could be treated with naloxone, which is an opioid antagonist, or other medicines that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose. Naloxone will also be provided to the police, who may need it as first responders facing an overdose or after inadvertently inhaling fentanyl during investigations. All ambulances will also be required to carry the medication.

In Spain, where there have been a few instances of drug dealers found with small amounts of fentanyl, some regional authorities are training drug users and emergency personnel on overdose reversal. The national government is also working to speed up the existing warning system on drugs by expanding free drug-checking programs across the country and the testing of wastewater to detect anomalies related to opioids, Joan Villabí, the official in charge of drugs and addiction at the Spanish Health Ministry, told Foreign Policy.

“We are monitoring in a very systematic way. When heroin hit Spain in the late 1970s, we were completely unprepared. It was a disaster,” Villabí said.

Universal medical care may have also protected Europe from a U.S.-style fentanyl crisis. In the United States, many people addicted to fentanyl began with prescription opioids, got hooked, and then when their prescriptions ran out, turned to the illegal market, where criminal rings provided them with the drug.

In the European Union, however, regulated and publicly funded health care systems have maintained a more limited access to prescription opioids, says Esther Gramage, a lecturer at the CEU San Pablo University in Madrid. The access to other procedures to alleviate pain also may have helped keep European patients away from painkillers. But there are growing reasons to fear that public health care won’t be sufficient to shield Europe.

[halfagone]

Writing Log Count - Year of 2023

This is a general look at what I did for this year. It doesn't fully convey all the work behind the scenes, but it's something.

To begin, let's take a look at each month!

January: 93,736 words February: 57,827 words March: 101,419 words April: 80,868 words May: 81,175 words June: 103,057 words July: 61,632 words August: 19,661 words September: 66,711 words October: 47,259 words November: 67,892 words December: 71,930 words

For a visual model:

(Tehehehe~ it's shaped like Batman's ears and everything!)

This gives us a general total of 853,167 words!! Please keep in mind that this does not include my co-written works or unused, unpublished drafts.

Let's glance at some of the major multi-chapter fics:

In this year, lex luthor's ascent from supervillainy to fatherhood saw a record of 278,198 words published over a span of 33 chapters. That is roughly 33% of my yearly total!! 13 of those 33 chapters came from January alone!

Off With [the Demon's] Head, which was published this year, saw a total of 15 chapters over a span of 3 months.

This year I participated in a total of 6 DPxDC Events. These are events are, in chronological order:

February - Ship Week

June - Family Week

August - Patrol Partners

August - Disney Week

November - Week

December - Winter Advent

Many of these events should be reoccurring, so I hope to see you all again in the coming year, whether it be through the fics I write or the ones you do!

There are many more things I could point out, but these are the stats that stood out to me the most. Sometimes it's important to celebrate your own achievements and everything you've managed to do. It might not seem a lot at the start, but over time, those little things tend to shine through.

This was mostly to cheer myself up, if I'm being honest. I've noticed an uptick in comments asking for sequels I never planned to give, or offering critique I never wanted. It can be frustrating at times to be a fanfic author, unpaid as we are, so it can be good to step back and just... let the stats do the talking for you.

We are doing a lot of work. And yes, it's voluntary work. But we can and do bring a lot of joy to other people's lives. Maybe people think we could be doing more, but we are already doing so much. Never let them tell you otherwise. <3