sweet roll
They also have an animal one that I linked a whole back on the same site !
its really crazy how fast food was billed as cheap for the price of being shitty and now its just like...... well with these prices might as well get an actually decent meal at a real restaurant lol
like if what used to be a 5$ meal at McDonalds is now 15$ why would i eat that when i can get actually good food at the local thai place for the exact same price. it actually tastes good, lasts longer, and im not liable to get a fucking pathogen from it
McDonald's was never cheap in my country. It was seen as a special treat.
A person says "It's a 100 degrees outside", and you have no idea if they are being hyperbolic or are just an American.
Objectively, Mat accidentally falling face first into a responsible domestic life is so funny. This man spends the first three books insisting that he doesn’t want to get married, doesn’t want any responsibility and have people expect things of him. Then Bam! He trips into being the general of a mercenary company and like a baseball from outfield gets hit directly in the side of the head with an orphan who’s adopted him as his new father and the final nail in the coffin accidentally getting himself legally married. When Mat says that there’s a bunch of tiny reasonable and unavoidable steps he has to take in any given situation that ends up spiraling wildly out of his control he means it. Like what kind of man accidentally gets a job, wife and child. The pattern was dragging that man about like a dog with a toy
From instructions on how to opt out, look at the official staff post on the topic. It also gives more information on Tumblr's new policies. If you are opting out, remember to opt out each separate blog individually.
Please reblog this post, so it will get more votes!
And again, please reblog this post!
So far: 34 votes, only 5 reblogs.
Full Transcript at the link; 3-minute listen.
Quote:
By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.
Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.
"We saw this immediately and it's very profound," says Braeden Charlton, one of the study's authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.
The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.
"This is a very real disease," says Charlton. "We see this at basically every parameter that we measure."
I feel insane seeing stuff like this because this research already exists for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a post viral condition caused by multiple types of viral infections that a LOT of people with "Long Covid" meet the diagnostic criteria for.
This article mentions that ME/CFS is a "similar complex condition" but that's DEEPLY underreporting the similarities. The phrase "post exertional malaise" (now researchers are trying to replace it but this article uses that phrase) was INVENTED for ME/CFS. It's the only known condition, before "long covid", that causes these kinds of symptoms after exertion!
It's good to know for sure that it's the same mechanisms at play when the inciting viral infection is Covid and not, for instance, Epstein-Barr or RSV, but half the time it doesn't seem like researchers are making comparisons at all, just reinventing the wheel and acting like "long covid" is a totally new phenomenon with no previous point of comparison. There are literally drugs in human trials to try to treat the mitochondrial dysfunction in ME, this dysfunction is well-established and fairly well understood and I feel insane when ppl report on long covid without mentioning that there is already a named and studied condition that accounts for this subset of symptoms!!
SOME researchers are drawing comparisons but they're largely ME researchers who everyone else is largely cignoring because of the widespread perception that ME is a fake disease for lazy women.
That same perception btw is why "graded exercise therapy" (GET), or exercise gradually increasing in intensity, cwas for years the go-to treatment despite MOUNTAINS of evidence that it makes ME patients sicker. Some end up permanently bedbound and unable to even eat or drink without a feeding tube/IV because the damage is so bad! The GET recommendation was finally changed only in the past few years in the US and the UK, and many doctors hate that they're not allowed to recommend it anymore, because they insist despite the evidence that ME/CFS is psychological and ME patients are just "deconditioned" and too lazy to do anything about it.
Now the same kind of "treatment" is being recommended for long covid patients despite evidence showing exercise is having the same kinds of cellular effects as it does in ME patients. "Taking PEM into account" sounds gentler but I'm deeply concerned about the reinvention of GET for patients who meet all the criteria for an illness that's been shown definitively to become permanently worse with GET. This mitochondrial damage is progressive in ME, and there's no reason to believe patients who meet all the criteria of ME after Covid won't experience the same progression if they force themselves past their energy envelope in such a systematic way.
PEM happens in part (it's complex) because your anaerobic threshold gets dramatically reduced with this mitochondrial damage. Every time you hit that anaerobic threshold, you're injuring your cells more and more. It's deeply worrying that GET is being recommended for long covid patients who meet the criteria for ME when research like this study keeps showing it's the same phenomenon.
If you have Long Covid
for the love of your remaining life
DO NOT LET THEM MAKE YOU DO GRADED EXERCISE THERAPY
I have Long Covid. I recently got in with a cardiologist who used exactly that word—“deconditioned.”
Maybe my resting heart rate spikes to 180 bpm because I’m just “deconditioned.”
She told me many of my problems could be resolved if I “just start exercising.”
I very, very slowly and painstakingly explained (for the third time in just this one appointment) that I am a marine biologist who, prior to having Covid (and then until three months after my infection), maintained a level of daily physical activity that would be impossible for most people. Even with severe Asthma that was sometimes disabling, I lived a more active life than most.
I told her that in July I was hauling in salmon nets by-hand, hiking 10-30 miles a day, commuting on a bike, transporting hundreds of pounds of equipment on-foot in the backcountry, and I’d recently begun training as a free-diver. I was diving in a 7mm cold water wetsuits in difficult currents between small islands with relative ease.
By October, going up and down the stairs could spike my heart rate to 200 bpm and I began experiencing fainting spells for the first time in my life. I tried to dive one day and nearly fainted in the water. I hadn’t even begun a breath-hold. I was just swimming. My diving partners had to rescue me and haul me to shore, where it took me an hour to recover.
It was like night-and-day.
She said, “you could start slow.”
I said, “what exercise is slower than using the stairs? I’ve read that exercise might actually harm me rather than help…”
She finally said, and this is a verbatim quote, “look, many of the women who come in here complaining about tachycardia are whackjobs. But you seem serious. I don’t know much about POTS—which I think you probably have—so I’ll refer you to my colleague.”
I was astounded that she 1. Outright called suffering patients “whackjobs” and 2. That she felt the need to specify that these “whackjobs” were women.
Presumably, men are perfectly sane and to be believed. Not like those silly women.
I could only be relieved that I somehow triggered her bias in a way that made her believe me.
What might have changed that? If I were fat, if I were a person of color, if I simply hadn’t lived such a rigorous lifestyle before that convinced her that now I’m “really” sick.
Until I stated my case, multiple times, this cardiologist I waited months to see simply decided I gave up my entire lifestyle for—what?? Presumably no reason?
She heard, “I’d do anything to be active again,” and her response was, “have you tried being active again?”
And then she gave me dangerous advice. My only saving graces were that I did extensive reading before I saw her and that I matched whatever patient profile she has arbitrarily decided to respect.
Healthcare for people with new and long term dysautonomia and fatigue is a nightmare!
Unfair as it is, you must do your own research and be prepared to self-advocate—tooth and nail. And even then, it may not be enough. But do what you can.
Not long covid (probably), but I recently had atypical pneumonia and I am still very fatigued, and have low grade fever in the evenings. From a person who worked part time and had quite a rigorous regime of physical therapy and hydrotherapy, including swimming around a kilometer twice a week, I became a person who can't work. Recently I slowly started working from home 2 hours a day, and I am exhausted afterwards. I was recently hospitalized for a day only to be released and told to try my best to return to normal, because they found nothing wrong, having a cancer marker (ca 72.4) much higher then normal and low grade fever in the evenings is perfectly normal, and I should do mindfulness and yoga.
This broke my heart. The doctor who told me all that was gentle, but me being trans, autistic and disclosing my ptsd probably left a bad impression. She also said she doesn't believe in CF and fibromyalgia because it gets to people's heads that they can't recover.
This broke my heart. I will look into CF treatment and diagnosis, maybe it will be helpful.
:(
If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.
(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)
Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.
Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.
Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and
But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.
So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.
But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.
But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.
So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.
You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.
The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.
Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.
Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.
You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.
Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.
Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.
Never mind that last part.
And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.
Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."
To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.
It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.
So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:
Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.
Interesting!
its official: tumblr is selling our data to Midjourney
we'd been hearing rumors about this for a bit but now its open and out there. some details from this article
it goes without saying, but if @staff goes through with this its going to be an utter shitshow and im all but certain the website will not survive it.
everyone go enable this immediately. it can be a bit hard to find because “visibility” is under blog settings instead of general settings or privacy. you have to do this individually for each separate side-blog
if you can’t find it on the app then the update probably hasn’t rolled out to you, and you’ll have to go through the web browser. what a truly wild way/time to implement this
B Ø L L Z
Angelic Pretty 2024 Spring Collection
Metamorphose Coordinate No.020 (~2001)
100434 お嬢様ヘッドドレス Black 3,400円 490117 クロス綿レースブラウス Black 17,800円 680322 フラノジャンパースカート Purple 22,800円 300222 茨プリント靴下 Black 2,200円 990124 ハートいっぱいストラップシューズ Black 24,800円
Fondly remembering the time that a cat owner casually entered their calico Maine Coon in a cat fancier’s competition and the judges lost their minds because the cat was 1) male and 2) able to bear children
Anyway here’s Dawntreader Texas Calboy as a silly lil kitten
Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles about the drama his entry caused among the Cat Fanciers that I thought was very earnest and sweet <3
And also some of Calboy’s children!
He is fearfully and wonderfully made!
ALT
I was about to say he would technically be an intersex king (not because I dislike the concept of trans cats, just bc intersex rep is sorely needed too) but I did some more reading on this icon and actually found the article OP referenced.
ALT
He’s not your usual male calico kitty as it turns out. That’s already cool and rare, but he’s even cooler and rarer than that!
ALT
ALT
Calboy is a chimera!! Which is really fucking cool of you ask me. The chances of having a male calico this way are slim to none, but the mad lad still exists! What an icon. I would die for Calboy.
Everyone in the tags of this post @ cat show judges
Originally I was looking for an adult picture of Calboy
(He’s so pretty 🥰)
But I also found a source for the article screenshotted above! And folks it’s WILD. It’s an incredibly interesting read if you happen to love hearing about niche hobby drama. It’s also just a fantastically written article!
The parts I find the most interesting are about how conservative the cat fanciers association is. This isn’t even all of the parts that talk about that.
People are so mad about this cat spefically because he has female colors. An animal who couldn’t choose how it was born. This is happening in Texas by the way. Hm. I wonder how they treat trans people over there?
Reblogging again for this crucial addition
wait i’m sorry
people are being transphobic. towards a cat.
what the actual fuck.
Also, not to derail, but “You know, we don’t let three-legged cats in here either”
Well, to put it politely, “Screw you and every single one of you who make that sort of decision”
@rainbow-lizzard was right! I think that a proper term here is:
(Who May Also Be a Trans King, We Don’t Know What Gender Means To A Cat)
Having XXY chromosomes (Kleinfelter’s), and having different sets of chromosomes (chimerism), are both intersex variants!
There are a lot of different lists of intersex variants. I don’t know of one that includes all of the variants on all the lists. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one. This one doesn’t show up as a Lovely Graphic Preview but it’s here on tumblr from @intersex-support so it gets my pick:
And about those three-legged cats.
That’s about the book; here’s the book itself:
Which stems from Orr’s 2018 Ph.D thesis in Women’s Studies, “Exorcising Intersex and Cripping Compulsory Dyadism,” which begins:
“Using hauntology as a linchpin, this dissertation explores the undertheorized connection between intersex and disability….
“Prolific intersex studies scholar Morgan Holmes explains,“[i]ntersex studies draws as much from the impulses, theoretical frameworks and critical lens of disability studies (emphasis added) as from the development of queer theory/studies and gender studies informed by feminist theory.”
And here’s one more activist whose work makes the connection:
“Our Resistance: Stories of Disability Rights Activists” includes Mariana Veliz Matijasevic, “an Argentinian Disability Rights activist and artist advancing human rights at the intersection of gender and disability. She is an illustrator and animation student that works under an artistic pseudonym that is Merion Lomari.”
[@merionlomari on Instagram]
“Mariana is a militant for the rights of people with disabilities and for the rights of intersex people. She is the co-founder of Argentina Intersex, an organisation focused on disability and intersex rights, is a member of REDI, a network for the rights of persons with disabilities, as well as part of multiple collectives, and groups working for the rights of people with disabilities and intersex people.”
“Duty was heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather.”
That is how the quote goes right