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autismserenity · 2 months

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

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

Five times as many.

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

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

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

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

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

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

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

#covid isn't over #covid 19 #disability rights #disability advocacy #wear a mask #covid conscious #covid cautious #mask up #wall of words #public health #health care

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girlfictions · 1 year

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— clarice lispector, the stream of life

#this quote makes me want to stare at the wall for 7 hours straight #on love #clarice lispector #words #quotes

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langernameohnebedeutung · 2 years

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American nutjob politicians will say stuff like: "We need climate change because tornadoes will carry us to heaven during the rapture! The terrorists are stealing Christmas!" and British politicians are like... you'll just casually find out they were 5 times asbestos eating champion of the Lower Prickwhiggle Club, their university entry interview consisted of throwing endangered toads at poor people from a bus, and everyone at their hometown knows them as that rich family whose Estate is the only remaining continuous bubonic plague vector since 1348 bc they traditionally wear squirrels for hats.

#American politicians will be like: terrorists are stealing our jobs at the steel-factory! Jesus build a wall around abortion clinics!#you're just waiting to find out which order they're going to use the words in.#Meanwhile British politics is a slap in the face at every syllable #uk #politics #nonfandom

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quietwingsinthesky · 1 month

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im just saying that if i had been in charge of s6 of doctor who, i would have fully leaned into the horror of amy's pregnancy, the loss of her own agency in it, the way she was used as a vessel to create a child she would never hold again, amy pond who never indicated once that she even wanted a child and was made to have one anyway against her will, and once they were done using her, they even took away any choice she might make about it in the future.

and i would have had this be a factor in amy and river's relationship going forward. how do you interact with a child you never knew, never got to decide if you wanted to have, and she's also already your friend, you love her as this miraculous, insane woman who has saved your life more than once. she's always known more about you than you could about her, but now you know exactly how much she was keeping from you. it's not like she could have told you, could have stopped it, but all this time, she was your friend and she was your daughter, and how do you learn to live with her?

#im just. saying.#amy pond my most beloved.#amy pond #river song #doctor who #this is a horror story. to me.#it should be. it should be.#THIS STORY. IS ABOUT AMY POND. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE DOCTOR RISING SO HIGH AND FALLING SO FAR.#THIS STORY IS ABOUT AMY POND. THIS STORY IS ABOUT AMY.#THIS IS ABOUT HOW NO ONE EVER COMES TO SAVE HER IN TIME. THIS IS ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE WAS SEEING THROUGH #THAT GANGERS EYES FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS AND BELIEVED SHE WAS THERE WITH THE DOCTOR. AND HE KNEW #SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH HER PREGNANCY AND HE DIDN'T SAY A WORD. THIS IS ABOUT AMY POND AND HOW SHE NEVER GETS ANY CHOICE.#WAITING IS NOT A CHOICE. WAITING IS WHAT YOU DO WHILE EVERYONE AROUND YOU GETS TO CHOOSE. AND YOU'RE TRAPPED.#YOU WILL WAIT WHETHER YOU COWER OR YOU SOB OR YOU RAGE AGAINST THE WALLS KEEPING YOU IN. YOU WILL WAIT. IT IS NOT A CHOICE.#it is the absence of one.

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favvn · 2 months

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I am once again thinking about how in The Naked Time, Spock has an emotional breakdown after contracting the virus and cries about the regret he feels for not loving his human mother vs his shame he feels for his ongoing friendship with Kirk, but before he contracts the virus, Spock finds LOVE MANKIND written on the wall. And it's been written and discussed to death about what it means, I know this, but it's telling that Spock not only loves in spite of his Vulcan upbringing and continued adherence to their customs but that he holds regret and shame deep down inside because the love is still there, regardless.

Whereas Kirk likewise has his virus-induced breakdown over the opposite: his self-inflicted pressure to not love an individual, either due to fear of distraction from duty, losing his position as captain due to the ethical conundrum of "How can a captain date one of their crew?" (no, I do not know the details of how Starfleet manages crew relationships, but I'm assuming rank is an issue, especially where captains are concerned), or even the unspoken taboo of the show's production era, his sexual orientation, hence his focusing on the ship as the only safe and constant outlet for his love. But after this, Kirk finds SINNER REPENT written on the wall, as if to say his altruism isn't the full truth, as if what he desires is what he denies even with the virus lowering his inhibitions.

And like my god. What foils to each other! How damned telling the literal writing on the wall is for them! I am going to eat my fucking sweater!

#trekposting #star trek tos #the naked time #spirk #hello trek fandom i have watched this ep 4 times already and each time i become more unhinged #it's just any time i think about the words they find on the wall i want to scream #if the writers didn't intend on spirk what is all this then #sinner repent for what???#trek meta

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bluerbell · 2 years

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who let past me decide that rendering a metal goblet would be a good idea 😭

#i am fighting for my life #wall of words

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autismserenity · 11 days

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Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.

Let me teach you too.

The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.

The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.

There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.

Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.

Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.

That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.

The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.

The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.

From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.

Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.

Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)

By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.

In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.

Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.

Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.

Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.

In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.

As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.

At least, that was the plan.

Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.

And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.

They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.

They were very wrong.

He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.

He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.

He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.

Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.

As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.

The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.

But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.

About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.

Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.

By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.

That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.

Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.

(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.

Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.

Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)

Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.

Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.

Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.

Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.

But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.

Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.

Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.

It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."

(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.

It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)

Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.

It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.

Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.

Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.

The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.

Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.

That is how this conflict came about.

A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.

And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."

As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.

Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.

#free palestine #free gaza from hamas #free everyone from hamas it's awful #we want to live movement #free gazans group #center the people directly affected #Ironically it's almost exclusively zionists who know about and support the actual activists in Palestine #because Zionism is a real Jewish term for self-determination not something you can redefine to demonize us #and the pro-hamas movement is inherently both antisemitic and anti-Palestinian #wall of words #jumblr #jewish history #palestinian history

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deuteragonist1 · 1 year

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Merthur really have it all huh. King and lionheart dynamic. Fucking hate at first sight then speedrun to trying to die for the other. Slow burn? Never heard of her. One of them wears gloves and one doesn't and I'm not even gonna bother to explain why that is top fucking tier. Lies and secrets that could bring about the doom of the kingdom. Obviously adore each other but will actually fucking die before saying it with actual words. The prince is a gigantic asshole who doesn't know how to show care or ask for attention like a person who had healthy emotional development as a child and oscillates between pulling pigtails and acting like an over-eager puppy or both at the same time. Domesticity levels previously unheard of. They canonically wear each other's clothes. One of them makes up words and the other promptly starts using them. Both are extremely into the other's specific brand of dumbassery. Their love language is fucking playing together. "I don't want you to change" fuck this fuck everything

#also i just thought about arthur using one of merlin's made-up words in front of uther at dinner or something #and uther is like come again????#also i said hate at first sight but i'm pretty sure that was entirely one-sided #it came from merlin's side in case that wasn't clear #arthur got tingles from this peasant boy insulting him and didn't know how to deal with it so he threw him in the stocks #argue with the wall #when merlin isn't there he is just so fucking lost #imagine being a servant in camelot like #oh here's the king. wandering about the castle in his nightclothes again #checking corners for his daydrinking servant #again #bbc merlin #merlin emrys #bbc arthur #arthur pendragon #merthur

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