Alexa of Aether

My life is strange. Sometimes I write about it.

[alexaloraetheris]

So, I never thought we would get to this point, but here we are.

This little guy here is Remus. A year ago, he contracted Feline Leukemia Virus from Baby Kitten, who passed it on to him and Caramel.

Baby kitten passed away before we even knew what was wrong. When Caramel got sick, she got really really sick. We tried everything, from Virbagen to blood transfusions, but nothing worked. Two weeks of running to the vet every day, and all we were left with are broken hearts.

And now Remus is sick. He has a limphoma in his chest and he's probably going to need surgery. We can't afford to not try to save him.

Quite frankly, the treatment isn't cheap. Just the ultrasound, the blood panels and the biochemistry analysis cost 600€. The CT scan is going to cost more. And all of our credit cards and savings are thinning out.

And listen, I know we're all broke here. But if I can trade some cute cat pictures for a few bucks, even that will help.

My brand new Kofi account.

And some pictures of my poor, beloved, idiot son doing what he does best: sleeping.

[alexaloraetheris]

WE'RE BACK BAYBEY!!!

So I've been absent for a while, between seasonal work, my masters and other things that make my life difficult, but we're baaack!

First of all, Remus' treatment is going really well! He's lively and has an appetite, though he's well on his way to becoming a sphynx😅

One is just the patch where he was shaved for draining the lymph fluid out of his cavity that never grew back, but the other is actual hair loss. And in the other photo he still has two of his whisker hairs, but now, he doesn't even have that, poor baby.😥

But, re: his actual medical status, good news! The X-rays show an improvement!

This is the before:

The limphoma is (roughly) in red. The green is his LUNGS, which shows rather well just how big this shit was. You know it's bad when the vet's eyes go huge and then they immediately whisk your pet away to the ER.

But! This is the most recent one!

It's nearly half the size! His lungs are actually back in his ribcage, and his heart (blue) isn't completely swallowed up by the mass!🤩🤩🤩 For a while there we were worried it's attached to his vena cava but seeing this was a huge sigh of relief.

He's also lost a lot of weight, as you can see on the x-rays, and putting that weight back on is an uphill battle that we're fighting with his favorite wet food and baby food blenders (because the spoiled baby won't eat chunks, but whatever makes the food easier to swallow, we'll do it), and we've managed to gain 50 grams! That is honestly a win for us right now.

We can fight this. We're halfway there.

If you want to help, we are eternally grateful.

[tsalala]

“Nzuri, the King of Curls, known for his rare, naturally curly mane. He is one of the 7 Topi Boys in Marsh Pride.”

Taken in the Maasai Mara, Kenya Photographed by Chamith Kumarage

[starkidlabs]

Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.

With Choreography by Krzysztof Pastor and Music by Wojciech Kilar.

[gabri-jade]

Oh my gosh I loved this ballet so much, it was on the Wayback Machine last I checked, I need to watch it again if it’s still there

[headspace-hotel]

thought about that quote "homosexuality exists in 1000+ species, homophobia only exists in one" but how awkward would it be if we discovered another species that was homophobic

"homosexuality exists in 1000+ species, homophobia only exists in two. what? oh, humans, and the yellow-patched cuboid pinecone wren that was recently discovered on an island off the coast of canada. they're fucking bigots"

[ralfmaximus]

At last, a pill that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people

Drug arrives years after pandemic’s peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

There are good things happening in the world.

[meret118]

You can read about it here without a paywall.

Households exposed to COVID-19 now have an oral drug specifically cleared to prevent infection after contact with a sick person. The FDA listed Xocova, the brand name for ensitrelvir, as a 2026 novel drug approval for post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 following contact with an infected individual. The decision fills a gap that has persisted since the pandemic’s early years: until now, no oral antiviral carried an FDA-approved indication for prevention rather than treatment.

[warningsine]

[alexaloraetheris]

So, I never thought we would get to this point, but here we are.

This little guy here is Remus. A year ago, he contracted Feline Leukemia Virus from Baby Kitten, who passed it on to him and Caramel.

Baby kitten passed away before we even knew what was wrong. When Caramel got sick, she got really really sick. We tried everything, from Virbagen to blood transfusions, but nothing worked. Two weeks of running to the vet every day, and all we were left with are broken hearts.

And now Remus is sick. He has a limphoma in his chest and he's probably going to need surgery. We can't afford to not try to save him.

Quite frankly, the treatment isn't cheap. Just the ultrasound, the blood panels and the biochemistry analysis cost 600€. The CT scan is going to cost more. And all of our credit cards and savings are thinning out.

And listen, I know we're all broke here. But if I can trade some cute cat pictures for a few bucks, even that will help.

My brand new Kofi account.

And some pictures of my poor, beloved, idiot son doing what he does best: sleeping.

[alexaloraetheris]

WE'RE BACK BAYBEY!!!

So I've been absent for a while, between seasonal work, my masters and other things that make my life difficult, but we're baaack!

First of all, Remus' treatment is going really well! He's lively and has an appetite, though he's well on his way to becoming a sphynx😅

One is just the patch where he was shaved for draining the lymph fluid out of his cavity that never grew back, but the other is actual hair loss. And in the other photo he still has two of his whisker hairs, but now, he doesn't even have that, poor baby.😥

But, re: his actual medical status, good news! The X-rays show an improvement!

This is the before:

The limphoma is (roughly) in red. The green is his LUNGS, which shows rather well just how big this shit was. You know it's bad when the vet's eyes go huge and then they immediately whisk your pet away to the ER.

But! This is the most recent one!

It's nearly half the size! His lungs are actually back in his ribcage, and his heart (blue) isn't completely swallowed up by the mass!🤩🤩🤩 For a while there we were worried it's attached to his vena cava but seeing this was a huge sigh of relief.

He's also lost a lot of weight, as you can see on the x-rays, and putting that weight back on is an uphill battle that we're fighting with his favorite wet food and baby food blenders (because the spoiled baby won't eat chunks, but whatever makes the food easier to swallow, we'll do it), and we've managed to gain 50 grams! That is honestly a win for us right now.

We can fight this. We're halfway there.

If you want to help, we are eternally grateful.

[alexaloraetheris]

My son...

He has THINNENED!!!😭😭😭😭😭

[desinteresse]

Men who talk shit about gold diggers underestimate the grit it takes to put up with an insufferable man, even when money is involved. We should be thanking them for their service like they are veterans.

[little-trash-ghost]

Can't leave this in the tags..

[thestuffedalligator]

There’s a certain folkloric idea that if you die at sea, your soul is sort of. Inextricably stuck in the sea. Because your body is irretrievable, your soul is also irretrievable, down out of the reach of the gods who look at the surface of the world. In Norse mythology, they said that the souls of sailors who died at sea are caught in the sea-goddess Rán’s net and dragged into her domain, a distinct and separate afterlife alongside Hel and Valhalla. Davy Jones Locker. The funayūrei. A lot of cultures agree that once sea has a hold on you, even when your body has rotted and dwindled and been made food for crabs, it still won’t let you go.

Do you think we’re going to wind up saying the same thing about astronauts.

[baybelletrist]

Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

[brood-me-daddy]

Looks like the ACLU has a guide on how to take action in your community. They've already done a lot of ground work.

Get The Flock Out

Automatic license plate reader (ALPR) companies like Flock Safety are quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system. If ther

[mikkeneko]

Direct link to the toolkit:

Get The Flock Out Toolkit

[micamicster]

They should invent a glasses that you can lay on your side in bed wearing

[alexaloraetheris]

You mean contact lenses???

[zooophagous]

I have been a sheep caretaker for like two days and already I'm like. Wow. I get it.

I get why these were some of the earliest mammals to ever be domesticated. They look up to humans with this sort of dumb but all at once innocent and pure and trusting expression. They're happy to see you. They follow you around. They like to be rubbed under their chins. Maybe its just some latent Scottish highland shepherd DNA I still have in me but I look at my sheep charges and suddenly I see why the love of God for humanity is so often described as a shepherd and his sheep. I'd fight a wolf for these guys. I'd go way the Hell out of my way for them. I'd carry their young for miles on my own back.

[upward-bound]

nearly 80k reblogs and how many of you eat lamb

[zooophagous]

The ancient shepherds I'm referencing also ate lamb lol

[bebewrites]

genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almos

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.

[saltedweather]

so this is what gets me.

“A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information,” it continues.

“Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.”

This is, pretty much, true except for a few factors, and two questions. The questions first.

First: why are they pulping the remains. Scanning pages doesn't destroy them. There is nothing stopping them from boxing up the pages and either re-selling them or donating them to an archive, besides maybe not wanting their competitors to be able to buy them. Why on EARTH are they pulping the pages after scanning?

Because this is the minor factor – sometimes, an old book is MORE than just a delivery system. There can be information in the book that a scanner doesn't catch. Texture. Material. Things (flowers &c) preserved between the pages. Etc.

Second. Are they, in fact, keeping the data of the scanned books, separate from their LLMs. We all know by now that LLMs do not retrieve intact information from their databases. Are their databases accessible as archives themselves? Because if not, they ARE destroying the contents of a book that may be the only copy of the information contained within it.

If they're scanning these books and keeping them as a digitized archive, as WELL AS feeding the scans to an LLM, then again: they could easily make those digital scans available to archivists and public audiences. If not, then... yeah, they're not just drstroying a physical book, they're destroying the information within it, because LLMs do not, again, retrieve data intact except by coincidence.

I cannot believe that in the 21st century, with the technology to make archives MORE ACCESSIBLE, to access and include more voices in the archive than ever before, we are instead introducing a fifth silence. [1]

[femalegothic]

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

How Women’s Sports Uniforms Became So Controversial, Long Before The Paris Olympics

Nike’s viral track kit is just one part of the story.

Faced with restrictive and uncomfortable uniforms, these women athletes fought to change their gear

(cnn) — When Olympian Tess Howard put on her new uniform for Great Britain’s women’s field hockey team in 2021, she

Women’s beach handball team fined for choosing shorts over bikini bottoms | CNN

The Norwegian women’s beach handball team has been fined after players opted to wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms during a European cham

Top female athletes speak out amid Olympics, defy convention through their uniforms

Female athletes are breaking with their sports' apparel conventions -- if not regulations -- to prioritize their comfort during competitions

Women’s Uniforms: judgement of women clutters sports front

Sports Commentary Historically, women in sports have not garnered the same respect as men, though they perform the same tasks and play the s

An Olympic medalist who refused to compete in bikini bottoms says skimpy outfits are putting women off athletics

Pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw refused to wear the customary bikini bottoms and crop tops favored by the majority of female athletes.

Underlying Injustices: Female Athlete Uniforms

According to Women in Sport, 78 percent of girls avoid participating in sports while on their period. 78 percent.  CEO of Women in Sport, St

[torstherapy]

[tinsnip]

Per @spoonstrek

[alexaloraetheris]

Being a pretty out of shape woman at the gym at 10 PM is how I imagine being a limp-wristed artiste at a quantum physics convention feels like🤣 Everyone here is more qualified at this than me, but boy I'm here and you can't kick me out until I'm educated.

[viralfrog]