girl with ptsd voice: hey, so something really bad is gonna happen, right? you guys are picking up on that too, yeah? The other shoe is about to drop, I just know it.
girl with ptsd voice: hey, so something really bad is gonna happen, right? you guys are picking up on that too, yeah? The other shoe is about to drop, I just know it.
girl with ptsd voice: hey, so something really bad is gonna happen, right? you guys are picking up on that too, yeah? The other shoe is about to drop, I just know it.
girl with ptsd voice: hey, so something really bad is gonna happen, right? you guys are picking up on that too, yeah? The other shoe is about to drop, I just know it.
It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.
tech news today is that Mullvad VPN has gone mask-off about being the major funding source for the Swedish Orebro party, who are racist nationalists. unfortunately all discussion of this is occurring on fucking Mastodon instances i can barely load
if you are a mullvad customer (as i am) and want to get out, here is guidance from this guy
If you don't want your Mullvad fees going to fund neo-Nazis - or @mozilla VPN fees, which is rebranded Mullvad - cancel and get a refund immediately
that's whose "free speech" the official account is talking about here, and that's where your fees go to
EDIT: Mullvad has a 14 day refund policy. But the message below is a direct call to ask for a refund if you don't want to give money to Nazis.
If Mullvad refuse a refund, call your consumer protection agency. And reverse credit card charges on the basis of deceptive refund policy representations. It's not like you ever want to be a Mullvad customer again.
archive copy of Mullvad statement: https://web.archive.org/web/2026062717
some people have reported being refused refunds that fall outside their 14-day refund window. my sub was 60 days past the payment date, but fwiw I emailed support with my account number and a screenshot of the above mastodon post and explicitly said "In line with your official account's statement, I'd like to request an immediate cancellation and refund on the grounds that I don't share the values of Mullvad or any other company that knowingly profits Nazis. If you're unwilling to issue this refund, please let me know and I'll be happy to escalate the matter to consumer protection." and they issued my refund without a fuss.
spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.
anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.
The amphibians are returning to the wild 17 years after a deadly fungus nearly wiped them out.
It’s been 17 years since the bright yellow Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) hopped through its native habitat.
But after nearly two decades of hard work, conservationists are finally reintroducing a new generation of the tiny fluorescent amphibians back into the tropical island’s ecosystem.
It wasn’t that long ago that golden frogs were staring down almost certain extinction. The saga began in the late 1980s, when an invasive fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) arrived in lower Central America. Soon, Bd spores spread throughout Panama.
The fungal spores had no difficulty traveling through water—and because golden frogs only live close to streams, they soon encountered the fungus themselves...
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
wedding dresses are white specifically so that if the bride goes axe-crazy you can rest assured you will see the blood stains all over her and it'll be sick as fuck
i don't know how to fix our communicative problems, you're the source of it and it's exhausting to be treated as irrational for not responding correctly to small talk, do you think you could help a disabled bitch out and not put the onus of solving the problem on me, the one who is constantly excluded and treated as a freak
and then when you point this out they're like "but we literally put up with you, could you do something for us please?" and it's like. you put up with me?
It’s just a matter of time before Sporothrix brasiliensis reaches the U.S. a CDC expert says.
June 17, 2026
"WASHINGTON — Microbiologists are used to looking at gross pictures and hearing scary statistics. So when a moderator of a session on emerging fungal infections at the ASM Microbe meeting uttered the words “somewhat terrifying,” it caught my attention. He was referring to a sexually transmitted skin infection that is becoming increasingly drug resistant. But what came next was even more horrifying to me.
Medical mycologist Shawn Lockhart stepped to the podium and began describing a fungal disease that attacks cats, causing oozing skin ulcers and worse, and spreads to humans. It isn’t yet in the United States … that officials know of. But the disease, caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis, has sickened and killed thousands of cats and infected more than 11,000 people and at least 200 dogs in South America since its emergence in Brazil in the 1990s."
...
"Infected cats develop skin ulcers and nodules and swollen lymph glands. If the infection isn’t treated with antifungal drugs, it can become a respiratory disease and spread throughout the body. “Without treatment, it’s 100 percent fatal, and even with treatment, it has a pretty high fatality rate,” Lockhart said. In people, it causes painful skin ulcers. If untreated, the disease can also be severe and may kill those who have weakened immune systems.
Risk of contagion is complicated because symptoms don’t always show up right away. Two members of a family who moved from Brazil to the United Kingdom developed the disease three years after the move, health authorities reported in 2022. One of the family’s two cats turns out to have been infected with Sporothrix brasiliensis. A vet who treated the cat was also infected."
...
"That’s because the fungi may live a long time on surfaces, Lockhart said. Up to 10 weeks, according to one lab experiment testing how long the fungi could grow on stainless steel discs that mimic the examination tables in veterinary offices. By contrast, Candida albicans, fungi that people naturally carry and that sometimes cause yeast infections, lasted 48 hours. Candida auris, a fungus that can cause infections in those with weakened immune systems, died after about a month, he said.
S. brasiliensis’ persistence means that if veterinarians miss a spot while cleaning, the lingering fungus could infect other patients. The good news is that the fungi is easily killed with bleach and ethanol, Lockhart said.
There’s no commercially available test for S. brasiliensis and cats coming into the United States just need a certificate from a vet saying that they appear healthy. That makes the disease easy to miss.
Because veterinarians may be the first to notice when the fungus arrives in a new country, Lockhart urged pet health professionals to notify local public health labs or the CDC if they start seeing cases of sporotrichosis. “There is an opportunity for it to spread quite easily,” he said. “We need veterinarians working with infection prevention and public health to make sure that this doesn’t get here and happen in the U.S.”
romaincrisis
izzy806
blakekathryn
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
