This Generic Drive Cannot Be Stopped

[1000-life-hacks]

[archeologist-prophet]

Lovely to see we have spaces where you can gain access to so much literature!

[heartpdf]

[hms-no-fun]

BLAUGUST 5: the scholars by car seat headrest

y'all heard this album? hot damn

i'm not a car seat headrest deeplore gal. despite being active on tumblr in their heyday and even reading cate wurtz's lamezine comics in the 2010s, i totally missed CSH. my first encounter with them was on a film set in oklahoma when the DP, who i'd worked with a bunch of times and was a friend of G&E, was wearing a t-shirt bearing the cover of twin fantasy. i asked him what the shirt was and he said, "I don't know. I saw it at the store one day and it spoke to me. I saw it and knew it was me." those are pretty close to his exact words. then on another film gig some months later, after the shoot wrapped for the day and we were hanging out on the porch of the cabin our crew was staying in, he was listening to twin fantasy and i asked him about it and he said it was one of the best albums ever. and this was like 2017 so he wasn't even talking about the new version. anyway i went and listened to it and liked it but wasn't like SUPER enthralled by it.

sometime later after i came out as trans and hadn't worked in the industry for a while, i went to party at his place and he was playing a live record of theirs and singing the praises of will toledo's lyrics and told me teens of denial was a stone cold classic. so i listened to teens of denial and THAT was what got me. i fucking love that album, man. it was the only thing i listened to for like three months straight. when i was writing godfeels 2 in 2019, that record was on the entire time. i still put on fill in the blank and sing it at the top of my lungs some mornings just to get myself energized and ready to work.

csh came into my life at an important moment. for a long long time my favorite band was Brand New, whose albums always seemed to come out exactly when i needed them, with an evolved aural identity that reflected the changes i'd undergone in my own life. in 2017 they released their first new album in a number of years, titled science fiction, i think in the very same month that i realized i was trans. then not long after, it came out that lead singer/songwriter jesse lacey was a manipulative sex pest with a long history of taking advantage of his young impressionable fans. i tried to separate the art from the artist but suddenly the undertones of ironic whiny male entitlement stopped seeming so ironic.

car seat headrest filled the void they left behind. making a door less open came out in 2020 when i was stuck in ireland for three months after lockdown, and it felt like the perfect soundtrack to that moment. in 2021 when i was writing godfeels 3.1 chapter 8, i finally dug into their back catalogue and how to leave town became my "sit on the porch, smoke weed, take notes" go-to. all of which is to say, i don't have a particularly long history with csh, but it's nevertheless a meaningful one.

so anyway, The Scholars. it's a rock opera. i'm a big prog rock person myself, i love concept albums (even though most of them aren't, like, great), so i was already excited. but this one's really something special. it's a mature, meditative album that speaks to a lot of really unique and specific experiences. the first half is a collection of shorter songs where one character confronts a figure of authority or controversy in their life, and ends the song with a different perspective than where they started. devereaux is about someone pleading to a deceased grandfather and mother for guidance, only to find that they shared his feelings of being lost in life and that this makes him closer to them than he ever realized. lady gay approximately is about a trans man coming home to an unsupportive mother who, in the process of an argument, realizes she was wrong to deny who he was and begs him to share his true self with her (the shock of which has him repeating over and over "am i dead?" only for her mother to reply "no, you're my son"). equals is about a guy getting a phone call from someone in his friend group who just got mega turbo canceled and ultimately deciding that even though what he did makes him uncomfortable, he can't convince himself that this person's guilt is the only thing they are and decides to remain friends with him anyway. that one in particular is such a pained and empathetic song, i really love it.

the second half of The Scholars is much more high concept, with two ten minute tracks and one twenty minute track. the latter is planet desperation, the thematic centerpiece of the album which chronicles the thoughts and memories of a man dying from poison. i don't really have time to dig super deep into it right now, so i'll share bits of a conversation i had about it with my girlfriend a few months ago. she liked the album but felt a bit conflicted because it seemed to rely on the existence of a loving god, something she denies emphatically. i didn't agree with this reading, and wanted to explain why. everything that follows is messages copied over from discord:

so re: the scholars and my perspective on it. this bit from planet desperation feels like the emotional core of the album, or like the moment when absolutely everything else has burned away at the moment right before death. as a dream, there's obviously no clear chain of cause & effect, the details don't matter so much as the tensions they indicate. that in between all of the things we're stressed about, around our own animal urges, even at our lowest points, there are people who will try to reach out to you and prove that they're as alive as you are.

those last lines from the monkey read to me like the naivety of a child who doesn't understand the permanence of death. the hurdy gurdy man talks of the tall narrow gate, which is symbolic in a "you can't take it with you" sense, but the monkey thinks it's a literal gate and naively wants to know what's inside "when you get back." and for me, the "it" on the other side of the door the monkey refers to isn't necessarily God but rather the distance between two people that we close by choosing to trust them. the gentle tragedy of this section is hyacinth realizing that the only thing that matters in life is the kindness of strangers

with hyacinth's soul later repeating "amazing grace" i don't take that as like, oh he went to Heaven and has been Saved. it feels more sort of ironic to me, and the way that it works in tandem with the rest of these lines is once again more a gesture towards the primacy of Real Things In Real Life, like the amazing grace that saved him was every kindness that helped him stay alive that much longer

so in that sense i guess i don't disagree that the album hinges on the notion of a loving god, it's just that to me the implication is that said god lives in these actions. it's not a force outside of us that dictates fate but is something we make when we love each other

i'm definitely reading my own spirituality into the song here lmao but that's the sort of emotional stew planet desperation stirs up for me. that section of it at any rate

RE: "the great speckled bird" i see it as connected to malory's mother talking about how his spirit visited her before he was born, how he came in a coat of many colors

and with another of hyacinth's dying words being "my gnostic soul cries out in question, when will i be born" i feel like we're more looking at a cycle of death and rebirth

with "you can love again if you try again" as a sort of cosmic mandate

there's definitely a lot of wiggle room for different interpretations

but the way planet desperation evokes all the other tracks just hits me in a really particular way

like i think there's an argument to be made that the great speckled bird is actually rosa from gethsemane

gethsemane's midpoint is rosa refusing the call only to be confronted "you can love again if you try again" and she nominally resolves at the end of the track to embrace her ability to take on other people's pain

like her experience of other people's psychodrama is as a self-contained diorama

to a hallucinating dying man, someone who accepts his pain and tells him "you can love again if you try again" is sort of a god figure

i'm almost certainly reading against the grain here lmao but i'm allergic to a straightforward christian-like interpretation

it sort of evokes jeevan at the end of station eleven, to me. someone who's willing to sit with a person while they die

OKAY PRESENT TENSE SARAH IS BACK TO CLOSE THIS OUT. i think The Scholars is a tremendous album beyond anything csh has done so far. it's literary in the sense that it demands closer reading. the best experience is sitting down with the lyric book from the vinyl, which includes a big illustration for each track as well as some unspoken stage direction that helps give them more dimensions. easily my favorite album of the year so far, every time i listen to it i find more to latch onto. if you haven't already, definitely check it out.

[shamebats]

From the OP: "If you sit at a desk or stare at your phone all day, this is for you. Here's how to undo the damage: - Banded Chin Tucks - Strengthen your neck flexors and fight forward head posture - Banded Pull-Aparts - Target your rotator cuff and improve shoulder stability - Banded Abduction - Activate the midline of your scapula for better posture - Lateral Deltoid Raises - Build shoulder stability and control - Banded Up-and-Overs – Boost scapular mobility and range of motion These simple banded drills will help you stand taller, move better, and feel stronger - even after hours at a desk."

Some of these are the same or similar to the exercises my physical therapist taught me.

[sam-keeper]

if it's so easy to use a technology that employs unprecedentedly massive corpuses of scraped text baked into complex vector maps designed to prioritize priority consensus answers to cheat on your coursework, erm, maybe that proves the coursework was bullshit in the first place? 😏

maybe next time academia will spend decades if not centuries designing its coursework in anticipation of this technology that's been viable for like two years 😂 🤣 you snooze you lose, people trying to make it so that doctors, engineers, &c have a minimum level comprehension of their fields!

I am very smart

[covid-safer-hotties]

I want to ask you this in good faith-- at what point do you think we can "stop worrying" about covid? Is there a particular statistical benchmark or qualitative indicator that you believe will show the covid pandemic is over?

I'm curious because you've responded to multiple people pointing out that the death toll & long covid metrics are lower than ever essentially saying that isn't enough to stop caring. So in your view, what is?

The benchmarks professionals have listed throughout the pandemic have yet to be met. If we could hit a single one, that would sure be nice. I'd stop worrying about covid if we could hit about 20,000 infections a week during a seasonal peak with reasonalble vaccine uptake (~70٪ or higher) of a vaccine that provides both mucosal and sterilizing immunity at reasonable levels. We're averaging around 20,000 infections a day in the 3-4 valleys we get a year right now, and that's without widespread wastewater testing from coast to coast and extremely low lab testing, so we know that those cases are an undercount. Not even 18% of Americans got the latest booster this fall, and the current vaccines neither induce mucosal immunity nor provide decent levels of sterilizing immunity (vaccinated people can act as unwitting asymptotic carriers of the virus) and (especially mRNA) vaccine efficacy drops rapidly after an antibody titre peak at around 2 months post vaccination. Current expert estimates for xmas day show us hitting more than 1,000,000 infections a day. A million infections a day would only take the national level into the CDC's new "medium" category. It's higher than both the Alpha and Beta waves. Of they were pandemic, so is this one. To act otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" and that is our current public health response. Even if covid's death rate remains ~1%, that's 1% of a minimum ~20,000 a day even when we're not in a peak. One in five of each of those cases will develop lingering viral disease that mirrors HIV in its viral persistence and immune damage. If any of these things I mentioned can be reasonalbly addressed and substantially lessened, and these waves stop happening globally every 2 to 4 months, we'll stop being in a pandemic. If the government stops stifling data collection and acting like public health is a personal choice, I'll relax just a bit, because then I could actually do a risk assessment and trust that my community has mitigations in place like air filtration, masked staff, daily tests for staff, etc.

The death toll isn't the only metric to look at, and those deaths shouldn't be dismissed just because we're no longer stuffing corpses into reefer trailers. Each infection is a threat to someone's life and health in the long term, and we're refusing to look at that reality and adapt. Ignorance and bluster are not a public health response, and y'all should be pissed that's what the government is doing, not going out for mimosas even though "I've had a 'really bad cold for 5 days'."

The effects are cumulative and ever growing. To act like those effects just dissappear or don't matter is eugenics.

[feminist-space]

"“It’s not your fault,” I told 16-year-old Cara, whose mother died of a SARS-CoV-2 infection [Cara] gave her. To be clear, the doctor confirmed Cara (not her real name) had passed on the virus and Covid was entered on the death certificate as the cause of death.

Cara’s mother had not been outside their home in the weeks preceding her death.

When masks were dropped in the “Omicron’s mild” phase of the pandemic, Cara continued as the lone masker at school to protect her immunocompromised mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy. It was tolerable until a child psychotherapist said on the national airwaves that some girls would continue to mask anyway “to hide their acne”.

His words were used to bully her. Cara left, but without support from teachers she strugg­led. Her parents pleaded with the school to use the Hepa filter they bought. The school refused.

Cara eventually returned to school unmasked, caught Covid and infected her mam. It killed her. Cara self-harms because she blames herself. She hasn’t been to school since.

Research shows that more than 70pc of Sars-CoV-2 transmission in households started with a child.

The incidence was highest during unmitigat­ed in-person schooling. In a recent paper, Dr Pantea Javidan, of Stanford’s Centre for Human Rights, described the ways children’s rights to life, health and safety during the ongoing pandemic have been falsely rendered oppositional to education and development.

Methods used to manufacture consent to forcibly, repeatedly infect children, according to Dr Javidan, include minimising harms to children (“kids don’t get it or spread it”, “it’s mild”) and moral panic around mental health and educational attainment.

Regarding mental health, in August a study looking at paediatric psychiatric emergencies found school openings – not lockdowns – were associated with an increase in the number of emergency psychiatric visits.

In May, a study found that children with and without congenital heart defects showed increased risks for a variety of cardiovascular outcomes (including cardiac arrest, clots, palpitations) after Sars-CoV-2 infection.

In July, a study found that children and teenagers experienced cognitive impairment 12 months post-Covid infection, consistently correlated with poorer sleep and behavioural and emotional functioning.

Last month alone, several studies were published documenting Covid paediatric harms.

One found that children and adolescents experience prolonged symptoms post-Sars-CoV-2 infection in almost every organ system.

Study co-author Professor Lawrence C Kleinman said: “We have convincing evidence that Covid is not just a mild, benign illness for children. This is a new chronic illness in children. We need to be prepared to deal with it for a generation.”

Another study analysing paediatric and adult hospitalisations found teenagers were at greatest risk of severe disease among all children. Yet another study showed compelling connections between viral infection and subsequent autoimmune disease. Early in the pandemic, some children showed negligible Covid symptoms, only to later develop organ failure.

Researchers found the children’s immune systems had latched on to a part of the coronavirus that closely resembles a protein found in the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes and GI tract and launched a catastrophic attack on their own tissues. “Experts” who claimed asymptomatic paediatric Sars2 infections equals mild were catastrophically wrong.

Covid is consistently a leading cause of US child mortality. Paediatric mortality has increased markedly with each year of the pandemic in the US, UK and elsewhere. In 2022, over six times as many children died from Covid than from flu in the US."

Tess Finch-Lees: If parents don’t fight to protect children from Covid in schools, nobody else will

“It’s not your fault,” I told 16-year-old Cara, whose mother died of a SARS-CoV-2 infection she gave her. To be clear, the doctor confirmed

[sam-keeper]

Joe Biden might be the first of America's inexhaustible stable of ancient war criminal ghouls, at least in my lifetime, to experience anything resembling the public humiliation that he has rightfully earned. I'm glad he's had such a completely grotesque and undignified fall from grace.

[maaarine]

@hatr @fasterthanlime

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Oh man I hope these services die an awful nasy death

[atotalmess]

[covidsafehotties]

[feminist-space]

"Filial responsibility turns on the notion that an adult child should be obligated to pay for a parent’s housing, care and necessities. Only eight of the 30 states provide that the child’s liability will be waived if the parent did not provide support for the child while a minor. For the other 22 states, a child’s liability is absolute.

These laws really hit home when a parent incurs an extraordinary expense like a nursing home. In one Penn-sylvania case, a nursing home successfully sued a son for his mother’s $95,000 nursing home bill. Pennsylvania has a filial responsibility law.

Texas is one of the 20 states that does not have a filial responsibility law. That does not, however, mean that adult children who live in Texas may not be held liable for a parent’s expenses.

Consider what happened in another case involving a Pennsylvania nursing home. In that case, the nursing home threatened to sue two daughters who lived in Florida. Florida, like Texas, does not have a filial responsibility law. However, the suit was under Pennsylvania law. The case eventually settled when the mother qualified for Pennsylvania Medicaid and the nursing home was paid through Medicaid.

Most of the 30 states with filial responsibility laws do not enforce them. That may change when more people enter nursing homes, and the Medicaid money dries up. Someone must pay the nursing homes, and the government simply will not be able to borrow, print or tax enough money to carry the burden.

Aside from a blanket law, there are other ways that nursing homes rope children into paying for their parent’s care. One common ruse is the “responsible party” designation on a nursing home contract. Some admission agreements define a responsible party as being financially responsible for the patient’s care. It is not merely a designation of a primary contact or medical agent for the patient."

The parent trap: Filial responsibility laws cause financial havoc for children

A thousand years ago, Gui Jujing wrote The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety. As the story goes, while grief- stricken over his father’s

[vague-humanoid]

A Self Defense Study Guide for Trans Women and Gender Non-Conforming / Nonbinary AMAB Folks

Published in coloration with Transfighters/Traction Project, A Self-Defense Study Guide for Trans Women and Gender Non-Conforming / Nonbinar

[wakewithgiggli]

The threead continues:

All people have a tendency to be unconsciously biased toward seeing trans women as untrustworthy, unsafe, lacking vulnerability, the problem to be solved rather than a person to be taken care of. And this is not less true in trans and queer and feminist communities. It’s just more unconscious, and more propped up with social justice, feminism, queer lib, leftist, and anti-oppression beliefs. This book is talking about this in context to a physical public situation of harassment, but this is true of social conflicts too, including on social media, in friend groups, in all kinds of situations. The unconscious bias also gets taken advantage of by people who know what they’re doing and hide behind that bias to make their mistreatment of transfems seem reasonable—again, often supported with social justice and anti-oppression rhetoric. TERFs aren’t the only people who do this! It felt so incredible to see this spelled out in print, plain as day, an actual book calling out a real thing I’ve experience more times than I can count, that all transfems I know go through, and that I still feel crazy for seeing because there’s so much gaslighting about it. You know how when you KNOW something is real, but you feel defensive about that knowledge, like you have to be ready to hold onto it, and then you see something confirming that knowledge for you in no uncertain terms and it feels like “wow maybe I wasn’t crazy all this time!” That’s how I felt seeing this.

The book linked is free to read and download. See the link above.

[punishedgwyndolin]

if you’re a transfem you should read this, and if you’re not you should reblog it for your transfem friends & followers, the advice in here is extremely good and the grips breaks are not hard to practice!!

[feminist-space]

I don't want to ask AI a question. I don't want AI to write my sentences for me, at all ever. I don't want AI search bars to be the default and I don't want them to be in such a way that I can't opt out. I don't want this kind of AI in my life and there is no such thing as AI art, there is only theft of art from human artists by AI scrappers. I don't want any of this, I hate it. Maybe in a world that isn't driven by tech bro capitalism we can see machines doing all the dangerous inane things so humans can be free to pursue life and creativity. But that's not what's happening right now and I hate it.

[bellybuttonblue2]

[anexperimentallife]

The best way to fight climate change is to destroy capitalism.

[softwaring]

this reply kills me 😭

[jenroses]

this is "if you can't afford to pay your workers you can't afford to stay in business". I'm sorry, if you can't train your AI without copyrighted material, you have no business doing what you're doing.

[living400lbs]

If you are using copyrighted material you need to license it and compensate the owner just like anyone else were you born in a barn?

[drst]

Saw this tweet on Blue Sky yesterday

"20 years ago we were suing teenagers for millions of dollars because they were torrenting a single Metallica album and now billionaires are demanding the free right to every work in history, do that they can re-sell it. The law only ever serves capital."

[curiousobsession101]

The law only ever serves capital.

[charliejaneanders]

Senator Admits "Kids Online Safety Act" Will Target Trans Content Online

The lead sponsor of the "Kids Online Safety Act," otherwise known as KOSA, has stated over the weekend that it will be used to "protect mino

This is legit scary. Marsha Blackburn is openly admitting that her bill KOSA will be used to drive trans people off the internet.

But Democrats are lining up to support it, and LGBTQIA+ orgs have dropped their opposition. WTF WTF WTF

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

A discovery in the muscles of long COVID patients may explain exercise troubles

Long COVID patients can experience severe energy crashes after physical exertion. New research provides clear evidence that there's a biolog

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."

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

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.

[rosslynpaladin]

If you have Long Covid

for the love of your remaining life

DO NOT LET THEM MAKE YOU DO GRADED EXERCISE THERAPY