When I say “free water, free food, free shelter, free healthcare, free education for everyone” in that “everyone” I even include the people I hate. Too many people get surprised at the idea that I do wish for the people I hate to have better lives.

When I say EVERYONE, I mean EVERYONE. These are things ALL people should have. If you reblog this saying “except THIS group” then you’ve missed the point entirely.

i want to remove the boots from necks altogether, not just be the one to put on the boot.

Don’t know about OP, but when I say it, this is not selflessness! It’s not selflessness at all. There are still people I would prefer get fucked over! There are really awful shitty people in the world!

But I understand that the tables always turn. ALWAYS. There is no final glorious revolution where The Right People will be in charge forever. The only way to ensure the boot will never be on your neck again is to throw away the fucking boot. Set the table so you eat well no matter which way it turns!

ALL OF THIS. Leave no one behind. We all deserve food, clean water, clean air, healthcare, housing, electricity, internet, and so forth. No matter who you are, you deserve to be able to access and have what you need to survive.

So yes, yes, yes to “throw away the fucking boot.”

The emotional response IS anger - it's your system's answer to injustice, the way your body knows "I Don't Fucking Deserve This." Let it move you. Don't let it control you.

Do you know how many people I'd love to guillotine? The violent fantasies coming to mind every time I hear some billionaire or politician is fucking over the peoples or the planet? It's there! And maybe one day we'll have to indeed physically fight for our lives - Many already have to.

But as a political system? We can't stand for prison abolition and executions at the same time. We can't look at the past and go "ok so one of the problems with past revolutions WAS authoritarianism" and then decide we can wield it right, actually.

We gotta kill that cop in out brains, daily.

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.

this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability

less "this is gonna suck", more "finally a test worthy of my skills"

...he is weaving the chocolate. Do you copy, this bitch is WEAVING CHOCOLATE

Revolutionary Girl Utena

Not to speak of how much from yourself you have to cut away. Your time isn't yours, it belongs to your spoons management. How many do I have today, how much will every action cost? Is it today a Bad Pain Day, a Bad Fog Day, or both? This balancing act, daily. This acknowledgement that doing one fun thing means days and days of recovery. Was it worth it? Reaching out costs! But so does being lonely.

Chronic pain means phantom pain - and the thing you're mourning is you.

virgin mary barbie doll from argentina

Bad news, cause OP either didn't know or chose to be vague about it: It's not an ACTUAL Barbie doll, it's part of an Argentinian art exhibit called Barbie: The Plastic Religion.

Good news: There's also a Saint Sebastian Ken

for anyone interested I found the line up

they are mostly christian figures

many are religious figures from Argentina and other places in Latin America (like la virgen de lujan or la difunta correa)

There, in the sunlit forest on a high ridgeline, was a tree I had never seen before.

I spend a lot of time looking at trees. I know my beech, sourwood, tulip poplar, sassafras and shagbark hickory. Appalachian forests have such a diverse tree community that for those who grew up in or around the ancient mountains, forests in other places feel curiously simple and flat.

Oaks: red, white, black, bur, scarlet, post, overcup, pin, chestnut, willow, chinkapin, and likely a few others I forgot. Shellbark, shagbark and pignut hickories. Sweetgum, serviceberry, hackberry, sycamore, holly, black walnut, white walnut, persimmon, Eastern redcedar, sugar maple, red maple, silver maple, striped maple, boxelder maple, black locust, stewartia, silverbell, Kentucky yellowwood, blackgum, black cherry, cucumber magnolia, umbrella magnolia, big-leaf magnolia, white pine, scrub pine, Eastern hemlock, redbud, flowering dogwood, yellow buckeye, white ash, witch hazel, pawpaw, linden, hornbeam, and I could continue, but y'all would never get free!

And yet, this tree is different.

We gather around the tree as though surrounding the feet of a prophet. Among the couple dozen of us, only a few are much younger than forty. Even one of the younger men, who smiles approvingly and compliments my sharp eye when I identify herbs along the trail, has gray streaking his beard. One older gentleman scales the steep ridge slowly, relying on a cane for support.

The older folks talk to us young folks with enthusiasm. They brighten when we can call plants and trees by name and list their virtues and importance. "You're right! That's Smilax." "Good eye!" "Do you know what this is?—Yes, Eupatorium, that's a pollinator's paradise." "Are you planning to study botany?"

The tree we have come to see is not like the tall and pillar-like oaks that surround us. It is still young, barely the diameter of a fence post. Its bark is gray and forms broad stripes like rivulets of water down smooth rock. Its smooth leaves are long, with thin pointed teeth along their edges. Some of the group carefully examine the bark down to the ground, but the tree is healthy and flourishing, for now.

This tree is among the last of its kind.

The wood of the American Chestnut was once used to craft both cradles and coffins, and thus it was known as the "cradle-to-grave tree." The tree that would hold you in entering this world and in leaving it would also sustain your body throughout your life: each tree produced a hundred pounds of edible nuts every winter, feeding humans and all the other creatures of the mountains. In the Appalachian Mountains, massive chestnut trees formed a third of the overstory of the forest, sometimes growing larger than six feet in diameter.

They are a keystone species, and this is my first time seeing one alive in the wild.

It's a sad story. But I have to tell you so you will understand.

At the turn of the 20th century, the chestnut trees of Appalachia were fundamental to life in this ecosystem, but something sinister had taken hold, accidentally imported from Asia. Cryphonectria parasitica is a pathogenic fungus that infects chestnut trees. It co-evolved with the Chinese chestnut, and therefore the Chinese chestnut is not bothered much by the fungus.

The American chestnut, unlike its Chinese sister, had no resistance whatsoever.

They showed us slides with photos of trees infected with the chestnut blight earlier. It looks like sickly orange insulation foam oozing through the bark of the trees. It looks like that orange powder that comes in boxes of Kraft mac and cheese. It looks wrong. It means death.

The chestnut plague was one of the worst ecological disasters ever to occur in this place—which is saying something. And almost no one is alive who remembers it. By the end of the 1940's, by the time my grandparents were born, approximately three to four billion American chestnut trees were dead.

The Queen of the Forest was functionally extinct. With her, at least seven moth species dependent on her as a host plant were lost forever, and no one knows how much else. She is a keystone species, and when the keystone that holds a structure in place is removed, everything falls.

Appalachia is still falling.

Now, in some places, mostly-dead trees tried to put up new sprouts. It was only a matter of time for those lingering sprouts of life.

But life, however weak, means hope.

I learned that once in a rare while, one of the surviving sprouts got lucky enough to successfully flower and produce a chestnut. And from that seed, a new tree could be grown. People searched for the still-living sprouts and gathered what few chestnuts could be produced, and began growing and breeding the trees.

Some people tried hybridizing American and Chinese chestnuts and then crossing the hybrids to produce purer American strains that might have some resistance to the disease. They did this for decades.

And yet, it wasn't enough. The hybrid trees were stronger, but not strong enough.

Extinction is inevitable. It's natural. There have been at least five mass extinctions in Earth's history, and the sixth is coming fast. Many people accepted that the American chestnut was gone forever. There had been an intensive breeding program, summoning all the natural forces of evolution to produce a tree that could survive the plague, and it wasn't enough.

This has happened to more species than can possibly be counted or mourned. And every species is forced to accept this reality.

Except one.

We are a difficult motherfucker of a species, aren't we? If every letter of the genome's book of life spelled doom for the Queen of the Forest, then we would write a new ending ourselves. Research teams worked to extract a gene from wheat and implant it in the American chestnut, in hopes of creating an American chestnut tree that could survive.

This project led to the Darling 58, the world's first genetically modified organism to be created for the purpose of release into the wild.

The Darling 58 chestnut is not immune, the presenters warned us. It does become infected with the blight. And some trees die. But some live.

And life means hope.

In isolated areas, some surviving American Chestnut trees have been discovered, most of them still very young. The researchers hope it is possible that some of these trees may have been spared not because of pure luck, but because they carry something in their genes that slows the blight in doing its deadly work, and that possibly this small bit of innate resistance can be shaped and combined with other efforts to create a tree that can live to grow old.

This long, desperate, multi-decade quest is what has brought us here. The tree before me is one such tree: a rare survivor. In this clearing, a number of other baby chestnut trees have been planted by human hands. They are hybrids of the Darling 58 and the best of the best Chinese/American hybrids. The little trees are as prepared for the blight as we can possibly make them at this time. It is still very possible that I will watch them die. Almost certainly, I will watch this tree die, the one that shades us with her young, stately limbs.

Some of the people standing around me are in their 70's or 80's, and yet, they have no memory of a world where the Queen of the Forest was at her full majesty. The oldest remember the haunting shapes of the colossal dead trees looming as if in silent judgment.

I am shaken by this realization. They will not live to see the baby trees grow old. The people who began the effort to save the American chestnut devoted decades of their lives to these little trees, knowing all the while they likely never would see them grow tall. Knowing they would not see the work finished. Knowing they wouldn't be able to be there to finish it. Knowing they wouldn't be certain if it could be finished.

When the work began, the technology to complete it did not exist. In the first decades after the great old trees were dead, genetic engineering was a fantasy.

But those that came before me had to imagine that there was some hope of a future. Hope set the foundation. Now that little spark of hope is a fragile flame, and the torch is being passed to the next generation.

When a keystone is removed, everything suffers. What happens when a keystone is put back into place? The caretakers of the American chestnut hope that when the Queen is restored, all of Appalachia will become more resilient and able to adapt to climate change.

Not only that, but this experiment in changing the course of evolution is teaching us lessons and skills that may be able to help us save other species.

It's just one tree—but it's never just one tree. It's a bear successfully raising cubs, chestnut bread being served at a Cherokee festival, carbon being removed from the atmosphere and returned to the Earth, a wealth of nectar being produced for pollinators, scientific insights into how to save a species from a deadly pathogen, a baby cradle being shaped in the skilled hands of an Appalachian crafter. It's everything.

Despair is individual; hope is an ecosystem. Despair is a wall that shuts out everything; hope is seeing through a crack in that wall and catching a glimpse of a single tree, and devoting your life to chiseling through the wall towards that tree, even if you know you will never reach it yourself.

An old man points to a shaft of light through the darkness we are both in, toward a crack in the wall. "Do you see it too?" he says. I look, and on the other side I see a young forest full of sunlight, with limber, pole-size chestnut trees growing toward the canopy among the old oaks and hickories. The chestnut trees are in bloom with fuzzy spikes of creamy white, and bumblebees heavy with pollen move among them. I tell the man what I see, and he smiles.

"When I was your age, that crack was so narrow, all I could see was a single little sapling on the forest floor," he says. "I've been chipping away at it all my life. Maybe your generation will be the one to finally reach the other side."

Hope is a great work that takes a lifetime. It is the hardest thing we are asked to do, and the most essential.

I am trying to show you a glimpse of the other side. Do you see it too?

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely, like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

"How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting."

*sets this down in front of you*

*rushes to a nearby bush and peeks at you through the leaves*

HOLY FUCKING SHIT I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING NOW.

Archetypal mad scientist who is an Ecologist and her evil plan is always something like put Baikal seals in the Great Lakes

she has an evil sidekick that provides her with ideas like "What if we created a powerful new form of Kudzu, called Kudzu with a Gun"

honestly I have a whole ongoing list in my head of things I would do as an evil ecologist including

i have that streak of mad scientist hubris in me that looks at the warnings of the past (bradford pears, kudzu, wintercreeper) and yet thinks "I can do better than all of those fools blinded by their refusal to see something greater...I can put tree ferns in Kentucky"

I think texas would benefit from a few spotted hyenas while we're at it

i'm also going to breed armadillos to be bigger and bigger sizes until we create a new Glyptodon if that's okay with everyone

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination! It's $Free.99!

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

@staff , I hope y'all know you've murdered Tumblr.

I'm not trying to be dramatic. I was there when LiveJournal went down as a fandom, art, and writing hub. Remember the causes of its painful, drawn-out, inevitable death - Bans of NSFW content, purging of accounts with no recourse, the CEO throwing tantrums and personally deleting users, making the site hostile to post in to maximize profit (back then, ads everywhere), and changes in the TOS that severely killed privacy.

There's a threshold for distrust, and once you've lost your userbase's good will, there's no way back. People will hop onto the next platform, and it won't matter if it's a wreck as long as it's not as bad as this.

You ought to know. It's why us ancient mummies came here and made this place a thing.

Happiness Will Come To You.

when tho

When You Least Expect It. Probably Late March

reblog for happiness to come for you in late march!

I reblogged this last year and I hung out with blink-182 backstage on March 30. Reblogging again because it worked the first time.

honestly, last year one of the best days of my life happened in late March

I really need this march

Help me out please March

I neeeeed this