Kitera Matar

My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.

This is what will happen when I die if I am good.

so mad that our takeaway from the mask thing hasn’t been “wait, so we could have been getting like 80% fewer colds and viruses this entire time?”

We really just accepted that “yeah, every several months we just feel like shit and do nothing but lay in bed for a week while so much snot pours out of our face holes that we have to keep 27 wads of tissue within arm’s reach” even though the solution was not only simple and easy but also offered infinite possibilities for fashionable accessorizing. I hate it here

i’m never going to stop wearing a mask in the winter time because 1) colds and flu, obviously 2) my lips don’t get chapped and bleed in the winter anymore. This is revolutionary. 3) it’s actually just common sense to wear a badass goth wolf skull mask in your day to day life??

now I can wear whatever clothes I want and people will still know I’m cool and goth

“oh no everyone not getting the flu for two years is going to make people’s immune systems weak and flu season will be worse!”

1) that’s not how the immune system works. 2) masking killed some strains of the flu because there was no one to pass it on to. we have the ability to MAKE VIRUSES EXTINCT with masks but oh noooo we have to worry about a piece of fabric on our faces. spare me.

You Don’t Have Immunity Debt

*stealthily sending this to folks I know who still won’t get vaccinated because they can use needlephobia and childhood abuse as their excuse*

Also (I’ve unfortunately lost the link) it turned out that one of the reasons “cold and flu season” exists is because the colder air makes the part of the immune system occupying the mouth and nose worse. In addition to making you a less effective disease vector, masks also shelter your nose and mouth somewhat from the cold air, making you further resilient to infection.

I know what you’re talking about, give me a bit and I’ll grab the link. But essentially your nose has immune cells living in it to help protect against infection, I think they’re intrasnasal macrophages??? I’ll double-check when I get the link.

I can’t quite remember for sure if they’re fully external, in that they’re not living within the tissues of the nasal passage but are instead hanging around on the surface, or if they still reside in the tissue like normal macrophages; but regardless these cells are very, very close to the surface of your nasal cavity.

In other words, when you breathe in all that cold air, they’re getting exposed to it directly. And they’re not built to withstand that, they’re fragile little cells that need to be kept warm in order to function properly, and by breathing in cold air you’re quite literally killing them off by freezing them to death. Those cells are there to defend you from all the microbes constantly going through every time you breathe, and breathing in cold air destroys them, and makes it easier for microbes to invade.

So you’re not imagining it, you really do catch more respiratory infections in cold weather. The cold itself isn’t making you sick, no, but it is rendering an important aspect of your immune system unable to function by killing off those macrophages lining your nasal passage.

I’ll go dig up the source here in a minute, watch it not even be macrophages lol

I’m a dumbass it was extracellular vesicles not macrophages lol, I think I was thinking of alveolar macrophages (tho there ARE intranasal macrophages but that’s not what the study’s about lol)

Anyway, extracellular vesicles (EVs) are little packets of any number of things your cells yeet out to go somewhere for any number of reasons. In what we’re specifically interested in here the EVs are responsible for helping deliver some genetic material that helps regulate different aspects of the immune system (helps promote antibody production for one example of something it does) and for binding to the virus particles and basically blocking them from grabbing ahold of your cells and infecting them by binding to the sites they use to attach, thereby neutralizing them as those attachment sites are now blocked off by the EVs and can’t be used to attach to the cell.

What they found was that cold exposure not only decreased the amount of EVs the body was able to produce, but also lowered the amount of genetic material each individual EV was able to package and reduced the ability of the EVs to bind to the virus particles. So basically it cut down how many EVs were being produced and also made the ones that WERE produced worse at their jobs.

So, yeah. Keep your nose nice and warm everyone. It needs it in order to do its job.

Study:

warm nose confers advantages??? *taking notes*

Can someone explain to me why wearing a cloth mask works against viruses when

1. Simply vaping or exhaling a cigarette clearly shows fine particles are able to penetrate it even when properly worn

2. Scientific research and even fauci concluding himself that masks didnt work nearly as well as the narrative said?

I am disconcerted by the fact that probably 8/10 people are unaware that viruses are significantly smaller than say , bacteria that causes bacterial infections. Masks probably are an objectively good way of preventing bronchitis, but i am very skeptical of viruses themselves , including corona chan. It is surreal to me that people are still pushing this idea 4 years into corona existing. And when presented with debate they often just berate and screech without proper counterpoints , despite being supposedly on the side of science (which should lend itself well to debate).

I think my biggest takeaway has been that if the governments of the world didnt push masks, then it would have looked like they were doing nothing at all and the public would begin to become unpredictable, riotous, even. All they care about is getting reelected and making more money as the only people who wake up wanting to control and ruin other’s lives are the same people who run for office which grants them those powers.

I’m pretty sure (someone correct me if i’m wrong on this) it’s just that even though viruses themselves are tiny, they’re not just floating around in the air naked, they’re in particles of snot and fluids that get released into the air. It’s the Gunk you gotta worry about.

@hammercarexplosion

1. Vape “smoke” and most of what’s visible in smoke is water vapor. That’s not the same as “fine particles.” You need a specialized P100 respirator with canisters to deal with vapors.

2. Covid travels via droplets and aresols.

3. You’re misquoting Christian news spin on the Cochrane Review’s finding that, at the time, there were not enough studies on how mask wearing effected the spread of covid specifically. You’re literally regurgitating right-wing dogma with zero basis in reality.

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane-review-says-about-masks-for-covid-19-and-what-it-doesnt/

4. For the love of fuck learn to do a web search. Look at all these scientific studies.

Yeah viruses do not fly out of your mouth all alone, it’s your spit floating through the air.

Jason Todd's not-Robin vigilante names

Fic where Bruce and Jason are separately thrown 10 years into the past and wake up in their younger bodies.

9 year old Jason is perfectly fine living on the streets, thank you very much. And is trying very hard to avoid Bruce like the plague so he doesn’t end up as another “good soldier” in this life. Not like Bruce even knows he exists, so it should be easy.

30 year old Bruce, on the other hand, is hunting Jason through Gotham. Because his baby could be SICK or INJURED or COLD and he’ll be damned if Jason doesn’t have everything he could possibly need in this life. It’s a fresh slate and he’s going to do it right this time.

Unfortunately, it ends like this

today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:

there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.

Google's trying to save you the time spent clicking on a site full of AI-generated SEO garbage by presenting the AI-generated garbage right up front! Such efficiency.

#so google probably uses chatgpt right? #because for some time now chatgpt has done this #become utterly insane and make up random bullshit #and nobody knows why

I was under the impression that we did know why: AI isn't actually a brain and can't actually think or understand information, so it has no concept of something being true or not, or what markers indicate truth or falsity, or how to synthesize information. It's putting a bunch of words in a jar, shaking the jar, and then dumping it out, and acting like that means the jar knows how to talk.

Like, in this case, OP asked for information about a recall. The AI knows that, throughout the entire internet, the word "recall" usually is surrounded by information like a date or a number, so it gives you a date and a number. It doesn't know what a date is or what it's for or what it means. (It also apparently doesn't know the difference between "recall" as in "removing a dangerous product from the shelves" and "recall" as in "remembering," since it smooshes the two together)

what's that thing again that you can put into ublock that blocks all the ai results from google?

On Github is The Huge AI Blocklist for UblockOrigin. You can import it, the linked ReadMe gives a description on howto.

[ID mostly by @homunculusalphonse : A photo of the Google search results for the phrase "cvs thermometers recall": "On February 8, 2024, CVS Health recalled its rigid tip digital thermometer with memory recall and fever alarm. The thermometers have a memory recall feature that stores the previous temperature. The item number for the recall is 375235991489." Both the links attached to this text are from eBay and Pinterest. This module does say "AI overviews are experimental", in much smaller font. /End ID]

The uBlockOrigin AI blocklist above is super helpful y’all.

Try this as well

https://udm14.com/

Being kink positive makes it really hard to be a hater of media rip. I used to love watching “the WORST book I’ve read this year” booktube videos but now its like I hear them ask, “Who is this werewolf smut even for?” Omegaverse fans, next question. “Why would you write this?” Because they find it sexy, can we stop focusing on the ewie yucky kink part and focus on the fact that the author used the word knot five times in a single scene? It’s bad werewolf erotica, but it’s not bad because it’s werewolf erotica like come on

quite literally the only thing i know about him is that he should get more hours of sleep

Leverage episode where they have to bypass security and burn the Gävlebocken

This would be part of a completely unrelated job in Sweden where burning the Gävlebocken only ends up being necessary by a hugely convoluted sequence of events, so that the entire episode everyone has to constantly remind Parker they are not here to burn the Gävlebocken, leave the Gävlebocken, do not be distracted by the Gävlebocken. Until we finally are rewarded with the delight on Parker's face as everyone on the team concedes that in fact we now must burn the Gävlebocken.

The fact that the villains really like Tim Drake

I love when artists draw damian in this pose. he is such a little Shape

my wife is right

this is the ONLY damian wayne design i accept by the way. brown skin, a crooked nose, dark green eyes and thick eyebrows. keep that white-washed monstrosity away from me

request from @devine-fem prompted by her post!

This is a distance of roughly 625 miles and we are going to assume that the speed does not include the time penalty of Spain having a different Rail Gauge than France.

At 890 miles of rail you can get New York to Chicago which would be the ideal first route, but what can you get with 625 miles that makes more since than Columbus?

Well at that distance you can get Raleigh-DC-Philadelphia-NYC- Boston

With intermediate stops in Richmond, Baltimore, New Haven, and Providence

That is a route that is not only good, but has potential to be one of the most used rail lines in the world if it were at high speeds and a cheap price

How about putting some more rails, especially high speed, out here in the midwest, so those of us stuck out here can travel without hours in a car or spending hundreds on a plane ticket?

I guess another route of equivalent length would be St.Paul-Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago- -Indianapolis-louisville

I remember when Obama put aside the money for a rapid light rail system from Chicago to Minneapolis. And the loathsome then Governor of Wisconsin gave the money back, and blocked the project.

Jason is trying his best to make him look vicious ; )'

Can someone write a fic where Bruce is on a JL mission and they somehow get a baby that they need to take care of until they find their parents. And all the JL members just cannot stop this baby from crying (this is before Clark has Jon so he’s pretty clueless with babies still) and eventually Bruce is like, “give them to me.”

And the JL is like “uhh, we don’t know if we should trust BATMAN with a baby, but at this point… fuck it.” And hand the baby over to him.

And Batman tucks the baby into his chest and softly bounces them, talking to them gently in a deep rumbly voice. “It’s okay sweetheart. Shhh, you’re safe.” And eventually, the baby doesn’t just stop crying, but falls asleep.

And the JL just stand there, gobsmacked. Because what the fuck??? Why is the Batman so good with babies??? And the rest of the mission Batman just has the baby because a) they don’t want them to wake up and start fussing again. And b) because Batman looks genuinely happy (as happy as Batman can be without deeply horrifying the JL).