#and are aware of its damage to the environment

[skiagrafia]

Oh no it seems that my institution is supportive of generative AI 😩

[chowadoe]

sonadow fankid blast 💥 meet Breaker! his twin is up next 🕺

primarily takes after Sonic, taking over the day shift of watching Green Hills and the 'hero' mantle. beloved face. helps grandmas across the street. avid errand runner. has helpful big brother/camp counselor vibes!

🌖 At first I named him Breaker as a shorthand for 'daybreak' (his twin being named Dusk) and thought it was stupid (bc Sonic would name his kid something stupid) but the more i thought about it.. the more it worked.. windbreaker…. circuit breaker…a breaker being a heavy sea wave connecting to Sonic's fear of water..breaks/brakes… mm wordplay

very aloof! enjoys life. loves hiking. he loves anything with a good view. prefers to take it a day at a time, if given the choice. has a curiosity and interest in the powers and skills of others

he's incredibly strong w/ powers including electricity + Chaos Control/time-space manipulation (and still wearing limiters)

he is extremely tactical with when and how he uses Chaos Control. Breaker wouldn't use his Chaos Control on new opponents, choosing to rely on speed and fistpower. If he did, he'd make it seem that he was just extremely fast getting places, using the shadows of his opponent and surrounding environment to slip between places

ever since he was a little, Breaker’s always come out on top. he’s always looked up to heroes, naturally- after all both their fathers were. and he’s settled into the role quite nicely, one of Green Hills’ very own, and just as beloved. all the townsfolk know him, all the women fawn over him, a true bonafide role model. But even his twin brother Dusk wonders/isn't sure if thats really what he wants or if its simply a role he’s acclimated to.

Breaker has a bit of an iceberg to his character. Most people see the very top layer, what they see day-to-day of the young aloof Mobian heralded as "Sonic and Shadow's son". there's something else that goes on beneath..

his powers essentially distort him from living the same wavelength as others. Like that moment in Sonic Prime where Sonic is going so fast, time has essentially stopped for everyone else. Tapping into this power has led him to believe he is invincible in ways, but not entirely. he enjoys all the scuffs, he enjoys what life has to throw him, his friends, etc. It keeps him grounded. as a result, he has a curiosity when he finally gets to dance with danger one-on-one like the average Mobian. he appreciates any opportunity to throw himself into dangerous situations because he enjoys the thrill of possibly getting hurt, as the pain allows him to feel 'mortal'.

One of his core principals is that he doesn’t want people hurt. He wants people safe. But sometimes it's unsure if thats the case or if its because he wants other people out of his way so he can set the stage between just him and his opponent.. and thus, minimize the collateral damage/cleanup.

He is rather tactical outside of battle too and does especially well in social settings. he already has the chops for it, being charismatic from the getgo- but he knows how to set people/things/his environment up in ways that would allow him to get that final push for things to successfully go his way without anyone being aware he had pulled any strings at all. he is incredibly observant, and always picking up on the finer details. his penchant for people-watching both comes in clutch as a both hobby he truly enjoys in the present and something that could help him in future instances. the "kill two birds with one stone" type. maybe three, if the winds decide it that way.

Whether Breaker wants to admit it or not, he cares about his image. Although his swagger comes quite effortless, he cares how the townsfolk perceive him, not just for the sake of vanity or narcissism but because he understands that people need an idol- they need guidance. That's what his dad was, and that's what he's for. It's what the stars were here for-- people had to look up to somewhere (or someone) for answers. He understands that he is something like a guiding light, a north star- but if they choose to refuse him, it's no skin off his back bc that’s their choice. He doesn't interfere with the choices people decide to make for themselves.

Breaker is a weird paradox character. where he's direct and very upfront, he is also so incredibly indirect about stuff too. Bro's always contradicting himself which makes it very hard for anyone to really pinpoint just what he's thinking beyond what they might know from the "hero" image he shows off once they truly get to know him.

Being good is a choice for him. But it's a choice he doesn't think about and something he's trained himself to wholeheartedly believe is instinct, as he doesn't believe himself to be a bad guy (and he isn't!) But it's like making a lie real and true.

Breaker, like his brother, has his own brand of isolation. Because of his powers, he lives on a different wavelength to other people. Always looking things through a window. He can look close enough to pretend the glass isn't there, that he's with there with everyone else, but there still exists that separation. So he chases after whatever makes him feel 'alive' and in the moment with everyone else.

[teaboot]

Hey! Bamboo toilet paper person here. Your response was very thoughtful-- I want to apologize for placing the onus of climate issues on individual action, haha. I work at a zoo that bills itself as being very heavy on conservation messaging, but as a non-partisan organization we're obviously not allowed to talk about the evils of capitalism. This means that in our programming, we MUST place the responsibility of stopping climate change on individual guests, encouraging them to make more environmentally conscientious decisions like buying reef safe sunscreen or reducing carbon emissions by driving less. The most "political" we're allowed to get is telling people to stay educated and vote in favor of laws that will have a positive impact on the environment. I think I've been drinking the Zoolaid a little TOO much recently, because you're totally right-- the vast, VAST majority of damage to the environment is caused by major corporations, not random people working around their own unique needs. It was also low key a little ableist of me to take issue with that ngl.

Obviously no obligation to respond to this publicly (though it's fine if you choose to do so), but I did want to thank you for your response and mention that it did get through the nonprofit mission-based-organization propaganda living rent free in my head haha. Cheers!

Hey, you work at a zoo? That is SO cool, aadsdggjjg@!!!

And hey, no worries, you totally had a good point about endless waste and trying to counter it where possible- Just from personal experience involved in the barest edge of the fashion industry, I really, really, REALLY hate the idea that, like... people can't access simple shit like plastic straws, even if they're the best, most practical, least-harmful option for them.... because a 12 year old made up some random number for a school project about plastic waste

Where, as a zoo person, I imagine you're already aware that the average sea turtle is WILDLY more likely to die from abandoned plastic fishing nets or ocean-dump grocery bags than accidentally get a straw inside it

So here we are, using paper straws!- which may be an improvement, or may not, I don't have that data, and construction emissions are their own thing- BUT WE STILL HAVE OCEANS FULL OF ABANDONED NETS

WHICH ARE OBJECTIVELY WORSE, but MUCH harder to get rid of, and as the average person doesn't USE fishing nets, it'd much harder to market as a "You, not me" sort of issue.

Cleaning up fishing nets isn't trendy. It isn't sexy. You can't troubleshoot a cute little trendy solution for it that you can market to upwardly-mobile tweens.

But a reusable water bottle? A cute canvas tote? A metal straw? That's a solution you can buy and feel good about.

Never mind that you need to use a single cotton reusable bag somewhere like a million times before the cost of its construction counterbalances the cost of a single grocery bag every time you shop- which, hey, some of us were reusing as trash liners for their wastebaskets, or bundle bags for donating clothes, or lining for our leaky winter boots!

If a better option is available, I'll take it. But as ZERO HARM is next to impossible at this time, I personally am gonna aim for MINIMAL HARM as long as I can.

...sorry, I didn't mean to ramble off again.

But hey, if your nonprofit is doing good things, feel free to shoot me a link! I can post it on my blog :D

(Link to original post for context lol)

[m1zisu4]

on sua and appearance

sua is shown to be sensitive about her appearance regardless of the intention or content of the comments directed at her. in official material, she becomes depressed and self-conscious when a classmate compliments her on her small face

the way the compliment is phrased bothers sua, because its intended effect occurs by way of comparison. generosity to the recipient depends on the speaker's self-criticism. the compliment elevates sua while sinking the speaker's status, which reminds sua of her relationship with her sisters—in a competitive environment where nigeh's favor was currency used to purchase social standing and to avoid punishment, positive feedback incurred their jealousy. sua apologizes to her classmate and takes responsibility for her perceived negative feelings about her own failure (having a large face), which echoes the ways she was made responsible for her sisters' "shortcomings" and resultant anger. sua's success threatened their standing, and they made her the subject of abuse in both anticipation and retaliation of their displacement.

i took sua's classmate's comment "i was trying to cheer you up" as her predicting that sua would be upset by the photo due to her sensitivty about her appearance. her compliment is an attempt to accommodate sua's emotional needs. however, it falls short because sua is tight-lipped about her relationships with her sisters and with nigeh and the breadth of the damage it does to her psyche. even positive comments dredge up memories of her sisters' harsh criticisms. there is no way for her to anticipate sua's true needs because she doesn't share them. this is a pattern seen also in her relationship with mizi; even when she's jealous over till and ivan taking mizi's attention, she refuses to admit it, and mizi has to guess what she's done to upset her. while it's almost certain sua never explicitly divulged her sensitivity (especially to someone outside the main group), i do find it plausible that it was readily observed by her classmates in a school wherein everyone is constantly together.

sua's older sister implements her knowledge of sua's sensitivty as a tool to foster her dependence on her (sua says, "back then, you were all i had. and that's why you scared me"). i won't get into it now but i really believe that it was, in some part, because she wanted to protect her sister from the horrors of the garden (though this love is complicated by jealousy, possessiveness, and deep resentment). she understand that sua relies on her, and specifically remarks on her appearance and physical habits when she mentions mizi to remind sua of that reliance. she comments that sua is "stupid" and "unkempt," disorderly and poorly groomed. she points out one of sua's nervous habits and implies that it diminishes her value—that her truest, most natural self is a blight to be masked or erased. sua becomes aware of herself here, and further constructs her persona by carefully regulating her self-expression. by forcing an association between hope (sua's aspiration to meet mizi, her view of their mother as "happy" or pleased) and fear (criticism of her appearance, reminders of death), sua's sister sets the groundwork for sua's habits of being closed-off, withholding, and possessive of her few joys

by the comic's end, sua insists that anakt garden wasn't the hell her sister proposed it was, because mizi loved her there. sua pities her sister because she never experienced the warmth real love gave her, even if sua herself met a violent demise. tamsyn muir's "it's finished, it's done. you can't take loved away," etc etc

shoutout to the GOAT whatafruit for translation!

[frostbitebakery]

LOUD.

“It’s a,” and here Cody bites his lips, scratches the side of his nose.

“A?” Obi-Wan prompts gently. Keldabe Kiss doesn’t, objectively, sound too dirty. What’s in a name etc. but when Cody had said, if Obi-Wan is game, they could try something, Obi-Wan had kept his expectations open.

“It’s a headbutt,” Cody wrings out of himself after another few seconds.

On the list of things Obi-Wan had, after all, expected to some degree, this isn’t one of them. He keeps silent. “You want to give me a concussion?” He’s great at being silent, turns out. “Or vice versa?”

Cody is already shaking his head, foot gently shoving his helmet further away from them. “No! It’s a sign of affection…”

Only in the Mandalorian culture, Obi-Wan thinks fondly. “Explain it to me,” he signs, eyes crinkling despite himself.

Cody huffs, leans back against the wall behind his bunk. Most of his armor is stacked on its stand. The helmet on the floor near them because Cody had been fiddling with the antennas when he’d gripped it with both hands, stared at the visor, and asked if Obi-Wan knew what a Keldabe Kiss was.

Obi-Wan sits cross-legged in front of him, restless fingers playing with the starched to death blanket. The mask is on and he wishes it weren’t. The last engagement had knocked the air right out of his lungs when a Hyena-class suddenly dropped down on them and delivered proton bombs on mass. He ended up gasping and on his back after the action was over, so for now the mask stays on.

Cody adjusts the hem on the t-shirt he’s wearing, the bandage no longer peeking out when he’s done. “I’m stalling.”

“I noticed,” Obi-Wan signs back, knocks his shin against Cody’s and lets it rest there.

“Growing up,” Cody begins after a few long moments where he’s watched their legs touch, “we’d sometimes see the Template put his forehead against Boba’s. Gently,” he adds, crooked smile for Obi-Wan’s concussion related fears. His voice turns wistful and Obi-Wan’s heart aches. “We didn’t— most of us didn’t want to be in his place. The Template hadn’t been popular with the clones long before he rejected us. But something about that gesture…”

The gentleness of it in contrast to the cold, neutral environment they’d been growing up in. The obvious affection of it had been calling them. One of the trainers had let it drop what it was named. And over time they had been able to put together a definition.

“You headbutt your enemy to get out of close quarters engagement,” Cody explains. “You have to be aware how you hit them so you don’t injure yourself while inflicting the maximum amount of damage to your opponent.”

“Is that why your nose is a bit,” Obi-Wan signs, pointing at the crook of his own nose just above the mask.

“Wolffe’s head is harder than his bucket,” Cody mutters, thumb stroking over Obi-Wan’s ankle absently.

The other definition, the one the clones had mostly embraced, the one that brought warmth and solidarity into their midst when no one else provided it, that one was based on affection. Clacking your helmets together after the heat of a battle, a job well done. Bringing your foreheads together to be there, to mourn together, to show the other isn’t alone. To remind the other they’re loved.

“It’s also a proxy for a kiss,” Cody explains, color high in his cheeks which makes Obi-Wan’s heart squirm in his chest. They’ve had sex a few possible and impossible ways and yet Cody is blushing over explaining a kiss. It’s sweet and touching and— “You can’t kiss when you wear buckets,” Cody says, “and sometimes you can’t kiss at all for various reasons. So it’s— it’s a kiss by proxy,” he ends, shrugging helplessly and aborted.

Obi-Wan waits as the question builds up inside Cody, firming the strokes of his thumb, the determination in his spine. He waits while Cody is stealing his breath.

“Can I kiss you?”

[path-of-grass-and-leaves]

Bioregional Magic: Working with Invasive Plants

UPG Time: All information comes from my personal practice.

Within a locally based practice, one might feel compelled to work with only native plants. After all, it makes sense to want to form relationships with beneficial plants that grow naturally in your area.

But what about that enormous patch of 4 foot-tall Mugwort growing in the corner of the yard? Or the huge Rose of Sharon shrub covered in edible blooms? What do we do when native plants are scarce or too valuable to local wildlife to disturb, and the ever-abundant invasives are right there?

We put them to work. Invasive plants are a useful resource that we can collect and utilize without harming (and often benefiting) the local ecosystem.

Invasive vs Non-Native & Naturalized

Remember that not every non-native plant is invasive. Not even every weedy non-native plant is invasive. Invasive plants grow rapidly, have few predators or pathogens, out-compete natives, and harm the ecosystem. Plants classified as non-native don't support wildlife as well as native plants, but do not pose an ecological threat. Naturalized plants are non-native plants that have successfully integrated themselves into their new environment without causing ecological damage.

Additionally, some species are invasive in certain states or provinces but are fine in others, so look up your local invasive species list!

Invasive Species Correspondences

There are a few general correspondences that come to mind when I think of invasive plants. They are weedy with an aggressive growth rate. They out-compete and smother their native competitors.

If you're looking for fast-acting magic, a quick prosperity working, or magic that gives you an advantage over someone else, these are the plants to use. I could also see them being used in workings related to adapting in an unfamiliar environment.

On the contrary, they can be great for curses and hexes, with the ability to choke, smother, overwhelm, and destroy.

Ethical Harvest

All living things deserve dignity and respect. If you are an animist, regularly work with plants and animals, or have a set of "Ethical" or "Honorable" harvest rules in your practice, you probably agree.

Invasive plants aren't trying to destroy our ecosystem. They were introduced by humans and unfortunately do far too well in their new environment. In my practice, if you harvest these plants with contempt or hatred, your magic will fall short.

In terms of safe harvesting practices, it's important to wear protective gear and be aware of potential toxicity. Additionally, one should be aware of how to properly collect different species. Certain harvest or culling methods can actually cause some plants to reproduce faster. Mugwort, which is invasive in some parts of the US, spreads by rhizome and pulling it from the ground will only make it grow faster.

Narrowing Correspondences

While the general correspondences listed above can be very useful, they aren't unique to any individual plant. All invasive plants are native to somewhere, meaning that there is some place where they have their own ecological benefits and rich cultural meaning.

As practitioners, we want to actually get to know these plants on an individual level. A good starting point is through learning about their ecological benefits within their native range, and their symbolism/folkore. The intent here isn't to absorb this symbolism into our paths and divorce it from its original context. The goal should be to learn about these plants so they can be approached from a place of appreciation and respect, and perceived as more than just "invasive".

Once you've learned about an individual plant, you can begin to write your own correspondences. Some things to pay attention to are time of year fruiting, sun/shade tolerance, leaf shape, seed dispersal, growth pattern, and wildlife value (if applicable in your area, otherwise, look into wildlife value within the plant's native range).

Invasive Plant Offerings

If you want to venerate an invasive plant, or are performing a working that requires leaving offerings, it should be done in a way that doesn't encourage outdoor growth. This means no watering or offering things like compost. Here are some ideas for invasive plant offerings:

Bowls of water, compost, or fruit, left for a specific period of time and then removed

Incense

Devotional art and jewelry

Stones and other natural items

Compostable trinkets and art made from materials sourced from the plant (nothing that could encourage reproduction, like seeds)

Utilizing Invasive Plant Materials

Invasive plants can be harvested with virtually no damage to the ecosystem. More often than not, they will just keep growing back, providing a near-endless source of materials and ingredients. This differs from native plants, where harvesting requires great care and should be done sparingly.

Some ideas for utilizing invasive plant materials:

Wands and stangs

Ingredients for workings that require specific plant parts (roots to represent death, flowers for love workings, etc.)

Incense blends and smoke bundles

Wreaths for warding or altar decor

Edible plants: kitchen magic, teas, tinctures, infusions, recipes

Flower petals for strewing

Offerings for associated spirits or Deities

Bath Teas for ritual baths and glamours

Botanical salts for specific workings

Note: If you are applying a plant to your skin, using it for incense, or consuming it, please properly identify the plant and confirm that it's safe for your intended use. Always use a plant reference book, foraging book, or field guide in addition to a search engine. Never rely on plant identification apps. Learn about look alikes too. Never expose yourself, household, or your pets to potentially toxic plants.

[kelxya]

Welcome to the Multiversal Integrity Restoration Agency. Repairing universes one glitch at a time.

MIRA, short for the Multiversal Integrity Restoration Agency, is an independent organization responsible for repairing glitches that result from failed resets, coding errors, and outcode interference. Operating from their headquarters within Sciencetale, MIRA is staffed by outcodes and multiverse-aware incodes. Their technicians are often out repairing different universes, although they are seldom noticed by incode residents.

More MIRA lore below.

MIRA's Three Tenets

Observe. MIRA's surveillance team monitors the multiverse for unstable universes, no matter how small the instability.

Repair. When a glitch is discovered, a team of technicians are deployed to repair the damage. Each technician is trained in a wide variety of coding languages and restoration techniques, including emergency access to SAVE and RESET.

Preserve. Universe scripts and incode residents are not to be interfered with. All MIRA staff are neutral to multiversal conflicts. MIRA's goal is to repair any damage unnoticed, and will only call on other outcodes when a technician's life is in danger.

Uniform Guide

Each MIRA technician is sent into the field with the following equipment.

Uniform: Many technicians customize their uniforms to their personal taste, but all uniforms must be primarily in the agency's brand colours. The standard MIRA uniform includes an inventory pouch of emergency supplies, eyegear, gloves, and a Soul Guard vest.

Eyegear: Allows technicians to read a universe's code. Encrypted data and communications are sent back to MIRA headquarters in a live feed, and the connection can only be severed by damaging the eyegear or entering the Void. A single-lens visor comes standard, but custom eyegear can be requested.

Interfacing Gloves: These gloves have controls to view a universe's code, and the magic-lined fingerpads allow technicians to interact with the code directly for repairs and multiversal portal creation. A screen on the back of the left glove communicates important messages from headquarters.

Soul Guard: The Soul Guard vest, as its name implies, protects a technician's soul while out in the field. The technician's soul can't be forcefully summoned, and the technician's magic is amplified to create a protective barrier equivalent to 9999 DEF. The Soul Guard will also protect technicians from the effects of high LV exposure, and grant safe passage if they end up in a hostile environment such as the Void. Like the rest of their uniform, a technician's Soul Guard will take on the colour of their magic.

Recruitment Policies

MIRA are always looking to recruit talented incodes and outcodes to the following departments:

Surveillance

Research

Engineering

Field Technicians

Both full-time and contract positions are available, including AU-specific positions (for example, technicians who prefer to only work within Fell universes).

To apply for a position with MIRA, submit your application, qualifications and references to Human Resources.

[each-time-again]

wow this show really goes out of its way to show the audience that Paddy is gay and deeply in love with Eoin and damaged irreparably by his passing (as opposed to explicitly telling us, i imagine to give them plausible deniability when they’re accused of defaming recently deceased, celebrated war heroes beloved by uptight conservative military historians). and they do it consistently, from episode to episode, even having Eoin haunt the narrative long after he has died - but so much of the heterosexual audience on non-Tumblr social media will say either they didn’t “get that vibe at all” or that there’s no reason to assume it was more than friendship.

like putting my gay indignation aside completely, how dense and cinema illiterate do you have to be to completely miss or misinterpret established run-of-the-mill cinematic techniques meant to convey romantic attachment or attraction? in regards to the cinematography and visual/audio storytelling, what could possibly surpass the depiction of romance as the filmmakers’ primary objective when they chose to zoom in on Paddy’s hand resting on Eoin and then leave the camera there for a long and intimate moment as they play a famously longing, romantic composition together on the piano, looking emotionally and physically insular and private despite the presence of the other men around the hall? the men, whose raucous banter has been muted. in a scene that would otherwise serve no purpose to the narrative (actually, it laid the foundation for a frequently revisited metaphor symbolizing Paddy’s inability to move on and desperation to feel a connection to Eoin again).

and then to repeat the touch/camera zoom technique again, in the very next episode! in a deeply romantic moment where Eoin makes it clear that his direction in life is entirely dictated by Paddy and where Paddy goes. we don’t get the impression that they have ever made the nature of their love explicitly clear to each other; we do, however, get the impression that they are life partners and soul mates who are mutually aware that they’ve dedicated themselves to each other. maintaining their relationship in this way might be the most practical method in their current circumstances - their relationship is physically unconsummated, but they have figured out how to maintain each other in their day-to-day lives in an emotionally consummate way that doesn’t risk the notice of those with the capacity to punish, hurt, and separate them, and restrict their freedom.

okay now reeling the gay indignation back in, the straight viewers who argue that there is nothing inherently romantic about a hand on a shoulder/that not showing anything more explicit means that “the writers are leaving it up to the audience” to decide if it’s friendship or romance are dicks for refusing to consider it within context or even ask why a romantic attachment might manifest itself in such brief and seemingly trivial touches.

what types of touches do they genuinely think would occur between two men harboring romantic affection for each other, when the entire lives of those two men are spent in a hyper-macho, violent environment that is hostile towards sentimentality, and legally and socially punitive of homosexuality? in their current circumstances they are unable to achieve the safety that would be afforded to them by a genuinely private physical space where they could be transparent about their feelings and motivations. they are never alone, so they enact touches in ways that would be perceived as commonplace camaraderie by an observer who doesn’t know to look closer, and literally speaking that is what is happening. meanwhile, the actors are tasked with the feat of minutely conveying a longing that the characters have kept hidden even from each other in the interest of self-preservation and preservation of the other; but the actors have to be even subtler than subtle, so that it doesn’t become unrealistic or compromising to the characters given the precariousness of their situation.

with those limitations always in place, it becomes necessary for the camerawork and music choices to convey that meaning for the audience in ways that the characters literally cannot. you need to give this touch between them its due attention, and consider the emotions that informed it and resulted from it: longing, desire, tenderness, pleasure and comfort in each other’s presence, revitalization. hopefully from there the viewer could surmise that Eoin and Paddy have adapted common rituals to their own needs in order to satiate a hunger inside them that (most of) the other men don’t have.

e.g.,

insisting that he let me teach him to play the piano will put him in close proximity again and again, and when he leans over and around me i can try to feel the warmth of his body hanging close, and sometimes i might even get to feel the direct heat of a hand placed on my shoulder. / he’s teaching me to play but i’ll hover with my drink over the piano and him below me, so that when it comes time for me to repeat his movements, i might be able to lean in close enough that i can discern the pattern of his breathing or the smell of his hair / when i touch him, he never looks me in the eye, but it doesn’t upset me, because i can feel how deeply the rest of his body welcomes it. it thrills me to know that there’s no other person on this earth that he would permit to touch him like this. / if i perform this drill remarkably or outlandishly enough, the men will clap and holler and i know then Eoin will come and put his arm around my shoulder, and an arm around the shoulder is nearly an embrace.

[aurantiumred]

jercy headcanons? jercy headcanons.

percy is little spoon. jason would prefer to face him but also he understands that percy wants his back covered, some sort of instinct after the achilles curse. percy likes sleeping in colder environments but he also understands jason's need to cuddle (wolves) and makes the sacrifice for him.

they're both equally overprotective of each other and it's slightly annoying to deal with. like you breathe too aggressively around one and the other stares at you intently for the next hour. people have tried to fake sick to avoid having to spar with one or the other because they do NOT want a big 3 against them in capture the flag. however, i raise you them fighting side by side in a battle. it looks so fluent, like they were made to be together.

speaking of fighting, you cannot convince me those spars weren't FILLED with tension. jason gets percy pinned and someone shouts "KISS!" from the crowd watching. he commits to the bit and (with permission) does.

worlds worst gossips. they know everything. they've also tag teamed people in arguments with insults so bad they got psychic damage. the plan is to use this on the gods next time they try getting them to do a quest.

jason hears that percy is scared of flying and the air like way too late. he never noticed when they were flying! percy always seemed so comfortable with him, why would he hide this secret? it's wildly confusing for percy when jason suddenly starts questioning if he REALLY wants to fly with him, because he's sure there's alternatives... jason is considered neutral ground when they fly together (most of the time) because he's a friend, and that's where percy is most comfortable. with his friends. oh and jason's protection means that his father technically shouldn't touch them. he still clings a bit too tight and jason cant tell if its cause he likes being in contact with him or he's terrified.

on the flip side percy is very aware that jason is scared of his father. he brings him over for a family dinner with some magic (whole meet the boyfriend, coming out thing) and jason is terrified the entire time because oh. like. he could be squished on a whim here. he's not used to not having the power. he'd better not mess up. percy is happily chatting with different creatures and jason is standing next to him shaking. looks like the wolf is swimming with the sharks now/ref

everyone is scared of the idea that they might break up because that may be the day that the sea and the sky go to war, and no matter which one wins there will be casualties and destruction. everyone is also scared of the idea of jason dying, both for the one who caused the death and for nico's dad. yikes.

[smilepilled]

syscord did serious damage to my perceival of things, discussions, and people's lives/identities. it forced me into condenscendingly correcting and brutally "educating" people who weren't aware of every little thing. it made me a much more abrasive and cold individual on the basis that i should always be correcting everyone on everything at all times and enforcing the same one-size-fits-all mold of "morality" onto them. it made me angry, aggressive, frustrated, isolated, scared, and it was absolutely not worth it.

with this post, i hope to help other people realize how a lot of syscord spaces manage to radicalize people into being aggressive, extremely demeaning and bitter people, by default. this doesn't apply to every system-based discord server, but the big ones where you get dogpiled and then shittalked for anything wrong you do — instead of, you know, being properly talked to like you're a person

it is a terrible place to be in for anyone, let alone people struggling with their mental health. do not force yourselves to stay in syscords for templates or decor, its genuinely not worth it. extremely harsh environment; namely the syscords where its filled with exclusionist 15 year olds who constantly pick at everything and anything to make you problematic. do not stay in these spaces, its not worth it. i promise you there are many resource servers where you won't feel like you're in a killing game with five hundred people at your neck

[homeboundmonsters]

Javert: Prison and Desire.

Struggling to formulate this but here it is anyway, a mini essay. This is a very abridged version of some ideas that have been percolating in my mind.

I think something not often discussed is the effect being born and raised in a prison would have on Javert’s understanding of affection and love. I think a lot of Javert’s confusion over his desire for Jean Valjean come from his early experiences and upbringing.

Javert’s desire for Jean Valjean is often expressed through violent imagery: tiger’s claws and teeth -leaping to bite; a spider catching a fly in its web; a cat toying with a mouse in its claws. Javert struggles to process desire as something that can be tender or intimate. He struggles with gentleness and affection. This can even be seen in how when he finally realises and recognises his own desire for Jean Valjean it is considered a form of destruction or forced change: claws being made to unclench, ice being melted; or as a form of submission: a dog submitting to a master. For Javert desire can only be expressed by violent taking or through complete submission of oneself to another. The roots of this can be found in his childhood.

We see the effect of prison on Jean Valjean: it takes a normal, loving family man and turns him into a man capable of murder, a man who interacts with society and processes his emotions through bouts of anger and violence. Javert has experienced what changed a grown man into a potential murderer in his most formative years. We know from his pre-suicide letter that Javert spent sometime in a woman’s prison witnessing the abuse of female prisoners who were given more space between bars most likely in order to facilitate sexual favours that would be coerced from them by guards. It is highly likely that during his developmental years he witnessed acts of sexual violence alongside acts of generalised violence. His small skull is associated, during the period Hugo was writing, with childhood neglect as it was caused by a baby being left too long lying on their back. This suggests that he lacked motherly attention or affection. Not to say that his mother did not love him, but it is highly likely that due to her circumstance she would not have been able to give him the input required. This was common for many children of the poor, but combined with growing up in a hostile environment surrounded by violence, sexual violence, and the removal of freedoms as a punishment for non-compliance we can begin to understand how Javert might grow up to associate violence with desire or love.

Javert’s natural submission to authority, his ability to disappear, his acute observational skills, his unwillingness to criticise those in power, the correlation he makes between destruction of identity (giving up his career and leaving into obscurity) and punishment can all be tracked to his experiences in childhood. Javert has spent his formative years living in fear, learning to make himself small and becoming hyper aware of what is around him at all times to avoid abuse. This has left him a damaged and vulnerable individual with no solid sense of internal security. He has never had love or stability, he has been deprived of affection, and has lived in an environment of constant physical and psychological abuse. We know from modern studies that these things quite literally change the brain anatomy of children growing up in these conditions. For a newborn baby the earliest form of love is being fed by their mother, and so food comes to be one of the earliest forms of comfort. Javert was no doubt seeing sex traded for food and for safety from physical violence, hence it would formulate in his mind not to equate to love or emotional intimacy but as a form of currency. Affection too, feigning love or preference, a tool for survival. How, in these conditions, can we expect him to develop into a psychosexually healthy individual? Hugo states that Javert is a virgin and, although we know Hugo did this because of his weird hang-up about virgin= good person, we can suppose that Javert’s virginity stems from a deep-seated trauma associated with his development within a sexually violent environment.  

Then, as young adult, Javert moved to working in male prisons. In France, during the 1800’s, prisons had some of the highest rates of recorded homosexuality in the country and it is likely that all throughout his career as a prison guard Javert was witnessing acts of sexual violence, or acts of consensual but unlikely to be safe sodomy. As he went through puberty he would have been only interacting with male/male acts of sexual violence. Whatever he might have felt would have been confused with fear and awareness of the inherent danger that existed within male/male sexual relationships in prison. Male/male sexual desire, although legal in France by the time of Les Mis, was still something considered morally reprehensible and as belonging in the underbelly of French social life. When Javert desires Jean Valjean, he desires him through the framework of violence because he has spent a lifetime witnessing sex as an act of violence or as a framework through which power and control can be expressed. He wants to have power over Jean Valjean- that is to say arrest him- and at the same time experiences this strange conflicting but also correlating desire to possess and ‘devour’ ‘his convict.’

When he finally recognises his desire for what it is, and detaches it from his desire to arrest Jean Valjean, his desire transmutes itself into a desire to submit. This is because, for Javert, submission has been his norm: one must submit to authority in order to survive it. When he sought to destroy Jean Valjean, he was secure in his understanding of male/male desire, when he realises what he desires is something more tender- a dog licking the intruders hand- he finds himself adrift unable to process his feelings. How can male/male desire be tender? How can it be loving? How can it mean devotion and choosing to submit in the understanding that you will be safe and unharmed? This is outside of Javert’s psychological vocabulary. This is also why Javert cannot understand Valjean’s freeing of him at the barricade: authority means violence. Valjean has authority and chooses mercy. Javert has no previous experience with or understanding of love and so has no groundwork on which he can build. Valjean at least had familial love in his sister/mother figure, his father, and the love of his nieces and nephews, but how does one begin to approach loving another human being when they have lacked even that? Love is not a natural occurrence it is a learnt behaviour and one Javert has never been taught.

I think this is part of what I find so interesting about Javert, so often he is criticised for not living up to modern moral expectations and yet so little consideration is given to the traumatic circumstances that existed throughout his childhood and which formulated his rigid perspective of the world. How can one who has never experienced mercy be expected to know how to give it? How can one who has never been loved be able to offer it? Javert has lacked the basic structure of society and has learned to survive under tyrannical rule, that is not something so easily shucked off in adulthood. Despite leaving prison, prison never left Javert and it shapes every decision, every flaw and every fault he struggles with throughout his life.

[theothersideofthesolver]

Obscure Murderdrones Fact #7

Source: Murderdrones Episode 1

Timestamp: 4:45

Subject: Khan’s Room Is Very Disturbing

It’s no secret that Khan is a concerning individual. The sentiment holds when we take a look at his personal environment.

Immediately noticeable is his habit of tracking ideas with sticky notes, much like his daughter. But distinguished is the disturbing contents of these records.

“Doors > Uzi” affirms a bold, uncomfortable, but unsurprising reality to his apparent favoring of his technological achievement over his own child (which only begs more questions considering the doors are apparently sentient.) But what truly makes this disconcerting is its evidence that Khan is very, very aware of his stance, and believes it enough to proclaim it openly on his wall. Why does he feel the need to do this?

Moving up, arguably more distressingly, a note reads “New Idea: Monthly Subscription Based Doors?”

Khan’s Doors are the only thing keeping out sky demons. Why would Khan feel the need to charge for this? How would this even work? Who is paying? Paying for individual protection seems farfetched, given the doors are an all-or-nothing protective measure.

Is he considering charging the other outposts for access to his technology? That makes marginally more sense, assuming that the outposts aren’t directly linked (big assumption here,) and that one failed door wouldn’t a breach all Outposts.

Perhaps the concept is charging subscription for regular doors, and thus limiting the non-subscribed access to their own quarters or other Outpost 3 locations. That may be the best-case scenario.

Finally, it’s obligatory to mention the photograph. Interestingly, Nori’s segment of the family photo appears charred away by a Dissasembly Drone’s Nanite Acid. It’s fitting, given the acid is what spurred her “death” to begin with, but how did the photo itself become damaged?

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

SARS-CoV-2 is now circulating out of control worldwide. The only major limitation on transmission is the immune environment the virus faces. The disease it causes, COVID-19, is now a risk faced by most people as part of daily life.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities.

Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s.

The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth.

Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time.

These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio and dracunculiasis. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, measles and rubella. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery and recognition, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade.

These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others.

An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities1.

Rat climbing a ship's rigging. Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s. The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower2). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth. Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time. These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century3-5 on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s6 (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals7,8. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio11,12 and dracunculiasis13. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws14,15, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis16,17, onchocerciasis18,19, measles and rubella20-30. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal31-33 and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe34,35, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides36,37 to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis38,39.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades41-43. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola44-46, Marburg47,48), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah49,50. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Pigs in close proximity to humans. Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths51.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population52 (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery53 and recognition54-56, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat57-60, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit61-65. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet66-69, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Group of bats roosting in a cave. Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats68). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals70-71 – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade. These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals72. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans73-75, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species76-78. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats79 – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others80.

Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world, circa June 2009 Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world. Credit: Jpatokal An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries81-83.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Oklahoma’s Strategic National Stockpile. Credit: DVIDS Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated84. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype85,86) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly87. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

UK National Covid Memorial Wall. Credit: Dominic Alves Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades88. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries89,90. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades91,92. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Mpox virus particles. Credit: NIAID And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category93 in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying94,95. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

This is the previously unthinkable future we will live in from now on in terms of our approach to infectious disease.

What may be controlled instead is information. Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. Early in 2020, such practices – blatant denial that there was any virus in certain territories, outright faking of COVID-19 statistics, and even resorting to NPIs out of sheer desperation but under false pretense that it is not because of COVID-19 – were the domain of failed states and less developed dictatorships. But in 2023 most of the world has adopted such practices – testing is limited, reporting is infrequent, or even abandoned altogether – and there is no reason to expect this to change. Information control has replaced infection control.

After a while it will not even be possible to assess the impact of what is happening by evaluating excess mortality, which has been the one true measure not susceptible to various data manipulation tricks. As we get increasingly removed from the pre-COVID-19 baselines and the initial pandemic years are subsumed into the baseline for calculating excess mortality, excess deaths will simply disappear by the power of statistical magic. Interestingly, countries such as the UK, which has already incorporated two pandemic years in its five-year average, are still seeing excess deaths, which suggests the virus is an ongoing and growing problem.

It should also be stressed that this radical shift in our approach to emerging infectious diseases is probably only the beginning of wiping out the hard-fought public health gains of the last 150+ years. This should be gravely concerning to any individuals and institutions concerned with workers and citizens rights.

This shift is likely to impact existing eradication and elimination efforts. Will the final pushes be made to complete the various global eradication campaigns listed above? That may necessitate some serious effort involving NPIs and active public health measures, but how much appetite is there for such things after they have been now taken out of the toolkit for SARS-CoV-2?

We can also expect previously forgotten diseases to return where they have successfully been locally eradicated. We have to always remember that the diseases that we now control with universal childhood vaccinations have not been globally eradicated – they have disappeared from our lives because vaccination rates are high enough to maintain society as a whole above the disease elimination threshold, but were vaccination rates to slip, those diseases, such as measles, will return with a vengeance.

The anti-vaccine movement was already a serious problem prior to COVID-19, but it was given a gigantic boost with the ill-advised vaccine-only COVID-19 strategy. Governments and their nominal expert advisers oversold the effectiveness of imperfect first generation COVID-vaccines, and simultaneously minimized the harms of SARS-CoV-2, creating a reality gap which gave anti-vaccine rhetoric space to thrive. This is a huge topic to be explored separately. Here it will suffice to say that while anti-vaxxers were a fringe movement prior to the pandemic, “vaccination” in general is now a toxic idea in the minds of truly significant portions of the population. A logical consequence of that shift has been a significant decrease in vaccination coverage for other diseases as well as for COVID-19.

This is even more likely given the shift in attitudes towards children. Child labour, lack of education and large families were the hallmarks of earlier eras of poor public health, which were characterized by high birth-rates and high infant mortality. Attitudes changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century and wherever health and wealth increased, child mortality fell, and the transition was made to small families. Rarity increased perceived value and children’s wellbeing became a central concern for parents and carers. The arrival of COVID-19 changed that, with some governments, advisers, advocacy groups and parents insisting that children should be exposed freely to a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus to ‘train’ their immune systems.

Infection, rather than vaccination, was the preferred route for many in public health in 2020, and still is in 2023, despite all that is known about this virus’s propensity to cause damage to all internal organs, the immune system, and the brain, and the unknowns of postinfectious sequelae. This is especially egregious in infants, whose naive immune status may be one of the reasons they have a relatively high hospitalization rate. Some commentators seek to justify the lack of protection for the elderly and vulnerable on a cost basis. We wonder what rationale can justify a lack of protection for newborns and infants, particularly in a healthcare setting, when experience of other viruses tells us children have better outcomes the later they are exposed to disease? If we are not prepared to protect children against a highly virulent SARS virus, why should we protect against others? We should expect a shift in public health attitudes, since ‘endemicity’ means there is no reason to see SARS-CoV-2 as something unique and exceptional.

We can also expect a general degradation of workplace safety protocols and standards, again reversing many decades of hard-fought gains. During COVID-19, aside from a few privileged groups who worked from home, people were herded back into their workplaces without minimal safety precautions such as providing respirators, and improving ventilation and indoor air quality, when a dangerous airborne pathogen was spreading.

Can we realistically expect existing safety precautions and regulations to survive after that precedent has been set? Can we expect public health bodies and regulatory agencies, whose job it is to enforce these standards, to fight for workplace safety given what they did during the pandemic? It is highly doubtful. After all, they stubbornly refused to admit that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne (even to this very day in fact – the World Health Organization’s infamous “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne” Tweet from March 28 2020 is still up in its original form), and it is not hard to see why – implementing airborne precautions in workplaces, schools, and other public spaces would have resulted in a cost to employers and governments; a cost they could avoid if they simply denied they needed to take such precautions. But short-term thinking has resulted in long-term costs to those same organizations, through the staffing crisis, and the still-rising disability tsunami. The same principle applies to all other existing safety measures.

Worse, we have now entered the phase of abandoning respiratory precautions even in hospitals. The natural consequence of unmasked staff and patients, even those known to be SARS-CoV-2 positive, freely mixing in overcrowded hospitals is the rampant spread of hospital-acquired infections, often among some of the most vulnerable demographics. This was previously thought to be a bad thing. And what of the future? If nobody is taking any measures to stop one particular highly dangerous nosocomial infection, why would anyone care about all the others, which are often no easier to prevent? And if standards of care have slipped to such a low point with respect to COVID-19, why would anyone bother providing the best care possible for other conditions? This is a one-way feed-forward healthcare system degradation that will only continue.

Finally, the very intellectual foundations of the achievements of the last century and a half are eroding. Chief among these is the germ theory of infectious disease, by which transmission chains can be isolated and broken. The alternative theory, of spontaneous generation of pathogens, means there are no chains to be broken. Today, we are told that it is impossible to contain SARS-CoV-2 and we have to "just live with it,” as if germ theory no longer holds. The argument that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife means that containment is impossible illustrates these contradictions further – SARS-CoV-2 came from wildlife, as did all other zoonotic infections, so how does the virus spilling back to wildlife change anything in terms of public health protocol? But if one has decided that from here on there will be no effort to break transmission chains because it is too costly for the privileged few in society, then excuses for that laissez-faire attitude will always be found.

And that does not bode well for the near- and medium-term future of the human species on planet Earth.

(Follow the link for more than 100 references and sources)

[artbyblastweave]

I was wondering if youd read Hench yet.

I feel like the premise and the start were solid, and the main character's framing of superheroes through a strict environment cost-benefit analysis was interesting.

But it feels weird that in it's criticism of heroes it just sorta...gave villains a pass. Plus the incredibly loose world building, which early on was a strength in establishing the "you know how this works", vibe, but as the book progresses and the plot hinges increasingly on old interpersonal drama, it's suddenly a big gaping hole.

These are my broad criticisms of it, yeah.

Full disclosure- this is the book I was vagueing about a couple months ago, the one where I got annoyed because the back cover copy was pulling the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" card in relation to working as a henchman, in a way I found disingenuous given that many supervillains are on the face of it much, much worse for the world than the average tech start-up- particularly the kind of supervillain with a staff. But I also thought it would be disingenuous to bitch a book out purely on the grounds of its back-cover marketing department copy, so I bought it and read it. And unfortunately the final roundup on that tension appears to be that villains aren't that bad, are they? Maybe even kinda girlboss even!

Bulleted list under the cut!

The opening is strong, and gave me high hopes, specifically because of how it seemed to be aware of these tensions. Anna, our protagonist, opens as a temp in the employ of a sleazy c-list supervillain who's performative in his interest in his staff's wellbeing but doesn't hesitate to put his interns and temps in the meat-grinder for a leg-up; even a decisive loss to an A-list hero is a way to climb the ladder if you're a C-list villain. On the other side you've got superheroes who are horrifyingly cavalier with the lives of anyone they've deemed to be "on the other side." The protagonist is framed collateral damage in the grand idiot melodrama between two sides that don't give a shit about the lives of the little people in distinct but interlocking ways, and that's pretty compelling- particularly because at this point we're still coloring within the lines of the typical genre paradigm! That mutual self-centered apathy, the ways in which people get pigeonholed into specific roles in the melodrama that define and dehumanize them, drove seven seasons of The Venture Brothers, and now we get the tragicomic spin on that dynamic, we get a story told from the perspective of one of the henchmen or random civilians who get callously offed as part of a sight gag about how awful all of these people are!

That's not where it goes, though. @st-just has a pretty great writeup where they point out that for a story driven by the premise of heroes that cause immense collateral damage and use their institutional influence to dodge the consequences, the story is oddly incurious about the level of damage that Leviathan's enormous criminal organization does in the course of its operations; how many people have died because of all those superweapons he's handing out to lower-level villains? It's all oddly bloodless, and it feels like it keeps pulling back at the last second from the protagonist truly suffering moral injury- or from acknowledging that moral injury. Given how much of her plan involves waging psychological warfare on heroes until they snap publicly, there's a bit of an eric-andre-who-would-do-this vibe coming from then pinning that collateral purely on the heroes. I never got a good read on how self-aware the story is about the fact that Anna very, very quickly becomes attached to real tangible power in a way that makes her underdog framing feel extremely hollow; how quickly she becomes like her former boss, arraigning henchmen in the line of fire for the sake of the Grand Plan. One of those stories where it keeps gesturing but I can't tell the extent to which it intends to commit with a sequel.

The worldbuilding, as you mentioned, is an issue, because there's a failure to clarify quickly enough the larger systems that incentivize the heroes and villains- in fact, it often feels like the characters are operating from within different incentive systems, from different settings. The early sections of the book read like a "Silver-Age-taken-seriously" situation, similar to The Venture Brothers- the casual levels of temp-agency integration, card-carrying supervillain-as-tech-start-up boss, and of course, the myopic violence of free-agent cowboy cop vigilantes-slash-celebrities who never get called to account for it. Halfway through there's a pivot and now there's a Draft, capital-D, and it turns out that this has actually been a superhuman registration setting the whole time? "Supervillains" are actually just any superhumans who don't toe the line? "Superheroes" are screened for in middle schools and separated from their families? That's, uh, not completely incompatible with the aforementioned dynamic but it's a bit of a kludge! There are beats that are really great- Quantum relocating from New Zealand for a chance to partner with Supercollider only to end up subordinated for sexist-marketing reasons, the fucked nuclear family shit going on with Flamethrower and his kids and with the Ocean Four- that imply a level of individual career discretion on the part of the heroes that you'd need to do some work to square with whatever pressures are being exerted by the higher powers. It's actually pretty important who's calling the shots here and to what extent! If the climax is predicated on wanting to overthrow the system you need to make that system consistently visible and legible through the rest of the book!

As you mentioned, the book also pivots into there being a deep interpersonal drama that propels the back half; Leviathan turning out to actually be a former superhero who was dramatically wronged in a morally clear-cut way by Supercollider, who murdered his mentor for inside-baseball cape politics reasons and had this covered up. I've got really mixed feelings on this, because although the seeds of something fascinating are here it feels like one of the ways in which the book is hedging itself. Supercollider's callous but genre-standard disregard for hench lives isn't grounds enough to condemn him, no, he also has to have committed some off-duty murders as well, and he's a shitty boyfriend on top of that, he's a supervillain dressed like a superhero. We get Leviathan's justified grievance, and spectacular violence enacted on agents of an obviously evil system, but no up-close-and-personal villainy- he's functionally a hero with a villainous aesthetic (and a smattering of anecdotes about awful shit that he's done, but the story isn't interested in really making us feel it in the way that it is with Supercollider.) There's a beat that I really liked, where Quantum tells Anna that their respective villainous and heroic bosses care far more about beating each other than they do about the women in their lives or anyone else working under them. I think it was a grave misstep that this turned out to not be where the book went; making it so that there actually is a clear-cut good guy and bad guy in the Leviathan/Supercollider conflict, that they're fighting over something that matters, pushes the entire story dangerously close to what I term "Banal Hatswap" territory.

For more of a vibes-based criticism; and easily my most uncharitable; the entire story is written in a register of self-righteousness, and I have a hard time separating what's meant to be the biased viewpoint of the protagonist from what's meant to be the author Displaying The Correct Applause Lights for Twitter. You've got a protagonist who cracks a one-liner about supporting Penal Abolition.... who also puts out a hit on a guy who slowly dies horribly of sepsis as a result. A one-liner about a female superhero's "suspicious WASP" vibes, right before she emotionally manipulates said hero and arranges to have her kid kidnapped. "It's not my job to kinkshame, buuut," right before proceeding to leverage the embarrassing sexual proclivities of a superhero who's roundly characterized as boorish and misogynistic in conjunction with that. Bemoaning how Quantum, a strong heroine of color, is subordinated and put through the wringer by the patriarchal marketing machine, before acting as the major practical driver in the total collapse of said heroine's life. (This one is the one the protag displays the most self-awareness about, which might be related to the subtext that said superheroine is a potential love-interest.) Grandstanding about and predicating the whole plot on how all human life is valuable and villains don't deserve to receive life-changing brutality.... before being party to Quantum's graphically-detailed levels of payback against her shitty ex Supercollider, I mean we're talking like arc 14 Vicky Dallon levels of body horror and violation here, in borderline pornographic detail. All of this feels like either a very clever reproduction of how the very online know how to say all the right things to launder the fact that they constantly do all the wrong ones.... or it's just. an unreconstructed example of the thing. I can't tell, but the back-and-forth bothers me a lot. It's a situation where it becomes super fucking obvious how much Worm benefited from constant alternate-POV interludes; getting any of this from the head of someone other than Anna would go a long way for me.

Ultimately the book heavily depends on my sympathy for overeducated, temporarily embarrassed white collar computer touchers who throw in with evil worldwrecking conglomerates in exchange for dental. Unfortunately I think we all just axiomatically have it coming and superheroes would ideally pulverize way more of us so there's a level on which I was lost from the word go

Now, for the sake of a balanced assessment I'm going to go over a bunch of the ideas in the book that I did think worked really well:

As mentioned, the opening is extremely strong; the nightmare existence of living paycheck to paycheck as a temp, juiced up by the genre-elements, the slice-of-life hardscrabble existence of a woman at the bottom of the economic totem pole constantly having her attempts at a life worth living blown up by her proximity to this nonsense. Having a date break down because you have to drive your maimed henchman friend to the ER is a fucking amazing beat. Unfortunately the narrative moves away from this low-level approach very quickly, because a lot of what's going on with this thing is that it's a specific strain of power fantasy- a significantly-more-competently-executed version of a kind of villain-falls-for-his-hardworking-assistant Wattpad romance. That's not a pejorative or a criticism, just a kind of power fantasy that requires an end-of-act-one escape from the nightmarish mundanity in order to function. But I like the nightmarish mundanity! Bring back the nightmarish mundanity

The book has some great beats about the intersection of superheroics and women's issues. In a nod to the plight of superheroines from the silver-age and earlier, Quantum Entanglement is a superheroine with reality-warping levels of firepower who's constantly forced to downplay her own presence and individuality in order to help juice up the brand of her male partner Supercollider; in the climax it's revealed that this extended to subtly using telekinesis to create the false impression he's capable of independent flight, which is, implicitly, this settings version of Superman's transition to flight from really big jumps. There's a tendency for superheroines to get big power-bumps in conjunction with an arc about succumbing to a very gendered insanity- Malice and Avengers Disassembled being two prominent examples I can think of- and Quantum's eventual break from the monstrous Supercollider feels like commentary on this. In another one-and-done beat you have the heroine Abyssal, whose career is on the verge of being derailed by her third pregnancy; the catch is that she's a member of what's implied to be a family team (think New Wave or the FF) and her pregnancies are laced through with expectations and hopes that the kids will exhibit powers and be able to pad out the roster. By the end of the book she's mentioned to have been permanently benched, and another member of her team is killed "on-screen-" but that's alright! We've got her three kids waiting in the wings! A deeply grim superheroic spin on a very real kind of patriarchal pressure to set your own career aside to perpetuate your family. Compellingly fucked in all the worst ways.

There's a one-off beat about a nursing home for retired superheroes who are having difficulty controlling their powers in their old age, and it's portrayed as a fucking warzone; dementia-ridden psychics and pyrokinetics constantly inadvertently chewing through the staff and causing gigantic disasters. I think the age-based incontinence of superpeople- and the damage they can cause through no fault of their own- is a really underexplored area for superhero deconstructions, one adjacent to a lot of real-life problems faced by caregivers, and often problems that have no good answers. Near and dear to my heart, this particular problem.

The character of Supercollider is compelling down many of the same lines that Homelander is compelling; a "Superman" figure constructed by marketing-department fiat, with no identity of his own, difficult for the characters to sincerely hate in the end simply because it's impossible to determine where the marketing copy indoctrination stops and the hollow shell of a human begins, Surrounded by a meticulously constructed, rotating "Bat Family" extended cast that are his only semblance of human connection despite how immensely distant he is from them in every way that matters; the designated love interest with whom he's going through the motions, an utterly superfluous sidekick he's implied to be grotesquely co-dependent with to the point that his efforts to keep him safe in the field is a major driver of the collateral damage he does. Most of this we get third hand as Anna is mincing his support-system from the outside in, but the implied inside baseball is genuinely gloriously fucked, and I'd love to have seen some of it go down from the inside.

Anyway, 2.5 out of 5. Good ideas and character concepts that desperately needed more room to breathe, fun worldbuilding beats that desperately needed fleshing out to give those ideas and character concepts that room. Genuinely, this should have been a 1.7 million word web serial.

[tempests-bards-and-birds]

i think that one of the most tragic aspects of venti's character is the fact that no matter how hard he tries, no replication that he can make of the bard will ever be perfect because for a single image or concept to be long-lasting and static goes entirely against the nature of the wind.

it has been consistently emphasised throughout the game that "seeds of stories brought by the wind" will be "cultivated" by time - in other words, they will grow, but they will never remain the same as they were when they were first told; to try to remove that element of warping and artistic interpretation that is inevitable as a story is passed on is like trying to bottle up a storm and hoping that'll stop it from damaging the surroundings - instead, no one will ever know about it, and the only thing that it will have left to destroy will be itself.

venti is basically doing exactly this by trying to preserve the bard's memory - the only way to stop it from being warped would be to remove it from any kind of environment where that could happen, which would require taking the story out of circulation, which then means that he is the only living being who knows it in its whole detail and entirety. he understands, however, the fallibility of his own memory, as can be seen in how reminders of it seem to shake him; in his story quest, he seems strangely unguarded after resolving the situation with hans (whose story is massively identical to venti's for a reason - having a mirror can be very useful for storytelling, and genshin relies on it perhaps a bit too much), describing the barbatos statue as "the usual place" despite the fact that for our traveler, it is not (this ties into another theory that i am Not going into here lol). we know that venti prizes being able to keep a certain level of anonymity, with him describing the traveler's high level of intuition as "scary", so for him to show even the slightest level of disregard for maintaining his façade suggests that being faced with the reality of the impossibility of his self-imposed purpose is something that did really bother him (which tbf makes sense now that i write it out).

comparisons have been made before between venti and zhongli wherein the irony of having a god of wind whose appearance is unchanging and a god of stone who is (supposedly, if we assume zhongli's teasing about his own past forms to be reflective of the truth) in contrast constantly shifting is often key, and in a lot of ways zhongli's situation does mirror venti's in many ways; he theoretically has the ability to accurately preserve history as one would by carving it into stone, and yet it is almost as if he lets it slip through his fingers instead - he finds humour in inaccurate historical accounts and allows himself to change, not just physically but in terms of attitude (the whole point of the liyue aq is for him to be able to do this; to live as a mortal after millenia spent overseeing as a god). in many ways venti and zhongli are polar opposites, but the theme of wanting to transcend one's physical constraints, of wanting a state of existence that the other already in theory has, is consistent throughout both.

venti, however, seems to be so much more uncomfortable with this than zhongli is, and this awareness of the issue while still being so bothered by it to the extent that he pushes it away even more, causing the pressure in that jar to by extension increase too, is where the true point of tragedy lies.

maybe, though, by deciding to share the bard's story with the traveler, he is beginning to accept the necessity for change.

[leonw4nter]

Warmth For The Winterfall

ID!Leon x GN!Reader ; roommates/house decorating || Leon Secret Santa || 🎁: @uhlillie 🎄: @leonsecretsanta <3

Leon's operations always proceed as follows: infiltrate, carry out, and slip out covertly. It's always that easy in principle, but in practice, things never turn out the way he had hoped. He's tired of it all; it's the holidays, goddamn it, but work won't let him take a break for even a moment. A gloved finger releases the safety catch as a far-off, rhythmic vibration brings him out of his reverie. He is driven insane by the absence of any other sensory cues than touch, sound, and sight, as well as the darkness trails behind him where his flashlight isn't focused. The experienced agent feels as though he is heading down a path with no assurance of return since the tunnel seems to go on forever in front of him.

“Hunnigan, are you sure this is the right one?” He asks into his comms, voice low. “I’ve been walking for 30 minutes but I did hear a noise earlier.”

He hears her type into a keyboard and click a mouse before she responds back to him. “Yes, I’m tracking you now and you’re exactly where you need to be. The tunnel is purposely long to throw any wanderers off; years ago, there were functioning gate systems for every kilometer walked but it appears that they’re not employed anymore and haven’t been for a few years now. Stay vigilant Condor One, I’m picking up a heat signature somewhere in the system. Stay safe.”

“Copy,” he responds before turning it back off to listen to his environment better. He sighs before he continues forward, unable to speed through things and wrap it up for the year– he can’t afford to do that.

After a few more minutes of walking, he reaches a seemingly unassuming manhole in the ground and after receiving instructions from Hunnigan, he opens it with some effort and descends down the narrow opening. Before he can totally reach the ground, something grabs him by his ankle and yanks him down with enough force to smack him down; the impact forces air out of his lungs, stunning him for a moment as he tries to take in large amounts of air. He recovers quickly though, retrieving his loaded gun and aiming at his beastly assailant: an alligator as tall and long as a double-decker tour bus in the roads of LA, its scaly body covered in green grime and some sort of slime mold. The BOW lunges at him, its hideous maw wide open as it charges but Leon dodges the charge, aiming expertly at fatal points but his bullets do little damage to its thick hide; he realizes this, also recognizing that using a grenade in this space would kill him as well, opting to run to safety to avoid the gator as much as he can. Luck not being on the agent’s side, the alligator is a lot more intelligent than he thought it was, using its tail to slam Leon and send him flying into a wall, landing awkwardly into his forearm before a particularly nasty fall. Pain struck through him like a thunderclap, a resonant ache too powerful for Leon to ignore, amplifying the sickening awareness that something had been horribly misaligned. His consciousness was ebbing, bending to the will to cave into the fresh surge of torment, yet he managed to retrieve a grenade from his gear. With his good hand, he pulled the pin and sent it to the gator’s direction. Right before it explodes, he gathered whatever strength he had left to find the most secure spot around to duck in. A white-hot brilliance is followed by a roar that interrupts the air, from the grenade or the BOW Leon isn’t sure but he’s relieved that the damn beast is in chunks and bits now, turning on comms again to relay information back to HQ.

“Mission cleared,” he grunts. “Request back-up… broken arm…”

“Report your status agent,” Hunnigan asks to repeat.”

“Just said my arm’s broken,” Leon repeats with a slight edge of impatience. “Rat bastard flung me against the wall… goin’ to fucking pass out…”

“Copy,” she responds. “Hang in there Leon, I’ve dispatched a rescue team and they’ll be there in 20. Stay with me.”

“I’ll… try…”

He groans a little more, trying to limit movement in his bad arm as he props himself up from his previous ball curl position. Such a simple injury shouldn’t render him this weak but that hit was just too strong for him to make it out unscathed, his consciousness beginning to give way to a creeping desire to fall asleep. The world began to darken around him, vision unfocusing but he kept his resolve steadfast: if he could make it through this one, he won’t let the holidays pass without him letting you know your laugh, your kindness, and your mere presence had kept him fighting. He’d trade his silence for vulnerability because if he could survive this madness, he’d be able to survive the terror of telling you that he’s loved you from the start. He admires your mind, how your thoughts could dance between profound and playful, how you could say something so wise and crack him up with a stupid joke at the same time; he adores the way you make him feel understood and be his truest self, and how enchanted he is with the way you can be fiercely independent and also nurturing– your existence is proof that the universe fought tooth and nail to bring such a blessing in his dark life.

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The scent of antiseptic, the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, and a soft pillow supporting his head greets Leon as he stirs awake from his unconscious state. The blinds are drawn around his bed and his bad arm is now in a black sling, taken care of by the doctors who tended to him. He quietly groans, running his hand through his face and feeling the prickly stubble that’s begun to grow on his cheeks and chin. Somewhere in the room, he hears Hunnigan’s faint voice conversing with someone and since it sounded like she’s the only speaker present, it must be over a call. He doesn’t have the energy to eavesdrop, preferring to close his eyes and fall back asleep for a little longer but his FOS agent interrupts his plans, pushing aside the curtains and greeting Leon.

“You’ve been out for nearly an entire day,” she points out. “How are you feeling?”

“Crusty.” He deadpans, earning a nod from her.

“Makes sense.”

Silence fills the room again before the FOS agent speaks up again. “Called HQ today and field for a 2-month rest and recuperation period for you. You deserve it after 7 years of non-stop work. They’ll still need a written report from you though but I told them to cut you some slack since your arm’s broken and the holidays are right around the corner.”

She purposely leaves out the part where she nearly instigated an argument because her and Leon’s higher-ups refused to let him off, standing her ground fiercely and convincing them to let the man off the hook otherwise she’ll personally email the President herself and send in documented reports of over fatigue, violation on ethics, and liability regarding an overworked employee being denied a recuperation period; Leon certainly wouldn't like hearing about her nearly getting nasty with his boss so she decided to keep this to herself.

“Thanks, Ingrid. I appreciate it,” he says with a closed lip smile. “So, uh… when do I get discharged? And the hospital bill?”

“You’ll be discharged in about… 4 hours and the agency’s got your bill covered, just focus on getting better soon. Anyway, how’re things between you and them?”

A barely perceptible smile tugged at the corner of his lip though briskly concealed carelessly with a clear of his throat that gave away the simmering nervous excitement beneath his nonchalant exterior.

“I’ll do something about it soon,” he carefully responds, it being his tender affections kept lock-and-key in his heart. He looks up at Hunnigan whose arms are crossed, looking down at him with a look that shows that she doesn’t quite believe that that is all he has to say.

“What?” Leon asks with a shrug. “You look like you want me to say more.”

“Because I know there’s more than just that,” she points out. Leon looks down and stays silent, remembering the promise he made to himself moments before he passed out. “Don’t act like you don’t spend your work break talking to me about them and texting me at ass-scratching hours of the night because Jill and the Redfields are sick of you not doing anything.”

“Guilty as charged,” he says with a half-smile. He took a moment to collect himself internally, to shift in his hospital bed that will display a convincing feigned indifference that will redirect attention away from the telltale crimson burning in his ears. “But I… I promised myself that I won’t let the holidays pass me by without letting them know that I’ve loved them for so long, so that's something, right?”

“Mhm.”

“They deserve to know how incredible and precious they are to me but there’s this voice that tells me they’re better off not knowing, and I hate how much I listen to it. It sounds selfish of me but I don’t want them to walk out of my life just because I couldn’t keep myself in check.”

“Why do you think that they’re better off not knowing? Sometimes we assume that silence is safer but it can create a distance when there doesn’t need to be any,” Hunnigan begins. “It’s okay to feel scared but don’t let it rob you and them of a chance to experience something genuine. Do you trust them to treat you well, Leon?”

“Yes–”

“Then trust that they’ll handle your feelings with care. Certainly you’ve got reasons on why you trust them and I’m sure that it’s because you’re treated kindly and valued so why not trust them with your feelings? With your heart?”

Chapped lips parted with the intent to say more words but instead, a soft sigh of resolution is released. Hunnigan gave him an encouraging pat to his shoulder before walking to the other side of the bed, letting the nurse who came to do their rounds in. “Good to see that you’re back with us, Mr. Kennedy. How are we feeling?”

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In the meantime, he will have to accept rides from friends or use public transit a bit more frequently; his beloved XDiavel will have to spend the next six months gathering dust in the basement parking of his apartment complex. It will take some time to get used to using his left arm, and asking for help from others will make it even more difficult. He is unsure of how he will handle this aspect of his life for the time being, but he is aware that he will need to practice putting on shirts with his less dominant hand, especially sweaters and button-ups now that the weather calls for layering clothes. He will definitely miss the thrill and breeze that riding his bike brings him, but it's a welcome change if it means allowing his arm to heal properly. 

The car ride to Leon’s apartment is filled with comfortable silence, neither agent energized enough to start small talk, especially at 2:17 AM. As he looks out the car window, blue irises meeting the sight of ice white like the sclera of eyes, he internalizes the fact that he’s lucky to make it to the end of the year, still alive to see another Christmas; the year has been rough, like last year and the year before last year, but he’s amazed at how long he’s kept going despite it all. Instead of the weariness and stench of his line of work sticking to him, it’s the stingy scent of hospital disinfectant that clings to him like a distant memory. He leans his head against the window, the coolness of the external environment oddly grounding as he thinks of his dear roommate and a clandestine focal point of his most tooth-rotting indulgent domestic dreams– you, who unknowingly filled in the cold and empty spaces of his life. Even when he’s out in the field, hyperfocused on the mission objectives, his thoughts always find a way to circle back to you: he swore to protect you from the horrors he’s faced, even from afar, yet he’s too terrified to ask for more of you. For the longest time, as a man who is no longer a stranger to losing people he cares about the most, the idea of being your trusty roommate was enough for him.

“Catch some sleep, Leon.” He cranes his head to look at his coworker from the corner of his eye.

“We’re still a few minutes away. I’ll wake you up once we’re there.”

Leon mumbles a faint ‘thanks’ before settling cozily into his seat, succumbing to the bone-deep exhaustion and dozing off to a light slumber.

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He tries to keep his footfalls as light and muted as possible, a conscious effort to make the pads of his heavy combat boots lighter. Now, he stands in front of the door; he’s sure that you're fast asleep, blissfully unaware of the world around you as you’re somewhere in dreamland. Carefully, he unlocks the door and steps inside a dark home before locking it once again behind him; everything is neat and in order, just like how he left it 3 months ago, though the couch definitely looks a lot cleaner, the throw pillows have cases he’s never seen before, and the air smells faintly of mistletoe room spray. He walks down the hall, careful to avoid bumping into anything, and turns the corner where the bedrooms would be– yours to the right and his to the left. He doesn’t mean to be creepy or unsettling but as he stands near your door, he listens closely for any noise and to his relief, he only hears soft snores which ever so slightly tilts the corners of his lips skyward. Once he realizes that he’s grinning fondly, he brings a hand to rub at his stubbled chin as he chastises himself for foolishly folding for something as simple as a soothing slumber of the one person who unknowingly occupies all 4 chambers of his heart.

“Mushy,” he inaudibly scolds himself while still sporting a stupidly-in-love grin.

Shaking his head to rid his mind of such soft thoughts, he decides to head into his room and have the first proper sleep he’s gotten in months. He forgoes a shower– too tired to have one, fuss around with his sling, and wait for the water to run warm. Grabbing a clean blanket from one of the cabinets inside his bedroom, he kicks off his boots then lays down on his bed and drapes it over himself, laying on his bare mattress in his Levi’s and the same black shirt, his leather jacket now on the ground somewhere near his boots. 

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Morning comes, prompting you to start your day a minute before your alarm disturbs the tranquility. After your morning rituals, you cook yourself a packed lunch to bring to work in order to save up for a gift for Leon– that is, if work won’t hog him until Christmas. You’re not even sure what he likes aside from sleek watches and neat jackets, something within the bounds of your salary. A shaving set? Premium leather cleaner? A gift card to a popular barbershop in town? Something for a grill? Does he even own a grill?

“I swear, Leon, you’re so going to get Vaseline lip balm from me because I don’t know what you want that I can afford,” you tell yourself as you flip the food over to thoroughly cook the other side. “What the hell do you even do for a living to earn 6 figures? How are you still living in an apartment and not in some mansion at a mountain overlooking an ocean, seriously. Might just be a man thing.”

“Not really a big fan of huge houses,” a raspy and baritone voice coming from behind you responds.

Your heart leaps and lodges into your throat, turning quickly as your breath hitches while you come face-to-face with the owner of that voice with your eyes wide. A soulful, honest-to-god scream coming from the depths of your chest crawls its way out of your chest and it’s now Leon’s turn to be wide-eyed and off-guard, his face nearly mirroring the same shock from your own face.

“Easy, it’s just me!” Leon explains, voice tinged with his own nerves– too much for just having woken up in the morning.

“You scared me! Why are you freaking out?!” You say with a flinch. “What the hell, Leon?!”

“Smelled something good cookin’ so I got up,” he begins to explain as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “Missed your cooking.”

Unable to form coherent words with the overwhelming blend of emotions, you opt to go in for a hug. In your haste, you don’t notice the black sling that nearly blends in with his shirt. To your confusion, he steps away an inch and politely extends a hand to place some distance between you both.

“Arm,” he points to his injured left arm. “I just got it treated yesterday so uh… we’re gonna have to find an alternative to the usual hugging.”

With the dramatic overload of information dumped on you all at once in under a minute, you end up sobbing instead and you’re certain you don’t look a single bit attractive which definitely won’t work in your favor if you want to woo your roommate.

“Don’t scare me like that again!” You sniffle as you wipe your tears with the back of your hand. “And your arm too, that looks like it hurt like a bitch.”

He chuckles and steps closer to you, bringing you into a one-armed hug as you press your face to his chest and cry a little more at him being back home safely, at the injury he sustained, and at the unintentional scare he gave you.

“It’s so good to see you again, Leon. I was wondering if you’d even be back for the holidays,” you say as you begin to calm down.

“Yeah, me too. I’ve missed seeing you,” he regrets his words when he sees your eyes subtly widen at his phrasing. “And uh… I’ll be here until March so you can have me as long as you want. Feels good to not be bothered for a couple of months, y’know.”

“That sounds great. You’ll finally be able to watch the DVDs you have stacked,” you motion to the neatly kept stack on the center table beneath the wall-mounted TV.

“You can watch them with me if you want,” he instantly offers. You’re not sure if his cheeks have always had that subtle flush in them or if his pupils are normally large, but you agree to take his offer anyway.

You finish up cooking your miraculously unburnt lunch, packing it in tupperwares as Leon watches from the dining table while he nurses a mug of instant coffee; it’s a little sweeter and creamier than how he usually has his but he doesn’t mind, you cared enough about him to even share some of the sugary coffee you enjoy. You chatted about whatever happened in your life while he was gone– being a contender for a promotion, a plan on adopting a kitten around the new year, unproductive coworkers making workload heavier, and other random things that come to mind. Leon chuckles and offers his own commentary, missing your voice more than he previously thought; he notes how your hair is now a little longer, there’s slight bags under your eyes, and you’ve got a new bracelet; he wonders from who.

“Sorry but I’m going to cut my yapping short, I gotta clock in to work now.”

He nods, getting up to place his mug in the sink before walking you to the door.

“I’ll be here waiting, it’s not like I can go anywhere with this arm.”

You smile and give him a kind pat to his right shoulder. “Right. Welcome home, Leon. Feel free to grab some sweets by the way, they’re in the left cabinet.”

He nods and watches you leave, only shutting the door once you’re out of his sight. Looking down at himself, he decides to take a shower but first: he’ll have to figure out how to put on the waterproof cast by himself and thoroughly clean himself up.

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In the days leading up to Christmas, your routine merges with his in order to help him out; frequently seeing Leon shirtless becomes the norm along with helping him put on button-up shirts, slip his arms into cozy sweaters, changing his slings, and cooking meals for two… almost like how couples do. Despite how often you see his chiseled midriff, fingers cautiously ghosting over scar tissue and lean muscles, you always require a breather afterwards in order to rid your face of that telltale redness. Just hours ago, your cheek brushed against his and you swear you felt him rein in a sigh from escaping his lips; you wished that he was feeling just as clammy and nervous as you were, hearts synced in beats and powerful emotions. His eyes trailing your movements as you secure his sling doesn’t help your confusion too, causing you to frequent ‘signs that he is in love with you’ articles each night. On a more surely positive note, his fast food intake has been reduced and he’s been enjoying healthier meals that you cook: constantly giving you compliments and his detailed praises for each dish and technique. You cringe at yourself whenever your mind automatically drifts to your wild imaginations at being happily married to him. 

Leon finds himself unable to fall asleep; he’s tried everything– white noise, a sleeping mask, and getting off of his phone but to no avail. Each time he sleeps a little deeper into his slumber, images of the grotesque and macabre dance through his mind and drive him mad. It’s not like he can even get into his usual sleeping position due to his arm, preventing him from fully getting comfortable, so he sits up with a groan before slipping out his room and into the living room; christmas decorations are half-up, some adorning the room in festive reds and greens but there are some that appear as if they were placed there without a care, a little more of the decorations still in boxes. You did note that you’ve been busy covering shifts and working overtime, leaving no time and energy to finish furnishing the house in time for Christmas. Struck by a brilliant idea, he takes the initiative to complete the rest of the decorations so you’d wake up to a Hallmark movie dreamscape in the morning… and it’ll all be thanks to him and you’d smile real wide and call him charming– he’s getting ahead of himself, a mindless smile once again gracing his features. He gets to work on what he can, finding little to no trouble on using one hand for this task.

He shocks himself with how good and fitting his pairings are: the decorations, tinsel, wreaths, and holiday charms complementing each other a lot better than he expected. Maybe he should come over to the Redfields and help them put up decorations, Chris could seriously use some lessons on coordinating and matching. One break per hour turns into two then three and eventually, he’s conked out on the couch with a box of christmas balls on his lap and tinsel on his free hand; his mouth his open, head thrown back and some brunette fringe curtaining an eye. You’d love to spend the entire day giggling and describing the state you found your endearing roommate, teasing him to no end– the poor man woke up confused, seeing the first rays of daylight filter in and hear your muted chuckles as you took pictures of him.

“Fell asleep decorating?” you ask, though it’s a little pointless to ask: you know the answer.

“Yeah,” he rubs the back of his neck before setting aside the box and standing. “I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to get busy. Hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I seriously don’t mind. I could use some help since I’ve been so busy and tired so you’re heaven-sent for putting some of it up, thank you again. You’ve done so much for me already–”

“No, you’ve done so much for me already. Don’t give me all the credit,” he says with a timid grin.

You walk around, stopping around the walls and tables and in front of the tree. “You’re really good at this! You even swapped out some of the things I already put up– no biggie though, it looks even better now. Who knew Leon Kennedy could make a–”

“Hallmark movie dreamscape?”

“Yeah!”

The entire thing isn’t particularly funny or the pinnacle of comedy but you both find yourself sharing a fond chuckle and you feel your hummingbird heart rattle against its bone-cage and Leon already knows he’ll be obsessing over this moment all day long.

“You’re great at this, Leon– genuinely. It’s so… pretty and magical and basically the stuff of dreams. I love the arrangements, I don’t know what’s better to keep staring at: you or this Christmas wonderland.”

He’s sure to yap Hunnigan’s poor ear off all afternoon while you’re out.

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From that day on, he spends most of his days (and sleepless nights) planning the perfect confession: writing it down on paper, pacing around the room acting it out, and mumbling the words he’ll use. He knows he’s acting and treating this like a silly teenage boy with an out-of-league crush and in a way, he thinks you are: you’re heaven-sent, God’s apology for all the evil and scum in this world. He giggles and chuckles at the prospect of confessing to you, getting all wiggly until an ache in his bad arm cuts it short and causes him to wince for a moment before getting back to where he left off. Claire calls him delusional, Leon thinks he’s being a romantic visionary. 

The sight of Leon’s brightened, reinvigorated puppy eyes stuck with you until you reached your workplace; those bedazzled eyes, coupled with his perfect smile, is the kind of thing that belongs to someone who has it all: charm, looks, and confidence. If there were already others interested in him, surely you can’t compete: he deserves someone bolder and more upfront, not just someone fumbling with half-hearted attempts to be seen by their secret darling. Every attempt to flirt and hint at your affections seemed to go unnoticed, his responses always polite but never suggestive of anything more; maybe you weren’t clever enough to capture the attention of someone as effortlessly suave as Leon Kennedy

“It’s not his fault,” you bitterly thought to yourself as you bit on the edge of your pen. “I’m just not that outstanding for him to leave an impression…”

“Who’s fault?” your coworker asks, peeking over their cubicle.

“Nothing,” you quickly dismiss the slip-up. “Work must be getting to me, I’m talking to myself now, haha...”

There’s already an ‘incident’ wherein you took the time to shape the foam in Leon’s coffee into a heart. “Thought I’d sprinkle some love for your day.”

“Lattes aren’t really my preference but thank you,” he responded that one embarrassing morning. “Mm, this is really good.” Despite him enjoying the coffee enough to take it to work, it still left you red-faced and ashamed of yourself.

Unwilling to let other embarrassing memories like these get the best of you, you push those thoughts down before they have a chance to simmer up and bother you so you occupy yourself with work.

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“I can do it myself,” Leon mutters half-heartedly though his predicament betrayed his words: the remaining sleeve of his favorite sweater dangling around his neck like a sad scarf.

You ignored his stubbornness, hands gentle as you fumbled with his sweater as you fixed it up for him before slipping his bad arm inside with tender care.

When the sleeve finally aligned, it’s as if your heart overrode your ability to logically reason with yourself and so, you placed a hand on his stubbled cheek to steady him. The touch lingered for a little longer, the seconds stretching on a little longer. Leon’s breath camps out in his throat, too terrified to make a little move and shatter the magic. Unfortunately for him, you took your hand back as if his face was a cup of hot cocoa too hot to hold.

“Sorry,” you whisper before backing off, leaving an achy emptiness in the blue-eyed agent’s heart. “Is it all okay now?”

“Huh? Right– yes, it’s fine now. Thanks, by the way.”

You nod, excusing yourself from his presence to occupy yourself with something else, the awkward void palpable than ever though you both know that you felt a shared crackle of something precious.

The night is all so perfect and cozy– a delectable Christmas feast, soft Christmas sweaters, and a comforting atmosphere settling over your shared apartment with Leon. You don’t want this night to ever end, for this feeling to dissipate come morning time. It’s now or never, so you direct Leon to stand with you in the arch of the doorway. Taking a deep and steadying breath, you let your feelings be known before the fear can ruin everything again.

“I know you probably think that this is sudden,” you carefully begin. “But it’s not. It’s been simmering for a year and 3 months now– each time you come home from some work-related thing or when I make you smile or when I help you out with your sweaters and shirts, there’s this feeling that threatens to crumble me deliciously and it’s all because of you.”

Leon tilts his head, unconsciously mimicking a confused puppy. “What do you mean…?”

“Under this stupid mistletoe that I placed while you were taking the pies from the neighbor, I can’t let this moment pass without me being honest to you: you mean so much to me– so much that if I lost you, I’d go insane. I’m completely, overwhelmingly, and all-consumingly in love with you and honestly, it’s impossible not to.”

Your voice trembled and if even the slightest thing didn't go your way, you’re certain you’ll cry from the immense pressure on you. You laugh softly, trying to soothe yourself as a nervous warmth flows through you.

“You’re not the only one,” Leon speaks up, voice thick with emotion, “who’s been thinking about this moment.”

He steps closer, cautiously perching his right hand on your hip.

“I was going to say something first but you beat me to it first,” he adds while sporting a tantalizing smile. “I planned on telling you later tonight but guess I’ll have to let you win this time.”

Your eyes locked with his, the weight of formerly unspoken feelings suddenly lifting and giving way to something charged. Taking a tiny step closer, you cup his face in your hands again and you sigh at how perfect the fit is.

“So… what did we learn?” You jokingly ask.

“That we both suck at keeping secrets?” He jokes back.

A shared and equally shy giggle erupts between you two like you’re both teenagers new to the whole shtick of love.

“So… you do know what being under a mistletoe requires us to do right?” he softly asks.

Beneath the mistletoe, time seemed to stop and the seconds that flowed were tinged with genuine nervousness intensifying as your faces drew ever nearer.

“I love you,” Leon says before meeting your lips with his, gentle and feather-light with hints of hesitation. It was slow yet sweet, sweeter than all the combined holiday treats you both had. The shared warmth and affection blurred the rest of the world into insignificance; each brush of lips were delicate like falling snowflakes. As you both pull away to catch air, you rest your foreheads together and share a giggle in the tingly aftermath of your first kiss.

NOTE - Happy holidays everyone <3 I would like you to give yourself either a tight hug, a pat to the shoulder, or both for making it to the end of the year. The year certainly wasn't smooth or easy for some of us but I'm proud of you for ending the year with me and the rest of us who deeply care about you. I hope that every single one of you are warm and cozy in your homes, with stomachs happily full from a tasty dinner, and content with your lives right now. If you're currently going through something, please hold on and stay strong: things will all be okay in the end and if they aren't okay right now then it's not the end just yet-- rest and slow down if you must but never give up <33 You got this and I know you do because I believe in you, sending virtual hugs and kisses to every single person who sees this post on their dashboards *<]:D !! If you're seeing this, thank you for taking time to read and interact with this post :3 I <3333 UUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The dividers are made by @cafekitsune (the moving red line divider), @bernardsbendystraws (the Christmas lights divider), and @wcnderlnds (the red and blue snowflakes) + the images are made by me (sourced from Pinterest).