#i said it last year & ill say it again

[jarvis-cockhead]

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[stabbylambchop]

Hey uh

anyone here on Art Fight this year or-

Cuz I'm on there, same name and everything. I'm on Team Vampires.

You can like, add me or whatever...I mean, if you want...

I haven't interacted with anyone on here or even really drawn in a couple months, sweet pulsating spider-christ ...

[ms-all-sunday]

a year ago, today, was the day i first watched arlong park. it was the day i admitted to myself that one piece could be my new special interest. it was also the day i wanted to show my childhood friend one piece and then thought that would never happen. (it happened and she reacted exactly the way i wanted her to. it was so perfect! you have her back in your life now and shes so perfect. you can literally feel her love you.)

i think the guy who experienced arlong park for the first time would be so fucking happy with where we ended up. he would be so happy we have her tattoo, she's apart of us not only our identity but our body, too. he would be so proud, jealous, and in shock that any story- any shonen- lived up to our expectations.

he'd be in shock i like m/f pairings, he'd be in shock i like romance in one piece, he'd be in shock that i like sanami. he'd be in shock that we are now in love with a story in a way we never could've imagined or never even experienced ever. he'd be in shock that we have a blog about one piece that people i think respect the opinions of- he'd be in shock that now generally id say my preference romantically is towards women. and we are attracted to women and are normal about it, now. he'd be in shock that we now trust creators of stories and we trust oda to write a good one, that one piece as a story can in fact love it's audience in the deeply intimate way any story can love it's audience. that it loves us. that we are no longer scared of that trust being broken.

he would be in shock, but he would've said "i told you so", because today was the say he said "if one piece isn't the story to be my new special interest, there's nothing else it could be. this has to be it." -an author capable of arlong park is capable of anything. an author capable of giving me nami is capable of giving me my new special interest.

[thelastspeecher]

I don't know if my neighbors smoking so much pot it can be smelled throughout the entire apartment complex is making my 'vid symptoms worse but it sure ain't making them better

[codexxgigas]

Having an alcoholic parent is so painful idek how to describe it. And a functioning alcoholic at that in a society where alcohol abuse is normalized & you're weird if you dont drink. I hate it hate it hate it i dream of walking into a store with a bat and smashing every bottle of alcohol in there and setting fire to it.

[yotd2009]

something abt realizing you're listening to someone sing for the last time really hits in an awful way

[whatever-dude]

Gonna be honest, my life is v stressful and hectic rn, so im probably not going to watch much (if any) of the playoffs, but here’s who im cheering for:

Avs vs. Kraken - Avs

Stars vs. Wild - Wild

VGK vs. Jets - VGK

Oilers vs. Kings - Oilers

Bruins vs. Panthers - Panthers 

Toronto vs. Tampa - Toronto

Canes vs. Islanders - Canes

Devils vs. Rangers - Devils 

[b0ydyke]

so deep in the maze of being unforgivable that not being able to say happy birthday feels like another left turn further in. a couple months ago on s’s birthday i was telling chris the tall dude that asked about my trip on new years, not chris my best friend, that i remember his birthday when he made a toast and sprayed me with champagne by accident and he was like woah good memory (not when it matters) and s was like “i think you wished me happy birthday at 11:58pm” and that’s true i always remember the birthday even if im too eager or too soon. and it kills me i can’t say happy birthday to the friend i can’t talk to. saying this is my own fault or this of my doing won’t get me anywhere out of this feeling but it’s true what they say about losing people we don’t talk but i still think about you on your birthday one minute you’re in the middle of something and the next it’s all a very long time ago and we have become different people the time will pass anyway i forget what it was like but i remember the feeling do you remember too how am i to deal with i have things to say but i am dead to you so i will have to sit with it and hold it in my closed fist instead

[cannot-copia]

Mental Health Check for the Ghesties! How we doin'?

uh

ive been better

ik i like never respond positively to these asks, I’m sorry whoever you are

but thank you for asking <3

also sorry to those who’ve tagged me in tag games the past while too, i do like them but between working for the past 14 days straight and some more not good things happening irl i have not had time to do them and now i probably won’t find them

[geometricalien]

him, already with a girlfriend that he wants to marry: I wanted to kiss you when I saw you. I wanted to kiss you on the bridge as well.

me, externally: i- eh- what-

me, internally: soooo many red flags how can he just admit this??

[retrogradedreaming]

One of my clients just told me they’re giving me half the work they normally do for the next month and a half because they’re taking a break for the holidays and I’m trying not to freak out but like. girl help

[finalhaunts]

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[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

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[hyah-lian]

:') nevermind my tags from b4 apparently the house smells disgusting

[lukasadss]

Lukas is yet again overflowing with love for art and the artistic process and the power of hyperfixafions

[autismserenity]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)