Down in the Sand

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

Only high temperatures will kill cyclospora. It resides in what is like a shell, which is highly resistant to water and most cleaning chemicals. The substance it uses to cling to food is so strong we don't even fully know what its limits are. It may be best to avoid fruits and veggies you can't cook. Scrubbing only works if done hard enough and on foods with no hiding places (Like cucumbers and grapes). Peeling the skin off is your best bet at avoiding it however, scrubbing is not guaranteed.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

Your ex boyfriend is not a "narcissist". He's a typical misogynistic douchebag who treats women like shit because society allows him to.

Your boss is not a "narcissist". They're a typical classist dipshit who thinks workers' entire purpose in life is to generate profit because society allows them to.

And even if they happen to be a "narcissist", that's not what gave them the power to get away with abuse.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

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If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.

But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.

Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.

This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.

Cut to the next day and I was in the Students Union, when a friend came up to me and told me how funny that video was of me falling asleep in class was. What? I asked her about it, what did she mean, who made the video, and she realised I literally had no clue about it. Kindly, she told me who to talk to and I thanked her. I was already upset, but I knew it wasn't the messenger's fault. So, I took to Facebook and messaged the girl who made the video -- a girl on my table in the class from before. I asked her about it, and she admitted it right away -- she took the video on her phone during class and posted it to her snapchat. That's how the other girl saw it, not to mention countless others.

Sorting this out was an absolute toil. I felt betrayed and violated that someone would do that while I was obviously not in a position to have any say about it. I lost friendships with the people who took the girl's side, as if it was no big deal or "funny". I had to tell the lecturer about it, because let's face it, that's a shit thing to allow to happen during class itself, the department moved to be more alert and proactive about restricting phone use in class, and all that girl had to do was give a half-hearted apology. The next semester, she was still openly using her phone in another class we had.

For a long time, I couldn't trust anyone who held their phone up around me, as if to take photos or video. It would make me so anxious and put me on edge. I never did speak to the people who cosigned her behaviour, who acted like it wasn't their problem that their bff video-recorded a person in class over their health condition without their consent.

Victims of abuse and violence, people who've gone no contact with family, people (usually women) with abusive exes, special needs children, etc, etc. All people who could be easily found and hurt if these 'ha ha funny' videos end up in the wrong person's feed.

For the love of all things holy, please grow out of this need to try and 'go viral' from filming perfect strangers and adding a 'funny' little soundtrack.

This all comes back to the entitlement attitude. That girl mentioned above didn't video the other for fun. She recorded it because she found it funny and thought that she would get attention and likes or whatever by posting it to her social media.

If you do this, you are profiting off of someone else's image/struggles/life. That 'profit' may not be money, but it's clout, it's likes, it's reblogs, it's a whole buncha others joining in to make fun of this person who has no idea they've been recorded and are now the target of some joke.

It's cruel, it's childish, it's rude and hurtful. Stop thinking the entire world is your personal content fodder, and stop recording strangers for the lolz.