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There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):

Smallpox:

Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)

There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)

There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.

Other relevant viruses:

Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.

Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.

Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.

So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?

There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.

Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)

Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.

Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).

Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.

Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.

TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).

(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)

Sources & further reading under the cut!

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

Okay, here it is! The Unmarketable Thing! It’s sort of an overlayer lace hippie skirt. It has a drawstring along with an elastic waistband enclosed in a knitted hem, and the drawstring has little beads and bells.

It did turn out incredibly cute and I’m also very proud of it, because I basically eyeballed the length of the elastic for the waist and then I uh, I did not check my gauge. So I was kind of applying broad experience and kind of lucked out a bit because they fit exactly; even my allowance for the effect of the yarn floofing up and shrinking in a little with washing was pretty amazing.

It’s a 25" waist and intended for a medium-little kid, who will love it and still likes handmade things and may absolutely destroy it. If this does not happen, the estimated waist size is almost perfect—it should fit a little loose now and cover another year or two of growing.

Oh! Also, I had some cool bells of the kind that just chime rarely and softly BUT those things are pot metal and have got to have lead in them, so because of the little kid aspect, I went with the non-toxic craft store ones you buy to put on like, excessively wholesome gnomes and stuff. If I were making this for an adult (bro you’d think a kid won’t chew the waistline drawstring but you can never be sure), I would’ve used the timeless-looking little chiming bells instead.

Absolutely blown away and a little bit bafled at how quickly I was able to knock out this sweater seeing as I started knitting this in April

The base image is from Norman Lindsay’s A Homage To Sappho

This will be the second time I’ve switched up the genitalia on one of this series but is the first time I’ve hand drawn the addition of the body hair and genitalia. More adjustments made tomorrow but yeah!

I have some segments to redo, refining to do with a single thread going back thru, and graphite to carefully remove but per request some of the ladies got top surgery

*dragging myself across the floor and covered in blood* it is finished…

My bad I’ve been in a mixed episode for almost two months and it’s made me have more episodes of lying in bed unable to move or do anything meaningful

JAR (Joel Arthur Rosenthal) sheep head hair clip

I guess you could see things like that, here and there, in the area in which I grew up, but that's not how I remember it. I think of a family down the road from us- a mother, grandmother, and seven children— living in a two- room shack that had originally been built as a chicken coop. If I close my eyes I can still see those children, especially the girls, blue lipped, shivering at the bus stop, their faded dresses starched as stiff as paper, and just as thin. I remember their landlord, the man who owned the slaughterhouse. Collecting for the Red Cross, I pedaled my bicycle out the dirt lane to his farm, and after I explained why I had come, he took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and threw it in a puddle. “There," he said. “You want charity? You can crawl in the mud for it." Those are the kinds of things I remember: poverty and ignorance, cruelty and smug intolerance.

I was not a native of the area in which I was raised, which meant that I was relentlessly persecuted from a tender age. My brother and I did not look like our neighbors, nor did we act like them. We grew up in a house containing more books than did all the village libraries put together, and our parents insisted that we speak grammatically passable English. This did not make us popular.

I am not talking here about a little teasing. I am talking about years and years of being beaten up at school, on the school bus, and at the bus stop. I am talking about being attacked by six or ten people, being shoved down flights of concrete stairs, of eyeglasses being smashed, of kicks and karate chops, of hate notes signed by an entire class. It was brutal. It was like going to war every day with no gun and no ammunition. My brother and I became very good street fighters. We did not follow precisely the Marquis of Queensberry rules, but we learned that good, swift moves— brutal, savage maneuvers— might dissuade at least some of our attackers from getting too close.

We were not the only ones who were so tormented. There were a handful of Jewish children, a tongue-tied girl, an obese brother and sister, an effeminate boy, and a couple of kids who smelled bad. We were all pariahs, for whatever reasons, and because of the intensity of the hatred we suffered, we were not able to band together. Any one of us, alone, was a potential victim, but any two of us, even my brother and I, were like a target flashing a large and brightly demarcated bull's-eye.

We, the hated, did not get to know each other well, although on occasion, over the years, we exchanged furtive, sympathetic glances. It's not that we were not interested in one another. I spent minutes at a time, when I could, gazing at these children, my brothers and sisters in oppression, trying to understand what was so terribly wrong with us, why we were treated so cruelly. I paid special attention to the effeminate boy, because my deepest, darkest secret— the one thing about me that my attackers never seemed quite clever enough to discern— was that I, even though I was a girl, was somehow just like him.

In that town, a poor community crushed and corrupted by the inexorable contraction of its inadequate mill-town economy, having a cunt was the only real measure of femininity. Of course the girls, by eleven or twelve, would learn to pad their breasts, tease and lacquer their hair skyward, and lard a thick layer of makeup over their faces, but that was just an announcement of availability. Life was too harsh for daintiness to be required of women. They were generally a coarse, tough lot, and my flagrant butchness didn't stand out.

But I knew. I knew I was different, and I knew that if anyone else suspected it, the abuse I would suffer would make my former persecution pale in comparison.

In my town, homosexuality was the deadliest sin. Bestiality, wife and child beating, incest, and rape were tolerated with a raunchy good humor that might have made a respectable nonresident blanch or retch.

For instance, we had a town rapist whose identity was known to everyone. If a woman was stupid enough to be waylaid by him, well, to the town folks it was obvious that she got what she deserved. When one of the farming families won more than their share of blue ribbons at the county fair, it was explained, with a nudge and a wink, as the predictable result of how satisfied that family's cows were, given how dutifully the sons made sure the herd was well fucked.

I attended school with more than one product of father-daughter and brother-sister unions, and a couple of my schoolmates became pregnant by their fathers. These were not secrets. They were not spoken of in whispers. Delicacy was a luxury the townspeople could not afford, and so I knew just how every peccadillo was regarded. One could break bread with a rapist, a cow fucker, or a man who beat his wife and kids. These activities were the stuff of jokes, but nothing to get too upset about. Homosexuality, which I never heard referred to by such a polite or positive term, was a predilection that deserved beating, rape, castration, and/ or murder, as far as my neighbors were concerned.

In so hostile an atmosphere, I took the safest course. I did not, quite, admit to myself what I was, and I certainly did not act on it, until I was safely out of high school and out of town. I didn't wait a moment longer than I had to (within four months of graduation I had managed to sleep with my first woman) but while growing up I hid it even from myself, although I spent hours crying about this unnamed propensity. Still, in that effeminate boy I saw myself. He provided the only hope I had that perhaps I was not utterly alone in my predicament. His existence was like a whisper in the wind, a small voice telling maybe, just maybe, I was not the only one. In that dark world of loneliness and terror, he provided my only hope. God might goof once, I reasoned, but if God had made two of us in one small town, maybe it wasn't an error at all. Maybe we were like albinos or double-pawed cats, unusual but not unique. Maybe, somewhere out there, there were more of us.

My fantasy was that there was someone, somewhere out in the world beyond my hometown, who could love me. The effeminate boy made me hopeful of this. I worried that even then, as he and I were being harangued and beaten, she was somewhere else, suffering similar punishments for being like us.

At night when I said my prayers, after I had prayed for my family and our pets, I would say a special prayer for this faceless girl, praying that she would have the strength to survive her childhood, praying that we would both survive and someday find one another. I knew that I had to be strong and savvy. I knew that I could not expect her to keep her end of the bargain if I did not keep mine.