couple important bullet points here:

the people who infected everyone else had gotten negative covid tests before traveling to the wedding

everyone was in a tent. it doesnt say how enclosed the tent was but it would definitely cut down on air flow

doesnt say whether or not people were wearing masks but i suspect not

if these people hadnt been vaccinated, it would have been a lot worse

the big delta wave will hit the US pretty soon, and is already starting in states with low vaccination rates. new mutations (delta plus, epsilon and lambda) are on the way; lambda is more infectious (symptoms and severity are unclear). the CDC is wrong, everyone should still be wearing masks indoors and in crowds (which is what the WHO says anyway). children still arent vaccinated. 

you do not want to get covid at all, even mild covid. long covid even with mild symptoms is really fucking people up (talk to anyone with a chronic illness about what this is like and hopefully they can scare you straight). even mild symptoms like “brain fog” can effectively ruin your life. one guy got tinnitus from long covid that was so bad he committed suicide.

"But she also stressed that preliminary data from the past few months suggested that 99.5% of coronavirus deaths in the US were occurring in unvaccinated people. 'Those deaths were preventable with a simple, safe shot,' she said."

they are quoting Rochelle Walensky, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"Both wedding attendees who had Covaxin got their second shots in India, just 12 days before the wedding, study author Timothy Farinholt from Baylor College of Medicine told Insider. He suspects that may be the reason why they got infected with the Delta variant in the first place, because their second shot hadn't had enough time to take full effect."

please get vaccinated! as soon as possible!

There have been a comment for me to do voice training, but I have no intention of doing it at this time. You should do ears training.

"Never forget" x "It's over, get back to normal"

Replies by Cathy Kimport (@/PurpleNinjaGrrl) read: Ever think about how 22 years post-9/11 we still can't bring 4 ounces of sunscreen and a nail clipper onto a plane, and yet 3 years into an ongoing pandemic we're able to walk around a cancer treatment center maskless? I sure do.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

I appreciate that you’re emphasising that AI isn’t something to be simply trusted, nor that it should be given any kind of writing. However, from the point of perspective of someone who writes essays on their stories explaining in detail how/why I made which writing choices, with the explicit goal to help others understand how I put a story together, it’s quite crushing to read that you’d rather go and ask AI to teach you how to do that.

I don’t mean to offend; I’m just letting you know that it feels very, very personal and hurtful. Because I know full well that AI can teach you that because I and many, many other authors have taken the time and effort to explain how our writing works and how we decide what to keep, what to cut, what to tidy up and what to expand. And our work has been scraped and used without giving us any credit, so you can ask AI how to teach you the same things that we have spent hours upon hours trying to explain to the best of our ability. Essays and guides you could have found with a simple search, no AI required, in a day and age where search engines tend to be very good and every good bookshop and library will have guides on writing.

Because that’s the other side here. I have spent many, many years trying to get to this point, have worked with beta readers, have read books (like The Art of War for Writers) and essays on the internet, have read books myself and made notes of what I liked about a specific author’s writing style. I have notebooks full of quotes from my favourite books and random funny, thoughtful, interesting and otherwise memorable statements people have made in my vicinity, that I have noted down since I was about 13 and pick up when I get stuck, just to leaf through and see if anything jumps out at me. Very often something does.

By the by, I, too, struggle with communication. I have no official diagnosis, but I am somewhere on the spectrum, and I’ve always struggled to understand people around me. Taking the time to observe others, note down what they said, remembering their reactions and then going and putting all of it into a fictional setting, trying to imagine what would have made a character say that, what would have made another react like that – then getting feedback from my beta readers on what I had written, has helped me learn ways how I can improve my communication and interpretation of what others are telling me.

It is profoundly saddening to me to read that your choice is to use AI for all of that. And it’s even more saddening that you seem to believe that AI is giving you the tools that you needed. Because the tools AI is giving you are actually the tools that I and others have been creating for decades.

The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.

HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.

So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.

To be clear, I do not just hate generative AI. I also hate golf, lawns, space tourism, war, monoculture farming, clear cutting forests, building on floodplains, deep sea mining, developments that destroy habitats, and corporations bulldozing ecosystems for endless growth.

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning—Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene magazine, described the Instinctive Drowning Response like this:

“Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.

Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.

Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.

From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.”

This doesn’t mean that a person that is yelling for help and thrashing isn’t in real trouble—they are experiencing aquatic distress. Not always present before the Instinctive Drowning Response, aquatic distress doesn’t last long—but unlike true drowning, these victims can still assist in their own rescue. They can grab lifelines, throw rings, etc.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are in the water:

Head low in the water, mouth at water level

Head tilted back with mouth open

Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus

Eyes closed

Hair over forehead or eyes

Not using legs—vertical

Hyperventilating or gasping

Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway

Trying to roll over on the back

Appear to be climbing an invisible ladder

So if a crew member falls overboard and everything looks OK—don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

Source/article: [x]

I’ve been a lifeguard for 6 years now and of all the saves I’ve done, maybe two or three had people drowning in the stereotypical thrashing style. And even those, like the save I made last weekend, it was exactly like OP describes where the person’s head is going in and out of the water but it isn’t long enough to get any air. Mostly you recognize drowning by the look on someone’s face. If someone looks wide eyed and terrified or confused, chances are they’re drowning. That look of “oh shit” is pretty easily recognizable. And even if you can’t tell for sure: GO AFTER THEM ANYWAY. I’ve done “saves” where a kid was pretending to drown and I mistook it for real drowning, but that’s preferable to a kid ACTUALLY drowning.

Also please remember that even strong swimmers can drown if they have a medical emergency, get cramps, or get too tired. If your friend knows how to swim but they’re acting funny get them to land. And even if someone can respond when you ask them if they need help, if they say they do need help? GO HELP THEM.

However . If the victim is a stranger, I can’t recommend trying to get them. Lifeguards literally train to escape “attacks,” because people who are drowning can freak the fuck out and grab you and make YOU drown as well. If you do go in after someone, take hold of them from the back and talk to them the whole time. IF YOU ARE GRABBED: duck down into the water as low as you can get. The person is panicking and won’t want to go under water and should release you. Shove up at their hands and push them away from you as you duck under. Don’t die trying to save someone else.

When the lifeguard got us both out, a woman came running down and accused me of harming him and said he had been completely fine in the water. That there was no reason to drag him out of there. The lifeguard had to explain to her that her son had been drowning, to which her response was to say that she didn’t hear him call for help.

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

eating disorder recovery is just getting angry over and over again because food is treated like some horrible necessary evil instead of one of the great joys of life. eat some nuts because they taste good and you are a living thing that thrives on pleasure and calories. you need both.