Silver, they/them. Should probably start posting

It's a common corporate practice for credit card accounts to get cancelled due to lack of activity.

It's been very funny to see their notices progressively escalate from "pwease wemember to use ur Circle Card uWu" to "WE R GONNA CANCEL U ANY DAY NOW WE MEAN IT >:(".

By their timeline, that card should have been cancelled last year.

But no. Target just sent me a brand *new* card, and the emails have gone back to "pwease wemember to use ur Circle Card uWu".

But it shouldn't be surprising. I am 49, sure, but I have also been online since I was 14. Same as many other people my age and younger.

It's actually really convenient as a litmus test, to see which social media-isms and memes that person has aligned themselves with. For example, if a person is very steeped in 4chanisms, that's a red flag for me.

And perhaps most important of all...

second of all, while some people use "non-binary" as a dumping ground to put all edge cases regardless of whether they want to be there or not, so far as i can tell the majority of people use "non-binary" to mean "a third gender, which uses they/them by default". if a bigender person is male and female, and uses he/him and she/her pronouns but not they/them pronouns, calling her "non-binary" when he doesn't want you to is functionally inaccurate! if someone says "i am both male and female" and your reaction is to go "got it, i'm putting you in the neither category," you have messed up. i do also know at least one agender person who uses he/she pronouns; you can't derive someone's gender from their pronouns. but you have to respect people's understanding of their own identities!

as a side note to my second point: if you are a programmer reading this post and going "but 'both' is just as non-binary as 'neither'!" i am going to need you to recognize that when there is colloquial usage of terms that also happen to be programming terms, the colloquial usage is the one that matters in day-to-day life.

and i think we're at risk of having one of those things where all the prescriptivist answers are wrong, because there are people out there who say "non-binary" and mean "both". and i think at this point we're sorta fucked because we don't have a way to distinguish which of several usages we intend, and it's not obvious to me that "popularity contest" is the best way to resolve that, or if it were, who would win. it's an ambiguous usage at this point, which is. great. but honestly it's fine as long as people don't assume that the particular variant they're used to is the only one.

I’m agender nonbinary. I identify as trans. My experiences with my own identity and the struggle to be recognised as myself align closer to a binary trans person than a binary cis person, but that literally isn’t necessary because I just am not cis. That’s enough.

imagine being on your lunch break, and your supervisor comes over to your table, tells you to stand up in front of everyone. they draw everyone's attention to your thighs. they tell you that you have broken the dress code because of the length of your shorts. they tell you to go change (so you do not get the rest of your lunch break). they do this every single day at lunch. every day. so you read the whole dress code front and back, and you choose your clothing carefully to not break it. you bring a cloth tape measure with you to work because they will not believe you. this time when your supervisor tells you that you're breaking dress code, you pull out your tape measure and show that you are within the limit. your supervisor says "I bet you wouldn't want me to bring you to the boss and let him measure it, would you?" it's clearly a threat: if you don't obey then you will be put alone in a room with your boss and he will touch your thighs. you don't know how to respond. you're taken out of lunch again.

But eventually I did find:

Gdi, Munch.

He did this a lot, too:

Though the one instance where he could reasonably get promoted would be in the event that 1) Mustang has some sort of opening in his sector and 2) Mustang feels like being a dick.

“Hey Fullmetal, long time no see.” “Yeah yeah Al and I are in a rush. We wanted to leave Central an hour ago so hurry up and spit it out what’d you call me here for?” “Oh don’t worry it’s good news. Wonderful news. You’re really making your way in the world. See Lieutenant Colonel Davis transferred recently to Southern Command–” “Oh no.” “–Which means there’s a spot for Lieutenant Colonel open here.” “No no no you didn’t.” “Longer hours, more responsibilities, sure. But better pay, and you’d get in good with some high-ranking people, assuming you know how to brown-nose.” “I will literally kick your ass, Mustang.” “For what? Brightening you future?” “No really I will kick your ass if you’re being real here–” “Is that a challenge, Lieuuuutenant Colonel Elric?” “I swear to God Mustang if you a c t u a l l y  d i d…”

This frustrates Mustang for some time, at least until Mustang discovers he actually is in possession of a real threat against Ed: Promotion.

This confuses a lot of people, who overhear fights between Ed and Mustang that end with Mustang menacingly discussing the better healthcare benefits of Lieutenant Colonels. Or the nicer pay. Or the guaranteed apartment housing in Central. 

Most soldiers start theorizing this is some kind of back-hand threat. Something like “You know Elric, you’re under consideration for Lt. Colonel and would get all these nice things. But if you’re going to be difficult, maybe we’ll give these to someone else? Think of what you’d be missing out on.” 

This theory loses all of its credibility one afternoon when Mustang’s soldiers overhear a loud, heated argument between the two of them from inside Mustang’s office. It ends with the sound of Mustang slamming both his hands down on his desk, kicking his chair back, and shouting, “I SWEAR TO GOD FULLMETAL IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP I WILL PROMOTE YOU!”

im going to keep posting occasional rebuttals to people saying this because yes it does count, yes it can make you permanently ill, yes even from food poisoning you dont notice. i am ver sorry to contamination ocd followers because this is one area where paranoia gets justified which is really tough

"Marth's team experimented with a dose of Salmonella so low that there were no significant symptoms."

Marth's team experimented with a dose of Salmonella so low that there were no significant symptoms or death, and all of the Salmonella were successfully eliminated by the host. "This type of study had never been done before and the results were shocking," says Yang. "We observed the onset of a progressive and irreversible inflammatory disease caused by previous infections. That was quite surprising because the pathogen had been easily cleared by the host." By the fourth infection, which had been separated months apart from the first, the inflammation had steadily increased and colitis was now present in all subjects. Surprisingly, the disease did not improve despite the cessation of repeated infections -- indicating that the damage was already done. "We have discovered an environmental and pathogenic origin of chronic intestinal inflammation in the course of modeling human food poisoning as it occurs repeatedly over the adult lifespan," explains Marth. "Remarkably, Salmonella have figured out a way to disrupt a previously unknown protective mechanism in the gut that normally prevents intestinal inflammation."

This week is ME/CFS Awareness Week (at least for some of the world), so shout out to all the folks out there living with this condition and here is a masterlist of every resource I've found so far on myalgic encephalomyelitis...

🔹 General info:

It’s not just ‘chronic fatigue’: ME/CFS is much more than being tired

What is Post-Exertional Malaise?

🔹 Diagnosis:

Diagnosis of ME/CFS; What You Need to Know

ME/CFS and Blood Tests – an in-depth look at what blood tests should be done to ensure your diagnosis of ME/CFS is correct, what the results mean, and when blood tests should be repeated

🔹 Managing fatigue:

Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) – What It Is and How To Avoid It

Pacing Tactics

Ideas for Managing Fatigue (Note: This piece is sponsored by CareCo Ltd and features affiliate links)

🔹 Other symptoms:

Strategies for Brain Fog – This article is aimed at people with long-COVID but the strategies suggested may work for anyone dealing with brain fog

Sleep Tips for New Spoonies – not specifically aimed at ME/CFS but many of the tips will apply

🔹 How to cope with ME/CFS:

Energy Conservation – a Tumblr post by @rthritis

Energy Conservation Techniques; Home Management – a Tumblr post by @rthritis

How to Keep House While Drowning: A gentle approach to cleaning and organising by KC Davis [📖 book recommendation]

11 Tips For Making Meal Prep Easier to Save Spoons

The Tray™ – how to feed yourself without preparing food [🎥 video]

Tips to make showering easier when you are physically disabled – a Tumblr thread not specifically aimed at ME/CFS but many of the tips will apply

The 7 Types of Rest & How to Use Them to Feel Better [🎥 video]

The Bedbound Activity Masterlist

🔹 Treatment, diet, and lifestyle:

All Current ME/CFS Treatments

The low histamine diet – a resource from Johns Hopkins' ME/CFS clinic

Dietary Supplementation for Fatigue Symptoms in ME/CFS – a journal article looking into supplements like L-carnitine and guanidinoacetic acid, oxaloacetate, CoQ10–selenium combination, NADH and NADH-CoQ10 combination [📃 research]

Fact Sheet: Food and ME/CFS – covers what foods are best to base your diet on plus some information about supplements, weight gain, weight loss, gastrointestinal symptoms, and when to see a dietitian; by The Association of UK Dietitians

🔹 Other:

Tips for Applying for Benefits with ME/CFS [🇬🇧 UK]

Please let me know what other resources you would like to see on ME/CFS; asks (including anons) are always open and you're welcome to reblog or comment to make a suggestion.

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.