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.

It’s easy to say that cyber bullying doesn’t matter in the real world or whatever but targeted online bullying campaigns have the power to wreck entire communities and support networks.

It’s difficult to just turn off your computer when all the people who relate to this aspect of your life are in there.

I’ve definitely met other asexual and arospec people irl but it’s quite rare. And real life queer spaces are in fact often bars or kink spaces. And like bully for you if you like kink or alcohol or romance but when your entire identity is based around not feeling the feelings often associated with romance and/or sex that’s not always super fun.

And people got relentlessly mocked for bringing up this issue. Shut down. Called childish. Like okay. Fuck us for wanting a sober non sexual spot to meet other queers, right? So childish for wanting options.

I’ve been involved in the online asexual community and doing education about asexuality and aromanticism in both irl and online queer spaces for almost fourteen years now and that short period of time around 2016-2018 took a wrecking ball to my people that I feel like we’ve still barely recovered from and I’m still angry about it.

Theoretical goal of banning things you find uncomfortable as a CC:

Bad things you don't like will stop being made and existing about you/your character.

Actual outcomes of banning things you find uncomfortable as a CC:

Bad things you don't like will Still Exist.

Subsets of your community will harass & abuse other fans. Trolls will make upsetting bait content that devoted fans feel a duty to engage with & fight against. Well-intentioned fans who don't know the rules exist will break them and get yelled at. People will arbitrarily interpret rules to bludgeon other fans' headcanons & send hate campaigns after each other. This WILL happen, no matter how many times you caveat with 'but don't harass anyone': You have issued an edict whose only enforcement mechanism is harassment.

Some of the fans who are most viciously defensive of your rules will still create stuff you find uncomfortable. Life finds a way. If you ban peanut butter, the fandom will create a series of intricate excuses as to why ground peanuts with sugar added is totally a different thing, and moreover how dare you imply they would break boundaries. The stuff you dislike won't stop being made, it will just be mislabeled and harder to avoid.

Artists will inevitably make cool shit that technically breaks your boundaries but Is Cool. Engaging with it will get that artist harassed for ignoring your boundaries (even if you say this one is fine).

Less people will engage with your work. You will have a smaller audience and much more limited free advertisement.

Everyone following the rules will create a constant need for judgment about things at the edge of your comfort zone. 'Ask for permission' means you have given yourself a part-time job arbitrating to strangers on whether it's okay to draw you mad at another minecraft guy.

More earnestly: By and large the people who are most online, who take boundaries seriously and actually care about seeking permission, are teens and very young adults. That's who you're setting rules for and telling that they can't depict certain things. The kinksters and smut writers and grown-ass adults are generally going to be unaffected, because their self-esteem doesn't hinge on the approval of a Twitch streamer.

Genuine question: Do you want to have to stare at an ask on Tumblr and consider whether to give permission for some 14-year-old to write a fic about your character self-harming or having cancer or being sexually assaulted? To say yes or no, while knowing that this person is probably asking not out of prurient interest, but because it makes them feel a little less alone to imagine an older, stronger character going through what they are?

That is the actual effect of setting those rules.

(The better boundary, btw, is 'I don't want to see things that make me uncomfortable': it's still not perfectly enforceable unless you entirely abstain from the internet, but it is much more actionable than 'make that stuff stop existing'. Having a dedicated 'don't look' tag blocked solves a lot of problems. Another strategy would be letting friends/trusted fan-acquaintances vet the best work and send it to you to gush about, rather than scrolling your tags at random.)

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!

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children

Kiki’s Delivery Service: takes place in the regular world— albeit at some nebulous point in time— but also magic is real and witches are a thing. Witches exist in this world because it’s fun and we like them. It’s fantasy elements in a familiar setting— essentially urban or modern fantasy.

Porco Rosso: takes place in an extremely specific place and time and contains exactly one fantastical element— Marco’s pig head— which is never given an explanation and is never questioned as a biological impossibility. It’s clearly a metaphor and commentary on a real world issue but it’s also very much literal. This dude 100% has a pig head. No other mentions of magic are made. This is magical realism.

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.