Look a blog title!

sounds like someone needs to go in the water

Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’

To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’

The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

ESPECIALLY the diy ones. back before costumes were mass-manufactured, people were left to their own devices and shit got WILD.

It was an absolute free-for-all. back before you could buy a batman mask in a drug store for $5, people really just did whatever

and it was FABULOUS

bonus points to these early commercialization attempts. yes that is a batman dress

Image Description:

Screen cap of a Facebook post, reading:

Something ironic that I’ve noticed from being in both autistic mom groups and NT mom groups. Let’s pretend a child cries every time they have to be buckled in the car seat..

NT mom group: “tell them to deal with it, it’s for their safety” “ignore the outbursts, they’ll get used to it” “maybe the straps are too tight? If not, and nothing seems to be wrong with the seat, let them cry it out, safety is most important.” “Sometimes, you just gotta deal with it, hugs mama, sorry this is happening.”

Autistic mom group: “is your child verbal enough to express or show why they’re in distress?” “is the fabric of the car seat scratchy?” “Are the windows tinted? If not the sun may hurt.” “Maybe he wants someone to hold his hand, can you reach back and hold it maybe? anxiety is a real bitch” “transitions can be hard, especially on little humans, maybe give advance notice that you will be leaving in the car at x time?” “Obviously something has him distressed, does he have a toy he’s attached too and can hold?”

Look at that dialogue. “She thinks she knows.” He’s trying to get Mulaney to see his wife’s expertise as instead a weird misperception. He’s coaching him to undercut his wife’s confidence in the truth and her own abilities.

And Mulaney replies exactly the right way: “She does know.” He asserts not only that she’s perceiving the world accurately, but that she is an expert at something he’s not good at.

vinegar and bleach makes chlorine gas, which is highly toxic

ammonia and bleach makes chloramine, which is highly toxic

rubbing alcohol and bleach makes chloroform, which is highly toxic

hydrogen peroxide and vinegar makes peracetic/peroxyacetic acid, which can be highly corrosive

the quiz to finally end the discourse

Are you a Soldier, A Poet, or A King?

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT

(The corsets pictured are genuine historical garments from the collections of the Met Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Anyway, Elizabeth’s dress doesn’t need to bring in her waist, since she’s very obviously wearing an underskirt that makes her skirt go FWOOM and makes anybody’s waist looks big by comparison. All her corset (and a little CGI) does is make her bodice lie flat and give her amazing tits.

I don’t usually post personal shit but my friend and I were talking and there were some things she didn’t know were PTSD related, and sometimes it’s just so weird and out there so. Some stuff I learned too late were caused by trauma:

- Nightmares that have *nothing* to do with your trauma

- Getting angry at anything that startles you/is loud/is irriatating

- Becoming alarmingly calm in situations of crisis/chaos

- Shaking, just, all the time

- Needing very little sleep to function effectively

- Massive mood swings that often get mistaken for personality or mood disorders

- Feeling like there is a layer of dirt on you/that your skin is dirty and needing to get it off

- Believing you will die young and alone !! Big one!!

- Looking for reasons to cut people out of your life

- Needing things to be exactly as you like them to be – not necessarily clean/organized but just to be a specific way and be within your control, and getting angry when it is not *this one gets mistaken for OCD v often

- Preferring high stress/very busy lifestyles to keep occupied

- Needing compression/pressure (ie tight shoelaces, heavy coats and blankets, snug fitting hats, etc) to feel comfortable/safe

- Discomfort with silence

- Very sensitive to heat, smell, and lighting

- Ringing in ears!! I had no idea about this one tinnitus is not that uncommon for ptsd, even if there was no direct head trauma involved

- Physical numbness, often in arms & hands when a flashback or panic attack is about to start

- Derailing conversations when they are causing stress

- Sudden and unexplained onsets of just the most deep sense of melancholy (often accompanied by a lot of tears)