is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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maryellencarter:

brin-bellway:

sigmaleph:

transgenderer:

so strange to me when people pretend that reading subtitles doesnt severely affect your experience of a show. like, unless its very low on dialogue, youre gonna spend most of the time staring at the bottom of the screen. like, its totally valid if thats a valid tradeoff for you, or if it isnt dubbed, but it clearly IS a tradeoff

today on posts from a parallel universe: ????????

this has not been a problem to me, ever*, and I watch stuff with subtitles on all the time (including stuff in languages I am fluent in, because parsing audio is a pain sometimes.)

*(ok technically I had problems with subtitles when I was a tiny child, which I’ve always attributed to not yet being able to read very fast. Maybe this is an acquired skill you need and I picked it up early because of American cultural imperialism and my parents (correctly) hating dubbing)

I was *already* missing most of the details of what was happening on the screen [link], so there isn’t much to lose by turning on subtitles.

Oh yeah, reading subtitles absolutely severely affects my experience of a show, because I can actually understand what anybody is saying and therefore what’s supposed to be going on. ;P

I think the original post is about anime due to the “if it’s not dubbed” bit, but like… I have somewhat accidentally never watched an anime in my life. We’re talking 100% spoken English media here, for me. I just have bad enough auditory processing that the “tradeoff” is between understanding while only looking at the characters 90% of the time (rough estimate, but I know I can read a Terry Pratchett novel in four hours, I read *fast*), or not understanding at all.

(I also have a *lot* of issues with dubbed media. I would always rather hear the original inflections since I’m going to be reading subtitles anyway. Is hearing completely different voices and performances supposed to affect your experience of a non-English-original show less than “the one-inch-high barrier of subtitles”? :S)

(I mean, I will grant, ability to read fast and comprehend what you’re reading is frustratingly rare, at least in the US. One of the big things that’s driving me crazy at my job is being told by the support team “it’s unreasonable to expect us to read all that” when I ask for help and try to give them the information they’ll need. So maybe it’s a more average experience to find yourself absolutely hobbled by subtitles. But really… that doesn’t sound like a subtitles problem.)

I think you’re being overly uncharitable. People who have a harder time with text or images than with audio deserve sympathy too.

Note that I *didn’t* say subtitles don’t make it harder for me to parse visuals! They *do*, and I can absolutely see how someone’s sensory processors could be set up in such a way that subtitles do more harm than good. It’s just that *my* sensory-processing bandwidth is so small and so text-weighted that *most* of the things being sacrificed are things I would have had to sacrifice regardless, and *many* of the benefits received in exchange are things I needed.

(I recently read a *transcript* of a TV episode after watching it with subtitles and discovered that–despite the subtitles being helpful on net–I had *still* missed some of the dialogue. I’m really not that good at interacting with stories on a synchronous basis in general. Real life is *somewhat* easier because it doesn’t run on Chekhov’s Gun rules: the background details I missed very often *don’t* ever become important.)

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sigmaleph:

transgenderer:

so strange to me when people pretend that reading subtitles doesnt severely affect your experience of a show. like, unless its very low on dialogue, youre gonna spend most of the time staring at the bottom of the screen. like, its totally valid if thats a valid tradeoff for you, or if it isnt dubbed, but it clearly IS a tradeoff

today on posts from a parallel universe: ????????

this has not been a problem to me, ever*, and I watch stuff with subtitles on all the time (including stuff in languages I am fluent in, because parsing audio is a pain sometimes.)

*(ok technically I had problems with subtitles when I was a tiny child, which I’ve always attributed to not yet being able to read very fast. Maybe this is an acquired skill you need and I picked it up early because of American cultural imperialism and my parents (correctly) hating dubbing)

I was *already* missing most of the details of what was happening on the screen [link], so there isn’t much to lose by turning on subtitles.

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

not-a-fed:

gruene-teufel:

I have a friend, who’s a history major, who has only played one game the past two years. He’s spent almost 2000 hours on Crusader Kings II and that’s all he plays every single day after class.

When I tried to recommend Titanfall 2 to him, he said, “No thanks, I already play a video game.”

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less extreme but this is kinda how I feel

why would I play new video games when I already have games which I am enjoying playing

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

eightyonekilograms:

If you listen to audiobooks or serious podcasts, do you also do it during high-intensity exercise (weightlifting or any cardio beyond a walk), and if so do you find you retain any information that way?

cc @dagny-hashtaggart but anyone else is welcome to answer.

I’m not sure how much of an *attention* problem I have with listening while jogging, but I struggle to make out what they’re saying over the sound of the treadmill.

(Instead, I watch subtitled Youtube videos.)

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brin-bellway asked: For kinky attention: what do you like about hypnosis?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

tototavros:

Hmm, this is kind of hard, because I’ve been into hypno since before I knew what sexuality even was, I memorized the NLP bit in Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony (I still remember the “I’ll be wearing a <> tie. Pay attention to that. There’s a hundred and one ways this can go wrong, and the police could tie one of us up.”). Even my first dream that I realized was sexual several years after the fact involved hypnosis! 

Some ideas as to why I’m into it: I’m a very individual person, being near people, interacting with them, etc., is not *natural* to me, I often have a thing running when I’m with people wondering “am I having quite a fun time? if not, how do I extricate myself?”

But unfortunately, I’m not able to take care of my desires just by myself, so I entangle myself with other people, so hypno/mc is a way to patch these contradictions to just directly move them into ways that I prefer, rather than having to do something so annoying as ~communicating~ 

There’s another aspect of direct power that I like, which is imposing either temporary restrictions or modifications that are too powerful for most people to be able to do directly to themselves, changing their perceived body, or ability to speak normally, or cognitive capacity

*

>>I memorized the NLP bit in Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony

Huh, it’s interesting that that stuck with you. If you’d asked me for a list of top MC moments in Artemis Fowl, that would not even have made the list. Didn’t strike me as salient at all.

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>>Even my first dream that I realized was sexual several years after the fact involved hypnosis!

Mine was about being assimilated by the Borg. I was kind of disturbed at first by how much I enjoyed it, but I got used to it after a while.

(It might have helped that the delay was shorter: it was maybe a few months afterward that I stumbled across some hypno-fetish stuff on TV Tropes, reevaluated my entire life through this new lens, and went “…well *that* explains a lot”.)

—

>>But unfortunately, I’m not able to take care of my desires just by myself

I *mostly* can (it helps a lot to be ace), but sometimes I just desperately want to drift off to sleep in the arms of someone I love and trust and I’m still not sure what to do about that.

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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larshuluk:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

https://brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org/89538.html

@rustingbridges replied:

tomatoes really don’t travel well

they’re one of the fruits where the supermarket variety is the supermarket variety because it survives the trip, not because they’re good

meanwhile tomato plants are really low effort. if you have favorable conditions you can do literally nothing

—

Where are you *finding* conditions that aren’t full of weeds and wildlife-competing-with-you-for-the-food and the occasional blight? A greenhouse?

(…actually, that might not be a bad idea. I *have* heard of people building little personal greenhouses in their backyards, and nothing keeps squirrels from taking one bite out of your mom’s tomato and walking away like a fucking *door*, right?)

Re: surviving the trip, home-grown zucchinis taste about the same but we’ve noticed the shelf life is *vastly* longer. Store-bought zucchinis start to shrivel up and go soft within a few days of bringing them home; home-grown zucchinis can sit in the fridge for several *weeks*. Makes it a lot easier to plan your meals.

Honestly, probably a good part of my problem with gardening is that, because *Mom* loves home-grown tomatoes for some fucking reason, they end up the focal point of the garden and a great deal of my gardening-related labour is thoroughly alienated: I never see the fruits *or* the vegetables of my labour.

A garden optimised for what *I* thought was most worth growing would have zero tomatoes and more garlic and zucchini, with perhaps just enough potatoes to keep in practice so that I can put potatoes in the victory garden. And probably more perennials like mulberries. And possibly mushrooms. And I would want to do a bunch of research and expert-consultation regarding which weeds are secretly edible, since anything *that* easy to grow sounds like something I should take advantage of.

(I’ve been meaning to do some more digging into how to eat dandelions. I’ve heard you can put the new greens in salads and the petals in pancake batter, but I don’t normally eat salads *or* pancakes. Can you just, like, munch on a raw dandelion flower straight-up? Can I fulfil my childhood dream of eating a pretty flower I found in the backyard?)

@larshuluk replied:

Yeah, you can just munch any part of dandelion – I often do that when I’m reading in the garden. Older leaves get bitter and shouldn’t be eaten in big amounts, and roots need cooking. Flower is just fine though.

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Hell yeah!

—

This is another area where I like a lot of the things the communing-with-nature people are putting out but for completely different reasons. I want to know more about the natural world around me *so that I can exploit it better*. Which wildflowers can I eat? What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!

(I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it, to assume everything was poisonous until proven otherwise. And for the most part, nobody ever taught me which interesting plants I didn’t have to resist.)

Let’s get a few other cool edible / semi-edible plants out then :)

I mostly like fruits, since they are easy to identify and I don’t really have skills in identifying leaves. (So you see, I’m not an expert, don’t take this as authoritative advice! Also I’m looking up some names in a dictionary, since English is not my native language.)
Most suitable for central Europe, since that’s my location.

First: Poisoning yourself is very much a thing which can happen! Be careful!

There’s a lot of stuff which has some poison of the same strength as found in apple seeds, and that poison is removed by cooking. If you find these things on the side of the path and you snack small amounts, realistically nothing bad will happen. Cool examples:

– Elderberries
– European beech nuts (different, weaker poison. It is said the taste gets better, too, when lightly roasted. I love them as is already. Taste varies quite a bit from nut to nut, and is not very predictable from the look of it. So if you don’t like it, maybe still try a few more.)
– Rowan fruit (they’re disgusting raw, only bother if you want to cook them)

Then there’s stuff which is not commonly eaten, but can:

– ONLY THE FLESH of yew fruit. These are my favourite, they are planted in many locations, especially near graveyards. The pit is *very* toxic. I usually spit it out.
– Cornelian cherry fruit. Tastes great, take the very dark red ones.
– Blackthorn fruit. Need to be frozen before they become tasty.
– Sea-buckthorn berries. Grows on dunes near the sea, and generally on sandy ground.
– Hawthorn fruit. Taste somewhat like flour, not a great taste on its own. Take the very ripe, dark ones. Can be used to extend jam. Is often planted near fields as a hedge.

As a rule of thumb, all the stuff which grows on abandoned lots is mostly focused on settling the place *at all*, and therefore doesn’t focus much on poison. (Meaning they are great plants to *investigate* for edibility, not “just snack them, what could possibly go wrong?”)

Notably, thistles, stinging nettles, dandelions, many amaranths / pigweeds, plantains are edible both raw and cooked, including roots and flowers. Artichokes are basically thistles. Roots are hard even after cooking and don’t taste great, so I recommend not to bother. For stinging nettles and thistles, obviously remove / flatten the stingy parts before sticking them in your mouth.

Any other advice? Or tips for different regions?

(see also)

—

First, a postscript to the previous post:

Okay, better exploitation isn’t the *only* reason I want to know more about the nature around me. It also just bugs me to look at a plant or an insect or what-have-you and not know what it is. It feels…a lot like the feeling I get when I hear my co-workers chatting to each other in languages I don’t speak. Like I’m not a full person, missing a way of parsing the world that a person would have.

—

Thanks for the tips!

—

>>First: Poisoning yourself is very much a thing which can happen! Be careful!

I have a food-poisoning phobia and am *very* careful. That’s part of what concerns me about this whole food-security concept space, that I’m not as flexible as most people in what I’m comfortable with eating.

(On the bright side, if I *am* comfortable eating something I will happily eat it every day for years on end. I hear a lot of people worrying about the morale effects of having to resort to a repetitive diet in times of crisis, and I really don’t think that will be a problem for me.)

—

I did a bit of googling and there do seem to be some local homesteads-and-the-like in my area offering classes and advice to people who want more self-sufficiency. They’re intensely Living in Harmony with Nature types, but even with some clashing values I expect there’s still much to be gained by learning what they have to teach.

—

@rustingbridges: >>idk about potatos specifically but I think durable transportable stuff like potatos and onions is the relative advantage of actual farmers. relative to growing fragile vegetables that kind of thing is probably only worth doing to the extent you’re having fun with it

Like I said, the point would be to keep in practice. Potatoes are among the worse things to grow in a regular garden (because you could have just skipped all the bullshit and bought a 10lb bag at the grocery store for like $3 instead), but one of the best things to grow in a victory garden (high calorie-density, stores well, quite a few nutrients).

(…I should probably clarify that I’m using “victory garden” broadly: the disaster-fucking-with-access-to-groceries need not be a *war* specifically.)

Certainly this makes potatoes a lower priority: one would probably not need to grow them in particularly large or frequent quantities under normal circumstances. Indeed, I have enough other safety-net holes to patch that it’s likely not *currently* worth doing at all, completely crowded out by more important tasks.

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@florescent–luminescence: >>We also had a lot of Critters come sample the garden.

Yeah. That’s almost always been a major problem for us, and it was *especially* bad in 2020. We’re definitely going to have to look further into physical barriers: greenhouses maybe, but at least some sort of cage.

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oh my god i’m cleaning out my desk and i found my first phone

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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scotchtapeofficial:

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it was a fucking house phone that i was so stoked to have because it was mine that i kept in my own room and i cannot believe technology has progressed at the speed of FUCKING light to the point where this is a hilarious artifact to have had in like 6th grade and now theres kindergarteners with iphones

 

princess-peridot:

How did you know if you dialed the right number

 

scotchtapeofficial:

each button made a different tone so the numbers you dialed a lot became a subconscious melody in your head and if you hit the wrong button by accident it would sound like a wrong note in a song you know by heart

 

teaboot:

i can’t beleive that is a legitimate question in my lifetime

 

poipoipoi-2016:

It’s a legitimate question *now*.  

Because people don’t do this and this is terrible UX. 

 

brin-bellway:

Do you notice how the question says “how did you know if you dialed the right number” *full stop*, but the *answer* is specific to “numbers you dialed a lot”?

Yeah, dialing numbers you *didn’t* dial a lot–which was just about all of them if you were a kid! it’s not like kids have much reason to talk on house phones, not being in charge of coordinating any appointments and not having had much time to accumulate friends-no-longer-in-physical-proximity!–was *exactly* as anxiety-ridden as it sounds. It’s such a relief to have screens to double-check with. Even *dumbphones* like the phone at work have screens now.

(Plus phones with screens *also* make the button tones, as a second layer of defence. Do y’all not have the button tones on your smartphones? Did you turn them off?)

 

maryellencarter:

I’m not sure if the button sounds on my phone defaulted to off or if I turned them off by choice, but I have never felt any need to turn them on. This probably relates to the fact that I can’t remember a melody without words and that phone numbers do not adhere to the melodic principles of Boethius anyway (okay, I never actually made any sense of Boethius, but he was the “Great Book” cited on Why Music We Don’t Like Is Objectively Bad and as a side note Stop Liking Pentatonic As A Scale It’s Unchristian) uhhh where was I. Right. I can’t remember numbers anyway, I can’t remember the little tune associated with the numbers, so they just all sound wrong. It occurs to me though, and the deficiencies of my auditory memory may be assessed by the fact that I’m not actually sure, but in the part of my day job that involves helping set up brand new phones and then telling the person “now please dial our test call number which is such and such”, I don’t think I usually hear dialing beeps before the announcement. Maybe new smartphones come with the dialpad beeps off by default.

There is a distinct possibility that smartphone button tones are opt-in, and my family is just in the habit of switching them on. As it happens, my first-ever SIM card† is currently in the mail, so I guess it will soon be time for me to investigate a phone app’s settings myself.

—

@sigmaleph​ [link], there’s still the part where you’re waiting for them to pick up! And it’s been my experience that often *somebody else* will pick up the phone, and then you have to sort out whether this person is sharing a phone line with the intended person or whether they’re completely unrelated.

—

†not counting the PC Mobile one that came with my first phone, which I never activated

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

titaniumelemental:

titaniumelemental:

The thing that’s frightened me about the COVID restrictions from the very beginning was a lack of the idea that the mental suffering from social restrictions was something worth balancing with the intended effects. Not that it necessarily does outward the benefit, just that it was at least worth considering. Instead you either got people totally dismissive of the danger of the virus, or people saying “how could you think about [need for human contact phrased to sound as frivolous as possible] when people are dying because it of it?!”

But the thing is, everyone not only accepts some level of risk for themselves, but also accepts some level of risk for other people. That amount isn’t ever zero. In 2019, I had contact with a lot of people that could have potentially spread influenza. I got my flu shot as always, I washed my hands the normal amount, but I did not become a hermit. Now you could argue that my selfish desire to see multiple friends in my apartment at the same time was increasing the possibility of other vulnerable people catching the flu. Didn’t I think about how as much as these people mattered to me I should be putting the needs of others first? But I didn’t, and in that situation no one expected me to.

We are not in that situation now. The magnitude of that risk is radically higher and that’s why I’ve continued to live a radically altered life. But I plan to someday inch back towards the old thing, and we’re all going to have to figure out how much and when. It’s going to be more complicated than treating “your actions affect other people” as a trump card that justifies any and all restrictions.

My lingering, probably paranoid fear since last spring has been: if people around me accept the precedents that anything that puts other people at any increased risk is something you shouldn’t be able to do, and that wanting to be in the same room with people you like is something trivial that no one is willing to stand up for, then what? That sounds like a system of social norms where you let scrupulousity-brain write the rules. So if people don’t actually believe those two ideas (and I don’t think many do) I’d appreciate it if more were willing to say it out loud.

And the point is that I don’t know what an acceptable level of risk to put other people in is, I don’t have numbers, and I get why no one wants to have this conversation because admitting you accept risk to be higher than zero makes you sounds like a horrible person. But we have to acknowledge it some time, or I’m afraid we’ll end up in a situation where you’re expected to feel low-level guilty about any people you interact with the way you’re supposed to about unethical consumption under capitalism or not being sufficiently critical of the problematic media you enjoy. (Which is to say, people whose brains work a certain way will feel low-level guilty about it all the time and others will let it run off their backs and appear to have no comprehension of what the other group feels when they bring it up.)

…what does *the value of other people* have to do with anything? Anti-plague measures are taken for one’s *own* sake, directly and/or to protect [people such that it would suck for you if they got hurt].

The thing that horrifies me about people going “but social interaction” isn’t their self-centredness. I’m self-centred too! But I did the egoist moral calculations and came to the conclusion that the value of in-person social interaction outside my bubble was negligible next to the risk of catching COVID-19, and if other people’s calculations are coming out differently, that means they’re either very bad at moral calculus or (more likely) have very different values. Both of those things are scary! Who knows what these people will come up with next?!

—

(I guess maybe the main thing that makes this whole discourse feel weird to me is: I have never once been coerced into taking anti-plague measures I thought were overkill. I *have* *frequently* been coerced into taking *fewer* anti-plague measures than I wanted to.)

—

>>But I plan to someday inch back towards the old thing, and we’re all going to have to figure out how much and when.

This is my plan:

When everyone in my household has been vaccinated: cease wearing a respirator. Wear a cloth mask in indoor public spaces if official (read: presumably underestimated) local caseload is above 1/200k/day, to reduce the chances of becoming a carrier and reduce the chances of spreading it if I already am (spreading disease to people who aren’t lucky enough to be vaccinated yet is bad for the society in which I live (people can generally be assumed to be doing something useful, even if indirectly), and also sets a bad precedent (I expect to live through other plagues in the future, and quite likely I will be lower in the vaccine triage list for the next plague than I am now: someday it’ll be *me* who hasn’t been vaccinated yet, and I wish to do my part to encourage a norm I would one day benefit from)). Do not *offer* private social gatherings to unvaccinated people, but seriously consider accepting unvaccinated people’s social offers. Freely offer and accept social-gathering offers with vaccinated people: to us COVID-19 is somewhat less dangerous than a cold, and only baseline anti-cold measures [link] apply.

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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twitblr:

Definitely masking up post-COVID (x) {{the original link didn’t actually lead anywhere; I have replaced it with a genuine source link}}

 

juliainfinland:

Also, let’s keep having soap and disinfectant dispensers everywhere.

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

By contrast, I’ve been getting the same number of sniffles that I do every year even though there’s no one to catch them from, which is how I learned this year that I’m not prone to minor colds; I’m prone to hayfever.

 

brin-bellway:

Huh, you’re still getting hayfever with a mask? I started wearing a mask in 2017 *specifically* to avoid pollen, and it’s been working wonderfully for me.

Have you been keeping the mask on outside, and when near front doors that people are opening a lot? Does it have a well-fitted nosepiece?

—

I also had no colds in the calendar year 2020. It used to be fairly normal for me to go entire years without getting sick (after I adjusted to my current microbial milieu, that is; I got sick a *lot* the first couple years I lived in Canada), but then I started working a customer-facing job where nobody else ever took sick leave and staff members were forbidden from wearing masks, and I went from a cold every 1 – 2 years to a cold every few months. Getting rid of that damned fast-food cold rate wasn’t worth what it’s cost, but it’s a very nice silver lining.

(for anyone who finds my rate of colds bogglingly low: I’m guessing the two big components are “trained myself out of touching my face in public when I was a pre-teen, and always wash my hands upon returning home” and “rarely travel”, in that order)

I didn’t even used to do any anti-airborne measures†, just anti-fomite. I plan to start wearing a mask in indoor public spaces from October – March or so each year and on public transit year-round, and it’ll be very interesting to see what that does to my baseline cold rate.

(also, on a broader scale, it will be interesting to see if COVID-19 vaccines grant any cross-protection against cold-type coronaviruses)

—

†Except in extreme situations like “on an airplane two seats away from a coughing dude”. Guess who didn’t get sick until an incubation period *after* the rest of her family? (unfortunately there’s only so much you can isolate from people you’re sharing a hotel room with)

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

I very rarely wear a mask. I hardly leave the house and when I do, almost nobody wears masks here because there’s no covid in my state outside of the quarantined medi-hotels for infected international arrivals; we just sanitise, social distance, keep records of where we go and get tested any time symptoms show up so that when it does show up, we can respond before it’s got more than a couple of people. The distancing and group size limits are enough that basically nobody’s getting colds.

My probably-hayfever is very mild and isn’t debilitating at all (which is probably why it took me so long to notice); I just get a sniffly, runny nose so I haven’t bothered with any pollen precautions. They’d be more annoying than just living with it.

 

brin-bellway:

Fair enough, I suppose.

When I started wearing pollen masks, my only symptom was mild sore throats. The main problem I was having was that pollen attacks felt exactly like…well, the onset of a cold. *Physically* the sore throats per se weren’t a big deal, but I hated never being sure whether or not I was coming down with something.

I’ve started getting runny noses too now, which I found even worse in that they’re impairing in their own right. Maybe I’m just more bothered by having a runny nose than you are.

 

alarajrogers:

My allergies are for animals and dust. I have pets and am far too disorganized to dust. So yeah, I’m actually just as miserable this year as I am every year, but I definitely have noticed, no colds. Runny nose and sneezing and occasional sore throat and cough… but at my age, the biggest symptom of a cold is a draining and horrible fatigue. All my fatigue this year comes from diabetes and depression.

I do think I’m going to keep using masks during the winter every year.

 

brin-bellway:

At your age? Are you implying you *didn’t* get horrible draining fatigue from colds when you were younger?

When I saw that one of the DSM rules is that in order to qualify as having clinical depression it has to be at least two weeks, I thought “ah, of course, they’re thinking of self-limiting diseases”. The last week of December, 2017, I had a cold that *didn’t* come with a transient depressive episode, and it was amazing how much less it sucked. Turns out that while sore throats and stuffy noses and coughing fits *are* pretty annoying, *most* of the badness of colds is from direct inducement of misery.

…if there are people who *normally* don’t get depression from colds, that would explain a lot about how blase they are about disease prevention.

(…“people with enough depression at baseline that colds are just background noise” would also explain a lot but in a much more horrifying way. you indicate that in at least some cases they can be distinguished, though.)

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges replied: “no, I don’t feel that way. identifying a cold mostly consists of ruling out allergies and guessing”

holy fuck

 

poipoipoi-2016:

Same really. 

At some point, I will give in and move to the desert but right now, the year is: 

* Mold/Dust season all winter
* Fading into OH GOD OH NOOOOOOO season as pollen season arrives and I more or less fall over flat on my ass for a month
* Summer is great except for the bit where it’s 97 degrees and going outside is hellish
* Into August/September where ragweed arrives and knocks me out for 3 days every year
* Into leaf season where it’s time to get bronchitis and pneumonia again just in time to redevelop a continuous hacking cough for
* Oh look at that, it’s dust season.  

I literally have a rule that I maintain 3 alarms and if I sleep straight through them, it’s a sick day because if it’s a choice between ragweed and getting hit by a truck, let’s go play in some traffic.  

Horrible draining fatigue is pretty normal, but trivially, if you can throw a depressingly expensive cocktail of OTC, prescription, and illegal meds at “Getting your nose the f*ck back open”, that basically goes away.  

Then of course, I’m increasingly certain I ended up with Long COVID, because I’ve had constant chest pains and shortness of breath since April, so I’m working on going remote so I can carefully maintain CO2 levels below 600PPM…. by opening a window to ragweed spores year-round.  

Ouch. Many sympathies for what you have to put up with.

Every year my pollen sensitivity NOS (the allergist couldn’t figure out what to make of me) gets worse: stronger symptoms, for more of the year, after less exposure. I hope I never end up in as terrible a position as yours, but I’m worried I might.

I also don’t get depression from pollen, but again worried this might change as my condition deteriorates. (The psychological problem of a pollen-induced sore throat is the fear from “I associate this feeling with *becoming* depressed a few hours later”: pollen currently doesn’t *directly* cause any brain symptoms.) For a cold, the depression hits before the nose symptoms do, so getting my nose open clearly isn’t enough.

What happens if you just…wear a mask all the time, taking it off only when you need to eat or drink or something? Maybe with one of those tabletop air purifiers too?

—

@jadagul has reported in as not experiencing cold-induced depression [link], although honestly I’m not even surprised. Like, if you’d asked me before all this “does jadagul get cold-induced depression”, I’d have said “god, probably not, *nothing* depresses that man: failing to get depressed when sick is *exactly* the kind of weird shit his brain would do”.

—

I have now written up a post describing what colds are like for me [link].

Tags:

#reply via reblog #allergies #covid19 #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #oh look an original post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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twitblr:

Definitely masking up post-COVID (x) {{the original link didn’t actually lead anywhere; I have replaced it with a genuine source link}}

 

juliainfinland:

Also, let’s keep having soap and disinfectant dispensers everywhere.

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

By contrast, I’ve been getting the same number of sniffles that I do every year even though there’s no one to catch them from, which is how I learned this year that I’m not prone to minor colds; I’m prone to hayfever.

 

brin-bellway:

Huh, you’re still getting hayfever with a mask? I started wearing a mask in 2017 *specifically* to avoid pollen, and it’s been working wonderfully for me.

Have you been keeping the mask on outside, and when near front doors that people are opening a lot? Does it have a well-fitted nosepiece?

—

I also had no colds in the calendar year 2020. It used to be fairly normal for me to go entire years without getting sick (after I adjusted to my current microbial milieu, that is; I got sick a *lot* the first couple years I lived in Canada), but then I started working a customer-facing job where nobody else ever took sick leave and staff members were forbidden from wearing masks, and I went from a cold every 1 – 2 years to a cold every few months. Getting rid of that damned fast-food cold rate wasn’t worth what it’s cost, but it’s a very nice silver lining.

(for anyone who finds my rate of colds bogglingly low: I’m guessing the two big components are “trained myself out of touching my face in public when I was a pre-teen, and always wash my hands upon returning home” and “rarely travel”, in that order)

I didn’t even used to do any anti-airborne measures†, just anti-fomite. I plan to start wearing a mask in indoor public spaces from October – March or so each year and on public transit year-round, and it’ll be very interesting to see what that does to my baseline cold rate.

(also, on a broader scale, it will be interesting to see if COVID-19 vaccines grant any cross-protection against cold-type coronaviruses)

—

†Except in extreme situations like “on an airplane two seats away from a coughing dude”. Guess who didn’t get sick until an incubation period *after* the rest of her family? (unfortunately there’s only so much you can isolate from people you’re sharing a hotel room with)

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

I very rarely wear a mask. I hardly leave the house and when I do, almost nobody wears masks here because there’s no covid in my state outside of the quarantined medi-hotels for infected international arrivals; we just sanitise, social distance, keep records of where we go and get tested any time symptoms show up so that when it does show up, we can respond before it’s got more than a couple of people. The distancing and group size limits are enough that basically nobody’s getting colds.

My probably-hayfever is very mild and isn’t debilitating at all (which is probably why it took me so long to notice); I just get a sniffly, runny nose so I haven’t bothered with any pollen precautions. They’d be more annoying than just living with it.

 

brin-bellway:

Fair enough, I suppose.

When I started wearing pollen masks, my only symptom was mild sore throats. The main problem I was having was that pollen attacks felt exactly like…well, the onset of a cold. *Physically* the sore throats per se weren’t a big deal, but I hated never being sure whether or not I was coming down with something.

I’ve started getting runny noses too now, which I found even worse in that they’re impairing in their own right. Maybe I’m just more bothered by having a runny nose than you are.

 

alarajrogers:

My allergies are for animals and dust. I have pets and am far too disorganized to dust. So yeah, I’m actually just as miserable this year as I am every year, but I definitely have noticed, no colds. Runny nose and sneezing and occasional sore throat and cough… but at my age, the biggest symptom of a cold is a draining and horrible fatigue. All my fatigue this year comes from diabetes and depression.

I do think I’m going to keep using masks during the winter every year.

 

brin-bellway:

At your age? Are you implying you *didn’t* get horrible draining fatigue from colds when you were younger?

When I saw that one of the DSM rules is that in order to qualify as having clinical depression it has to be at least two weeks, I thought “ah, of course, they’re thinking of self-limiting diseases”. The last week of December, 2017, I had a cold that *didn’t* come with a transient depressive episode, and it was amazing how much less it sucked. Turns out that while sore throats and stuffy noses and coughing fits *are* pretty annoying, *most* of the badness of colds is from direct inducement of misery.

…if there are people who *normally* don’t get depression from colds, that would explain a lot about how blase they are about disease prevention.

(…“people with enough depression at baseline that colds are just background noise” would also explain a lot but in a much more horrifying way. you indicate that in at least some cases they can be distinguished, though.)

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges replied: “no, I don’t feel that way. identifying a cold mostly consists of ruling out allergies and guessing”

holy fuck

 

alarajrogers:

I’ve suffered from depression since my 20′s, though, and yet the whole “a cold comes with terrible exhaustion” dates to… I wanna say maybe somewhere between 35-40? After I had my kids? A good bit after I was diagnosed with some unspecified fatigue disorder which turned out to be depression under a new guise?

Also, the kind of draining fatigue I’m talking about isn’t what I suffer from my depression.

A depressive episode comes with: i know I ought to do that thing but I really don’t feel like it, I have no willpower to do anything, everything seems kind of pointless, I could get up and do the thing I’m supposed to do but it’s so hard, can’t focus, nothing gives me any sense of satisfaction, no real emotions aside from a general feeling of blah unhappiness or else deep sadness

A cold comes with: going up the stairs has me out of breath, I want to do things but the physical energy is just not there, not sleepy but so tired, watching TV is exhausting, emotional state is anger because I want to do things and my body is betraying me and won’t let me, but I don’t have the energy to rage about it

They both manifest as fatigue, but different kinds of fatigue.

(see also)

That first one sounds much more like a cold to me than the second one does. I guess we’re experiencing different things after all, even now.

I…I’d kind of suspected something like this might be true ever since I had that non-depressive cold in 2017, but it’s still kind of a revelation to have people confirming they actually don’t experience this.

I wonder where the difference lies.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #depression

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