the scariest thing in the world is probably whatever’s going on in the tiny gap between my kitchen counters and the oven
I didn’t know these existed for far too long as an adult but they are more than worth it (this particular brand is under US$10 on Amazon but I bet you can do better):
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#found this in the notes #unfortunately my stove is next to a wall and not a counter so I don’t think this will work for me #but something to bear in mind for other setups #domesticity #oh look an update #recs #unsanitary cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Salvete, Gaius Iuli’us Caesar sum et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos, sed interdum virides lauros et imperium Romanum construxi et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum) et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia). Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?. Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo. Pallidam cutem habeo. Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici. Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo. Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero. Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe! Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum. Ambulabam foris Pigverruca. Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix. Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.
My Latin is pretty rusty, but I know enough to say that it’s a bunch funnier, so let me take a stab at translating. I’m breaking down the original so if I make any ridiculous mistakes through not having taken Latin in 15+ years, other people can correct me.
“Salvete, Gaius Iuli’us Caesar sum” – Greetings, all! I am Gaius Julius Caesar
“et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos,” – and I have spears that are whiter than snow and golden
“sed interdum virides lauros” – but sometimes green laurels
“et imperium Romanum construxi” – and I built the Roman empire
“et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum)” – and I was, like, its first Caesar (that’s how I got my name) [note: a more literal translation is “thus I earned my name”, but it’s obvious that this is a direct reference to the line “that’s how I got my name” in the original]
“et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia).” – and many people say to me that I seem to be like Marcus Crassus (if you don’t know Marcus Crassus, your work is money). [translator’s note: “your work is money” is not a phrase I’m familiar with. Google Translate suggests “you need money” as a more idiomatic translation. My best guess is it might mean something like “you work for your money instead of being a patrician with a family inheritance”.]
“Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?.” – Brutus is not my son, which is good because AND YOU, MY SON???!? [note: this is the more classically attested version of Caesar’s last words, famously quoted in English as “et tu, Brute?” or “and you [are killing me too], Brutus?”
“Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo.” – I am a [vampire?] but I have white and straight teeth. [note: I’m more familiar with the Lamia as a Greek female monster similar to Scylla but with only one neck. However, Google Translate’s suggestion of “vampire” seems likely accurate from the obvious context.]
“Pallidam cutem habeo.” – I have pale skin.
“Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici.” – Also, I am a female witch [at?] a magic school, named Hogwarts, which I will stop visiting (I am 2094), I came, I saw, I conquered.“ [note: “Veni, vidi, vici” is famously what Caesar said when deciding to bring his army to Rome and become its ruler.]
“Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo.” – I am classical (if you didn’t know) and I have bought many togas in the Julian Basilica.
“Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero.” – I love reason and I conduct the Gallic [French] wars.
“Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe!” – As if, today all Gaul is occupied. All Gaul? Definitely!
“Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum.” – It is not a small village between Aquarium [pun: fish tank], Babaorum [pun: rum cake], Laudanum [pun: opium product] and Short Good.
“Ambulabam foris Pigverruca.” – I was walking outside Hogwarts.
“Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix.” – It snowed and rained and Gaul was divided into three parts, which made me happy. [note: Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars famously begins “Gaul is divided into three parts”.]
“Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.” – Marcus Porcius Cato [the Younger, a famous opponent of Caesar’s ambitions] stared at me. I put my middle finger up at him.“
The year is 50 B.C. All Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All? No! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Petibonum…
#okay so this one is closer to 8 business *months* (2023-05-14) #I don’t think any of the others are nearly so old though #My Immortal #language #oh look an update #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
a few years back zinc acetate lozenges were doing the rounds and I love a good superstition so I went ahead and incorporated that into my belief system. been a while so I thought I’d check to see if the state of the science on the subject had shifted since then
afaict there hasn’t been much work on the subject in the intervening time, and nothing much to change your mind one way or the other. good work everyone, you may return to your superstition behavior.
some details:
one study¹ recently reported a null result, but based on the going theory for zinc lozenges that’s what you would expect (zinc acetate was administered by capsules). also the study was lacking in other ways.
another² has a good looking graph and is maybe positive for the concept. haven’t read the fully study yet
that’s maybe about it? my method for researching this research was to search pubmed for “(zinc) AND ((acetate) OR (gluconate)) lozenge” plus some other words instead of lozenge, as there were too many results without an additional keyword for filtering. I am sure there are other places results are published besides pubmed. feel free to catapult relevant studies into my inbox
yeah that sounds fucked up! had no idea that was the case for some people, I always thought of a cold as a 1-3 day kind of thing. but presumably if someone gets 20 day colds they’re probably very glad to cut a week off that
The third week of a cold sucks a lot less than the first week so, like, maybe only as much as a normal person’s cold, but yeah if there’s a pill for cutting that third week off, I’m interested regardless of whether it helps with the main brunt of the cold. Gonna have to look into this.
you want zinc acetate, or if that’s not available, zinc gluconate. it has to be a lozenge or otherwise dissolve in your mouth, since the theoretical method of action is coating some tissue or receptor or something with ionic zinc. preferably with as few additives as possible. if it doesn’t taste bad and feel astringent, it’s not working. in the US everyone buys the life extension ones. idk about elsewhere
it is ideal to start as soon as possible. preferably in the not-sure-if-im-actually-sick-yet phase. starting once the infection is well developed seems to be much less effective
tbh I will actually take one prophylactically if I feel like I was in a high exposure environment. this is a not the protocol the research was done on but it seems reasonable and as long I don’t do this every day it is at worst a bad tasting zinc supplement
iirc the studies mostly had a protocol along the lines of one lozenge (of varying size and type?) every 1.5-2 hours while awake until symptoms subside. that’s a lot. it seems to produce some effect in the studies. I do not know that anyone has done any real study on taking more or less to compare, so it’s unclear what the optimal amount is, or how long it is worthwhile to persist in taking them
…well, I tried a Life Extension zinc-acetate lozenge (not to be confused with a Life Extension zinc-oxide/gluconate + citric acid lozenge, which I previously got by accident and which are much wimpier), and, uh, that was kind of scary.
I *didn’t even get a full dose*! I ended up running out of time before bed and having to spit two-thirds of it out! And it *still* took about *17 hours* for my sense of taste to stop being blunted!
(my sense of smell still worked, FTR, so I’m *probably* not just leaving a proverbial bad Yankee Candle review)
…I’ll *consider* giving it one more try the next time I’m *confident* I’m sick, but I cannot do this at-first-sign-of-illness when my first-sign-of-illness has a 99%+ false-positive rate.
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#reply via reblog #oh look an update #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I cannot find the post but I saw someone recently saying that the Yankee Candle Index looks bad again for this winter #(that is to say‚ Yankee Candle is experiencing another flood of negative reviews from #people who actually have sudden-onset anosmia but are blaming the lack of scent on poor candle quality) #P.S. I started wondering whether my health-log data supported my 99%+ estimate #so I did some ctrl-F and wow‚ I have non-contagious sore throats *even more* often than I thought #I had a noticeable amount of non-contagious throat soreness on *86 days* out of 2023-so-far #plus one contagious sore throat spanning two days‚ slightly under 24 hours total (before moving on to different cold symptoms) #but bear in mind that in the period 2020 – 2022 inclusive‚ *every* sore throat was non-contagious #so yeah‚ lately I *have* had >100 sore throats that don’t lead anywhere for each one that develops into a cold
Extremely Important Update: in April 2023 the World Bird Sanctuary had an orphaned eagle chick in need of care, so they decided to see if Murphy could live up to his parental ambitions.
He successfully raised the chick, which is now thriving with the other juvenile eaglets!
Congrats Murphy, you made it happen through sheer determination.
(Pictures are from the Facebook page of the World Bird Sanctuary; I can’t link them directly because I don’t have a FB account and the site is a nightmare to interact with if you’re not logged in, constantly resetting and kicking you to registration pages.)
This bird took care of an effigy of a baby until the fae gave him a real baby
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#(I kind of thought I had queued a version of this update already but I can’t find it anywhere) #(apologies for any accidental duplicates) #birds #oh look an update #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once #(P.S. found the other copy I was thinking of) #(it was in an open tab‚ not yet queued) #(so we’re good)
“Adult Canadian residents”, give or take, so maybe tens of millions of dollars.
I was going to say “and you have to live somewhere where food prices are low enough to make the math check out, so, like, not Nunavut”, but then I did some checking and…none of the grocery stores in Iqaluit seem to have online catalogues, but there’s a Real Canadian Superstore branch in Whitehorse, Yukon and it claims to be selling Cheez-Its for exactly the same price as the Superstore in Kitchener ($3.39 for one or 2/$5).
(I do kind of wonder if maybe it was too clever for its own good and ignored me asking for Whitehorse data, but OTOH I guess if any food *were* going to be the same price in Yukon it’d be a lightweight non-perishable like crackers. Hmm…okay, a 3L jug of store-brand apple cider is $3.99 in Kitchener and $7 in Whitehorse, so it looks like this is real price data. (Although I was honestly expecting the apple-cider prices in Yukon to be even worse.))
Maybe the main issue is *how many* grocery chains are in your area: the more options you have, the more likely one of them has a good sale on a given week. And since the receipt has to be from a (fairly long, but still) whitelist of specific chains to count, looks like the folks in Iqaluit are out of luck no matter how good a Cheez-It price they get.
I *am* wondering now if Brother is obtaining a larger fraction of his own food than I’d realised. But even if 0% of my food spending were for him (*definitely* not true), that would still only be USD$8.21.
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#reply via reblog #oh look an update #food #fun with loopholes #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land
imagine you’re in a timeloop and everything goes exactly the same every time, except for a random user that just posts completely differently each loop. sometimes they don’t post at all. they never post about the timeloop, though
during one loop you message them to ask if they know what’s going on and they immediately block you and go back to posting
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#okay so I was able to message one of the people who seemed to know the context for the previous post #(I picked the person that I knew to be a mutual-in-law (metamutual?)‚ seemed the most appropriate person to message out of the blue) #and they gave me a link to this post #which I am scheduling for two minutes after the other post is due to leave the queue #(I considered letting you see it in the ”proper” order but then my tags don’t make much sense) #(so I will give it to you in the order that it was given to me) #(…unless you are one of those people who reads their dash reverse-chronologically in which case I guess you *will* see it ”properly”) #((certainly a large fraction of the paired posts I come across are reblogged backwards)) #anyway #oh look an update #story ideas I will never write #this post was queued to ensure proper timing
Does the “I’m gonna get a good grade in” person know the impact they’ve had. Do they know they did in fact got a good grade in post, something that’s both normal to want and possible to achieve,
#holy shit that tweet was from *2019*?! #it feels older #(like I know 2019 was at least two eons ago but even after accounting for that) #thank you‚ Sara‚ for your incredible gift to society #oh look an update #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
(Update: it looks like ArchiveTeam was using grab-site or some other form of wpull, not wget.)
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#reply via reblog #oh look an update #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #amnesia cw? #…aaand lizardywizard isn’t following me on Tumblr and will not be notified that I reblogged this post #I guess I’d better PM them on Dreamwidth or something and let them know
Brinens and Things 