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
Tags:
#conversational aglets #recs #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the power of science #illness tw
the time of the year we are able to buy fangs in retail. and i’ve tried literally every brand of fnaga that spirit halloween carries (and more), so this is my review and recommendations.
Scarecrow Fangs
unpopular opinion, but i did not like these. They’re way too expensive, imo and the molding solution sucks and is a nightmare to work with. the fangs themselves are alright.
price: 19.99 us
rating: 5/10
Spirit Halloween
It’s surprisingly good! i used these until i broke them – they use thermoplastic for molding, which i think should be the standard for fangs. It’s far easier to work with. the plastic is cheaper than Scarecrow, but they feel solid and are a more realistic color (at least for me)
price: 4.99 us
rating: 8/10
Monster High
Oh my ghoul, i love these. These fangs are a bit on the smaller size, which is useful if you’re going for subtle. and of course, being monster high, i’m all for them. i mean, that case is adorable
again, these use thermoplastic. Though its imortant to note not to put the fangs themselves in hot water while you’re molding them- i warped one by accident. regardless, they are so comfortable and resilient. my second favorites.
price: 9.99 us
rating 9/10
Special FX
we’ve all seen that video of that girl using these in like 2008 and wanted to be her. at least i did… but im sad to report that these fangs dont work on my anatomy. they mold to your back molars with thermoplastic, and when you press on the bar, the fangs come down. these fit simular to a retainer as they just sit above your teeth.
i, however, am missing one of those molars and cannot line it up right to use them. (never beating the kentuckian stereotype)
price: 9.99
rating: 3/10
Now for the ones not sold at Spirit Halloween
Amazon cosplay fangs
You’ve most likely seen these before. they’re nothing special, but they get the job done. i do like the case they come in! very convenient. But the color is far too unrealistic for me. still, they do use thermoplastic! which is always a win. and theres four sizes, again convenient.
price: 7.99 us (give or take)
rating: 4/10
Dracula Fangs
I had never heard of this brand before someone posted about these on tiktok. i bought them immediately (i am not immune to propaganda, and neither are you), and i gotta say… They’re my favorite I’ve tried.
I got the large ones; and let me tell you, they’re massive. definitely not for subtle vamp vibes. They’re sharp, too! That’s a plus for me, not for everyone, i assume. and they mold with thermoplastic! they come with way more than you need (which you can use to make more fangs if you desire)
they do come in smaller sizes as far as I’ve seen, but i haven’t tried those yet.
price: 20.00 us (i know that’s rather pricey)
rating 10/10
honorable(ish) mentions
…
vampire condoms. only get them as a bit. a /j fang if you will.
price: 0.99 (i got mine at dave&busters for 25 tokens)
rating: i am wampire/10
Walmart Fangs
i swore there were some in different packaging, but i can’t find those now. these suck (not in the fun way). They’re made of rubber, and i dont remember them having any molding agents. just skip these, okay?
price: 2.89 us
rating: 0/10
Tags:
#transhumanism #recs #Halloween #vampires #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
i insist that the loud noise is the one thing that separated vacuuming from being best sensory experience possible to the worst sensory experience possible. imagine vacuuming if it’s completely silent. it would be so much fun it feels like a beast on a leash swallowing up everything in its way indiscriminately it’s so awesome
get ye a mechanical sweeper
it works without any batteries or electricity; it’s just a little flippy cylinder wheel that pushes dust and garbage into the little side containers, but for that it works remarkably well; I was pretty surprised at how big some of the stuff it picked up was
we use them to sweep the carpeted dining hall at work and they’re pretty fantastic for that although they don’t work well on tile and you’ve got to empty the traps decently often for maximum effectiveness; I don’t know how well it works for house floorjunk as opposed to dining hall floorjunk
Tags:
#oooooooh #recs #domesticity #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #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
Thinking about getting an air purifier. Given that half of my followers are huge nerds living in various wildfire-smoke-affected cities, it occurs to me that you might have opinions on this topic.
What should I get?
Come on, surely one of you owns one of these. Save me the work of reading a bunch of reviews online.
Build a cube of MIRV 13+ filters and a box fan. Much cheaper than a freestanding air purifier.
Alternatively, if (like me) you live somewhere where high-grade furnace filters are very expensive, go to IKEA and get some air purifiers from them.
The Förnuftig has a carbon filter and is wall-mountable, but (at least in Canada) you have to go to an IKEA store in person to get one and it’s over an hour’s drive away, so instead I got some Uppåtvinds which they’ll ship to you. They’re 50 CAD upfront and they take $6.50/year in electricity (at a weighted-average time-of-use cost of 9.27 cents per kWh) and $10/year in particle filters, vs my previous air purifier’s maintenance costs of $41.41 and ~$35 respectively. (Sure, the old one had a higher CADR, but only 23% higher: I could buy *two* of the smaller IKEA ones and still come out ahead on cost fairly quickly.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #proud citizen of The Future #recs #domesticity
Whoops. I did not intend for this post to blow up in the way it did. I’m not saying this is gonna happen tomorrow or even this year. I don’t have any inside information, and I’m purely basing it off of past experience. They could surprise us. Who knows?
The signs I’m seeing are based off of watching other fandom-driven websites in their end days.
The biggest glaring red flag: they no longer have any visible active moderation team or admins that are working on Fanfiction.net specifically. Reports are going unanswered on everything from plagiarism to abuse to page-breaking ads. Emails are not returned. Twitter mentions are never addressed.
Based off of their limited Twitter activity, all of their resources appear to have been funneled to FictionPress, leaving Fanfiction.net to flounder. If a website does not have anyone actively attending to it, it will eventually die.
The abuse alone could drive users from the website. When users are receiving repeated death threats and they have no way of curtailing the abuse or banning abusive users from messaging them, users will eventually just leave. Admins would have the capability of blocking the IP addresses of people sending abusive reviews and messages, but… what admins?
The code update that went through a few years ago that broke many old fics was never fixed. Many users are reporting major issues in uploading fics. The more they leave the site unattended, the more things will break.
The domain is registered through 2028, but if they keep going in the way that they are sooner or later it’s just going to wind up as a barely-functioning corpse of a website.
I am convinced that the only reason they leave it up is to collect ad revenue. If users continue to leave due to abuse and unreliable service, that ad revenue is going to tank.
I’ve seen this happen to so many websites over the years, and they rarely – if ever – get a revival.
But again – they could surprise us. I’m not counting on it, though. Nobody’s home anymore.
This is well-timed, because I logged on there a couple months ago to back up all my old fics. Put in my username and password. Someone else’s account information loaded up. I literally logged into some stranger’s account with my own user info. My fics were there, but the profile (including the user ID number) was someone else’s. I took a bunch of screenshots and sent in a support email aaaaaaaand nothing. I managed to snag all my fics and that’ll be it for me for that site. I don’t know wtf is going on there but it ain’t good.
Reblogging again because my friend mentioned being locked out of her account and ff.net blocks people from copy pasting, so she was afraid her fic would be lost forever when the site eventually goes down.
If you are in danger of losing all your old things, I found a reddit thread with a number of work arounds so you can get your fic off the site.
As of 26 March 2021, the staff of FictionPress have confirmed they are migrating FFN to the same server – which is extremely bad news for that server and for FFN as a whole.
Lots of technical stuff is going haywire too based on using the Inspect tool in Google chrome.
Hey! If you didn’t know you can copy and paste from ffn’s mobile site. If you want to copy paste from the browser for convenience sake go to m.fanfiction.net
There’s an even easier way of archiving fics. There are tons of free applications and websites you can use to directly save the fic as a PDF/HTLM/ePub/etc file. This is the application I use (usable on both Mac and PC). Also, this website lets you save fanfics as ePub files. This is much easier and quicker than copy-pasting fics.
I for one am going to go on an archive binge of all my favorite fics, just in case.
If you’d like to make sure that all the original formatting is preserved, I highly recommend SingleFile [Firefox, Chrome, Edge]. My local FFNet archives are SingleFile-based: works great, and means I don’t have to worry about whether the format translation to ePub or PDF or what-have-you broke anything. (I haven’t tried the specific downloaders mentioned above, but I know the downloaders I *have* tried often struggled to translate webpages into non-HTML formats without losing images or information-conveying fonts or other such issues.)
SingleFile is also handy for a wide variety of other use-cases involving manual downloading of individual webpages. (For use-cases involving automated mass-downloads, you’d want to look at wget (here’s some Dreamwidth-specific tips) or grab-site.)
—
This isn’t super relevant *yet*, but for anyone who stumbles across this post later *after* FFNet has completely collapsed and is thinking they might be too late: here are links to a scrape of FFNet from 2012 and a more barebones-formatted scrape from 2015. You might want to dig around in those and see if the stuff you were worried about is in there. And if all else fails, ask around and maybe you can find someone who saved a copy.
Tags:
#bringing this back for its advice #FFNet #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #recs #the more you know
my birthday is tomorrow! if you want to do something nice for me for my birthday, one nice thing would be to check out the session logs for Two-Faced Jewel, my formerly-D&D fantasy campaign i’ve been running and writing summary posts for for the past couple years. i’ve put a considerable fraction of my time and creative energy into this for a good long while, and i think like, two people besides the players ever read them? (i very much appreciate both of you. 💙)
there’s an index of all the posts here, and a fun short-form recap of the first twenty-odd sessions here. i think i’ve done a lot of cool and interesting things with it, am seeking sweet sweet validation, and am not above invoking Birthday Law to beg!
Tags:
#I appreciate you too! <3 #keep up the good work #@readers these are great and y’all should check them out #storytime #recs #scrupolosity cw #reblog coercion cw?
Yeah, for a couple weeks recently I was wearing CAD$35 thrift-store hiking boots (to be fair they were probably over $100 new) with CAD$50 merino socks.
My conclusion:
The socks *are* great. They’re remarkably comfortable especially compared to my lower-end wool socks, they’re well-built. They’re better than Walmart socks.
…but they’re not *fifty times* better than Walmart socks. And they cost fifty times as much.
I will be reserving them for hiking.
Tags:
#although it looks like if you buy 3+ pairs at a time they’re only thirty times as much #but still #reply via reblog #clothing #recs #(sort of) #adventures in human capitalism
Update: I have now listened to the first season of “24 Bauer Party People”, and it is *very* funny.
Tags:
#oh look an update #podcasts #recs #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(sort of) #food? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
if you liked @earlyandoftenpodcast (which is itself excellent as an amalgamation of a century of history, told with an imperceptible amount of fnords), I recommend Presidencies of the United States
it’s a bit slow (it’s taken him six years to cover twenty years of history) but i like it that way
Presidencies of the United States does have transcripts, if you’re so inclined. You can find them at the bottom of the page for each episode, such as the most recent one.
if you liked @earlyandoftenpodcast (which is itself excellent as an amalgamation of a century of history, told with an imperceptible amount of fnords), I recommend Presidencies of the United States
it’s a bit slow (it’s taken him six years to cover twenty years of history) but i like it that way
Tags:
#hmm #I consume very little audio (and am thus already saturated) and this doesn’t seem to have transcripts #but Early and Often *was* great #I suspect that in practice I will never get around to listening to this‚ but hey‚ maybe they’ll come out with transcripts someday #anyway‚ all of you should go read the Early and Often transcripts #(or I guess listen to them if you’re into that sort of thing: I never did) #podcasts #recs #history #home of the brave
Brinens and Things 