MrShankles

I found this research interesting because of personal anecdote:

My family and I have joked that my mom must have some kind of immunity to covid. Before a vaccine was available, she had several direct (and sometimes lengthy) exposures... but never any (noticeable) symptoms or illness. And after being vaccinated with the monovalent rounds, she had several direct exposures to omicron... and still nothing

I myself have worked the front lines as an ICU nurse in the US since the first wave, and have never had covid, that I know of. Never symptomatic and never tested positive (granted, I am much more fastidious in regards to infection prevention). The kicker on my end is that my wife is immunosuppressed, and she also has never gotten covid, even with me working covid units and coming home to her (also why I have been so incredibly anal about not bringing it home).

Could be luck, or anything in-between, but I still wonder if my mom and I are resistant. We both have had many (sometimes severe) respiratory infections when I was growing up, and I've wondered if those exposures to other Corona viruses helped train our immune systems.

Like I said, that's my personal anecdote. We both still get every vaccine for covid-19 that becomes available, because fuck all that. But I've always been curious what future studies of the immune system might reveal. Because we have been wildly lucky, all things considered

Looks like that vehicle could use a little Freedom

And much of the US Southeast in general. And probably the Northeast as well. But many people in the US can evacuate inland. Countries around the Caribbean Sea... not so much

Low-income households in the US are also disproportionately affected; cause it's hard to evacuate your family without a car, or to rebuild your life after it's been hurricaned away.

Thank you for that read. That honestly gave me a lot more perspective than I had, and that speech was quoted from over a decade ago!? The more I know, the more I realize how much I don't know... but hot damn. I know it's been a fight, but "a war" really does seem more apt

It's a subreddit/event that they do every year (or I think it's only once a year?) where every user can place a single, colored pixel on a large digital canvas.

Your pixel can be over-written by another user, and each user can only place one pixel every 5 minutes or so (and there's a lot of bot-use, which is lame)

So different subreddits will band together to try and orchestrate a picture and protect it from being over-written by other users (or bots... if possible)

So alliances between subreddits are formed, fall apart, some backstabbing and deception... all until the event is over and the final canvas is locked-in.

It was actually a pretty cool event. You could maybe join a discord, a pattern and placement would be followed, and you'd just drop a pixel where it needed to be when you could, to help the overall picture. Or go rogue and try and etch a tiny little corner somewhere yourself

I had fun with it last year, but c'est la vie. I ain't going back there for anything. Would be cool if the different instances could somehow do something of the same nature across the fediverse one day. It was the comradery and light-hearted fun that really made it

God damnit, now you're gonna have me watching the enitre mini-saga again. You wanna be a tree? Cause if I had the power, you'd become a tree

Lmao, alright alright... ya got me with this one. Just saying thanks for the little laugh

I mean, I guess whatever makes ya happy man! Different folks with different strokes or something like that lol

I mean... your rational has merit. I don't really have a way to definitively prove I'm not a "reddit bot shill." I would assume my grammer, wording, or whatever, would kinda show I'm not a bot?

Am I bot and don't even know it yet? Hell of an identity crisis, that's for sure

Sorry, I'll be posting another actual shower thought later. Maybe on my lunch break if I get one

I respect that too, just a difference in opinion. Maybe it gave me some closure to an era, or just simply a little bit of petty satisfaction. But that was the first time I've opened reddit since I found the fediverse and the last time (albeit for maybe search results if they're ever relevant, but I bet someone around here could answer the call first)

Oh, I've been gone. Deleted all my accounts except one, and never went back... until I saw that the coins would go away. Figured I'd put them somewhere fun real quick.

Not surprisingly, the first comment on the post I awarded (on r/pics) was a 10y premium account with the most basic-ass response that was "totally not a reddit shill".

Verbatim, they commented:

"Ok, it's been weird... but weird stuff is what the place is all about!"

Take from that what ya will, but looks AI generated to me. Doesn't matter, I've been loving bullshitting around the fediverse since the day I joined and have relegated reddit to the level of quora. It might answer some questions if I'm searching for something specific, but I'll be asking around here first