Not me growing foxglove and hellebores like I’m trying to kill Socrates again 😅

I’ve definitely noticed. When I was a kid in the South, lovebug season was a whole thing. I got drafted to wash the car constantly. Last time I was down there during lovebug season driving around, I didn’t see a single one. No splats, no scraping bugs out of the grill, nothing. No fireflies either. It is depressing. I’m a city girl now, but I still keep a densely planted organic flower garden. Even with huge patches of native flowers, I see very few pollinators, and it really bums me out. But I do often see bees sleeping in my flowers, so there’s that.

Name dropping TU Delft is surprising to me! ETA: found more info here, but not about the lawsuit piece.

https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a-no-thank-you-to-the-person-who-assumed-i-was-the-coffee-lady

We were recently in Vancouver, and people were happy to have us! You shouldn’t worry. We did some extra shopping in solidarity and they appreciated our support.

Yes!! I love picking up little tidbits in other languages while traveling.

It’s also amazing how ubiquitous English has become in the last 20 years, thanks to the internet. Back in the day, French or Spanish was required for some countries that spoke zero English, and that isn’t really the case anymore.

Speaking a foreign language badly, not knowing a word for something, or only knowing the most basic greetings. People all over the world are generally delighted that you bothered at all, and are eager to teach you more. This has been true for me in big cities (even Paris) and tiny villages. The more obscure the language, the more delighted they will be. I have botched so many languages and conversations with strangers at this point that I am immune from embarrassment about it.

Also in N Seattle, also got some TJ’s eggs for $3.99 today! Hi neighbor!

Sierra Leone is gorgeous once you get out of Freetown! Bureh, Tokeh, Tacugama, and all the inland rural areas are all genuinely beautiful. But Sierra Leone is so hard to get to. They built the airport super far from Freetown, so it’s either a 3-hour drive or a chaotic 45-minute ferry ride (plus time to load the boat etc.) after you land at the airport. Not exactly what you want to deal with after flying! I think they would have more tourism if they solved that.

Becky Chambers’ monk and robot series is also really cozy good reading!

My cat does the same thing, but uses both paws like the little troll he is.

My dog is a leftie, for sure. Anytime he touches his face, raises a paw to ask for pets, or pees, he favors using his left paw.

Right there with you. I believe Gaiman was using her as a smokescreen for exactly that reason. (I’m being generous and assuming she wasn’t actively and deliberately trafficking women for him.)

And yes, there are a lot of song lyrics / tweets / media that aged like milk for both of them.

This is why women choose the bear…

Idk how to format, but I want to save you from reading if you need that. So here’s a brief list of claims in the article:

• she frequently and repeatedly recruited homeless, impoverished female fans to provide childcare without any payment
• she repeatedly left these women alone with Gaiman, without the child present
• she warned Gaiman to “keep his hands off” at least one woman
• she said that at least 14 women had come to her for help with Gaiman
• she subsequently wrote a song about how much of a chore it was for her to deal with the multiple “suicidal mess”es Gaiman created
• she routinely controlled employment/housing of these women and knew Gaiman was, at best, sleeping with them (this cannot be consensual when housing/employment are in the mix)
• when notified of an assault that happened with her child present, only questioned whether the child was “wearing headphones”
• refused to cooperate with at least one police investigation
• refused any material help to assaulted women after repeatedly assuring them she would “take care of” them, get different housing/employment set up, etc.

Just…awful stuff, and this is best case scenario, FFS. She is fucking trash.

I didn’t heed the warning and regretted reading the whole thing - there are very detailed and gruesome first hand accounts of his alleged assaults on multiple women. Excellent reporting throughout, which only makes it more sickening.

Also, as a former Amanda Palmer fan, fuck her, too. It’s clear she enabled this and committed, at minimum, wage theft crimes. Both of them deserve to do jail time with even the most generous best-case-scenarios. I’m sure she was also abused by him, but that is not an excuse to abuse other women. Some feminist.

Ah, the joy of cats!

He has 2 heated beds and a cat tree! But he’s 16, and I think the older he gets, the needier he is.

I wish that worked. Mine screams to be picked up and held like you’re burping a baby. Absolute mad lad.

Of course! Everybody should stay on top of annual flu shots and COVID boosters - and RSV if you are eligible - and don’t forget about routine or travel immunizations, either. Tdap for example only lasts 10 years. In my lifetime, we’ve also had new vaccines for HPV, RSV, malaria, and chicken pox/shingles, which is amazing. Vaccines are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to take care of yourself and the people around you.

Okay, re: any cross-protection from vaccines, the answer is again likely no. For years people have been working on a “universal vaccine” so we wouldn’t have to do annual shots. There is currently work being done with the mRNA technology that came out of COVID, as well as universal HA targets. But we are, for the moment, still stuck with traditional flu vaccines.

Our current flu vaccines work by stimulating the production of antibodies targeting two surface proteins of the flu virus, HA and NA. These control viral attachment/fusion and release, respectively, which are important for viral infection and replication. When we think about vaccine effectiveness studies we want to see those HA and NA titres high because they are linked with protection.

The human vs avian strains of influenza behave differently when it comes to these proteins. HA proteins of human-to-human strains recognize α(2,6)-linked sialic acid, while avian strains use α(2,3)-linked sialic acid. Not every species has tissues with both of these sialic acid receptors. Some do - like pigs, quails, and turkeys - which is where we see viruses start to shift and cause problems for humans. So, mutations in those HA proteins in avian influenza is what decides whether they can reproduce in humans.

In other words - our current swine flu “H1” vaccine is unable to target any avian flu “H1” protein, and that’s actually a good thing! It means that the strains are well and truly separate, and avian influenzas cannot readily reproduce in humans without additional mutation. If and when we start to see human-to-human transmission of H5, then we can look at that strain’s protein structures and determine appropriate targets for vaccination.