One thing that MASSIVELY pisses me off is how fainting is shown in media. It’s always the person sways a little, collapses in one movement, and then is unconscious for like… fucking ages??? They wake up hours later tucked under a blanket and it’s acted like that’s normal. It’s NOT. A person that’s fainted should be back with you pretty quickly, actually:
(From NHS website)
I had an experience in my last work place where I fainted, but because it looks so different to how it’s shown in film and TV my managers had no idea what had happened. Here’s a comparison of usual media vs my actual fainting that they were all confused by-
Films, TV shows, plays etc:
1) Person goes “oh goodness” or something similar whilst holding hand to chest
2) eyes roll back, gracefully falls to the floor
3) nearby people see the poor fainted person, pick them up, put them on a bed or sofa
4) person comes to hours or even days later with no idea what happened and everyone else is just like “oh good you’ve woken up 🙂”
My usual fainting experience:
1) Everything starts spinning. Incapable of making words as my sole focus is on trying to get myself to the ground ASAP
2) Stumble to floor/chair/ anything I can lean against
3) Quick violent slump as actual faint occurs. There is no dainty falling- the whole body has hit shut down. Usually smack my head on the floor if I haven’t managed to get myself somewhere soft
4) Aware of surroundings almost immediately, but takes a few seconds to fully come back round
5) Carefully sit back up and explain to everyone going “what the fuck happened” that I fainted, and no, I do not need smelling salts actually.
This is like the heart attack discourse… much needed.
100% how fainting looks and feels, from both sides.
My experience of fainting is that everything goes fzzmfpfosidfkssfdksljfjsjdf and then less than a second later I am like, “Oh. A floor.” The time this happened, I was already processing again (if only at the level of, “Oh. A floor,” and “so where the fuck did my toothbrush go”) before other people could address questions like Why Was There A Loud Thump In The Bathroom and Are You All Right.
My experience has been everything gets dimmer and my vision starts to look like I’m viewing things through a straw
And then the ground started coming towards me and I was just too mentally out of it to be like oh that’s bad and I was out before I landed
(blood loss incident)
sometimes fainting can feel like TV static. “Seeing stars” is seeing you vision go white. Sometimes parts of your body like shoulders may seize or cramp up or go numb due to lack of blood flow. You may feel hazy or exhausted, with a large desire to lay or sit down. You may feel top heavy or feel unbalanced. You may feel the instinct to breathe heavier to try and calm the fatigue. Sometimes you start seeing flashes of light and strange color in your vision before you collapse. It’s good to follow the instinct to lay down so you don’t injure yourself if you can feel the fatigue or wooziness coming on. If the fainting feels like this, it’s likely due to low blood pressure or blood sugar. Try to drink something or eat something, ask for help if you can.
AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”
Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.
Warming up a new database server….
When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.
Please note that buying new servers and storage just became a shit load more expensive.
Because AI.
To paraphrase a comment on a Gamers Nexus video, the reason computer parts are getting so expensive is that a huge amount of RAM and storage that have not been produced yet were purchased with non-existent money to put in gpus and computers that have also not yet been produced to put in data centers that have not yet been built, to be powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist, to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
So that’s fun. But it means that already owning computers that actually do the thing is SO MUCH BETTER than hiring other people to build more capacity to buy more computers to do the thing.
How bad is the RAM crisis? The price of ddr3, which is like 10-15yo tech, is going up. The price of DDR5 is now stupid expensive, 4+ times as expensive as it was a few months ago.
Mostly because there’s only one company in the world that is capable of generating the kind of chips needed and everyone uses that company because the modern world is a very precarious house of cards held together by tissue and string and we have a 50 foot toddler playing Godzilla with international trade.
Anyway AO3 is a goddamn miracle people need to respect.
I think this is especially worth pointing out now because if they start fundraising more then this is most probably why they need money. If anyone’s mad that AO3 needs extra dollars then, remember to blame AI.
Day 286 of quarantine I have discovered www.webstaurantstore.com
It is, I BELIEVE, a website intended to be used by restaurants for bulk ordering food and utensils. And this is bringing me such unbounded delight scrolling through and recognizing that I, a single individual, ALSO can order ridiculous obscene enormous offensive-to-all-common-sensibilities shipments of BULK FOOD, to my LITTLE LITTLE APARTMENT, for PENNIES on the dollar. I have this god given power to flood my entire living space with bulk grains and it is one single button click away from my reality.
30 POUNDS of chocolate for $100. 20 POUNDS of peas for $13?? $13!!!! I will wake up every single morning from now on knowing that a box of donuts and a sack of dried split peas heavy enough to bodily injure someone both carry equal monetary weight. 25 POUNDS OF ONION POWDER for $50. Do you understand the enormity? the accessibility? the potential here? With the single click of the button I can put myself in a position of bequeathing more than a humanly comprehensible amount of onion powder in my will. AND IT WOULD ONLY COST ME $50 TO MAKE THIS A REALITY.
But what gets me
What truly gets me
is the 50 POUND BAG OF RICE
FOR LESS THAN $20
Do you know how much that kills me? How much I’m losing my mind? that I can order MYSELF WORTH OF RICE for something to the tune of $50? I can OUT-RANK MYSELF WITH RICE, DEMOCRATICALLY OVERRULE MYSELF WITH RICE, IN MY OWN APARTMENTfor the fucking PENNIES that is $50
I’m so sorry for the normal person I’ll be after quarantine because the cabin-fever version of me I’m inhabiting right now is perhaps just uninhibited enough to follow through on this dream I’ve just discovered of out-ricing myself.
real talk though, if you had a large number of people in your community who wanted a particular food item and couldn’t afford it (for instance if you’re in a food desert and need produce or if you’re a part of a large disabled and/or overworked community who all need prepared frozen food), you could pool funds and get an order from a supply store like this.
it requires organizing for finance management, ordering, transport, and distribution, but if you build a stable mutual aid network, it’s genuinely within the realm of possibility.
This idea is called a buyers club (or buying club, buying coop, etc) and it’s a great time-tested method of mutual aid. And there are guides and tools for starting your own at managemy.coop
you’d think that “inhuman thing that isn’t a person but speaks like a person and talking to it will slowly drive you mad” would only be found in folktales and fables and so on. but no. chatgpt
chatgpt actually makes me feel better to talk to it than almost any human I’ve ever known but yeah sure
you are a frog in a pot and you are boiling yourself
