A Bunch Of My Friends All Moved Into A Big Group House Called Valinor. I’m Not Capable Of Living Together

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

i know that “don’t harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!” is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, i’d like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done

and before you come in with “yeah, you never know who is and isn’t autistic, and you shouldn’t force people to out themselves!” i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldn’t be okay to go after NTs for being weird. they’re people, janice. they’re allowed to be really invested in naruto

Could i offer you a samurai in this trying time?

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

The silver bullet we’ve been waiting for took all of one weekend to design.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

[…]

According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for roughly the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.

[…]

If we do all that, he says, the entire timeline could be compressed to as few as three months. The production and distribution of a vaccine adds considerable cost, bureaucracy, and even some chaos, as we’re likely about to see. But three months from the design of the Moderna vaccine was April 13. The second and third surges, the return to school and the long-dreaded fall, 225,000 more deaths and 50 million more infections — all of that still lay ahead. Shave another month off somehow and you’re at March 13, the day the very first person in New York City died.

The “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“ authorized $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research in 2016, don’t know what he’s planning on doing as president but this would be an excellent use of research money,  Wouldn’t say no to both though.

i found a d20 in my kitchens junk drawer and i absentmindedly rolled it and got a 1 and was like, aw dunk, and then i immediately stubbed my toe into the trashcan while trying (and missing) to throw something away

how come you can name your kid Lily or Rose and that’s totally acceptable but you trying calling em Baby’s Breath and everyone flips

“why aren’t u talking abt this one Problematic thing involving that actor/show u like??”

listen. i am tired. im putting down my pitchfork. i’ll acknowledge that thing was bad if it was but im tired of vilifying ppl for their mistakes just bc they’re famous. i want to enjoy things. i want Peace

…

Something I’m not 100% sure how to put into words b/c flu but nonetheless woke up thinking about is:

it’s so disappointing when fiction that purports to show the “villain’s side of the story” actually just flips the roles, making the original villain a precious cinnamon roll and the original hero 100% garbage. it’s such a lazy narrative and it makes me wonder if you’ve really thought about *why* you want to tell the story you’re telling.

and like – there’s nothing *wrong* with just writing a power fantasy wherein your villainous fave comes out on top. but it’s always kind of unnerving to me when fandom will jump on those narratives without fully thinking them through, and thus react just as vitriolically to the new villain as an older audience did to the original.

Maleficent has this problem, Orange Is the New Black has this problem, The Shape of Water to some degree has this problem (though concentrated in the fandom and not necessarily in del Toro’s narrative). it’s really bizarre to me how people will walk into a “villain redeemed” narrative and come out with their hatred intact, just shifted to a new, more “deserving” target. like, do you not see how recursive that is? and are you not just a little bit troubled by the knowledge that your sympathies are that easy to manipulate by a shift in narrator?

again, it’s fine if it’s just a power fantasy, but if you’re trying to make any kind of overarching point about villains and narratives and redemption, it’s at least *prudent* not to just switch the vantage points.

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.