A lot, considering we politicized the fuck out of that virus, which lead to global pushback against mitigating its spread and ultimately resulting in avoidable infections, unnecessary suffering, and senseless deaths. You’re on the receiving end of that attack, so previous poster isn’t wrong to include your personal suffering into the broader generalization of the covid dumpster fire as a whole.
That said, his delivery was shit, and he was wrong about the “You don’t!” bit - you can absolutely retrain your senses. I’ve got nothing but heresay on the ‘how’ side of that though, so my advice would be to make an appointment with your doc and see if he or she can point you to an effective sensory therapy process.
And for real, good luck. I’ve gotten that shit twice now, and honestly losing taste was among my biggest fears. Food is one of the only things I can consistently look forward to on a daily basis… losing the ability to enjoy food would be depressing as fuck. Like literally, clinically depressing as fuck - food is a massive part of pretty much every culture, and our social events pretty much all revolve around food. Contrasted against the “it can kill you” side of covid, the taste and smell thing is kind of permanently out of the spot light, which doesn’t do justice to the (albeit nonlethal) severity of that symptom.
Yeah that’s been the leading hypothesis for a while now, but even if that’s its intended purpose, I’d argue it still does more harm than good. I work in the OR, so I might be a bit biased by only ever seeing the surgical side of things, but we take appendixes out ALL THE TIME because like to inflame and rupture, which without surgical intervention means your abdominal cavity is now full of poop, and then you go septic, and then you die. Those little fuckers are SUPER dangerous.
Intestinal biome is definitely important - if it gets fucked up bad enough, some patients need a fecal transplant, which is exactly what it sounds like: they take a donor’s poop and shove it up the patient’s ass deep enough enough for it to pass and hopefully shed enough microcritters to seed a new biome.
…but we don’t get paged a 3am to rush to the hospital to frantically set up for a fecal transplant because some dude rolled into the ER needing a poop donation. We do get get those calls when some poor bastard rolls into the ER writhing in pain because his appendix is stretched to capacity and is getting ready to pop; or has already popped and we need to flay his abdomen open to clean him out.
So yeah, I’d vote to just make them not exist. If hospitals have to take on the occasional extra fecal transplant patient, I’d call that a fair trade.
Iirc there are some reptiles with two sets of eyelids on each eye, the inner one being transparent, so they can close just the one while under water or in like dusty/windy conditions, but still be able to see.
If you live somewhere with a good variety of different cultures, most of them probably have an association of some kind, which often host events that let them share their holidays and traditions with the larger population. Try to track down their local event calendars and show up whenever you can. I live in a medium sized city with decent sized Hispanic, Indian, Vietnamese, and Native American populations, and between the lot of them there’s ALWAYS something going on - and for me personally, 99% of it is stuff I’ve never even heard of, so it’s a completely new experience every time (vs trying to drag out the more familiar holiday feels by leaving the xmas lights up until March lol).
Immediate concern is difference in scale - we’re a drop compared to Meta’s ocean, and I don’t see how we can have any shred of hope moderating the tsunami of content that’ll be heading our way.
Long term is EEE. I have zero expectation that Meta would handle a union with the fediverse ethically, and that’s their ticket to killing it off before it has the chance to grow into any kind of real competition.
The conversations about Threads has me nervous about that bit. If “because it’s fucking Meta!” isn’t reason enough to defederate with them by default, we’re looking at getting hit with a tsunami of content that will be impossible to moderate. Guess we’ll see.
Not censorship, but enshitification. Reddit has been steering in an anti-user direction for quite a while. Killing the 3rd party apps that made that site useable was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
People who whine about being booted over “personal beliefs” tend to conveniently neglect to mention what those beliefs are. If you feel strongly that pineapple should absolutely NEVER go on pizza, then I’ll disagree with you and leave it at that; if you get booted from a community over that opinion, yeah that’s fucking crazy and indicative of a community that should be abandoned anyway. If you feel strongly about things like gay people should be killed or women should have restricted rights, then I’ll disagree with you and report your ass for every comment that even hints at bigotry, cuz you’re a horrible person and are absolutely not welcome here.
I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don’t dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. ‘Ick’ factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain’t risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.