Notices by katharine (thatkatharine@ohai.social)

When today's protest extends into tomorrow and the crowds maintain through the week and beyond, and the cops show up in their riot gear against the aged Boomers in their Tilley hats and puffer vests, then we'll see if this has potential as a movement for change. Looks like it was a nice day out for the brunch-havers who are mad because brunch is cancelled while there aren't enough eggs for the bennies.

Yes, it's important for people to show up. Yes, the crowds were impressive in that we see, yes, everyone's angry right this minute. But after ~15 years of seeing protests over racial injustices stretch on for days/weeks/months and get escalated to violence by cops, it's not enough for white people to gather around the town square for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

It’s not as much fun watching the world burn as we were led to believe.

I saw a blog about travelling with boat buddies indicating that groupthink could lead to minimizing dangers, which was a reason to not rely on the boat buddy system. Made me think of the Covid-conscious community and how a bunch of us would probably be decent boat buddies.

RIP dreams and wanderlust

That lowkey guilt when I’m about to delete an email acct I’ve had for ~20 years that somebody from the Before Times might feel compelled to reach me and that’s the only address they have. Oops. Sorry, I’m gonna miss that “vague compliment before asking a favour for my labour” email, buds.

Setting up my phone so that everything leads to a photo of Burl Ives in the bath or John Diefenbaker in a swimsuit.

Who can tell me if it is very specifically possible to put a non-Android OS onto a Blu brand phone? And furthermore, which OS and perhaps also how?

@Infoseepage It just got its NIOSH approval in February, so if it's not yet shipping, it's closer than it has been in several years of waiting.

Guess what

https://microclimate.com/pages/faq-s

Officials ignoring airborne transmission was a deliberate choice and we got screwed. This piece past-tenses the airborne mitigations that could’ve been put into place to prevent the damage done. Damage is still being done and we could prevent more damage.

Clean air and respirator use could be implemented by the general public now, without government mandate and Covid spread could be legit reduced now.

Denial is a choice that people continue to make.

https://canadahealthwatch.ca/2025/03/11/how-denial-of-airborne-covid-transmission-broke-the-world

What annoys me about the articles about long Covid is when they look for people who are finding ways to be productive and active in spite of their conditions. Like, who doesn’t love a good triumph of the human spirit story, but it’s the sort of thing that ableists use against the chronically ill to say “look, if they can do it, why can’t you” (sometimes the ableist and the chronically ill person are one in the same).

If you haven’t, for example, persevered to write the Great American Novel through your brain fog, forgive yourself. (“great” and “american” aren’t the aspirations they used to be anyway.)
If you haven’t been to a cafe or pub in years, those places are gross and shouldn’t be given business until they improve their air quality anyway.

If the best you can do is hang out to see if science can rustle up some effective treatments, that’s a valid way to be.

Yes, dear followers, I am also tired of looking at respirators and thinking about them and seeing the pointless game cluttering up my feed.

Where we part ways, dear followers, is that you can unfollow me and cavort about your merry way. I’m stuck with me.

Run free, run far, and may the winds ever be in your favour.

*channelling used car salesman energy* What would it take to get you into an N95 respirator today?

I am Very Cranky about signing up for services/platforms to use online and then finding out shitbags are involved with it. (I haven’t cancelled proton or pixelfed yet, but now I don’t want to use them, but if I start deleting accounts, I might get into a “I don’t know who’s not a shitbag involved in anything I use” mood and delete everything.)

Which is to say, don’t directly recommend any alternatives unless you for definite sure know there’s no shitbaggery and you are also not a shitbag.

PBS wants those feel-good all-American pandemmy stories. Get ready to read another round of fuzzy accounts of how the Lockdowns™️ of 2020 feared folks up so much they gleefully booked their revenge travel the moment they got jabbed, that LC keeps some folks in bed most days but they find joy going unmasked to crowded restaurants every few months, that catching Covid every season is totally worth it for Freedom™️…

https://pbsnewshour.formstack.com/forms/covid

I got a perfume sample with a drug store order recently and just did a little spritz. It’s been a good long while since I’ve used/smelt perfume and it is overpowering. The scent isn’t unpleasant, but, yeah, I can dig why you wouldn’t want to encounter it in an enclosed public space. Like, settle down, chemical flowers.

Headline: Canadians boo US national anthem at sports game

Why are the sports games still happening? Billionaires own sports teams. Stop supporting rich people games.

Tired: Booing national anthem at games

Wired: Boycotting games

Inspired: Looking up who owns the teams and what other things they own and boycotting all those things also