I just can’t get over that after years of reddit speculation about how MDR’s work must be 3-D printing brains into clones and putting souls in goats or whatever it turns out to just be…rich people trying to find a way out of the human experience. subjugating one or two or six people you will never meet to an existence of pure suffering so you don’t have to be inconvenienced or feel a negative emotion ever. it could never have been anything else
just finished watching spider-man 3 for possibly the first time? or at least, the first time since i was really young. um. harry osborn is my blorbo and nothing bad ever happens to him.
someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue
I can admit this is a little out of hand, but I promise AI didn’t write my 150k fic 😂
As I’ve been posting old photos from my collection on here and my personal blog I’ve mentioned a few times that my favorite thing in the world is to buy historical photos/albums/diaries/etc. with little or no identification and try to track down clues about them.
I’ve received a few PMs (and get questioned often in real life) as to how I go about this, so I thought I would document the project I’m working on today to give people a basic idea of my process.
TODAY’S PROJECT…
is this “A Line A Day” five year diary which covers the years 1933-1937.
This morning, i heard on the public health reddit that the HIV page at cdc.gov had been scrubbed. Sure enough, the landing page was there, but all links to information about programs, treatment, data were gone.
Then we started to hear that all CDC was going to be removing data. Whole data sets. I started looking, and the Social Vulnerability Index, which identifies geographic areas that are vulnerable to climate, economic, or health-related disasters, it was gone.
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a national survey that helps identify things like smoking prevalence, healthcare access, are people meeting nutrtion guidelines, was gone. I had just downloaded that dataset and the documentation on Tuesday to run some stats on colorectal cancer screening in my state. It was now gone.
My colleagues at the health department started messaging each other. Were they also having troubles finding data? People on reddit were frantically trying to download datasets, comparing what they already had. For fuck’s sake, the Census website and data was going down. The goddamn Census.
There are some heroes, like the good people at the r/DataHoarders subreddit who had heard rumblings earlier this week and had started scrapping the entire CDC website. The End of Term Archive had already been archiving federal websites and data for months, and are getting those datasets up on GitHub.
But this is unprecedented. This is fascism. This is an authoritarian regime removing public data from access to make sure theres nothing out there that can conflict with their message.
This is not normal.
If you live in the US and have the capability, call your reps and ask them what they’re doing about this data scrubbing, ESPECIALLY if they’re Democrats. Hold their feet to the fire.
