What Are the Options?
1) I was very sorry to hear about the death of Petra Mayer, still so young. Although some of her obituaries mention she was a genre readerand romance proponent, she was also a fanfic reader. Maybe even writer - who knows who has an account at AO3.
2) Spotted this article about lingering medical treatment effects thanks to
petzipellepingo but decided to comment on my own post. The focus is on post-ICU symptoms from Covid patients, but this is a vastly underdiscussed story that makes me very angry for a number of personal reasons.
“Why is it we high-five when people leave the ICU and then never think about them again?”
Because we focus only on life and not quality of life. Plus the people working in the hospital are not the ones left with the job of caring for the patient outside of its boundaries -- sometimes literally, in the case of people who have to be brought inside the ER area to get treatment.
There appears to be no national tally of the number of people with covid who have spent time in ICUs since the pandemic began.
Leaving aside the inaccuracy of even the number of deaths from Covid, I blame the media for this because they almost never focus on people who didn't die. You never hear an incident reported on (or remembered as) "8 people died, and 20 more will be left with lifelong disabilities which have devastated their families." Not to mention that fairly often people who are left grievously injured from an event later die as a result of that event, one way or another. But the devastation that affects peoples lives is a messy story and it takes work and it's far easier to focus on a finite number and then move focus onto something else.
9/11 continues to be memorialized every year, with the thousands of deaths cited. Very rarely is attention given to the people who developed medical conditions and kept dying bit by bit over the years. Given the enormous scope of this pandemic, over 600,000 official U.S. deaths (but you know that it's easily 200-300,000 more than that by now) the reverberations will never be adequately assessed, especially because there has been pressure from day one to "return to normal" and forget everything that's happened in order to return to the status quo (especially an economic one). For a lot of people, "normal" will never come again.
“It makes me want to cry,” said Connie Bovier, a 61-year-old Pittsburgh woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who has been in the ICU twice since 2018. Thoughts flit through her mind quickly and randomly, she said, like a riffled deck of cards. She cannot focus. She has short-term memory problems. She is repeatedly distracted.
This really zinged me. Years ago I had an "outpatient" surgery to remove my gall bladder. It went well enough and solved the problems I'd been having. But for 8 very long days after returning home I suffered from these same issues. I couldn't read, watch a TV program, or anything else because my mind couldn't focus. I knew it had to be drugs, and fortunately for me eventually they cleared my system and took the madness with them. I had been about to start graduate school so you can imagine what an end those symptoms would have put to those plans had it continued.
I later got a full copy of my hospital charges and gave them to a pharmacists friend. She confirmed my suspicions that not only had I been overmedicated, but that some of the drugs should never have been used together to begin with. All of these people are suffering from medical malpractice -- perhaps not in a legal sense, since the practice is clearly standard, but in the very real sense that their long-term well being has never been considered.
I also blame the entertainment industry, the same one that shows people shrugging off gunshot wounds, and who makes hospital stays general entertainment and never follows the stories of people trying to recover long-term (much less being fine right after a surgery) or the many who are the victims of that medical treatment as often as they are helped by it. There's a movement afoot to rethink how we portay policing in shows and movies, but we are way overdue for looking at the medical industrial complex differently as well.
3) What is with this new practice of just leaving video links in posts at AO3? I recently subscribed to an AO3 feed for videos, but even when someone is linking to YouTube, which makes embeds super easy, people leave links and sometimes they're not even active ones. Why?
4) Following up on previous studies showing that some people are simply assholes online and spread misinformation deliberately, comes another study showing how people interact with news depending on political outlook.
"Unfortunately, our work on this personality trait also suggests that accuracy labels on news stories will not solve the problem of misinformation. We ran a study where we explicitly stated whether each news story in question was false, using a “disputed” tag commonly seen on social media, or true, using a “supported” tag. We found that the supported tag increased the rate at which real stories were shared among both liberals and conservatives. However, LCCs continued to share misinformation at a greater rate, despite explicit warnings that the stories were false. Though it’s possible these participants did not believe the fact-check system, the findings support the contention that LCCs share fake news to intentionally sow chaos."
5) Just wanted to point out that there have been a series of posts about national fandoms at Henry Jenkins' blog which makes for interesting reading. Unfortunately they don't share a common tag but you can see others in the Recent Posts sidebar. The posts also talk about the state of media fandom studies in each country and which fandoms tend to get attention.
View poll: Kudos Footer-326
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) Spotted this article about lingering medical treatment effects thanks to
petzipellepingo but decided to comment on my own post. The focus is on post-ICU symptoms from Covid patients, but this is a vastly underdiscussed story that makes me very angry for a number of personal reasons.
“Why is it we high-five when people leave the ICU and then never think about them again?”
Because we focus only on life and not quality of life. Plus the people working in the hospital are not the ones left with the job of caring for the patient outside of its boundaries -- sometimes literally, in the case of people who have to be brought inside the ER area to get treatment.
There appears to be no national tally of the number of people with covid who have spent time in ICUs since the pandemic began.
Leaving aside the inaccuracy of even the number of deaths from Covid, I blame the media for this because they almost never focus on people who didn't die. You never hear an incident reported on (or remembered as) "8 people died, and 20 more will be left with lifelong disabilities which have devastated their families." Not to mention that fairly often people who are left grievously injured from an event later die as a result of that event, one way or another. But the devastation that affects peoples lives is a messy story and it takes work and it's far easier to focus on a finite number and then move focus onto something else.
9/11 continues to be memorialized every year, with the thousands of deaths cited. Very rarely is attention given to the people who developed medical conditions and kept dying bit by bit over the years. Given the enormous scope of this pandemic, over 600,000 official U.S. deaths (but you know that it's easily 200-300,000 more than that by now) the reverberations will never be adequately assessed, especially because there has been pressure from day one to "return to normal" and forget everything that's happened in order to return to the status quo (especially an economic one). For a lot of people, "normal" will never come again.
“It makes me want to cry,” said Connie Bovier, a 61-year-old Pittsburgh woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who has been in the ICU twice since 2018. Thoughts flit through her mind quickly and randomly, she said, like a riffled deck of cards. She cannot focus. She has short-term memory problems. She is repeatedly distracted.
This really zinged me. Years ago I had an "outpatient" surgery to remove my gall bladder. It went well enough and solved the problems I'd been having. But for 8 very long days after returning home I suffered from these same issues. I couldn't read, watch a TV program, or anything else because my mind couldn't focus. I knew it had to be drugs, and fortunately for me eventually they cleared my system and took the madness with them. I had been about to start graduate school so you can imagine what an end those symptoms would have put to those plans had it continued.
I later got a full copy of my hospital charges and gave them to a pharmacists friend. She confirmed my suspicions that not only had I been overmedicated, but that some of the drugs should never have been used together to begin with. All of these people are suffering from medical malpractice -- perhaps not in a legal sense, since the practice is clearly standard, but in the very real sense that their long-term well being has never been considered.
I also blame the entertainment industry, the same one that shows people shrugging off gunshot wounds, and who makes hospital stays general entertainment and never follows the stories of people trying to recover long-term (much less being fine right after a surgery) or the many who are the victims of that medical treatment as often as they are helped by it. There's a movement afoot to rethink how we portay policing in shows and movies, but we are way overdue for looking at the medical industrial complex differently as well.
3) What is with this new practice of just leaving video links in posts at AO3? I recently subscribed to an AO3 feed for videos, but even when someone is linking to YouTube, which makes embeds super easy, people leave links and sometimes they're not even active ones. Why?
4) Following up on previous studies showing that some people are simply assholes online and spread misinformation deliberately, comes another study showing how people interact with news depending on political outlook.
"Unfortunately, our work on this personality trait also suggests that accuracy labels on news stories will not solve the problem of misinformation. We ran a study where we explicitly stated whether each news story in question was false, using a “disputed” tag commonly seen on social media, or true, using a “supported” tag. We found that the supported tag increased the rate at which real stories were shared among both liberals and conservatives. However, LCCs continued to share misinformation at a greater rate, despite explicit warnings that the stories were false. Though it’s possible these participants did not believe the fact-check system, the findings support the contention that LCCs share fake news to intentionally sow chaos."
5) Just wanted to point out that there have been a series of posts about national fandoms at Henry Jenkins' blog which makes for interesting reading. Unfortunately they don't share a common tag but you can see others in the Recent Posts sidebar. The posts also talk about the state of media fandom studies in each country and which fandoms tend to get attention.
View poll: Kudos Footer-326
Comments at Dreamwidth
.