Okay it’s finished. Feel a little unsatisfied still but I guess that might just be the self doubt urge
I'm trying to write a post about tick safety and avoiding tick bites, but a lot of the info on websites is like "Avoid going in the woods, in plants, and where there are wild animals" and "Activities like hiking and gardening can put you at risk" and I'm like thanks! This is worthless!
As ticks and tick borne illnesses are expanding their range, I think it's important for people to be educated about these things, and I think it's especially important to give people actual advice on how to protect themselves instead of telling them to just...avoid the natural world
Rough draft version of Tick Advice:
- Ticks don't jump down on you from trees, they get on you when you brush against grass, brush, bushes etc.
- Ticks get brought to an area when they get done feeding from an animal and fall off them. In the USA, the main tick-bringing animal is deer, but I've seen plenty ticks on feral cats and songbirds.
- Ticks get killed when they dry out so drier areas with more sunlight are less favorable to ticks.
The above is useful for figuring out whether an area is likely to have lots of ticks, and how vigilant you have to be in that area.
- Wear light-colored, long pants outside. Tuck your pants into your socks, and tuck your shirt into the waist of your pants. Invest in light, breathable fabrics idc
- IMMEDIATELY change out of your outside clothes when you come back from a tick-prone area, wash them, and dry them on high heat to kill any ticks that might be stuck on.
- Shower and check yourself for ticks after coming inside. Hair, armpits, and nether regions in particular. You can use a handheld mirror or rely on touch; an attached tick will feel like a bump kinda like a scab
- While you're outside, you can just periodically check for ticks by running your hands down your legs and checking visually to see if anything is crawling on your clothes. Light colors make them easy to spot, and they don't move fast.
- Combing through each others' hair to check for creepy crawly critters is a time-honored primate ritual and is not weird. When hiking, bring a friend who will have your back when you feel something on your neck and need to know if it's sweat or a tick
If you're careful, you can usually catch ticks before they bite you, but if one does bite you, it's not the end of the world. Since tickborne diseases are different regionally i suspect this advice will differ based on where you are, but the important thing is remove the tick with tweezers (DON'T use butter, a lit match, or anything that kills the tick while it's still attached, please) and contact a doctor to see what to watch for. Most illnesses you can catch from ticks are easily treatable if you recognize them when symptoms first appear
I’ve also been told that holding on to the tick after removal can potentially be very useful for any health care professional trying to diagnose any potential tick-borne illnesses. If you’re somewhere with little plastic baggies and you think you’ve been bit, bag the tick and hold on to it in case symptoms develop.
remember in ace combat 6 when they added a chihaya plane but they gave the plane depression and anxiety
LOOK WHAT YOU DID
felfs-deactivated20141130
Scooby Doo is the most useless member of the scooby doo team why is the show named after him, the show should be called Velma
get dodgeballed idiot
ninjagoundertale-fan1
OP united us all…but at what cost.
happy annoy squidward day
Actually, Annoy Squidward Day is January 15th. Although the calendar doesn’t have the month written on it, if you continue to watch the episode, they’re competing for January’s Employee of the Month.
I’ve been waiting all year to reblog this
me starting gundam 1979: damn they’re rly gonna make this neurodivergent kid pilot a giant robot lol
gundam (gripping me by the shoulders): what if there existed a form of neurodivergence that was widely misunderstood in-universe and mischaracterized as the ability to pilot Big Robots Good thus spurring attempts to weaponize it and even induce it artificially in order to produce better child soldiers
me: what the fuck
Guys, guys, let’s get back into Animorphs!!!
lesbiangender
They are all free to read with Applegate’s permission on the animorphs website!
ego-ann-16
Oh yeah babey
radicalclownfriend
She has also written some absolutely amazing books recently.
These are just a few of them. I read The One and Only Ivan to my students every year (and there’s a sequel coming out in May!).
Every one of her books I’ve read has been beautifully written. Yes, they’re written for children, but you won’t regret reading a single one of them. Applegate is hands-down my favorite middle grades author.
Read. Her. Books.
Also this
Animorphs says trans rights
AAAAAA WOKE UP AND WAS TIRED AND WENT BACK TO SLEEP AND DID THIS TWICE FROM FEELING WEAK AND NOW WOKE UP FROM A DREAM WHERE I DREAMED THAT I HADN’T WOKEN UP TILL 5 AND IN THE DREAM WOKE UP WITH SLEEP PARALYSIS TWICE AND TRIED TO SLOWLY REACH OVER AND POUR WARER ON MY FACE FROM MY WATER BOTTLE BUT MISSED AND THEN WOKE UP IRL BUT ONLY REALIZED WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE I LOOKED OVER AND MY WATER BOTTLES CAP WAS STILL ON WHAT THE FUCK
so Drimo for those of us who do not know what is the Armored Core series about [leaves out convenient soapbox for no reason]
If you asked a room of 100 people nowadays, "do you guys know FromSoftware?", the majority of them would stand up and answer, "oh, yeah! The guys that made Dark Souls, right?" You would hear about people wondering when Bloodborne will be ported to PC, or when it will get a sequel. You would hear lamentation for the lack of Sekiro DLC. You would hear praise and anticipation for Elden Ring DLC.
If you were in 2008 and asked a room of 100 people, "do you guys know FromSoftware?", maybe 4 would stand up and say "Oh, the guys that make Armored Core, right? My cousin had it, it looked ok."
The truth of the matter is, FromSoft was a niche studio before Demon's Souls planted a seed and it grew into the massive tree we know as Dark Souls, and its countless branches lush with beautiful flowers, like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring. It even inspired nearby trees, all beautiful in their own right! Trees like Code Vein, Nioh, and others.
But I'm not here to talk about fucking trees and their god damn branches.
I'm here to talk about the sterile wasteland, the wilderness of fallen angels, where the ocean meets the sand. I'm here to talk about pre-Soulsborne FromSoft, when FromSoftware was an unknown, niche, small video game developer barely hanging on to relevancy. They had games like King's Field. They had games like Shadow Tower. They had games like Armored Core. Hell, all of these games still live on in Soulsborne! Did you know? The notorious Mushroom enemies that punch your entire lifebar out from Dark Souls are originally from 1999's Shadow Tower:
Iconic boss fight, Seath the Scaleless from Dark Souls? He's originally from King's Field 2!
The well-loved bald rascal with a penchant for annoying fighting styles and kicking, Patches? Originally from Armored Core! Lucky Patches AKA Patch the Good Luck:
The Moonlight Greatsword? That's originally from King's Field:
Knight Commander Dragonslayer Ornstein? The Bloodborne Reiterpallasch? Armored Core originals, baby:
The truth is, Soulsborne is as dear to old school FromSoft fans such as myself as it is because it carries the past of FromSoft, it carries part of all the old games. The old, niche, unknown FromSoft that we fell in love with lives on in this new, successful, popular FromSoft of nowadays, all without selling out. FromSoft's design philosophy and mission statement has always been to make things that are out there, that aren't generic, that have that slab of esotericism to it, that are inspired and raw and difficult and challenging and oh so rewarding. Soulsborne wasn't a surprise hit. Soulsborne exists built on a foundation of trial and error that carries in its DNA years upon years upon years of difficult, niche titles. I've not even mentioned all the Tenchu references that Sekiro has! How the Powderkeg weapons from Bloodborne are mostly Armored Core weapons scaled down to human size, such as the iconic Stake Driver being the mighty Kiku from Armored Core!
Armored Core was the biggest franchise FromSoft had prior to Soulsborne. The biggest. And it wasn't too big, to be honest. A rather niche, unknown game franchise with numerous titles that did just well enough to justify sequels, with strong cult followings, Armored Core is all about that mecha high octane action, right? Well, it's 50% about that mecha high octane action! Your average Armored Core is a high intensity, breakneck fast game full of machine guns, laser swords and huge explosions when you're in the field, but in order to be able to do that, you must construct your machine, your Armored Core, piece by piece. Not just the chest core or the head piece or the arms, we're taking about generator, radiator, targeting system, thrusters, subsystems, all of that! And each given piece has a stat screen that looks like this:
This is a single laser rifle's stat screen. Every piece has about this many numbers to it. As you can imagine, it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but for those that took the time to understand it? That familiarized themselves with the game well enough to just be able to look at a piece and understand what it did and roughly how well it performed? Oh, this was to die for. The amount of unique builds, of mechs that were your very own, unique creation, catering to your own specific tastes, was basically infinite. You could make your own dream gameplay machine, that operated in exactly the way you wanted it to. 50% of the time, you were in your garage, tinkering, mixing and matching different parts to improve your Armored Core more and more, to make it better, comfier, stronger, cooler.
Do you know what was influential in Dark Souls' success? And I say this with all the love in my heart, as a massive Dark Souls fan: It was simplification. Dark Souls is a different beast in many regards, of course, compared to Armored Core, but what Dark Souls did was simplify the Armored Core formula, in both comparative gameplay execution and building, and focused on other aspects, like making incredibly cool unique enemies, polished combat, great enemy placement, the works. But end of the day, Dark Souls is a simplified Armored Core. You're not boosting around and firing laser weapons in Dark Souls, but the fundamentals are all there: Tempo based fighting, with intensifying speed, lots of numbers to play with in order to optimize your character to your preference and needs, and the flexibility to switch around builds to certain degrees, more so in the mid game and late game. Hell, the ever-present "little plain white number above the enemy that shows you how much damage you did recently" and how Poise works in Dark Souls are both originally Armored Core things. Most every Armored Core veteran that I know, myself included, that played Dark Souls just felt it click naturally after a bit. Because it's an extension of Armored Core (and King's Field/Shadow Tower).
Armored Core, since its inception, has been about being a mercenary in a callous world where companies that are as powerful as countries, plural, wage in economic war with each other. Rarely has there ever been a good guy in Armored Core, it's the pristine FromSoft absolutely horrid and doomed world narrative that they love so much. You can even go into debt! Your rewards at the end of any mission are affected by how much ammo you consumed and how banged up your AC got, you have to foot the bill for repairs and ammo (unless your client specifically states that they'll cover it for you), and if you don't perform too well and end up going into sufficiently big debt? Why, you forcibly get put into the Human-PLUS program to offset your debt, which actually makes your stronger, since it gives you the ability to ignore Total Weight restrictions and gives you infinite energy! At the cost of, you know, your humanity. At that point, you're literally just a corporate drone with more machine than brain in the nogging. It's a fancy Easy Mode toggle, so to speak, that comes with lore. This game is from 1997. Even from back then, they were making stuff like this. The setting of Armored Core is ruthless, cruel, and brutal... And yet, beautiful, the little things, they are there. But I won't tell you about them. You have to find them yourself. The beautiful things only have value if you find them in a horrid world by your own merit.
This is true for Armored Core, and this is true for Dark Souls.
Armored Core, on a personal level, is what I grew up with, what inspired me as a child, the kind of storytelling that gives you a few explicit morsels, and the rest, figure it out yourself. Armored Core is basically what came before Dark Souls. I consider Soulsborne sequels to Armored Core. They are so very alike.
Brutal gameplay, challenging management, ruthless storytelling... It's heaven.
Armored Core is a series of a gaming era long gone. Armored Core is the opposite of "cinematic experience" games. Armored Core is brutal, it wants to test you, it grants you no quarter, but it wants you to succeed. Armored Core wants you to master its management systems and its high speed combat. Armored Core wants you to be a sharper, better you.
Armored Core is a video game series about giant robots blowing each other to bits.
Armored Core is both a test and teacher, and it wants you to win. It wants you to become the you that can beat it.
Armored Core loves you. Armored Core will do all in its power to prevent you from winning. Armored Core knows you can win, which is why it tries so hard.
Armored Core is a good video game.
