Carmel (she/her) | this is the worst timeline

Alto2 × sometimes writer. Chronic illness, advocacy, science. Still trying to figure out what I wanna be when I grow up. View = mine. @ccsrafalo.bsky.social

[Carmel (she/her) | this is the worst timeline @ccsrafalo]

Hey y’all, I think I said it before (can’t remember) but I will be here until the site literally doesn’t exist anymore. If you want to stay in touch/have a backup for when that happens you can find me:
- [email protected] on mastodon
- cactusdove on instagram

[Promethean 🌲🚄 @martian_lore]

Something that always gets me when I see an old pet photo:

Photographs weren’t cheap back then. You couldn’t just take your phone and snap a picture. For most, photographs were an indulgence. Something for special occasions

These cats were *loved*

[covid is oncogenic @chaitrovert]

a lot of the supposed isolation problems with remote work are just problems with working 40+ hours a week

[Nicole Lee Schroeder, PhD @Nicole_Lee_Sch]

Instead of paying Wired for trash subscribe to/donate to @thesicktimes for real, meaningful coverage on #LongCOVID

[Joel Montfort @jmontforttx]

An article on data centers making people sick with symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, nausea, and anxiety.
Folks report noise levels approaching 100dB, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The rural data centers powered by natural gas are the worst, with a jet-engine sound.

https://t.co/Ai3fP36bio

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Don't hate your local foxes. When foxes decline, Lyme rates climb.

A 2012 paper in PNAS tracked Lyme rates against fox populations across the Northeast and Midwest. Wisconsin saw an 80% decline in foxes from 1984 to 2009 and a 300% rise in Lyme.

Martha's Vineyard, which has almost no foxes, has Lyme rates five times higher than nearby Woods Hole, which has plenty of them.

If you want to help the foxes in your area:

1. Stop using rodenticide immediately. When foxes eat a rodent that's actively poisoned, the fox can die too. Rodenticide poisoning also kills owls and hawks.

2. Don't shoot or trap them. Kinda goes without saying.

3. Secure your trash, your chicken coops, and keep cats inside to avoid conflict.

Next time you see a fox, tell it thank you.

[adam.tsuris @AdamTsuris]

Make sure the people in your life read this instead of the awful Wired article.

[Danielle Beckman @DaniBeckman]

Hey @WIRED, how about interviewing neuroscientists who are actually studying the brains of people with #LongCovid? I'm available, and so are many others in the field.

"When the brain gets stuck in a feedback loop of fight or flight" What does that even mean? #Pseudoscience

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

[Amelie Magazine @vickyslyth_]

I saw a post on the TL saying that people are not truly alt anymore a lot of genz-ers were complaining, but this is true. The problem is that many young people larp. They try to pretend they were from the time these subcultures were born, but they simply lack this:

[International Space Station @Space_Station]

Growing stem cells in space to treat cancer and disease. 🩸🚀

Researchers are working to produce high-quality stem cells in larger quantities in space. This could improve patient outcomes for people on Earth that have blood cancers, immune diseases, and other blood disorders. https://t.co/L3xhHEf2KK

[OrangeMaxxing FreddyG @OrangeFreddyG]

Reminder that tear gas violates The Geneva Convention but “our democracy” has decided it can be used on us whenever the police want.

[Ben Inskeep @Ben_Inskeep]

🚨Big scandal brewing in Indiana after the State admitted it doled out a shocking $655 million 💰💰💰 in data center sales tax exemption subsidies in 2025.

It previously had claimed it had given less than $1 million in subsidies in 2025.

[Gregory Travis @greg_travis]

Just a reminder that in the USA, the number of excess deaths from disease in the 2020-2023 timeframe exactly matches the number of officially recorded COVID deaths

COVID deaths were not over-reported and vaccines didn't cause death. It was (and is) the virus

[charlos @loscharlos]

“Given that nearly everyone in the US is believed to have had COVID, the 16% rate extrapolated to the approximately 340 million people in the country would mean that roughly 54 million Americans developed #LongCovid.

An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.”

[Nicole Lee Schroeder, PhD @Nicole_Lee_Sch]

Hope everyone mandated to use AI at work is wasting tokens on the dumbest shit. Burn it down.

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

Encyclical Against the Machine

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The mechanism is specific and worth reading carefully.

Able-bodied adults without dependents must now document 80 hours per month of work, training, or volunteering to maintain SNAP. Job searching - actively looking for work - does not count. Miss the threshold over any three-month period: ineligible for three years.

The exemption that previously protected former foster youth from this time limit has been eliminated. A population already more likely to face housing instability, academic disruption, and unemployment now runs the same clock as everyone else.

The average SNAP benefit is $6 per day. That is what this policy fight costs at the individual level.

The bill that built this requirement cut $187 billion from SNAP in the same legislation that extended tax cuts for corporations and wealthier Americans. That contrast is in the record.

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

I’ve always loved this study.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.