Webb Powell

Help! I'm looking for people with ME/long covid or similar who do something creative (eg painting, photography) that is inspired by nature to feature in my book. Ideally people more severely affected than me, so bed bound or partially bed bound

Also, one time I tested with my ear next to my wife’s, and she could hear the contractions, too! (It makes a sticky crackling noise when opening.)

When I was a kid I would contract my tensor tympani while sneaking. Dampening my hearing made me feel less audible.

@librarythingtim @bkpark And no graphic designers to tell them ‘don’t centre-align all text, and use line breaks intelligently.’

@bkpark And no plumbers around to tell them what plumbum means either!

Six years since the greatest Google-Translate Latin motto: Plumbum, Credo, Inspire best translated as "The metal lead, I believe, inspirjb."

@JonElliot11 @ChasePitzer @LaurenWhatevs @GriffinWB Exact same for me, multiple times, yesterday and today. Have to force-close a second time to get unstuck.

I don't know what happened but the game is unplayable today : - I play one single round not even a match, the game freezes after a concede - so I'm forced to close the app - I reopen the app and it's stuck on this loading screen - so I'm forced to close the app again Any fix?

@lifesciexplore @Naomi_D_Harvey In case it helps, here are the emulsifiers I personally found to be problematic. Cellulose and cellulose-related ingredients are the ones I found most often in tablets.

@lifesciexplore @Naomi_D_Harvey …in a solution, can’t say if this is viable.

Suddenly these B12 deficiency symptoms are back and getting worse day by day. They are probably worse than when I was diagnosed with the deficiency in 2021. Whole body parasthesias, even in the head. So scary.

@M8Void It’s not a quantitative test, but using 3M Fit Test Solution and a mister seems like a good method. twitter.com/ghhughes/statu…

Dear Covid realists, is there an affordable and accessible way to fit test your respirators?

@arisonsned @cfs_jo Wikipedia says dysesthesia can be related to many neurological things. Seems plausible that it could be caused by ME, too. #Causes" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysesthes…

@cfs_jo Ahh, that’s Jo. What a weird one that is! It’s fairly new for me. I thought it was likely connected to neuropathy. Must be weird to have patches of goosebumps!

Here’s a weird one. Does anyone have a feeling of water being splashed on their legs? I keep thinking my legs have got wet but when I check they’re dry 🤷‍♀️

@arisonsned A few years ago I’d often get the sensation of a cold water droplet falling on my upper thigh/hip. Frequently happened while submerged in the bath, so it definitely wasn’t actually happening. I also sometimes feel like my eyebrows are sweaty, though they’re dry.

Canadian COVID Forecast is out! For March 28-April 10, 2026 Thank you to Dr. Moriarty & the volunteers for doing the job of public health! covid19resources.ca/covid-hazard-i…

@n_e_rd I had it prescribed while in my late 30s, before being put on an immunosuppressant medication for Crohn’s disease.

I had shingles at 30 and never want them again. Has anyone had their doctor approve of it while being younger than 50?

Actual definition: “Manifesting or characterized by development, aptitude, or interests considered advanced for a given age.”

I’m slightly disappointed to learn that this 👇 is 100% correct usage of the word “precocious,” I just didn’t know what it meant. I always thought it was similar to “mischievous.” Common usage in novels: ‘That kid’s so precocious, always getting into trouble, a real handful.’

@SaraAlfageeh You’re probably talking about the cool animation and live text wrapping, but in case you’re interested in static text wrapping: Affinity (free; formerly Affinity Publisher, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer) can wrap text around a shape. affinity.studio/help/text-wrap…

on my hands and knees, crying, begging someone to teach me to do this.

Do you wonder why there are so few *serious* studies on COVID interventions? The answer lies in how studies are reviewed. 1) Crony Studies. Sometimes a big monopoly is in charge of a lot of the funding. The people in charge of it are at "elite" universities and either have an impressive scientific history, or are small-p politically connected (mentees, collaborators) of those who do, sometimes almost no accomplishments to date. They may have had little to no vested interest in COVID as a grand-scale public health problem at any point, and often rarely after March 2022. They don't mask because they don't care about COVID much at all, and much less than other health issues. They have very little interest in what pwLC have to say. Since they don't view COVID as a serious problem, they devote little effort into trial design or even understanding basic issues like biomarkers, plausible mechanisms, or how to diagnose Long COVID in any reasonable way. There is very little oversight and no meaningful external review of said studies to determine whether they are worthwhile or how they should be improved to use funds responsibly. The studies inevitably fail. These studies should be high-risk, high-reward, so it's not all on them, but it seems like they are disproportionately set to fail. 2) Rigorous Science. Often, people submit rigorous studies to standard funders, where they undergo rigorous external review. What that looks like is that 2-5 reviewers read, score, and critique each application in detail, and then a larger group (who reviewed various other application on all sorts of topics) discuss each application, everyone scores them, and the top apps are funded. The problem is that just about any one of the 5 main reviewers can tank an application by giving it a bad score. Moreover, to get funded, an application needs a pretty good score from basically all 5 reviewers. If one reviewer is delusional (COVID is "over," etc.), the application will tank, and it's very rare to get 5 reviewers enthusiastic about COVID research. To be enthusiastic would mean admitting the scope of the problem, that they have made serious personal mistakes, that family members or co-workers or people in the community are dead or disabled because of their behavior, etc. Keep in mind, lots of lower-impact rare disease research with minimal quality-of-life impact commonly gets funded (good, fund it all!), so funding rigorous COVID research should not be a big deal, except people struggle to acknowledge it is even a small problem in 2026. Nobody can acknowledge COVID as a small problem, because it's a gigantic problem, and saying it's a gigantic problem mean people acknowledging many mistakes with mortal consequences. 3) Chuckle Studies. Often, people have no theoretical framework, no understanding of mechanisms, apathy toward scientific training. They submit "chuckle studies" testing whether random intervention X has any benefit in random population A. It could be a random supplement, nasal sprays, neti pots, magnet hats, yoga cures, whatever. These studies will often get rejected. BUT the interventions are arbitrary, so the scientists can submit a LOT of these types of applications. Often, there will be industry funding to prop these up to get them going, running pilots and paying for scientists' time so they can submit lots of funding apps. Just replace intervention X with intervention Y, population A with population B, and keep throwing spaghetti at the wall. There's no theoretical framework (sometimes celebrated as "it's a mystery"), no real supporting literature (maybe 1-3 deeply flawed studies), so easy to update the application. Do this enough, and it will get favorable peer review. The delusional peer reviewers will love it, because it poses no threat to their delusion (COVID as a non-issue). It lets the reviewer keep the mindset that COVID is a joke and warrants a joke solution. Everybody chuckles while they keep getting reinfected. The end consequence is a lot of crony and chuckle studies, and various little rigorous research. A lot of us are fighting to push through rigorous studies, but it's an extremely uphill battle, and too few of us. Most of us who take COVID seriously are not in pharma. Lots of engineers, behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, etc. It's more of the prevention and population science lens. We can do helpful things to push forward the research agenda, but even that's against all these obstacles. The obstacles apply to manuscript reviews too, so often the rigorous pilot behavior, engineering, or epi work can't get published, and so the grant apps are weaker for that too. There are very few people doing pharma research from a serious COVID aware perspective. Sisyphus backed out, more content with his day job.