Finally some new material I'm not even vaguely familiar with! And it's not looking good for the Kwisatz Haderach!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/C5DNwWsRy7A

"Three years after long COVID entered clinical consciousness, tens of millions of people worldwide remained imprisoned by debilitating fatigue, cognitive fog, shortness of breath, and pain — while medicine offered little beyond symptom management because the mechanism remained genuinely unclear. A landmark 2025 study from Yale School of Medicine and the University of California Davis has definitively characterized long COVID's biological architecture: a combination of persistent microclotting and immune system dysregulation that sustains itself indefinitely unless both components are treated simultaneously.

The microclots — tiny clumps of fibrin and spike protein fragments too small to detect on standard imaging but discoverable through specialized microscopic blood analysis — reduce oxygen delivery to tissues including the brain, causing the cognitive and fatigue symptoms characteristic of long COVID. Simultaneously, a subset of T cells becomes persistently hyperactivated, maintaining an inflammatory state that prevents the microclots from resolving naturally. Each component feeds the other in a self-perpetuating loop.

The treatment protocol that breaks this loop combines: low-dose triple anticoagulation therapy (aspirin, clopidogrel, and rivaroxaban) to dissolve the microclots, plus specific immunomodulatory drugs that calm the hyperactivated T cell population. In 180 long COVID patients who received the combined protocol, 74% experienced complete symptom resolution within 12 weeks. The most dramatic recoveries were in patients who had been bedbound for over a year. ?
The suffering that accompanied this mystery was compounded by the delay in solving it. The combined protocol is now entering multicenter trials and may become standard of care within 12 months."

If there is no such thing as matter, as some irreducible substance, which is basically what physics has shown all the way down to quarks, what becomes of mass and from whence does it arise?

Imagine a rock. It has mass and weight and inertia. Nobody would argue with that. Now imagine all the molecules in the rock being separated from each other by a very tiny distance. The rock would basically become something more like a brown cloud of molecules. The mass and weight and inertia it formally had would all be gone, and it would float away. What happened to the mass? And why does it appear to depend totally on whether the molecules are close enough to each to become a solid rock? Mass perhaps a property emerging from the compactness of the molecules and not inherent to matter itself?

Currently free on Plex.

Forget about 1918's The Spreading Evil. This is the ultimate STD movie, involving a sexually transmitted curse.

Worth a re-look after more than a decade, because this time around -- despite the shorter hair -- it's subconsciously nagging you that you've seen Jake Weary before. And that's because the television version of Animal Kingdom didn't exist quite yet in 2015.

95% rating on RT, 83 score on Metacritic. An episode of The Good Wife referred to the film.

It Follows ... https://youtu.be/HkZYbOH0ujw

Whedon still very much cancelled by the industry, as the now axed Buffy slash Sunnydale reboot demonstrated via his absence. Marc Guggenheim and Tara Butters are the showrunners.

Will revolve around the events between the final episode of the series and the "Serenity" film. Everybody is presumably back providing their voices, except Ron Glass, who died years ago. It's unclear whether someone will speech-replace him or the show will drop the character and introduce a new one. AI could replicate his voice, but that's probably taboo.

Note that by the time period of the movie, Shepherd Book had already left Serenity. So there could be a quick departure for Book in the reboot. They're surely going to have a new preacher, though -- not even a space Western is complete without one. (Oh, I forgot, it's 2026. It will probably be an imam rather than a preacher.)

"In the comic Serenity: Those Left Behind, Book expresses concern that he is being corrupted by living on Serenity and leaves the ship. By the time the movie Serenity begins, he is living on the planet Haven."

Firefly reboot - animated series
https://parade.com/entertainment/firefly...ted-series

In Christopher Langan's Reality Self-simulation principle, he refers to something called the Universal Distributed Form or UDF which is invariant. And that it couples to a terminal configuration supported by it.

It is clear to me that he is referring to nothingness or non-existence. And the terminal configuration is existence. Whereby existence and non-existence are one, due to the fact that they must contrast with each other in order to be distinguished.

I think he alluded to the coming of the Internet several times, but only in passing. His whole notion of a coming "global village" connected by an instantaneously accessible medium seems especially prescient in itself. Here's something he said about the "next medium":

"The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.”
-Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion.’ Perspecta, Vol. 11 (1967) pp. 162–167. Published by the MIT Press.

"This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin [sic] calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence."

“Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language. Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever. Such a state of collective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of men. Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of “weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.” – Understanding Media (1964), p. 80, MIT Press ed.

“Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and say you’re working on a history of Egyptian arithmetic … they say it will be right over. And they at once Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic information conditions.” (p. 101)