I don't know if these oral steroids are doing anything for my vertigo - maybe? - but at least I'm constantly nauseated and exhausted. Much better. /s

I built a blanket fort for my darling Nibbler to celebrate another #caturday together. #Nibbler #CatsOfMastodon #catstodon

I appreciate that not everyone wants to hear about the minutia of the fascist creep in the U.S., but it's not a go to demand we use CW on political content when much of our national tumult revolves around people trying to regulate our discussions. I'll put in a hashtag for people's filters, but consideration is a two-way street. And if any uncomfortable things slip past your protections, just substitute in the names of your local fascist and their targets. I'm sure you can think of some. We're all feeling the strain. Please be kind. #USPol

It's supposed to drop to 81 degrees tomorrow in Los Angeles, and I'm already thinking about what sweater I'm going to wear.

While I'm slowly melting into my couch after four nights in the hospital, this is the only song I want to hear. "Home at Last" by the great Steely Dan. #Mastodan #SteelyDan #UncleMusic

The worst thing about not having the usual private rooms at the hospital is being close enough to the nurses' station - we're ringed around it - to make it impossible to pretend they're not mostly assholes. #ISaidIt #NotAllNurses

I was in the hallway bed behind a slightly delicate girl and her incredibly awful husband. After her tests came back negative (yay!), he started berating her for what she "put herself through" by going to urgent care, then ER, for a chronic thing that could be nothing or life-threatening. Then he started lecturing her like a shitty fucking life coach on how she allowed herself to be scared and how she could learn to be different - and turned the topic back to him and his business philosophy. God, what a toad. The way he was clinging to her the whole time in the waiting room just bolstered my impression that the relationship is abusive, and that she should get out. Fortunately, it sounds like she's had fertility problems, so she can make a clean break if she needs to. I hope she does so with all reasonable alacrity.

I may be spending my Friday night at the ER because I have been staggering into walls all week, but in a small victory, I did not yell MOTHERFUCKER in front of the only child in this section of the waiting room. I'm almost certainly going to be fine, but things are going amiss in this tiny head of mine. My guess is that my intracranial pressure is high again - my recorded blood pressure is 20 points higher than usual, which is what was happening last year, before the IIH diagnosis/surgery.

Hey hivemind, is there a way to temporarily mute a server? Every once in a while, a server's user base gets enthusiastic about something that I find annoying, and I would rather just let them have their fun more privately and continue to enjoy them the rest of the time. I'm definitely the crank here, I want to make clear that I know. TIA! I did actually check Feditips first, but I didn't find any server-level mute directions.

We do like to joke about generational and geographical gaps here on social media, and mostly it's in good fun. But I will say that sometime in your life, someone will blithely joke about world-changing events in which people you knew and loved were killed, and you will remember that time in 2025 nobody who cared about you told you how awful the things you joked about really were. Like anything important in life, this isn't about hate grifters or campus speakers. It's about plagues you survived, so they're done now. Wars in countries that may no longer exist, or that you never heard of, so you whistle past that graveyard of millions. We all do it at some point and to some degree. But the bigger the disaster, the more likely you will run into someone for whom it's not a historical graveyard for millions, but a grave marker for their baby sister who didn't leave enough of a body to bury. And then you will have the choice to apologize and ponder why you make funnies about mass death, or gather support from other callow youth online so you don't have to feel or think. I've watched a lot of people make the wrong choice lately, and I'm going to continue to let most of you boil in your own broth. But please do better. It really does come back to you.