musk is going to die in a Tesla explosion in 6 months after sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and we will never get a conclusive answer on whether it was a CIA car bomb or just a normal Tesla malfunction
Like to charge, reblog to cast
pet peeve is when a fellow hater conducts their haterism such that they leave the hater community vulnerable to attack. “i think characterizing Character A in x way is boring and annoying” = beautiful, flawless, unimpeachable haterism. no one can tell u that u aren’t allowed to find a certain characterization boring. “it is morally/objectively wrong to characterize Character A in x way” = sloppy, reactionary, overcommitting. you have left our eastern flank open to attack girl what the hell….now my dedicated hater troops are taking fire from YOUR enemies fuckkkkk
Daryl Cagle, November 23, 2003
Going to add something here as a few people in the notes don't know the significance of the date here, or think this might be a dig at Sesame Street somehow - on November 18th, 2003, there was an absolutely landmark legal case in the state of Massachusetts that ruled that civil unions in that state needed to be given the same rights as marriage. This was HUGE - gay marriage was not legally recognized in any state at the time, and civil unions were the closest you could get. This is a WONDERFULLY hopeful, sweet comic drawn five whole days after an enormous, major step forward for gay marriage POSSIBLY being legal. Massachusetts wouldn't even properly legalize gay marriage until May 2004, and it was the first state to do so.
You can Google Goodridge v Department of Public Health for more details.
Official Post of Massachusetts
A lot of parents shouldn’t be parents. Which is not me advocating for eugenics. Sex ed, abortion and birth control should be free and easily accessible and we should create culture that doesn’t treat reproducing as inherently altruistic and moral and makes it more acceptable to choose not to have kids. It’s an extremely weighty irreversible choice but it should always be a choice. You should have a damn good reason to have a child instead of it being something you do to tick off a box. If you don’t like kids and you don’t want to sacrifice your time and money to your kids, don’t have a kid. This isn’t an anti-parent anti-kid kid rant, it’s just so sad to see how many parents are kind of meh about their kids or straight up open about regretting them and to remember how many of my friends and classmates growing up had shitty parent horror stories.
None of this is wrong, but also this is a symptom of an atomized society - parenting is HARDER in the nuclear family model under late capitalism where most families need at least two full-time income earners to get by. Humans did not evolve to live lives this solitary and we suffer psychologically for it - many lackluster parents would be much better parents if they had intergenerational and community support, and kids benefit hugely from a network of caring extraparental adults and older kids.
I was promised nerdy loser Fandom obsessed freaks but you're all like beautiful women with multiple degrees and a circle of friends
Guys?
this is literally the first time i've seen this meme with the artist's signature not blurred or cropped, so I looked him up and learned that he is Genildo Ronchi, a 56 year old Brazilian artist. He created this on his birthday in 2013 after changing his usual seat in his bus ride home and realizing he had a much nicer scenary to look at from the sunset-facing seat.
Genildo said in an interview that he is happy to see his piece doing the rounds on the web, but adds: "[the piece] being turned into a meme is great for sharing my work, but it's important that you keep my signature."
had an appointment with my surgeon about my fractured arm (which is healing nicely).
Dr.: it's filling in. have you been lifting weights with it?
Me: I have been carrying my cat with it.
Dr.: Your cat?
Me: You said last time I should try lifting 5kg. My cat is 5kg.
Dr.: I see, and you can do it? No pain?
Me: I don't exactly lift him up high but I can support him on my arm quite easily now.
Dr.: Okay good, keep doing that then.
So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community.
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it.
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
so was anybody gonna talk about the new ecology paper proposing Ethiopian wolves as potential pollinators of native nectar-rich flower inflorescences positioned on stalks conveniently within wolf enjoying height AND that it includes photos of said wolves doing said unconfirmed alleged pollination (delightful) AND that it has observational evidence suggesting some wolves do like 1 flower and are done and other wolves just get really into it and spend upwards of an hour going between 20 and 30 flowers for up to 4-5 minutes per cluster just utterly going at it, lost in the nectar sauce? because I cannot BELIEVE I haven’t seen something on this webbed site about it yet. it just has everything this site enjoys
Random thought about the current obsession with regret rates for trans people:
We justify our "presumption of innocence" standard by saying it's better to free 100 guilty people than to imprison 1 innocent person. Because prison is so bad.
Transphobes seem to think it's better to block 100 unregretted transitions than to let 1 person regret transitioning. Similar reasoning.
Blonde person with yellow popsicle: can somebody tell me how the fuck you make friends after high school?
Brunette person with glasses: Show up somewhere regularly. The reason you make friends in high school is because you see the same people everyday. The reason you make friends at work is because you see the same people everyday. If you want to make friends as an adult, go to the same cafe every week, or go to a calligraphy class. If you don’t want to leave the house you can just go to the same twitch stream everyday that’s what I do, and I’ve made friends there. If you are a familiar face in a place where people share your interests, you’ll make friends.
This is 100% correct. Please follow this advice. Seek out something you find interesting and consistently interact with people who do as well.
his eyes say it all and it really really makes the video from an 8/10 to a full tenouttaten
You can just SEE the moment where they realise their girlfriend has walked in but they just. Keep. Singing.
I need everyone to know, if they did not already know, that he has never stopped making that mask nor videos with that mask.
you guys made luigi mangione trend for days and I need to see the same energy for brianna boston. she is a 43 year old mother of three who ended a phone call with blue cross blue shield (after being denied a claim) “delay deny depose, you’re next” and is now being held under a 100,000$ bond and could face FIFTEEN years of prison if charged. she has no weapons, her record is clean, and yet she is being held behind bars. they are afraid of the public and are trying to subdue. do not let them!!!! say her name!!! be outraged that our freedom of speech is being threatened!!!!! deny defend depose! free brianna boston!
#WHAT a fucking read of the manic pixie dream girl#I want this desperately actually???#perfect quirky enigmatic mystery girl who has all the traits you don't but long for#and lives life with extreme confidence and whimsy doing whatever she truly wants#and she's the future you can have!! she's here because she loves you! she wants you to be happy!#she hated being you so she knows how much you hate being yourself but she's here to prove to you#that there is a joy you can attain#there is a self you will love (tags via @aethersea)
i do not care if someone learned compassion from a cartoon or a comic or an anime im just glad they're here with us now a better person fighting the good fight. should it have taken something so trivial? maybe not- but it's in the past! and this is the now! and if they're objectively better for it who cares
"it took gay shipping for this adult to stop being homophobic 😬" ok but they stopped being actively homophobic. that's what you just said. that's literally the only important part you understand that right? this is a win for everyone you get that?
we all start somewhere and im going to be real buddy i only care about the harm you did or didn't cause on your journey and where you ended up. whatever set it off only matters as much as you want it too
Surely that is a major part of why we want more representation in mainstream media in the first place. It's very weird to campaign for good portrayals and then get mad when they work.
"They were homophobic until their own kid came out as queer!!!!" Ok. So what I'm hearing is that they're not homophobic anymore. What I'm hearing is that their child came out as queer and their parent then looked at their prejudices and questioned whether or not those prejudices outweighed their love for their child. What I'm hearing is that their love for their child won out against the prejudices they'd spent years espousing. What I'm hearing is that they grew as a person and they're an improved version of themselves now.
Chinese Chrysanthemum Varieties 瑞云殿RuiYunDian(Auspicious Cloud Palace) and 国华圣者GuoHuaShengZhe(Guohua Sage)
half of these are whipped cream tentacle monstrosities and the other half are peony wannabes except they're too tight-assed for it.
