a distant birdcall; the hush of rain

hey there. you can call me rowan or doragon. thanks for dropping by! ---- they/them

[revizyonist]

med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid 😒" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times

[revizyonist]

"Before surgery, your body’s reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If there’s food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. That’s called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you

[ancelineonline]

I have four kids. I’ve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

I’m not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.

[bowditch]

i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!

[arctic-turtle-cassiopeia]

Reblogging to save a life and teach medical professionals basic communication skills

[yourfaveisintersex]

what if I just made my profile picture a male calico cat or something. hurm

[icewingassasin]

Could I suggest a picture of Dawntreader Texas Calboy? He is a beautiful male calico cat who is a chimera. He's also somewhat controversial among some cat fancy associations since he is a male cat with female colors, and some people are strangely transphobic towards him, despite him being a cat? There was even a rule implemented to keep him from competing in a cat show. If you look up his name, he made a few news articles.

[yourfaveisintersex]

Oh my god?????

Yeah you're right about beautiful I'm squeezing him until he pops!!!!! I love this guy I think I'm going to make an edit real quickly Calboy I love you I'm so sorry people are calling you a freak??????

[yourfaveisintersex]

:)

[twig-the-escaped-cephalopod]

i am Thinkimg . about the Character. and listening to a Song. i a m sure this will not have repercussions

[kyssimmee]

starlight and trixie comic

[kyssimmee]

i'm breaking the author's silence to address these tags directly, because i've seen similar responses a few times. your context is part of you. you like your favorite band because you found them somehow. you speak the languages you speak because somebody else taught you. you feel the way you feel because you have memories and experiences. shaving off pieces of yourself will not reveal a truth at the center, and will only make you feel less like a person worth being. you will never shed your context or influences, anymore than you will ever become younger or undrink a glass of water. but you are free to create as much additional context as you like. build yourself outward instead of digging for yourself at the center. trying 100 new things will give you 100 more data points on what you like, don't like, think, believe, feel. it might begin to reveal an image of yourself that you can recognize, respect, and love. your life is not an object to be kept clean, it is an ongoing action that you get to control. also that's starlight glimmer not rarity.

[cumpriest]

so funny to me when white american christians are like “ooh i incorporate my religious trauma into my art and thats why i draw these stained glass gothic church gold multi eyed reneissance sculpture angels agnus dei” like i know your protestant southern california ass didnt have any of that. go make some art about this

[deoidesign]

ok

[arsonsara]

Damn way to read the assignment and go above and beyond.

[sunshine-tattoo]

the bleakness and sanitized feel of most American protestant churches really is an underused medium.

[sketchy-scribs-n-doods]

idk why tf the images were deemed to be ‘violating community guidelines’, but here’s what this post used to look like

[chromaticrainarts]

I think this ship (spaceship) is really funny

[northstareclipse]

Springing off of my addiction post once more, I am also skeptical at best of 12-step programs, because their framework has just never remotely aligned with my actual experience.

The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.

But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.

Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.

And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.

Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.

And that just hasn’t been true for me.

I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.

I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.

I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.

I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”

So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.

What does make sense, looking back, is context.

When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.

When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.

That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.

But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.

I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.

For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.

What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.

Rat Park, people. Stop forgetting about Rat Park.

[mephistopheles]

um so quick question you do know that the world isn’t divided into People Blindly Accepting Of Gender Roles and Smart Trans Ppl. the world isn’t divided into People In Romantic Relationships and Single Aros. the world isn’t divided into People Who Socialize Easily and Oppressed Autistics. the world isn’t divided into Enlightened Queer People and Stupid Misogynists. like you are aware of this ? i hope you are aware of this

[elizabethwydevilles]

[hangsawoman]

happy i've never been wanted anywhere thursday

[folkfashion]

Bedouin woman's veil, Egypt, by bedouincraft

[mutant-distraction]

Melinda Hartzler Bundy

[parkayquarts]

hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS

[parkayquarts]

somewhere out there is a guy who meticulously takes screenshots of every individual frame of his favorite tv shows and then painstakingly etches each one onto a roll of film which he puts into his old timey projector and recreates the footage as a silent film with his own lavishly hand-lettered dialogue cards and original score that he plays on his upright piano and charges audiences one shiny penny a play. at last, big media has finally outsmarted ol' Zachary Zoetrope

[theheroheart]

PSA for everyone who doesn't know, explained simply

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

you can fix this by going to your browser settings, searching for "hardware acceleration", and turning that off.

[team-thickness12]

This also fixes screen sharing to other screens. It has been GODSEND

[lucarleigho]

type this in the toolbar to find this setting in firefox: about:preferences#searchResults

[mctreeleth]

ol' Zachary Zoetrope is back in business!

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

[arachanine]

Finally complete. My submission for the Tennocon 2026 community art showcase. This thing has been a work in progress for months now!

Single versions of the two below

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[gregtom]

[k-simplex-deactivated20241001]

Happy Pride

[astriiformes]

Do you think after they send the taumeoba samples to Venus and the apocalypse is averted, there are people back on Earth who are like "See, this is why we should pay teachers more"

[astriiformes]

The United Educators of San Francisco do a press release at some point that's like "Former UESF union member Dr. Ryland Grace has officially saved the planet, proving once again that teachers are undervalued"