We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

You can call me Andromeda. She/her / they/them, over 30 years old, a dyke, and very queer. ACAB, no terfs or swerfs. Header by lovely-oasis

[cutecipher]

as a feminist i support recreational abortion

[cutecipher]

i have mixed feelings about competitive

[cutecipher]

*maddest ive ever been, eye twitching* thats baseless. its something else actually.

[gatheringbones]

“During superpod aggregations, “the real old and real young ones like hanging out with each other,” Ken narrates. “Females who haven’t seen each other for months just stay together for days on end, and chat around as if wanting to talk about what they did all winter. The young like rolling and tumbling and chasing.” During their parties, play and love flow freely. They’re light on parental guidance, and as in many other dolphins, much killer whale play is a bit X-rated. Young male killer whales start sex play in early childhood. “Even with the little one-year-olds,” says Ken, “soon after they stop nursing, there’s a lot of rolling around with their little snakes out.” Older males aren’t exactly inhibited with each other, either. “We see groups of guy whales with their three-foot wangers draped over each other—pink floyd, we call it.” Like other dolphins, they frequently indulge in same-sex enjoyment, getting help from a friend’s flipper or snout. Many free-living dolphins routinely masturbate against objects, and Ken has even had aroused whales rub against his boat. It’s vigorous but not aggressive. When Diana Reiss put a large mirror in their pool, the seven-year-old juvenile male bottlenose dolphins Pan and Delphi positioned their bodies in front of it—and watched themselves imitate the sex act with each other. (Bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behavior than any other known creature.) As Denise Herzing concluded, “Dolphins love to have sex and they have sex a lot.” Killer whale females start acting sexual in their teens—and never stop. “It’s pretty interesting when postreproductive grandmas start rubbing against males, sliding along them,” Ken tells me. In a killer whale version of “cougars,” older, menopausal female killer whales seem to entice younger males into sex play. “Any randy young guy,” Ken says. “Sometimes, even young males five or six years old. They’ll get the males all excited. We haven’t seen actual mating, but we’ve seen a lot of penises draped over whales that are upside down and downside up and sideways. They’ll roll over and you can see that their vaginal area is swollen. There’s a heck of a lot more sex than there is reproduction. They’re just very sexual.””

— Carl Safina, Beyond Words

[gatheringbones]

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[anndromedea]

[chateauofmymind]

have you ever suddenly + involuntarily lost consciousness

yes (fainted)

yes (head trauma)

yes (substance-induced)

yes (lack of oxygen)

yes (blood loss)

yes (multiple)

no

Remaining time: 5 days 7 hours

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[smadsel]

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

[smadsel]

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

[manuciruja]

hey staff what the fuck

[villainessbian]

hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose

[shrodingers-catgirl]

HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE

[tieflingkisser]

[lesbianslimefriend]

here's where to find it on windows 10

[eebie]

The apple they fed to snow white wasnt poision at all it was just a red delicious

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

sorry to be a broken record every month but christ menstruation is a stupid concept. oooooh excuse me for not getting pregnant, why the fuck is there goo falling out of me about it? grow the fuck up and reabsorb that shit for nutrients.

[carolofthebell]

The lack of punctuation initially led me to assume that “christ menstruation” was a new irreverent way to refer to the way some denominations take the sacrament of communion monthly instead of weekly like others.

I was ready for some scathing inter-denominational reads but then I hit the word “pregnant” and had to reevaluate.

[muffinlance]

But going back to OP @batmanisagatewaydrug : there are ways to give your period the boot semi-permanently and safely!

Research options and talk with your doctor, but I haven't had a period in years thanks to my hormonal IUD. My kind is literally prescribed for heavy/painful periods as well as birth control.

Viva la fuck that bodily shit revolution!

How Long Does It Usually Take for Mirena to Stop Your Periods?

Mirena is a prescription IUD that affects periods in different ways. Find out what to expect from your periods using Mirena and signs it is

TL;DR: 20% of people stop their periods completely. Everyone else has the joy of having them at least dialed the fuck down, because it literally works by thinning the lining that sheds during your period.

I plan on offering my daughter the option for one of these immediately upon it becoming possible, because why SHOULD she have a period for the majority of her lifespan just because Biology Says So. Naw man, if she wants to unsubscribe from monthly issues I'm 110% behind her.

Also! It reduces some types of uterine cancer!

GET AN IUD YOU'LL THANK YOURSELF LATER

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

jesus god. this post has breached containment so hard people are explaining birth control to me (sex educator). unprecedented.

[ravendognerd]

@batmanisagatewaydrug Can young children use IUDs? (Its been 20 years but) when my sister was young they just had her go on hormonal birth control to treat her heavy periods. I would assume there would be concerns with the child still growing and how an IUD would impact that?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

IUDs are perfectly safe for young people to use, especially since it's a long-term form period management that doesn't require daily upkeep like hormonal birth control pills. they're also the most effective form of birth control anyone can be taking, which makes them a great safety tool for young people (or any people) who are having or are interested in having the kind of sex that could lead to pregnancy.

IUDs are a safe and suitable option for anyone menstruating, and have been approved and recommended for use by young people by organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (x).

What I Wish All Teens Knew About Long-Acting Birth Control

One ob-gyn shares how she talks with teens about IUDs and implants.

[aesths-deactivated20220604]

[catboybiologist]

After some years of HRT I've been left with this deep, low simmering rage. Because what do you mean it was always this easy to be happy

[catboybiologist]

I take a shot once a week, and even if that was too much, I could do it as pills, and so many of my problems just evaporated overnight.

And not one person thought to bring it up.

When I was talking about how horrifying puberty felt. When I was cutting myself. When I was in inpatient care. When I attempted suicide. When I talked for YEARS in therapy about how dissociated and trapped I felt in my body. When I felt like I never truly fixed something that was deeply wrong about me that started at puberty.

Not one person said it was a possibility. No one thought "hey, maybe this kid should go to someone trained to identify dysphoria". No one mentioned that trans people weren't some weird other group of people. It didn't have to be pressure. It didn't have to be "forcing" me. Just mentioning that trans people exist and it could be me. That it was possible and it was easy. No pushing, just laying the option out there.

HRT is treated like this last ditch option. This horrific, mutilating thing that I GUESS we can give to you if you have NO OTHER options. Because did you know it's permanent? Did you know you'll be on it for the rest of your life? Did you know the health risks? Did you know it'll make you infertile? Did you know that it's deviant? Did you know that it's an alternative lifestyle for other people?

No one said it was okay to WANT it to be permanent. Or noted that most people are reliant on the medical system in one way or the other anyways (and it's not even necessary for HRT). Or that the health risks are the normal parts of having that hormone, even in cis people of your gender. Or said it was okay to not want kids, or mention that you can just freeze gametes. Or acknowledged that the "deviant" people are just people, living their lives, that have been violently pushed out of "normal" society.

I grew up in an area that Republicans mock for being a kind of "woke central". And even then it's just. Not treated as an easy option. It was never on the table if you don't specifically already know you're going through gender stuff, and no one will help you get to that point. At which point, it's still treated like the last ditch option. Did you know you can be a feminine man? Did you know you can slap a "she/her" in your twitter bio and be done with it? Did you know that you're oh-so-valid without it? Did you know that you shouldn't take HRT? Maybe don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't ta-

When you've been in it a while, HRT is the easiest, most casual thing in the world. Just pop a shot on a Saturday as part of your "everything shower" routine and you're done.

Anyways. Support trans kids always and forever.

[catboybiologist]

And if anyone comes swinging in here with "but Sierra you don't have to take HRT to be trans this is toxic" I'm going to fucking scream, because that is the status quo. "Just do this without doing this" has become a "give them an inch" refrain when making ourselves "acceptable" to the cis. Of COURSE you don't need to take HRT. I'm only reminded of it a dozen times a day.

[kamil-a]

when you reblog something from someone and their partner reblogs it from you instead of their lover: homewrecker 😈

when your post gets 2 likes from a couple: got adopted👩‍🍼

[maculategiraffe]

it is very instructive to play both silent hill and resident evil videogames because they are very similar except for how silent hill is good and resident evil is stupid. it helps you figure out what is stupid in a video game and what is good

for example, in silent hill games, you are confronted with many weird baroque puzzles you have to solve to proceed, because that is the dark and creepy and confrontational nature of the world you are in. in resident evil games, you are confronted with weird baroque puzzles you have to solve because apparently, separate from and unrelated to the ongoing zombie apocalypse, the raccoon city designers designed the subway station map so that if you insert a red jewel into the correct diamond shaped recess, a drawer opens that contains a live hand grenade

[jerreeeeeee]

not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally

[jerreeeeeee]

what mutual is prev

my liege lord

my loyal knight

my wise wizard

my evil advisor

my brother in arms

my lady muse

my wild mermaid friend

my fellow alchemist

my dashing rapscallion

my monstrous foe

Remaining time: 2 days 16 hours

[alphacrone]

pulling yourself up by your strap-on or whatever they say

[blessyouhawkeye]

forever thinking about that girl at my uni orientation who, after being told to pour out her water bottle before entering an event, looked at me and said "they tell us to stay hydrated and then make us pour out our water, this is like totally kafkaesque" and then poured out what was very obviously an entire water bottle full of whiskey. hope she's doing well.