i am bad at tagging, be warned • sometimes i tag things borderline nsfw as nsfw? not always • adult • very special snowflake❄️✨ • he/she • genderqueer • femme • intersectional feminist • i support ao3 • inclusionist • christian universalist protestant • note: sometimes i reblog things, especially ones about certain worldviews, that i don't believe in, but find interesting •
i will now be reporting any donation asks sent to me as spam. i used to vet each one i got (and they were often verifiably spam, but the influx has become too much and my energy too little. if you are somehow a real person sending me requests for donation and you don't want to be marked as spam, this is your chance to back out
hey i have other blogs!
so, here's a pinned post telling you to not just look at this mess of a blog but also my other blogs!
dreamwidth
my dreamwidth, probably will have similar vibes to my art blog
ART
@bismutharts, my art blog where i post my own art. this one is so super important to me and you should all follow it. i do digital art, crochet, knitting, sometimes poetry, embroidery, fun stuff!
@its-all-good-here, my art blog for other people's art, especially stuff that inspires me in some way
@all-the-fashion, primarily fashion, largely historical, but sometimes i decide that non-fashion images that are useful as reference images go there as well
@writing-and-drawing-prompts, my inspiration blog, mostly for writing but a little bit for drawing, also where i put how-to's for both of those
@could-be-incorrect-quotes, a blog once borne out of a plan to make one of those "incorrect-X-quotes" blogs, but now it's just anythinig that's a cool quote, there's actually a tagging system that's moderately adhered to here, and i've got a theme on desktop
OTHER
@cadmium1040, my oldest sideblog, that is a lot like my main but slightly more focus on fandom and just. less. if you like this blog but wish it'd not overtake your dash, go follow that one
@jesus-judas-coffeeshop-au, my religious sideblog
hey i have redbubble now!
Bismuth209 is an independent artist creating amazing designs for great products such as t-shirts, stickers, posters, and phone cases.
The worst sin you can commit around so-called "woke" white liberals is pointing out that, actually, NOT every homophobic republican is gay!, actually, many of them are just evil cishets doing their thing, and the closeted ones affect people more through evil than through their gayness so why are y'all so fixated on it? Hooooboy y'all those liberals will FLIP THEIR SHIT because how DARE you fuck with their hilarious narrative turning every evil anti-queer politician into a good ol' fashioned fag like they deserve, it's actually SUPER liberal and cool and effective to blame all queerphobia on queer people, why are you RUINING our GOOD TIIIIME
"BUT DOESN'T GRINDR KEEP CRASHING WHEN--" no. Jesus it happened ONE time at ONE republican gathering. Yes there's a SLIGHT increase in traffic on the site for their gatherings - the same as EVERY SINGLE BIG GATHERING OF HUMANS. If you've been telling people "Grindr crashes at EVERY GOP convention" you've been spreading misinformation to blame queer people for the violence they face in the US and it's gross
mandatory viewing on this subject (particularly the second one which provides some well-needed critical thinking and fact-checking on the whole "republicans always crash Grindr" claim; there's a shit ton of blatant misinformation going on there we need to make people more aware of. like, a major part of this myth stems from a straight up satire twitter account's post that was taken at face value.)
from the second video:
But building on that essay [first video], and what we’ve discussed today as a prime example of a narrative born from the “homophobes are secretly just gay” trope, I want to examine why it’s so resistant to correction, and why people that are otherwise usually media literate and concerned with truth over comforting myths might grab onto this with both hands and refuse to let go.
And I'm including myself in this. The first time I heard the Grindr crash thing, I laughed. I'm not coming to you from moral superiority. I'm coming from a position of "I also fell for this and then felt annoyed about it and made it everyone else's problem in the form of a video essay because I think the truth is actually a more effective political weapon than a lie."
So why does this work? I think there are four main reasons, ranging from "understandable" to "I'm not sure that's healthy babe."
The first reason: yo, it feels good. Queer people are constantly on the receiving end… Of right-wing politics in a material, tangible way. These aren't abstract disagreements. These are people who've campaigned on the premise that your love is invalid, your identity is a disorder, your existence is a threat to children. And when the power imbalance is that stark, there is something extremeeeelllly satisfying about the idea that the oppressor who thinks they are so much better than you is nothing but a fraud. They can’t even meet their own bar for “deserves rights.”
It's the political equivalent of "the bully has a crush on you." We're told that story from childhood. So when someone offers an adult, political version, "they're homophobic because they're secretly homosexual", we’re already primed and lubed, and it slides right in to how we understand the world. And suddenly, the power dynamic feels more manageable, they’re just pathetic self-hating gays, I’m not scared of that. It feels good, and it feels true. And that’s the exact kind of story that goes viral, regardless of whether it’s based on evidence.
The "Republicans crash Grindr when they gather" claim has every quality of what misinformation researchers call “sticky”, as in, it’s sticky. It’s sticks to your brain. And it does so, even after you learn the truth. Researchers call this The Continued Influence Effect (CIE). It’s a cognitive phenomenon where misinformation continues to influence a person's reasoning and beliefs even after it has been clearly and credibly retracted. The paper posits that people continue to use misinformation because, on some level, they still feel it is relevant or useful, even if they know it's false. This paper frames this not just as a problem of forgetting the correction or new information, but as a problem where the feeling of familiarity and narrative coherence from the original misinformation overrides the factual knowledge of its retraction. We believe, because it feels true.
And you’ll see this under any post that’s been debunked. People who fell for it will say “well, it might as well be true” or “This case might be false, but this really happens, so it might as well be true, and in a way it is true.” [laughter] Like yeah but in another way that isn’t nonsense, it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter, once it’s in your head, it’s often hard to get rid of. Especially when it’s gone so viral that you’ve seen people talking about it from all directions, each time your new worldview being compounded and cemented. And this… it went viral. And I get why.
One: it’s funny, and funny storied spread faster than boring ones.
Two: It’s ironic.
Three: We have a clear villain being a hypocrite. People love an exposed hypocrite because...
Four: it feels like justice. It’s someone we see as a threat getting caught in the act, exposed for their lies! They finally get their just desserts! And on top of that, it’s easy to believe because...
Five: it’s just plausible enough even for a skeptic.
Because under the post about giving minors the right to medically consent, people are spreading a ton of misinformation on this - largely because they just do not question the stuff they just assume are "normal". Which here is: "kids are all afraid of needles and therefore if we let them consent or not to medical proceedures, they would just not consent and not get vaccinations, because needles hurt".
And, look. Here is the thing: no, needles do not actually hurt a whole lot. And while, yes, certain procedures that involve being stabbed by a needle hurt more if you are younger for a bunch of reasons... that is actually not the main reason children fear needles. Because, again: the pain is not that bad. And most kids, especially young kids, whose motor skills are still developing, usually will have a bunch more hurting scratches, bruises and the like at any given moment than there will be pain from the needle.
No, from what research can tell, the main reason kids are afraid of needles, is more that for many of them needle procedures are very traumatizing. And that is largely because of the consent issue.
Imagine you are a person who is still pretty darn new to that whole human thing. So for one, yes, your brain is actually not that great in understanding what pain is dangerous and what pain is a safe limit of pain. So yes, someone intentionally hurting you (like with a needle) is really kinda scary. But then there is also the thing where this person hurting you is not telling you why they are doing. The people who you normally trust with keeping you safe (your family) is betraying you, by just holding you down and scolding you for crying over it. Or maybe it is not your family, but some strange nurse who is holding you. And while you are scared, because someone is intentionally hurting you, while someone else is restricting you, the adults around you are telling you, that your emotional reaction to this is actually bad and you are wrong for reacting that way. They might in fact lie to you and tell you that something that is insanely scary to you is "not that bad", instead of just understanding that it is super scary to you. And that is then what you start to expect whenever you see a doctor prepare a needle: people holding you down, hurting you without reason, and telling you that you are wrong for being upset, actively gaslighting you.
We have research on this. And this research is pretty clear: most kids are actually somewhat okay with needles, if you inform them why you are doing it, allow for them to have their emotions, talk to them about their emotions, and allow for them to set at least some conditions.
And frankly, I hate how many people just accept the framing of "kids are naturally afraid of this because it hurts". Like, folks, I know y'all are fucking Americans and that in your culture it is kinda normalized to like put kids into like some sort of fortified hamsterball to stop them from like doing typical kids stuff. But... let me tell you: if you do not do that, kids will actually very regularly engage in dangerous play that they know will often end up in injuries that are going to hurt. And, no, they are not to dumb to understand that. The kids know that this is what might happen because of their play. They actually just take the risk. Yes, they will cry if they get hurt, because - again - their nervous system is still calibrating how it relates to pain. But they will likely do that thing again and again. I can tell you: I fell down a tree so often during my childhood, and I still climbed it. Again and again. So did most kids I knew. Like, fuck, we lived next to a forest. We played "Tarzan", and tried to go along paths without touching the ground. And we fell. A lot. And we still did it.
It is not the fear of pain that makes kids afraid of doctors. It is the fear of the associated force, and gaslighting.
The thing is, if you don't explain it, how are kids meant to give informed consent? That's why a woman named Mary Jenner created The Butterfly Pig, which sells medical play toys to families with medically sensitive kids and children's hospitals, so kids can play about the stuff that's going to happen or watch their caregivers show them. For this reason in particular, there's a syringe toy to simulate injections, and it includes a Buzzy toy, which imitates a real Buzzy that vibrates and is cold so injections don't hurt as much, and the real Buzzy is used in over 5,000 hospitals and clinics globally.
Toy butterfly needle comes with a Velcro strap for easy placement on doll or stuffed animal. Lab tubes are dual-sided so a twisting motion c
Buzzy® Mini Healthcare features a contoured and compact design that tucks under a standard tourniquet or fits easily in the hand to deliver
There are very few studies on the use of a thermomechanical device for reducing injection pain in pediatric dentistry, especially for inferi
Effect of toys made from medical materials on anxiety among hospitalized children: A randomized controlled trial
— the profession is fully dedicated to supporting kids and families in the health care setting, and a significant portion of that is educating kids (in a way they can understand, developmentally) and making plans With them to make the experience easier!
And there is SO MUCH research out there! If you explain to kids what’s going on, they need less anesthesia, get better quicker, and have less medical trauma— which leads to a willingness to accept preventative care in the future!
Child Life has been leading the charge in this area for decades, and it’s so awesome to see it becoming more mainstream knowledge!
As much as I love TOS, there are a few episodes I hold in deep contempt, and sometimes I just feel the need to try and articulate how deeply, deeply stupid "Wolf in the Fold" is.
Well, okay. The premise is that Scotty has contracted misogyny because a woman was responsible for an accident he was involved in, though physically he was either easily patched up with no harm done or never injured at all. Obviously that's not something you can just leave to fester, so they basically force Scotty to get medical treatment for misogyny: exposure therapy to hot, unthreatening women. The idea seems to be that Scotty can get his head straightened out in a controlled environment, then go back to behaving normally around hot crew women on the Enterprise (who have probably been justifiably contemplating murder, tbh).
Kirk and Bones take Scotty to visit a planetside cafe that has lots of drapery and gorgeous, decorative, hedonistic women (in sexy red outfits) scattered around as a matter of course. It's not exactly a strip club—nobody even slightly strips and the inevitable sexy dancer is a belly dancer with back-up drummers and various other musicians—and it's not a burlesque, it's not just a restaurant with belly dancers, but it's not really a brothel (the women don't seem to have any incentive whatsoever to do anything they don't want to, at any rate). But the mood is a bit of all of the above, if the obligatory sexy women were super into it and there for their own enjoyment (surejan.gif).
Anyway, it turns out that Kirk talked to the sexy dancer of the moment, Kara, beforehand and he and Kara had already arranged for her to hang out at their table and generally be unthreatening and appealing around Scotty. To cure the misogyny.
But there's also a guy into her who's jealous and pissed-off about her going off with Scotty, and one of her musicians is behaving Suspiciously. It turns out that the latter is a man she's danced for her whole life: her father.
So the whole dancing musical number that he is part of seems ... probably less exclusively sexual in the Argelian cultural context (hedonism notwithstanding) than it's initially framed as by the camera, given her father's direct involvement, though the episode is too shallow to think too hard about that. My vague impression is that the hot hedonistic cafe women who want to go further with willing guests generally leave the cafe with them; it's not a place with facilities for literal sex, but more of a place to find agreeable potential partners.
It's very slightly funny because Scotty gives zero indication of the (alleged) kneejerk loathing of women this is (allegedly) a treatment for; perhaps James Doohan just didn't have it in him to play Scotty that way, who knows? Regardless, Scotty is nothing but good-natured and stupidly agog from his first moment onscreen, in much the same way that Scotty usually behaves around women he finds attractive. We repeatedly get the "Scotty POV" shots of her ... let's say, waist, cutting to shots of him just staring with his mouth open.
Bones seems like, well, might as well enjoy the show since I'm here, but not as vicariously embarrassing about it. Kirk is simultaneously admiring, courteous, and managing to maintain another variant of his closed-knees/hands folded/straight-A polite schoolgirl sitting style on the edge of a pillow.
While Kirk is cordial to Kara herself, it becomes pretty clear that he finds Scotty's whole deal somewhere between vicariously embarrassing and hilariously stupid, and McCoy seems privately less than thrilled with the whole thing too. This is them responding directly to Scotty:
So after Kara takes Scotty for a walk like he's an over-eager puppy who needs extra training, Kirk dryly says to Bones, "My work is never done," and they have a little conversation about how all that was totally on the clock. It turns out that this particular cure wasn't Kirk's idea but McCoy's (who among us is surprised, lol) and the two of them were primarily overseeing it to make sure Scotty is 100% cured. Now that they're actually off the clock, Kirk proposes going to a different place in the city "where the women are—" and Bones just responds, yeah, I know that place too, let's go.
Given that the women here are already staggeringly gorgeous and decorative, the impression at the time is that this other place has to be some kind of brothel or something that they've visited separately, right? Like, the cafe is Pleasure Planet Sexy Lady Place Stage 1 and then this other place is more Pleasure Planet Sexy Lady Place Stage 2, the real deal. Or something. They never actually get there because of the plot, and we only hear about it again at the end, so more on that later.
The even stupider main plot involves murder cloud alien Jack the Ripper framing Scotty for the murders of various women. He targets women because he feasts on fear, and (allegedly) the spike of terror women feel right before being murdered is more intense than men in comparable situations (yes, this is actual Jack the Ripper's motive according to Star Trek, though he also just hates women). That whole plot happens, everything's resolved, everyone's pretty chill throughout, RIP to the various murdered women no one seems to care all that deeply about in the end.
The crew had to be drugged into unconcern to starve Jack the Ripper Murder Alien Cloud of his preferred diet, while Kirk and Spock beamed him into space via the transporter to dissolve the cloud into millions of tiny fragments that will gradually die off. Everyone else on the ship is fairly loopy. Scotty and Bones, definitely loopy, wander in to the transporter bay, leading to Kirk being like, well, not much is getting done for the five or six hours until the drugs wear off.
Spock, always ready to peer-pressure his captain into taking a break, points out that Kirk didn't get leave in any meaningful sense in all this. So maybe he should go back down to the planet and chill out for real!
Kirk, not beating the bi4gay allegations, responds by inviting Spock to come with him to the 2nd sexy lady location he and McCoy had been going to visit before the murders. In the process of the invitation, he reveals that this other place is also a cafe, something he mentions multiple times in just a couple of sentences.
Spock certainly wasn't along for the first, on-the-clock cafe adventure, so it seems like Kirk specifically wants him along when they're off-duty for real, but no explanation is given for this or what's special about the women at Cafe #2.
It's certainly not illuminating when Bones and Scotty enthusiastically want to tag along this time too—Bones insists again he knows the place in question, i.e. Sexy Cafe #2 and not the lesser Sexy Cafe #1 we've already seen—and Kirk immediately shuts them down and says they're not in the right shape to come along.
Not going to lie, I got the feeling that he mostly doesn't want them, or at least Scotty, along on his actual leave. It was one thing to hang out with Scotty at the sexy lady cafe as a professional matter, but they're work friends at best. Kirk doesn't want to spend his precious free time with subordinates who aren't really personal friends.
After that interruption, Kirk invites Spock to come to the planet with him to appreciate Cafe #2. And at that moment, we get the single highlight of the whole episode: Spock's wordlessly bitchy gay head tilt as Kirk is eagerly urging him to share shore leave with him at the sexy lady cafe. Spock's level of baffled disdain for the idea pervades this single reaction to a degree that has to be seen to be believed, and immediately stops Kirk mid-sentence. Even his hand drops.
So Kirk just interrupts himself with, "No, I guess not" and a disappointed look. He glances at Bones and Scotty doubtfully, then back at Spock while hanging onto the transporter console, and plaintively says "Alone?" with puppy dog eyes and zero enthusiasm.
Kirk then visibly gives up, heads towards the door, gestures and says "Gentlemen" to Scotty and Bones, gesturing for them to leave first through the doors out of the transporter bay. Scotty, Bones, and Spock all go through the doors before Kirk follows after them, apparently uninterested in beaming down to Argelius without Spock, or at least in going alone.
Things we don't know by the end:
Since all Argelians are hedonists, including the (gorgeous) ones at Cafe #1, and both places are explicitly described as cafes, what makes Cafe #2 so distinct that even a vague reference immediately identifies the place Kirk is talking about? Like, the women are so what? Are they just extra turbo sexy? Are they empaths like Sybo? The world will never know.
Why is Kirk so deeply unenthusiastic about going to any of these places alone? And particularly prefers to go to Cafe #2 with Spock in particular?
btw do Argelian cafes have... names? Do you just describe everything by the vibes? The women?
Why is Kara's father part of her dancing number at a sexy lady cafe?
Are we supposed to think Scotty always had more-than-usually misogynistic leanings that were amplified by some random woman being responsible for the accident, or that someone who isn't misogynistic could just spontaneously develop it via explosion (that didn't even hurt him much)?
I can imagine why Uhura is not in this awful, sleazy, misogynistic episode, but known appreciator of female beauty and shore leave Uhura being in "Wolf in the Fold" would make it slightly less obnoxious. Maybe she was at Cafe #2 the whole time.
What is with the weird tone of this episode about *checks hand* women being brutally murdered?
so. i do this thing where i wake up still half-asleep, write a note in my phone, and then fall back asleep and forget about it completely until i find the note later.
and i need to show you all some of these because ?????
Being blocked on tumblr is the funniest thing ever because when you visit their blog it dosen't even say you're blocked, instead tumblr will try and gaslight you into thinking the blog never existed at all. What the hell so you mean "there is nothing here" I literally saw my mutual reblog this post that is time stamped 2 hours ago.
does your have have any original research or is it just a review of sources? did you find all your sources in english or did you do any translation? do you read any other languages? you seem to know some greek, latin, and arabic. how much of the book are your insights & opinions?
The book will mostly be a synthesis of existing research, but presented for a lay-audience. I consider my job to be introducing the sources and scholarship in a digestible manner, and thus try to keep my own takes to a minimum. This is impossible. My own commentary is present.
My English is excellent. My French, Spanish, classical Greek, and Latin are bad. My Hebrew, Arabic, and German are worse. When I quote a source it is because I read an English translation. If I have to discuss a source I cannot read, I rely entirely on existing scholarship.
My methodology is a focus on the emic/etic divide. Sections are generally separated into two parts; a review of the source, followed by a discussion of the scholarship and reception history of the source. This isn't always possible with extra-complex topics like Hekhalot-Merkava, Gnostic literature, or the Jabirian Corpus. So those sections are shaped different.
The Jabirian Corpus succeeded in receiving the bulk of alchemical knowledge from the Latin west, and while it made some crucial additions to alchemical theory, its main value to the Islamicate world was its role as a storehouse of knowledge. Everything was in there. Naturally, the next four centuries of alchemical literature are Islamicate alchemists disagreeing with, or even outright denouncing, the Jabirian corpus. The first in this illustrious lineage, was an eminently practical alchemist named Abu Bakr al-Razi.
