the plot chickens
we're not kids anymore.
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Kiana Khansmith

#extradirty
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Andulka
Mike Driver

roma★

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taylor price
Show & Tell

shark vs the universe
Monterey Bay Aquarium

PR's Tumblrdome

★

Origami Around
sheepfilms
Misplaced Lens Cap

Product Placement

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@chicken-tamer
the plot chickens
say, you wouldn't happen to have that 'getting over needles' post quick at hand still, would you? I'm supposed to be on an injected med but i keep procrastinating taking it because ive been panicking more every time I'm supposed to take it, but i should really be on it. i remember that write up being good, but, it was a *while* ago
I think it got scrubbed from the site when @maidslime got nuked :( brief moment of angry silence for all the good and wonderful things we lost in that wipe.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Getting Stabbed
Almost everybody is scared of needles, to some degree, it's just very normal to not want any kind of puncture wound no matter how small. It is also very common for people to have had childhood experiences that intensify the fear. I found it very helpful to keep in mind that so, so many people have had to face their fear in the exact way we're going to. we're in this shit together!
Getting over a fear is not a matter of overpowering it, that is in fact a great way to exacerbate the problem. Fear is your friend, it wants nothing but to keep you safe. Honor it, love it, allow it to be here. Our goal here is to replace the fearful associations with positive ones.
Make The Needle Your Friend
When you get your injection supplies ready, the part that starts your heart really racing is (probably) seeing the needle. That's our handhold, we're gonna get a grip on our fear with it.
Starting on a day that you're not doing an injection, carry a syringe with a (capped) needle around with you as much as possible. I kept mine tucked behind my ear. Every so often, take it out and just look at it. Hold it in your hands, touch every part of it. We're teaching your subconscious mind that this object is familiar and safe.
if you often set things down, forget where they are, and then have to find them, great. "Oh shit, I don't have my needle, I need to have that" is a fantastic thought to have here, yeah?
There's Levels To This Shit
We've got a grip on it now, let's apply some (gentle) pressure and turn that first step forward into a cycle. It goes like this:
Be afraid
Become acclimated to the fear until it feels like something you can manage.
Make it a little scarier
Repeat
A good first escalation is poking at yourself with a capped needle. As you do this, pay attention to what you're feeling. The goal here is not to overpower your fear, but to render it into something familiar and (ideally) comfortable. This is your time to get to know it.
Each escalation should be small and done slowly, you are allowed and encourage to go back down a step if you feel like you need to. Rushing yourself is counterproductive, be patient with yourself like you would be with a small child or nervous dog.
No escalation is too small, simply taking the cap off and looking at it is enough to count. Be careful re-capping it but, if you do accidentally poke your finger, that can be an opportunity to engage with the fear.
Play Around With It
When you're comfortable and can't think of any other escalation that doesn't involve touching yourself with the needle, it is time to touch yourself (with the needle). Crucially, we are still not injecting ourselves.
Just very little pokes and touches. It's essentially impossible to do any actual harm to yourself with it, the goal is to teach that to your body. For me, this culminated in lightly scratching my skin with the needle to see what would happen. It felt like exactly nothing, but the tip of a needle is astonishingly sharp. Here's a picture of what that looked like when I demonstrated it to a friend:
(the bracelet says "Gock in My Rari", good pun)
Okay Time For Stabbing
Well, almost. Keeping in mind that our goal is to create a sense of comfort and safety to replace the fear, think about your injection routine.
Play your favorite soothing music. Do it in the coziest part of your house. Get yourself a little treat to have afterwards as a reward. Kiss your partner. Just do anything and everything you can to make the experience as positive as possible.
And, of course, remember: The fear isn't in charge of you, but it is your friend and loyal adviser. Allow it to be in the moment with you and it won't fight you so hard.
Now stab yourself 💜
"there's like 8 rich guys standing between us and shorter working hours / week" posting is fine until you think about it for two seconds and realize that the most rabidly anti-reformist group of people are the people with a bar and two employees who would amputate one of their worker's arms if it meant getting a 0.8% income tax cut
has anyone written about truck memorials, those custom vinyl decals that people put on the back windows of their trucks (or, less commonly, other vehicles) in honor of deceased friends & relatives? seems like a bizarre cultural practice to me. why a car, of all places? what's going on there? are you just like, acknowledging how you managed to get a nice truck without the traditionally exorbitant car payment which generally accompanies them?? (probably not, right?)
it occurs to me that it could also be a consequence of the ubiquity of lee brice's critically acclaimed (&, imo, deeply cringe) 'i drive your truck,' a song which i have just learned was inspired by the real dad of a medal of honor recipient who drove his dead son's truck & for some reason did interviews about this specific practice. 'i drive your truck' is a fascinating cultural object: it's about how you're sad about your dead friend, who would probably punch you in the arm for crying about it, so you drive his truck with his dog tags & his go army shirt in it, even though the truck has terrible gas mileage, to go 'tear up' back roads & a field [goin muddin, one surmises, but also it feels very pointed that driving & grief are presented as destructive]. i just find this complex like, hilariously on the nose: oh did your kid die in an imperialist war intended to, among other things, secure american access to oil? and you're so sad about it you go literally waste gas? bro. come on here bro. experience a scruple, or at least like, a moment of self-reflection here, bro
this song also feels like it's in continuity with another popular country song, david ball's 'riding with private malone,' which came out in august 2001 & reached its popular height in the wake of 9/11. it's about buying a vintage corvette from the mother of a guy who went off to die in vietnam (a note left in the car reads "if you're reading this then i didn't make it home / but for every dream that's shattered another one comes true / this car was once a dream of mine now it belongs to you"); the singer nearly dies in a car crash, but is saved by the ghost of the titular private malone. hilariously, wikipedia informs me that this song received critical acclaim for its 'subtlety' in expressing the american psyche after 9/11. the mind boggles, but then i suppose the bar was low
neither of these songs are the same flavor of vile, unabashed patriotism typified by, e.g., toby keith, but they're still making the same 'freedom isn't free' argument, centered on iconic cars: both vehicles are haunted by an american soldier, either with the ephemera of his life (brice lists dog tags, a dirty baseball cap, and a shirt, along with a radio station preset and a half-drunk bottle of gatorade, which one must assume is by now swollen with the noxious fumes of incidental fermentation) or more literally (ball notes that the radio picks up an oldies station, but also the speaker sees 'a soldier riding shotgun'). i'm fascinated by the way that cars are emotionally central, in these songs & in the memorial decal tradition. they're making a claim about what american soldiers are dying for (our ability to drive cars) & operating from the assumption that we all agree that this is a tragic but noble exchange, because cars are just like, so great. there's a sort of self-serving maneuver in both of the country songs in which they acknowledge the radio; as a person who spent a ton of time stuck in the back of other people's trucks listening against my will to the local country station, i can confirm that these songs both got a ton of play (chart data reflects this observation too). fascinating in a sick way, i think. there's some obvious stuff going on here about the narrow straits of country-star masculinity; trucks & vintage corvettes (especially ones which you fix up yourself, of course) are suitably cool & tough to cover for unmanly emotions like 'being sad.'
i know it's sort of popular currently to valorize some idea of american rural culture that is left-leaning or radical, and to imply if not insist that this culture is neatly separate from the toby keith of it all (consider, e.g., the popular 'ghost of dale earnhardt' page, which emphasizes the anti-police origins of NASCAR; needless to say, if you live in the deep south & know NASCAR fans, they are not a group of obvious commies. i picked this example because dale earnhardt jr. claimed that the ghost of senior saved him in a crash once & it felt thematically related, but others abound). the claim that there is a leftist rural history needs no defense because it is flatly true, but the idea that this legacy can be neatly disentangled from racist, reactionary, & imperialist tendencies is much more tenuous, in my opinion. american pickup truck culture (& to some extent other vehicles, which are treated metonymously with rural life; e.g. kenny chesney's deeply annoying tune 'she thinks my tractor's sexy') is so fuckin wild y'all
i’ve said it before but anglo lesbians are so so racist about yuri it’s actually absurd how bad it is
feel the need to mention that this post was inspired by a bechdel-wannabe comic artist making a strip about how all yuri is incestuous and dirty art lmfao
White lesbians in Seattle when the yuri has competent writing, themes, and fleshed out characters who act like people and not a bunch of trite archetypes with sex jokes presented with the tact of a Disney XD cartoon:
the transmisogynized boy-prince will be understood as the panel one princess of the future. and also the panel two princess of the much nearer future
punk homu
Religious princess: "Dark forces have conspired against princess to prevent her from growing sizeable boobs"
Atheist princess: "Material conditions were not ripe for princess to eat lots and lots of ice cream and butter chicken"
Agnostic princess: "Nobody knows why princess has A-cups"
the mycelial super-network of eastern oregon has been observed learning linux code on the deserted laptop of a grizzly bear attack victim
did you know? some primates have been observed to exhibit "blogging" behavior
some primates are known to enjoy progressive rock music
members of one species of great apes have been seen playing league of legends in their natural habitat
Whenever I accuse Western scholars of being “racist,” they always become defensive, insisting that they are merely criticising “systems” and “governments,” as though racism ends with crude prejudice against the intrinsic traits of other peoples. This is not how racism functions in the 21st century. Even historically, racism was fundamentally about the maintenance of structures of hierarchy. While it was once more fashionable to attribute deceitfulness, cowardice, and other supposedly inherent defects to “Asiatic races,” contemporary discourses of “democracy” and “authoritarianism” have become à la mode instead: a narrower, more elegant means of maintaining normative hierarchies and portraying other civilisations as defective and in need of domination, sorry, “democratisation.”
where is prev on the food chain
high
middle
low
scavenger
one of my favorite things about Civilization VI is that a legitimate strategy for culture victories is training religious units and deliberately letting them get their ass kicked so they can become martyrs and create relics when they die. feeding cats to coyotes but tourists keep coming to see the cat’s fingerbones.
I am extremely online but in like the Loser Way. if you try to make me use instagram or tiktok I fumble around with it like a grandma who has never seen a phone before. if you send me a tumblr screenshot however, I will tell you that not only have I already seen the original post but that I'm mutuals with OP
telling a cis woman I just think it would be more radical if she got phalloplasty
no but like it's more radical for a woman to have a penis so you should go do that. it's more subversive it's radical you should go do it