🪼
Xuebing Du
Mike Driver
hello vonnie
Origami Around
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
NASA
Today's Document
roma★
No title available
Product Placement
Show & Tell
blake kathryn
oozey mess
occasionally subtle
JVL
No title available
★
sheepfilms
seen from Brazil
seen from Brazil
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seen from United States
seen from Philippines
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seen from United Kingdom
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@daydreamerdisease
Cuba en el recuerdo de los sucesos de Chernóbil
Cuatro décadas han transcurrido desde aquel fatídico 26 de abril, día en el que aconteció el peor accidente nuclear de la historia. La explosión del reactor 4 de la central nuclear Vladímir Ilich Lenin, al norte de Ucrania, provocó uno de los grandes desastres medioambientales que el mundo ha sufrido y dejó importantes lecciones para la sociedad y la comunidad científica. Luego del accidente…
Dudes healthcare is so fake. My ADHD meds are $940 without insurance. But they gave me a website of "coupons" which straight up looks like a scam website, and I got it today for $60! Just a coupon from a random website and it was $900 cheaper. America, I am confusion!! America explain!!
For all my uninsured judys out there it's for Walgreens only: walgreens.rxsense.com
as a pharmacy technician i can share with you some websites that give you those "coupons" for your meds!
goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you
some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!
if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too
good luck out there 👍
How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke
another one is singlecare.com, brought my duloxetine from $240 a month to $20
and there are coupons for hrt on there as well :) different options for different pharmacies
dollarfor.org saved my broke ass, it can save urs too
“but if i communicate it perfectly then they will understand me” WRONG 10,000 years of suffering
but surely I'm just not explaining it well enough!!! I just have to explain it better!!!!!!
[ID: gif of a skeletal person from a video game. They are moving in distressed ways, shaking their head, beating the ground, hitting their head with their hands, and covering their ears. End ID]
Hey anyone notice how google translate is being pretty liberal with their translations as of late? Takin some real liberties to infer tone.
ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.
I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output
For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".
I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.
To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.
I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings? I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this. I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.
What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-
I AM SO SICK OF DEFAULT AI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.
Time to repost our photosensitive and colorblind friendly Jewish queer pride flag. The flags is a combination of the lavender stripe flag, the original flag, and the progress flag with a Star of David added.
[ID: a rectangle flag made to mimic the progress pride flag. The flag is horizontal, equally sized, and 9-striped with the colors lavender, magenta, red, orange, yellow, green, teal, indigo, and purple from top to bottom. There's a layered Star of David on the left of the image with the colors black, brown, blue, pink, white, and yellow from outside to inside. The yellow part has a small purple Star of David that makes the yellow part mimic the intersex flag. /End of ID]
Tagging: @radiomogai @io-archival @themogaidragon @genderstarbucks
Think of all the times when authority figures say to a child, "Stay out of it unless you want to get punished too."
The child is required to watch an act of unfathomable cruelty and show exactly zero signs of disapproval. The child is required to be a monster. And that's not an exaggeration.
Then, adults complain that "children are so cruel". Um, hello? You literally required them to be cruel. There were times when they showed kindness and compassion, and you punished them in order to force them to be cruel. And now you suddenly decide that cruelty is wrong and they're supposed to be kind and compassionate?
This is why I refuse to demonize people who did something cruel a long time ago. You were required to be cruel. When you're regularly taught, "Be cruel. No, not like that," it's only natural that some people's cruelty will go beyond what's expected. If your moral compass was temporarily fucked up because of that, I refuse to see you as a forever monster.
This doesn't mean you get a clean slate. You must respect the boundaries of anyone you've hurt, which will most likely involve disappearing from their life if the hurt is bad enough. You must be actively opposed to the patterns that caused your cruelty and not just changing enough to fit in. You must refuse to associate with anyone who would allow your cruelty to continue.
If you managed to repair your moral compass, grow out of your cruel patterns, and learn how to have a positive effect on other people, then you're a much better person than those who mindlessly obey the status quo and who tolerate cruelty as long as it's done in a socially acceptable way.
i think living in a walkable area with friends would fix me. like i really do
Your personhood isn't determined by an MRI scan.
By now many of you have probably seen the news reports of a scientific study in Nature supposedly showing that people actually become neurologically ‘adult’ at the age of 32 years old — not 25, as fans of the frontal lobe myleination theory of adulthood would have it, or 18, as the purely legalistic definition of adulthood would, or even 13 or 15, as many cultural rites of passage have variously held it to be.
No, now that some entirely exploratory research has discovered that the average, non-developmentally-disabled brain tends to enter a new phase of functioning and connectivity around the early 30s, we have a new random spot on the ground for pop scientists and those seeking to limit the rights of marginalized young people to draw a target around, and act like they were aiming for it the entire time.
In sum, researchers Alexa Mousley, Richard Bethlehem, Fang-Cheng Yeh, and Duncan Astle reviewed a large pool of nearly 4,000 MRI brain scan results, filtered exclusively for neurotypical participants, and found that, consistent with prior research on the subject, the density of neural connections tends to peak around age 30 for most people, as does topological efficiency (in essence, how long a distance neural information needs to travel across the brain, with shorter distances being more efficient).
Less reported on have been the study’s numerous other findings on neural changes that tend to occur with age, in particular the findings that neural modularity (how clearly neural nodes can be grouped into sub-sections) and efficiency between nearby nodes (also called local efficiency) peaks at around age 90.
Why having a brain that is hyper-connected and generally efficient is the marker of adulthood, but having a brain with highly specialized organization and really efficient individual connections is not is, of course, completely arbitrary. The only reason the news media isn’t treating brain modularity and local efficiency as hallmarks of maturity is because it would make too obviously a specious headline to claim that adulthood begins at 90.
Once you have allowed that certain people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions because of how their brains are structured, you open the door to limit any freedoms you dislike. All you have to do is pluck one random developmental trend from the sea of published neuroscientific data, and claim that anyone whose brain deviates from this milestone is a neurological ‘child’ who needs protection from their own autonomy.
But as any honest neuroscientist will tell you, the brain never finishes developing. Adulthood is a socially constructed category, not a biologically observable reality, and we all exist at some point along a continuum of development that is highly personal to us. Our endocrinology, ability to grow muscle, hormone production, metabolism, circadian rhythm, neural organization, neural efficiency, the presence of brain tumors or cysts — all of these things are changing within us at all times, and remain beautifully inconsistent over the course of our life span. We are not static. And we are all growing more disabled on a long enough timeline.
There is no single moment at which we can be said to be at our most adult — not without creating a definition of adulthood that is at once completely fleeting and ableist. Is it more adult to think quickly, or to make fewer errors than others? And if so, at what point do we start cutting off large swathes of people from the possibility of ever being a true adult, not just our elders and younger comrades, but every single person with a cognitive disability, brain fog, temporary injury, low blood sugar, or who just happens to live on the low end of the bell curve?
What’s the use in packaging a diverse collection of rights, social responsibilities, and modes of interacting under the single banner of ‘adulthood,’ anyway? Is an adult a person who can operate a vehicle? Take on a loan? Join the military? Understand every possible outcome of having sex or getting a medical procedure? Someone who has done an estimable deed for their community?
I can think of a lot of adults who have never done any of that. And I know a great many people who have taken on immense social responsibility when they were in a state of cognitive disability, or while they were children: they raised younger siblings, got drunken parents washed up and headed to work, drove a car full of their family members through a mud slide in the mountains, reported a predator sliding into their inbox, and registered dozens of adults to vote when they weren’t allowed to vote themselves.
I wrote all about the shoddy brain science on "adulthood" and why it's damaging to youth, elders, disabled people, and anyone who believes in liberation. You can read the full thing for free on my Substack.
I love vague labels that make people go "but that's confusing" or "but that could mean anything" Good. Keep guessing lol
"Queer doesn't actually tell me anything" who says I wanted to tell you anything. Who even are you.
Something something people not knowing the history something ...
I am increasingly of the view that the besetting flaw of modern, internet-based, leftist-progressive culture is the tendency to take concepts that were intended as consciousness-raising, "have you noticed"/"makes you think" moments and treat them as all-encompassing rules for life. The Bechdel test is not a yardstick for feminism and/or artistic worthiness. It's not a test you were ever meant to apply to any single work. It's a thought experiment intended to illustrate how the entertainment industry as a whole discounts the interiority, desires, and relationships of women except as they relate to men. But again and again you'll see people - and perhaps especially people who define themselves as feminists - who treat it as the one and only meaningful measure of a work's value. In reality, there are feminist works that don't pass the Bechdel test, and works that pass the Bechdel test that are not feminist, and works with tremendous political value that do not foreground feminism because they're about something else.
And if the Bechdel test is a relatively old example, this is a phenomenon that keeps cropping up. "Some artifacts in museums were stolen or looted, with colonialism and racism providing a cover for acts that in other circumstances we'd easily recognize as criminal" has become "all museums are piles of loot and stealing from them is righteous even it it's to melt the artwork down and funnel the profits to organized crime." "Zoos sometimes abuse their animals and the goal should be to reintroduce specimens to the wild" has become "open all the cages and let the animals out (to spaces where they will almost certainly die/be killed to stop them killing people)". "Ethnic foods are sometimes treated as more palatable, and sold for more money, when they're marketed by white people" has become "people should only prepare and eat food from their own ethnicity". Again and again, it feels like these ideas that were meant to make us think, to pause a moment and notice the unspoken assumptions and elisions that exist in our world, have been turned into catchphrases that shut down thought. I think the reason that happens is that people enjoy the feeling of righteousness that comes from calling out institutions like museums or the film industry, but along the way you can become just as dogmatic and tunnel-visioned as the bodies you were calling out.
These posts are sisters
TMI just means Tell Me Immediately. Sorry not sorry 🤷🏻♀️
stop earning advanced degrees i need you to finish your fanfiction
Back up your LJs!
I know this post is for a very small audience here on Tumblr but some of my oldest friends I met on LiveJournal are still here, so I'm making it anyway just in case.
But there have been some changes at LJ recently that do not bode well at all. Rahaeli made a thread about it on bsky with some more worrying details. For a bit of background on this, LJ is surprisingly big in Russia. Like way more than on the western side, and it's been owned by a Russian company for a long time now (it wasn't always - there was a big controversy when LJ got sold to the Russians back in the day).
The Russian side of LJ dropped a very big change on Dec 29th without warning on their users, essentially making it so they'd have to register their ID or bank info with LJ to post or comment. Any posts from people outside of Russia, or without Cyrillic services turned on, are invisible and can't be interacted with by people inside Russia. It's nearly impossible to turn Cyrillic services on if you're not in Russia either, so there's a big wall now between both sets of users. Rahaeli speculates that this could mean the Russian company that owns LJ could be considering selling off or just shutting down the western side of LJ soon, thus why they're sectioning it off. There's been no mention of this on the western LJ news comms or anything which is also worrying.
Fandom's moved on from LJ now, but that doesn't mean that a large chunk of old fandom didn't take place there before, and if LJ does go down then tons of fic, fanart, meta, communities, kinkmemes, discussions, rp, goes down with it. Everything up in smoke! I think people underestimate sometimes just how much stuff went on there. LJ being dead is much different than LJ being gone... the thought of it really disappearing after all this time breaks my heart. I've spent so much of my life there, even after everyone else left. ;_;
But how to do your backups? Dreamwidth is an easy answer as an LJ clone, with an automated importer that'll snag all your stuff and move it over for you. Another tool I've been using is ljArchive, specifically this fork of it which will also save comments and communities, although it won't get userpics. There's also LJ Archivr, although that one costs money, and I think some others are mentioned in the bsky thread. Whatever you pick, I'd do it sooner than later.
From Canadian artist Richard Savoie
the way the quality of the light falls off and goes orange… the reflected light in the sky… I do not know snow but I think this artist really does.
In case you’re scrolling fast…
These are paintings!
They should invent a method of asking for reassurance that nobody secretly hates you that doesn't make people secretly hate you.
this reply deserves to be here.
