Echo In The Mirror

Personal blog of Thera, 37 year old trans woman, poly and pan and full of whimsy and horrors. Randomly nsfw, not well-tagged

[eldritch-sexting]

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Poesy, Collage, and Mythopoeia

Hey all! I’ve started up a Patreon so people can see and support my creative works!

Here’s a sampler of what I get up to:

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[annax-and-a-lot-more]

golden mary

at the end of each turn, it gives you one leaf (tooth), but instead of being added to your scales they go directly into your pocket

i need to post the sunflower one day.....

[annax-and-a-lot-more]

one day my pvz hyperfixation will be back... promising to all of my pvz followers, it returns every once in a while

i could actually send the sunflower card as well rn

so sunflowers are like squirrels (sort of) at the end of your turn (and also at the start of the game), you get 1 sun. you may draw either a plant card from your deck, or a sunflower. at the end of your turn, sunflowers give 1 additional sun each (if they survived)

[annax-and-a-lot-more]

my 100th and 101th card 🎉

cube with spiral: every 2nd turn, the card attacked by kernel pult is forced to skip its turn

(it's supposed to resemble butter with uhh spinning head stunning effect)

[annax-and-a-lot-more]

more pvz inscryption stuff

remember sunflower squirrels? they have alternatives

obtained by ??? (i'll edit this later), gives 2 suns every turn instead of 1, but only 5 cards in the deck (assuming that default sunflower deck has 10 cards)

so there's a location on the map that allows you to change day to night, right? (and vice versa) doing so will give you sun-shroom deck instead of sunflower, and allow to use night cards in general

[phantomrose96]

job interviewer: would you be willing to destroy and betray yourself for nothing?

[phantomrose96]

job interviewer: (reading the room) would you be willing to destroy and betray yourself for a pizza party?

[dragongirlbunny]

weed gummies are such a fake sounding concept like yeah if you eat this piece of candy and wait an hour you'll suddenly become very easily entertained and airheaded and cuddly

[somethingsomethingwizard]

willy wonka creation

[gingerhastoomanyobsessions]

Things that actually happen in hunchback of notre dame, in no particular order

The book mostly is told from the POV of Pierre, a self-insert who is failed author and, I cannot stress this enough, utterly pathetic 

Quasimodo damaged his hearing as a teenager from years of bell ringing and now uses sign language whenever he can

There is a scene where Quasimodo and a fellow deaf guy have to have a conversation without using sign language because they’re in a courtroom and the jury doesn’t know sign. It goes about as well as you’d expect 

Frollo has a little brother, Jehan, who he raised after their parents died. Jehan is now a frat bro in college whose hobbies consist of getting drunk and being mean to Quasimodo. In his first scene Jehan complains about college DEI because an Italian guy got a scholarship he wanted. 

Esmeralda is accused of witchcraft because she taught her pet goat Djali how to do math

Djali may or may not be sapient. He can and does imitate human mannerisms to make fun of people on purpose. He does this while on trial. 

Yes. They tried the goat for witchcraft, too. 

Pierre writes a whole play riding on the pun of dolphin/Dauphin. Nobody likes it. 

Frollo is an alchemist and has a secret mad science lab where he writes on the walls

Jehan literally pulls a “buy my silence” and frollo gives him money to make him shut up

There’s a trio of catty girls who bully Esmeralda like it’s Mean Girls

Quasimodo and Frollo literally have Cryptid Status— Parisians circulate rumors that Quasimodo is either a familiar, a homunculus, or the result of demonic mpreg, and that Frollo is a wizard with wizard powers and/or a ghost

There is a little old woman who lives in a hole and shouts slurs at people. She has a tragic backstory. 

There is a homicidal con man/king of thieves named Clopin Troillefou (surname translation: The Fool of Fear) who deserves tumblr sexymanhood.

Pierre learns how to carry chairs with his teeth 

There’s an entire chapter dedicated to the layout of the streets of Paris in painstaking detail

There’s another chapter that is a rant about interior design 

Esmeralda and Pierre get platonically married due to Clopin’s murderous shenanigans. Pierre tries to make a move in her but ends up being more emotionally attached to Djali the goat than to her. I think that should be grounds for divorce

There is a scene where Pierre has to choose between helping Esmeralda escape or helping Djali. He picks Djali. 

Frollo hides from his own brother by laying face down in mud and playing dead. Somehow this works 

There is a Plot Significant Tiny Shoe. A Tiny Shoe Chekhov’s Gun. And Victor Hugo will not stop telling you just how Tiny this shoe is. 

There’s a soap opera style plot twist that involves a false accusation of cannibalism and the woman in the hole who shouts slurs

Quasimodo makes up a stupid little song that doesn’t even rhyme to confess his love to Esmeralda, who remains oblivious

He then attempts to demonstrate his affection via convoluted metaphors that involve props. She doesn’t get it. Boy please say what you mean

Frollo pulls the classic discord groomer tactic of threatening self-harm if Esmeralda doesn’t give in. 

Jehan rolls up to a party/rescue mission scheming session in Clopin’s secret hideout in full plate armor (how did he get that???), drunk off his ass, and acts like he owns the place. Everyone finds this so ridiculous that they just let him

Hugo goes on and on about how innocent and naive Esmeralda is but then casually reveals that Esmeralda carries a dagger on her person at all times to fend off assault. When Frollo attacks her and Quasi intervenes, she takes Quasi’s knife and almost kills Frollo (fair!) but he flees. She contains multitudes?

Frollo has a psychotic breakdown in the middle of a field surrounded by chickens and hallucinates skeletons everywhere 

For the first half of the book Esmeralda is like 70% sure Frollo is a ghost, not helped by his aforementioned Cryptid Status

Jehan eats a moldy piece of cheese off the ground 

Frollo tries to send Pierre on a suicide mission in drag. Pierre objects to the suicide part but not the drag part  

Clopin’s preferred weapon is a scythe, he’s very good at using it, and he sings when he fights. Again: sexyman potential. 

Victor Hugo has a foot fetish. I initially dismissed it as Frollo having a foot fetish until Victor Hugo included a foot fetish torture scene without any Frollo in it. So I can only conclude that the foot fetish is authorial in nature. Unfortunately the foot scenes are important to the plot. 

Frollo is canonically 36, he just aged like shit and is bald. The narrator will not stop telling you just how bald he is.

Despite being in full plate armor, Jehan gets splatted like a bug

Almost every named character dies. Djali the goat lives. 

[tpwrtrmnky]

The parachute study is actually a wonderful piece of art because it demonstrates so succinctly the kind of situation where randomized controlled trials are not the gold standard of evidence, and in fact reach misleading conclusions.

Because you can't recruit people to willingly jump out of mid-flight passenger planes for science, you redesign the study to engineer a scenario where the risk to the control group is minimsed. The plane is landed.

And then, because you've removed the main reason to use a parachute, you find that parachutes have "no effect" on mortality or injury.

The constraints of performing an ethical RCT guarantee this result. A result that we obviously know is dangerously wrong to extrapolate to the real-life uses of parachutes.

Now here's the thing: The people insisting that "evidence-based medicine" says we need RCTs of trans healthcare know this is what they're doing. It's extremely well established that you can abuse these "standards" to engineer incorrect results.

SEGM and their ilk are doing this on purpose because they know it's an effective way to dress up science denial in a veneer of scientific rigor.

[disbelive]

How would one go about making such a study though?

As in, how would an RCT look like that attempts to create misleading data, when it comes to HRT or trans healthcare in general?

I agree with the post, I just can't think of a way to create a control group with that effect

[tpwrtrmnky]

Well, barring exceptionally fortunate cases like this one, where they were able to use "skip the conventional wait time" as the test group and "wait as usual" as the control, you sort of can't.

It's foundational medical ethics that when you have a treatment that's known to be effective, you don't withhold it for a study. The demand for RCTs is done knowing that it's unserious.

[sanguinifex]

The "gold standard" here would be some kind of quote-unquote "natural experiment" where you have 2 different countries that are very similar but one enforces wait times for trans care and the other doesn't, and then you compare outcomes for trans people in each country. Likewise, the "natural experiment" for parachutes would be crashes where people were able to eject with a parachute vs. crashes where they weren't. Or you could throw ballistics dummies out of planes.

Basically, the way you study this kind of thing is you look at where existing regulatory or other differences have created two different population groups, or you simulate it.

[tpwrtrmnky]

The interesting part there being that we know for a fact that the SEGM-affiliated gender clinics, many of them state monopolies, have worse outcomes than informed consent clinics.

Based on the extreme rates of patient complaints and high rates of patients being traumatized by the clinicians' behaviour, that is.

And yet, somehow, when these clinics self-incriminate in their research, it's taken as evidence that care needs to be restricted more.

[elliespectacular]

we could probably condense the 7 deadly sins down to like 4 because greed and gluttony are basically the same thing, envy is just greed with nuance, and lust isn't a problem

[elliespectacular]

pride: you think you're better than everyone sloth: you don't care enough to help out wrath: you cause problems when you don't have your way greed: you want more than you need gluttony: you want more than you need (food version) envy: you want more than you need and someone else has it lust: you enjoy sex

[uptownlowdown]

vanita smythe performs double-entendre laden "back door man" in this 1946 soundie, directed by william forest crouch.

[wirelessmousegirl]

Dating an incomprehensibly large megastructure girl is interesting because she will send you pics of endless halls and chasms of impossible geometry on scales that threaten to break you fragile perception of reality in 2 taken from security cameras miles above the ground and then respond with something like ">///////////////////////////////<"

[paradoxicalgentleman]

@eldritch-sexting

[nosdoog]

nap gone wrong

[linolinoing]

guys pls don't die from the heat i love playing tumblr with you

[charl0ttan]

to be honest i do have beef with some microbes

[yoshspace]

shoulda cooked it longer that gets rid ofem

[h0lyshift]

The older i get the more i understand why some people become obsessed with privacy, not because they’re hiding something, but because being constantly perceived starts to feel spiritually exhausting.

[melyzard]

Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

And often, they are assholes, too.