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I have trouble taking care of my teeth because everything that involves doing that is a sensory nightmare. I decide to do some research to see if there's anything I can do about this. The results?

"How to make your autistic child brush their teeth"

"Autistic Children and Sensory issues relating to tooth brushing"

"How to get your little shit to brush his fucking teeth"

Like, yeah Google, thanks, that really helps. And like, even if I was a child, some of the advice seemed... unhelpful. Like, doing a dance and singing a song while brushing your teeth? Even for a kid, I don't think that would help distract from a sensory experience as intense as brushing your teeth. Like, the extremely intense and unpleasant flavor, the intense feeling of the brush against your teeth scraping across it, even mouthwash has such an intense and disgusting flavor that I have difficulty keeping it in my mouth for more than a few seconds. I wish there was SOMETHING that could be done.

phoenixiancrystallist

I actually did research on how to keep your teeth clean if you don't have access to a toothbrush or toothpaste! I needed the info for a story, but thankfully it also has real world applications. Maybe something here will help:

If the bristles are a sensory nightmare, try a soft cloth instead. Cloth was one of the methods used before toothbrushes were invented, although they used shit like burlap. Don't do burlap. Cotton or linen should do fine.

You can also buy natural toothbrushes made with bamboo and boar hair. I've never tried them so I'm not sure how different they'd feel compared to synthetic bristles, but they're pretty cheap on Amazon if you want to give them a shot

If even the "extra soft" bristles are too stiff, you could try soaking them overnight in some mouthwash to soften them further. This is what we did when I was growing up, and it worked like a charm. Bonus points that the alcohol in the mouthwash kills any germs stuck on the brush

If the toothpaste flavor is horrendous, make a paste with baking soda and water, then flavor it however you want with a sugar-free extract. Heck, look for recipes to make your own toothpaste, and experiment until you get something you can stand to use.

If the texture of the toothpaste is bad, the baking soda method might work better for you, or you could try scrubbing salt or activated charcoal on your teeth instead—that's what they used before toothpaste was invented. Personally, I'd recommend the baking soda or making your own toothpaste.

Different brands often have different textures, and some even have different flavors (this is especially true of kids toothpastes, which work just as well for adults), so swapping brands might help, too. I can't stand Crest, it makes my mouth feel all filmy no matter how well I rinse, but Colgate doesn't leave a weird feeling in my mouth. Also Colgate is the only brand my grocery store carries that has cinnamon flavored toothpaste as an option, and I'm a whore for cinnamon

You're probably using too much toothpaste anyway. Most people do. You really only need a dollop about the size of a pea. I smush it out across the bristles so I don't have to deal with a glob of it in one spot.

Floss if you can. That's going to do more to stop your teeth from rotting than brushing will. Standard dental floss is obviously an option, but if you're like me and you can't stand putting your hands in your mouth, try disposable floss picks or investing in a water flosser. I still hate the feeling of the floss between my teeth, but it's manageable since I don't have my fingers in my mouth on top of it. Haven't tried the water flosser since the picks work well enough for me

Try chewing sugarless gum, especially right after you've eaten. It's not perfect, but it'll help. Also it comes in a billion flavors so hopefully there's something you like in there

If absolutely none of that is helpful, rinsing with water is still better than nothing. You can mix in salt to help kill bacteria if you can handle it, but bare minimum try to do a rinse and spit.

Obviously not all of that is from my pre-modern teeth cleaning research—some is from personal experience! But hopefully something in there is useful to you

It's absolute bullshit that we have to approach these problems sideways because the people actually making "helpful" articles about it are all ableist :| Maybe some day soon we as a society can get over that.

your-resident-boat-person

Oh my God you are my hero thank you so much

moonbeam-llama

i love (LOVE) my water flosser. I have a very tiny mouth and consistently tight jaw so regular floss was never really an option, plus I despise how it feels. I used to use those floss things on like a toothbrush handle, but it's still floss. But the water flosser doesn't feel bad to me (with warm water in it) and I genuinely feel like it cleans my teeth so well. For me it was 100% worth the cost. Also neither of my children will floss regularly but they don't mind the flossing toothbrushes? We have Dr. Plotkas, they actually feel really soft to me (I prefer an electric brush, I like the vibrating feeling). We also have 4 different types of toothpaste because none of us like the same kind. I prefer the ones that are like a gel and don't feel gritty, and I hate mint. One of my children also hates mint but likes the more gritty paste feeling. And on and on. I think it's helped a lot to just... Keep trying stuff.

dandelionsresilience

I linked a handful of specific examples of different kinds of toothbrushes/toothpastes/mouthwashes in my Sensory Tools list here, under headings “Tactile > Oral” and “Gustatory” :) These are not necessarily the cheapest or best options, but they show some options that exist for you(general) to look into

thundergrace

Republicans and their influencers keep calling the SAVE Act a "voter ID law". They use polls exclusively on "voter ID" to claim it's popular. Voter ID is a popular common sense voting policy that requires a state ID to vote. It's already a thing. No one has a problem with that.

The SAVE Act, however, is NOT a "voter ID" requirement. They know if they spelled it out no one would support it.

During Kamala's campaign when she was seemingly doing well with women due to the reproductive rights platform issue, men on the right were going all in on "we need to repeal the 19th amendment"

And here's one of the earliest bills proposed. As usual, they're throwing immigrants under the bus to get it done. They're claiming millions of undocumented immigrants vote in national elections when it's illegal and a lie (when challenged on the matter, a pundit once claimed 77 undocumented immigrants voted in the last ten years. This is the best they can do). They're using that lie to justify disenfranchising 70 million women and anyone who can't afford a passport, pretty much.

It costs money to replace an ID, get a copy of your birth certificate and obviously to buy a passport.

This is a poll tax.

depsidase

duckworks

Weirdly, everytime I see a reference to the ICE List link being blocked, it never includes the link to the list. Click here.

depsidase

thank you for posting the link.

thememedaddy

petrovalinescrossedstrings

So if for some goddamn reason you still have tiktok? Maybe delete it

This shit is dystopian as fuck

Delete it as soon as you can do not fucking use the app at all

papayajuan2019

the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor

sniperserpent

One of the most jarring moments of my university education was in a physics class when I was given a device that measures gravity and was told “this cost the university sixteen thousand dollars, but the only glass blower in the world who could make the glass springs inside it died so it’s literally irreplaceable. If you drop it those springs will shatter. Go fuck around with it for a day and take some measurements”

nothingbutthedreams

In the UK there's a thing called the endangered crafts list which I highly recommend if you fancy discovering some crafts you never even knew existed. Scientific and optical instrument making is considered 'critically endangered' and glassworking (scientific glassware) is just considered endangered, which is for 'crafts with a shrinking market share, an ageing demographic or crafts with a declining number of practitioners.' There's some other crafts in that category which are easier to teach yourself or go to classes on that list, like lithography, marbling or block printing on fabric, so it might be worth considering those if you're looking for something to try.

oakfiddle

Read my Merlin fan fictions on AO3. Always idiots in love. Always a happy ending.

epicallyepicnerdery

lifeafterpsychiatry

It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!

creamypancakebatter

this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks

breelandwalker

junflower123

fvlter

I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.

noodle-the-queen

this is so fucking important. reblog.

thememedaddy

shamebats

If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.

shamebats

Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn't said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.

liberalsarecool

Typical cult logic. Obey the abuser. Protect the strong man. Don't think for yourself.

hippynerdguy

I read an article about Costco back in 2008. The owner was approached by a business consultant with a plan that could make him $1 million a year, personally. The plan would’ve had the owner fire 20% of his work staff, cut benefits and start new employees at minimum wage. After reading the proposal, the owner said, “You’re fired. I make $350,000 a year. I have two houses two cars two kids in college, a boat and a RV. No one needs to make a million dollars a year at the expense of your employees.”

If there was a Costco near me, I’d be there weekly just support such an honest company.

gean-grey-blog

One time I was leaving a friend's place and an older lady with basically no English came up to me and communicated that she was very cold and needed a ride. She pointed to tell me where to go.

I got there and her daughter or granddaughter came out and was like omg her phone died we were worried

And then the older lady said something and the younger lady translated.

"She knew she could trust you because you have pink hair"

I thought it was funny at the time. But when I think back on it I think she was basically saying "you had a visible sign of not vibing with the system I was afraid of"

Be weird. Be colorful. Help random people.

fragiledate

hayy. heres a random, spontaneous, niche art note compilation

phantomrose96

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

jujuthewulfpup

As someone that is also a software enginerr snd graduated college in 2019, I find this summarized history compelling. I honestly never thought about interest rates being lower than inflation equating to free money for rich people. I understood it when trying to get a mortgage while interest rates were rising but it never occurred to me that rich people,investors, CEOs, CFOs probably think that way all the time.

Thanks for this.

amemait

A bezzle

khmelisuneliart

merthur.

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