Amber, she/her, nearly 30 but you don't need specifics. Please place your soul into the gaping maw of the eldrich abomination to your left. I mostly blog fandom stuff, insects, and music, as well as anything else i deem interesting. Icon made in: https://picrew.me/image_maker/117958
I thought I might share one of my new tattoos. A couple years ago, a dear friend and I coined the term “fish bag moment”
A fish bag moment might be sitting all alone in an empty new apartment after coming out and upending your life, or starting a new job in a brand new line of work because it’s closer to your dreams
It’s what happens when you take a leap of faith or make a hard decision for yourself, when the future is so hard to visualize and everything feels scary. You’re just a fish in a bag and you can’t see where you’re going
It didn’t just survive the kiln, it thrived ❤️ to anyone out there who needs to hear it right now, rest assured: even if the path forward seems unclear, you’re on your way, and I’m proud of you
their name comes from their three eyes. if i'm correctly recalling the Wikipedia page i read, they exist dormant, possibly for years, waiting for sufficient rainfall in the desert to emerge.
For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again
"For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again tomorrow.
That routine just changed.
On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Awiqli (insulin icodec-abae), developed by Novo Nordisk, as the first and only once-weekly basal insulin ever approved for adults with type 2 diabetes in the United States.
This is not a minor update to an existing drug.
It is the first entirely new class of basal insulin to reach U.S. patients in more than two decades.
Instead of injecting insulin every single day, people with type 2 diabetes using Awiqli will only need one shot per week, on the same day, every week.
That means reducing from 365 injections a year down to just 52.
For anyone who has ever felt the weight of that daily ritual — the anxiety of forgetting, the physical discomfort, the constant reminder that their body needs help — this approval represents something much bigger than a dosing schedule.
It represents relief.
How the Drug Actually Works
Understanding why this injection lasts a full week requires a quick look inside the body.
Most traditional basal insulins are absorbed into the bloodstream and begin breaking down within 24 hours, which is why patients need a fresh dose every day to maintain stable blood sugar levels.
Awiqli works differently.
Its active ingredient, insulin icodec-abae, is engineered to loosely attach to a blood protein called albumin, which is found naturally and abundantly in the bloodstream.
This attachment creates a slow-release reservoir.
Instead of flooding the system and fading fast, the insulin releases gradually and consistently over an entire seven-day period, keeping blood sugar in a healthy range around the clock...
The FDA reviewed and ultimately declined to approve it for people with type 1 diabetes, citing concerns about a modestly increased risk of hypoglycemia in that population specifically.
Some regulatory agencies in other countries, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Japan, have approved Awiqli for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but for now the U.S. approval is limited to type 2...
What Comes Next
Awiqli is not standing alone in this space for long.
Eli Lilly is developing its own once-weekly basal insulin, called efsitora alfa, which is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
If that drug also earns FDA approval, it would give patients and doctors two once-weekly options to choose from, allowing for personalized decisions based on a patient’s health profile, insurance coverage, and individual response.
The broader direction of travel in diabetes care is unmistakable.
Fewer injections, smarter formulations, and better integration with digital tools like continuous glucose monitors and insulin-tracking apps are all converging toward a future where managing diabetes requires less daily mental effort without becoming any less medically precise...
A Small Shot With Large Implications
It is easy to look at a once-weekly injection and see only a scheduling change.
But the science behind Awiqli, the scale of the ONWARDS trials, and the consistent satisfaction reported by patients all point toward something that matters far more than convenience.
Diabetes management has always asked a lot of people.
It asks for daily vigilance, daily discipline, and a daily willingness to confront one’s own condition, sometimes in uncomfortable or inconvenient circumstances.
Anything that reduces that load, without reducing the quality of care, is worth taking seriously.
For the more than 37 million Americans living with diabetes, and the hundreds of millions more around the world, a simpler weekly routine could mean the difference between a treatment plan that works on paper and one that actually works in a person’s life.
That is the real significance of what the FDA approved on March 26, 2026.
Not just a new drug.
A new way of keeping people healthy, one week at a time."
"you only deserve food and shelter if you contribute to society" says people living in countries where nobody's labor actually feeds or benefits their neighbors anymore but exclusively benefits the companies keeping the food and shelter behind the artificial paywalls
You're not nomads relying on each other to hunt and gather anymore, you're talking about stocking shelves for fucking wal marts
And even the oldest societies on earth all took care of the elderly or sick anyway
dudes will be like "if you don't Contribute To Society you don't get to live, that's the simple facts" meanwhile their job is like Marketing and Brand Development Specialist
the thing is that I think lots of the time we talk about childhood trauma cycles wrong, because people will frame it as like, "this happened to this person, which is why they act like this" and really it's like, "all children learn social behavior via what is modeled for them by the adults around them and their peers; if what the adults in your life model for you repeatedly, over a long period of time, is that they get their needs met by dehumanizing others, then you will learn that the way needs get met is via dehumanization"
it isn't about how certain things being done to you somehow write Abuse Into Your Psyche, it's about learned behavior. it's about not being shown alternative models. (INTO MY LOUDSPEAKER) IT'S ALL ABOUT NOT BEING SHOWN ALTERNATIVE MODELS
Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!
The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.
This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.
Here is a short and easy video showing this in action
The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.
You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.
If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!
I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.
If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
