sail that ship!

no real theme y'all, just re-posted gifs and things for my ships. so many ships.

[mephostophilis]

I HAVE BEEN FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED BY YOUTUBE FISHING VIDEOS

[cobaltegg]

so like, what if you were the last surviving animorph but it's been canonically established that you still had your best friend's DNA in your body

[lady-raziel]

i'm sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i'll consider giving any thought to

[lady-raziel]

i say this with 100% sincerity: if you want to know who monica lewkinsky is, she's the person who deserves to be back in the white house more than any person alive and she should get full rights to execute any 1990s comedians of her choice by firing squad. she deserves to be on the $20 bill and have her own monument on the national mall, but instead she's happy with reclaiming the narrative. she should have been america's people's princess instead of diana. we don't deserve her.

[strangermask]

Okay, so I did google her and the scandal you mentioned in the tags, and I have two things to say

1. Holy shit

2. Yeah, I think she has the best one for the trend

[s-leary]

Somehow, it is one thing to know that people born after 9/11 are now adults, but it is another entirely to understand that there is a cohort of adults who don’t know who Monica Lewinsky is.

[vaspider]

Yeaaaaah.

[biglawbear]

I've seen fake Monica tweets before so I double checked this one and I'm delighted to report that it's real

[blood-fang]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't she get famous for blowing the president? That's about as much as I was ever told about her

[krypti]

Yup. She was perfectly willing and able to walk away. She chose to take part. She's been riding that train ever since.

[greekwords]

… she was an intern at the White House. Imagine being an intern at the White House right out of college decades before the current wave of feminism. And the *president of the nation* asks you to blow him in the Oval Office. And you want to work in the white house as your full-time job. Do you deny him? Suppose you don’t want to do it. Can you deny him?

I’m thrilled by the modern-day attitudes about this. Genuinely, the way this would go in 2024 is that the intern could say no and tell the press what happened and half of America would support them. But when I was a kid? No way!

And Monica Lewinsky didn’t ride a train to fame from this situation. She was America’s laughingstock and punching bag for twenty years. She was the butt of every sex joke and the least respected person that everyone knew the name of. She couldn’t live any sort of remotely normal life or do the things that she wanted to do because every single person, including all members of the press and every comedian, was out to get her. Every “cancelled” celebrity nowadays pretends they’ve been treated the way Monica Lewinsky was and you know what, she’s right that they wouldn’t last an hour in her shoes.

I’m very happy about the cultural shift that has allowed her to come back into the public again. You have to understand how recent this shift was.

[grizlatron]

Not to be a total bummer, Clinton did act completely irresponsibly and incorrectly over and over again, but Monica does report having a pretty strong crush on him and enjoying the intrigue of having an affair. It was inappropriate for him to enter into that affair, but it wasn't a "blow me or lose your job" sort of situation. That doesn't take away the fact that the way the media and late night talk show hosts treated her and the whole situation was deplorable in the most extreme sense of the word.

[casketfreak]

Y’all I don’t remember the title

[spookybuttons-deactivated202101]

thinking about how novartis is running a lottery where the prize is literally the life of babies and apparently this went unnoticed

[spookybuttons-deactivated202101]

Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a degenartive disease that affects between 4-10 children in every 100k live births. For those of you unfamiliar with epidemiology, this number might not have a lot of meaning, so suffice to say it is a rare disease, but among the rare diseases, it’s a common one. When it comes down to diseases which only affect one gene, SMA is the most common cause of infant death. 

I won’t go too deep on how and why it happens, or all the diffferent subtypes of the disease, but what it entails is that for the severe presentation, because the baby is lacking one gene, they’ll gradually lose the strenght in their muscles. By the age of 4, most those children are dead. 

It’s not an easy death. The child loses the capacity to breathe and swallow by themselves because of muscle weakness. We provide support as best as we can, but there’s not a lot we can do about something like that. And though muscle strenght is lost, cognition is unaffected, which means the baby brain is maturing as it would regularly, inside a weakening body. 

So, it’s horrific. But because it’s a single gene causing the mess, and because science has advanced this far, scientists went “hey what if we could give the kid this gene?” 

And that’s exactly what they did. Enter Novartis, pharma giant. They decided to try it out: put the gene inside an empty virus, give the virus to the kid. Did it work?

to those of you who don’t speak medical: yes. yes it did. it worked really well. it worked well to a point where they ran tests with 15 kids and all 15 kids survived without need for respiratory aid, as opposed to the usual 92% death/permanent ventilation rate. 

“Wow, this is good,” said Novartis. “I’m going to put a 2.1 million dollars tag on it.”

“What the fuck?” said the parents, who are regular people who do not have 2.1m sitting on their banks.

“Well, you know,” said Novartis. “You only have to take it once in a lifetime! Seems like a fair price to me. Uh, but also, do bear in mind it only works if you give it to the baby before they turn 2 years old.” 

but does it end there? no! although the drug was FDA approved, Novartis needs their prized treatment to get cleared on the rest of the world. people are complaining about the price tag, too. so they have an idea. a brilliant idea! 

“We’ll get the contacts of the kids who have it around the world,” said Novartis. “And then we’ll run a lottery! Because we are generous, we’ll give away a hundred doses a year for the entire population of planet Earth! Of course, that means your country has to agree my drug is legit.” 

“What if I don’t get picked,” wonder the parents of the children.

“Well, you know. You can always just raise 2.1 million dollars, but remember you have to do it before your kid turns two.”

so now i sit here seething in hatred toward big pharma, watching mothers desperately trying to raise an absurd amount of money which is even more absurd if your coin is weaker than the dollar, saddled with the weight that if they don’t do it in time, they’ll have to watch their kids die

and then every once in a while one of them manages to raise the cash, and then they’ll post videos in their social media and i get to watch as the babies gradually regain strenght and starts sitting on their own, then moving their limbs, then standing up by themselves

while the other mothers share increasingly desperate videos of their kids who can no longer sit, and no longer swallow, and no longer breathe, until it all ends with a single text shared through instagram that just says “thank you all, but my child has passed, and we’ll give what we managed to raise to the next one.” 

meanwhile novartis pats themselves on the back for their generosity of playing roulette with the lives of babies

[teacupdream]

… i just confirmed this. I am floored. There is no humanity in these people. It’s called Zolgensma.

When a lottery 'wins' sick babies life-saving drugs

The company behind a gene therapy for muscle-wasting disease SMA will give out 100 doses via lottery.

[left-reminders]

Socialize Healthcare Now

[iamthecutestofborg]

There’s a lot of issues that are ambiguous, morally grey. This is not one of those issues. There’s right and wrong here, good and evil. And this is evil. Mustache-twirling, death-ray-inventing, Disney villain evil. I don’t understand the depths of depravity and greed that leads someone to justify this. They are just telling the world “We don’t care if babies die. We could help them, but we won’t” I have no idea how to respond to that.

[lagonegirl]

Bishop Curry V may be young (10 years old, to be precise), but the little kid from Texas has some big ideas. He’s currently working on a device that could help prevent children from dying in hot cars.

The number of children who died in hot cars increased across the country last year, and Texas had the highest number of cases. Sadly for Bishop, the issue also hits close to home because a baby died in a minivan last summer outside a home near his own family’s home in McKinney.

Bishop was inspired to create a device he calls “Oasis,” which would attach to a car seat and detect if a child is left inside the vehicle, prompting it to blow cool air until parents or the police are notified.

“It would be a dream to have lots of inventions that would save many lives,” the precocious 10-year-old told the news station.

source

A lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to leave something in a hot car. It’s easy to forget something when it’s not in your daily routine, especially if it’s asleep or under a blanket or something. This is a nightmare. I don’t have kids myself, but I can absolutely understand how this could happen- everyone’s sick so you’re probably kind of out of it, you run in thinking you’re just going to be a minute, get distracted with the task at hand… and then your child dies in a horrific way because of it…

I’m all for any methods or technologies that can help prevent it from turning tragic.

#BlackPride #BlackInventors 

[soofyanstevens]

THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST WAY TO WAKE UP holy shit I am so proud of this child I wanna give them a huge hug

[lagonegirl]

His GoFundMe is here: https://www.gofundme.com/endhotcardeaths

[tundrakatiebean]

He only has raised $2,950 as of 2/2/17

Let’s boost the hell out of this

[grizlatron]

Kids doing amazing things is always worth boosting! Sadly there have been many inventions trying to prevent car deaths, mostly alarms to let parents know that the car seat is occupied. The trouble comes with manufacturing - it can be really hard to get funding because companies are too scared of the lawsuits and bad publicity if a device should fail. There is even one designed by NASA scientists that never got off the ground.

[finnglas]

I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.

About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.

The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.

It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.

Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.

They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”

“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”

It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone. 

And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.

So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”

The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.

“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”

When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.

They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.

When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”

After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.

Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.

It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.

We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.

She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”

Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”

“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.

“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”

And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sindri42]

fucking finally

[falseficus]

had to watch a sea urchin fertilization lab for school and the way they dispose of the fertilized urchins is putting them in a tub labeled “used” lmao

[falseficus]

cruelty

[vietnyamese]

slutty urchins banished to the whore chamber

[betweenheroesandvillains]

trying to translate the OG squad’s bickering is just [outdated arabic term] [outdated italian slang] [untranslatable word of potentially proto-indoeuropean origin?] [french] [crude mix of classical and medieval latin] [habibi/amore] [precise specifications of a gun that hasn’t been in wider use since 1978] [wordplay that only works if you combine at least three languages, one of which is extinct] [outdated french term] [explaining the meaning of a word none of them can translate into even one common language] [outdated italian] [slang] [inside joke] [potentially old french but the french guy says he has no idea what the woman is trying to tell him?] [inside joke] [sign language???]

[asterosian]

Every time I like or reblog a post, I leave a little bit of man residue on it

Every time I reply or add commentary to a reblog, that’s five times as much man residue

Me following your blog means your whole blog has man residue

I’m spreading it everywhere

[asterosian]

@jaekaeyay here ya go

[elisamaza]

oh my fucking god. she’s unironically saying men have cooties

[asterosian]

Now that this has blown up, I want everyone reblogging it to know their blog has man residue on it

Reblog to get man residue on your blog

[pizzaback-deactivated20201011]

I hate how the stereotype is that dolphins are good and sharks are evil, when dolphins are so smart that they have the capacity for evil but sharks are simple fish who can only be true neutral, so even if a minority of dolphins are evil there are still more evil dolphins than sharks

[rageclit-deactivated20181208]

quality marine philosophy discourse

[terrypratchettappreciation]

“It’s amazing what a child who is quiet and observant can learn, and this includes things people don’t think she is old enough to know.”

— Terry Pratchett - The Wee Free Men (via aeshnacyanea2000)

[whitepeopletwitter]

[amuseoffyre]

My money says that’s what plesiosaurs were like: fast underwater, extra padding for buoyancy, long neck. Look at their skeletons!

It’s just like this:

They’re basically large horizontal penguins with a long tail and spiky teeth.

[autumngracy]

OH SHIT THEY PENGUINS!!

[v0idbird]

OH SHIT PLESIOSAUR PENGUIN!!!!!!!!!

[uncle-beanbag]

This is the inherant problem with most reconstructions. It’s just unknown how much fat the animals really had.

[glumshoe]

Children playing with Barbies in media: “This is Sally. She’s the mommy. She loves fashion, swimming, and she drives a convertible! She has a baby with Ken and sometimes they kiss.” OR “Look, I ripped Barbie’s head off! Ha ha ha! I’m a boy.”

Children playing with Barbies in real life: “This is Aurora, the fallen goddess of the sky. She has been banished from her kingdom and bound to a mortal body by her sister, who rose to power by human sacrifices. She now leads an army of cannibal water spirits who eat men. Sometimes they have orgies. They dismembered a traitor and keep her head on a Popsicle stick as a warning to others. Aurora can turn into a wolf and uses battle magic to paralyze her enemies. The king of the stuffed animals developed rabies and she had to slay him to save his people, but they do not understand that it was an act of mercy and kindness and are sending assassins after her for regicide. This is Aurora’s soulmate, Crystal, but her soul is trapped in a gemstone while an evil spirit pilots her body and attempts to murder her friends.”

[pr1nceshawn]

[limitededitionsanderssidesblog]

THANK YOU FOR THE LAST ONE

[sword-and-nightingale]

Bisexuals are…

Valid

[sneesler]