Icon is me with hiking poles used for mobility, header image is me posing with my rollator beside a 2000 year old redwood cross-section at California's Henry Cowell State Park.
I've been meaning to make a post talking about my stroke because y'all got bits and pieces of the recovery but I never actually told the story of HOW it went down and the thing is the type of stroke I had is usually the type young people have and since having mine i've now heard multiple stories of people under 40 having very similar strokes and the scary thing is, is that they didn't get help right away. Because you're young and healthy and sure you feel weird but it'll pass right? but it doesn't, and it gets worse, and by the time you get to the hospital (some people literally take days to go) the deficits are worse and recovery is harder.
so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.
So for strokes the signs are abbreviated BE FAST. Balance loss, Eyesight changes, Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, -> Time to call 911.
Had I known those MAYBE I would have figured it out but my symptoms were a little mixed. I was reading (fanfic!) in bed because it was a sunday morning and i had nothing pressing to do and suddenly got dizzy. I put my laptop aside because my eyes were blurring (Eyesight changes - symptom #1), and laid down, thinking it would pass, it didn't, it's a little vague how it progressed because I'd been having headaches and neckpain for about 3 weeks leading up to it so I was like 'idk is this a migraine?' (headaches can be a stroke symptom so symptom #2) but i got nauseous and eventually got up and to my utmost surprise I immediately fell over as if I was the drunkest of frat bros. The room literally spun before my eyes as I fell to the floor (Balance loss - symptom #3). I have had some Nights and I had never been that unsteady before. I crawled my way to the bathroom, threw up (nausea - not a common stroke symptom) , took 800mg of ibuprofen, and crawled back to bed.
if you know anything about ibuprofen you might know it's a mild blood thinner and that's a high dose. I may have inadvertently helped myself with that one. I was just feeling like shit and thinking 'idk this might help'
At this point I still thought we were still in Normal Land. Sure, it was a weird morning, but Surely There Was A Reason. (Yes There Was) Anyway, as I'm lying there willing my body to stop suffering I realize my arm is going numb (stroke symptom #4) and I switch positions, because weird, but it doesn't go away, and I gave it a good little while. I'm on a medication that can make my limbs tingle but it usually just does it to my fingers and it dissipates quickly but this wasn't dissipating, and then I realized one of my legs was also going numb. Then one side of my face is going numb.
(at the time I did not look in the mirror but I had a drooping eyelid - symptom #5)
Those all seem bad. I grab my computer and google 'when to go to the hospital for dizzyness' as that felt like the worst of my problems. and indeed the list I found highlighted that if you are also experiencing loss of balance, blurred vision, nausea, and limb numbness, you should see a doctor. That seems like far too many symptoms to be having all to be listed. I grab my phone (thankfully plugged in and by my bed), and start layering on more clothing because it's about 10 degrees out and i'm in a pajama dress. The very nice man at 911 talks with me and sends an ambulance, I tell him I don't think I can get out the front door of my building on my own and he asks if I can get to MY apartment door to which I say yes and he assures me that's fine they will have keys to my building.
(I have been since informed they love to chop down doors but no, I could get that far)
I wait by my door laying down on the ground and they arrive pretty quickly. They see to me in the hallway, which is more of a lobby in my building and the only place with room for me to lie down (I cannot stand unassisted at this point) they ask me a bunch of questions, take vitals, and ask me where I would like to be taken. Me, having never had to go to the fucking hospital in an emergency before, simply go 'wherever is close' because I again, I am having a stroke and do not have the wherewithal to think through these things.
A big firefighter helps me down the stairs (it's only a half flight and I still almost did not make it) and we get underway.
At the hospital they wheel me into triage and I mostly lie there gratefully and answer some questions and respond to some tests (grip strength, following a pen with my eyes, that sort of thing) and then I hear what is great when you've been at urgent care for two hours but what is Very Bad when you just arrived in an ambulance and that's 'She's next'. I jumped the line for a CT scan and an MRI. I was there less than ten minutes before I was actively being scanned. honestly closer to five.
my active symptoms seem to have been worse than some of the stories I've heard, not being able to walk AT ALL in particular, although some other are pretty equal (Footless Jo on youtube had a stroke around the same time I did of the same type and has discussed hers, she delayed going in despite the severity for a variety of reasons and it sounds like her recovery has been difficult) My recovery was pretty easy because i was actively being cared for and on blood thinners right away. I was pretty out of it in the beginning, but I was only in the hospital for 6 days and then in a rehab for another 4 to relearn how to walk and balance, then i was released unto the world and just spent time going to physical therapy and recovering for awhile. I was out of work for about 8 weeks total. I basically had the best outcome for a stroke. I recovered almost fully back to 100% (I'm about 2% less sure footed than I used to be, but it's rarely noticeable), my face still feels a little weird but has markedly improved so I live in hope it will eventually get back to normal. It massively sucked. But strokes can fuck you up for life and I came out a weird medical story to tell and have to take some extra medication now/precautions to take (i cannot do certain types of yoga, no weightlifting, no push ups, no going on rollercoasters.... things that could strain my neck essentially) but overall I escaped very lucky.
For anyone who has ever had covid before, please be sure you are aware of stroke symptoms. Each successive infection raises the risk in a pretty major way, and a lot of people are dying young due to not knowing these signs or being afraid to act on them. Please take care of yourselves.
My wife had a stroke a couple years ago at like 40 (also possibly a covid thing, their BP wasn’t high and it wasn’t an obstruction thing) with basically no lasting symptoms. But we both have psych related degrees and decent insurance at the time so the MOMENT I saw the asymmetrical face droopiness I was on the phone with 911, followed by friends in the area who could stay home with kiddo. By the time the ambulance arrived they couldn’t walk. Now they’re back to exercise and almost all our old usual activities.
we were talking about the criminalization of homosexuality in class and my professor (who as far as i know isn't in any way queer) said something i quite enjoyed in that. well the exchange was more or less this: a student asked a question (doesn't really matter what exactly just know that i was rolling my eyes So hard internally) and the prof looked at the student and was like (i'm paraphrasing here this conversation was not in english) Do you have any queer friends? and the student went Uhhhh in a manner that made it clear the answer was probably no and the prof said Actually statistically speaking you most likely do. If I had to divide this room into two groups the way to do it would not be "people with queer friends" and "people without queer friends" it would be "people whose queer friends are out to them" and "people whose queer friends aren't". And if you're in the latter category you should consider why that is--if maybe your behavior is indicating to the queer people around you that you're not safe to come out to. to come back to your question if you really want to know about queerness there's a very simple way of doing that: you make yourself a person queer people feel comfortable talking to about their experiences and then you fucking listen to them when they do (the fuck is not paraphrased) (there was a fuck involved) (frankly king shit)
Also, it's Tumblr. If I try to tell anyone about your knock-off Wish-quality sex toy there’s going to be a horde of Autistic lesbians doing a power point presentation in the notes about safe sex toy material and correct battery storage.
Which I am 100% down for, but it will not get you any sales.
I was trying to figure out if you were someone important on a other platform, because there's no way in hell anyone actually thinks you can be classified as "Influencer" if you have a big Tumblr blog.
And then also think advertising to this mob would be a good idea
There are actually lots of people who sell stuff successfully on here, usually drop ship stuff.
They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).
And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.
I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.
They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.
It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.
They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.
This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.
It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.
Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.
So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.
But there are also drop-ship sellers on here who get enough of a kick-back from affiliate links to make selling cutesy kitsch stuff worth their time on here. They’re just making sure you don’t know you’re being marketed to.
Throwback to when I openly talked about this and got blocked by several huge “meme” blogs that were actually drop shippers who didn’t like me lifting up the rock and exposing how they hide their ads in plain sight lol
Hey, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, but if you didn’t realize these types of posts/blogs were ads… that’s okay! They are designed to trick you!
These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.
After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?
Turns out, not so much.
Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”
And maybe it was obvious to them.
I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.
But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!
You’re not dumb or silly or worthless or any of the unkind things some people are calling themselves in the notes. You just needed more information. Happily I was able to provide it and now you know what to look for. Go forth and scroll with newfound knowledge 🫡
[VD: A TikTok titled "My 10 favorite (inexpensive) holiday gift ideas for the blind & visually impaired." The first clip shows a person pointing up at the title as they voice-over: "These are my ten most favourite gifts for the blind and visually impaired".
The following items are demonstrated in the video and described in the voice-over:
1. Assorted bump dots - Various kinds of stickers with protruding dots on them that can be put onto appliances to make them more tactile.
2. Pocket money brailler - A device that allows you to imprint braille onto paper notes, indicating their value.
3. Liquid level indicator - A device hung on the edge of a container with metal prongs that detect when liquid has reached it.
4. Braille Pop-It - A pop-it with the alphabet in braille on each bubble.
5. Tactile Rubik's cube - A rubik's cube with unique textures for each color.
6. Braille color clothing tags - Tags with braille to indicate what colour a piece of clothing is.
7. Signature guide - A card with a rectangular slit in it to guide the user when writing their signature.
8. Low vision playing cards - Cards with very large and colorful numbers on them.
9. Pop-A-Cell - A plastic card with 6 bubbles you can indent to practice braille characters.
10. Talking keychain clock - A clock that says the time aloud when you press a button.
rbing again to boost my description! please make sure to rb this with a description! its a bit painfully ironic to see a video about blind people without a description... yknow, so visually impaired people can access it
to be seen on social media, fitness instructors basically always have to have contemporarily attractive body types. whereas fitness instructors you meet in real life have a huge variety of body types.
being a well-qualified fitness instructor requires education and experience and yes, usually a significant level of fitness, be that strength, flexibility, stamina, so on.
Many people have all of those qualifications, while also being fat.
Perhaps the biggest lie advertising has sold you is that being "fit" means being thin. That is spectacularly untrue. The world is filled with fat athletes, amateur, professional, in all variety of sports, performing remarkable feats any of us would be damn proud to accomplish. That's a hell of a lot of experience and talent, including many educators you or I would be lucky to learn from.
One of my favorite things about Leverage is that they were not afraid to put their men in colors. I'm not just talking about Nates obnoxious cutomes either. But the amount of times that Hardison is just casually wearing pink. The amount of fun patterns that Eliot gets away with while still being the "guard dog".
You know. Some people could really stand to get more comfortable with the idea of “you shouldn’t say that because it’s mean”. Especially with really common body shaming and straight up bullying lines.
“You shouldn’t make ugly bald jokes because what if a transman on T sees it!”
“You shouldn’t make virgin jokes because what if someone who’s asexual sees it!”
How about you just don’t make them because they’re mean. How about people can be balding or a virgin for a number of reasons and also don’t deserve to be routinely made fun of. How about saying that the reason you shouldn’t make x joke because it spares x specific identity’s feelings also let’s them know that you actually have no problem saying or thinking bald people are ugly or virgins are stupid or etc but you’re just not saying it in front of them. How about you understand this kind of body shaming and bullying especially in a very public setting online are always going to have way more unintended damage to people who did nothing wrong than damage to the person you’re upset with.
Sometimes the best reason to not make a bad joke like that is because it’s fucking mean.
facts about myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) to combat the disinformation campaigns going on:
what does the name mean? my = muscle. algic = pain. encephalo = brain. myel = spinal cord. itis = inflammation.
ME is classed by the WHO as a neurological disease. the Decode ME study found immune and neurological genetic markers in its analysis of 15,000 subjects.
ME is more complex than just fatigue. many experts and patients dislike the old name ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ because fatigue is only one part of the condition, and it’s the least unique trait.
the most unique trait is post exertional malaise, where, 24-72 hours after any exertion outside the patient’s limits, there’s a peak of worsening and new symptoms affecting multiple bodily systems. PEM often involves immune activation, such as sore throat and a low fever, and a loss of muscle recovery after exertion, measurable through CPET testing. (normal muscle recovery takes 200 mins, but muscle recovery in ME takes days, with some patients taking longer than a year to recover from a single exertion.)
ME can range from mild to profoundly severe. these severity levels are only within the context of ME, not general illness; ‘mild’ ME is still a severe illness as it includes a 50% loss of functioning. ‘mild’ ME can feature debilitating pain and complex symptoms and can turn basic activities of daily living into a marathon.
severe ME is (naturally) even more physically limiting than mild ME. people with severe ME are largely bedbound and only rarely able to leave their room in a wheelchair, and usually can’t perform their own care tasks, needing help dressing, washing, and eating.
in very severe ME, the person may be unable to leave bed at all and may not be able to speak, swallow, roll over, sit up, read, or be exposed to light or noise, for years or decades.
ME has a measurably lower quality of life than any other illness studied, including cancer and stroke.
finally, many of us can attest that exertion can cause years of deterioration and loss of functioning in ME patients. ive been 95% bedbound for the last decade bc of ONE WEEKEND where i walked too much when i was 15. im 26 now. and ive known so many people who went through something similar. do with this info what you will.
today, 8th august, is severe & very severe ME awareness day. it was chosen to honour sophia mirza who died of severe ME. please consider and remember us today 💗
“I think he is no longer trying to assimilate into society,” notes Cubillan when discussing Lestat’s mindset at the start of season 3. “He’s no longer hiding himself, his sexuality. I think at the beginning, there’s still some hiding of being a vampire, but barely.” It’s hard to imagine Lestat ever being truly inhibited or repressed, but during their time in New Orleans, Louis and Lestat had to hide in plain sight—both in the sense that they were vampires living among humans, and in that they were a semi-closeted queer couple. In Montreal, Cubillan wanted to set the scene for a bold new era of Lestat’s story—which is absolutely what we get once his band goes on tour.
In our latest, @hellotailor sits down with Andres Cubillan, The Vampire Lestat's production designer, to talk about the team's work on a variety of the season's sets, from Lestat's Montreal apartment to the double-decker tour bus to the Fang Gang's hideout.
Read or listen to an audio version of the (lengthy!) interview: https://fansplaining.com/inside-the-vampire-lestats-brilliant-production-design/
Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally
Yes actually I will not shut up about how these foods are from the Americas/cultivated by the people there, and did NOT exist in Asia, Africa or Europe before the 1490s, there was an absolute food revolution going on in the 1500s. Whatever you think is traditional food for your country? Check again, you’ve maybe only been using that ingredient for maybe 500 years. Here is the full list of crops, it is very interesting :))
🌎💚 We partner with planet-loving companies to reduce and eliminate plastic, one product at a time!
Real change can happen when we work together to protect the ocean from plastic pollution. We’ve partnered up to cut plastic out of the products you love. Out of our systems, out of our stores!
☕ Captain + Stoker: We ditched plastic bags and labels in favor of fully reusable and recyclable steel coffee cans, now available for purchase in the Aquarium Store.
👕 Liberty Graphics: we brought back our vintage otter tee with plastic-free packaging, raising funds for our important conservation programs along the way. (Shirts are still available as a gift with donation!)
🍺 Alvarado Street Brewery and Fruition Brewing: We worked together to create signature beers inspired by the ocean, with original artwork printed directly on the can to skip plastic shrink labels entirely.
Small packaging changes can create a big ocean impact. We can make a world without plastic that’s healthier for people and our ocean planet.
A few weeks ago one of my historical pet peeves was activated when I heard about a new Robin Hood movie that takes the groundbreaking, unprecedented, bold and visionary step of suggesting that the Middle Ages were a time of brutality, cynicism, and lawlessness.
Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless.
Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.
We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"
To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.
About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.
The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.
You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M.
"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."
Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.
It wasn't a perfect time, but it was far from the callous brutality depicted on our movie screens.
the whole "insulting someone based on their appearance is bad because it could indirectly hurt people you like who share that feature" is a good start for unlearning body shaming but i do think we need to go further and remind people that even if there was some physical trait that was magically 10000% exclusive to conservatives and creeps and nobody else ever had it, we still shouldnt be insulting them based on that. because the problem with them is not their appearance its their ideology and actions. by insulting their appearance you arent just indirectly insulting others who look like that, youre literally not making the correct point. stay on topic ya know.
