KactusNZ

She/her, adult. No coherent theme, I just reblog stuff I like. Almost everything is queued so I might forget what I said in tags by the time you see it.

[dduane]

In the Perfect Innate Understanding of Internet Book Marketing dep’t…

“Please buy and review my hot guy rescues cat book so I can write more about this ridiculous himbo paladin.”

I mean, FOR GOD'S SAKE. :)

(His link: mybook.to/SK1SpiritBlade)

[newlevant]

The School Library Journal complimented the historical likenesses in Queer and How We Got Here—one of my favorite things to draw!

Here's a sampling:

...and many more!

Buy my book! Come see me on tour! xoxoo

[scrixels]

a snowy owlbear!

[nonexistent-triangle]

the irredeemable pervert is generally well regarded among their friends for their insightful thoughts and all around pleasant demeanour

[writing-prompts-for-palestine]

#654

A wealthy, single regency era woman uses her money and education to build the perfect husband.

—

Today’s campaign:

Bessan's Family, from Gaza Funds.

$9,873/$20,000 [50%]

Donate to Urgent Help to Evacuate My Sister and Her Family, organized by Bessan Khalaf

My name is Bessan; I'm a Canadian citizen who lives in Ontario. I've cr… Bessan Khalaf needs your support for Urgent Help to Evacuate My Sis

[introvertedx10]

[maxyvert]

Mermay 2026 begins NOW!

This year I'm trying to use a limited color palette again, we'll see how it goes :) I also got a new sketchbook and pen nibs, I'm a bit rusty with traditional art sadly, but it was easy to line them at least!

[rabbitkinglune777]

we bleed the same - we live the same

[rabbitkinglune777]

my last self reblog for this: I know ppl want furry tiddy art or whatever but I'm black and I wear that proudly while also wanting to depict my vulnerability when it comes to it. it's something I wanna do along with my general queer furry art

[baglieg]

My video game about playing video games on a haunted computer is (very slowly) coming together

it has an actual 3D model of the computer now, and ascii art animation

[teaboot]

DMV? I thought you were Canadian 🤔

I mean I could have said "I was in line at ICBC" but honestly as I was typing I was like "DMV is a universal concept, yes? That is the broad term for a location with this purpose?" And didn't even consider the possibility that this was yet another case of USAmerican cultural spillover until right just now, when this specific message made my ass look up "does Canada have DMVs?"

[invinciblerodent]

[invinciblerodent]

you guys are so right, I should have added the best part

[askrobouteguilliman40k]

This meme ages like a fine wine every year that passes.

[orphanedsource]

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

[fipindustries]

you ever tried to help a teenager study for something or help with homework, and you try to explain the concepts to them and you can tell they are not paying attention but they are still nodding along and saying "yeah yeah, i get it" and you ask them to repeat what you just explained and they stop and try to do a half hearted effort to regurgate the one or two words they remember but eventually they have to admit that no they dont remember anything and they werent paying attention. and you are like "why did you tell me you understood when you didnt then?" like you can tell their priority here is not to learn but to get your aproval. they just want you out of their hair. you were explaining it and they were not getting it and they didnt stop you, they wanted you to believe they understood so you would leave them alone.

i understand this. i sympathize with this. when you are a teenager school can feel and in fact can be a waste of time where you are cramming useless information to please the education system and it has no bearing on your life, your interests or your priorities as a teen.

what ive seen in my job is that a lot of actual adults have this exact same attitude when their doctor is explaining to them their medical conditions and their treatment

[elisabethdeep-blog]

Also it can feel like you understand something even when you don't. Recognition is about the lowest level of uhhh cognition appraisal. Hearing or reading and something and going yea I know these words I'm following. But your brain is just registering familiarity and it may not even be correct. (Martial arts are very different from marital arts, which confused me about machop for a while).

The cognitive load of having to look like you're listening and being respectful and not looking stupid can leave little processing power for actual comprehension. Teens and adults can very easily not recognise their own confusion until they have a moment to think- in the case of a dr appointment, often not till after the appointment is already over. Too late.

In education we use strategies to ameliorate this problem. A bit of information at a time. Multiple modalities. Work pauses into the interaction- crucially, pauses where your student isn't having to perform under your attention. Look away. Faff with some paperwork. Give em 30 seconds of think time without the pressure of your gaze.

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred. And you can't build it for them. And it takes a minute.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

wait, Derin how did your leaving make the hospital shut down?

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

It's not like some nanny who doesn't even work for the hospital could go out of town for a weekend for the first time in three years, and get the only public pediatrics ward in the area shut down for a week.

[abundantchewtoys]

[alex51324]

This saga does also illustrate something I learned about in library school, which is: when management starts reducing your staffing (or other resources) to the point that it jeopardizes your ability to function, make visible cuts.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?

It can feel like sort of a dick move--to your immediate boss, your coworkers, your patrons/customers/clients/patients/whoever--to say no when it isn't technically absolutely impossible to say yes. But the doctor and the nanny in this story were both right to stick to their guns about this one well-planned and anticipated day off, and the rest was just a cascade of failure that ultimately stems from the decision to intentionally understaff the hospital, and to ignore warning signs of an impending staffing crisis.

[ignescent]

And remember, "we can't find people to hire" almost always means "we're not offering a high enough paycheck".

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#as someone also in Australian healthcare#yep#they nearly fucked my states entire ambulance service a few years ago#the government and the major telcos decided to turn off 3G which in the rural area I grew up in was sometimes the only reliable signal#like at all#and the ambulance service had to Libby the government to push it back because every defibrillator had a fucking button Nokia#that Nokia would transfer every ECG (the thing that tells paramedics if you’re having a heart attack) to the doctors who could advice us#it literally determined the protocols paramedics used#every ambulance had to update every single defibrillator and phone so that we could keep people alive#but in the rural area like mine it became glaringly obvious they needed 4G coverage#it took way too long to sort it all out it was a massive deal#I still remember the paramedics I was with at the time stressing out over it all#ignorance and complacency is the highest killer because when something small and seemingly innocuous happens like 3G being turned off#or a nanny not being able to work#it shows how deeply and fundamentally our health system here in Australia is struggling

[retronator]

Clouds practice #3

I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I've been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.

This time it's painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).

[foxes-in-love]

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

You've instilled in me a fear that I could one day be scrolling and come across one of my own lecturers

It's not half so terrifying as the time someone sent me a message asking if Tumblr user X was one of my students

And I went and checked and they fucking were. Instantly blocked. On Monday I saw them and told them what had happened, and the look of fear on their face until I said "So I immediately blocked you" was indescribable. We ceremonially unblocked each other when they graduated

So that was terrifying