Okay now that gets interesting and I would want to actually ask a rabbi whether that would be a thing. like, if one must consume the blood of living things to survive, does it make a difference whether one limits it to the blood of kosher animals or not. I could see it being ruled either way. (I would think if there is only one type of blood one can metabolize or if only one type of blood is available, one can consume it regardless.)
I remember learning that human blood (not sure about animal blood) is permissible to consume if it has not been “poresh” (”separated”) from the body (in the context of “if you cut your lip or your finger and immediately and instinctively put it in your mouth, you don’t have to spit out the blood”).
So
Drinking blood out of a goblet or vacuum-sealed bag would be assur, but sinking your teeth into someone and drinking directly (so that the blood never touches the air or is in a vessel) would be okay.
Okay, so I asked my rabbi about this (… yes, my actual rabbi). Short answer, @fenrisesque, is that the ideal situation is for the vampire to intravenously ingest blood that was donated by a human in order to stay alive, assuming that donation doesn’t kill the person. If homemade intravenously doesn’t work, then storebought oral ingestion is fine too. This applies whether or not the vampire can drink animal blood. Long answer, which I find fascinating but is long so under a cut:
#the fact that 'can prove access to an online account at least 12 years old' or even 'account to be verified is itself fully 18 years old'#AREN'T accepted methods of age verification is such a telling sign of what the real purpose of age-gating laws is:#data harvesting and deanonymization and the buildout of state-controllable ways to restrict both content and internet access itself en masse (via @shinelikethunder )
Despite all their issues, I do want to say that the UK government does actually take antisemitism seriously. I will admit that it helps that our prime minister has a Jewish wife and their kids were raised Jewish so he has a unique perspective on the situation, but genuinely I do think Kier Starmer is trying to help.
The problem is, money for security and more policing can only go so far. The government can try to fight antisemitism but without British society admitting it has a racism problem, it's very hard to make meaningful change. The government aren't the ones picking up knives and stabbing us, setting our synagogues on fire, or trying to run us over and in a way, they're caught in the same catch 22 that we are.
If we Jews say we feel (and are) unsafe, we are accused of playing the victim.
If we are killed, it's a false flag.
If we advocate for antisemetism training, we are brainwashing people.
If the government points to publicly available statistics showing Jews are more likely to be attacked than any other minority, they're giving into their Zionist overlords.
If the government raises the issue of antisemitism at all, they're on the pay roll of Bibi.
The cults of the far left and far right have indoctrinated their people to blame us for everything to avoid facing their own deep, toxic failings.
There's an election this week in the UK and the far right and left populist parties are about to do very well because people are so blinded by their own hate and desire for instant gratification and vengeance that they can't even see that they're signing their own futures along with the futures of those who live around them over to ideological zealots with no intention of trying to benefit society.
my yidden transmascs, listen to me. the unrest in your body is a prayer of protection from your grandfather’s grandfather’s father.
the furrow in you brow as you linger in the hall, uncertain of which side of the mechitza is yours, is a mirror of your forefather’s, his fingers worrying his patchy beard and fretting at his too-long sleeves.
your voice cracking in musaf is evidence of things not yet to be, destinies not yet written. yet, there is time still, for you are written here.
the way your nose is tugged down by your lips when you laugh is how we tenderly remove the sheets from our mirrors after shiva concludes. the dead are not gone, never gone, but they will not scorn you as you seek to look upon yourself.
the animal of your body paces in anticipation, for fear of the next blow. may you trust it better than anyone before you, may it receive you kindly as it grows taut and wild, and as familiar as if it were your first meeting.
what kind of man will you be, all told? a knightly lion? a giant killer like david, an angel tussler like yaakov? will you be like yosef, will you be envied for your gentleness and scorned for your clear-sight? you will wear the armor of a general, or a coat of fine colors, or the pure garb of a kohen.
when a zadie chases you down and asks you to make a minyan, go. when a bubbe chases you out of the kitchen to go sit with the fathers and cousins and uncles, you may go. or, you may stay, to help her make stock and knead challah.
do not deform your proud back so they may not have to look at you, and be unnerved. don’t forget your kippah before you go, and and do kiss the mezuzah as you pass through the door.
“I will have an undergraduate class, let’s say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: “I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.” … I say to them: “Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?” Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position-since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak… From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework- “I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident” - that is the much more pernicious position.”
As someone who has overcome substance abuse, I find this decade’s framing of addiction incredibly insulting.
Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”
Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.
When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.
There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.
What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.
This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.
There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.
Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.
When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.
We deserve better language. We deserve distinctions. We deserve a culture that can tell the difference between compulsion and preference, between harm and habit, between numbing out and nourishing ourselves. Not everything that holds our attention is a disorder. Not everything pleasurable is a vice. And not everything repetitive is an addiction.
"Steve left Bucky but Bucky would never have left Steve"
STEVE WOULDNT HAVE LEFT HIM EITHER THEY WERENT EVEN DOOMED BY THE NARRATIVE THEY WERE DOOMED BY MARVEL EXECS WHO COULDNT HANDLE PEOPLE CALLING CAPTAIN AMERICA GAY. DONT TRY TO ACT LIKE CIVIL WAR AND ENDGAME STEVE WERE THE SAME GUY WE WERE LIED TO.
i talk about transitioning and all anyone ever says is "I hope you don't regret it" what if instead we said I hope you love it. I hope it's everything you ever wanted. I hope you live the rest of your life in utter bliss. etc etc.
I hope you transition and I hope it's the best thing you ever did and I hope you never look back and I hope you finally feel comfortable in your own skin
having two chapters written of a fanfic and the feeling of being so torn between just posting it NOW and writing while posting or finishing the whole thing and THEN uploading while beta’ing
*having spent all day manhandling logs around on a frosty mountainside in the freezing bloody cold until my legs went all wobbly and I could taste iron in my spit*
Picture Bucky Barnes, surviving the fall from the train, not losing his arm, but breaking every single bone in it, clambering out of the icy river, snapping off a treebranch to make an impromptu splint along with his belt, and staggering up the mountainside to try and get back to the Howlies camp before they leave without him.
(But by the time he gets there he finds that the friendly American soldiers waiting, who bundle him into a plane, are... not actually friendly. The SSR is already rotten, they just didn't know. And so maybe he's flown to London, right behind the Howlies, and put into a cell in the War Rooms, which Steve walks past regularly, and he only loses the arm because the doctor they bring in to look at him is... recent capture Arnim Zola, who decides it's too far gone and should just be cut off.)
And now picture Bucky telling Steve this several decades later.
inspired by this post, here are some headcanons and meta about Steve & Bucky and queerness pre-war.
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Sarah Rogers:
This idea of Sarah's awareness/acceptance of queerness, doesn't necessarily have to be a function of her living in NYC.
If we go with the idea that Steve's parents were Irish immigrants, and Steve was born in 1918... Well that gives Sarah time to have been living in Ireland during the Easter Uprising.
Steve Rogers's mother is obviously going to be involved with that, probably a member of the Irish womens' paramilitary group Cumann na mBan. (Would've also brought her into contact with Suffragists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists to pass that onto Steve, if she wasn't into all that already.)
And y'know who else were involved? A fucktonne of lesbians, that's who (including more than one female doctor and even one butch sniper!)
(My personal headcanon is that she was a nurse on the front lines in 1916, and actually left Ireland because she was in danger of getting arrested if she stayed. She met post-WWI-injury naturalised-American Joseph, either in 1916 while he was visiting Ireland (his home country) and they fought together, or in NYC, after he had been invalided home in 1917, then they married and had Steve in 1918.)
So if Sarah was a part of the Easter Uprising, she could've come into contact with/been accepting of lesbians, at least, long before she set foot in NYC.
You could so easily have her attitude as being like 'ah so there are men like that too, are there??'
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Gay-Community Steve:
It is hard for me to reconcile 'bloody-mindedly honest, terrible liar' Steve with being gay and knowing he's gay, and not being open about it, in a self-destructive-for-the-period way.
So either he was so deeply in the closet that he himself didn't know yet, and so hadn't been a part of a gay community with gay friends because he literally didn't know to look for one.
(Like, he and Bucky are a couple and sleeping together for years, but Steve is so naive or in denial he thinks it's just a thing all bachelors do in the absence of a girl they're going to marry.)
OR...
CATFA's view is the propagandised version of events, and Steve actually did know he was gay, and was out to his friends, and the real reason Captain America kept getting rejected for active service is not because of his disabilities but because... he kept admitting to being gay?
And it was only after he got serum (and got in the news), that his public records were expunged to cover up the fact that their darling supersoldier (good and pure and Therefore straight! or perhaps asexual!) ...had broken the law; both by being gay and by falsifying his enlistment forms multiple times.
(Kind of like how how celebrities get a suspect 4F or dodge the draft, and their PR team makes up a more-palatable lie to feed to the public. Like how Frank Sinatra got rejected for active service on psychiatric grounds, but pretended it was because of an inner-ear problem.)
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So, if Steve did have rainbow connections, where are they?
Possible reasons (beyond hate crimes, imprisonment or institutionalisation), why it looks like Steve only has the one friend:
Steve could also have had friends in the disabled community and lost them to illness?
Lost friends to the Depression/poverty, or had to move away from NYC for economic reasons?
Lost friends to internment (it wasn't just Japanese-Americans!), deportation, or lavender marriages (felt their new concentration on children and straight-passing made them strangers?)
had friends who were not enlisted, but we didn't see them because when we first meet Steve it's the middle of the day and they were all busy working?
had queer friends but: they were all enlisted by the time CATFA rolls around, and/or already died in the Spanish Civil War?
had queer friends but: they were all in the Navy and kept getting in fights with Steve about the Army being superior.
had queer friends but: they were introduced to Steve by Bucky, and 9/10 were actually friendzoned guys harbouring secret hopes and weren't exactly ecstatic to find out that Bucky was taken -- or, even worse, didn't see Steve as competition at all! -- and therefore never formed a good relationship with Steve.
('Jeez Steve why can't you n' these guys ever seem to get along? He was always so nice to me!' 'I know Buck, it's a mystery.' 😏)
had queer friends but: every time he went to a gay bar the men he could've befriended avoided him to hit on Bucky, or avoided him because he was hitting on Bucky, or avoided him because Bucky was hitting on him (and giving them the stink eye), or both of them were avoided because they were too... distracted to pay attention to anyone else.
(And/or the lesbians that talked to Steve all sidled up thinking he was a beautiful butch woman, then panicked once he opened his mouth, or were only there to ask if that friend of his was 'the double-date guy.')
imagine cops running Steve down outside a gay bar to arrest him for being a woman wearing pants… (Bucky would not let him hear the end of it.) And then being like 'oh! uhh sorry sir…' (two second pause before they suddenly clock that Steve and Bucky are a gay couple) 'Wait a second-' (Steve and Bucky already running.)
Maybe Steve would even become reluctant to go to the clubs, out of a fear of losing Bucky to someone else? Or Bucky reluctant to go for the same reason, and because Steve just attracts bad luck? (See: mob-related stuff below.) Both of them just sick of having run-ins with the cops?
had queer friends but: his views were so ahead of his time that even they found him too much.
(IE. barred from the gay bath house for protesting ableist body standards, the lack of POC, fighting the police too hard during a raid, and/or criticising the mob owners... Maybe Steve eventually couldn't go to any gay club, because he was in shit with the mob? Maybe the police actually thought he was straight, because they'd seen his photo up behind the bar as a persona non grata in gay clubs?! Future idiots will say this is 'proof' he stands for 'Traditional American Values.')
Banned from politics club for criticising Stalin's regime; barred from the jazz club for fighting a white dude there; banned from the radical womens group for bringing a trans friend; banned from the trade union for attacking the mob / wanting to fix union and police corruption. (Has he been excommunicated yet? It's probably only a matter of time.)
Picture hapless social-secretary Bucky helping Steve limp home from yet another Club that Bucky got him into, and having to listen to Steve rant about why 'they're all a bunch of hypocrites, Buck!' Perhaps homebody introvert Steve, secretly wanting to stay in, while extrovert Bucky keeps trying to help him get out more, and every time Bucky thinks he's found Steve the perfect place this time, Steve's all like 'we'll see.'
had queer friends but: he was so open about it that he was alienated by potential friends who wanted to remain on the DL and considered him dangerous.
(Perhaps especially so, if they were / or about to be enlisted and didn't want to risk a blue discharge, and couldn't sanction the way Stevee blatantly proclaimed his orientation at recruitment stations? 🤔 Whereas Bucky was so invested, and had cultivated such a lady killer rep, that he can not-worry about being seen with Steve.)
Or: he was on the DL and was alienated by potential friends who weren't, and looked down on him for passing?
Or: he was estranged from gay friends who did the same thing he did (ie. declared their orientation during recruitment) but because they actually wanted to dodge the draft, etc.
Also consider: gay Steve and gay Bucky, both aware of their sexuality but not out to each other yet... independently going to any of the numerous gay hot spots in Brooklyn, seeing each other there, and fleeing in horror before they can make any friends, thinking 'omg why was he there? did he follow me?? does he know?!' And not figuring it out... because they are just genuinely that dumb.
Likewise, both of them in the pre-out phase, thinking 'well I can't risk having gay friends because they'd have to be a part of my life and then Bucky/Steve will find out!!' ...because they are just genuinely that dumb.
There are actually loads of options!
You could definitely do a have-your-cake-and-eat-it version of events where Steve has been part of a wider queer community, made friends, and yet still wound up having only one who stood by him. (There has to be reason why 'even when I had nothing, I had Bucky' would be true).
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Other Possibilities:
Steve and Bucky double-dating beards / playing mirkin to lesbian couples? = Hell yes.
(Sidenote: I also headcanon Bucky as having a gay sister, so maybe she could've been Steve's plus one, or they'd take out all Bucky's sisters to act as chaperones?)
Shit, why not turn it into a business? Bucky the Escort who gives his lesbian client a cover date, a great night of dancing, and a second cover-escort guaranteed to not steal her girl!
(Service comes complete with beautiful handwritten love letters (dictated by Bucky, penned by artist!Steve), a personalised sweetheart-style photo of Bucky, and a messy Public Break Up Scene on her stoop.😉)
RE: them moving in together: everyone talks about how queer Brooklyn was, but what if the boys went above and beyond for their own safety -- February House style -- and lived in a building exclusively populated by queer people? Maybe by queer members of the forces, or people who occupied humble positions in creative industries?
If Steve has lesbian friends from BK, and lesbian friends in the chorus line... why not both at the same time? Why not have some of those lesbian friends be Brooklyn girls who signed up to be chorus girls because- y'know -chorus girls, and were then like 'Steve?! Wtf are you doing here?!'
(Why not kill three birds with one stone: one of those chorus girls is Bucky's sister? Cue Spidermenpointing_meme and mutual assured blackmail -- she promises not to tell Bucky what Steve did if Steve promises not to tell Bucky that one of his sisters has run away from home to become a showgirl.)
Bucky as the social butterfly of the two, more likely to be out and about, especially in risky places (ie. he worked on the docks; he could actually get and keep jobs in those places), and/or the safer one, and given their later pattern of Bucky's friends becoming Steve's (ie. the Howlies)... I think Bucky would be more likely to be the one making eye-opening introductions to Steve rather than the other way around. Which could have interesting knock on effects... (see above).
Maybe he got Steve a lucrative job illustrating queer 8-pagers (maybe there's an underground queer magazine out of BK, a la The Circle, and he illustrates for that, using Bucky as a model?
Cue hilarious 'what were you doing at the Devil's Sabbath?' moments when random men come up to Bucky in the street like 'where do I know your face from??' 😱)
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Re: Extended Family
I also headcanon that Bucky had a gay Uncle Jim (maybe a tailor?) who was institutionalized for being gay, and received harrowing medical treatments like electroshock therapy that eventually resulted in his death.
So by the time Bucky -- named after his dead uncle -- started showing signs of being bi, Bucky's parents had already had their eyes opened. Or maybe, like Sarah, they had already emigrated from a specific open-minded situation, so queer Brooklyn wasn't such a revelation.
Alternatively: In Stucky fic, people often seem to think as far as 'Brooklyn was queer!' but no farther.
But why not? Why does their queer education have to have started in queer Brooklyn?
Why not have Bucky's or Steve's (or both!) parents be engaged in Lavender Marriages, and open about it? One gay parent, or both?
(This might be another reason why Steve appears to not have friends outside Bucky; he might have got all the queer community he needed from his own family unit. Imagine it! Not just connected to Brooklyn queers but Edwardian queers, darling! The Herstory!!)
What if Steve's mother wasn't single but simply... 'never married?' 👀 Or maybe she was straight, but in love with her late lavender husband?
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And during/after the war:
Re: the Howlies.
(Have brought this ficbunny up elsewhere)
The Howlies knew and were fine about it, because... maybe there was an official investigation during the war to establish whether or not any of the Howlies were gay and/or in a relationship with Steve.
So, being a bunch of professional mischief-makers, and acting completely independently, the Howlies all pulled an 'I am Spartacus!' and claimed to be gay and in a relationship with Steve, under interrogation.
Steve also admitted to being gay, because he is terrible at lying and had to stand by them when he was told all his men admitted they were gay.
(Except for Bucky. He kept his head during interrogation -- sadly, not his first rodeo.)
So Bucky went down in hastily-redacted Army Record as somehow the only straight Howling Commando??
(The interrogators couldn't tell if they were being made fun of or not, and in any case the scandal was considered absolutely monstrous and a terrible blow for morale, so it was immediately covered up and no further steps were taken.)
Ironically enough, Steve & Bucky weren't even the only queer Howlies!
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The Future:
Seeing gay marriage legalised, the Stonewall riots, openly queer films and celebrities and tv shows, queer pride parades etc. etc. would be heart-breaking for Steve... because of course by this point he has become Captain America, deluded women he barely knows have spent decades claiming to have been his true love, and the people that did know him have been loyally covering up for him claiming he's straight. He'd feel like a hypocrite for not being what they said; or like he's letting them down by unmasking all their hard work.
And of course his real beloved isn't here any more, when he's finding all this out he's totally alone, no one to share it with, (doesn't know if any of his other friends are still alive, yet). And he doesn't want to have to relive that pain over Bucky by being interrogated on his love life...
Plus, after a century of being mythologised, he associates coming out with even wider public furore and a violation of the privacy that Steve Rogers never gets to have.
So all he has is the private escape of the 20th century's queer cinema, literature, tv shows, and porn (which all feel like an embarrassment of riches) ...but without being out to anyone - he feels he has to keep it a secret.
Until Bucky comes back, and isn't in a prudent enough mental state to realise all this. So for him, finding all this out about queer rights etc. is an untrammelled joy, and that's what finally gets Steve out of his negative headspace and into the light.
(And then, yeah, out and married. Try to stop Bucky getting his citizenship back when he's literally married to Captain America, assholes! Nowadays, the only women that hit on Steve are lunatics who think they can turn him, and Steve's only other problem is all the gay men who either want in on that threesome or think they can steal him away from Bucky!)
Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help
“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.
“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.
“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.
Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”
Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.
You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19
I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.
So I am not an emergency worker, and I need that to be clear because my sample size is small. I do work at a very large anime convention, so I've been around a few emergencies. Not many. But enough to notice a pattern:
The problem is not bystander apathy (which is not a thing), but bystander confusion. There's this moment where everyone is sort of processing "fuck, that just happened, now what" and loses the ability to think logically about next steps. As soon as one person steps in and says "you there! Do this next step!" the confusion breaks and people begin to react to fix the situation. Literally all it takes is somebody basically going "yep, we all saw that, now let's move."
While the murder of Kitty Genovese was a bullshit homophobic coverup, if you're in an emergency situation where someone needs medical assistance and there's more than one person, you can help a lot by loudly but calmly saying "Does anyone know first aid?," giving a chance for someone to respond, and then singling someone out by something identifiable--"hey, you in the red shirt and Steelers hat"--and telling them to call 911 or your country's equivalent. Even if nobody there knows first aid, as soon as someone sounds like they know what they're doing people will start trying to help.
Also a few things for you to know that I learned many, many years ago as part of my Red Cross first aid training and haven't forgotten:
1) stay calm and encourage the injured person to stay calm.
2) for a stroke, ask the person to raise both arms at the same time, and to smile. If you observe unevenness in either motion, call emergency services IMMEDIATELY. Seconds count.
3) the "cough to stop a heart attack" thing is a myth. Call emergency services immediately and have the person sit down.
4) contrary to what Sherlock would have you believe, you should actually remove belts, suspenders/braces, and tight clothing from an injured person. Yes, if the injured person has breasts this may mean unhooking their bra. Now is not the time for modesty.
5) never, never give a severely injured person water unless instructed to do so by emergency services (spoiler alert: they're basically never going to tell you to do that). It can cause vomiting, and then you have more problems.
6) never move a severely injured person or someone who's hit their head even if they "seem fine." Your kind intention may kill. Wait for emergency services and keep the person calm.
7) never try to restrain a person having a seizure.
8) only move a person having a seizure if they're in immediate, imminent danger (for example, falling right next to a campfire they may seize into). Banging an arm into a chair leg is not imminent danger.
9) "swallowing your tongue" is a myth. Never put anything in a seizing person's mouth.
(Can you tell I had a classmate with epilepsy?)
10) bleeding injuries should be raised above the heart.
And finally,
11) I'd also encourage all of you to get your Red Cross or some equivalent certification. I actually used mine for the first time about six months after I got it, and it did in fact save a life. (And you will notice I said "for the first time." Most of those incidents weren't nearly so dramatic--99% of the time it's been me saying "you there, call 911" and rolling somebody into the recovery position--but every single time I've been damned glad to have it.)
