deep fried lesbian

damn do I like a good critter

[unbotheredmuse]

[hazystars]

you forgot the best part tho

(via @butchmuppet)

[chilewithcarnage]

no lie, the second half of this post really helped me put a different perspective on my life and greatly the decreased the anxiety i have about my life to come

[poupon]

Wow thanks for the ingot man let me just inspect the quality real quick

Dude come on

[thememedaddy]

[what-even-is-thiss]

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

[auroranibley]

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.

[stuckinapril]

headlines all about the "ceasefire talks" we have been hearing of literally since israel started unapologetically genociding palestinians. nothing about the metastatic famine in gaza, nothing about the fact that aid trucks have not entered gaza in months (last report of an aid truck successfully entering gaza dates all the way back to feb). nothing about the fact that most agencies have literally given up accurately documenting how many people have been killed. it's so fucking ghoulish. it makes me sick that i ever have to be part of a time period where this was allowed to happen

[girlnephew]

[andromeda049]

[thememedaddy]

[hbmmaster]

[notajerusalemcricket-deactivate]

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

It's a femininopticon

[grenade-maid]

Genuinely the #1 thing you can do to make sure trans people around you get gendered correctly is to just lead by example. Saying "hi this is [x] she'll be joining us today, could you show her [y]" is 100000x more effective and less scrutinizing pressure than a pronoun circle.

[voluntaryvictim]

happiest nuclear winter rerelease???

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[sirlorence-deactivated20251220]

[everydaywomble]

ninth doctor my beloved. . .

[hotvampireadjacent]

LMFAO

[spiribia]

we do need to revisit the wording of "you can't have your cake and eat it too" because i don't think it clearly enough conveys that it's more that you can't simultaneously retain a cake and also get to consume it (which would render you cakeless). for years i was like But why not....it's my cake....?

[ferrettoy]

this fucking problem is how they caught the unabomber

[m0thmancore]

hey you should uh. elaborate. for my own personal satisfaction

[ferrettoy]

the unabomber was pedantic about idiomatic phrases like "have your cake and eat it too" and rephrased it to "eat your cake and have it too" (which to be very fair makes sense). fast forward to when he starts writing manifestos. he uses the phrase word for word in his pedantic style and his brother (who has been keeping his eyes on the unabomber shit for obvious reasons) notices the phrase and is like "oh fuck that's my fucking brother no one else fucking says that" and calls in an FBI tip