[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[rootbeergoddess]

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

[thesaltofcarthage]

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

[mylordshesacactus]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[mylordshesacactus]

I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.

I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation. 

I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.

It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post. 

And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.

If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.

I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.

A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic. 

They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.

If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried. 

Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.

You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.

It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.

[thedreammweaver]

We need an alternative to doesthedogdie cause they’ve started fucking paywalling warnings that include timestamps for triggering moments.

[thedreammweaver]

Like what the fuck

[autisticharrywells]

I just checked and

Need to read about trigger warnings? Please click the whimsical dog icon for more information!

I recommend Unconsenting Media. Not as comprehensive as DoesTheDogDie, but if sexual assault is a trigger for you, it’s a good resource

[troglobite]

rbing again real quick--i and other(s?) have noted in other rbs that this is almost never done. it's for very few properties, and it's only for timestamped warnings that are done in-house, not by users.

there are still timestamps available for warnings on those same triggers for those same properties. just bc there's a paywall on something doesn't mean other comments and timestamps can't be posted or read for free on that property or that trigger.

see here:

i don't have an account and haven't paid for anything on the site, so all of those comments are what i'm seeing for free.

i had to search and search to find anything that had paywalls, and had to resort to looking at The Substance, as referenced here. i've been using the site regularly since the op posted and have never organically encountered a paywall on anything, including on very popular properties.

i don't see any reason to stop using the site--everything is still available for free. they just have added another way for some ppl to choose to pay some $ (in addition to ads), since this is a completely free service, and no website is free to maintain.

as an example, someone with the money could pay to see the timestamps, and then leave a free comment with the same timestamps for others if they wanted to.

[sarith-kzekarit]

I've seen this post on my dash a few times now and I want to boost this specific addition. I've emailed the owner of the site to get clarification on this, and I was told the motivation behind this. He wanted to start paying some people to memorize all 200+ triggers on the site, sit down and watch popular movies/shows to thoroughly analyze whenever any trigger pops up, and note down timestamps and details of them. Ads unfortunately do not cover this (they probably only cover the site's base upkeep), so the subscription service is specifically to pay these people. Community comments have never been paywalled and are still accessible.

He thanked me for my feedback when I expressed confusion and concern about the paywalled comments being mixed in with the free comments, and has since updated the site to make them clearly distinct, along with a preview of what the paid comments look like:

He was very transparent about it all and very kind. He also said this was his mistake and is trying to clear it up. Please continue to use DoesTheDogDie.com, it is an excellent resource and there is nothing else like it!

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[only-embers-remain]

another little thing of antiblack racism hurting whitefolk. none of us are free till all of us are free.

[thekidsfromyestergay]

This was on a post about how it's ignorant and privileged to wear headphones in public and I fear its already become a part of my vocabulary. Must everything harbor a moral failure.

[only-embers-remain]

also some of us don't have a choice. i can't go outside without headphones in, it is too noisy out there and triggers my sensory processing disorder. So it's headphones or having panic attacks.

[pjharvey-moved-deactivated20250]

making fun of americans is pretty much always ok if youre not doing it in an edgelord “you guys have so many school shootings” way or acting like we’re the only country that has racism. but like posts about americans and hamburger get me every time

[empress-hancock]

This is just objectively hilarious

[prokopetz]

While it is generally agreed that the folkloric figures of "Link" and "Princess Zelda" are based on real historical individuals, neither those individuals nor their respective myth-cycles were contemporary, being separated in time by nearly two hundred years, with each initially being the protagonist of their own body of tales.

When the two myth-cycles were fused by later chroniclers to produce the combined Link-Zelda cycle which is familiar to audiences today, the figure of Link assumed the role of overall protagonist. Securing Zelda's freedom from captivity is often inserted as a secondary objective into episodes which were originally Link tales, while Link typically subsumes most or all of Zelda's role in episodes which were originally Zelda tales.

In many cases, the Link-Zelda version is the only iteration of a given episode which survives, so determining which tales were originally part of which precursor cycle is not without controversy; however, the repetitive nature of the perils which preclude Zelda's active participation in many episodes – kidnapped, possessed, sealed in enchanted crystal, etc. – may offer some clues.

(The Gamelon saga represents the the largest known body of Zelda tales which are believed to have persisted in more or less their original form. Linguistic analysis suggests that the episode in which Link is revealed to have been trapped in a heretofore-unmentioned magic mirror the entire time is a clumsy interpolation by a later author, inserted to justify the saga's inclusion in the broader Link-Zelda cycle.)

[firefly-factory]

[tobiasdrake]

The very first Legend of Zelda was itself a Zelda legend, hence its title. It was also one of the first to be adapted to the contemporary Link-Zelda structure of the myths. The introduction of Link into this myth was shoddy and introduced a number of inconsistencies.

For example, it's said that Link is a wanderer from afar who rescues Impa from Moblins but when he arrives in Hyrule, he has to take the place of the unarmed and inexperienced Princess Zelda. And so this allegedly experienced warrior who just killed a bunch of Moblins arrives in Hyrule without so much as a sword in hand.

Similarly, the original myth featured Zelda assembling the Triforce of Wisdom, the only force that could stand against the Triforce of Power in Ganon's possession. Because it was the first to be adapted, there were concerns about disempowering Zelda by replacing her entirely with Link. As a result, a strange compromise was struck; One in which Zelda, after assembling the Triforce, then immediately broke it back down into its component pieces and re-hid them for Link to find.

By contrast, The Adventure of Link, true to its name, is the first Link legend. The importing of Zelda into it as the sleeping princess that Link awakens from her long slumber proved to be just as clunky as the importing of Link into The Legend of Zelda. Most notably, the confusing questions raised as to whether Zelda is meant to be the princess Link rescued in his previous adventure or the one he is rescuing in this new one.

Similarly, Zelda's nemesis Ganon is roped into Adventure of Link very awkwardly. Link's nemesis is his own dark shadow, with only a scant few mentions of the idea that Link's defeat will somehow result in Ganon returning... just because.

But the largest and most consequential of adaptations made to The Adventure of Link is the revising of the magic scepter Link uses to awaken the Sleeping Princess into the Triforce of Courage, a modern invention meant to tie Link more closely to Zelda and Ganon's mythos.

And this is where the study of the legends' history becomes rocky, as many scholars consider the very notion that the Triforce of Courage did not exist in the original tales to be downright apocryphal.

[daja-the-hypnokitten]

We also can see the shoehorning of Zelda into Link's Oracle Saga, where instead of having 2 unrelated adventures, Ganon's minions form a superficial bridge between the two stories to introduce peril to Zelda - Zelda's presence or lack thereof has no significant impact on either story

And there are some distinct quirks to the Gamelon cycle that argue for the presence of syncretic merging of the Zelda in the tales we know with a similar legend from another culture. As does the difference between the Triforce of Wisdom, her sometimes status as a Sage, and the Sacred Power/Light Force/etc power that has different names in different legends.

But it's an interesting pairing of a Celestial legend (Zelda) with a Cthonic one (Link) - after all, how many of the stories that clearly are originally Link tales involve another world? I submit as evidence the presence of stories such as Link to the Past and Majora's Mask; even in the Era of Twlight cycle, we see a previous version of Link resurrected as a shade.

On the flip side, the Era of the Sky gives us Zelda as explicitly, canonically a reincarnation of the Goddess Hylia; whether this was part of the original mythos, or an evolution of why she has the Sacred Power of light in her bloodline is unclear to me. But Skyward Sword was clearly, originally, a Zelda story - after all, Link spends the entire tale chasing after Zelda.

[karaloza]

Skyward Sword cannot possibly have been a Zelda tale, because it clearly follows the ur-pattern of the Legend of Link, wherein Link meets three challenges (usually associated with the colors green, red, and blue) and is rewarded with his principal sword, with which he is then able to meet some number of additional challenges before defeating his foe.* However, it is highly likely that in the original iteration, it was Hylia and not Zelda whom Link sought. Skyward Sword has many hallmarks of being a later expression of the Link cycle, including themes of enlightenment and spiritual transcendence that are very different from the simple physical violence of the earlier expressions. Link's quest for Hylia is a quest for the essence of divinity itself.

Current research seems to indicate that the oldest extant version of the Link tale is the one labeled Wind Waker, which clearly dates to the Hylians' Seafaring/Exploration period, before they settled in the land which they named Hyrule (the legend-within-a-legend wherein Hyrule is sunk under the sea can be attributed to a later admixture of elements from other versions of the Link cycle, or other mythologies entirely). There is of course a Zelda figure in Wind Waker, but for the first half of the tale she is identified as Tetra, a very different character indeed! There is speculation that most of the "Zeldas" in confirmed Link stories were actually Tetra, his original female companion, before she was overwritten as Zelda when the two mythologies were merged.

* Linguistic scholars believe "Ganon" to derive from the Hylian root dialect word gann, which simply translates as "enemy" or "opposition." There is no reason to suppose that every instance of "Ganon" or "Ganondorf" in the tales refers to the same entity!

[prokopetz]

While identifying Tetra with Zelda is of course the product of later revision, the revelation that Tetra is herself a princess may not be.

As previously noted, descent into a mystical Underworld – often, but not always, explicitly identified with the realm of the dead – is a common element of Link tales. This descent is frequently paired with an encounter and subsequent rivalry or alliance (often one, then the other) with that realm's queen. In particular, the motif of Link forming an early alliance with a mysterious young woman who later proves to be the Underworld realm's queen-in-exile is not found only here; consider, for example, the (admittedly divisive) Twilight saga. Indeed, if we accept the identification of the Skyward saga's desolate surface realm with such an Underworld, the revelation of Link's childhood sweetheart as a mortal incarnation of the goddess Hylia arguably fits this mould!

(Of course, as the earliest versions of the Wind Waker saga are presently lost, any conclusions regarding exactly how this trope was introduced to the tale are unavoidably speculative. In the absence of further discoveries, whether Tetra was originally simply a young pirate lord who acquired her Underworld-queen attributes in the process of being fused with Zelda, or whether she was already queen-in-exile of a very different Underworld which was later replaced with a fallen Hyrule to justify her identification with Zelda must remain an open question.)

[leebrontide]

Ok the US Attorney General says that she will remove ICE if MN drops all our sanctuary laws, complies with ICE, hands over all our SNAP, Medicaid and voter rolls. They demand control over our voter registration so they can "ensure free and fair elections".

They want to control our elections.

I am dead serious people call your representatives. Get volunteering. Get protesting. Get LOUD.

They released a letter full of straight up lies. Spread the truth. MAKE NOISE.

Source

[rederiswrites]

How interesting. How very interesting. They rejected my Blaze of this post.

Well, y'all. Make of this what you will, eh?

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

Then I guess we'll just have to Blaze it the old fashioned way, eh?

[megpie71]

Boosting signal. AGAIN.

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

nuclear power is impressive until you get up to why. "we use the most precisely engineered machinery ever created to split atoms to release energy" oh yeah how come? "boil water to turn a fan" get the fuck out

[darinaethelaianprophet]

The power of atom turns out to be, yet again, the power of steam

[kendoola]

[only-embers-remain]

okay so as funny as the messages afterwards are, the one isn't true, Wind, hydroelectric, and solar all make electricity and don't use steam/boiling.

[titleknown]

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

[hopesterling]

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

[withasmoothroundstone]

This explains a lot.  And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce.  Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.  

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that.  Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid.  Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given.  It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

[lizardtitties]

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/

[thebibliosphere]

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

Eat the rich. Resist.

[dyannehs]

When I was travelling in Germany once, I seriously hurt my ankle. In a few hours, it had swollen to twice its size, and I went to a little ER in a tiny town. I spoke no German and only one nurse spoke English. They ran an X-ray and an MRI to determine what had happened (turned out I had bruised my peroneus brevis muscle and pulled the tendon), gave me a ton of very regulated meds for the pain and swelling, including some supports so I could walk…and my poor little 22-year-old ass was sat there, knowing all of this would cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, back in the US. I was shaking.

I’m in the exam room, post diagnosis and with pill bottles in hand, and in walks the one nurse I’ve been able to speak to the entire time. She pats my hand and tells me (and this is verbatim—I will never forget this conversation as long as I live), “I’m so sorry. We had to run those tests, and they are expensive. You don’t have insurance so you will have to cover the full cost.”

I start crying.

She continues, softly, as if telling me someone has died, “It’s going to be three hundred.”

I start sobbing, certain I’ve misheard, certain that I would be absolutely fucked, broke and going into debt in a foreign country. “Thousand?” I clarify.

Her entire demeanor changed, and she looked at me as if I had sprouted four extra heads. “No,” she says, “euros.”

That moment radicalised me.

[queern-bn]

My family got charged several thousand dollars for a late-night trip to the ER when I was a kid after an oops at home resulted in a large cut that needed almost 40 sutures. We lived in the US at the time.

Now we live in Canada. Last year my leg got rolled over by one of the front tires on a pickup truck. I spent 3 weeks in hospital, had 3 surgeries, one of which included skin grafting to cover the half of my leg that was degloved in my accident. I had IV antibiotics 4 times a day, I had physiotherapy daily, I was on a lot of meds for pain and having complex wound dressings changed every day. After all that, I had a home care nurse visit me every 1-2 days for 6 weeks to help with my wound care. The greatest expense to us as a family for the amazing care I received was my parents and husband using the parkade next to the hospital, which was like $13 a day. If we’d lived in the US, that injury absolutely could have bankrupted us.

[cranquis]

This information needs to be part of the US med school curriculum.

[beaniebaneenie]

I remember the moment that radicalized me.

I went to the UK for graduate school, and being there for that long meant I had to buy insurance for the duration. 18 months was something like £800 (this was in the early 2010’s). I, being American, figured “oh ok, that’s the premium and if I need serious medical care, I’ll get charged deductibles and all other kinds of fees at the time of care), because that’s how it works here.

Some time in the early part of that winter, I got incredibly sick. I’m immunocompromised, so sometimes that happens. But being a broke ass grad student in a foreign country, and dealing with unrelated financial abuse from family members, I figured I couldn’t afford going to the hospital. I figured I’d go to their version of Walgreen’s (Superdrug, and yes that is really that store’s name, load up on cough drops, some OTC meds, and try to ride it out as best I could.

One of my friends in my program came over to check on me and offer help. When she got to my room and saw how sick I was, she asked why I hadn’t gone to hospital. I was near tears and said I couldn’t afford it.

This is when I suspect my friend knew she was dealing with an American who was ignorant of how socialized healthcare actually worked, and realized that I couldn’t really be reasoned with. So she said, “I’ll pay for it- let’s go.”

Off we went to hospital, my friend did the talking bc my voice was so shot. The receptionist said, “as you don’t have an appointment, you may need to wait quite a bit.” I heard that and figured 5+ hours was at least what I was in for.

23 minutes later, my name was called.

My friend went back with me, bc I was pretty out of it. The nurse leading us back apologized for the “huge wait” because having a sick patient wait “nearly half an hour just for medical care” was unacceptable. I was stunned.

The nurse and doc asked some questions, looked at the medical records I had on my phone (bc I was a foreigner with very little medical history in the country), did a few rapid tests. The whole time, I’m seeing an old-timey calculator ringing up charges and freaking out… even though my friend said she’d pay, I was so conditioned to believe this would cost a fortune.

About 30 mins later, the rapid tests confirm I have both bronchitis and pneumonia. Doc writes me a prescription for some serious heavy-duty meds. My American ass is thinking, “ok, so now I go home, wait for 4 days for the pharmacy to fill it, then go get it.” The doc tells me that there’s a pharmacy counter on the way out, and I can stop there to collect the meds before heading home.

I’m skeptical but thank him. My friend gets me to the pharmacy counter. I give my name and hand over the paper, fully expecting to be told that it’ll take days to fill. The pharmacist turns around, pulls a bag off the shelf, hands it to me. Because my meds were already filled and waiting.

Me: you had them already?

Pharmacist: of course- there’d be no point in sending you home without medication, that’s why you came here. To get medical help.

Me: that’s so fast? (I am very confused)

Pharmacist: well, we expect people to have these illnesses at a higher rate this time of year, so we do our best to stock up on our end.

Me: that’s so nice? Also, what do I owe you?

Pharm: sorry, love?

Me: what do I owe you? For the medication? And the visit. All of it, how much do I need to pay?

Chat, her whole fact changed. She realized I didn’t just sound funny because I was in respiratory distress. I had an American accent. She reached over and patted my hand.

“Love, that’s what the health insurance is meant to be for. You’ve already paid for this. We’re not taking extra money off you, we don’t do that here.”

The entire visit was less than 2 hours, absolutely free, and everyone worked to be as efficient as possible in the goal of providing comprehensive healthcare for me, the patient.

Once I got home with the meds, I did actually recover pretty well (and relatively quickly, as far as I’m concerned). I talked to the friend after, and she admitted that she knew it was going to be free, but that I wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that in the brain fog of serious illness, so she said what she had to in order to get my stubborn (and terrified of bankruptcy) ass to the doctor.

That’s what healthcare should be. A goal of providing comprehensive and compassionate care to your patients, being well-staffed enough that no one waits for hours, anticipating medication needs, ensuring that patients leave with the medical care they sought- and that they’re not afraid to seek it, because they know medical care won’t make them homeless.

[un-monstre]

Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.

[un-monstre]

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

[jimmythejiver]

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

[imagedescribed]

[ID:

A public Facebook post by The Curiosity Curator that reads as follows:

When the washing machine arrived in 1925, she sat on the kitchen floor and cried for three hours—not from joy, but from grief for the fifty years she'd lost.

Mary Richardson was 62 years old when she turned on an electric washing machine for the first time. Her daughter found her sobbing, surrounded by soap and laundry, and asked if someone had died.

Mary looked up, tears streaming down her weathered face, and whispered: "All those Mondays. All those years. It didn't have to be that hard."

For fifty years—every single Monday since she was twelve years old—Mary had done laundry by hand. Not the romantic version you see in nostalgic photographs. The brutal reality: waking at 4 AM, hauling 50 gallons of water from a frozen well, scrubbing clothes in boiling lye soap that stripped skin from her knuckles, bending over washtubs for ten hours straight until her back spasmed and her hands bled.

2,600 wash days. 26,000 hours of backbreaking labor.

Her diary entries, discovered by her great-granddaughter a century later, tell the truth history books sanitize:

"Monday again. My hands are so raw I can barely hold the pen. I watch Father reading while I scrub his shirts and think: why is his comfort worth more than my hands?"

She was only fourteen when she wrote that.

There was no "bonding" over shared labor. There was exhaustion and silent resentment. There were no songs—only groaning, water splashing, and women too tired to speak.

The washing machine had been invented in the 1850s. Electric models existed by 1900. Wealthy women in cities had them for decades. But Mary was born poor and rural, so she scrubbed on a washboard until her hands became gnarled and her back permanently bent.

That's a 25-year gap between technology existing and Mary being able to afford it. Twenty-five years of unnecessary suffering.

When the machine finally arrived, it did in fifteen minutes what had taken her two hours of brutal physical labor. She watched it fill with water automatically, agitate the clothes without anyone touching them, and she understood—truly understood for the first time—how much had been stolen from her.

She cried for three hours. Not tears of gratitude. Tears of grief.

Her daughter Alice wrote: "Mother grieved for all the Mondays she'd lost. For her ruined hands. For the life she could have had. I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? She was right. It didn't have to be that hard."

Mary lived fifteen more years. She never did laundry again—not because she was too elderly, but because her daughters understood intimately what fifty years of wash days had cost her.

At her funeral in 1940, Alice said: "My mother's hands were destroyed by laundry. Her back was broken by it. Half her life was stolen by a task that should have been mechanized decades earlier. We're told to celebrate women like her for their resilience. I think we should be angry instead. Angry that she had to be resilient at all."

The women in attendance—who'd lived their own decades of wash days—applauded. Because they knew. They all knew.

The washing machine didn't just save time. It liberated women. It gave them back their hands, their health, their Mondays, their lives.

When we romanticize "simpler times" and "family traditions," we erase the reality: women were trapped in systems of domestic labor that destroyed their bodies and stole their futures.

Mary Richardson never got to pursue education, travel, or develop talents beyond domestic skills. Because every Monday was wash day.

She was 62 when a machine did in fifteen minutes what had taken her fifty years. And she grieved for every Monday she'd lost.

Sometimes progress isn't about losing tradition. Sometimes it's about ending suffering we mistook for virtue.

Sometimes the "good old days" were only good because we've forgotten who was hurting.

And sometimes the greatest gift isn't resilience—it's liberation from ever needing it again.

/end ID]

[chrisbrecheenwritingaboutwriting]

[dndmultiverse]

Meanwhile, over in Shadowrun...

[only-embers-remain]

the funny thing is that I feel like they would be better at the job and a whole lot less likely to further contribute to climate change, something about living for centuries means you gotta keep the future in mind...and yeah, yeah i know, fire breathing think people are tasty monsters would really be an improvement at this point.

[cineemaa]

black girls in cinema

willie dynamite (1974) uptown saturday night (1974) an almost perfect affair (1979) lady sings the blues (1972) the killing of a chinese bookie (1976) le samourai (1967) mona lisa (1986) angel heart (1987) sugar hill (1974) brian's song (1971) beyond the valley of the dolls (1970) neapolitan mystery (1979) a warm december (1973) the beast must die (1974) friday foster (1975) ganja & hess (1973) love jones (1997) the watermelon woman (1996) the swinging cheerleader (1974) waiting to exhale (1995) the craft (1996) paris blues (1961) hell up in harlem (1973) black orpheus (1959) dirty gertie from harlem (1946) coming to america (1986) clueless (1995) eve's bayou (1997) b.a.p.s. (1997) lady cocoa (1975) little shop of horror (1986)

[imanisays]

Some of these movies I’ve never seen . Gotta go watch them.

[only-embers-remain]

sorry for the derailing on this one but why the fuck was this labeled "mature audience" by Tumblr? Look when i get disappointed by Tumblr I expect it is some crazy post by someone not the algorithm being blatantly racist.

[moniquill]

[shdwsilk]

Oh, THIS motherfucker. THIS motherfucker is going to accuse indigenous Americans during the colonial era of child sacrifice???? Let's talk about child sacrifice, you steaming pile of rancid shit.

Choosing to tie SNAP benefits to the government shutdown when there was explicitly a carve-out to let them continue.

Trying to ban life saving gender-affirming healthcare for trans kids.

All of the bullshit they're trying to pull about vaccines.

Gutting environmental protections.

Among other terrible things, the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP as part of that terrible and terribly named big bill.

All of the harms to children of immigrants in the contact of sadistic and overreaching ICE raids.

Not to mention all the other children getting tear gassed and terrorized in Chicago.

(and it's worth noting that all of these policies are impacting indigenous children as well as children in a range of other demographic groups. I have no doubt there are also policies and actions coming down from this admin that are also specifically targeting indigenous children in the US.)

And this is just a sample. Go to hell, and take the rest of the whole administration of child sacrificers with you. We'll all be safer without the sacrifices you're willing to make at the altars of greed, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism.

[snazzy-hats-and-adhd]

They think that fear is the same thing as respect.

[teaboot]

So much of this shit feels over and over and over again like a gigantic racist idiot with a Dunce cap on his head is standing on a stage going “eating poop is delicious and good for you” and 500,000 doctors go “NO! Here is every piece of evidence in existence definitively proving beyond reasonable doubt that we are NOT supposed to eat poop EVER” and yet there’s still a crowd full of people below the stage going “:) Yay! Poop :)” and then months later you’re at a gathering and someone asks you “hey are you eating enough poop” and you tell them “no and nobody should be doing that” and the nearest ten people go “why are you being so aggressive about this everybody is entitled to their opinion and actually government officials agree and support eating poop so maybe you should do some looking into that I’ve heard there’s studies being done on the benefits of poop” and it feels like you’re going insane

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[gingersnapsvhs]

did your parents *"pre-screen" the media you interacted with when you were a kid/before legal adult age where you are?

yes, always AND they did parental guidance talks about it

yes, always but there was no parental guidance involved

sometimes, with parental guidance talks

sometimes, no parental guidance talks

not usually, but occasionally (WITH parental guidance)

not usually, but occasionally (WITHOUT parental guidance)

they never pre-screened but there were other rules (elaborate?)

my parents fully didn't give a shit about what media i engaged with

see results

Voting ended onDec 16, 2025

*by "pre-screening", i typically mean any sort of behavior that exists on a spectrum of "actually watching/playing/reading the thing before you played it" to "doing any sort of research on it before letting you watch it".

feel free to share your experiences in the tags or replies or whatever!

[gingersnapsvhs]

admittedly, i am a little obsessed with like 65% of the tags on this post so far basically saying "my parents didn't pre-screen things but they [describes behavior that DEFINITELY qualifies as pre-screening]". i kinda hope maybe this post and others like it wake some people up to the fact that yes, even YOUR parents were controlling what perspectives and ideas you were and were not being allowed to access.

[yorickalas]

I’m a bit old (almost 60, feral gen-x latchkey kid) for this poll but with my Y2K kid, i set up a computer in their room before they were 1 yo (to play Shrek film - put them aslep in 15-20 minutes), and got them a tv with cable connection at 6 yo.

We did watch stuff together and talked about what was going on but we also trusted our kid. They early on got into true crime and cryptids.

[only-embers-remain]

my mother had only a single rule for media, which was no Simpsons, which she claimed was too violent because Homer strangles Bart in it, and yet had no problem with me watching Family Guy which is way more violent...so yeah no prescreening and some kinda screwy rules (or well rule)