The Bog of Pangur

Mora duit to ye, this is my Pangur Blog where I drop all my shite like the Old Croghan Man was dropped in the pete, he's a what? a severed torso? The Clonycavan man at least sorta had a head- Point be! Call me Pangur The name is obviously a reference to Pangur Bán the 9th century poem. pronouns are whatever feels convenient for you. I'm nice like that. what i hope to achieve with this blog? a place to keep the craic 90 shur. Slán agat.

[pangurbog]

Currently learning how to juggle, the high I felt when I first felt the rhythm of where the third ball goes is unmatched literally

[pangurbog]

Lads, having perseverance is insane. It's been five days and I can just about juggle 3 balls properly, my only problem now is actually catching them consistently. I know 23 isn't very old but when you actually achieve a quick little skill for yourself it's so satisfying.

[pangurbog]

Currently learning how to juggle, the high I felt when I first felt the rhythm of where the third ball goes is unmatched literally

[depsidase]

[deathtofun]

I told a guy his total was 13.21 and he said “wish it were that year, could actually get some good music on the radio”

[regularlesbian]

breaking news from the AP, our boys on the front have just sacked constantinople. take that, heretics. coming up next are the soothing lute dirges of bing crosby

[villainessbian]

*screams of a witch burning at the stake*

THOU ART CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

*Gregorian chanting*

13.21

*leper bell ringing*

HIGH MEDIAEVAL FM

*recording of John Lackland sobbing as he signs the Magna Carta*

WHENCE COMETH NAUGHT BUT LITURGIES

LITURGIES

AND MORE LITURGIES

*Templar knights praying out loud*

THIS ISN’T THY GRANDMOTHERES STATION

*Imagine Dragons - Radioactive starts playing*

[pangurbog]

Yea alright the North is cooked. Can we become a united Ireland now so we can save them from the trenches?

[maudit]

[profeminist]

RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.

Gifset source

[missbliss12]

Reblogging in honor of Marjane Satrapi, one of THE great graphic novelists. Her comic Persepolis was a crucial text for shaping my belief that comics can deeply explore identity, culture, politics, and history.

[pangurbog]

The Superman movie was great, i hope ye watched it and then bought/burned the movie on DVD or pirated it after so it cant either -miraculously vanish or so you can continue watching it forever even if the studios are evil. Keep being a Punk Rocker

[pangurbog]

ye should use Txt.fyi fer the craic

[storybookprincess]

so back when my little brother was in high school, my mom went as a chaperone for their senior year field trip to an amusement park. which, you know, brave move to volunteer to supervise a bunch of high school seniors let loose in a wonderland of rollercoasters and sugar

my brother and his friends in this field trip group were truly great kids. but they were not above run of the mill teenage boy shenanigans. it’s the end of senior year, you and all your buddies are at the amusement park, you’re naturally going to want to act like a complete moron

there was one kid in the group who was especially prone to goofing around. committed to the bit, some may say. my mom knew that if nonsense was going to break out, he’d likely be at the center of it

so she goes up to this kid at the very start of the trip and says “hey, i’m kinda worried about this chaperoning thing. this might be a lot to ask, but can you help me keep an eye on everyone? you wouldn’t have to do anything big, just be an extra set of eyes for me.”

friends, this kid proceeded to run their field trip group like the fucking us marines. everyone is at the meet up spots at the designated time. everyone waits in line for the rides like a bunch of boy scouts. the second the horseplay gets too out of hand, this kid is getting it back under control

it’s incredible how differently people act based on the expectations you set. instead of going to this kid and saying “hey, i know you’re trouble, so i’ve got my eye on you,” my mom went “hey, i know you have influence in your peer group, so i think you can help me.”

treat someone like a problem, they’ll act like a problem. but give people a chance to help, make them feel important, and they usually rise far above the occasion. it was a stroke of genius that i’m honestly still in awe of

[jkemotcore]

I think leaving twitter a year ago really changed me fundamentally, because I loved to argue and now you'd have to pay me willions of dollars to engage with any pointless queer discourse that crosses my path.

He/him lesbians? HRT femboys? AMAB enbies?

Buddy my definition of queer is so broad it includes some straight cis people. I am in my fortress, happy. If you try to argue I am laughing at you and/or straight up punching you with my mind.

[quotesverse]

[deepwithinwords-deactivated2026]

[pangurbog]

I think everyone should genuinely watch Swiss Army man and actually finish it. You can feel gross about things in regards to it being put on yourself like listening and hating acapella, if someone else loves acapella it hurts no-one so you should mind your own business. It's the same with someone being gay/trans or even just a bit fucking weird in their own time. Mind your own business. Unless you maybe want to try opening your mind to it, trying new things and exploring a world of human free will (within reason: i.e. It hurts no one) Because thats the thing - - If it genuinely hurts no one then its literally fine why are we whinging? Disgust doesnt equal morality Yea if youve seen Swiss Army Man and you didnt take that message from it then you watched it wrong

[depsidase]

[depsidase]

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Not superstitious and not not superstitious but a third secret thing (read a lot of fairytales as a child and doesn't believe them but also would never be rude to a mountain while still on it just in case)

[lasrina]

I've said it before but this is both the Icelandic and the Irish approach:

Of course we're modern educated people who don't believe in fairies

But we're also not gonna fuck with 'em, we're not idiots

[benjaminbadpennywho]

The "Why tempt fate?" approach.

[pangurbog]

Yea when i read op just there i was like "oh yea we do that!" then read the second one where yer man mentions Ireland LMAO

[st-just]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[booksandchainmail]

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[zenosanalytic]

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

[burninglights]

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

[crazy-pages]

“Smallpox was.”

Fuck. That hit me hard.

[duckbunny]

death and the stars

[hedwig-dordt]

I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse

[dykepuffs]

One of my friends was a university lecturer who had worked in the lab where the final smallpox case escaped from a lab and killed Janet Parker, a medical photographer who worked in the room upstairs. He was a very funny man, always "on", but once a year when he taught the lecture about smallpox and about 'swiss cheese' risk management, he looked like a dead man walking.

[perfectlyvalid49]

I’m sure I’ve reblogged this before, and I’m sure I’ll reblog it again.

But scroll up and look at that first graph. Really look at it. For 2000 years, for every society for which we have data, roughly 1 in every 2 kids died. I have two kids – statistically, one of them would have died (to be fair, my daughter was medically complicated in utero and the medication that saved her was developed in the 1960s, so in my personal case, there’s no “statistically” about it). Do you have a sibling? One of you probably would have died. Are you from a big family with lots of siblings? Your parents would have probably buried more than one of you, assuming that both of your parents had managed to make it to adulthood in the first place.

And to be entirely fair, there are reasons beyond modern medicine why childhood death rates have dropped in the last 200 years. Obviously, medical care is not the only place where we’ve made significant advancements in ways to reduce mortality rates in children. Like, 100 years ago children were still sent to go work in mines and factories in an era where OSHA did not exist. The fact that we don’t do that anymore also helps.

But medicine is a HUGE contributing factor to the childhood mortality rate plummeting. And some of it is big, exciting stuff, where a child is obviously dying, and a doctor gets to be a hero with a life-saving medication or procedure. That’s what happened with my daughter. And in cases like those, it’s super easy to draw a line of cause and effect. Child’s life was in danger -> medication given -> child’s life no longer in danger. Medicine saved the child.

But it’s actually much more common for a child’s life to be saved by the quiet, everyday work that primary care pediatricians do. Some of that is education – SIDS rates were cut nearly in half in the first ten years of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, which was just doctors telling parents that it’s safer to put your infant to sleep on their back rather than their stomach. But a lot of it is vaccination. Like, A LOT a lot.

I went looking for exact numbers, and I found this study from 2024. And I just want to quote the findings section of their abstract:

Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year. For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10·2 billion years of full health gained. We estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality, 52% in the African region. In 2024, a child younger than 10 years is 40% more likely to survive to their next birthday relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccination. Increased survival probability is observed even well into late adulthood.

Those numbers are huge. 154 million lives saved. 10.2 BILLION extra years of healthy lives. And the study didn’t even account for smallpox. Because as mentioned above – smallpox was. But the cause and effect line is much harder to draw. It’s easy to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles makes the baby cry, and potentially get a little sick for the next few days and these things all seem negative. It’s much harder to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles will keep them safe from a disease that they may or may not get in the future. And it much harder to see how stabbing my healthy baby with needles helps protect that other baby who is too sick to get stabbed.

But we are all being chased by a very slow tiger called “vaccine preventable disease.” And getting yourself/your children vaccinated is how we build tiger proof shields before the tiger ever gets close enough for us to notice him. Because if you can see the tiger, it’s already too late.

[starlightomatic]

There are also many public health interventions that are less obviously "medical" than vaccines that have contributed to lower mortality rates. Having clean running water is a huge one, as opposed to city wells that share a wall with a cistern where poop gets dumped, like the one that started the 1854 cholera outbreak that led to the cause of cholera being better understood.