Queer Physicist

• 20’s • queer • they/them •

[tourfilm]

living under a rock is so fun i love watching a movie that’s been famous for decades and being like wow this is so good.. did you guys know about this

[caseyscraftycorner]

watching my husband get diagnosed with and treated for sleep apnea over the last year was not the thing that radicalized me re: weight and healthcare but my goodness it has solidified my stances.

sleep apnea is more common in people who are fat.

society decided for some reason that this meant that being fat causes sleep apnea. its often difficult to get referrals for sleep apnea treatment if you are fat, because some PCPs will tell you try losing weight first.

turns out!! having untreated sleep apnea causes weight gain in a not-insignificant number of people. it also makes it fucking impossible for many people to lose weight.

my husband worked out the same amount before he got a cpap as he does now. there have been no major diet changes either. yet he has been losing weight -- and gaining muscle tone -- consistently since he started using a cpap in january.

also, his blood pressure -- which was high, which docs blamed on his weight/diet -- went down significantly within one month of starting cpap treatment, before his weight changed significantly.

ANYWAYS. this is getting long. two final thoughts.

- I Want To Strangle Medical Fatphobia With My Bare Fucking Hands

- if you are exhausted constantly for "no reason", and especially if you snore, you should probably ask your doctor about getting tested for sleep apnea. it is extremely common -- estimates are around 1 in 10 people -- and is also wildly under-diagnosed. like, some estimates suggest that 80% of people with moderate-severe sleep apnea are undiagnosed.

[klapollo]

almost seven years deep into the 2020s this feels less like a retrospective evaluation and more like a prophetic vision

[headspace-hotel]

You've heard of Earth is space australia now get ready for: Earth is the space Amazon Rainforest. Aliens land on Earth and they are losing their goddamn minds because every square inch of the ground is absolutely PACKED with life like there are hundreds of species just in this one site, there are winged animals flying through the sky and multiple colonies of sophisticated social insects just in the shadow of their ship, this ONE ROCK is covered in MULTIPLE SPECIES OF ORGANISMS that are themselves MULTIPLE ORGANISMS LIVING SYMBIOTICALLY, the tall, woody autotrophs look so different from each other because they're...holy shit that's like 5, 6, 7???? different species on this one site???

they start talking to a human and the human is like "haha yeah that's a crow!" and the alien researcher is like "you called it a 'bird' earlier, is that a different name?" and the human is like "oh a crow is just one species of bird, there's like, 10 others out there"

"On this planet?"

"No, in the back yard right now."

[headspace-hotel]

imagine aliens that come from a tidally locked planet where only a thin band of the planet is habitable, or a planet life was only able to develop in small areas at the poles, or in the few pools of liquid water on the planet's surface, or just in isolated areas where geologic activity causes geysers and springs, visiting Earth. They seem completely unprepared for the shock of realizing that Earth's continents appear green because the continents are absolutely covered with green organisms.

[headspace-hotel]

The alien biologists are so uncomfortable because there are certain protocols for maintaining certain distances from life signatures to avoid harming unfamiliar organisms, and groves of plant like autotrophs and pools where aquatic life dwells are carefully protected and respected, with very important rules for approach

On Earth, the inhabitants are just. Playing and walking LITERALLY STEPPING ON CARPETS OF ORGANISMS the whole time. the aliens are like "it doesn't hurt them??? Can't you just...move them to a place where you don't have to step on them?" and the humans are like "no of course not, grasses evolved to tolerate being stepped on, and besides, more plants would grow there if we tried to move the existing ones"

It then must be explained that humans would need to regularly spray poisons on the ground to prevent any given area of bare soil from filling up with plant life, and that "regularly" means "multiple times within a single solar cycle." And that the poisons stop working within a few decades because the plants evolve to resist them that fast.

[headspace-hotel]

Human: yeah solar is the dominant energy source these days but some of the recent solar farm projects are pretty controversial because they're in reclaimed strip mining sites that others argue should be restored as best as we can to their previous ecological state

Alien: I don't understand...why would you not place the solar farms in an area of the planet with no existing ecosystem?

Human: ...what?

Alien: You have rather sophisticated protective gear and have done some space exploration, surely you could establish them in an area of the planet to which life is not yet adapted?

Human: ...there isn't one.

Alien: ...what do you mean there isn't one

[headspace-hotel]

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU 'DON'T KNOW' HOW MANY SPECIES THERE ARE"

[headspace-hotel]

"Our biologists would love to collaborate with your Earth scientists to draw up a definitive listing of Earth species and resolve any inconsistencies in the records."

"I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Only 25% of Earth's species have been formally described, at most."

"that's...that's most of them."

"Yes?"

"Well...I suppose the ocean trenches and abyssal plains must be difficult for you to reach...where did you have to travel for your discoveries?"

"Travel? I moved here to Alabama in the first place to study its aquatic ecosystems. The crayfish I discovered live in that creek I showed you earlier."

[dvandom]

"Too bad you couldn't have come here a few thousand years ago, humanity has really been doing a number on our diversity of species. Some say it might be the next great extinction."

"Wait. I believe this is something your language refers to as needing 'unpacking.' The current biodiversity represents a historical low point?"

"Well, a local minimum, as the math people say. But yeah, I think there was some recovery after the Younger Dryas about ten thousand years ago, but for every new species humanity creates intentionally or unintentionally, tens or hundreds have been wiped out. We're not proud of this."

"We will need time to digest this, to the point I'm afraid to ask the next question: NEXT great extinction?"

"Yeah, I forget how many there've been total, and there's some arguing over how bad it has to get before it really counts. A comet or meteor strike 65 million years ago wiped out the majority of life...the majority of species or even genera...there's entire classes of life we didn't know ever existed until we found their fossils a few hundred years ago. And then there's the Permian, when a good chunk of a continent erupted and I think we lost...ninety percent of all species? Maybe more? I'd have to look it up. There was also a mass extinction that just happened because all the continents got pushed together and apparently that was bad for life on land and in the sea. You're looking a little faint...do you need to sit down?"

"But...even a single great extinction has always meant the end of life above the unicellular level, on every world we've visited. This planet has evolved complex incredibly ramified life repeatedly despite three mass extinction events?"

"I wanna say...five?"

[explorerrowan]

A Deathworld is scary. A Lifeworld is fucking terrifying.

[gay-homoerotic-iceskating]

[thebelchers]

[desolationlesbian]

I don't want to buy mass-produced garbage from a big box store so I go to etsy but half of etsy is now dropshipped mass-produced garbage or AI slop so I go to the local arts and crafts street market but a ton of those booths are also selling the same generic plastic objects or identical stickers or 3D printed dragons so WHERE do I buy real trinkets and art from sincere freaks

[catchymemes]

[luna-azzurra]

If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.

[anxietyproblem]

[hexpatient]

me: im disabled and have limits

the smartest most intelligent guy in the world with the most hugest dick ever like so big, like the biggest dick ever, man and also soooo intelligent and thoughtful and just so so intelligent: have you tried pushing yourself?

[hexpatient]

from my own experience and also from what i hear from others, the issue seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of how i know my limits. i know because i have discovered and tested them. i push them sometimes, carefully. and occasionally i get ok results or at least nothing bad happens. but sometimes something does happen, so i MUST respect my limits.

but when i talk about disability to abled people, they assume its just a bad attitude. like ive defaulted to a "i cant" attitude. and that stems from a fundamental mistrust of disabled people, and the cultural grift of acting like bad things can only exist in the mind. yes i know this is old news. anyways.

[phemiec]

my doctor literally told me point blank to cancel my gym membership and stop going, and that avoiding pushing myself, even on good days, was the most important thing I could do for my health.

I could have cried because its what I felt all along, I knew that's how my body worked best, but the internal and external shame over being "lazy" is so insane it had me doing things that I knew actively triggered flareups just to avoid the perception of laziness.

[whatbigotspost]

Gen Z men twice as likely as boomers to say wives should "always obey"

“It is troubling to see that attitudes towards gender equality are not more positive," said Julia Gillard of King’s College London.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

>Particularly among Gen Z, our data shows an interesting duality: they are both the group most likely to agree that women who have a successful career are more attractive to men but are simultaneously most likely to agree that a wife should always obey her husband and that a woman should never appear too self-sufficient or independent.

Incredibly stupid things are happening

[cryptiddies]

I know these two things seem contradictory, but there’s nothing a conservative man loves more than to tear off an angel’s wings. There are plenty of women that would willingly choose the obedient SAHM lifestyle, but these kinds of men always seem to go for the opposite. Why? Because it’s a power play. There’s no need to break a horse that’s already broken, and that would do nothing to validate that man, his ego, and his place in a world he sees as designed for him.

[ifoundmybeatingheartagain]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Another factor is that these men avoid dating conservative women who already want the lives they want them to have because those women's standards are too high. Specifically, such women expect to be the obedient stay at home mum, but they also expect their men to be the masculine ideal from the other half of the equation -- they tend to look down on their men if they cry, they expect them to be able to financially provide for the household, they want them to uphold their end of the bargain. You see this again and again in groups of conservative men who go out of their way to date liberal women; there is a power play, to tame someone untamed and bring her into line with his expectations, but there's also her lack of expectations of him. They want a woman who will do all the household and keep the home but ALSO will not reject him for not being able to afford to finance the family alone. They want a woman who'll respect and obey him but ALSO be fun and relaxed and let him show whatever emotions he wants. They want the Perfect Trad Wife who won't expect him to be the Perfect Trad Husband.

You see the same thing in conservatives who complain that all their leftie friends are abandoning them, but who won't just hang out with right wing friends instead. They don't want to hang out with other righties because a group of righties quickly becomes judgy and hateful and socially competitive, and is only fun to hang out with when they want to vent, whereas their leftie friends were more relaxed and fun. They want license to be unpleasant and expect unreasonable things of others, but want the people around them to be pleasant and not expect unreasonable things of them.

[outofcontextgarf]

[coolerdracula]

[monster2001]

Just because I’m crying doesnt mean ì can’t take it

[thulium]

[painpassion2013]

Was what we had real or cake

[dramatic-dolphin]

and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.

[hiveswap]

^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.