Untitled

[forgotten-emerald]

[histrionic-dragon]

--Eva Stratt

[maggotsandcream]

Something I do find lovely about the first 4 Murderbot Diaries books (can’t yet speak on all of them) is:

Murderbot chronically finding new scientists/travellers to claim as “clients” (whether paid or not) like one of those sheepless herding dogs that goes around finding sheep (or anything else they can herd like a flock of sheep). Like it clearly has a protect humans instinct and a desperate need for enrichment.

Given its general lack of self awareness and unreliable narrator status, there’s no way in hell Murderbot is aware it’s doing this.

[silas-lehnsherr]

Murderbot: I just want to be left alone to watch my shows. I care nothing for these humans. I hate having clients.

Also Murderbot: *noticing unaccompanied humans that have nothing to do with it at all* Oh look, clients.

[thememedaddy]

[pangur-and-grim]

I told my little nephew that I'd wave at his airplane when it flew over my house today, and he very calmly and politely explained that it wouldn't be possible to see me due to the limitations of human vision. I said he just had to squint real hard, and he took a deep breath and went into the toddler version of "see, what you're not understanding–"

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.

[jessebloom]

guy who wouldn’t even notice they’ve been sex pollened with all the repressed lust they’ve got going on

[yesornopolls]

When youre cooking, do you sometimes try a little bit of raw meat to check if you put enough spices

(Im not afraid of tapeworms, tapeworms are afraid of me)

When youre cooking, do you sometimes try a little bit of raw meat to check if you put enough spices?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 6 days 9 hours

[thatredfirelight]

Our laundry room has ants so I laid a bunch of traps and stood there mocking the ones that crawled into the traps

Is this how it feels to be starscream

[thatredfirelight]

EDIT there are more ants and they are in the kitchen they brought an army and my plan has backfired horribly

this IS how it feels to be starscream

[johannestevans]

It's really funny when doctors and medical professionals don't like, meaningfully understand how comorbidity works. "oh, it's very unlikely someone would have all these rare conditions at once"

yeah. maybe that would be fair to say about say, discrete viruses. but about syndromes?

like. the conditions of the human body don't know that they're taxonomically discrete. they don't know that they have different names or lists of symptoms. if a human body has a consistent issue with say, its heart rhythm, or its inflammatory response, or its glandular response, or immune system

the reason that ehlers-danlos syndrome (EDS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), IBS (irritable bowel), autism, and even shit like coeliac and PMDD or endometriosis overlap is bc like. these are largely inflammatory issues or issues with the fascia

It's not "what the fuck, how can this person have all these different things wrong with them", bc these are largely like. syndromic definitions of how x bodily issue manifests in different systems, structures, or organs of the body

many of these conditions change in definition over time

and that's bc they're studied and understood more over time where people more meaningfully understand underlying causes and issues, such as through hormone or genetic profiles, or largely like. immune response

it's also how "rare" conditions become understood as more common over time

idk like. not to be on my soap box on this specific issue but this is what happens when you don't teach medical professionals philosophy beyond the basic ethical shit. the reason philosophy is important to medical study is so you don't mistake etymological or philological issues for scientific ones

[madanimalscientist]

I got told by a -medical geneticist- that it was extremely unlikely for someone to have both celiac and EDS because both were so uncommon so therefore I probably didn't have both, despite clear physical evidence to the contrary. I pointed out that there's enough people out there that even with low incidence of both, even assuming there was no link, statistically there were going to be people with both just by basic probability and that 'rare' didn't mean 'doesn't happen. I also pointed out I had 2 younger half-sibs with celiac and a cousin with celiac, T1D, and EDS-h, so odds are that no it wasn't as unlikely as she thought especially given that kind of family history.....She did not in fact care for my attitude. I didn't care for her lack of understanding of her own job, so the feeling was mutual.

[vaspider]

Lol I definitely have both.

[hasufin]

I think many medical professionals are very narrow-focused on their specialty, forget the rest of the body exists, and don't think of it all as an entire system.

I recall reading the book A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness. It's about a nuclear worker who received a lethal dose of radiation due to a prompt-critical accident while making nuclear fuel. As the title implies, he died over the course of 83 days.

What struck me about the book was, it's pretty clear his DNA was just shredded and nothing was really replacing itself effectively. His organs and systems failed at a rate consistent with their typical cellular lives. At each step of this, they brought in specialists to manage the problem: he wasn't producing erethrocytes, they brought in hematologists. His stomach lining was breaking down, they brought in gastroenterologists, &c. Each one had this faith that if they kept him going past this crisis, his body's natural healing would take over and he would get better. But looking at his body as a whole, it was obvious from very early that was Just Not Happening. Each specialist was looking at it as "Oh no, my one part is failing, I need to get him through this and the rest of his otherwise healthy body can pull him along!" except the whole damned body was going because that's what a lethal neutron flux does. And somewhere around day 30 or so they should have said "I'm sorry, this is not going to work, we are switching to palliative care" and he could have died a week or two later, but that's not how specialists think.

The body doesn't know we've divided it up into organs and systems and specific types of cells. It's just a body and each part affects everything else.

[whetstonefires]

the number of doctors and other medical professionals, including knee specialists and physical therapists, who were completely unable over the course of several years to give me any advice about a problem with one of my knees once it was determined that 'tingling and numbness' meant it was 'something with a nerve, probably getting pinched or something' was staggering.

finally i asked my neurologist, whom i had because i'd eventually gotten some weird symptoms in my neck identified as part of a pattern of chronic migraines.

she agreed it was a compressed nerve, possibly not in the knee itself but in the hip or where it runs parallel to the iliotibial band down the outside of the thigh.

regardless her recommendation was. a specific stretching exercise.

which didn't 100% erase the problem, but ameliorated it enough that it's no longer one of my major mobility concerns or sources of pain.

absolutely insane this was not on the radar for anyone who was supposed to be an expert in knees or stretching, simply because it involved Something To Do With Nerves.

[kiragecko]

Eczema, allergies, and asthma are all likely to overlap, because they're all different ways of the body overreacting to harmless substances.

Autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and Tourette's are all neurodevelopmental conditions, and guess what? When the brain decides to develop abnormally, it doesn't look at a checklist for a specific condition and then follow the list! It just develops weird, and people label the results. Sometimes with a LOT of labels.

Generic names that cover all the possible manifestations of an issue often aren't very helpful. Because not everyone whose skin keeps trying to self-destruct ALSO stops breathing if they try to jog. Even if the "manufacturing error: air causes breathing shutdown" and the "manufacturing error: skin breaks down when in contact with necessary skin yeasts" are coming from the same source, the solutions may vary.

So breaking things up into discrete labels is helpful. But it sure would be nice if medical practitioners were TAUGHT that this was what's going on!

[lady-halibuts-chambers]

[belladonnabedlam]

Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…

What is your AO3 user ID?

I’m an OG user 5 digits or less

Six figures baby!

I’m in the millions…

Remaining time: 6 days 4 hours

I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!

[myjetpack]

my latest books cartoon for the Guardian.

[arinrowan]

Look, coyly hiding the settings on your application and making it keep opening doesn't encourage me to USE the app, it encourages me to delete it

[wifihunters]

its pride month and im very burnt out from working in healthcare however i do love it for the ambiguity the uniform/masks offer. had a conversation with a patient after seeing him for a day or two where he was like

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend--"

Which of course, I brace for hell, since he is around 60, and i am a gangly cryptid that people usually struggle only to find the right slur to apply to. But i dutifully keep my work voice and go "nah nah, don't worry, what can I do?"

He hits me with "Are you--uh, I've been saying 'thank you ma'am' but are you... okay with that? What should I call you?"

And i live in a small conservative pocket within one of the most liberal states in the US, so my experience in public is varied. People have guessed, they've gone with she, he. they, they've awkwardly avoided it, but no stranger had ever asked me.

So i panicked and chuckled. This felt kind of like walking into a fake tumblr post. I said "Oh, you can call me whatever you want, its fine."

Any cis person would probably sound a little insulted. i knew i was confirming some kind of gender fuckery, but giving him the out that he didn't have to change anything. Fucker kindly smiles though, and like. Pounces. Asks, much more confidently, "But would you prefer sir? What are your pronouns?"

He's on script now, I'm astral projecting to a different plane where i'm a bug on a well lit microscope and my throat's a little tight all the sudden. I say, "Oh. I uh--I use they/them."

I use they or he, but 'they' is the language curveball. I know this, which is why i usually just let people use whatever. He nods, and I choke out (because its been a bad bad day, autoimmune flare pain on top of record high patient numbers) "Thanks. No one... has ever asked me. Have a good day."

He told me the same, I booked it, because the dim room was hiding watery eyes but not for much longer. Got it together in a nearby closet (ha) and moved on.

Came back later on in the evening because I had promised to visit when his wife was there earlier in the day. She's sweet, he's sweet, I do my usual spiel, he avoids any 'ma'am' studiously, but on me going to head out again, hits the dilemma of having no polite substitute for 'ma'am' or 'sir' that isnt gendered in some subtle way, and he's fucking trying, but this is not second nature obviously.

So what comes out is "Have a wonderful night, Them!"

Beaming, proud, right next to his extremely confused wife, who he seems to have not outted me to (nice) who now thinks he's probably having a stroke (funny, but not nice lmao)

Anyway, tldr, not adding to the well-meant bigot strawman theory, man wasn't a bigot, it was just. Nice, that in a sea of alt, visibly queer or vocally liberal people my age or younger who never thought to ask or just didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of stumbling through it... some lone dad guy decided 'good enough' wasn't enough and volunteered to correct himself.

[apolladay]

If two women in a romantic relationship together were both pregnant from the same donor and gave birth at roughly the same time, would you consider the offspring some sort of twins?

Yeah, they're genetically related & times line up

Sort of?

No, they MUST be from the same egg

Too unlikely to consider (Results)

If two women in a romantic relationship together were both pregnant from the same donor and gave birth at roughly the same time, would you consider the offspring some sort of twins?

Yeah, they're genetically related & times line up

Sort of?

No, they MUST be from the same egg

Too unlikely to consider (Results)

Remaining time: 5 days 13 hours

[shofarsogood]

Fraternal twins don't share an egg. If you picked the third option, you're arguing that fraternal twins aren't really twins even if they share a placenta and uterus.

[authoratmidnight]

Unless the mothers are literal clones of each other, they'd just be half siblings. Twins need to have the same DNA from BOTH parents. So unless the mothers are clones of each other, they would be half siblings (same dad, different moms). It has nothing to do with the parents being in a relationship or not lol

Like, you do know it is in fact quote possible for one man to get two women pregnant at around the same time, yeah? And have then be due around the same time because of that? Like, this happens. I'm sure if you looked you could dig up stories of like, cheating where a guy gets his SO and affair partner pregnant at the same time.

That doesn't make their kids twins guys.

[alexseanchai]

I bet it ups the kids' likelihood of calling themselves twins, though

[smallercommand]

I am aware of kids who were both adopted (to the same family), born within a month of each other, who were referred to as twins. Because if you're raising two kids the same age in the same family, they're twins.

[charl0ttan]

something i actually just realized on call w some friends recently is how crazey it is that your online friends are as many as thousands of feet above or below u right now. like if you teleported to their location without changing your height above sea level, well your fucked in some way basically

[charl0ttan]

How high above sea level are you right now?

0-250 feet

251-500 feet

501-750 feet

751-1000 feet

1001-2000 feet

2001-3000 feet

3001-4000 feet

4001-5000 feet

5001-6000 feet

6001-7000 feet

7001-8000 feet

8001+ feet

Voting ended onJul 19

[muffinlance]

When you use the dictionary website to check your spelling and your intended meaning is marked "archaic". STOP CALLING ME OUT, MERRIAM-WEBSTER.