izzy's playlists!
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Stranger Things
Sade Olutola
Fai_Ryy
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Xuebing Du
EXPECTATIONS
Peter Solarz
Three Goblin Art
roma★
YOU ARE THE REASON
Mike Driver
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Keni
Cosmic Funnies
pixel skylines
One Nice Bug Per Day
Janaina Medeiros
hello vonnie
seen from Iraq
seen from Tunisia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
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@somedrunkpirate
Six year old, bouncing up and down with glee as desserts are unpacked: "I'm so appointed!"
Took me a moment to realize she had logically assumed "appointed" must be the opposite of "disappointed" and used it as a synonym for "excited."
official linguistics post
My favourite harmless prank I've heard of was done by this girl whose dad was a geologist, and they'd go on day hikes with his geologist friends/co-workers and when she got bored on them she'd habitually pick up a random rock and go ask him what it is, and one of them would explain what kind of a rock that is, how it probably got here, and usually some notions of the more unusual features the rock had, if any.
And she had a friend who had once gone on a tourist trip to Iceland and brought back a volcanic rock. So she borrowed the rock and took it with her on the hike, and after two randomly picked up "hey dad what rock is this", she presented the volcanic rock, in the same fashion as all the others.
3 minutes later there are five middle-aged and older men circled around this mysterious rock, all agreeing on what it is, but not why it is. They keep asking her questions, where did she find it? Were there any other rocks around there that looked like it? Was it like this on the ground? People walking past the group try to stretch their necks to see over the geologists' shoulders to see what's the source of such amazement.
And in the end she couldn't take it anymore, burst into laughter and confessed. The geologists agree that it was pretty clever.
Geologist enrichment
you are the prime shining example of a Wholesome Chungus Tumblr Millennial. and youre canadian. pick a struggle
What the hell did you mean by this
Translation: "you have the personality type of a very genuine, if cringe, person in their 30s or older. Also you're from canada which has its own separate stereotypes, even though I associate these chungus traits with USAmericans. This is a humorous and odd confluence that I wish I didn't have to parse"
If you plant your feet in the earth and remain as you are unchanged while the world spins around you then you will come to find a pattern in the seasons that come and go, while the seasons themselves will see only you and your sameness forever
I do think it's kind of funny how john green wrote a book about tuberculosis that brought a lot of renewed attention to the subject and he's since become the darling of the tb world, speaks at tb conferences, my dad and every other tb researcher I know is absolutely smitten with him, and they'll be like "we love this guy! have you heard of him??" and I have to be like well yes, I have. for other reasons
"You mean the guy who got cyberbullied off of tumblr by 14-year-old anarchomarxists but then triumphantly returned as a coffee company?"
idk what other disabled person needs to hear this but if you need someone to do something for you that would be very difficult for you to do but very easy for them to do, that is a small favor. you dont have to feel gratitude and guilt at scale based on how hard it would be for you to do it disabledly
also a more general point: you dont have to feel guilty when people do things for you. if someone is offering, or if you ask and they say yes, that means they want to do it. if for some reason they are pretending to be okay with it, that is not your fault, it is theirs. this goes for things you are incapable of doing, things that would be difficult for you to do, and even things that you could do without difficulty. even if youre not disabled. if someone cares about you they should be willing to help you out in the ways that they are able to.
I developed a 'code' with my dad regarding this because I was feeling guilty during college burdening him with my panic over some issue or another. Turns out that what was a 10 in stress and complexity for me, for him was a 2 to hear about and help me fix it. After coming to this realisation, I started my panic calls with tearfully sobbing "this is an 11 issue for me but I think its a 4 for you, do you have a moment?"
let this be a reminder that even if it takes time your dreams can come true
an astronaut foretold to go to the moon by a fortune cookie can be a kind of magical girl, I think
“i should take a walk for my mental health” boring, tired, i don’t even really wanna do it tbh
“i need to check the perimeter” i need to check the perimeter
Apparently my favorite picture books as a child were written by queer authors. This brings me joy.
Look, most of the queer people I know, myself included, had pretty rough childhoods (for a variety of reasons, but being recognizably queer was part of it) and as a result, we are fiercely protective of kids. Not protecting kids in a walled-garden sense the way conservatives want, but celebrating the wonder and whimsy and weirdness of being a child, and treating children as people - people who might need more supervision and care, but people with opinions and thoughts that really do matter. So of course the most beloved children's books of the last 40 years are written by queer folx. It makes perfect sense.
I asked my kids if they’d prefer a secret garden or a secret library and my son shook his head and was like “I don’t trust the secret gardeners and librarians”
Me: what if there aren’t any gardeners or librarians.
Son: there’s always a librarian. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And it’s a garden, there has to be someone taking care of it or it isn’t really a garden.
Me:
Me: this was supposed to be lighthearted
Daughter: don’t trust the secret librarian.
Son: any librarian who hoards a library to themselves is hiding something.
Daughter: /nods seriously/
Me: why are you two talking as if from experience should I be concerned
The kids are right Jazz
But what if I want to be the secret librarian?
Me: what if you were the secret librarian?
Son: wouldn’t be a secret library. I have nothing to hide.
Daughter: so not a secret librarian. A good librarian.
Me: you two are on a wavelength I can’t understand
What a way to find out your kids went on a whole-ass portal fantasy adventure at some point.
I adore that riverside Iowa just decided one day that they were where kirk was born and the writers were just like fuck it why not
Steve Miller, a Riverside councilman, knew this before anyone else. Steve was a Trekkie, and he read in Gene Roddenberry's book, Making of Star Trek (1968) that Kirk would be born in a small town in Iowa. The book didn't name the town. Miller thought, "Why not Riverside?" At the next council meeting (March 25, 1985) Miller proposed that Riverside declare itself the Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk. The motion passed unanimously.
So I just now learned that museums on Twitter were having a battle over the best bum around! I am delighted!!!
I mean, just look!
WHY DID NOBODY FUCKING INFORM ME
never lose hope. somewhere, a middle-aged, gender ambiguous person with an advanced degree in an esoteric field and a fiber arts hobby could be crashing out and pinning all their remaining mental health on getting obsessed with your otp. any day now, the most elegantly written 100k fanfic you have ever read is going to hit ao3. it could happen. it has happened.
Spitballing with the fellas on discord and we've come up with a Star Trek character we want to see: A 200-year-old top Vulcan diplomat attending a function and laughing boisterously and slapping backs with everyone and then just relaxing into resting bitch face the moment nobody is watching him. He takes his job deadly seriously and studied parties extensively in the diplomatic academy. Every year he's brushing up on new developments in party theory. He knows every party nuance you could possibly think of, for the sake of intergalactic relations. Peace in the galaxy depends on it. It's weird but you gotta meet people where they're at, he thinks.
Sarek fucking hates this guy and it's 100% envy
human diplomat: [laughs at joke]
vulcan diplomat (to himself): this is great. I’m going to get a good grade in Party, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve,
So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community.
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it.
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
“On the matter of touch,” Crowley begins, waving his teaspoon in what he hopes passes for idle curiosity. “Thoughts?”
For two ineffable husbands, they don't really touch each other much. Here is a story on why that might be.
Words: 9,030
Status: Complete
Rating: Teen And Up
@somedrunkpirate
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I love this so much <33 Thank you, its perfect.
why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel
an insane response, but i can't fight this. carry on
im being hunted for sport in the notes
you! the person reading this! please tell me one good thing that happened to you today
