I have had a bit of an obsession with Iron Lung. I went and saw it in theaters twice. I love the use of practical effects and the lore. I thought the packing was great. Have some fanart I worked on for 7 hours and 49 minutes. I am not the best at drawing people, but I am trying to get better at it.
One of the best ones I saw was a thing noting that every single one of the few survivors of suicide jumps off of the Golden Gate Bridge realized, on the way down, that the problems they were killing themselves over actually were fixable or could be worked through...except for the now - extremely unfixable - problem of gravity.
Went to the Holocaust Museum in DC once. There was a video interview of an Auschwitz survivor who said he and some other prisoners stayed up all night with a man who wanted to kill himself. The man didn’t kill himself and survived to liberation.
In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”
Hearing that from a guy who survived the Holocaust rewired my brain a little bit.
I think something a lot of people don't understand is that depression is not suicidality, and suicidality is not depression.
People can, and are, depressed without being suicidal, and sometimes suicidality peaks as people are emerging from depression.
Suicidality is a wave, and the trick is to allow that wave to crest and subside WITHOUT acting on it.
Whatever it takes to ride it out. For some people that's distraction, like watching television. For others it's calling a friend -- not to talk about the suicidality, but just to talk. For others it could be as simple as going to sit in a coffee shop or library, because the presence of other people is a huge diminisher of suicide risk.
That's what suicide safety planning is about. It's like having any other type of emergency plan, like a plan for fire or evacuation. It's making a plan when you are in the frame of mind to do so, so that you can just DO the plan without having to think about it when the occasion arises.
When you're in the midst of suicidal ideation, or even intent, you're not in a problem-solving mood. So knowing past!you, with the help of a therapist hopefully, came up with the plan and all you have to do is follow up until the wave crests and subsides, is what allows you to see another day.
ETA: Here's a link to a safety plan. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/988-safety-plan.pdf
There’s a really compassionate and well-written paper/book/thing called Suicide: The Forever Decision that’s written specifically for people who are currently suicidal. The letter to the reader at the beginning is wonderful and deeply understands how to talk to someone who’s suicidal without preaching or talking down to them.
It’s very honest. It’s very clear. It’s very kind. It presents you with a lot of information and a lot of understanding and lets you take it all in like the autonomous human you are, and make decisions from an informed place. It goes over the reality of suicide attempts, pain involved, likelihoods of survival, after effects of attempts, and how to get help if you want it after reading all of that and learning about the reality of suicide attempts.
You can read it for free here: https://qprinstitute.com/pdfs/Forever_Decision.pdf
No one can ever stop you if you’re really determined. Only you can stop yourself. If you’re suicidal and there’s ANY tiny part of you that wants a chance to not go down that route, but can’t convince the rest of you yet, give this short book a try. Or share it with anyone you know who might need it.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
Edited To Add: The wiki entry should be in here vs the history.com link - so here you go.
Y'all this is a tree farm. You harvest trees from a place like this so that actual forests get left alone. This is the far side of some redneck's lot, not wilderness. It's not supposed to look natural. There's no need to be scared.
There ARE monoculture forests, they are in England and were the first attempt to re-forest a decimated area in the 19th century(!). They are trying! They are people trying to restore the environment! You gotta do it badly before you learn how to do it well.
Ok, I'm gonna try to be nice about this, but "tree farms" are not neutral entities exempt from criticism and they certainly don't exist so that "actual forests get left alone." Maybe in some parts of the world that's true, but I'm actually looking into this (and already did to a certain extent for my Master's thesis) and it's so incredibly, incredibly insidiously incorrect. It's like saying 'this palm oil plantation is a good thing actually because look, they're also trees!' or 'this 1000-acre plot where we exclusively grow corn is fine because corn is a plant!'
Let's start with the basic principle of an ecological system: diversity = resilience = a healthy system. This is as true in a desert or Boreal forest as it is in a tropical rainforest or coral reef. Plantations, by definition, are devoid of diversity. They are monocultures - in the case of tree plantations, sometimes duo- or tricultures - and that's where the diversity ends. The basic reason why a palm oil plantation or a corn monoculture is bad is because they convert healthy, diverse (social-)ecological systems into ecological dead zones. Tree plantations - even the ones with two or three tree species - do this too. Animals don't live in these plantations. A few, maybe - the tough ones. Same goes for the fungi that have symbiotic relationships with species not selected for the plantation. Same goes for soil microbes that need a rich diversity of plant and animal matter to thrive.
I'm going to tell you an anecdote, because this is what really drove the point home for me.
In February of 2021, I was riding in a truck with a Sámi reindeer herder and activist. It was around 8 AM on my second day of fieldwork for my Master's degree (in sustainability), and we were heading up the hill to go feed the reindeer. At that time of year, the roads are paved with ice and all of the trees bowed under the weight of a good meter of snow. As we made our way up the logging access road (the only roads in the region are owned and maintained by the state logging company), I asked him a question. I don't remember specifically what the question was, but I used the word "forest."
"I'm gonna stop you there," he said. "These aren't forests. This is just... trees. There's nothing here that makes it a forest. Nothing for the reindeer."
I asked if he could elaborate. Bear in mind - we're out west of fucking nowhere south of the Arctic Circle. The closest grocery store was an hour and a half drive away, the closest train station twice that. It's the sort of place you can easily romanticize - a kind of reindeer wonderland, where humans and nature still share a bond.
So he elaborated. He told me about the logging industry in Sweden - how all of the trees are Scots pine (a very profitable timber tree) interspersed with a species of spruce. That's more or less it. In the entire country. How in the early 20th century, colonists started planting lodgepole pine - a fast-growing North American variety unsuited to the climate but very profitable for the pulp and paper industry - and planted so densely that it's deadly to anything with antlers and much-loved by predators for that same reason.
And he told me how in Sweden, there is no old-growth or primary forest left - or so little that it's barely worth mentioning. How it's all artificial - replanted since the 1920s or so strictly managed that nothing but Scots pine, spruce, and the occasional birch is allowed to grow, because anything else would cut into profit margins. How the trees are not allowed to mature, because they're cut down as soon as they reach 70-80 years old (when they could live for centuries if left alone). How the reindeer suffer, because young woodland can't produce the lichen reindeer need to survive the winter - so the reindeer herders (all of whom are Indigenous Sámi) spend hundreds of thousands of SEK each year (equivalent to tens of thousands of Euros) on grain to keep them alive. How entire ecosystems - from mycelial networks and soil microbes all the way to moose and bears - have been degraded and hollowed out by the inability of diversity to take hold. How the relationship between the Sámi and their whole social-ecological community suffers as a result.
This is the whole of Sweden, as much as the logging industry likes to paint itself as "green." These ecological dead zones aren't separate from "actual forest" - they are what the country has instead.
And that's just Sweden. While details are different - exact proportions of planted and primary forest, forestry methods, etc. - the story is the same in most of Europe. France and Germany are some of the worst culprits, but Switzerland doesn't get a pass. Go into any woodland in Europe and marvel at the unnatural stillness - the lack of biodiversity that comes from cutting down all the trees every human lifetime or so. And consider that the reason why these woodlands have the ecological integrity of a haphazardly maintained lawn is because they are all maintained like a lawn.
And that's just Europe.
So next time you want to fantasize about how tree planting is some sort of morally neutral endeavor meant to protect "real" forest and that ecological integrity isn't necessary in these plantations, consider what would happen if this was the only type of forest that existed. And sit with that knot in your stomach when you remember that in some places, that's the apocalyptic reality.
I’ve said “I hate this” so many times on this website, and never actually meant it, because “I hate this” is just shorthand for ‘this is an example of a meme given a twist I wasn’t expecting with intent to surprise’. Which is, in of itself, a meme on this site. God damn it.
But this… This is something else.
The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.
For the love of fuck, how do you explain loss.jpg? How do you explain gun?
it is a YMCA reference - that’s one of the 6 memes being represented here
ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)
this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)
“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)
‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)
and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)
which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)
(but i need to add that this is the greatest version of loss.jpg i think i’ve ever seen. the initial ‘young man’ lines up with the guy bursting through the door, and the shock meme ‘gun’ matches the shock scene of the woman in the hospital and idk if OP even thought about that but it makes this just so much better)
it might also just be a coincidence due to loss.jpg’s format but the whole white minimalist four-panel setup is also suspiciously reminiscent of those early 2000’s rage comics
I’m not reblogging this because I want to. I’m reblogging this because sometimes you’re a witness to history whether you want to be or not, and you have to embrace that.
Ok but I need someone who can actually make a meme to add on but do the Thor ragnorak meme where tumble is Hela and she’s like you can’t defeat me and Thor is that first original plane white meme and he says I know but he can and the fire guy is the most recent one. Thanks
being sick & miserable objectively sucks, but it has become significantly easier to cope with since learning that “sickness behavior” is a well documented part of the body’s immune response
feeling not only physically but also emotionally like fucking garbage is unfortunately an extremely effective way to force your body to prioritize fighting infection & keeping you alive. i don’t have to like it, but knowing why i get weepy & pathetic when sick does help at least a little
I’ve met people who will actually argue against this (and I suggest just blocking anyone who does) but if your choice is between going hungry and getting fast food or snack food….PLEASE JUST FEED YOURSELF. No food is actually bad enough that it’s better to skip eating entirely. Malnutrition is more dangerous, more immediately, and more long-term than any consequences of eating a damn twinkie or a cheeseburger.
At the peak of my disordered eating, I had a nutritionist who was like “milk and cookies is a good snack because fats+sugars+proteins, but more importantly, it’s food that you’ll eat.”
On the bad days where I don’t want to eat cuz food is repulsive, the first thing that doesn’t sound completely disgusting is the thing I’ll eat no matter how healthy or junky it is for THIS EXACT REASON. You can always work out or eat better later, but you can’t do anything to get there if you pass out or worse due to not eating at all.
I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.
Stop backing up my fucking files.
Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.
Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.
I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.
dededos
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
