basically spam

well here we all are :) Don't trust the veracity of anything you may see on my blog!

[pyrobchilling]

Oh shit I just realized I can post the "Gaussian Blur Wizard That Gaussian Blurs You" here

[transgendercyborg-deactivated20]

[zzoupz]

his friend "Motion Blur Mage That Motion Blurs You"

[blastovkatamarinecromancy]

Their long suffering associate, the "Sharpen Cleric that Sharpens you (badly)"

[artastic-foe]

Nooo!!! What have you all unleashed upon us!?!

[l4byr1nthz1]

dont forget the chromatic abberation warlock that chromatically abberates you

[vinnybox]

may I add Mystic Mosiac who turns your quality waaaaaaay down

[theo-window]

What did he do to deserve this

[rain-droplet]

punished by the council

[mothprincess]

many of the ppl who are good at something have practiced copiously. practice copiously!!! you do not have to be naturally talented at something to do it well!!!!

[ayeforscotland]

as someone who’s watched the whole zoe bread vs andy burnham & the manchester city council drama go down live i would find it so fucking funny if THAT GUY then becomes the labour leader. especially since he’s one of the better choices. like, that guy?? the one who got taken down by a single influencer/investigative journalist who walks around with a paper bag over her head to cover her identity??? THAT GUY is one of the best options?????

As much as I want the position of UK Prime Minister to no longer exist, I will accept Zoe becoming PM for the interim instead.

[thehmn]

In Copenhagen you can visit The Round Tower. It used to be an astronomical observatory until light pollution and the vibrations from increased traffic in the streets made it useless for its original purpose.

Today it’s mostly famous for what it looks like on the inside.

It has an equestrian staircase though it’s so smooth it’s really just a gentle slope more than a staircase. It was build like that so our lazy bum king could ride his horse all the way to the top (king not in photo)

And naturally people have also driven cars up the tower

And held a bike race

For a while it was just sort of abandoned by the authorities and became a spiraling marketplace

But today it has been restored and become a tourist spot as well as a popular destination for school trips. And yes, you can still watch the cosmos at the top.

[orpheusilver]

god. shinzo abe got his shit wrecked by a goddamn doohickey but the lethal gunshot wound capital of the world cant aim for shit. what the fuck is the second amendment even for

[kaity--did]

We do not do elf of the shelf but our house does have borrowers. Penny knows that if she leaves a mess out at night the borrowers will take that as a sign that they can have it and take it into the walls to build their homes

This teaches her to out her stuff away at the end of the night or I chuck it out and also sometimes she wakes up and yells "HEY ELEVES I LEFT YOU SOME STUFF!" And it is hilarious

[kaity--did]

Penny: THE ELVES HAVE ONIONTIZED

My mom on FaceTime: ???

Me: I had to explain to Penny how the borrowers are part of the elf union and so they go to North Pole the last 3 weeks of the year so no one ever has to work too much over time and that's why they haven't taken mommy's wrapping paper or scissors or anything else I've left out... shes trying to explain the elf union to you.

Penny: THEY GET PAID EXTRA CAUSE OF THE ONION

[adverbian]

[kaity--did]

I'm in tears 🤣🤣🤣

[puppygirllaika]

at some point in your life you are going to do or say something racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted. Your goal is not perfection, your goal is to be the kind of person that the people you've hurt feel safe being honest with when that happens.

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Thou wouldst not downloadeth a car

[1five1two]

[punk-pins]

apparently this is not common knowledge among punk diy sewists but if you’re sewing patches / doing any sewing that requires pushing a needle through multiple layers of fabric, use a needle grip. they’re little rubber things that have excellent grip on the metal needle so you don’t have to pinch the needle as hard. you will save your fingers soooo much unnecessary pain.

there’s two main types. the basic type is just a little circle of rubber that you fold around your needle, and the fancier type is a little rubber cap for your fingertips. they’re very cheap, under five bucks for the fancier kind and less for the basic, and they last forever. you can buy nice ones from your local craft store or steal them from the quilting section walmart idc. if you’re in a pinch (pun intended) and can’t go out, if you have a non-slip mat under a rug, cut off a little corner and that will work decently. please treat your fingers kindly <3

[earhartsease]

ooh rubber thimbles are back

[higglety]

DO NOT BITE THE NEEDLE

There may come a time when you are trying to pull the needle through a stiff/dense bit of may layers of fabric and your fingers just cand punch hard enough so you feel tempted to use nature’s pliers (your teeth) to get a firmer grip on the needle and pull it theough.

THAT IS THE DEVIL TALKING. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, BITE THE NEEDLE.

Tooth enamel is NOT harder than steel! if you bite down hard enough you WILL chip a tooth! Are you wondering howni know this? can you guess????

Save your teeth, get a rubber thimble. Keep a pair of needle-nosed pliers in your sewing kit. Hell, in a pinch, a vinyl or nitrile glove will work. Just don’t use your teeth!

[some-kind-of-robot]

Favorite trope from real life experiences

[were--ralph]

Legitimately can not stop saying "The Muffin Man" like this

[cpericardium]

hey everyone "I" have something to show "you"

[cpericardium]

[cpericardium]

[oysters-aint-for-me]

there’s a used bookstore in rural western massachusetts (the montague book mill) whose motto is “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find” and i just feel like that summarizes tumblr too

[oysters-aint-for-me]

posts you don’t need on a site you can’t search

[fangirlsovertoomanythings]

The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.

[gardnerhill]

There’s a whole subset of Sherlock Holmes stories that could be labeled Asshole Guys Try to Control Women’s Money.

[three--rings]

Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil.  Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again.  (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)

[waterhobbit]

I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.

The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.

[three--rings]

This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life.  The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.)  There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors.  Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime.  And yes, so much of it is of the personal type. 

[volkswagonblues]

dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.

[fahbee]

One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases.  In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them.  Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:

Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)

Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.

[faejilly]

#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )

[muffinworry]

Let’s not forget the time Holmes helps a young woman who’s being catfished by her own stepfather to steal her inheritance, and when the villain sneers that the law can’t touch him, Holmes grabs a horsewhip out of sheerest chivalry.

[smokingtigerhiddengun]

So, the most canon-accurate iteration of Sherlock Holmes in the last few decades is actually Benoit Blanc….

[plaidos]

it’s pretty hilarious when people say “lmao you obviously don’t know anything about Alison Bechdel if you think she’s a terf” because if anything the exact opposite is true: if you know anything about Alison Bechdel outside of a few comics uploaded to tumblr it is shockingly obvious that she’s a terf. She can’t get through a full sentence without shilling one or the major terf playbooks (Fun Home opens with her self-insert proudly reading Gyn/Ecology for fucks sake), all of her real life feminist heroes are… you guessed it! they’re almost all terfs! Where did she spend her time every year? Why, at the infamously transphobic Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, of course! She only stopped going when they completely cancelled the event (because of how many trans people were protesting it) and still went after trans people she knew asked her not to

“but what about that one comic where she re-examines her bias about bathrooms?” i don’t know how to tell you this, but people can still be transphobes if they think trans people should get the dignity of having somewhere to pee; not every racist (or even every white supremacist) is arguing about how we should bring back racially segregated bathrooms and indeed many modern racists are patting themselves on the back for finding no problem with that. Besides, the punchline of the comic is that trans women are less likely to be stopped in bathrooms than cis lesbians because we conform to gender stereotypes more than them (in her mind) — it’s just one in a long line of comments in Dykes To Watch Out For about how trans people are, at best, “conformist homosexuals”

if you look in the comments section of Dykes To Watch Out For on her website, youll find that it’s absolutely teaming with terfs, many of whom Bechdel was close friends with and mentioned in her blog posts.

the crazy thing about this is how many people are unwilling to hear a single, basic & incredibly apparent criticism against a white cis woman because she represents a “RETVRN” to “the good days of feminism”. anybody throwing a tantrum about trans women pointing out these incredibly obvious politics held by cisgender idols should similarly be considered a terf: if people were genuinely concerned they’d ask for more information rather than immediately shutting down any mention that this could be true.

[plaidos]

me when im not a terf and i signal this by using terf bibles to represent my journey to lesbianism

[taino-ti]

i just don't understand what is so hard for people to wrap their heads around here. even people who got with the program irt JKR are wringing their hands over this, and i find the solution very obvious: if you have previously respected Alison Bechdel as an author or an artist, you respect her as a terf. terf politics are part & parcel with her art-- the curtains aren't just blue here, folks. In this example: She could have literally chosen any other feminist literature to depict her journey with queerness. There are a plethora of cisgender, lesbian authors who write theory and literature who are not terfs. When an artist makes literary reference in this way, they do so for a reason. It can be used as a tool for characterization, an allegorical reference, or even a signal to the audience. Something that might say "Hey, I read those other books too. We're cool." Even here, she calls the experience a "novel fusion between word and deed"-- she herself making it inseparable from the action of lesbianism in her eyes.

As yall can see, the audience is meant to consider the idea of "feminism as the theory, and lesbianism as the practice". When those feminists in question are terfs, what do we think the authors trying to imply here? To Alison Bechdel, the world needs writers like Adrienne Rich & Mary Daly. To Alison Bechdel, terf politics are inherent to lesbianism. If you respect Alison Bechdel as an artist, you respect her as a terf.

[sophie-frm-mars]

Bathtub estrogen

This is a harm reduction post about DIY

I've seen some people recently using the term "bathtub estrogen" as a little joke about the production of DIY estradiols. This is fine by me as a joking term, I get that people are 1) trying to evoke a DIY punkish or prohibition moonshine sort of image and 2) communicating that we are having to turn to much less carefully prepared forms of medicine than cis people can access when we use DIY. However I recently saw a trans woman with a large platform make the joke and then when asked about it sort of waffle around the topic for a bit and then shruggingly say she does think that some estrogen is made in a bathtub in a way that made it pretty clear she doesn't actually know much about the production side of DIY. She also gestured to a global south DIY producer as being the one who was doing this, which I think is just clumsily labelling people overseas as a bit dumb and less clean.

I've been researching the production of DIY HRT for a few years as I think that the overseas supplies of DIY will be the next thing to be cracked down on by the government after all legally prescribed forms of HRT for trans people are shut down. My aim in researching it is to spread the relevant information to reduce harm for DIY users without making anyone's operations obvious to malicious parties. I can't entirely rule out the possiblity that someone very dumb and reckless is producing DIY in a place that is not sufficiently sterile, and this is part of the inherent risk of DIYing. I can however say that anyone who could afford to get the ingredients to produce DIY estradiols categorically has the money to use a professional-grade lab for it.

I would like to be clear here: bathtub estrogen does not exist

The cheapest way for someone to make estradiol is the individual-use case described by Lena from Kiev, mixing a single vial typically for the person who is making it. It is time consuming and inefficient but very cheap, and so people who care less about lab-level standards will likely resort to this method. This method is also the easiest to sterilise, as it's actually surprisingly easy to create a relatively dust-free and sterile environment for an operation this small. The primary risks with this method are from people being quite lazy about cleaning, skipping terminal sterlisation (heating the vial after mixing to kill bacteria) or neglecting to use a filter and introducing some dust, which may cause a granuloma and in the worst case chronic pain in the injection site.

If someone were scaling up from that model, the most effective methods for properly mixing all involve lab equipment, and if we were talking about a quantity of estrogen big enough to fit in a bathtub, the most effective thing to get it properly mixed would still involve transferring the carrier oil, powder and preserving agents into smaller containers for mixing and then using syringes to fill vials. Ideally all of that is done inside of a lamina flow hood or at least still air box setup and if it isn't then basically what is produced at the end is dangerous garbage. I haven't encountered anyone so far who is operating at that quantity who is not using at least a still air box, but realistically anyone who can afford the ingredients for a bathtub full of estrogen can afford a brand new container of a significant size that comes pre-sterilised or new unsterilised containers and the equipment necessary to sterilise them.

Even if someone were to make estrogen in a bathtub "for the bit" they would need to buy a brand new tub (which again would be inexpensive compared to the rest of the setup

Sterilisation is an ongoing struggle for DIY producers. For example anyone who isn't using a professional chemistry lab is probably not using depyrogenated equipment, which requires much higher temperature sterilisation to achieve. However this struggle is one that DIY producers are very deeply invested in and trying to overcome, because DIY hormone producers are trying very hard not to kill the people they make hormones for and suggesting otherwise is harmful to people's overall access.

I am not immune to transfem shitposting, I love the image of us in our long stripey socks cackling away stirring a big cauldron of secret witches' brew, but I would like for people with platforms to be careful not to communicate to the world that this is what is actually happening. I just want people to be a smidge better informed about this to avoid spreading misinformation in the community. All of the major suppliers of DIY that people order from online are either supplying hormones manufactured by pharma companies or has been tested by transharmreduction dot org, a great resource to check out if you want reassurance. Their tests found no contaminants in the majority of vials tested from all sources, and you can read the full breakdown on their website.

It is worth communicating to users of DIY about the real risks involved, of which sterilisation is one, but another that is commonly overlooked is allergy. Pharmaceutical companies use ingredients that generally have the lowest chances of setting off an allergic reaction, and while nobody is allergic to estrogen, the carrier oil which makes up the majority of the actual finished product can sometimes be made from coconut, seed or nut based oils that some people have allergies to. Another important risk for people to look at is safe injection, which is why I and many other organisers are working to normalise trans-focused needle exchanges where information about HRT is available as well as phsyical resources to ensure people are taking their hormones safely.

Soon hopefully there will be more resources available to lots of us so that we can be maximally informed about what is out there, how it's being made and for those interested how to make it safely ourselves. For now the best we can do is avoid saying careless things that could scare people into hopelessness

[promiseimnotacop]

if you are uk based and interested in logistics, legality and safety of diy and or homebrew get yourself and your crew in contact with dandelion bristol. they can even help you and your group weigh up the pros and cons of establishing yourself as an officially harm reduction programme and help you navigate how to gain that status.

[promiseimnotacop]

this is the post that got my blog deleted lol