::walks funny and carries a big stick:: @thischick25 - Tumblr Blog

I don't want to just disappear the way some people do online, so I'm making this post.

Short story: I'm dying--I have a year at best.

In September of last year, I was diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer, and I'd started chemo with high hopes for effective treatment and eventual recovery (as did the doctors, because I am "so young"). Halfway through chemo, things looked promising, and although there were fast-growing tumors in my pelvis, they'd shrunk by about half after three cycles of treatment. In April, the tumors began to outpace the treatment. The cancer has grown in such a way as to form malignant bowel obstructions that bring my digestive system to a stop, and I'm currently being fed almost completely by IV. We haven't really found a way that I can eat solid food that doesn't eventually cause intense pain.

The oncologist, GI, and radiotherapy teams have informed me that the tumors in my abdomen are aggressive to the point of being inoperable, and even if the radiation/chemo combo gets them under control that that may only extend my life another few months.

There *will* be more damage to my intestines from the radiation, which will draw things down to a point where we'll have to decide if suffering the treatment is worth it or whether I want to actually *live* the last time I have.

To all the friends and mutuals I've made here: I've enjoyed my time sharing and learning cool things with you. It is no exaggeration to say that tumblr changed my life in many ways.

Please take care of yourselves. This post isn't goodbye; I'll stay here as long as I can, and hopefully, my queue will hold my memory for a little bit after, as I have some far-flung dates in that guy. I'll be leaving the keys to my account to my sister (who is a tumblr ex-native) to make the final announcement after I'm gone.

#cw death mention #cw cancer

docholligay

Doc, what are the top five items food banks LOVE to receive? I'm doing a collection soon and want to ask for specifics.

MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY

That aside.

I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome.

1) Canned chicken and beef

looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins.

2) Fancy nut butters

Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)

3) Canned or packaged tuna

You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend.

4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like)

Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry.

5) Shelf-stable juice

This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives.

kesonafyren

But seriously, give money

And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done

pennie-dreadful

Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.

kyraneko

collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done .

hint: the point should be to help people.

ovenroastedtwerkey

Also, please consider setting this as a scheduled post for June/July. A lot of food insecure families with children rely on school lunch to make ends meet, and that’s obviously not an option during summer vacation. Lots of people give during November and December, but summer is a lean time for food banks. Which is a shame, cuz fresh produce is at a boom during that time of year, so not only would summer donations boost how many people the food banks can help, it would boost the quality of the help they provide.

prismatic-bell

If you want to do a cash drive but also exploit the dopamine hit people get from dropping their can of garbanzo beans into the box, my middle school did something that was SHOCKINGLY effective:

A penny drive.

(DuckDuckGo tells me a penny in 1999 would be worth two cents in 2023, but given how much food prices have gone up, I’d make this a dime drive in the modern day.)

Here’s how it works.

Every classroom got a gallon water jug. You brought in your pennies from home and put them in the jug. Every penny equaled one point, and at the end of a set time period, the classroom with the most points won a pizza party. All the funds were then donated.

BUT.

You will notice I didn’t say the class with the most pennies. I said the class with the most POINTS.

And that is because you could sabotage other classrooms by putting other denominations in their jugs. The number of pennies equal to the cent amount of those denominations would then be deducted from the penny total (so for example a nickel would lose you five points). I saw one kid absolutely TANK some of the eighth-graders by dropping a five-dollar bill in their jug, which they then had to make up in pennies before they could make any further progress.

(If you’re wondering who rolled all those pennies: it was me. Literally it was me, I volunteered because I’m an autistic weirdo who thinks counting change is fun and it got me out of class. The office ladies helped too.)

To modify this for adults, consider having it be one work shift versus another. Or there are multiple jars split between options for a vote and you get to vote by putting your change in a jar. And you MUST include the sabotage—for one it makes it more like a game, which humans love. And for another, if you’re asking for quarter donations but someone really wants to tank another group, they’re gonna whip out a twenty dollar bill. It generates higher donations because people want to win by nature.

You can ABSOLUTELY make cash drives sexy. You’ve just got to know how.

ysalamir

Carrie Fisher tweets // Star Wars

lizawithazed

this is the single greatest one of these ever made

fyeahgothicromance

Happy May the 4th!!!

egax

I have been saving this since last year. Happy Earth Day everyone.

freefitty

literally has been in my queue for an entire year. you just can’t miss reblogging.

manypersons

gotta queue this for next year too

reallyreallyreallytrying

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

#heritage post #a classic #happy birthday to this post

kindaokmemes

It’s that time of the year again :)

pleasespellchimerical

Happy honk!

m1ssjess

readblogdescriptionandleave

This feels appropriate for this blog

twerklina

aflo

institutionalized-gaming

October can’t come soon enough

IT IS AUGUST

its-an-ear-hat-john

This has been in my likes since last year. It is time.

bedhead-queen

This is the 21st night of September skeleton. He only appears once a year.

everythingfox

A singer

#birb #cute animals #21st night of september #have some happy

vaspider

You mentioned in a post on my dash that you were old enough to experience real seasons unaltered by climate change. What was that like?

I was young, so it feels like something I read in a book sometimes. I remember how chilly it could get at night in the summer, which doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.

That's actually the thing that seems to keep popping back up in my mind - that like, it was really chilly in the mornings in summer even, and it would warm up, and it seems to just kind of... stay warm all the time.

I dunno. The seasons were more distinct, there were bigger temperature swings on individual days, and like... weather was more predictable on a seasonal basis, if not on a daily basis.

Like... the kind of seasons you read about in Olde Tyme Books? They... were real things. We didn't always have snow on Winter Break, but we had a pretty predictable number of snow days?

And it almost feels silly to talk about it. "What were normal seasons like, Uncle Spider?"

But yeah.

afishtrap

Watch seasonal-based movies made before about 1975 -- ones set around Easter, or Halloween, or New Year’s -- and pay attention to what people are wearing. Late October? It got cold when the sun went down, like ‘put on a jacket’ cold and I’m not talking northern US, I’m talking Georgia.

Today (Aug 18) is only a week before the start of most public schools in the US. A week from now? Back then, it’d already be chilly in the morning, enough to need a windbreaker on the way to school. By midday it would’ve warmed up, but even in Georgia the mornings had a nip to them by end of August, start of September.

And in northern Virginia, not sure about now, but the schools used to plan for ten snow days a year. I recall one year we had eleven days off thanks to a foot or so of fresh snow every two or three days. Even in years we didn’t use all the snow days, there were still frequent late openings and early closings. It wasn’t all that uncommon for summer vacation to start a week later, because those days had to be made up, somewhere.

Locally, this summer has (despite the terrible heat elsewhere in the US) been a strange bit of callback to my childhood. Excepting two nights all summer, every night it’s dropped to 72F at the highest, but most often in the 60s -- with the caveat that it sometimes took half the night to get there. It’s not a sharp drop like I remember, as a child. But at least it has been cool enough to leave the windows open and a fan on -- and that’s the kind of summer I grew up with, in Alabama and Georgia (regions significantly warmer, otherwise, than the mid-atlantic where I live now).

That sharp drop was the reason my dad installed a whole-house fan every place we lived: because the evening air would legitimately drop a good 5-10 degrees as the sun set. Enough to open the windows, run the fan, and the whole house would cool right down by dinnertime.

Now? If we go by last summer, even having a house set up perfectly (central open staircase) for a whole-house fan, what’s the point if the temperature stays just as high after the sun goes down, as it was before?

moiracolleenodell

Yeah, I remember having to wear a coat over my Halloween costume (and being seriously angry about it, because what’s the point of the costume if no one can see it?) and having the windows open in the evenings. Now I don’t dare leave the windows open overnight because it gets so hot so fast in the morning.

websurfingspider

I'm in the pacific northwest and while we've had some really freaky weather this year in particular (like, February levels of cold happening in June levels of freaky), overall it has been getting hotter and hotter every year. And yeah, it doesn't really cool down in the evenings in summer anymore. It can be 2 in the morning and still too hot to sleep, and it starts getting unbearably hot before the sun is even all the way risen.

vaspider

Yeah it was 85 degrees at midnight on Tuesday in Portland this week.

girl-with-the-most-cake

I grew up in Houston in the 1980s.

I was on the swim team and in June, the pool would be chilly at 8am. And we’d freeze at swim meets once the sun went down. July was much hotter. July and August were the only times we’d see it over 100 and those were rare enough that I wasn’t allowed to play outside.

In the winter, freezes were rare and never lasted long. That’s not nostalgia—I remember some years we wouldn’t buy heavy coats.

The weather IS worse. Hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.

vaspider

Oh yeah. It WAS cold at swim practice in the morning, wasn't it? I was in MD when I was little, but it was like... it was chilly. You really had to stretch and warm up so you didn't hurt yourself from the cold water.

thatdisasterauthor

It's still regularly hitting the 90s and even 100s where I'm at. This IS a more deserty area of the state than some others, but it's still not normal for it to stay this hot this long.

I remember having regular WEATHER as a kid. By that I mean sometimes it just rained, and sometimes it just snowed. It wasn't all big storms. We didn't constantly track (and break) records of "when" and "how much."

zjofierose

yeah it wasn’t that big storms didn’t happen - i’m from the midwest, and they certainly did - but there was a predictability to the rhythm of them that feels lost now? i feel like every season anymore i’m wondering will this be a hot winter or is it going to rain at all this spring when it used to be pretty solidly predictable when the leaves would change, when the first snows would hit, when you’d get the spring storms, etc etc. obviously there was always the occasional exceptional storm or season, but… not like now.

beepbeepsan

Do you ever see a bit of historical record from a regular person, like a diary from someone whose name never would have been remembered if the pages hadn't happened to be preserved? And you get a glimpse into their lives as they talk about something bigger than themselves, something huge they can't change, can only experience as its symptoms and consequences blow their way...

That's what this post feels like. First-hand accounts of the last generations to know the world before its twenty-first century climate tipping point. It's eerie.

vaspider

That's part of the reason I started keeping a physical journal again, to be honest.

elfwreck

I live in the SF Bay Area. It's comfortable, pretty much year round. The joke is, other places get weather; we have climate.

When I was young, every six or seven years, it got cold enough to snow, for like, an hour or two. Little tiny white specks that melted when they hit the sidewalk. Maaaaaybe enough to have a light dusting on the grass, if it was in the shade. It didn't last; we didn't get "inches" of snow, or even "half-inches" of snow. We got a flurry of flakes in the air. Sometimes. Twice a decade, maybe.

Move forward a few years.

My children, in their 20s, have never seen frost on the grass.

I'm sure it still happens sometime... but we don't have a yard, and we don't go out when it's cold. So of course they've never seen frost, even at a neighbor's house or in front of a restaurant or whatever, because we're never out walking around before 9am in the coldest part of winter.

When you can maybe, sometimes, every year or two, for a few minutes, see your breath.

That's the difference. In my youth, in the 70s and 80s: Snow was a rarity, an exotic thing that happened just enough that I could imagine what actual snowfall was like. (I have visited places that get real snow.)

In my children's youth and adult lives - in the 2000s and later - they have no memory of breathing out in winter and seeing the fog appear in front of their faces.

It may have happened, once or twice, but so rarely and over so soon that they don't remember it.

...I even remember a turning point.

I was pregnant with my first child, in 1995, and visiting the women's circle I was part of at the time, planning for our next event. We were outside, in the back yard, and it started to rain. Not a lot - not even enough to drive us indoors, but enough to move from the yard to the porch. It stopped in less than an hour.

And my hostess said, "It's raining? In AUGUST?"

I had not paid enough attention to the seasons (climate, not weather, remember?) to have noticed when "rainy season" started. But I remembered her saying that whenever that was, it wasn't August.

...I have noticed rain in August every year since.

lauravanarendonkbaugh

This is not my personal story (though I certainly remember different weather from my own youth). This is a secondhand story I heard directly.

I was at a "native village" in Alaska, an educational campus where different kinds of Alaskan Native buildings had been brought to a more accessible area than the bush, and representatives of indigenous peoples could show visitors around and explain things. It's the kind of thing that could be really awkward if done poorly or fascinating if done well, and it was done well. I talked with people younger than me who still collected sea bird eggs at home because commercial eggs weren't available out that remote, and people older than me who could describe changes since Alaska became a state. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

One woman was showing their house style from her own subculture, which featured a rooftop door (much of the house was underground for insulation). She was talking about house maintenance, not climate politics, but she mentioned that when she was young they would have to keep the door clear constantly because there could be five feet (1.5m)of snow on it. Today, though, it doesn't snow very often in her village.

We asked. Yes, within her lifetime (and she's not that old! Maybe in her 50s or 60s), the pattern had shifted from an expected five feet of accumulation to snow being rare.

Alaska, because of its location, shows climate change faster and more dramatically than the American Midwest. Our own family vacation photos show MILES of glacier retreat just between visits.

I truly don't understand climate deniers. The evidence is not hard to see. It's a willful denial.

feefal

Eukaryotic cell gang!! We love women in STEM.

The organelles of the cells have been translated into human anatomy, so the nucleus is the brain, the vacuole function as the lungs, and the mitochondria is the heart since it’s the… you already know, I don’t have to say it ;)

Greetings! Pardon me please for being this direct! 🙏 My little kitty needs your help as we are trying to raise some funds for her dental needs, I know times are tough but please if you have some time to spare, kindly boost/share the post I pinned for her. It would be so meaningful to me as I’m hoping it would reach more people.. please 💔🙏 praying you’d consider, and pls kindly send me a msg for a response or answer my ask privately so I could atleast thank you for doing us a favor! Wishing you good health and peace! 🫶🏽

13-hour-old account? Sad pet story begging post? Hi scammer!

#scam post

psychotic-gerard

“rap is the worst music genre” “no actually it’s soul” “no actually it’s jazz” “no actually it’s ska” “no actually it’s r&b” hey guys do you notice a common denominator in the genres you hate or is it just me

psychotic-gerard

genres people have said are the worst in response to this (including the deleted comment section)

funk, house, reggae, disco, gospel, bluesgrass, dubstep, country.

introspection done: zero

netherator

FYI house is mostly german, and country is derived from bluegrass which is mountainy white music derived from irish music. And Dudubstep is from a few south Londoner teens.

margbarcisforever

you think the banjo came from ireland you dumb mother fucker?

devoid-of-love

as someone super into dance music and who actually puts a lot of effort into learning about the music i listen to, people like netherator genuinely infuriate me

house started and was popularized in clubs in chicago. the djs and clubbers were largely queer black men. house takes a ton of inspiration from disco, jazz, and dub

dubstep is a fusion genre of dub and 2-step garage, both of which were pioneered by poc artists. "south londoner teens" erases all of the history that sculpted the genre and culture around it. the "dubstep" netherator is probably talking about is probably actually "brostep" which was popularized by skrillex (please watch "all my homies hate skrillex" by timbah.on.toast)

we would not have dance music without poc artists