May You Live In Interesting Times...

... And may you find what you are looking for.

[thebibliosphere]

There’s been a surge in online “medical professionals,” on TikTok and Instagram proclaiming that disorders like MCAS, POTS, EDS, etc, might actually be superpowers because they “let people sense toxins in the air,” that our ancient ancestors relied on.

What toxins? Never specified.

Relied upon how? Never elaborated.

Which I find is an odd way to describe allergic reactions to mold in your environment.

Like I get it. I’ve joked that back in the day, I’d be the village witch telling people not to settle the village so close to the willow trees because willow trees are notorious for causing houses built too close to them to rot and mold (not to mention the insects they can attract and the subsequent bacterial and viral illnesses that may follow) and I can seemingly smell mold a hell of a lot quicker than people without MCAS, but it’s not actually a superpower.

I didn’t “sense” shit. My throat closes up.

It’s not magic or “women’s intuition” or however the fuck some of them are phrasing it.

It’s a medical condition, one that is very hard to treat and one that doesn’t react solely to “toxins.” I’m allergic to my own god damn hormones, for Christ’s sake.

And while my genes have clearly made it this far, I have to imagine that most of my ancestors with the same gene defects just fucking died owed to the lack of auto-injector epinephrine and the countless other modern drugs that keep me alive.

(“Oh, but back in the day we were exposed to less toxins.” The Tudors used lead face paint to cover pockmarks. I’m going to go ahead and press X to doubt on that one. People like me just died. That’s why you didn’t hear so much about them.)

And maybe I’m being a hypocrite, but part of me sincerely feels like it’s one thing for people with the illness to joke about being the canaries in the coal mines of certain environments that could eventually make other people sick, but it’s another for “medical professionals” to try to turn around and label it a superpower when people are dying trying to access testing and care, and being labeled as hysterical and attention seeking in the interim.

But don’t worry, girly-pop, maybe if we do a rebrand and give your suffering some sort of purpose, maybe the temporarily abled will stop trying to kill you through malicious neglect.

That’s worked great for Autism and ADHD communities, right? …. Right?

[thebibliosphere]

“The divine feminine,” I mutter to myself at 12:49am as I roll over in bed and subsequently dislocate both my hip and my opposite shoulder because my connective tissue has the structural integrity of a wet paper bag.

[tanely]

The fact that they all look so tired, are crying or look exhausted watching the fireworks.

Something supposed to be joyous to celebrate freedom. But they've just had one of the worst day of their lives, Jesse is still locked up.

No one feels free.

[nuffnotsaid]

World's most dysfunctional polycule

[haruki-stars]

them

[dvandom]

(For those not familiar with it, the middle logo is for DownDetector.)

[creekfiend]

there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again

which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo

[creekfiend]

someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.

[whetstonefires]

you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.

and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.

the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.

[creekfiend]

oooo yes absolutely!

[knightswives]

i think you guys would have a better time watching this show if you watched it through the lens of knowing robby views langdon and mohan as his first bad pancake children and the pittlings (mel, santos, javadi, whitaker) as his second family that he’s gonna be a better father to

[pitviperofdoom]

What's fucked is that the warrior cats clans have little or no interdependence to speak of, which means that diplomacy is almost completely toothless when there's nothing the clans can offer or withhold from each other.

In real life if, say, one country does something shitty to another country, there are at least some things that can be done before escalating to military action, ways to mete out consequences without going to war: lawsuits, trade sanctions, travel restrictions, and so on. But the clans don't trade with each other, they rarely collaborate outside of extreme circumstances, and borders are permanently closed by default, so the only real way to retaliate at all is to escalate to violence. And even in quote-unquote peacetime, except in the aforementioned extreme circumstances, no clan ever really benefits from the existence of the other clans; not only are there no systems in place for sharing resources or skills, most characters in-universe would react with suspicion or confusion to the idea that they even should. The ideal situation in the warrior cats world is one where the clans don't interact at all outside of monthly Gatherings. This cat society is built in such a way that peace is synonymous with isolation. Travel between clans is impossible because every adult member of each clan is an active member of that clan's military unless they're on maternity leave or retired, which makes every crossing of a border an automatic act of aggression. Warrior Cats is the story of four military dictatorships shakily coexisting for months at a time until something inevitably raises tension and hostilities again, and both the characters and the narrative act outraged over idea that maybe they should be less of a military dictatorship.

[muffinlance]

the authentic childern-at-recess-with-other-packs-of-children experience. the author understood her audience.

[64mpg]

what do you mean my childhood affected me

[64mpg]

i have terrible news

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

[suspiciouslynotapastor]

Struggling to put into words how big this is.

[lydiahosek]

Attempt to get copyright on wholly AI-generated art gunned down by US Supreme Court

As game developers continue to argue about the value of generative AI tools, some genAI inventors are trying to claim for copyright on their

"Thaler's lawyers complain that if the Copyright Office's reign of terror continues unchecked, it 'will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years.'"

GOOD.

[supportingwomenswrongs]

McKay: *extending the olive branch that she's 9 years sober*

Langdon: .....I love you

[whitakers-intern]

my god langdon was so alone. mckay allowed him to look into his future. he could not believe his eyes.

[tonysopranoproskater69420]

lying in front of the street cleaner

[nic0las-uncaged]

did the street cleaner believe you?

[tonysopranoproskater69420]

it is like talking to a fucking genie with you people

[lesbinewren]

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email

[lesbinewren]

“ikr i only use it for-“ whatever you use chatgpt for is also embarrassing. you do not need the plagiarism machine that lies and evaporates water for anything actually

[cuuno-moved]

its unreal how all of my favorite characters have exactly the same traits and hobbies and diagnoses as me

[technicalzombie]

oh, have you been tricked into loving yourself?

[cuuno-moved]

oh my fucking god is that what just happened

[byjove]

One of my best friends growing up was the daughter of a single mother and her mother started saying ‘boobs of steel’ instead of ‘balls of steel’ after escaping her abusive husband and the saying spread to my friend and I so when someone is very brave I think damn, they have boobs of steel. I actually like it a lot more than the original phrase because everyone has boobs (except for those who have had a radical mastectomy) and it calls to mind the image of someone in a shiny steel armor breastplate instead of two useless steel balls bouncing around, which is not very inspiring. Codpiece of steel, maybe but steel balls sound like a logistical nightmare.

[kawareo]

Tumblr is like our elderly dog and when she makes an especially scary cough we apparently think "oh god it's the big one"

[kawareo]

The tumblr scare of 2026

[thelionofthenorth]

[waterandsilver]

crazy how the printer is the only piece of tech that acts up like that almost every day of its life. and we just accept it

[waterandsilver]

i don't think i've ever met a printer that actually wanted to be a printer. i think most printers have dreams of being on the stage

[in-the-drowning-deep]

I met a printer early in my IT career that did not want to be a printer. it sat in a school reprographics room, sullenly chewing any job it was fed - if it deigned to notice them at all.

then one day, a miracle occurred. an exhausted physics teacher, instead of punching in 12 for the number of copies she wanted of the 30-page booklet she had made for her A-level physics class, punched in 1200.

and that printer came to life. this print job was its moment, its magnum opus! it WOULD NOT be parted from it, no matter what we did, until we physically unplugged it from the wall, by which time it had printed almost 200 copies.

moral of the story: no printer wants to be a printer, unless you also do not want it to be a printer for a bit.

[netherworldpost]

printers do not want to be printers because they want to be problems

[the-haiku-bot]

printers do not want

to be printers because they

want to be problems

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[youre-only-gay-once]

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

[purgaytorysupremacy]

if you’re wondering why spellcheck and grammar check is worse now, it’s because they replaced it with AI! 🥰

now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.

ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!

people make the same spelling and grammar mistakes so often, AI thinks that’s the way you say it because it is a PATTERN DETECTOR and cannot THINK let alone use language.

[youre-only-gay-once]

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"