You know when someone goes through your blog on a mass like-spree for a fandom? I love those like, 19 notifications in a row. it’s like “Ah, I see you’re well into a fixation. God bless.”

nice shoelaces!

Thanks! I stole them from a man

What is this man’s occupation?

Oracle of Delphi

Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.

Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.

Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.

You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.

As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.

Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.

This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.

A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.

my pronouns? oh im a hee/heem. whimper

this headline is sending me into the stratosphere

TRANS WOMEN: HERE'S SOME SHIT YOUR DOCTOR WONT TELL YOU ABOUT HRT

1. Progesterone: not for everyone, but for many people it may increase sex drive and WILL make your boobs bigger. Also effects mood in ways that many find positive (but some find negative). Most doctors won’t prescribe this to you unless you ask. Most trans girls I know swear by it.

2. Injectible estrogen: is more effective than pill or patch form. Get on it if you can bear needles bc you will see more effects more quickly.

3. Estradiol Cypionate: There is currently a shortage of injectible estradiol valerate. There is no shortage of estradiol cypionate. Functionally they do the same shit.

4. Bicalutamide: This is an anti-androgen that has almost none of the side-effects of spironolactone or finasteride. The girls I know who are on it are evangelical about it.

@euryale-dreams

Are there HRT medications that don’t increase blood clot risk? I’m already at risk because of my blood pressure, and my doctor won’t prescribe HRT that increases clot risk while I’m on the medication - and I may never not be on the medication.

Absolutely.

The concerns surrounding venous thromboembolic events as a side-effect of hormone replacement therapy can mostly be traced back to one particular study known as the Women’s Health Initiative. This study was an enormous undertaking which, unfortunately, demonstrated significant adverse effects of the hormone therapies studied. As a result of this the use of hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal cis women was dramatically reduced as the medical community began to question whether or not the therapy caused more harm than good.

Naturally, trans women have been suffering from this fall-out ever since.

What physicians seem to fail to recognize is that the study examined a very specific hormone regimen which was, arguably, outmoded at the time the study was conducted: It examined the use of conjugated equine estrogen (Premarin) with or without the use of medroxyprogesterone acetate. Neither of these drugs is regularly used for the treatment of transgender women.

The estrogen most commonly used to treat transgender women nowadays is 17β-estradiol either in pill form or in the form of a sticky patch that you apply to your skin. Esters of estrogen (e.g. estradiol valerate) are also sometimes used either in a pill form or as an intramuscular injection.

Transdermal estradiol patches are the gold standard when it comes to treating women who are at high risk of a venous thromboembolic event. It simply does not increase the risk of developing a venous thromboembolism. The only thing you should keep in mind is that patches are not always well tolerated because of the lifestyle changes required to keep them from falling off and the fact that they tend to irritate the skin.

Fortunately, oral 17β-estradiol appears to be safe, regardless of the increased risk. At least one large study has shown that the use of oral estradiol in trans women is not associated with venous thromboembolic events. An individual woman’s risk would need to be substantial in order to contraindicate the use of oral estradiol.

For those who have significant risk of venous thromboembolism because they have had a previous thromboembolic event, because they are paralyzed, or because of some other factor it is good to know the relative risk between oral and transdermal estrogen. The latest research indicates that the use of transdermal estrogen lowers your risk of a thromboembolism to 80% of what your risk would be using oral estrogens.

It’s difficult to find hard numbers regarding the relative risk of venous thromboembolic events with regards to hypertension. The best I could find after an hour or so of searching was this study regarding VTE in lung cancer patients. Hypertension increased the risk by a factor of 1.8.

However, to put that into perspective being of African descent increases your relative risk for deep vein thrombosis by a factor of 1.3 when compared to Europeans. Europeans are, themselves, at increased risk when compared to Asians and Pacific Islanders by a considerable margin: a four-fold increase.

I should point out that being ‘male’ is also a risk factor for developing a thromboembolism and hormones are likely to be a contributing factor. Also, menopause is another serious risk factor. Given this information it is likely that the use of transdermal estradiol will lower your risk of thromboembolic events significantly.

As far as the anti-androgen is concerned: The primary use for spironolactone for cisgender people is as an antihypertensive.

Even if the risk of thromboembolism was truly significant with modern hormone replacement therapy it wouldn’t justify what your doctor is doing to you. The fact is that mortality in the transgender community from suicide–caused in part due to the lack of access to hormone therapy–is substantial. The quality of life lost when a trans woman is denied hormone therapy is substantial. The fact that your doctor does not appear to be taking this into consideration when they weigh the risk of thromboembolism against not receiving necessary medical care is deeply concerning.

I strongly recommend that you seek a doctor who is more sensitive to your medical needs as a transgender woman.

Edit: Fixed a minor, but embarrassing, error.

oh wow this is so helpful & good info

Everyone who cares about transfem people please reblog this

this was really fucking helpful

I know a lot of trans women dont have acess to information like this and its very helpful.

sometimes being therian is about connecting with nature and embracing my identity as a beast and sometimes it’s taking a rip and real long thinking about if buying yourself a jingle mouse is worth your own dignity. and it is.

i’m giving my jingle mouse goth eyeliner

caramel frappe give me the strength to clean my room

caramel frappe PLEASE

thank you so much this is the highest compliment

I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of "people also watched" and "for you" into the results. That's not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.

"I despise your wretched little games" perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy

They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!

Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.

If you use Firefox this extension is god send :D

I just love it when you select 'don't recommend this' and suddenly all of your recommendations are the EXACT SAME THING

love that

adore it

i feel like there's a bit of a tendency in leftist circles to do the same thing conservatives do, and pine for an imaginary time period that never existed. except instead of like, ancient rome, or the 50s, a lot of people are weirdly fixated on like...the middle ages? or the hunter-gatherer days? or pirates? like people will try to be anti-capitalist and say "oh medieval peasants had better lives than we do" or "humans used to all live in small communities that took care of each other" and like. idk man id rather have vaccines and the ability to leave your abuser and the right to vote.

it's tempting to think that since things are bad, they must be uniquely bad. but there is no utopia in the past that we need to return to, no garden of eden we were cast out of with the advent of. idk the industrial revolution or whatever. we need to create a better future, not despair about an imagined past.

part of this is also the extremely reductive idea that like, White Men are the root of all evil in the world, and therefor pre-colonial cultures must have all been utopias. in reality, they were neither barbaric nor magically perfect, they were just people with their own flaws and virtues. it turns out people everywhere were and are basically the same. looking for the magic button that will make everything perfect again just distracts from the mundane and hard work of making things better.

why is “report hate speech” not one of the default options with “report spam” instead of “report sexually explicit material”. i’m not a cop so i don’t care if people post hole & pole but i would love if i didn’t have to explain every time why it’s bad when there are nazis

no webcomic will ever be as funny as this strip from oglaf

i know its been added but the follow up is also hilarious

I don’t know why, but this one is always my favorite!

My dad told me a Queen Elizabeth x 9/11 combo joke but idk if it works in English

It goes something like this

Q: Why can’t Americans play chess against the British anymore?

A: Because the British are missing the queen and the Americans are missing two towers (rooks).

To whoever unfollowed me for this: I didn’t even come up with the joke myself, you should unfollow my dad instead.

As a part of the Chess Fandom™️ and also from a colonized country, this was the first image I saw the day the Queen died on my whatsapp chess club group:

So yeah, that’s how the news broke to me.

an incredible update to this post

Just found out my facebook birding group is public because my cousin (a lawyer who is not into birds) casually said to me “saw you couldn’t identify a willet the other day… pretty embarrassing”

man the site that used to be full of people horny for the onceler now getting really hyped about tree law is some serious poetic irony

we've learnt to stop loving idiot capitalist twinks and have sided with The Lorax, that bear of a man was right all along

14 Wind Turbines Aligned In A Row In Nevada

'can i copy your homework?'

'yeah just don't make it obvious'

the like to reblog ratio being almost the same is so funny, people are NOT happy with at this update lmao

characters who are absolutely convinced down to their bones that they are unlovable being subjected to the mortifying ideal of being wholly and unconditionally loved. that’s the good stuff. never get tired of it.