The Blog Speaks For Itself

That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?

I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?

Old folks sound off in the comments

This article about a woman who went on a life changing lesbian cruise.

Rather than beginnings like teenage coming of age stories, a 30's coming of age is about change.

The thing about turning 30 is that you know yourself better, and you are usually just starting to have the means to seek what you want. You have enough life experience to know what you like and don't like. You may have a little disposable income, freedom from family, or finally be treating something like depression.

It isn't like being a teenager where the coming of age is new experiences; it's coming of age in knowing what you want and changing your circumstances. You look around and think, "I want and deserve better than this, and I can do it," and you make the change.

Getting a new job. Going back to school. Dating someone new. Moving somewhere else. Going on a long trip. Trying a new hobby. Or even just dressing differently! There's so many ways this coming of age can occur.

But there are layers to this. Unlike a teenage growing up story where you're writing on a blank slate, a 30's coming of age is turning the page. You might have to do something painful. Quit your job. Break up with someone. Say goodbye to your hometown. There's change. And with that, comes apprehension for the future and grief over the past, but you work through that anyway to seek something better for yourself.

To quote the article above, one of my favorite quotes of all time: "There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.”

Oh and by the way. This doesn't just have to be the plot of a book or fic. This can be your life, too. You can always do better.

Getting older isn't bad. Turning 30 isn't the end of your life. Things can be better once you know yourself more and know what you want. Embrace it.

do you ever just

happy 10 year anniversary to this game changer thank u @joscribbles for your services

can’t believe it’s been 10 years since i learned to always put my name on my art, even if it’s just a shitpost, bc u never know what’s going to blow up

anyway here’s a signed version if you wanna use it to shut up people who are trying to tell you their Opinions

“China produces more rainbow flags than anyone. My nightmare is there is a factory with nearly slave labor, forced to live within the factory complex and get up every morning and have to churn out more and more rainbow tchotchkes.” He says he didn’t create the rainbow flag in order for others to profit off of “rainbow junk”.

He is horrified by some of the things he has seen. He says, “Walking down Castro Street, I can’t pay my rent, but I see rainbow dildos in the shop windows and rainbow keychains, rainbow rings, rainbow candles and so on.” He said it is similar to when the best music ends up as elevator music. He is gratified that the power of the rainbow caught on as rings, but that power can be diluted by over-commercialization.”  

-Gilbert Baker, creator of the Pride Flag

Absolute king shit. This whole interview slams.

“China produces more rainbow flags than anyone. My nightmare is there is a factory with nearly slave labor, forced to live within the factory complex and get up every morning and have to churn out more and more rainbow tchotchkes.” He says he didn’t create the rainbow flag in order for others to profit off of “rainbow junk”.

He is horrified by some of the things he has seen. He says, “Walking down Castro Street, I can’t pay my rent, but I see rainbow dildos in the shop windows and rainbow keychains, rainbow rings, rainbow candles and so on.” He said it is similar to when the best music ends up as elevator music. He is gratified that the power of the rainbow caught on as rings, but that power can be diluted by over-commercialization.”  

-Gilbert Baker, creator of the Pride Flag

Absolute king shit. This whole interview slams.

Do you ever wanna bond with someone so bad you’re like “damn i wish we were knights on a dangerous quest”

Every single one of us who survived abuse knows EXACTLY what happened, here.

Child Protective Services should have opened an investigation in December, to protect this child from his abusers, and they should open one, now.

And remember this: every. single. accusation. is. a. confession.

NASA putting mice in zero-g environments is one of the funniest fucking tests anyone has ever done and I hate having to hand that to them. Put those beasts in a situation.

Reblog and put the species of the nearest stuffed animal

US president shamefully employs child soldiers in his personal guard

They are more than happy to give their life for the emperor.

Gurl when I was a kid I would have been so fucking psyched if I got to do this I would have been the coolest kid in the world holy shit

forget fast fashion in 2023 the only viral trend i wanna see is workers unionizing

Tags that absolutely wrecked me. I think about this all the time. My little boy sleeping right next to me right now and I know that this love and joy will one day be followed by unbearable grief that I'll never be ready for

A Pangolin reacts happily to a human grooming it in places it could not reach or take care of it by itself. There are many benefits to humans having opposable thumbs. 

(Source)

wait are y’all an ocean guy, lake guy, or river guy. i am a river guy tbh

This pride month y’all have got to offset your doomposting with some gay fun you’ve had. And if you haven’t had any gay fun then you need to stop doomposting and work on that. I know we’re descending into fascism and there’s always kink at pride discourse and threats of violence and actual violence and hollow corporate allyship. But I only have so much room for that in my brain. I want to hear about the party you went to or the guy you met at the bar or the girl who strapped you within an inch of your life or hell the new clothes you bought. I as a gay person on the gay people website should NOT have to dread the gay month

For my thirtieth birthday I went to New York, got nearly blackout drunk, took my shirt off and danced at the club surrounded by friends, got hit on by a really hot guy that did porn, went back to his place, fucked all night, stumbled back to my hotel at 8a, then spent two days sleeping off a hangover. It was the best time of my life. I rarely drink or go out or hook up anymore and doing it all anyway was awesome. I love being gay and doing gay things. God that sex was amazing and that guy was so hot. Fuck.

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

Hey OP are you taking new patients. Do you take my insurance. I wish doctors were like you because every doctor my whole life has just told me to lose weight for every problem I've ever had ever and I've had it.

would you guys like to see the greatest beanie baby poem ever written

Some photos of the “food” section of the Pompeii exhibit at the MSI. I found this section especially fascinating because 1. I love food but also 2. People really are just gonna people. That frying pan looks like the cast iron frying pan I cook with. Next to it is a strainer that’s actually very similar to my mesh strainer and if I could buy one like that today, I would. 

That large orange terracotta bowl is two thousand years old and looks like something you could buy in a bougie home goods store today. 

The last photo is recognizable to most people with a tumblr and a passing interest in history as a loaf of Roman bread – it has the classic round shape with scoring across the top and an indentation around the edge where it was baked with a cord wrapped around it. It’s a copy of course, but it’s a resin cast of an actual loaf of bread recovered from Pompeii. As a bread baker myself I spent quite a while studying it. 

[ID: Three photos; top, a display of cookware including a modern-looking cast-iron skillet, a small, deep strainer with a long handle, and an angular, deep cooking pot. Lower left, a bright orange bowl with a flat bottom, high rim, and decorative printing on the outside; it has been cleaned and shines with a high red burnish. Lower right, the bread loaf appears as a round black disc with score marks around the edge and on the top.]

The history books always want to focus on the battles and politics, but every era of history was made up of everyday people trying to live their everyday lives.