sometimes I randomly think about the time a girl posted in this girls only Facebook group I’m in telling everyone how she broke up with her boyfriend and he lied saying that he lost the spare key she gave him, only to then break into her apartment when she wasn’t home and steal the cat they’d adopted while they were together, but then he denied having done this and she didn’t really have proof that he took the cat since he wouldn’t let her come into his place and look for it. And then another girl saw this post and knew her ex-boyfriend, and she was like “girl. I used to hook up with your mans back in xxxx and I still have his number. If you want, I’ll hit him up and get him to invite me back to his place and see if your cat’s there.” And the OP was like “bet.”

So this woman hit up homie dog, asked him out for drinks, went home with him, slept with him, and then woke up in the middle of the night and TOOK THE CAT. Like she had only said that she would confirm if the cat was there but then she took it upon herself to steal this woman’s cat back. Like she full on Trojan horsed this man and then hit up homegirl like “I got the goods. Where you wanna meet.” And then the two of them posted a photo of them together with the cat to the group.

And I just think women supporting women is so beautiful.

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

the irish prime minister gave biden a "shamrock bowl" but as far as i can tell this isnt like... a thing? they have sprigs of clover in their suits? this seems insane

proud irish tradition of fucking with americans about irish tradition

kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.

there are actually good discussions to be had about how alienated many americans are from food production (hi hello that's what my only popular post is about), but the real solution to this problem is to protect agricultural workers, citizens or not. ban child labor in its entirety. punish corporations and farm owners that abuse and poison their workers. reform the immigration process so that these people aren't barred from legal protection and recourse.

agricultural workers have been exploited since the dawn of civilization, but the US in specific has been doing this since slavery, and it evolved in the 30s when FDR's labor laws excluded them specifically because most agricultural workers at the time were black. now it's mostly latino immigrants.

food doesn't fucking pick or slaughter itself. but citizens aren't going to take these jobs when the entire industry is rife with abuse - both legal and illegal - and horrific wages and working conditions.

Stalin's USSR = most woke nation to ever exist. You heard it here first, folks.

Imagine, for a moment, trying to figure out what the fuck is being measured on a scale where the USSR is a 10 and Portland, Oregon is an 8 without the excruciating knowledge of the hyperspecific neuroses of fascists over the past decade

This is why I always recommend having an emergency cheese. Mine is parmesan.

wonder woman out here still saving lives

I… I can’t believe this joke is real and came out of the party popper my sister just opened.

Holding the actual joke in my hand again and still can’t believe it’s real.

A joke around being trans that isn’t offensive. Hell yeah.

As a medical professional and a medically complicated human this is very important to me

That’s not wrong.

These are both true

Both are very very true.

These are both true, but more importantly, not mutually exclusive!

Say a patient comes in with chest pain. First time they’ve ever had chest pain. They say they googled it, and clearly they have cancer now!

…no. That’s the first example.

But say a patient has chest pain, they’ve had chest pain for 10 years, every previous doctor has checked for all the obvious causes, and nothing changes.

That’s a completely different scenario. In the first example, the patient doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The condition is new, their knowledge is limited. That’s why we have doctors. But in the second example, the patient is the expert, and the doctor is the one who’s new to the situation. The patient has done all this before, and is very familiar with the pain (condition, etc.) that they have. The doctor is not the one with 10 years of experience. They need to listen, because the patient actually has something they don’t know to add to the conversation.

These two things are not mutually exclusive, they are not the same scenario, and both doctors and patients (but mostly doctors) need to learn to tell the difference and know when to talk, and when to listen.

This is also *highly* relevant to anti-vaxers.

There is a reason that the entire section on dysthymia in my psychology textbooks is basically “this person has been living with this for years longer than you will ever have researched it. help them facilitate their own coping strategies.”

*reaches through your screen and shakes you by the shoulders*

accessibility goes beyond what the government decides is accessible!

disability is more than what the government decides is disabled!

*shakes Americans harder* the ADA is not enough and should not be the stopping point for accessible advocacy!

I'm happy this struck a cord because it's deeply frustrating as a (mostly) ambulatory disabled person that my other disabled comrades had to drag themselves up the capitol steps without their mobility aids to get the ADA passed, which was hopefully meant to be a bare minimum of recognition of a systemic problem and hopefully reflect new access that mirrors what ambulatory able-bodied people can access. This was never the case and has been weaponized against us american disabled people of all demographics to insinuate that we already have equal access. Now we have fun things like "ADA entrances" and "ADA accessible" as a selling point for events and hotels and the like.

I can't use the bathroom in over 50% of public places due to lack of sanitary features for my medical device. The ADA does not require hooks and/or shelving for medical devices, only that if hooks are offered they be at a level accessible by little people and wheelchair users.

And when I do have access to an accessible bathroom/stall, it's usually the only stall large enough to accommodate mobility devices like wheelchairs, which makes me weary of taking space from someone else. I bring an S hook (thank you followers for the rec) to make my own adaptations to stalls in a pinch. This usually isn't an option for people who require larger hooks to hang their mobility aids. Most accessible stalls also lack sinks as well, so we still have to handle our medical devices with soiled hands.

July is Disability Pride Month. I'd love to recommend starting with An Oral History of the Capitol Crawl if you'd like to learn a little more about The Capitol Crawl itself and the organization behind it, ADAPT. Despite the shortcomings of the ADA, I don't want to downplay the blood, sweat, and tears that disabled activists put into getting the act passed. We wouldn't have what we have today without them.

Other disabled people feel free to chime in about your experiences, especially in other countries. I can only speak from my experiences as a us american.

By Gemma Correll.

This really does say it all.

BIG fucking mood

they seem to not like it when we doubt their credibility so i think the best thing to do now is further trash the reputation of an illegitimate SCOTUS. time to keep crossing that line. attending law school doesn’t mean you can’t have a shit take on something

that crunchy vibe that 70s/80s movies have that modern movies simply cannot capture... that kind of quiet empty vibe to em that can be played for either bleakness or a peaceful energy... why do all modern movies (even the great and pretty ones) feel overproduced after watching an older film. what is it I can't put my finger on it but it's there I can feel it

8. Pacing.

This is the biggest thing, and it's not even something most people will even realize they're noticing. Movies became more uniform in their structure, as hollywood found the "formula" for a hit movie. It means you lose quiet, peaceful scenes that don't fit into the pattern. That uniformity has done more to hurt the emotional tone of films than any visual effects tricks.

In 2005, Blake Snyder released a book: Save the Cat! It discussed movie "beats" and and gave an outline for movie pacing.

That outline has been followed like it's religious dogma for the majority of Hollywood movies ever since. It's enough that you can literally count the minutes in movies and say "ok, here comes the antagonist's big move."

it’s not just pacing but also average shot length (sometimes shortened to “ASL,” but not to be confused with american sign language.) a movie that only cuts every 12 seconds is gonna feel drastically different from a movie that cuts every 2.5 seconds.

As someone who's been watching a whole lot of 1970s horror movies lately alongside 2000s remakes, can confirm all of the above.

Never gonna know them, but shoutout to the healthcare workers who are breaking the law to help their patients get life-saving care. I'll never see an article about you because knowing you would risk everything including jail time. Nurses who lie on medical records so their patients can get abortions. Doctors making up shit so their patients can have HRT.

Wherever you are, you are keeping your promise to help your patient.

My mom is dead so she can’t get in trouble for this.

Many years ago when she was still healthy enough to work, she was the manager at one of those select-your-own-tests labs. They didn’t take insurance, which meant they had no insurance department, which meant it was actually cheaper sometimes than even getting the same test elsewhere WITH insurance, so her clientele often came in with doctor’s orders, and it is about one such patient I’m about to tell you. He was four years old and had leukemia.

At 3am the day my mom did his labs, she got a stat call. “Stat call” means “drop everything, contact the doctor, these numbers are outside the acceptable range and urgency is required.” She woke me to drive her to the lab so she could try to get in touch with the doctor on the way and say “I live five minutes from the lab I want you on the phone as soon as I get those numbers from my email.”

The doctor did not pick up.

Standard protocol at this point is to wait 20 minutes and call again, repeat until you get an answer.

My mom was not allowed to interpret lab numbers. She didn’t have the official credentials. But she was a medical assistant and had self-taught a lot of medicine to make herself a better MA (call it unofficial continuing education), and she took one look at this little boy’s numbers, and she had to make a judgement call. That call ended up being “Mrs. X, this is Catie from [lab name]. I received a stat call for your son and can’t reach the doctor. I’m not legally allowed to interpret these numbers for you. But pick an ER, I will call them and send the numbers and have them waiting for you. Go NOW. Don’t wait. I cannot stress enough how urgent it is that you GO RIGHT NOW.”

Had she chosen law over life, that little boy would have been dead by morning.

Instead she risked years in prison and being stripped of her license to practice. She got cupcakes and a thank-you card instead. As far as I know, the boy went on to make a full recovery.

When I think of my mom, this is what I want her to be remembered for. Nobody could ever know while she was alive. I want everyone to know now.

(And if you’re a 14-year-old on this website in 2023, and this sounds eerily corroborative to a story your mom has told you, and you grew up in Arizona, hi. My mom would love to meet you if she was still alive. But in her absence, will you tell me how you’re doing? I’ll tell her the next time I get up to her grave. She’d like to know.)

my dad was an infectious disease doctor from the early 80s till his death in 2012—spent a good 6 years really deep in early HIV research, took part in the studies that isolated some of the key gene signifiers, but he left research in the mid-90s to go into private practice. he worked mostly with AIDS patients, but also worked through arduous diagnoses with patients other doctors ditched and handled a lot of hepatitis. the majority of these patients didn’t have insurance, and more than a few were homeless, so—without anyone knowing at all, his wife included—my dad very quietly started fudging paperwork and pinching meds from various pharmaceutical reps. he gave patients money for expensive tests, funded labs, paid for meds he couldn’t get a hold of illicitly—all under the table, and all far outside the realm of his own bank account. when he died, he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and we had absolutely no fucking idea how or why until my stepmom uncovered some documents he’d squirrelled away.

i was googling him about a year ago in a weird bout of midnight grief and i found a post in the backwaters of the internet, a review of my dad from one of his patients. it had been posted 9 months after he died, and the patient had entered remission and hadn’t heard about his death—just knew that he’d gone quiet, stopped checking in like he’d been doing. the review was deeply emotional, weighted with gratitude for the “extraordinary lengths dr. [lastname] went to in the service of one messed up vet.” he said he wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for my dad, and honestly i can’t imagine how many other people he kept around like that, taking on this mind-boggling mountain of debt and possible felony charges and grounds for license revocations and so many chances for medical malpractice charges.

cheers to you, dad, and to everyone else going the thousand extra miles for the people our systems all leave behind.

"This one's been a bit under the radar, but the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are moving ahead with plans to force Catholic hospitals to refuse any sort of gender affirming care, which would include maintenance doses of hormone therapy for emergency patients such as stroke victims who were unlucky enough to be brought to a Catholic hospital."

Why do medical boards still license doctors who won’t provide care?

This is horrific. This is going to harm patients. If they go through with this, people will die, but given how the church treats sexual assault survivors, they don't even care.

Any doctor who follows this directive should be stripped of their license. No, I'm not kidding.

I am morally opposed to antivaxxers. I cannot just vaccinate a patient without their consent. I can't give someone chemo without their consent even though I know they'll die without it. I cannot take organs from a dead person without their prior consent, even if those organs are perfectly good!

Where does this end? "Oh this woman has had five kids with five different men, so we won't provide neonatal care." "This person was gay and has HIV so we won't give them antivirals." "This person is indigenous, so we don't have to treat them until they accept our religion." Oh, wait! They've already done that last one!

Man, fuck the Catholic Church for this.

This Restaurant Offers Food For Free If You Can’t Afford It

Just adding: that’s an Islam flag there and when I worked for a semester at a Mosque as part of a cultural exchange, the Imam told me that if there are hungry people within walking distance, then they are failing their duties.

I carry that with me always. Feed your neighbours.

If I may, I must make the gentle request that people consult Wikipedia for basic information about anything.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but more and more people coming to me saying they can’t find info about [noun], when googling it yields its Wikipedia entry on the first page.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll gladly say it again: You can trust Wikipedia for general information. The reason why it’s unreliable for academic citations is because it’s a living, changing document. It’s also written by anonymous authors, and author reputation is critical for research paper integrity.

But for learning the basics of what something is? Wikipedia is your friend. I love Wikipedia. I use it all the time for literally anything and everything, and it’s a huge reason why I know so much about things and stuff.

Please try going there first, and then come to me with questions it doesn’t answer for you.