Obliviate

I am obsessed with this.

So because parkour is such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of these movements that you're taught when you become an instructor plays to a male body's strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc.

She demolishes this course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She doesn't muscle her way up to her over a wall, she just throws a leg up over the wall. She doesn't use upper body strength to do the salmon ladder, she uses her hips!!! And it's fucking incredible.

So many girls and young women walk away from parkour because every movement caters to the strengths of men, because doing what makes sense for their bodies is seen as "bad technique" to be trained away.

If pre-transition me had seen this I would have cried tears of joy.

A very obscure language

The responses of people so far have only pointed out how silly it is to call Spanish obscure. So people should also know that Swahili is one of the official languages of Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, and is widely spoken as a lingua franca in many other countries and places. It is spoken by at least 100 million people. If these were the only two dictionaries they singled out, then it is even more transparently racist. The biggest racialised language in the US and the most common African language (besides arabic).

Also, it is already hard for any book to pass the censors but I was a bit shocked to learn from that article that for a prisoner to get a book in any foreign language, there also has to be a published english edition available for the prison to evaluate. Even Spanish books, in a country where 13% of the population are native spanish speakers. So I don't imagine inmates with less common languages are getting many options.

there is always some fucking laundry and dust and some other shit

Give all the stolen treasures back, thief

Why is he doing that

unrestrained summer fun

he ✨washin✨

I love men. I'm half man myself on my dad's side

“My dogs thought I was still in the front yard”

(via)

God can you imagine if Donald Trump became president? There’d be like a new bubonic plague and he’d be like “idk drink bleach about it”

Throwback to when I took acid for the first time in 2013 and predicted the events of 2020 like the fucking oracle of Delphi

Holy shit

trans friends— this has been circulating a lot on the internet already but PLEASE stop ordering from gc2b. their quality has massively declined, they send the wrong size binders correctly marked, the stitching is extremely poor and rips often times when first putting it on. do not waste your money on them!

if anyone wants to know why im fundraising for new binders its because due to the quality decrease in gc2b, im currently relying on one binder ive had since 2018. three of my other BRAND new gc2b binders have already ripped and two others were marked size large but were a size medium or below. on top of that, they hurt my back an ungodly fucking amount, so please be careful with them, i know how hard this shit is for anyone else who is poor and/or financially constrained, and i really empathize, please bind safely and be careful!

Archeologist 20,000 years after horses go extinct: *cries* I don’t

That comment is one of the most accurate things in studying history.

I can feel the pain already

Sometimes when I'm high I like to imagine arguments in the far future about what kind of milk or eggs were in our recipes. I hope the main opposing factions would be divided over whether the milk was from dogs or cats because "what other mammals were in the vast majority of households back then?"

Considering the current popularity of oat milk, almond milk, and soy milk I have a feeling there will be this exact argument in 100 years when people are doing Retro Cooking segments

i don’t think humans are inherently bad i just don’t. once i posted about how i can’t ever get poached eggs right and someone took time out of their day to send me tips on how to make them. they used their finite time on this planet to teach me how to poach an egg with no motivation other than helping a stranger have a better breakfast and if that isn’t proof humanity is worth saving i don’t know what is

was crying to a friend at a bar about leaving my academic program and this random woman came up to me and was like, “is it about a boy? tell me where he is. i’ll beat his ass.” and i was like omg no you’re so kind but it’s much weirder than that, i recently quit academia and i’m feeling extremely conflicted about it. she was nice but i fully expected her to leave because that’s a very niche thing and like hey, she was hanging out with her friends.

she sat down and spent the next several minutes telling me how it was all gonna work out and she knows my life is gonna be better now. just wait five years and i’ll see she’s right.

and i felt better about my specific problem, but i also felt better about a world where someone will see a stranger crying at a bar and her deepest instinct is to reach out and help.

The last time I was in the hospital to stay in. There was a lady in my ward who, when she overheard me talking to the doctor about Judaism, sat and woke up whenever I did and told me stories about her family and how they celebrated different Jewish holidays. She held my hand when I had to have different IVs.

When I saw spring awakening for the first time, the lady who sat on my row paid 58 pound on a cab to get me home because she saw me have a panic attack and didn't want me hurt.

Humanity exists to breed humanity. The world is good sometimes.

Last semester, I had a science teacher who played music before class. I asked her what the name of the song was, and along with giving me the title, she also gave me the whole playlist where the song was from. It also had other songs she played before.

She's not teaching in our school anymore, but when she emailed us our grades, she thanked me for being interested in her music taste and offered to give me recommendations if I needed it. She didn't have to go or do that far, she didn't even have to give me the playlist.

It feels nice; the playlist she sent me feels like I have a little piece of her.

The night before I left my study abroad in London, I ended up in the ER with a UTI. That was bad enough, but the real issue I was struggling with was that I was stressed to the max about how I was going to get to the airport the next morning, because the tube maps were still confusing to someone as directionally challenged as I am, and heaving suitcases up and down the stairs in the tube stations was difficult. This is relevant because, in the 6 or so hours that I spent in the waiting room for my test results, I befriended an elderly couple that was also there, and it turns out that their son was a cab driver. They promised me that he would be waiting outside my flat the next morning to take me to the airport. And you know what? He was. I got to the airport with time to spare and he helped me with my luggage and everything.

Another time, back in my home city, I was in danger of not being able to continue my schooling if my financial aid didn’t go through. Problem was, my university’s financial aid office is cruel and uncaring, and refused to return any of my calls or emails. I finally went to the office in person to ask them if my request for continued financial aid had been accepted, and they said, “Eh, we don’t know, we’ll get back to you.” Completely defeated, I found an out of the way hallway to cry in. 

Only, it wasn’t as out of the way as I thought. Another student saw me crying, and came over to ask what was wrong. I explained the situation to her, and her face hardened. “Come with me,” she said, and she marched me back into the financial aid office and demanded the clerk actually go look at my file to see if my request had been submitted. Once they went and retrieved my file, she patted me on the shoulder, said, “Good luck,” and left. I never saw her again after that, though I wish I could have bought her a coffee at least. She went out of her way to help me and I never even learned her name. (My request had been accepted, btw. Weeks prior. They just didn’t feel like telling me.)

There really is goodness and kindness in the world, but it doesn’t stop with us in these moments. We always have to remember to pay it forward, however we can. If you ever have an opportunity where you can be kind, or you can turn the other way, be kind. Always choose to be kind.

Kindness is even in the little gestures! So often strangers will see someone taking a photo or selfie of friends and offer to take it for them. People will hold open a door out of courtesy, wish you well when you sneeze, leave room for you while driving, and cut in line at a store.

People create things for free, just to make others happy. People build upon patterns, make improvements, offer solutions, write up tutorials, everything! The human urge to create and to help is really beautiful to me.

How…?

On the mornings your mouth is filled with the bitter taste from hollow tragedies of last night, where your memory is haunted by the brokenness of everything you once thought would be forever there, I hope you remember how once, you were new enough to the world that everything seemed like a joyous adventure. I hope one day you heal enough from all this pain and go back to who you used to be. Just a human looking out at the world, astonished by its beauty.

- Nikita Gill, Notes on Survival #4

I’m loathe to link to the Daily Dot, but this article (and the TikTok content) gives a good overview of why BetterHelp is a hot mess in so many ways.

I used the service for a while myself, and during that, saw three different “therapists.” The first therapist seemed to think that therapy meant just having a chat an allowing me to vent, which was largely unhelpful.

She was a Christian, but kept bringing that up, which also irked me because I’d rather not have religion part of my therapy goals. She wasn’t overly pushy, but it did bother me when she said, “As a therapist I have to say that this witchcraft stuff is your choice, but as a Christian I don’t approve.”

I cancelled and requested a new person after that.The second therapist seemed alright at first, but would regularly go on tangents about politics and her own life. I cancelled and requested a new therapist after a disturbing incident where she did the entire session (on cam, as usual) while loudly and angrily doing dishes in her kitchen.

In both of those cases, it felt like these people thought “therapist” means “online friend” or something, and never seemed to have real treatment plans or much to offer.

The third therapist I saw via BetterHelp was just for a single session. Despite consistently telling them, “I would prefer a non-religious therapist,” I was matched with someone who incessantly quoted the Bible. She kept repeatedly asking me if I was a “Bible believer” or had “accepted Jesus.” She also praised me to not standing up for myself, weirdly. She said it was best to let my husband take the lead because submission is a good quality or something like that.

It was ridiculous, and at that point I requested a full refund for that month. Around that time, I learned that BetterHelp doesn’t actually vet their “therapists.” In fact, scrolling their list of offerings, I came across “therapists” with such dubious credentials as graduating from Liberty University with a degree in “marriage” and specializing in “maladaptive sexual behaviors.”

I had to call their offices to get the refund. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t exactly polite during that call, and essentially said, “What you are doing is sick - some people do actually need help, y’know. You’ve wasted my time and money.”

If you want online therapy, I recommend looking for therapists who are semi-local and offer online sessions. Many do these days, and it’s much better than rolling the dice with BetterHelp. That and, y’know, they won’t sell your data.

The world you live in. Credit: BeYourBestYou

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