It's important to drink a lot of fluids when you're sick so that your body has the raw materials to generate gallons of snot.

I learned recently that mucus basically traps the viruses and expels them from your body which is why your body makes SO MUCH of it so now I just imagine drinking liquids as hiring a bunch of goons to take out the thrash y'see nyeehh see we taking back the streets from the bowler hat boys flush em out real good

Perhaps there are many problems which could be solved if you just made enough mucus

Reblog if you are solving problems by generating enough mucus

And they actually met 😭

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/09/solar-eclipse-new-york-teacher/

do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

from what I know of just the general history of building codes and osha rules, I would not be the least surprised if every single one of those healthcare codes exist not just to prevent someone from dying, but because pre-code, someone did.

osha rules, building codes, food production rules are all written in blood

they need to add two extra hours after ten pm where time doesn't pass so you can do some nice reading before bed

I actually don’t mind that “dead dove” has become conversational shorthand for “fics with heavy themes where you REALLY need to pay attention to the warnings”. such is the nature of language. what i do mind is when people tag their actual fics with dead dove and then give no indication of what they’re actually warning about. that is useless. that helps no one. that is completely against the spirit of the meme. i will not be reading that

When the tags say "bdsm" and "dead dove" it means that the bdsm is, like, super duper bdsm.

When the tags say "dead dove" with no other clarifying tags, it's like walking down a hallway and having someone shout "BE ALARMED" and then vanishing into thin air with no further details given. Be alarmed about what.

reblog to give warm bread to your mutuals

this is the single best picture of an eclipse I've taken ever. it's not even close

bark bark bark bark

if my celestial dog hand gets ten thousand fucking notes I'm going to mcfreakin lose it

Baby albino changyuraptor spooked by her own reflection, realizing that she's not like her other siblings.

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE l APRIL 2024

ALFREDO JUÁREZ | RAMI ASTRO | JOSHUA INTINI | KENDALL RUST | DERAN HALL | KUZCOKHANDA | TREVOR MAHLMANN | OTHINGSTODO | NASA | STEVEN RATNIK

I'm curious. Reblog this if you know how to cook

I don’t even care if it’s macaroni, ramen or those little bowls you stick in the microwave. Please, I need reassurance that most of the population on tumblr WOULDN’T STARVE TO DEATH if their parents couldn’t fix them food or they couldn’t go out to eat. 

Sometimes you wake up super depressed and feel like you can't carry on but then you eat a potato and you feel just a tiny bit better and you're like. Well I've gotta keep going. If one potato did that what could 2 potatoes do? 5? You have to keep living for the potential of more potatoes down the line

You gotta keep living so you can make Samwise Gamgee proud

Blissful fox

just encountered a spider so big I very seriously considered downloading tinder exclusively to find a man to come over and move it outside

which brings me to my app idea: spidr. it connects you to local weirdos of all genders who are willing to drive to your house and move a spider for a fee.

#whitewomantears

Fun fact: the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews having lots of money/being greedy/cheap began in the Middle Ages thanks to Christian laws.

The Christian church began forbidding Christians from having professions that involved lending money, banking, or pawn work. It was because the church believed that money was ultimately unclean so although it was considered a necessity, Christians were instructed to deal with it as little as possible.

But someone still needed to run all of those money-based businesses. So these societies which were already run by Christian leadership basically made it a rule that these businesses had to be run by Jews since they were already “unclean”. Furthermore, due to other restrictions on Jewish people in these areas, these money-based positions were pretty much some of the only jobs Jews could legally hold.

This eventually led to numerous stereotypes involving Jews and money. And the acidity of these stereotypes grew when Christian people and leaders became resentful of the livelihood Jews were able to achieve for themselves with these jobs.

So to sum up: Christian society forces Jews to hold down money-centered jobs since, according to the church, Jews were already going to Hell. Then, once they made lives with these roles they were forced into, Jews were mocked and hated for being successful.

The “Jews run Hollywood” stereotype has a similar origin.

Jobs in showbusiness were seen as low-class, immoral, and beneath the dignity of proper Christians. But people still needed their entertainment, and someone needed to provide it, so who better than the Jews, who were already considered low-class, immoral, and beneath the dignity of proper Christians?

And once again, Christians have the nerve to resent Jews for being successful at jobs that they effectively forced us into for lack of other means to make a living.

The other key thing re: entertainment is that they were new industries.

If you were a smart, ambitious working-class Jewish kid in the 1920s and 30s, traditional paths to success were often barred to you. Colleges had quotas, realtors redlined, professional associations wouldn’t admit you. But there was no one to gatekeep the new forms of media that were springing up: film, radio, comic books, Broadway. You could succeed on your merits. Otherwise, the quickest ways up the ladder were professional sports and organized crime. If you couldn’t be Sandy Koufax and you didn’t want to be Meyer Lansky, you could try to be Mel Brooks or Stan Lee instead.

(yes, sports. I once read a passage in a book about baseball from the 1930s that claimed Jews had an unfair advantage due to our ‘natural athleticism.’ You could swap out the nouns and it would have been indistinguishable from a racist complaint about black basketball players.)

Eclipse of the Sun in Venice in July 8, 1842 by Ippolito Caffi.

Clouds over sunset in Lazise on July 13, 2017 by me Only 175 years, 5 days and 124 km apart

rick riordan off the shits

rick riordan made his bones with pretty vanilla YA fantasy and then when he was too successful to stop hit em with the Muslim valkyries and the genderfluid homeless teenagers

Rick Riordan’s “vanilla YA fantasy” series was written for his son with ADHD and dyslexia because there weren’t any books about kids with learning disorders. He “made his bones” on representation, you just didn’t notice because disabled people don’t count.

Slammed that

Very annoyingly I can't find the post. Some of that is covered in this post about affinity networks, but step-by-step here is how you make friends:

Some tips:

It takes forever! It can be very stressful! I do seriously recommend seeing if you can become friends with people in regularly scheduled group hangouts if you can swing it because it replicates the way we form friendships as children - frequent proximity and increasing intimacy because of time shared together - instead of the "this feels like dating" feeling of trying to make friends with people you see occasionally.

Anyway sorry that's a lot good luck.

This is incredibly helpful, holy shit.

In case it helps anyone else, I’m gonna try to add something I got from a book on social skills (it’s by Daniel Wendler, written by an autistic person who’s learned the rules for autistic people who haven’t yet, highly recommend!) on the flow of conversation.

If you’re like me, maybe you struggle with infodumping and talking too much and forgetting to ask questions. If people don’t share as enthusiastically as you without direct prompting, you’ll accidentally dominate a conversation. Don’t worry, I get it! I thought, I’ll share what I want to share and they’ll share what they want to share, easy—right?

As I’ve had to learn…nope. 95% of neurotypical people (and a lot of neurodivergent people too!) won’t feel comfortable sharing without being invited to.

So, that “natural” back-and-forth of neurotypical conversation goes something like this:

You talk for a little bit. The less you know this person, the shorter your individual “blocks” of conversation should likely be in most cases. So if you’re at small talk stage, you say maybe a sentence or two; if you know them better you can get away with more.

Then it’s on you to pass the ball back. Your job here is to communicate “hey, your turn, I’m interested”, and to give them a cue of what to talk about so they don’t feel stranded and like they have to “come up with” an answer.

Not giving any cues is where awkward silence comes from, and it’ll feel to them like you’re communicating “I want out of this conversation!” So if your conversations with people often awkwardly peter out, check if you’re giving them a cue every time you finish talking!

There are, broadly speaking, two types of cues:

They’re very direct cues, and they’re the easiest for the other person to respond to. That means that the less you know someone, the more you’ll likely rely on invitations (but not exclusively! That makes people feel interrogated. 2-3 questions in a row are fine, after that you might want to throw in an inspiration or two to break it up and be less intimidating—more on that below!)

Try to always keep invitations at the same level of intimacy as the current conversation—don’t talk about the weather and then ask where this stranger grew up and what the weather was like there. These are such direct cues that it’s inherently awkward for the other person to dodge them, so make extra sure your invitations aren’t uncomfortable.

These are more indirect cues, and a little trickier in my experience. Essentially, you want to make sure that you end your bit of the conversation with something that’s deliberately easy to respond to—avoid ending on something that’s very niche that people can’t relate to or that’s very unique to you. If you want to mention something like that, you can, but tack something more general on after as inspiration (or just end on a question). Inspirations are still cues, they’re still meant to give the other person an idea of what to respond with, otherwise the conversation will feel awkward and unwelcoming!

What the other post mentioned re: offering slightly more personal information of your own often falls under this category. For example, if you’re talking about the weather as in the first example, but you mention where you grew up and what the weather was like, that can be inspiration for the other person to also talk about where they’re from!

But, unlike with a question, if they don’t want to share that information they can usually dodge it without having to make it extremely obvious that that’s what they’re doing. They can ask you something else, or shift the topic, and it might not be super subtle but it allows plausible deniability, so they’re not forced to either a) answer a question they don’t want to, or b) expose their discomfort (which is personal in itself!)

The more you know someone, the more you’ll likely automatically rely on inspiration to keep conversation flowing. That’s because you two have context for each other, something you say might easily have a bunch of things they could use as inspiration just because of past conversations you’ve had or things you already know about each other—anything can be a cue if there’s context! But with people you don’t know well, you’re gonna want to be a bit more mindful of it.

Generally, every time you talk in a one-on-one conversation, you want to leave some kind of cue for the other person to respond to!

Don’t worry too much about it though—if they want to talk to you, they’ll deliberately look for inspiration. If you throw the ball badly, they’ll still try to run to catch it anyway! It doesn’t have to be perfect.

But the less you know someone, the less you’ll be willing to “run” (because hey, that’s a lot of mental effort for a stranger who hasn’t proven they’re worth it, for all you know they might be an asshole!) and the more intentional you want to be about giving cues and making the ball as easy as possible to catch.

I’m very much still learning to “practice what I preach” here, but thinking of it this way has helped me enormously, so perhaps it’ll help someone else too!

This is so fucking funny

The first time I remember feeling suicidally depressed because I was certain I'd never have any friends and would die alone because I didn't know how to talk to people and everyone who acted like my friend was actually doing so in order to make fun of me or get me to do things for them was when I was ten years old.

That continued on until I was eighteen and happened into a scene that was full of accepting diverse, neurodiverse, and queer people that was A) quite welcoming and B) met once a month and C) had extremely clear social rules.

Once I found that group, I got a lot better at making friends and being able to act like a normal-ish person who could do things like hold jobs and talk to my partner's relatives without immediately coming off as someone dangerously unhinged.

To this day I have problems with trusting it when people are nice to me (because it always feels like they're setting me up for a public humiliation, something that happened multiple times in my childhood and something that made me very dearly want to grow up to be Carrie) and I have problems with overwhelming new people with too much information and too-aggressive friendliness.

So this is a guide written by someone who has had to painstakingly learn from the ground up how to trust people and make friends without letting myself get too hurt too often and without scaring people away constantly by coming on too strong.

Someone captured the solar eclipse on an airplane