Can we please talk about how the female Dragonborn doesn't have boobs?????

I was legit so happy when I saw this, to not have gender norms shoved onto everything. It makes their comments about pronouns and validating identities all the more special to me.

i’ve never before heard something simultaneously be a roast and the highest of praise

What not a lot of people know about asthma is that different substances trigger it for different people. And because of this sometimes people without asthma won’t believe you when you tell them something is hurting you.

Like I’m fine around weed smoke and can even take a drag or two off a joint but if my brother catches even a whiff of marijuana smoke he’s already using his inhaler.

I can’t be around floral perfume but some of my friends with asthma can be. I can’t be around tobacco smoke but another friend of mine with asthma is a heavy smoker. Some people can run and exercise fairly easily. If I start running I get an attack fairly quickly.

Some people get attacks more easily in the fog. For some people wet weather helps. Some people get triggered by dust. I don’t. Someone I know does.

So just because your sister with asthma uses perfume doesn’t mean you can spray a bunch of it near your coworker who’s told you it sets off their asthma.

Believe people when they give you info about their chronic conditions, basically.

hey, hi, I was just on the former bird app and came across this info from a brand new study and now I cannot stop screaming internally??? what the actual fuckkkk

theres' an article from the guardian here and here is the actual study:

I am reluctantly breaking my zero-post streak because I would like to address the outrage, which is drawing reasonable conclusions from incomplete information.

So, back when I was a mere twinkle in my father's eye, he took a job with [multinational personal care corporation] in their FemCare division, specifically in materials development. Among other things, he was involved in developing synthetic menstrual fluid and using it to test their products, so the "they were using saline and water" bit above didn't ring true to me. Naturally, I went to the source and asked:

I wasn't able to get the full article because it's behind a paywall, I no longer have university access, and Sci-hub doesn't have it (yet). However, there was this screengrab above [highlight mine] which seems to be the source of the problem:

Now, since I don't have full access, I can't track down what citations [3] and [4] are to see what they actually say, but I think the phrasing "a liquid such as saline or water" [emphasis mine] is telling. That seems like some people say they've used those, but by and large the manufacturers aren't telling. Over Discord, Dad concurs:

Now, dear reader, you might have noticed I said m'dad did this work in the late 80s/early 90s, and thus might be (reasonably) skeptical as to the applicability of his recollections to current product testing. To this concern, I say 1) Dad was still working for [multinational personal care corporation] in an adjacent division until the late aughts, so his secondhand knowledge is considerably more recent than 30+ years ago, and 2) while I was doing my first graduate degree, I happened to intern with the team doing fundamental research on skin & vaginal physiology at the same company, so I can also provide recent(ish) context. Ignoring that my placement on that team was hilariously incongruous with my own research specialty, I can tell you that the folks working on the R side of R&D there were quite interested in the minute details of the vagina - I sat through one presentation about mucosal proteins in vaginal discharge, and there was a guy on the team who was working on building a better model of the vagina to test product fit. In short: they still care about accurate simulations.

Touching briefly on the study's use of actual, human blood for their testing - as dear old Dad pointed out, blood testing has to happen in special blood labs. I can also personally attest, having looked into purchasing blood for my current job, that even if the blood itself is inexpensive, the S&H costs are exorbitant. Across the three vendors I priced out, the combined costs for 50mL (for Imperial unit folks, <2oz) of sheep blood (the cheap stuff!) consistently came out to around USD100. So, even taking into account the economy of scale, it's safe to assume that real-blood testing is limited for reasons of safety and economics. Good simulated fluid is therefore going to be a central component of testing.

All of this is to say that while the original study is really cool, the authors (and many people reading their article) seem to be operating under the misapprehension that corporate R&D does shoddy testing. And I totally get that, because manufacturers are very secretive about their testing protocols. But! Just for the hellsite record, people working in corporate R&D are trying to get/report good data, they just can't tell anyone about how they got it for trade secret reasons. Be mad if you want, just be mad about the right thing.

I mean, you're not wrong. AFAB health research is full of massive, gaping holes. The fact that the corpos have done (some of) the research doesn't really help that, because they're not allowed to publish except under very specific circumstances, and even internal documentation has all kinds of rules about dancing around anything that could potentially be seen as an admission of fault and/or liability in the case of a hypothetical court case or a spot of corporate espionage. My commentary was deliberately limited to pointing out that it's inaccurate to conclude that the products weren't tested with more sophisticated fluids than saline just because there's no literature on simulated fluid and/or blood testing, and even then, it would be fair to be skeptical because I am - for fairly obvious reasons - unable to provide concrete evidence of my claims.

[ID: tags reading #oh no now I have to call myself out for reblogging the previous version #100% confirmation bias happening v there because I admit #I am forever feral about AFAB people's health issues being underresearched/under-cared-about. /end ID]

Thank you for this @elodieunderglass - I was, to be honest, frustrated by the original round of outrage in part because while I didn't have the energy to do more than point out that testing with "real blood" would be extremely difficult (and is difficult even with literal medical products, let alone comfort products), it still really feels like people are focusing way too much on the "they didn't bother to test it with real blood!!!" part and like . . .

The actual problem here is that if physicians are using "how many tampons does someone bleed thru" or "does the disc overflow" or "what size of pad does the patient need" as their health-measure of how much the patient is bleeding and thus what intervention is needed, the intense variability and uncertainty of what claims are true makes this an impediment to good care.

In some cases it may cause alarm where none is needed: for instance if you switch to period panties, which the study claims don't hold much at all, and suddenly you're leaking all over the place, you and any doctor that takes this as the relevant measure may suddenly WORRY! because why have you SUDDENLY started bleeding so much more heavily! When actually nothing has changed . . . except your protection method.

In others it may work the other way around: if your menstrual disc thingie holds SO much more blood than a tampon, you may not be aware that you've been bleeding unusually heavily all your life, or that your bleeding has increased.

And then overall the problem becomes, wait, if this has been the reference, do we actually know how much blood going out in a menstrual period is correlated, in the majority, with things like anaemia or other health problems? If the products are this variable, variable even by brand, how obscured is the data here?

And that is the part that is Concerning. That's the part that is upsetting in terms of menstruating people's health. That up until now nobody has ever thought "we need a fine and precise measure of this, shall we make sure we're getting it?"

The problem is not that Tampax uses Some Kind Of Liquid to test the absorbency. Of course they don't use real blood, especially not real human blood (because that would be a HEINOUS waste) but honestly even real other kinds of blood, because the logistics of just Having A Lot Of Blood Around For Testing on a Mass Manufacturing Scale is fairly prohibitive. It genuinely is a logistical concern for medical product companies. That's neither shocking nor that bad.

The problem is that our physicians have, due to the lack of thought in the entire gynaecological field, been in the majority just using tampon sizes or pad absorbancies as a measure for how much we're actually bleeding, without anyone ever thinking that maybe we should take a closer look at that.

That's appalling.

Your daily dose of cat memes

I absolutely love that the Pokémon universe is literally tearing itself apart at the seams. Fantastic worldbuilding, A+++

A non-exhaustive list:

And the worst part is that you STILL don't have a skateboard to leap back over the ledges. *Sighs disappointedly*

Texas.

Peter Ferguson (Canadian, 1968) - Pastoral (n.d.)

Helpful definitions

Letting people who believe in the end of the world run it seems like a recipe for the end of the world.

Be teenager is time most people start able do lot more stuff. Start be see as more mature and need less help parent.

But, all this excite is make feel so more bad when are lose independence as teenager. It frustrate and emberess to see friend talk of learn drive and go college and so many fun new thing, and then go home and close to no can brush own teeth. To be age where want do thing self no parent but need help from parent more and more.

So, this post for us. For the teenager who are lose freedom while peer gain. For the teenager who are become more disable and see future had plan fall apart. It no is fair have happen, and Frog is send support to all people read this who need.

Where are the “queer is a slur” people about the newly widespread use of the word “fruity”? Could it be that “queer is a slur” was never any kind of movement with actual principles but was covertly started by people who wanted to drive wedges into the queer community and mindlessly parroted by people who need to have the Most Correct Opinions without actually doing the work of learning about the issues and thinking about them?

The feeling I get is that folks from the Bible Belt are "allowed" to be uncomfortable with a word, but *I* have to suck it up

Satanic manufacturing cannot appear in the realm of god

Since I discovered that “step out of your comfort zone” is supposed to mean “safely experiment with doing small things to expand your life experience” and not “ignore the fact that you are disabled and cause yourself physical and emotional pain until you have a meltdown and then stay in bed for two days straight”, my life has drastically improved.

It means what now???

The "Zepotha" trend on tiktok makes me SICK as an indie slasher fan. Why did they choose the name "Zepotha?" Name one fucking indie slasher from the 80's that isn't called something like House of Guts. "Zepotha" would be the name of an arthouse horror from the 70's created by a giallo-obsessed Johnny-come-lately director from New Jersey. Zepotha would be brought up in every other "obscure horror recs" thread on reddit until it became a circlejerk meme to even mention it.

"Oh you sound so mad, you sound like you just want to gatekeep--" I DO! I'M GATEKEEPING! None of these people even like slashers! They can barely make it through Fear Street, and then they still make fun of effects that aren't Marvel-sweatshop-grade CGI! You expect them to be able to create a fictional slasher movie with the conviction that this site had when it created Goncharov? Get! Off! Of! My! Lawn!

The bots are evolving

Zapotha's name bothers me because I don't think 80s teen slasher, I think low budget space adventure. Doesn't help that it sounds simlar to that "Jumunji but space" movie "Zathura"