It's mermay Monday again 🤭

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.)

same energy

there’s more

SIGH

here’s another one

IT GETS WORSE WITH EVERY ADDITION

how does this get even worse

I think about once in a while…

We have another one…

This is the internet now tho 😭💀

@lifeistooshorttowasteyourtime @marril96 @latent-thoughts @suometar

😂😂😂

Omg so many additions since I last saw this post! 😂😂😂

It’s funny but incredibly telling how entitled/ignorant/insensitive some of these people are… idk if it’s an education gap or purposeful ignorance.

The really bewildering thing to me is that I remember when you needed to get up and pull a dictionary off the shelf, or visit a library to look up the facts you needed. Now people have all kinds of information literally at their fingertips and they can’t be bothered to use it.

Oh dear gods, it’s gotten worse

When you know politics but no facts

don’t take people too seriously on the internet

This hits different when combined with that “Americans don’t learn other countries exist till they’re in 5th Grade” post from the other day.

Demily recently got another one lads

Also, I love that, in the sign language one, it seems like the last image might’ve been a gif of “fuck you,” screenshot at the perfect time to let you know they were about to sign “fuck you”

As a romanian person I gotta add this one too

This is my favourite post on this website

I have literally had people tell me that I’m a gross appropriator for learning sign language while not deaf.

I sometimes cannot speak, but leaving that aside, what the FUCK lol

I still remember the guy who got mad at me because I spoke about the cultural role of the Norse gods in my life and my culture and insisted that I should be “proud of my Christian heritage instead” and quite simply would not believe me when I told him I was from Scandinavia because “that doesn’t exist anymore.”

someone please edit that map of europe with the spain void to also have a void for the whole of scandinavia

Every now and then I just have to reblog this.

(while particularly loving: “Gender of the Day: Wales”)

kakashi week: day 2 (sakumo)

Naruto fanarts that I’ve never posted on tumblr :P Thinking on doing a new series of drawings like these with a different show. Hope you like these! Follow my other accounts: https://www.humanmgn.com/links

It’s my opinion that like if a white supremacist/Nazi is going to be reformed. They need to do so willingly. The only times I’ve heard of successful rehabilitation of fascists is when they made the conscious decision to no longer be one anymore and seek atonement. People who try to like hug and change fascists that don’t want to change are fucking morons

Correct. I was crypto-facist for a few years, and the people trying to hug me didnt change me because at that point I wouldnt have listened. It was only when I started to see the movement for what it was that I was finally able to listen.

I’m not derailing your addition but I’m horrified you’re only 18. When did you become a fasc?

Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. I’m ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when you’re young.

This is gonna be a long post.

For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.

I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.

Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.

The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.

So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.

Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie - Philip Defranco - Chris Ray Gun (sp?) - Thunderfoot - Sargon - etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.

Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.

I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.

I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.

From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.

To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.

But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.

I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.

From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.

I think that’s everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because I’ve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.

Reblogging for anyone who’s struggling with being an ex-fascist. Feel free to message me as well, I know how scary it can be.

Reblogging because, if this shows up often enough, maybe it will be someone else’s accidental click

learning to cheerfully dislike other people is I think a critical component of getting along with people who don't like you. Like as soon as I got a solid grasp on the fact that there is a wide swath of humanity that gets on my nerves and that it's my problem, not theirs, it got easier to be around people I find annoying. Once that's settled, it's easy to flip the reasoning around and conclude that if someone doesn't like me, that's a quirk of their own strange and arbitrary tastes, not a judgment upon either of us as a person. You can't like everyone. Not everyone will like you. It's fine. It's not a personal attack in either direction. We can exchange cordial nods across the room and then go on with our lives

“Disillusion” is an intricate sculpture carved from a single block of marble by Italian Artist Queirolo. Even the net is marble!

I’m sorry, what the fuck are you talking about. The net? Fucking how?

I’m sorry, what the

fuck are you talking about.

The net? Fucking how?

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

“Hello you’re through to the rare circumstances help centre branch of Jobs4U the only centre that deals with sufficiently rare and unusual circumstances among applicants, how can I assist you today?”

“I’m not sorry at all but I keep on telling the truth”

“Huh… Okay… Are you calling about a disability that prevents you from lying to your boss and thereby prevents you from acquiring or maintaining employment?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right”

“Well, not to worry. We here at Jobs4U believe that honesty really is the best policy. You’re among good company. What I’m going to ask you to do is fill in a request form that will specifically filter out jobs that require dishonesty. That way you can work with your disability rather than against it. Does that sound good?”

“Honestly that program in general sounds like it’s horseshit, but I think it’ll work just fine for me personally”

“Uh… Okay?”

“I feel as though you’ve understood my needs perfectly and don’t want to clarify myself further”

“Right… I… Would you mind waiting on hold for me while I confer with my colleague?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t feel up to waiting on hold right now. You should just send me that form because it sounds like it’s exactly what I’m after”

“I understand that. In the case that you want to fill out the form I’ve sent an email with the document attached to the address you have on file with us. In the case that you’re not after the form, please bear with me one moment”

*click*

*elevator music*

*click*

“Hello, are you still on the line with me?”

“No, I hung up”

“Perfect. Okay, ma’am, I can see several openings in positions we believe you’d excel at. Let’s see… Ah, yes. There’s an interview for a position near you later this afternoon actually.”

“That sounds terrible. Don’t tell me what it’s for”

“You’ll be working with a partner guarding two doors… They’ll explain it to you in more detail during orientation.”

Hobbies need to be accessible. I believe that it’s becoming more and more important for people to have physical hobbies that create real things and develop real skills–giving people a sense of accomplishment and overcoming feelings of helplessness. But so often, it seems like even beginner-level instruction is aimed at making the entry barrier as high as possible.

I was reading this book where this guy argues that people should develop areas of “micromastery” when getting into a hobby. Find one small, achievable, but still impressive task to master, so you have a cool skill to show off (and the sense of accomplishment) without having to master an entire huge area of knowledge. Instead of learning to cook, learn to create a really good omelet. Instead of learning an entire new language, learn to count to ten. And then you have a knowledge base to help you if you want to explore further. Seems very common sense. Very accessible. Learning is for everyone, not just people who want to devote tons of time to a new hobby. But even that guy, in his instructions, keeps telling people to buy the most expensive equipment to have the best possible results. There’s even a point where he says “the more expensive, the better”!

That infuriates me. I am enraged. The guy who’s trying to make learning accessible to the masses is now saying this is the realm only of the rich! It’s telling people to buy into the marketing ploy that more expensive is automatically better! It’s absurd. It’s insane. There probably is equipment that improves the outcome of the final product, but it’s not necessarily the most expensive stuff, and you certainly don’t need the expensive stuff when you’re just starting out!

Yet, tutorials and craft books keep pushing this message. If you want to start drawing, you need an expensive sketch book and seven different pencils and different weights of pen, and the right eraser. If you want to bake, you have to have the best flours and the appropriate sourdough technique. If you want to knit, you better have the expensive yarn. That’s garbage, and it makes things more difficult than they need to be.

When you’re just starting out, you’re learning if you even like the activity. Do I like spending time drawing? Do I even like the process of knitting or woodworking or building model airplanes? It’s pointless to spend tons of money on good yarn only to find that you hate the process of knitting. Pointless to get the good pencils when the process of drawing makes you want to crawl out of your skin.

If you want to try something, just try it! As simply and cheaply as possible. Want to draw? Get a free pencil and a bit of notebook paper. Want to knit? Get a pair of knitting needles from the thrift store and some dollar store yarn. As you get deeper into the hobby, you’ll probably want to upgrade your supplies–but now that you know more about the process, you know what problems can be solved by better supplies.

I was always intimidated by bookbinding–the tutorials always talked about having the right glue and the right book press–until a guy in the comments said, “I use Elmer’s Glue and my laptop.” I could manage that! That was accessible! I got some glue and some big textbooks and made a book! Not perfect, but it wouldn’t have been perfect even if I had the fancy supplies–I was just starting out! And then I figured out that a paper cutter and some kind of tool to smooth the endpapers would be useful. So I got that–as cheaply as possible. I have made books and I have enjoyed it without a huge investment in time and money. And more tutorials need to take that approach. I refuse to believe that we have to give tons of money to the crafting industry. I refuse to believe that we have to be consumers in order to become creators.

Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someone’s thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar

Sometimes I attend somebody’s thesis presentation and I’m so impressed that I follow them home to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am.

Sometimes I watch someone eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am with such fervour I am compelled to attend their thesis presentation

Looking back on it now, I think that one of the strangest things about The Lord of the Rings is that either 

Aragorn and Legolas managed to compose an absolutely epic lament for Boromir in the time it took to get Boromir’s body down to the river and arranged all nicely in the boat, 

or Aragon just started singing on the spur of the moment and Legolas took over for the second verse while Aragorn quickly made up the third. 

That’s some Cyrano de Bergerac wizardry right there.

Consider: Aragorn and Legolas had a generic lament all worked out with Mad Libs-style blanks for relevant personal details, just in case someone kicked the bucket and nobody else was down for singing their death song

Aragorn: Thank you for your help Legolas that was beautiful

Legolas: No problem I’d written it for you but I tweaked it

if you would be so kind as to reblog this if you feel insecure about your writing skills.

My country, Pakistan,

is one-thirds underwater and over 30 million people have been displaced, the largest amount since partition. Over 1000 people have died, hundreds of them children. Countless more are left without shelter, food, water, and healthcare. The climate disaster is real and achingly tragic, right in front of my eyes. It's swallowing my country up and I don't know when it will stop. Even when the flooding stops, its consequences won't be over. People have lost their homes, their loved ones, their livelihoods. Pakistan is doing its best which is not even close to enough, so donations are much needed.

Personally, I am not donating to any politically-affiliated flood relief funds, and given the political corruption in this country, I advise others against it. But there are good people, good charities and NGOs doing their best to mitigate the effects. They are on the ground (and in the water) delivering crucial aid to those that need it. It's important to note that at the time of writing, 1 USD = 220 PKR, which buys a lot more than you know, so every dollar really does count. Here is are some trustworthy organizations that I recommend, if you can contribute:

1. Alkhidmat Foundation Pakistan

2. Doctors Without Borders Pakistan

3. Pakistan Red Crescent

If you can, please donate whatever possible. If not, please signal boost, and keep Pakistan in your prayers. Thank you ❤️

This meme is a MURDER ATTEMPT.

I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!

Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.

Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.

Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!

The person who made this meme is PURPOSEFULLY, ACTIVELY, trying to get desperate people killed!

Pennyroyal oil contains pulegone, which is highly toxic, particularly to the liver. Ingestion can lead initially to gastrointestinal distress such as nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Later on, it can lead to failure of the liver and kidneys, resulting in bleeding, seizures, multiple organ failure, and death.

There is no antidote for pennyroyal oil poisoning.

- straight from poison control

The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download

THIS will be sooo good for my soundboard. Those online sessions are about to become even better :D

First music, then voice modifiers… Now this. Perfect.

Also, I’m pretty sure it can be used for a lot of other activities.

Yay, no more Soundbible!

The direct link: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm

For any content creators who’d like it!

I was watching Shrek 2 and my wife and I were reflecting on how much transmisogyny was in it as jokes (e.g. “gender confused wolf” “ugly step sister” “women’s underwear” etc.) and it’s so extremely ridiculous to me the transphobes’ line that having positive representations of trans people (esp trans women) in children’s media would be “too confusing” for kids—because they are literally already making references to trans women in children’s media, they’re just doing it in the most offensive ways possible. Taking away all the empty cis rationalization of it, really they’re not arguing for kids to not see trans characters, they’re arguing that kids should see trans characters as demonized, fetishized, objects of ridicule and disgust. Like that’s literally the subtext in these “how do I explain this to my kids” conversations. They really mean “let me continue to explain this in ways that groom kids into hating trans people and themselves if they are trans”

This…is a great point

I don’t know enough about Shrek to argue, but there is a lot of children’s media in which stuff like “putting a masculine person in feminine clothing” is done for giggles and punishment, and it’s literally something I had to explain to my firstborn child as a small toddler, LIKE.

“Why angry” well kid, he didn’t want to wear the tutu because… he doesn’t like ballet.

“Why laughing?” yeah, they’re being mean actually. We don’t point and laugh, that is wrong. They’re being naughty.

It’s awful. Let’s explain bullying to a toddler who has never been scolded. Let’s explain malicious cruelty to someone who has never witnessed cruelty. And let’s make it repeatedly clear that femininity is humiliating. It’s very important to the entertainment and stability of society that small children, who barely grasp the usage of gendered pronouns, be shown that wearing clothes for different roles is punishment.

Let’s be real, it is not actually difficult to have a five-word conversation about queerness with a toddler. “Some people have two daddies.” “Our friend is a they.” They really do not care about this. It is not hard. They’ll listen to you.

But explaining a scene like the one above? Where you’re trying to explain that some parts of society are broken, and we don’t copy those behaviours in our house, and we hold ourselves to a standard of decency higher than Peppa Pig? That’s hard work.

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here