Rantings of a Neurotic Dragon

Sometimes I wonder how people survive without obsessively thinking about fictional realities. Could not be me. Thinking only Real Life stuff for a whole day???? I would be dead.

Always leave a link to click to hurt meeeee

SEASON TWO LETSGOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! 🥟🐊🥳

I am meowing at my lung's fullest

boys!

Teafication

YT link

Transcript below provided by : @/divorcetual ! thank you !

When you are alone and have a heart attack. What are you gonna do then?

Take a 2 minute break and read this:

Let's say it's 5:25 pm and you're driving home after an unusually hard day's work.

You are really tired and frustrated. All of a sudden your chest pains. They are starting to radiate in the arm and jaw. It feels like being stabbed in the chest and heart. You're only a few miles away from the nearest hospital or home.

Unfortunately you don't know if you can make it..

Maybe you've taken CPR training, but the person running the course hasn't told you how to help yourself.

How do you survive a heart attack when you're alone when it happens? A person who is feeling weak and whose heart is beating hard has only about 10 seconds before losing consciousness.

1. But you can help yourself by coughing repeatedly and very strongly! Deep breaths before every cough. Coughing should be repeated every second until you arrive at the hospital or until your heart starts to beat normally.

2. Deep breathing gives oxygen to your lungs and coughing movements boost the heart and blood circulation. Heart pressure also helps to restore a normal heartbeat. Here's how cardiac arrest victims can make it to the hospital for the right treatment

3. Cardiologists say if someone gets this message and passes it on to 10 people, we can expect to save at least one life.

4. FOR WOMEN: You should know that women have additional and different symptoms. Rarely have crushing chest pain or pain in the arms. Often have indigestion and tightness across the back at the bra line plus sudden fatigue.

Reblogging this, because it is helpful information, BUT, with a couple of additions and caveats. First, this:

And then this:

And yes, as you get older, these are things you actually start thinking about, and worrying about, so I always try to stay informed.

Important for younger people too!! I was in my 30's, sitting in a waiting room, feeling sorry for myself because I was the youngest person at the cardiologist's. Then a kid who couldn't have been more than 16 walked in....

One of the most dangerous mistakes people make about their health is believing that a health problem doesn't happen to people "their age".

btw it wont be the first or last time i say it but sheezy.art is cool.

if youre an artist and youve been looking for somewhere to actually make friends/form an art community rather than just sadly refreshing your feed for likes/rbs i would recommend sheezy.art!

it's in beta rn and theres a timer that lets 10 people register every few hours, but theres also a kofi you can support thatll just let you register right away

the website's staff and multiple friends were the ones who brought the site to my attention (thank you lemmy), and every who ive met/talked to there has been super active and sweet ^_^ ik social media can be kind of daunting if you do art for fun so now its my turn to push you guys towards the site

also - i am fourleaf on there! i know my page is pretty simple, but the user profiles are extremely customizable... AND if you need to turn them off for readability/flashing, you can disable themes on any persons page!

i know a lot of people online like to use sort of like... eye-strainy colors or gifs, and while the site absolutely allows you to do that, it also gives the option to disable those things to people who may be sensitive to that

I’m enchanted by his rizzless loser ways

I need to be taken to the seaside for hysteria

You know, I think American capitalism kinda destroyed the concept of vacation. That we've turned our vacations into stress generators in their own right. And I think a lot of that is because we have so very little of it, we're desperate to get as much use out of it as possible.

The first thing is, we just plain don't get very much of it. The legally mandated amount of vacation in most European countries is more than I can reasonably expect to have even when I reach the end of my career. A full month off? Months? Plural??? Not gonna happen. And that's been the case for quite a while. It's always in my lifetime been "I'm saving up my vacation to take two weeks off". I recall back in the 80s, about half the time our family vacation was only 10 days because my father couldn't take two entire weeks off.

The second thing I've had to explain to non-Americans is, for most of us our vacation days and our sick days are rolled into one "Paid Time Off" pool. That if I get sick and have to take time to recover, that cuts into my vacation. Which really incentivizes people to go into the office and spread disease. It also means that even if we actually have plenty of PTO, we're reluctant to use it, since we might get sick and then not have enough PTO to use.

Which brings to the 3rd thing - rolling over PTO. Let us suppose I'm very diligent and health; a hard worker. At the end of the year, I can't have more than 400 hours of PTO available to use. Anything past that is going to be gone. They take it away. Oh, wait, isn't that cold and flu season? And when people want to take time off to be with family? For which we're given pretty scant holiday time?

Of course, that almost doesn't matter because my PTO is capped at 480 hours anyway. If I have that much banked, I can't accrue any more than that. No matter what, I can't take that six month sabbatical to learn chado in Japan.

Lastly, we get punished for using our PTO. Not directly. But if I'm out for more than a day or two, even my company is sufficiently understaffed that large amounts of my work will simply build up. If I take two weeks off, I'm going to spend two months digging out from under the backlog. And other places are even worse.

This means we all take our vacation in furtive snippets - a four day weekend here, maybe three days in the middle of the week there - and we're always in a rush to get to our destination, have as much FUN as possible, and then skid back in home at 1am, planning to be in the office at 7:30 am.

You can't relax that way. You can't unwind. You need time to sit and watch the waves, to have the opportunity to just get up when you feel like it, to go to bed when you feel like it, and for a while simply not have any worries.

And our current approach to the economy absolutely denies us that.

So I'm in Canada but a lot of companies here are run like American companies.

Last year for Christmas, I wanted to visit my family abroad. I, of course, saved up my vacation time so I could visit my family. Because where else am I going to use it, right?

I did what I always did: buy the plane tickets early and then apply to use up my vacation days. I was expecting to leave only 3 days before the studio shut down for Christmas. I was only using 3 of my vacation days.

I applied and got rejected immediately. I was told I should have checked with the studio first because they needed to coordinate with all of the other people working and see who was and wasn't working. BTW, my supervisor was able to take the days off I wanted but I wasn't allowed for some reason. So it's not like I'd be able to report back to him.

They were so INSISTENT that I NEEDED to get this one small project done before Christmas for this other guy, who ended up getting sick so the project wasn't even finished.

But no, I couldn't even use the vacation days I had diligently saved up because fuck me apparently. I had to use my one "personal day" to travel (which, don't even get me started on that bullshit. "You're only allowed one mental breakdown a year"). I didn't get home until 2 in the morning and I asked to at least be allowed to sleep in an extra hour, which they refused.

So yeah. Sometimes you're not even allowed to take a vacation during the one time of year you're most likely to use your minimal vacation days.

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

When I’m scrolling through a blog and see they reblogged one of my posts

"Stop saying 15 year olds with weird interests are cringe, they're 15" this is true however you should also stop saying adults with weird interests are cringe because who gives a shit

To wit:

I want to share some wisdom from my high school art teacher.

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.

Takeaway here: be as cringe as you want. Don’t limit yourself based on other ppl’s tastes. They’re not you, and you are incredible 💕

kissy 'n friends!

Also:

Aaaaaaaand

Also consider:

And!

I've never been able to determine the provenance of this one, but regardless:

"The best time for planning a book is when you’re doing the dishes" - Agatha Christie