Top/Bottom energy

Yeah, me too, Dylan. Me too.

(yawns) ...oh gods, SAME.

Jesus fuck this makes me so mad. I am just gonna copy paste my story because my hands are shaking too much to type it out.

Tldr vaccinate your fucking kids you assholes, this can and does kill people.

When I was a baby, I was allergic to the pertussis component of the TDaP vaccine. I'm not 100% sure how serious my reaction was - my mother just says I turned bright red and screamed for 3 days straight afterwards. When she told my pediatrician, the pediatrician said it was safe to not vaccinate against pertussis, as herd immunity would protect me. So the rest of my vaccines were tetanus and diphtheria only.

Fast forward to when I'm 8 years old. My family and I are traveling up to a family vacation spot like we did pretty much every weekend when I was a kid. We stop at a McDonald's. I play with the other kids in the little play area. My mom remembers a couple of them being sick, but I don't think I was paying attention. We eat, pile back into the car, and off we go.

Maybe a week later I start feeling sick. It looks like a cold, but I keep getting worse instead of better. My mild cough turns into horrible coughing fits, where I cough until there's no air left in my body ... it feels like I'm suffocating (because I am) until some instinct kicks in and my lungs reinflate with a horrible sucking gasping sound. I start coughing up blood and throwing up from my coughing fits.

My mom is terrified and my doctor (eventually a small team of doctors) is baffled. Remember, this was 1994, when the anti-vaccination movement was still pretty new. No one on my team had ever seen whooping cough before; it was just something you read about in a textbook, not something anyone actually *gets* these days.

They treated me for pneumonia, for bronchitis, for asthma and croup and I don't know how many other things. I just remember lots of pills and syrups and inhalers and a nebulizer that tasted like ghosts.

Finally, my mom saw a segment on the local news about an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough) in the area where we had been travelling. The epicenter of the outbreak was a charter school that had a high population of "persona exemption" unvaccinated kids. She looked up pertussis in one of her family medicine books (which she'd been reading like a fiend since I got sick) and the symptoms fit me perfectly.

The doctors didn't believe her at first. They thought she was being overdramatic and overprotective. It took her ages to convince them to test me. Lo and behold, it's whooping cough! They start giving me the proper treatment, and I s.l.o.w.l.y start to get better.

Most of my memories of that summer are pretty dim. I remember waking up in the mornings covered in blood that I'd coughed up in my sleep; I had to sleep with towels covering the bed because I kept ruining my sheets and blankets. I remember my mom sleeping next to me on the floor so she could wake up and give me medicine when I woke up coughing. That medicine tasted like death (I used to cry and scream when they'd try to give it to me), so she'd mix it with a glass of fruity sparkling water to get me to drink it. I didn't know how to swallow pills, so she would crush them up and mix them with these orange sherbet Flintstone's push-up ice cream pop things. (I still can't eat sherbet without throwing up.) I remember her holding me, rocking me as I cried because I was in so much pain from coughing. Each fit was agonizing, and I would cry because I knew another one would always come and I was helpless to stop it. I remember being rushed to the pharmacy, literally being picked up and carried into the car and then out again to the counter, for an emergency dose of some medication or another, I think it was an injection. It was loud and scary and chaotic and I didn't fully understand what was going on, just that everyone around me was terrified.

Most of all, I remember being really angry that the Lion King came out that summer, and I was too sick to go see it. Clearly I had priorities.

What I don't remember, because no one told me at the time, was just how serious this all really was. My parents and doctors were very reassuring, and I was too young to really understand the severity of the disease. My mom didn't tell me this until years later, but they had wanted to put me in the hospital in case I started to ... well, her exact words were, "They wanted me to put you in the hospital, but I said no because I wanted you to die at home."

I was incredibly sick for months, continuing to throw up and cough up blood for about a year after I first got sick. (I'd start coughing if I laughed too hard, so you can imagine my asshole siblings got a kick out of taking advantage of that.)

The long and short of it is, I lived. If I'd been even a little bit younger, or if my mom hadn't caught that news segment, or if my doctors had waited just a little longer to start proper treatment... who knows.

But I lived, and dammit, I'm angry.

This should not have happened to me. This shouldn't happen to *anyone*. Diseases like whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio... they're all absolutely *terrifying*. They can kill, they can maim, they can leave a person permanently disabled or brain-damaged.

Every time I hear someone say they're not vaccinating due to a risk of autism (or whatever the big scary syndrome is that week), I want to either start screaming or punch somebody. It takes everything in me to remain calm and rational and explain that (1) those are quite simply not things that happen as a result of vaccinating and (2) even if they were, do you really prefer a dead child over an autistic one? Vaccines are some of the most highly tested, carefully monitored substances in the medical world. They go through years or decades of trials and are constantly being reevaluated for safety and efficacy. The current recommended vaccine schedule wasn't just designed on a whim - it's been developed over the course of 50 years by three separate, independent medical organizations (ACIP, AAP, and AAFP, if you're interested) that are NOT in fact paid by Big Pharma or the government to trick you into things you don't need. Vaccines aren't some vast conspiracy to make the pharmaceutical companies millions, since they actually lose money on each vaccine they produce. (If they cared only about the bottom line, they'd let you get sick and sell you the medicine to make you better. There's more profit in disease than prevention.) Your doctor isn't giving your child shots because it's fun; they're doing it to spare your child from needless suffering.

There has not been one single case of a vaccination causing autism. NOT ONE. Every study, every exam, every peer-reviewed paper on the subject comes to the same conclusion: vaccines don't cause autism, they save lives.

The reason medical science even developed these vaccines in the first place was because the diseases can be *devastating*. Polio can cause permanent paralysis and deformities in the hips and legs. Measles can cause nerve damage which may become permanent, as well as permanent brain damage or death from encephalitis and meningitis. Rubella can cause fatal encephalitis and internal bleeding. Mumps can leave you deaf, infertile, and brain damaged.

These aren't colds. They're not even the flu. They're fatal, debilitating, AND UTTERLY PREVENTABLE.

WHY WHY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN RISK THE POSSIBILITY OF YOUR CHILD GETTING THESE DISEASES?! NOTHING IS WORTH THIS RISK. NOTHING.

This brings me to herd immunity. What the doctors told my parents was true - in a vaccinated community, I would have been totally fine. Vaccines work when everyone or nearly everyone has them. Whooping cough can't gain a foothold in a community if 99% of the people there are protected form it. One protected person gets exposed, and it goes nowhere. One unprotected person gets exposed and they get sick, but the protected people around them don't. It's like hitting a brick wall. The disease doesn't infect the community. The problem comes about when too much of the community goes unvaccinated, and "too much" varies by disease. For measles, a whopping 90-95% of people need to be vaccinated in order to protect the entire population. Yet there are schools out there where 80% of the children are NOT vaccinated. And that puts *everyone* at risk.

There will always be a segment of the population that cannot be vaccinated. It consists of people like me, who are allergic to a vaccine; young children, who may be too young to vaccinate or who haven't had all their doses and are still vulnerable; the elderly, whose immune systems are weaker and whose immunity may have worn off; and those with weakened immune systems, who are more susceptible to disease and cannot be vaccinated without risking contracting the disease.

Whenever a parent chooses not to vaccinate, they are not only putting their own child at risk - they are putting at risk everybody around them who is vulnerable. They are saying that the risk of autism (or, again, whatever the current unfounded fear is) is scarier to them than the risk of letting their child and possibly dozens of others get sick and maybe die. They are saying that they don't care if I, or someone like me, lives or dies.

I don't want to die. I don't want my child to die, or for her to watch a friend die of an illness that should have disappeared when my own parents were babies. I don't want that sweet old man down the street, who blows the pine needles out of my driveway every month because he thinks his leafblower is the most awesome invention ever, to die. I don't want someone whose immune system is shot due to cancer or illness or age or medication OR ANYTHING AT ALL to die just because some asshole ignorant fucknugget thinks 3 minutes on google is better than a medical degree.

Fucking vaccinate.

Adding onto this:

If you are An Adult™️ and you were fully vaccinated in childhood as is the thing responsible parents do?

Yeah, parts of your childhood vaccines may have faded in efficacy or even worn off completely. Because biology is weird like that. When I got vaccine titers done before starting my current job (I couldn’t find my old vaccine paperwork), I found out that the mumps portion of my MMR vaccine was no longer effective! Because I work for a large healthcare nonprofit, it was no big deal for one of the immunization people to bring me a mumps booster at work, and the problem was solved.

But yeah, if you have the opportunity to get vaccine titers done, I recommend doing it. Getting a booster is a million times better than getting a preventable disease.

And since the story here is about pertussis: the pertussis vaccine in particular very commonly wears off in adulthood. If you haven’t gotten a pertussis vaccine since you were a kid and you’re older than about 25 you should really look into it (or if you’re older and your adult dose was >20 years ago). Several pertussis outbreaks have been caused a few unvaccinated kids + a bunch of adults who didn’t know theirs had worn off.

I had a child die in my arms of pertussis, one time.

I don't want that ever happening to anybody again if possible.

Check your own vaccination history. And are there children around? Do whatever you can to make them safe.

Honestly, I don't mind the proliferation of emojis in casual online communication because it makes my favourite sort of bit much easier to pull off. Saying patently absurd shit in a perfect deadpan used to be hard to convey in pure text, and now all I have to do is punctuate and avoid using little cartoons.

It's actually kind of fascinating how expressing the formal register in textual communication has shifted over my lifetime. In spoken communication, the formal register is mostly about grammar and vocabulary, and this was once true of text as well, but these days folks will often use very formal grammar in casual text, counting on the fact that they're not captalising the starts of their sentences nor ending them with periods to establish that they're speaking in the casual register – and conversely, doing those things can establish a formal register even when one's word choices are conspicuously casual. We've basically evolved a formal register which is only intelligible in written form because it relies entirely upon orthography.

To the fluent speaker of contemporary textual communication, "fuck" and "Fuck." are completely different sentences.

Basketball AU or something (:

in guarani there's a standard greeting that literally translates to "are you happy" (ndevy'apa) and the natural reply is "i'm happy" (avy'a) and as americans learning the language we were so distressed like "but what if we're not happy....." and our teachers were like "that's so not the fucking point"

we kept trying to think of any other way to reply but our teachers kept trying to get it into our brains that it's an idiomatic greeting, it literally is not the time or place to traumadump, and as usamerican english speakers we are not some special exception for saying "what's up" with the reply being "not much" instead of "the ceiling"

but anyway while i was working in paraguay -- the country with the largest population of guarani speakers -- i got sent an article by some friends back home like "look! they're saying that paraguay is the happiest country in the world!"

and the methodology was "we went around and asked paraguayans if they're happy and recorded their responses" and i was like. oh. of course you did. and of course you got a 100% positive response rate.

@official-linguistics-post

official linguistics post

Standard greeting bias

Women want one thing and it's quite obvious, A large affordable interconnected North American Rail Network

You know, if I had a teacher like you when I went to school, boy, I would’ve learned something. I think you’ve learned enough. Not in school. Sidney Poitier & Diahann Carroll in Paris Blues (1961)

@hotvintagepoll

I have a beard, of a particular slightly-distinctive style. I've had that same beard for the entirety of my adult life.

This is, obviously, the most contingent kind of fact about me. If I wanted to shave it off, or to style it differently, I could do so right now with zero difficulty. It's not a cultural signifier, or a marker of group belonging, or anything; even to me, it doesn't really mean anything other than "this is a symbol of me-the-person because it is associated with me because I have it." I started cultivating it in mid-adolescence for ephemeral irrelevant reasons, and kept it going basically out of inertia.

Nonetheless: it is really important to me. Like, really really important.

Sigh.

Assuming that this is a veiled metaphor for racial/disability representation in media, potentially by way of the recent "BIPOC in the Rings of Power and the LotR Magic sets" and combat wheelchair kerfuffles:

Let's get the very obvious out of the way first and note that:

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It's important for me to say: there are people who care WAY more than I do about representation in media. Even though I'm BIPOC and technically have an invisible disability, I have never particularly expressed a desire for More Depressed Chinese Women In Media (and in fact have scrupulously avoided watching the one major recent film with that description, Everything Everywhere All At Once).

I am not part of the contingent pushing for More Representation. I don't want to get involved in the Discourse About Representation. I have THE most milquetoast opinions on this subject possible and expect to get scorn from both sides because of it.

Given that I am not seeking more representation: it still sufficiently bothers me when someone I consider a friend looks at the existing efforts others have put into increased representation and concludes "And having more people like you in media Was Bad For The Purity Of The Media Actually."

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In fact the hidden insight in this post is:

(Yes, yes, I know, Cirdan the Shipwright, don't @ me.)

The problem is rarely that there is no representation. The problem is that often there is Exactly One Representation: precisely one slot and one stereotype to shape the way others view you. The problem is that you are always Cirdan the Shipwright, no matter what actual role you want to play in this honestly-wonderful-sounding parallel universe where people talk about their elfsonas and kids grow up playing Let's Sail To Valinor or whatever.

The problem is that you can't say "hey let's go play something else". What's wrong? Why aren't you enjoying the main game? It's got a bearded character just for you, so what's the problem?

You want to play Mines of Moria instead? Well sure, we can do that, but that's such a super niche thing and then we've all gotta pretend to be greedy bastards, right? And do you have enough loaner fake beards for all of us? Hey let's practice our fake Scottish accents!

(The first few X-Men movies were coming out right when I became a teenager. I was always Lady Deathstrike. This was not any kind of terrible hardship; being the cool inscrutable villainous-second-in-command who dies in a big third-act showdown is pretty cool. Would I have a greater capacity to believe in my own protagonism and not try to die in every LARP I play if Armor, Sway or Karma had been in those films instead? Like, who knows.)

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Part of the reason I can afford to not care is because I don't have it bad at all. East Asians are pretty well-respected in mainstream American culture and depression is, like, the most mainstream of all mental illnesses. Minorities with a history of being negatively stereotyped and people with visible disabilities have very different and much worse struggles, and I don't claim to speak for them.

Part of the reason is because the number of people around me who said yes, you can play, we'll make room for you was always far greater than the number of people who said ew, no.

Piranesi fan art

I have a beard, of a particular slightly-distinctive style. I've had that same beard for the entirety of my adult life.

This is, obviously, the most contingent kind of fact about me. If I wanted to shave it off, or to style it differently, I could do so right now with zero difficulty. It's not a cultural signifier, or a marker of group belonging, or anything; even to me, it doesn't really mean anything other than "this is a symbol of me-the-person because it is associated with me because I have it." I started cultivating it in mid-adolescence for ephemeral irrelevant reasons, and kept it going basically out of inertia.

Nonetheless: it is really important to me. Like, really really important.

It's okay if you have trouble understanding people. Reading others is not as important as being compassionate and open to understanding them.

Mechanical Principles by Ralph Steiner (1930)

Every time I see this post I interpret it as an abstract critique of pornography.

or abstract endorsement, it could be an endorsement.

and it’s kind of hot..? it’s kind of hot.

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.

I know this has good intentions, so I will just add the "how you treat them, even as objects of fiction, can speak about your own character, be careful out there"

Your addition is actually completely antithetical to my message. It is literally the opposite of what I am conveying.

Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.

How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".

It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.

I can write tentacle noncon of my favorite character all day long and be a fierce anti-sexual assault advocate in real life because what I do in my head is not the same thing as what I do in real life.

These tags were too perfect to not include

Oh, cool. Cool cool cool.

So... we're heading for an era of extreme reactionary backlash.

The question is it going to be like 1980's style or 1930's style.

We shit on rainbow capitalism (as we should), but it is a good indicator of social acceptance of LGBTQ people. When brands are loud and proud about how much the support gay people('s money), it means the social conditions have moved in our favor and the potential backlash is weak.

Right now, the power is shifting back to the fascists. That's bad.

Remember y’all- the only immoral ship is censor-ship!

Ok y’all, I need you to drop links for free binder services. It’s November which means that parents won’t think it’s odd for their children to request that they not inspect packages. They’ll simply assume it’s a present for whatever holiday they observe. So please do your part by dropping links in the reblogs and trying to get this seen by those who need it

edit: k, so I mean this in nicest way possible. Liking isn’t going to help anyone. This isn’t just for me, other people need these links. If you if you can’t/don’t have the energy to find and post links to ACTIVE donations. Please at least reblog so someone who follows you can. Please and thank you <3

Master list version: I will be editing and adding to this version where possible.

PLEASE REBLOG

Blue text indicates a link:

First off: Y'all be safe! Links on how to activate incognito mode on an Iphone and an Android phone and on chrome on a computer. Remember to delete your Youtube history after watching!

If you'd prefer to sew your own binder, you can find a free pattern at Ureshii design

Links to lifehacks from the Transgender Equity Network Ireland for tips when binding or tucking for the first time

And here's a link to a Tumblr post showing a step-by-step guide on how to wash your binder. <3

Did you know you can join the Industrial Workers of the World even if you aren't traditionally employed? Check out IWW.org/join for more information on finding a local branch today!

[Image description copied from alt text: A square graphic with an illustration of a person sitting at a table with a laptop, looking at the screen with confusion. Text on the graphic reads, "Freelancer? Self-employed? Between jobs? You can still unionize! Find out how at IWW.org/join." The IWW logo is included in the bottom right corner. End description.]