Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

if I forgot your favorite subgenre or misclassified a band feel free to argue in the replies 👍

update Throbbing Gristle is industrial but not industrial metal. consider the likes of Nine Inch Nails or Rob Zombie instead…

also if your fave genre isn’t here choose the closest. Stoner and sludge metal falls under doom metal, melodeath and grindcore under death, etc etc

T shirt that says "I ❤ being stuck in a time loop"

Booty shorts that say "you always look"

the only grind I respect is girls grinding against each other or something. like whatever the mortar and pestle get up to

Must check car brakes

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

In addition to the fact that it kills you and the people around you, you should quit because Big Tobacco are smug, queer-hating assholes who named their campaign to hook gays “Operation SCUM” and, cross my heart, I am not shitting you. They also made the playbook used by Big Oil and antivaxx conspiracy theorists.

So, just a reminder that spite is a great reason to quit smoking.

Also, I keep hearing people RAVE about the book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr. You can do this - other people have done this! There’s help out there. And spite.

Good addition! Quit smoking to stand against capitalism!

HI harm reduction for anyone who just picked up the habit and feel very black and white about everything! Or anyone feeling too black and white and going well I guess I'll die then who cares! Harm reduction here

- smoke less! Make arbitrary rules about when you get to smoke. Tie smoking to some thing you hate to do but need to get done. Like, I only get to smoke when I do (thing I gotta do). Or I only get to smoke... when I am dressed for the day and have left the house. Whatever works from where you're starting. No smoking indoors, whatever, only 1 cigarette after work, make shit up

- If you're doing the "i only smoke when I drink" or "I only smoke socially" and it's becoming hanging out w smokers more often or drinking more often -> switch it up w prior thing new rules. I only smoke... alone. I don't smoke... with coffee. Whatever. Smoking w other smokers IMO only leads to more smoking don't do that for either of you

- Get your space smelling less of cigarettes. Like, wash your clothes all of em, designate one item your smoking jacket or whatever. Basically work to overcome the olfactory fatigue so you can actually smell how much you stink. I swear this one works even if you currently feel that you like the smell

- if you JUST STARTED, but your mental health is so shit that you don't have it in you not to smoke, moderate as well as you can to stave off the actual addiction part. Like, switch to lower nicotine cigarette brands (lights don't mean less, google this one). Don't smoke every day. Go every other. Make that your hard line - not every day. Give future you a better chance at kicking it

- In any context of this any starting point, supporting yourself through other avenues will help. Quality sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health care, whatever all the basics anything achievable for you do those things if you can

- Substitute treats. Pick other things to treat yourself. Food, tv, bed rot, whatever. Let your id have other stuff that's not smoking

Ok im done this is all just. Idk stuff I wish I'd known decades ago that I hope can help others. There can be more to it than just quitting or not quitting if you feel stuck or hopeless in it cheers on the nebulous other

It’s also worth noting that people get discouraged by repeated attempts to quit, but the people who succeed at quitting and making it stick? Are people who have on average tried many, many times! Don’t beat yourself up if you struggle. The struggle is not weakness, it’s where the success comes from.

New Drunk Fic Ahoy!

I wrote for the latest edition of Firewhiskey Fic and I won a thing! Behold this incredible banner made by @unmistakablyoatmeal <3

And here's the fic:

Time to Die Live

Harry/Draco | 950-ish words | Explicit or Very Mature

Summary: Draco pulls in a club and lo and behold it’s Potter.

Prompts Used: Sex Education, Honey

Tags: Clubbing; Depression; Depressed Draco (he's not suicidal but he doesn't really care if he lives); Hopeful Ending; Some Ableist Language; Drug Use; Drinking; Brief, Past Draco/OMC; Blow Job; Anal Sex; Semi-Public Sex; POV 1st Person; POV Draco Malfoy; I Was Drunk When I Wrote This

horse people are weird

what does this mean

horses can see demons

@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???

I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.

The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.

Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.

Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.

To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.

This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.

However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!

On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.

The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.

Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*

reblogging for the line “Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety”.

Also: horses have very limited depth perception. You know that thing where you out your finger on the bridge of your nose and it disappears because it’s behind your field of vision? Now imagine your nose is as long as a horse’s. The blind spot in front of a horse’s nose is huge, four to six feet or so. When a horse jumps, it can’t see the fence, it has to be trained / remember to look for it and remember where it is and how high. They cannot tell if that is a spot of oil or a black hole in the road. It’s probably a black hole. Better avoid it.

Horses can’t see your hand, they smell the treat (and use very sensitive skin/whiskers to feel.) Some horses are garbage at doing this gently, just absolutely awful, but remember - they can’t see what they’re doing.

Horses also have partial color vision - they see horse relevant colors. Blue, yellow and therefore green. No red derived colors. If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip, ride it in an arena with alternating sections of purple and yellow seating. Grey grey YELLOW YELLOW HOLY SHIIIIIIIT. Every single horse would walk past the purple seats and go OH MY FUCK at the yellow ones. This is why the bright red (grey) bucket isn’t a problem, but oH my FfffffffffSHIttTTTT do they notice a stray yellow plastic grocery bag.

Last statement here is, instinct tells a horse that anything clinging to your back is going to eat you. That we spend so much effort convincing them otherwise is amazing and in general a testament to the human race’s commitment to Bad Ideas.

[ID: A photo of a horse from the perspective of the rider. Top and bottom text reads: “I dont need a smartphone to find invisible monsters, I have a thoroughbred”

do it weird do it scared do it shy do it anxious do it lonely do it cautious do it with shaking hands. but do it.

the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

not again

it sounds ridiculously obvious now, but one of the best pieces of writing advice i've ever received is that most of the time, a character's flaws are also their strengths. a smart person might have trouble admitting they're wrong, or break down when they don't know how to solve something; a practical, capable person might lack emotional intelligence. a determined person might be so focused on their goals that they neglect their friends and ignore anything "superfluous" (i.e. they don't notice minor details that turn out to be important later on). kindness can become naivety; open-mindedness can become centrism; confidence can become arrogance. sometimes it's tempting to just reach into a grab bag of positive and negative traits and sprinkle them in at random, but it's much better to instead isolate the things you like about your character and take those traits to the logical extreme.

Dark Wizards: We have your husband.

Harry: How do I know you're telling the truth?

Dark Wizards: Please come and take him back. He's making us feel so bad. He's already composed 5 songs about how terrible we are at our jobs.

Harry: Oh that's him. I'll be right over.

being obsessed with a character is so fucking embarrassing like I'll be getting dressed in the morning like "I bet the 12th doctor would wear these socks" bitch shut the fuck up

some of you MUST be making up guys.

Idk who gort is but bertie wooster is a character from a tv show. I think he was the one with the valet named jeeves?

GORT??? GORT FROM THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL GORT????? IS THIS YOUR MAN??????

art by Jono Hey (sketchplanations)

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.