you! tumblr user!

can you reblog a two-part post in the correct order?

lately ive been bedridden with a terrible case of i dont wanna

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Like a half hour after taking pain relief meds: oh actually it doesnt hurt anymore i probably didnt even need to take those

my little bugs

I hate the sound of babies crying, but I can't hate a baby. They've been here for like five minutes and approach this situation with an unhesitant attitude of "my needs are unmet and I am going to make it everybody's problem", and I respect that.

Something I read years ago and completely agree with, is that human babies are pretty helpless compared to many other species. We can't walk or run within hours of being born, as many mammals can. We don't have teeth yet, to defend ourselves. We can't get our own food for a long time.

But one thing human babies are really good at - often within seconds of being born - is asking for help.

As we mature and gain new skills - vocabulary both verbal and written, gestures, facial expressions, and so forth - the way we ask for help changes. But babies have just one way of asking for help - filling their lungs with air and wailing. And they're right to do so! Their needs are unmet and they cannot do a damn thing about it except request assistance.

There's plenty of adults who could stand to take some pointers.

Throwing in some vintage @foxes-in-love

— Nikita Gill

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.

Anyone else feel like their mutuals are way out of their league? Like they follow you back and you’re just like

"Why does Group A deserve human rights if Group B doesn't have them?"

Both groups deserve human rights. That's how human rights work.

Anyone who convinces you to barter one group's rights against another is not interested in giving them to either group.

Lemme tell u guys a story

In my freshman year, my great grandma passed away. She never threw out or sold anything worth keeping if she could help it, having grown up in the Depression, so when she passed, my grandma suddenly inherited a lifetime’s worth of treasured items. She distributed most of them to her kids and grandkids, saved some sentimental items, and donated most of the clothing and trinkets to charity. I got back the stuffed leopard I’d given great-grandma in the hospital; the fur was still as soft as it’d been when I bought it. One of the biggest things she had to sort through was jewelry. For a year after my great-grandma died, my grandma was setting out organized rows of costume jewelry on basement tables and chivvying her granddaughters to take what they wanted.

And then, after all the choosing, she snuck me into her room while my cousins picked through wristwatches. On her bed were two small jewelry boxes: an old wooden one, and a cushioned one in white pleather.

“I brought you in here because if I gave these to your cousins, they’d sell it. I don’t want these sold. Do you understand?”

I understood.

This is the story of the biggest lie my grandma ever told her mom.

Great-grandma’s birthstone was garnet, and she loved the look of the stones, but could never justify paying for some. Her husband worked constantly, and so did she, and new clothes for the kids was more important than jewelry at the time. When my grandma was 16, she saved her first paychecks to buy her mom a garnet ring for Mother’s Day; that’s what was in the wooden box. The original receipt, handwritten, was crammed into the lid. Great-grandpa saw that ring and teared up; he’d always wanted to get his wife something nice like that, but hadn’t ever had enough money for it. Determined, he vowed to change that. He set aside money for years, slowly, hiding it away in a box in the attic, vowing to buy his wife something she could always wear with her ring.

Time passed, and inflation happened, and he slowly squirreled money away in the hopes that jewelry might get cheaper again sometime. Time passed again, and age had little mercy on him. He got older, typed up a note, and placed in in the box, describing what the money was for; he knew his time was near. Under no circumstances was the money to be spent on anything other than giving his wife a nice gift. The letter read, “One day, my dear Ruth, you’ll have garnet earrings to match that ring.” It’s what great-grandma had always mourned missing; she had such a nice ring, and no good earrings to go with it.

Well, men don’t live forever, and when great-grandpa passed away, my grandma cleaned out her mom’s attic as she prepared to move somewhere smaller. Going through boxes of polaroids and paper clips, she stumbled on the box of earrings money, note and all. She stashed it with her coat, and after that day of cleaning, went to the jeweler before her mom could try and spend the money on something too sensible. She came back with the white pleather box; sure enough, still nestled inside that box were two clip-on garnet earrings.

”Mom never got her ears pierced, you know. That’s why it took so long to find a good pair.”

Once she’d gotten the earrings, grandma presented them to her mom, along with the note. The paper was obviously old and warped by moisture, but it was legible. My great grandma cried happy tears and treasured those earrings more than any other jewelry; the last gift her husband could give her. Decades after the fact, I’d seen her wear them to Christmas parties and worry over them, checking that they stayed on her earlobes.

There was never any note from great-grandpa. Never any box. Never any earring money. My great-grandpa had spent his saved money keeping himself and his wife confortable throughout retirement. To set aside hundreds of dollars, even a bit at a time, for garnet earrings, was never a thought that crossed his mind. My grandma had seen her mom, exhausted, wracked with grief, and lied through her teeth about where she’d gotten the money for those earrings. She faked the note and everything, making sure her mom wouldn’t wonder where the money came from, and never winced at the pinch in her own pockets. And she never told a soul, not even my mom, until great-grandma was safely and thoroughly buried herself.

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.

People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.

I've noticed more and more in public bathrooms that people skip the handwash and just take a squirt of hand sanitizer from wall dispensers on the way out. hand sanitizer is NOT effective against most things that come out of your ass. i cannot stress this enough. i'm begging y'all. please. please please please please please use the soap.

i'm out here immunosupressed fighting for my life to not get naturally selected while people around me touch a public toilet handles and walk back to their tables to immediately eat a burger

Thank you for bringing this up! Many hand sanitizers and household cleaners proudly claim to "Kill 99.99% of germs."

In fact, this does not mean that the product kills 99.99% of all germs known to exist.

It means that, during product testing in a controlled environment, the product killed 99.99% of the germs it was specifically tested against. As you might imagine, Lysol isn't testing its kitchen disinfectant spray against millions and millions of unique microbes.

In the U.S., labeling laws usually require that companies actually identify somewhere else on the label which germs are being tested and killed. Next time you see a "kills 99.99% of germs" label, check out the rest of the label, and you'll find the small print which specifies that it kills 99.9% of one type of flu, or Covid, or E. Coli, etc. This is why many labels even include an asterisk, i.e.: "Kills 99.99% of Germs!*" Look for the companion asterisk elsewhere on the label for more info.

There are different kinds of germs, like Viruses; Bacteria, Fungi, and Protozoans.

The way we kill these germs to prevent infections varies based on the germs' structure. Essentially, we need different "weapons" (cleaning methods) to fight different microbes. A product that kills Flu Viruses and E. Coli can't necessarily destroy Norovirus or Giardia.

No product is effective against every type of germ, even common germs which regularly cause illness in households and communities.

Hand washing is effective against more germs, not only because it can destroy germs which hand sanitizer cannot, but because it simply washes them off your hands.

More on the many personal, community, & global benefits of hand washing.

Additionally, a lot of the germs that hand sanitiser DOES kill (which, as noted above, is DECIDEDLY NOT ALL OF THEM), many of them are only killed if you break down the surface of the cell.

As in: when you use sanitiser, it's not enough to simply coat your hands and then air-wave them dry. That's going to do fuck all.

You have to scrub the hand sanitiser the same way as you scrub with soap. The agitation of the chemicals against the cell is way breaks through the external shell of many germs and kills the bitch inside.

You should be relying on hand washing as a first port of call, but in the instances when your only option is sanitiser, at least use it properly. Squirt on a liberal amount, and then scrub your hands like you would if you were at a sink with soap, for 20 - 30 seconds. Get more sanitiser if you need to. Otherwise, all you're doing is drying out your hands and killing practically zero bugs.

NOROVIRUS IS NOT KILLED BY MUCH OF ANYTHING.

You have to wash it away! And just 10-100 viral particles are necessary to infect you! People shed BILLIONS in their poop!

Wash your