other as in other than your agab, not other than your gender. so for eg a cis woman reading this the question is if you were amab would you be a trans woman do you think

listen up chucklefucks, i just gotta say. I'm not defending zir, but I'm sad zie deactivated. Like, i get that trauma lasts a long time and the good stuff is maybe easy to forget?? so maybe it's just like that. And my beloved mutual @/pompeyspuppygirl made a post about zir clout chasing behavior, which is pretty shitty behavior if it's true (and if we're canceling someone it had better be pretty severe). anyways now that zie's gone pompeyspuppygirl said it was okay to make this post (again, thanks ppg everyone go follow her --really everyone in this whole drama is worth a follow)

ANYways yeah zie was my mutual and like, reblogged a lot my smaller posts. (that isn't to discredit what my mutual pompeyspuppygirl is saying about zie clout chasing ofc). AND idk zie was always reblogging art from new and undiscovered artists and reblogging donation posts (which if you don't know is really bad if you're trying to clout chase...) (again, though, ppg is my mutual i believe her.) and like, remember on valentines day i tried to blaze zir posts and zie told me to stop because zie didn't want the posts to go viral? (but again ppg is my mutual and has a lot of proof in the Google doc I'm not trying to disprove that I'm just saying what else I know)

Idk, like i feel like a lot of people loved zir's blog a while back, bc like zie DID make some good posts?? So idk why everybody's acting like they aren't even a little bit sad.,. like ngl this feels like maybe all the reasonable people left to Twitter and all the Twitter refugees who love drama came here??? shdfhhdhdhdhdh haha but idk...look idk, i just, julie i do miss you. idk. more thoughts later sorry I'm getting worked up shshs

Warding spells are real, if you want me to stay far away from you forever tell me that you practice reiki.

The nice thing is that I will probably never bring this kind of thing up. I'm never going to go out of my way to figure out if the people around me are, like, really into homeopathy. The less nice thing is that if you bring it up with me I am never, ever, ever going to shut up about it and if you attempt to show me a *study* on the healing power of prayer or the use of chiropractic to treat asthma we are forever enemies and I probably won't talk to you again but I will use the several hours of furious debunking that I did after our conversation to make arguments against your beliefs in the future. You are already a lost cause to me but other people are less stupid about the way that ice crystals form and I can work with them.

I *loathe* medical woo, it kills people and the people who engage in it are shitty human beings who are hurting other human beings.

RE: Herbalism

I don't think that there's a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn't understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.

But "medicine from plants" and "herbalism" are not the same.

The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you've got a headache.

What you can't do is control the dose. You can't do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you're measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it's not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.

That's not a huge deal if you're using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you're using aspirin as a bloodthinner.

And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn't* a big deal. The example they *don't* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that's a medicine from a plant that you can't fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it's done wrong it'll just straight kill you.

And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn't diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn't on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.

And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).

There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for "Hema Ketha" for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)

Are you attempting to take therapeutic doses of turmeric? There's some evidence that it can help relieve joint pain. However you need to take really, really high doses because the medicinal compound in turmeric has low bioavailability. And because you're taking high doses you may be swapping out the risks of NSAIDs for the risk of lead poisoning, because it is unfortunately very common for turmeric to be contaminated with lead.

One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than "allopathic" medicine. They think "it's better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea." But midol doesn't interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they're taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.

There's this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John's Wort tea that has "NOT FOR PREGNANT" on the label. It's good that they're recommending that pregnant people don't select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.

But it's just tea. And what could just tea do, right?

(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That's what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn't steeped as long doesn't hurt, so you drink it and you think it's fine, it's not a problem, and it isn't a problem until it is but you don't know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)

This is also why I'm extremely leery of the "you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor's care and you do what the doctors say" thing because that is relying on:

So long story short I'm not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you're recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.

Because that's the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren't held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don't have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that's in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they're not committing malpractice because there's no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there's no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.

I have pretty much limitless tolerance for things that people want to do to themselves. If you want to take valerian because you think it helps you sleep (in spite of essentially no evidence that it does so and more adverse reactions among natural sleep aids than things like camomile - which also has no evidence that it's an effective sleep aid) I don't care, just make sure to check for drug interactions first.

If you want to replace your elderly parent's NSAID painkillers with clove oil, fuck you.

Today is a big day on the Spanish internet. Valentine's day in Spanish is "día de San Valentín", which sounds almost the same as "Sam va lentín", which is how, in some parts of Spain , you would say "Sam goes slowly".

Hence, since a few years ago, every February 14th, the Spanish internet is full of "wait for me mr. Frodo" style memes. One of our holiest days of the year.

oh and the post would probably make more sense if I actually shared any meme right?

You can't even picture how many variations of the meme people post today. It's all very silly and I love it.

Hijacking your post to add mine

More excellent varations seen this year:

I can't believe I saw this one in Mastodon and not tumblr:

And this year we are getting meta already:

Was looking over lists of bestselling authors for no particular reason, happened upon Corin Tellado, a Spanish romance novelist whose name I hadn’t heard before. On the lists of bestselling authors for whom we have reasonably reliable sales counts (so from the last 150 years or so), she’s in the lower half of the top 20, a bit below Akira Toriyama and Leo Tolstoy, a bit above Dean Koontz and Horatio Alger.

But the real buried lede here isn’t number of books sold, it’s number of books written. Most people on this list are somewhere into the double digits, with the really prolific writers like Enid Blyton and R.L. Stine getting a decent way into digit three. Tellado? Approximately 4,000.

Assume a 50-year career, which seems about right, most of her work was published in the late 1940s to late 1990s range, that averages out to about 80 novels a year, or a novel and a half per week. And I mean I can’t imagine they were exactly high art when pumped out at that rate, but they were apparently popular enough to have sold about 400 million volumes in aggregate, or an average of 100 thousand per book. She’s generally regarded as the second most read Spanish author after Miguel de Cervantes.

I’d screenshot the wikipedia page for her selected bibliography, but it’s basically “do you love the color of Arial typeface.”

I just don’t quite know where people find the time.

Y’know what, none of you are giving my revelation sufficient attention, so I’ve changed my mind. Have her selected bibliography, and devil take the hindmost:

My library had one of her books so I checked it out and read the first couple chapters, then skipped to the end and was disappointed to learn that the protagonist got with the not-boyfriend she left the big city for instead of the married man the summary informed me she would have had an affair with if I’d read further. (I chose not to continue reading because it wasn’t that good and also reading in Spanish is more effortful than reading in English. Also I just wasn’t that interested. I have less discernment re prose quality in Spanish, so IDK if it was actually badly written or just mediocre.)

What's everyone's favourite flowers that aren't like. The normal ones. Like everyone's a fan of roses and sunflowers what's a more niche one. One you don't get in gift sets. Mine's sweet peas

So I found this CD on the street today on my way to work, right? So I decided I’d bring it home and listen to it.

And it was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic-0Aw5Kpak

LOL at all the people comparing this to ‘80s / ‘90s anime openings. My dad, who grew up Orthodox Jewish, flipped his shit when he heard the battle theme for Final Fantasy VI because it resembled Hasidic music. What is even going on, Japan?

Well this is kind of a revelation. This missing half of the equation.

Prog Rock + Hasidic tunes = 90s JRPG battle music.

OK but this post led me down a rabbit hole and I learned Hasidic music is really popular in Japan so I doubt any similarities to game / anime music is a coincidence. Holy shit u guys.

i’m glad this has resurfaced w/ v interesting commentary!

@taxicab-geometry Rachel help I can’t handle this info

Several years ago I briefly worked in the warehouse of a nondescript extremely large e-commerce company. I had no other options for employment but desperately needed money. Turnover was like 150%. I worked from something like 7pm to 5am, my commute was 50 minutes each way and before I got paid I didn’t even have the cash for enough gas to get home one night and had to bum $10 off of my kid sibling (this is all to give you an idea of my abysmal mental state while employed here.) You’re not allowed to do anything besides your job, no music or anything and they track your movement on cameras so you can’t even take a breather. The job is real monotonous, you get sent boxes of items of random sizes and you have to put the items into shelves of varying sizes and the shelves come to you, you don’t walk to them. Because the company tracks the rate at which you put items on these shelves, many small items are desirable because you can put a lot of them in quickly. Everything about the place seems almost designed intentionally to break you mentally and turn you into a robot. So I’m about 6 or 7 hours into my shift, feeling on the verge of a mental collapse, and up comes a container with a bunch of small white boxes, bout half the size of a deck of cards. No labels. Great, I’m already happy about whatever these things are. So I go to scan them in, and it gives you the name of the item and a little picture. Sasuke Penis Costume. What? Sasuke Penis Costume. A picture of that red cloud robe from Naruto and one of the headbands with the metal plate on it. I’m thinking, there’s no way. What is a penis costume? Am I hallucinating this? And there’s so many of them, literally about a hundred, and I know I’m going to be spending at least an hour with Sasuke Penis Costume, there’s so many and they’re so small, I’m already excited about the potential efficiency of these, and then I see it’s Sasuke Penis Costume? So the entire shift I’m like, trying to not put these things away too quick, because honestly I’m starting to build a kind of kinship with them. This is quite literally the most exciting thing to happen to me during my whole 2 week employment at the warehouse. I started to see Sasuke Penis Costume as a friend, some reminder of the outside world, a reminder of the humanity I was becoming so unfamiliar with, a reminder the world contained comedy, art, anime, and penis. I really couldn’t tell you if I ended up putting all of them away, the last thing I remember is my desperate need to look these items up when I got home. I needed a link to send to my friends for when I told them this riveting story. I learned that the costume is called the Akatsuki cloak in my fervent search for the item, and wouldn’t you know it, absolutely zero trace of these things exists online. Not on the e-commerce website, not on any specialized penis-costume websites (whose existence I was not privvy to prior to this incident) and no third-party retailer has these. Not even Google images will show me the hypothetical existence of Sasuke Penis Costume. Every few months I look it up, trying to find evidence that it can be bought, that any of this was ever real. My bond, my friendship, and dare I say even love for Sasuke Penis Costume feels as tangible as the boxes they came in, and yet the universe will give me no closure of their fate. Less and less frequently I search for them, each time becoming more and more discouraged that I will ever find them, but unlike their substance on this earth, one thing is inarguably certain. Sasuke Penis Costume exists to me, and it will live on firmly and resolutely within my memory and within my heart.

OP was it this?

WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS @beemovieerotica

akatsuki robe for a 1/12 scale figurine, about 15 cm, fits a large penis or a small sasuke

I’m wondering if there is any language in which “uchida” or a similar word translates to penis because that would make a lot of sense

It’s probably “chinchin” (ちんちん) which I could see being a typo for Uchiha (うちは).

Sasuke Penis Costume ending explained

Look, while both can kill you if you're not prepared, it's ultimately very simple:

In cold weather, you can always put on more or warmer clothes.

In hot weather, taking off clothes quickly becomes illegal, and then impossible.

presented without commentary or apology

Why OP

slam that fucking unmute button

Oh? what a promising thumbnail.

That’s quite a costume. I love this woman’s hair, and her energy…

WAITAMINUTE

Apparently I don't have enough to do, because I decided to spent tonight writing a song. This isn't quite a clean take—the ending is a little hard—and I'm still poking at other bits, but it gets the idea across.

Lyrics are the fourth and last stanza of "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" by A. E. Housman.

Ever see a depiction of St. George and the Dragon? It's pretty fair to say if you've seen one, you've seen them all: Georgie on a horse stabbing a flailing dragon creature, princess piously kneeling in the background, vague landscape alluding to the homeland of the artist's patron.

The most varied part is the dragons. No one had a real definition for the thing, it seemed. For your pleasure and entertainment, I have ranked some medieval depictions based on how impressive George's feat seems once you see the dragon.

Paolo Uccello, 1456

This is a terrifying beast. The hell is that. Uccello was one of the first experimenters with perspective, so the thing also looks surreal, like it's taking place on Mars, or a Windows 95 screensaver. I would not want to fight that, I would not want to be tied to that. (Sometimes the princess is tied to the dragon for some reason.) 10/10

Horse thoughts: Maybe if I look at the ground it will be gone when I look up

Unknown artist, c. 1505

This is a rare change of form for the dragon; it's the only one I've seen actually flying (or at least falling with style). It doesn't look particularly deterred by the spear through its throat, either. Also, George looks appropriately nervous. On the other hand, it hasn't got teeth, it seems to be fuzzy rather than having scaly armor, and George is bolstered by his army of Henry VII and his children, most of whom definitely didn't actually die in infancy. Still, wouldn't want to fight it, wouldn't want my pet sheep near it. (Sometimes the princess has a pet sheep for some reason.) 9/10

Horse thoughts: I am so glad I wore my mightiest feather helmet for this

Raphael, 1505

We are coming to Dragons With Problems. This guy looks about comparable in size to George, and does have wings, but doesn't seem to be using these things to his advantage (and has he only got one wing?) And how does he deal with the neck? He does have a comically small head, but holding it up with such a twisty neck seems complicated at best. But most egregiously, he is doing the shitty superheroine pose where he is somehow simultaneously showcasing his chest and his butt, with its unnecessarily defined butthole (more on this later) (regrettably). 8/10 bc it's Raphael

Horse thoughts: AM I THE BESTEST BOI? AM I DOING SUCH A GOOD JOB? WE R DRAGON SLAYING BUDDIEZ

The Beauchamp Hours, c. 1401

We had a spirited debate about this one at work. Again, the dragon has gotten smaller, and this one hasn't got even one wing. He's basically a crocodile. So the debate became: would you want to fight a crocodile if you had a horse and a pointy stick? Would the horse trample the animal, who can't get on its hind legs, or freak out and throw its rider? Would the pointy stick be enough to pierce the croc's thick hide? In this case, George seems to be controlling his horse and putting his pointy stick in the dragon's weak spot, so we can be impressed by his skill and strategy. However, his hat is dumb. 7/10

Horse thoughts: Dehhhh

Book of Hours, c. 1480

Here we have the same kind of croco-dragon, but George's focus on his strategy has gone out the window. He's flailing around, not even looking at his target, he's about to lose his pointy stick, he hasn't got a hand on the reins, and his sword seems to only be poking the invisible dragon over his shoulder. All he's got going for him is that his hat is slightly less dumb. 6/10

Horse thoughts: Yay, new friend! Come play with me, new fr- what is happening

Final dragons put behind this Read More for your safety:

I wish I could say I cherry-picked these, but really the image of the dragon as a sky-blotting behemoth seems to be a quite recent one. They started to get bigger and more menacing around the 16th century, but really you'd be hard-pressed to find a dragon bigger than the horse.

Here's an anonymous one from around 1510:

There's a hefty amount of dragon there; I also enjoy his bug eyes, George's impressively stupid hat, and the gnarly bone pile. Also, if you check out the distant figures, this artist seems to be covering his bases by also including the version of the legend where George instead captures the dragon with the princess's girdle, taking it back with him to her kingdom where he uses it as blackmail to get them all to convert to Christianity before he'll kill it. Nice one, George. (This does explain why it sometimes looks like the princess is tied to the dragon.)

OKAY.

I have learned of another dragon-slaying saint, and I am never letting George off the hook again.

The story of St. Margaret of Antioch goes that she was imprisoned for refusing to convert and marry a Roman official; in prison, she was visited by the devil in the form of a dragon. The dragon ate her, but she was holding a cross/made the sign of the cross and the dragon EXPLODED IN HALF and she escaped. (Still got beheaded tho; tough luck.)

And let me tell you. EVERY ONE of Margaret's dragons KICKS ASS:

That took me like five minutes. Big! Wings! Teeth! Fire! Sometimes there's another devil there getting his ass kicked too! And she ain't even trying!

And it nullifies my earlier thesis that they just weren't making big dragons back then. Go back and look at what Raphael had George fight, and then check out what he gave Margaret:

She don't even give a fuck. Why is George the dragon saint. George is FIRED.

Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.

“Well,” said Alice, “these are a dreadfully strange assortment of objects!”

“They all symbolize different aspects of Our Lord’s martyrdom,” said the Fisher King, casting a line into his teacup.

“Indeed. I am sure everything symbolizes something else, for if everything was only itself I should be very confused. Might I ask what the point of the bleeding lance is?”

Alice regretted asking the question as soon as she had done so, for she saw the pun that would likely be made about the word point. Instead, however, the room erupted in applause and shouts of “The Grail! She has achieved the Grail!”

The next castle she visited, Alice resolved to herself as the inhabitants of this one danced for joy, would be more sensible.

Or I could do this with The Knight of the Cart.

“Which shall you choose?” asked the guardian. “The underwater bridge or the sword bridge?”

“Both sound dreadful,” said Alice. “I think I’ll just float the cart across.”

The guardian sputtered so hard his helmet broke.

“You cannot ride in a cart to rescue a queen!”

“I don’t see why not,” said Alice, growing cross. “It can’t be worse than abducting a queen.”

“Oh, much worse! For to abduct a Queen is wicked but heard of, while to save he on a cart is virtuous and unheard of.”

“Oh, tosh!” said Alice, floating the cart.

“If you cut my head off,” said the Green Knight, “then in a year and a day, I shall cut off yours.”

“Certainly not!” said Alice.  “For if you can survive such a blow, it would be quite unfair to me, and if you cannot, then I will have killed a man over a silly game!”

“Silly games are the most important thing in the world,” said the Green Knight, “for it is after them that we judge honor.”

Alice thought to herself that if this was honor, adults could keep it.

In honor of a thing that keeps popping up in Arthurian novels I read…

“You have nothing to fear,” said the robber knight, “for you are traveling alone. Everyone knows a knight may not attack a maiden alone, but only a maiden traveling with a knightly protector!”

“That can’t possibly be a law,” said Alice. “Camelot is absurd, but not that absurd.”

“It is not a law, but a custom.” The robber knight sounded as if he were lecturing a fool, which Alice felt was very unfair of him. “Customs are far more important than laws, for laws may change, but customs never do.”

Alice didn’t think that was true, but she would not argue the point.

“What about attacking a knight?” she asked. “Can someone attack a lone knight, or only a knight traveling with a maiden?”

“One may attack a knight any time and under any circumstance. That is the meaning of the word ‘knight’- he can be attacked by day or by knight!”

With the understanding that, as a maiden traveling alone, she might attack the knight and he could not return the attack, Alice picked up a handful of rocks from the ground and began to throw them at him. She was not generally an unruly child, but everyone has their limits.

*by this I mean like using one name for work/business and using the other in your/their personal life or in private

**meaning if your names are AA and BB you'd change them to AB and BA

I'd appreciate it if you'd reblog to get further teach and more results!! 🙏

Oh my god I was just looking to see how much a copy of Hamlet would be through Barnes and Noble and PEOPLE ARE ROLEPLAYING WARRIOR CATS IN THE REVIEWS??????

@vriska

ok i was VERY involved in the. b&n reviews warrior cats roleplay scene when i was like 10-12. the first two books of the series were general hubs where ppl would post ads for their clans and other groups. there was a huge percy jackson community i remember participating in too. it worked through search results, eg. riverclan might be under the search result “rivers”. book 1 was rules and a “map”, book 2 might be the main area, book 3 the medicine cats tent, etc. there was also usually a book where ppl would post lengthy descriptions of their character(s). it was a rlly bizarre little corner of the internet jdksj also it was impossible to find any real reviews of any of the warrior cats books bc of it

Hey this is really interesting, OP I would honestly love to hear more

i can’t believe this post is still circulating but here is more info :)

- ppl based their roleplays under generic words (like i said river or mountain etc) but also classics which explains why these pictures were under hamlet. there’s like tens of different versions of romeo and juliet or les mis

- when i posted this years ago a ton of ppl asked why we used b&n reviews. i can’t speak for everyone but i had pretty limited internet access as a kid so i couldn’t go on roleplaying sites. i did however have an ereader called a nook that had access to the barnes and noble estore !

- there were like celebrities (?) of sorts. popular roleplayers would often create their own roleplay worlds or write fanfic and sometimes original fiction. i wrote stories and posted them… afaik the writing and plot was on par with dork diaries and i posted like 10 chapters ? i remember being relatively well known but it was hard to put things into perspective so who knows

there’s probably more to say but who knows. this is my favorite “hey did you know” thing to bring up once i get to know someone. truly life (weird children rping) finds a way

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