lol I had to get vaccinated for rabies once (for a job working w/ animals) and the post-injection sickness was SO BAD and the virus in it is fucking DEAD, you’re not actually sick at all it’s literally JUST YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM BEING A SHIT I was so upset but tbh it’s a good sign bc it means you’re good and immune if that happens
So now that it is the day after Trans Day of Visibility, I am hoping fellow cis people will actually make more than just cosmetic efforts to be tolerant.
If you don’t know how you can help, pretty much every struggling trans person I ever met has a PayPal you can donate to.
If you are broke or unable, keeping other cis people accountable, make a fucking effort to use/respect pronouns, make your spaces (work, school, bathroom, home) safe and comfortable for trans people especially your friends.
Keep your comments/criticism about clothes, gender, make up, passing, sex work, respectability, gatekeeping etc to your fucking self.
If you are an artist, writer, poet etc… Representation goes a long way. Not to have them suffer, or be in pain or struggle or die but to include them as much as you would someone who was cis, as a complex character.
If you still don’t know what to do listen to a trans person when they say what they need, do the work to make sure they are heard. Especially trans women of color, especially especially especially black trans women.
I wrote the first 5,000 words of William the Antichrist. It had a demon named Crawleigh. He drove a Citroen 2CV, and was ineffectual. Proper demons like Hastur and Ligur loathed him. It had a baby swap. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. Then my graphic novel Sandman happened, and it was almost a year later that the phone rang.
“It’s Terry,” said Terry. “‘Ere. That thing you sent me. Are you doing anything with it?“
“Not really.”
“Well, I think I know what happens next. Do you want to sell it to me? Or write it together?”
“Write it together,” I said, because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michaelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him.
So my trainer’s bf cheated on her. She broke up with him. He’s holding her stuff hostage until she agrees to talk with him. Which she refuses.
She trains; for free mind you; three college linebackers, a college wrestler, two martial artists, a body builder, and… wait for it…. a Navy seal. We’re gonna go get her shit for her.
This should make for an interesting story.
So everyone who commented on this being like the avengers, you are absolutely right. That’s what all of us had in our heads as we were rolling over to dude’s house. But I’m very proud to say, this ended without violence.
Arrival:
So the super friends all jumped into one of the linebacker’s explorer and headed over to dude’s house. Ok the squad: you all know me, but the other martial artist is a little wirey hapkido guy, the linebackers are all giants (an estimated combined weight of I’d say 750-800lbs), the wrestler looks like an escaped gorilla, then the navy seal looks like your average guy but something about him is unsettling. Really unsettling. Unfortunately, the body builder had to work. Anyway, we send the Hapkido guy and the wrestler to the door first and dude answers, screams at them, and then slams the door in their face. Then the giant linebackers head over and they ring the door bell again. Lo and behold, he was much more polite, but still denied access. Finally, me and the seal join the fray. I casually make my way towards the front of the group, but the seal decides to CLIMB THE BANISTER. We all just turned and started at him completely shocked when dude answers the door. He looks at this weird mismatched group of relatively threatening individuals and one guy perched on his banister like batman. He was like “FINE. Go take what you’re looking for.”
Retrieval:
So we’re all walking through the house gathering what we think are her things and putting them into two boxes. Mind you. We are completely guessing. We didn’t even tell her we were coming, therefore we had no list of items.The only one really being productive was Hapkido, who was legitimately looking for stuff. The linebackers were just randomly picking up furniture, turning it over, and putting it back down. Just showing off how strong they were. In case the numbers game wasn’t enough, I guess they were letting him know they could break him if they wanted to. The seal was just shadowing dude in his own house. Walking behind him, not saying much, just being creepy. Then there’s me. Who was causing general mischief…. He said to take what I was looking for, that’s what I was looking for. Ahaha and the wrestler made a fricken sandwich. Because “you guys look like you have it under control, and I’m a sucker for egg salad.” We were in and out in 15 minutes.
Delivery:
So the autobots rolled out and headed towards homegirl’s spot. She was conveniently outside when we rolled up. We got out and she was like, how do you all even know each other. The truth is, we don’t. She sent us all an email once and didn’t blind copy us all. She vented to all of us about dude holding onto her stuff and we started emailing and that was that. We told her that we went to see her ex. “OMG what did you say to him?” Nothing. We’re not messenger boys. We’re delivery boys. And we gave her her boxes of stuff. She went through the first box and said that was most of her stuff. Then she got to my box and asked “Wtf is all that shit.” So I explained that I took all the batteries out of his remote controls, his deodorant, the light bulb out of his master closet, every pair of dress socks that I could find, the laces out of his running shoes, and all the toilet paper in the house. The guys just looked at me and kind of nodded like they were impressed. She then unexpectedly started CRYING and thanked us. So you have this group of meat heads all standing awkwardly with this weeping trainer. It was quiet for a second when the seal was like “So…. chipoltle?” And we all got burrito bowls.
What a great day.
This is literally the most beautiful and thrilling tale. Start to finish.
I am almost in tears I am laughing so hard. This is beautiful. I can’t believe you took all the toilet paper. I’m dying. Help. It sounds like the start of a joke: two martial artists, a wrestler, two linebackers and a Navy Seal walk into a Chipotle.
I have reblogged this a dozen times and I will reblog it a dozen more.
wait no fucking way “there is no war in ba sing se” is an anime thing? from avatar? i thought i t was a real thing like a quote from some Important Literature that i had never heard of that must have some sort of marxist importance but no it’s from a show about a kid with a pet buffalo
Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:
All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”.
He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”. There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him. He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.
Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.
He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.
Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky.
He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.
What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.
“I hear some of you complaining “women always say they want a nice guy.” I know lots of women — I’m even related to a few — and I can’t say I’ve ever heard any of them say that. I can’t prove it, but this sounds like one of those things stand-up comedians say about women and everyone else just repeats. I’ve also never known a woman who cries when she breaks a nail — although I’ve known a few who swear like a 15-year-old sailor in jail — and I’ve never had a woman ask me if her outfit made her look fat unless she actually wanted and subsequently appreciated my opinion. So either I’ve stumbled upon a secret trove of women who aren’t passive-aggressive sob machines, or you need to stop mistaking Dane Cook routines for peer-reviewed sociological studies.”—Lore Sjöberg, Alt Text: Taking Another Look at the Myth of the ‘Nice Guy’ (via babyspooks)
I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’
and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?
Is anyone else just instantly endeared by people chillin’ on surfaces that aren’t made for sitting? Like hopped up on a counter with a cup of coffee, cross-legged on the floor eating cereal, drinking wine fully clothed in a bathtub, sprawled out on the hood of a car with snacks for a meteor shower, etc? I don’t know why I love it so much, but I do.
Ok so we all know that the answer to “Where did Captain America learn to
steal a car?” is “Nazi Germany” but I think the more pressing question
here is when the fuck did this complete maniac get a driver’s license
Because ok, Mighty Mouse 1.0 is too poor to own a car, too short to
reach the pedals, has vision problems, and is a goddamn New Yorker in the motherfucking 1930s, why on earth would he ever have learned to drive?
So this little bastard can’t even tell the gas from the brakes, he gets
all beefified, he goes on tour with the USO. Unless one of the showgirls
coached him through stalling out a car all over some Hollywood back
lot, he still can’t drive. He goes to Europe. At some point, some genius
looks at him and thinks “this strapping specimen of American hunkhood
obviously knows his way around a vehicle, let’s give him a motorcycle,”
and Steve “no parachute” Rogers is like “how hard could this be?” and
promptly wraps himself around approximately eight trees at the same time.
So then he’s kickin’ ass, fightin’ Hydra, and it’s just months of Bucky being like
“give me the goddamn keys, Steven,” and Dum Dum and Morita endlessly
encouraging his fucking insane Fury Road bullshit, like the Howling Commandos just use “grenade” as code for “Rogers” when they’re reporting
why yet another truck has been destroyed beyond recognition. Yes, sir, another grenade, I agree, sir, it’s very odd that we keep losing vehicles in the same way, that’s the third this month alone
So then he’s in the future and SHIELD is sorting his shit out, and
they’re not going to force Captain goddamn America to wait in line at
the DMV, they’re all in complete awe in him and they’ve seen the old
reels of him on his bike, so when they issue him his driver’s license without any type of road test
they go ahead and give him a motorcycle license too
and steve is like …neat.
Ok so then Bucky is back, shit is settled down, everyone’s heading
somewhere and Steve gets in the driver’s seat and Buck’s like WHOA WHOA
WHOA are you people out of your goddamn minds?! Why is Steve driving, is
this some kind of mission, are we heading into a combat zone, is the
plan for the vehicle to get blown up?? GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEYS STEVEN
And Sam is all “what are you talking about, Steve’s a great driver, I saw him jump his bike over a car once”
And Buck is all “yes but have you seen him use a turn signal?”
And Steve’s like, “Listen, we never needed to ‘signal’ our ‘turns’ in Nazi Germany.”
And after that Bucky always drives.
Fin.
okay but
this is basically how just about everyone in the us army in ww2 learned to drive
most infantrymen didn’t receive any instruction in vehicle use, but during ww2 they shipped about half a million jeeps overseas. most of them got used by logistics units and a lot got shipped to russia, but there were still so dang many of them that they would hand them to just about anyone who could have an excuse to use one.
gotta run a message? here’s a jeep. running gear up the line? take a jeep. got a 24 hour pass? just bring this jeep back safe, will you? you’re a cartoonist? here’s your own jeep. they handed them out like candy to everyone.
it wasn’t unreasonable on the face of it because the us was a car culture basically from the minute the car was invented, so most rural kids knew how to drive already. but tons of them didn’t, and at some point they’d almost certainly end up behind the wheel of a jeep.
as a result, accidents were hilariously common.
they pretty much assumed everyone knew how to drive based on the exact same logic used in this post. it was only after the war that somebody sat down and was like, yo, maybe we should make sure these kids know what a car is before we let them drive them.
my favorite compliment i’ve gotten at college was from a drunk frat boy who said i had “the body of the girl of his dreams” then paused and held up a hand to stop me from saying anything and continued “…..but the haircut of the boy of my dreams”
Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University
I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:
HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD
Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.
Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.
If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.
From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.
Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.
What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.
This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)
There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.
How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.
The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.
What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.
From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.
That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.
Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.
But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.
The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.
We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.
“At 23, JK Rowling was broke. Tina Fey was working at the Y.M.C.A. Oprah had just gotten fired from her first job as a TV reporter and Walt Disney had declared bankruptcy.”—Read This If You’re 23 And Lost by Heidi Priebe (via twentysomethingstate)
It’s fine to want things, but don’t act like you’re a victim because you want high quality stuff without having to pay higher prices for it lol.
it cant just be me who finds it rather jarring and unnerving that a 34 year old man and self-described “libertarian” wrote this post and yet it still gained some kind of traction
what bras aren’t overpriced though like by all means let me know
bras that you entitled “feminists” want: shiny, $50, money that could go to third world kids who need water bra made of papier-mâché and elmer’s school glue: does the job just fine, basically $0.00, checkermate feminists
ok but why do cis dudes always do this lmao… why do cis dudes constantly feel the need to argue with women about how much it costs to be a woman. has it occurred to a single one of them that how the fuck would they know? jfc
I have NEVER found a bra in my size for less than 50$ so bye
on the VERY RARE occasions i have found a bra for less than $50 in my size, they’ve fallen apart quickly and they hurt like hell. have you ever worn a bra, dude? apparently not. the cheap ones HURT. also, the cheap ones invariably come in small cup sizes. i do not have small boobs. bigger boobs = more expensive bras. you try bra shopping sometime.
whenever someone talks shit about the cost of bras, it almost ALWAYS turns out to be a cis dude who’s never had to purchase one or experience the shopping hell that is bra shopping in his life
i just bought 5 bras, plain and boring as hell,
ON SALE, and they still came to $170 before shipping and cross country/border duties. Once you added that in (because they don’t have that store here, and the sizes here cut off at 44), each bra came to $45
WHILE. PLAIN. AS FUCK. AND. ON. SALE.
shut your ignorant fucking mouth
As a plus size woman, let me educate you on the price of my favorite bras that are in my size, cover all my boob, and keep them in place. Mind you, I require all these things since I am a teacher and I work with seventh graders therefore not wearing a bra is not an option, and the only kinds of bras I fit in are plus size bras. I’m a fucking DDD, only certain stores carry my size and I fucking need bras.
So, the bras I like:
Soma’s Balconet Bra (comfiest, best coverage for my chest fat sacks)
MAN LOOKS LIKE THAT BRA IS $60 FUCKING DOLLARS.
What if I want to minimize these fuckers?
GEE. TWO BRAS FOR $120. MAN, I MUST BE A PICKY BITCH. LET’S SEE IF I CAN FIND A DDD BRA ANYWHERE ELSE. OH WAIT, I CAN’T. BECAUSE I HAVE BIG TITS AND I GET PUNISHED FOR THEM.
So, after much hassling from my parents and my dear roommate, I went in to talk to my physics teacher and I went “So, it’s come to my attention that I’m way too ADHD to be getting as much out of this class as you seem to think I should be, do you have any tips.” Because, you know, sitting in a classroom watching a teacher derive equations on the board for an hour doesn’t play great with attention issues and a total inability to sit still. It also causes problems on exams with a strict time limit for obvious reasons. And like it’s not that uncommon an issue so, foolishly, I assumed that he would have literally any help at all to offer me.
He suggested that I make sure I’ve done the reading before every class, in detail, so that I won’t have to pay as much attention in class since I’ll ‘already know the material.’ Because clearly reading between twenty and fifty pages of extremely dense physics textbook is going to go so much better. CLEARLY the best solution to attention deficit problems. OBVIOUSLY. The more fool ME for not thinking of it, right? Who wouldn’t think of that as the obvious solution to ADHD? God, Moran, what are you even doing with your life if you’re not meticulously doing the reading for everything? Because God forbid I realize that doing the reading is literally useless to me, even in classes I give even a single iota of a fractional fuck about as anything except a mandatory requirement.
Since I’m probably abusing sarcasm at this point: I just want to punch him in his smug asshole face. Really hard. A lot. Also the next time he laughs at me for not getting something I might actually flip a table.
I love seeing people heal on here. I saw you talking about suicide in June and now you can’t stop smiling. I saw you swear off relationships in March and now you’re planning a wedding. Man, the storm don’t last forever. I’m proud of y'all.
I swear, so often this site is like a weird little window into peoples’ lives and personal journeys because we put our saddest most awful thoughts on our blogs we’d never share anywhere else and so nobody in our ‘real lives’ even KNOWS the struggles and therefore, the amazing triumphs we’ve had, how hard we’re fighting, but I see this and I see people I follow overcome horrible shit nobody should ever have to even have nightmares about feeling, not once in their lives
but then I see them come out of it - or don’t, but live with it, and stick around for just one more day, and keep trying and living and just, every single fucking day, no matter how painful, my most common emotion here when I look at my friends is I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, PLEASE KEEP GOING.
I’m very glad that movies like Pacific Rim and Fury Road and The Force Awakens are as colorful as they are, because I am really, really tired of desaturated movies.
GOD ME TOO.
My buddy, my guy. Come close and listen to me.
You can have an apocalyptic, gritty, brutal movie with color. Really. You can. I promise.
