Welcome to The Nerd Cave™

"never kill yourself" is perhaps my favourite meme these days. there will always be joy in your future and you just need to stick it out to find it

growing up, my mum always told me, whenever i went to the doctors or any sort of health professional, that it was important that i told them that i was hypermobile. she'd done the tests with me (herself being hypermobile and disabled in large part because of it) and though she didn't know the details, she knew that hypermobility was important to have in my health record.

so it was to my great surprise and displeasure that, whenever i told doctors i was hypermobile, it was skipped over. never addressed, never touched on, not even a comment to belie what that meant for me. i myself didn't know the impact hypermobility could have on a person, but my mother had been insistent about that fact. it was important, so why did no one else seem to think so?

i grew up with kids in school who were on the extreme ends of hypermobility. i knew a boy in middle school who could put both feet behind his head. i knew a girl in high school with long, spindly fingers who showed me how far backwards her arm could bend.

both of them had health problems, which became more profound as they aged. i never knew the details, but it stuck out that they were hypermobile, and so was i, and with my own health declining there HAD to be a connection.

common knowledge gives the vague definition of hypermobility as extra stretchy muscles, of being double-jointed. it comes with warnings not to push your hypermobile body into the extremes. don't overextend, you will hurt yourself.

the warnings are warranted. the importance isn't overplayed. these things i knew, but i didn't know why. and without knowing why, they were warnings that i could never truly obey, despite how conservative i became with my movements in a vain attempt to protect what little ability i had left.

hypermobility is NOT stretchy muscles. muscles are supposed to stretch. in fact, it's important to their health (those conservative movements prolly hurt more than helped!). hypermobility affects connectives tissues, and lands under the umbrella of Ehlers-Danlos Sydromes (there are a few) which can range in severity from affecting skin and tendons to affecting blood vessels and organs.

severity is rare, and much easier to catch. this post is for the people who are "a little hypermobile" so that they can understand what makes their body different.

a muscle and its associated tendons are like a hammock. the muscle is the fabric you lie in, stretching to accomodate the load. tendons are the rope that attaches the fabric to the trees, providing a secure anchor for the muscle to operate.

so, what happens when the ropes on the hammock are also stretchy? well, you sit in the hammock and your ass hits the ground.

now imagine that the fabric of the hammock has the ability to clench like a muscle. a normal hammock doesn't need to work that hard to stop ass from meeting ground, because it has sturdy anchors. a hammock with stretchy rope, however, must exert several times more effort, because the more the muscle pulls, the more the tendons stretch.

in short, hypermobility forces your muscles to work harder, because they must first pass the threshold of stretch the tendons are capable of before it can actually do the task it's meant to do. the stretchier the tendons, the harder the muscle needs to clench, the easier it is to overwork.

this info reframed everything i was doing with my body. small tasks of strength required the effort of much larger tasks, and larger tasks ranged from extremely difficult to impossible. holding my arms up so i could work above my head required monumental effort. with an anatomical peculiarity of the feet, i needed to use several muscles in my calves and hips just to stand without losing balance.

so no fucking wonder i crashed and burned in my 20s, when everything i did took all of my strength to accomplish. no wonder i would contort myself out of shape, so flexible that i could anchor myself into extreme poses just to give my muscles a moment of relief, overstretching myself without ever realizing why, and what damage i could be doing.

so, some things to remember:

so yeah. if you're hypermobile, that's important. don't let a doctor's dismissal make you think otherwise. take care of yourself and know what you are and aren't capable of.

There has also been some suggestion that covid and other viruses which lead to postviral syndromes (like long covid, PASC) might be worse for people with some types of hypermobility. Attending to health therefore matters in many ways.

healthcare should not have a weight limit.

like it doesn’t matter if a person is so fat they’re immobile & have infections in their skin folds & need assistance with everything from hygiene to cooking to cleaning etc. they should still get good medical care.

the fattest person you possibly imagine still deserves medical care. it also doesn’t matter why they’re fat, even if that person got fat because all they did was eat and eat without ever exercising, they still deserve medical care.

I'd happily be friends with someone who draws their Sona fatter than their actual body because they feel euphoric and hot over it than someone who polices people about their self expression and desires towards fat bodies.

"ohhhh but this might be fat fetish ough ough"

yeah! thank you for reinforcing the dehumanization of fat people by basically admitting that being attracted to non skinny bodies is inherently a fetish no matter what instead of like, a preference...

and even if someone did fetishize and fantasize over bodies like mine or bigger than absolutely good for them because I'm at least desirable in someone's eyes and not people who police my or others sexuality wrapped in liberal speak.

the amount of people who claim my art is fat fetish art covered up with body positivity speak and that I'm not truly fat is insane because they cannot grasp the idea of fat people being viewed as sexy and wanted for their body without pearl clutching.

they try to be advocates for fat people but in reality they are extremely performative and are disgusted by fat bodies because of their own dysmorphia and trauma or internalized bigotry/fatphobia.

ok last point that should be an important addition: I love kinksters and fat furries and people who have fetishes because like, I'm hating the way puritanism and sex/kink negativity is seeping and poisoning it's way into leftist and queer spaces.

being attracted to fat people and having a fetish for them are both different but also not mutually exclusive and honestly, I see it harmless if you're clear on consent and respecting humans as a living thing. not that hard to grasp.

I do find it fascinating how transphobia is like, the canary in the coal mine for absolutely rancid political opinions, like no one is ever normal about everything EXCEPT trans people, it's always like indicative of some utterly wretched comorbidities

a world without trans people has never existed and never will

prints

baby cats very cute

It seems that your cheap phones are not a god given right but actually a luxury sustained by imperialist inequality after all. Mirá vos.

evil

People really hate thinking huh

Illiteracy is becoming rampant. Reminds me of the fact that a lot of children aren't taught how to sound out letters and are instead taught whole words from the beginning. They memorize it like it's a hieroglyphic instead of learning how to actually read and then picking up more advanced tricks on top of that foundational skill.

- George Orwell, 1984

The example in that screenshot is also just. Worse. Like, let's do a comparison here, and bearing in mind that I have not read Gatsby:

And the 1984 quote above is worth pointing out as well, not necessarily for the Newspeak comparison (Newspeak is an in-universe modified English deliberately constructed to restrict the articulation of ideas, a good IRL comparison would be censoring discussion of/references to LGBT+ topics, whereas with this BS it's hard to say whether the continued erosion of literacy is the secret true goal of this or just a side effect)

But because it's another example of how word choice matters and helps make a point. Notice how, when explaining the supposed benefits of Newspeak, the speaker barely uses Newspeak at all? And how this entire quote would become cumbersome and unwieldy if "translated" into Newspeak and probably wouldn't get all of its ideas across the same way? Notice, in other words, how the architects of Newspeak don't use it themselves and using Newspeak would make it impossible to properly describe it?

The scariest shit I see always comes from people who are quite confident that, being very loving, they could not be doing anything abusive.

THIS. THIS A THOUSAND TIMES. YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND STILL ABUSE THEM. PEOPLE WHO ABUSE THEIR LOVED ONES DON'T AUTOMATICALLY STOP LOVING THEM. THEY HURT PEOPLE THEY LOVE. SOMETIMES IT'S BECAUSE THEY LOVE PEOPLE BUT THEIR MEAN OR SELFISH OR WHATEVER. SOMETIMES IT'S BECAUSE THEY LOVE PEOPLE BUT IT'S A TOXIC LOVE WHERE THEY OBJECTIFY OR ACT OVERLY POSSESSIVE OVER SOMEONE ELSE. THAT ALSO APPLIES TO PARENTS AND PEOPLE WHO AREN'T JUST ROMANTIC INTERESTS BTW. YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND STILL ABUSE AND HURT THEM.

This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

Remember folks, the two types of conspiracy theory are "Things the CIA or FBI has admitted to doing" and "Antisemitism"

I feel like ODD being an official disorder in the DSM should be the thing that makes everyone go “hm” about how psychology is practiced

[looking a child directly in the eye] i diagnose you with Shitty Bitch Syndrome. this makes it legal to do medieval german tortures to you by the way

cmon man

someone asked what is the "point" of some clam shrimp continuing to survive after they can no longer produce eggs. there is no point, they are just little guys that eat dirt and roll around. the point is they're alive and life is wonderful