guys

healing in video games is fuckin easy. if one of your allies is like "hey im dying"? just hit em with a "dont" and theyll be at full health

the internet these days is insane because every 3-5 days you see an honest to god neuron-rewiring video produced by some rando with too much free time, and it's so fucking good that you know would have been its own entire meme for MONTHS in 2005. but we're so saturated with phds in breaking bad editing so you can't go into work like "hey did you see The Bear No Rush video game?" because nobody has any idea what you're talking about. back in my day we watched 1 blurry video of a guy doing the Numa Numa Dance and it sustained all of society for an entire year.

I cant wait until I can get Silksong so I can marvel at the beautiful new areas while Hornet thinks of amazing new curse words to describe how much she hates it

crisp glass of water moodboard

EVERYONE WAKE UP

It is releasing on June 5th on all platforms.

WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL??????

THIS IS FUCKING HUGE YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FUCKING HUGE THIS IS GOING TO BE IN MAKING WHEELCHAIRS EVEN COOLER FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

WHEELCHAIRS SAVE LIVES

I talk a lot about physically active video games on the internet. and one of the most common questions I get is, "can I play this sitting down?"

a ton of people who want to play active games and could benefit greatly from them wind up avoiding popular active games because even when someone can play seated, it is rarely communicated well in the marketing, requires going through a bunch of confusing options and menus, or was very clearly not primarily designed to be played seated. it often is an afterthought, at best.

this game being about wheelchairs is fantastic. for one, positive representation of wheelchairs and wheelchair users is life-saving on its own. but second, it also makes it abundantly clear that this is an active game designed to be played while sitting.

Cats will soon take over the world

do your best to drink ample water and eat ample fiber because chronic constipation can be a sign, sometimes a very very early sign, of some pretty major medical conditions. if your constipation is not caused by diet you want that checked out ASAP

and for the record the type of constipation that can signal something nasty does not mean you only take a dump every few days. it can look like that. it can also look like really having to strain but shitting every day, it can look like having diarrhea sometimes too, it can look like sometimes having a good day but just generally having a really bad time taking a shit on average. there are all sorts of patterns of poop struggles that can mean you have something going on that needs treatment.

the presentation I was watching at that moment was on synucleinopathies specifically, but many other types of autonomic conditions too. including those that are affected by things like autoimmunity. autoimmune conditions affect the autonomic nervous system, which involves the enteric nervous system, which is digestion! there is no comprehensive list of every infection, injury, or condition that can cause problems with the autonomic and/or enteric nervous system.

conditions like gastroparesis can be some of the first signs that something nasty is happening that will get worse without treatment, or worse faster without treatment.

my first big symptoms were gastrointestinal. they were excruciating and not taken seriously by anyone except me. I went years without proper treatment and, well. some things happened because of that

I had massive problems with my digestion for years before I found out that wasn't normal. I went to my GP, got referred for blood tests, and those turned up Hashimoto's thyroiditis and high levels of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. Got my thyroid out and went on thyroid replacement (levothyroxine) and found out I'd also been living with thyroid cancer. If your thyroid doesn't work properly, other stuff might not work properly either. My digestion* has been a lot better since my thyroid was sorted out.

*other health issues have been getting worse but that's another story.

yup! hashimoto's is one of the more common dysautonomia comorbidities. glad you caught the cancer too!! hashimoto's is one of those conditions that is just so horribly under and misdiagnosed. it can cause so many issues. it needs to be more common to screen for it!

I wish I'd been screened for it earlier! I might have been screened when I was 14 (but it might have been too early for the tests to flag it up?) when I first started having problems, but I didn't get screened again until I was 23, by which time my thyroid was massive and stopping me swallowing properly. I used to choke on water several times a day, and then after my op, frightened my nurses by swallowing whole (with water) large pills that were meant to be chewed up. "What do you mean you swallowed it whole? It's massive!" / "Until yesterday I had a huge rock in my neck and now it's gone."

But I wish I'd fought for screening in between! I might have been able to get out of bed more often when I was at uni*, I might have been able to hang out with my friends more at school, or stay awake when I needed to. As it is, years of my life were just... basically non-existent. And now I'm having more health issues take over my present (huzzah, sarcasm). It's so frustrating.

*and the doctor I saw there might have diagnosed my hypermobility earlier on, instead of seeing "patient with pain and fatigue" and smacking on that "fibromyalgia" label that turned out to be a misdiagnosis.

please do not blame yourself at all. autoimmune testing is so flawed, and that includes with hashimoto's. the blood tests, if you had them, very well could have been false negatives at the time. autoimmune conditions love hiding.

I know what it feels like to miss out on years of your life. it was the responsibility of your healthcare team to keep looking for answers until your quality of life was better. it sucks how often young folks are forced to doubt or argue with their own providers to get treatment. especially in a world where there is so much medical misinformation floating around that the average person, especially the average young person, is made to believe that doctors have all of the answers first try the vast majority of the time. and that questioning doctors, even with lack of effective treatment, is wrong.

reality is in between. doctors do not have the answers for everything all the time, and so many people only wind up getting diagnosed after someone other than their doctor says, "hey, have you gotten tested for this medical condition?"

good news is: some really high tech stuff is being used to find better tests and treatments for all sorts of conditions, including autoimmune conditions and their comorbidities.

better treatments are coming!

The Blue Spirit putting out firebending with a bucket of water is the absolute funniest thing ever done in avatar combat. It just is.

oh my god @murple

2pm arrives. Oh I got plany of time. 6pm arrives. Awhat the fuck.

I heard we gotta bring our own BOOPS this year

Astronomers are the funniest people on earth actually

Good morning I drew a sleepy cat

APRIL FOOLS THEY ARE A SNAKE WISHING YOU A NICE DAY !!!

a lot of the anti-porn shit i see from people is practically superstition. the vast majority of the time people aren't bringing up specific complaints made by sex workers– most of these people do not know or regularly talk to sex workers– it's just a vague idea of "well I've heard that the porn industry is really bad! sex trafficking and stuff!" (& they never bring up the treatment of male sex workers, because they get all their talking points from the White Slavery playbook). they never talk about the solutions that sex worker activist organizations have said they want to see implemented (they don't know that sex worker unions exist and have things to say on this topic, because then they can't center their feelings on porn under the guise of caring about sex workers). combine that with this magical thinking that somehow watching a recording of two people having sex will poison your brain and drive you to madness.

crazy idea folks but what if we actually left the discussion of the porn industry up to the people who actually work in it. it may be hard to believe but they actually are capable of expressing thoughts in writing & speaking! and YOU can learn from them instead of treating sex workers as a symbol to project your culturally christian anxieties onto!

And in turn, this puts sex workers in danger.

Kick a guy out of your apartment for being abusive? He can punish you by calling a trafficking hotline run by these fucks who'll send the cops to beat down your door in the early hours of the morning and 'rescue' you from your own chosen profession. This rescue often involves walking (or dragging) you down the hall naked while all your neighbours look on, looting your apartment and seizing any cash on the premises, and confiscating essential prescription medication 'in case it's drugs'. What happens to you once you're 'rescued'? You get charged with at least one crime, interrogated for hours, and held for an indefinite length of time in police custody. Someone might mention in passing that oh, by the by, here's the number for a counselling service. If you're lucky.

When people can use the tools meant to 'save' us as a punishment, there's something very wrong.