It seems I'm still not over the Laterano events. What was Arknights up to when they said

"These are not good people. They are not plot-driving villains, but they do as much evil. The difference is that a villain considers and is master over their own actions; these people move uncritically through life, doing whatever they think is 'normal' regardless of the consequences. When the decisive moment comes, they will choose to let innocent people die rather than upset the status quo."

"And they're in the gacha!!!"

<3

compilation

how could you forget his magnum opus

baseball heritage post

ashtail kiss

EU QUERO

I love how he went the extra mile and made an outfit that definitely fits with the Jojo aesthetic. Like yeah, I totally wouldn't think twice at a Jojo character wearing a leather outfit covored in mirror.

I've been off of my low dose post menopausal testosterone for a month bc the only compounding pharmacy is too far away and I'm too busy and it's fascinating to watch all the health problems that went away on it creep back. It's such solid evidence that yeah, maybe more cis women need T and more cis men need E probably to actually live healthy functional lives but we're so binary and stupid about sex and gender that T is the Man Hormone and E is the Woman Hormone and there's a baseline for cis people??? Insanity. Insane. Absolutely insane.

Off of T, my joint pain is back, my blood pressure is up, I've gained weight, I'm volatile if I don't control myself, I'm constantly an emotional wreck, and I can barely get out of bed. It took me years to get them to let me try T, and they kept arguing that all of those things would get worse ON T. I fucking hate modern medical science modern sex and gender science too bc my queer clinic was shocked to hear all this. Genuinely. They don't get it despite being THE local hormone clinic for queer folks specifically. They don't understand intersex bodies or that maybe our baselines are bullshit on an individual basis. All of modern sex and gender science absolutely ignores the natural sex differences in most people.

How many people get put on the wrong hormone for their wellness? Cis or trans. Because we've assigned hormones to gender. How many cis women deal with worsening body pain and mental issues bc they were put on estrogen when they needed T? Why are we gendering fucking hormones

I've had a billion doctors say the same shit to me. Last time I got my presh checked in-office on T, it was 110/70. Literally as perfect as it can get.

I was misdiagnosed with PCOS, but I have CAH. My blood pressure was critically high for most of my life and I was always told to lose weight. When I say critically, I mean 160/120 nearly every single fucking time. Dangerous. BP meds helped get it to a safer high, and testosterone got it to low-perfect.

I want to strangle every single doctor who nearly killed me by ignoring that critical BP and blaming ME for it. Don't ever let doctors convince you that there's nothing at all they can do on their end. Or that hormones are specifically bad for you in one direction or the other. Estrogen has nearly killed me and since I'm a cis woman, estrogen is supposed to "be the right hormone" to "fix" me. It never was.

On the other end: I'm trans and I'm on Testosterone to accomplish my gender goals like a year ago. I also was diagnosed with fibromyalgia about 2.5-3 years ago and it's widely believed there's no treatment options to manage fibromyalgia aside from exercise and muscle relaxers... which is only given in worst case scenarios.

Since starting testosterone? My symptoms have alieviated- not entirely vanished- but I have more energy and control over my life and my pain is far more manageable than when I was initially diagnosed. I relied on a cane around the time of my diagnosis. Now, most days I don't need it since my symptoms have improved and allowed me to improve my health.

I don't think T is the magic cure-all for my disability but holy shit my quality of life has drastically improved.

As someone who had fibro suggested but then got diagnosed with EDS and also still have pain but it's like cut in half? Yeah. I legitimately thought I was on a downward decline to an early grave bc I was so dysfunctional from pain. Now it's manageable.

Also - is it fibro? Is it EDS? Will we ever know the truth? Probably not :)

I really want everyone to know that modern medical science is AWARE that testosterone is an effective treatment for fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, and estrogen is not. This doesn't work for everyone and exactly how it works isn't quite settled science, but it's been known for like a decade. A LOT of doctors don't know this, because they're not up to date on the research, or are resistant to the idea because of perisexism/cissexism/prejudice against people with mixed sex characteristics in general/a misconception that giving a patient mixed sex characteristics is inherently harmful. BUT. Science, as a whole, knows! and more people should know!

Here's a fibromyalgia-specific review article that I think is well-written and has a non-technical summary of the main points. It should be open-access but let me know if you can't get at the full text.

White HD, Robinson TD. A novel use for testosterone to treat central sensitization of chronic pain in fibromyalgia patients. Int Immunopharmacol. 2015 Aug;27(2):244-8. doi: 10.1016/j.intimp.2015.05.020. Epub 2015 May 21. PMID: 26004314.

This article is TEN YEARS OLD. I'm printing this out and taking it to the gender clinic and stapling it to the nonbinary doctor's forehead that denied my intersex ass T gel because I identity as a woman and it would "make me gain weight and make my blood pressure go up." A nonbinary doctor told me this. A nonbinary doctor denied me fucking hormones that could have been helping me this whole time. A nonbinary doctor led the charge on forcing me to keep taking an antidepressant that was keeping me awake for days straight and making my kidneys hurt.

I'm so fucking mad. Not at the person providing this article - I'm pissed that I waited months on a waiting list to see this nonbinary doctor, hoping they'd be the change I needed, and in the end I had to hunt down a cis OBGYN with PCOS to medicate me properly. I'm sick of intersexism. I know three other local intersex people that this specific doctor has denied care to. Fuck.

Trans intersexism, y'all.

Me when I

When she

When I

When my shark girl gf

When she

When I

getting little-sister-zoned by the woman you're obsessed with. lets fucking go.

kinda insane

SHE'S THE WORRRRST

surely there’s more examples that i’m just not aware of but afaik the closest you’ll get to a n vietnamese perspective on the war is viet thanh nguyen’s the sympathizer (fiction and actually mostly takes place in america) and ken burn’s vietnam documentary series which actually interviewed pavn & vietcong soldiers for the first time maybe ever in american retrospectives of the war. i’m sure there’s more out there but it really is insane that it’s such a drop in the bucket compared to american-centered stories about how actually it really fucked me up to napalm your kids

bao ninh's the sorrow of war is one of the definitive books in the genre, as is novel with no name by duong thu huong for novels written by vietnamese. the mountains sing by nguyễn phan quế mai was published in the us in 2020 & is from a north vietnamese pov; both quan barry and ocean vuong have published quite popular novels & poetry touching on the vietnam war from a refugee/immigrant pov; lan cao has been publishing novels about the vietnam war from a vietnamese perspective since the mid-90s (though not necessarily of north vietnamese perspectives). i do understand why the sympathizer feels singular but um, a couple of notes: 1) while i adore the sympathizer, at least some of the pr for it is exactly that and detaches it from say a broader asian american lit tradition viz. karen tei yamashita's i-hotel novels (which do touch on asian-american diaspora left organising around the vietnam war + other race issues at the time) and 2) the novels from vietnam that make it into translation overwhelmingly come with the tagline "banned in vietnam" which also tells you what kind of narratives are privileged in translation and is very informative re. whether or not access to vietnamese literature & narratives about the war is limited to and gatekept entirely by a very liberal but essentially anti-communist us publishing industry.

please appreciate my favorite gbc tweet of all time

thinking about rui komatsuzaki gudako

🍊x3 by 续杯超盐酸@HSCHCl