this poem is about being nonbinary.

this is how it feels to be genderfluid in a homophobic surrounding

I am beginning to believe that the werewolf is not the problem here.

Spotted or Tiger Quoll (Dasyurus maculatus), family Dasyuridae, order Dasyuromorphia, found in eastern Australia

Threatened.

photograph by Charles Davis

fuck it, i'm curious. reblog and tag with the first fictional death to ever rewrite your brain chemistry and/or make you cry like a baby. mine was ares from the underland chronicles (who, for context, was a giant bat.) to this day i will weep if i think too hard about it. okay, go.

How many Frances Kelseys were let go from the federal government last week? Probationary workers were fired en masse, in a sham lunge at savings — really an enormous transfer of expenditure from organizations benefiting regular Americans to more tax savings for the rich.

Was there one future Dr. Kelsey? A hundred? We’ll never know. One would be too many.

What? The name Frances Kelsey doesn’t ring a bell? Of course not. People forget. Even though she was a hero — a local hero, too, University of Chicago Medical School, class of 1950, where she studied pharmacology.

Dr. Kelsey was a fresh hire at the Food and Drug Administration in September 1960 when a stack of three-ring binders, each the size of a phone book, landed on her desk, busywork for the new girl who joined the agency the previous month.

It was an application from William S. Merrell, an Ohio pharmaceutical company, for a drug it wanted to sell called Kevadon — a sedative introduced in Germany in 1957, and sold all over Europe. Approval was expected to be routine. The FDA had just 60 days to register an objection. Otherwise, Merrell could go ahead and sell the drug in the United States.

The company already was giving samples of Kevadon, a brand name for thalidomide, to U.S. doctors; eventually 1,200 doctors would start handing out free pills to 20,000 American patients, often to pregnant women, where it controlled the nausea of morning sickness. Without telling women the pills were unapproved. A field test conducted on the unaware, all completely legal.

But the application bothered Dr. Kelsey who, though new to the FDA, had years of experience in her field.

“There was something a little different about this one,” she later remembered thinking. Before the 60-day limit ran out, Kelsey wrote to Merrell saying its studies were “incomplete,” despite their bulk. She questioned the company’s methodology.

Merrell cried foul. Executives hurried to Washington to complain about the “stubborn bureaucrat.” They sent letters to her superiors, made phone calls, placed editorials in medical publications denouncing “dilatory tactics which certainly cause a loss to the industry of millions of dollars ... and even loss of life.” Kelsey was being “unreasonable and irresponsible.”

Language echoing in my ears when Elon Musk called for a “wholesale removal of regulations.” And regulators — thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, were summarily fired over the weekend.

“Regulations = Bad” has been the mantra of the Republican Party for years. But it was applied with an unprecedented frenzy over the past three weeks by the world’s richest man, given free rein over the government by President Donald Trump. Fortunes are not built by providing the safest product assembled by well-paid workers under humane conditions. They are built by mixing sawdust into the bread, by putting 10-year-olds to work in Southern textile mills. And by selling drugs that haven’t been tested on pregnant women.

All common practices until the government put an end to them. With regulations. Musk said that whatever dropped regulations are later found to have been necessary, after all, can be reinstated. In the same way that 10,000 deformed European babies — thalidomide babies had shortened arms, or mere “flippers” on their shoulders — added heft to Kelsey’s argument. A strategy acceptable only if they aren’t your baby or you, or you just don’t care.

Are some regulations over the top? Sure. Anyone who has tried to remodel a bathroom and gone to the town hall for a permit knows that. But ditching regulations wholesale because of excesses is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes literally.

We used to be better than this. In the United States, only 17 children were deformed by thalidomide. President John F. Kennedy gave Frances Kelsey the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962. Trump would have summarily fired her.

I was born in the summer of 1960, so I might have been a thalidomide baby. My mother wasn’t given thalidomide by her doctor. Dumb luck protected me. But “We Rely on Dumb Luck” is not a mantra embraced by a great nation, the past three weeks notwithstanding. We don’t know what the next thalidomide will be, or how many disasters bothersome bureaucrats and annoying regulations saved us from. Or what harms will come from having our government ripped apart.

We’re going to find out in the years to come, to our sorrow, as we tear down the wall that protects regular Americans from the tender mercies of big business. The harm is certain to be enormous.

It’s funny. Some of the people shaking their fists at government regulation have fists to shake only because of government meddlers like Frances Kelsey.

COMMISSION OPEN!

hiiiii hellooooooooo more information on my ko-fi page >_>)

rb is appreciated :3

cr: 百变花央

I’m out here buying tshirts and pants like a chump while some people are just wearing the world’s best rectangles

Pre-manufacturing cultures will really be like, here is the most elegant and gorgeous outfit you can imagine, and it’s achieved entirely with rectangles, ropes, and pins.

Over and over again, across the world, in cultures that never even knew of each others’ existences. Just, rectangles, knots, and pins. And I love that for them.

Can we bring this back to the mainstream fassion please?

Ch👏

I really appreciate seeing it without the lion costume, so you can see what an AMAZING feat of athleticism it truly is.

Wushou dancers are 100% drift compatible

This song has single-handedly taken over my life and it’s only been like a week

zlibrary gone... FUCK TIKTOK FUCK BOOKTOK I hope that app burns in hell

library genesis is still up (very similar site) and r/freemediaheckyeah and r/piracy have lots of other alternatives. zlib was the GOAT though. fuck tiktok

(originally commented. putting as a reblog as its important)

for anyone that wants to know about other sites, I also didn't know so this is a big help!!! thank you!

some sites i use to read online: - https://libgen.li/ - https://www.pdfdrive.com/ - https://libretexts.org/ - https://openlibrary.org/ - https://novel80.com/ - https://www.allfreenovel.com/ - https://bookreadfree.com/ - https://allbookshub.com/ - http://thefreeonlinenovel.com/ - https://www.epub.pub/ - https://www.readingsanctuary.com/ - https://yes-pdf.com/ - https://www.booksfree.org/ if none of the links work if you just search up "(book title) read online free" there's almost always gonna be a pdf link and those are always good to read from too

This is even more important with the internet archive losing the lawsuit and being forced to remove so many books. Consider donating to the Internet Archive.

and is your shame helpful? is it inspiring goodness and change? or is it keeping you frozen in time unable to move on and be everything you have expanded to be?

there was an aircraft collision over the potomac river. complex, ai-powered algorithms know everything about every person on the planet who has internet access. nazis, some of whom have already been in the federal government for years, are now making themselves publicly known. is this real life america in 2025 or is it the plot of captain america: the winter soldier (2014)? the answer may shock you

Free Barn Owl crochet pattern via StingyDingDing. Love it!

Archive 81, Episode 1: A Body In A New Place

No one ever tell me anything bad about the person who runs this account.

the person who runs this account, Katie Gouldin, is an evolutionary biologist who has an EXCELLENT podcast called Creature Feature which compares and contrasts the weird behaviors of man and beast! she is super cute and funny too!

oh thank GOD

just want to add i love how much she hates elon

yeah okay ill reblog that

She is also credited by the Audubon society with coining the word “birb”

Also source for probably the best reaction image in history:

I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

Are there any other particularly egregious examples?

This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:

It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).

This book can be downloaded for free on Researchgate, posted there by the author himself:

The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments