Are you in Colorado? Time to send grumpy messages to your reps ahead of April 1st 2025. You want them to reject SB 201.

I also find "age" misleading as fuck with these, because what they want is an upload of your licence. They want to tie the porn you watch to your government ID. Which, as things are going, should really concern you even if you don't engage with pornography at all.

i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this

I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”

No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.

No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.

Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.

All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.

Be kind.

sending girls the courage they need to kiss another girl in 2022

sending dnp the courage they need to divorce each other in 2022

what

ethics of making AI images aside, I do find a bit amusing the kinds of sob stories and mental gymnastics people make up to pretend like drawing is this super technical skill with an impossibly high barrier of entry when its like one of the first hobbies toddlers pick up

suddenly a lot of people think they got the next Lord of the Rings in their head but they were never able to turn their stories into anything tangible because the evil elitist artists are hogging all the talent and skill and they need a bajilion years of training or something as if one of the most popular manga and anime of the past decade wasn't made by a guy that draws like this

I get the impulse to project parent/child type relationships onto characters but sometimes the dynamic you're thinking of is Mentorship

Sometimes he would not fucking be their dad. Sometimes he's their weird teacher

Sometimes she's not their mom but actually fully just a woman their own age

please be what i think it is please be what i think it is please be what i think it is please be what i think it is please be what i think it is ple

FUCK YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

"you shouldnt use ai for schoolwork because its not actually helpful" this is true "and anyways if you cant even write a 600 word essay then you're stupid and an idiot" well now i think we've gone too far in the wrong direction.

This also goes for all the versions of tweets I see that say “if you have a physical disability that makes it hard for you to hold a drawing implement so you started playing around with AI art you’re just lazy and a cheater, you should learn to hold a pen in your mouth like I did.” There are problems with AI art and they are plentiful but perhaps let’s not repurpose “making things easier is cheating you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and suffer” as a left wing talking point. We can talk about the problems with AI art without resorting to whatever the hell everyone has gotten waaaaaay too comfortable with saying

tsubomi redraw ✨

man how the hell is this stupid ass sport legal. why do we funnel HIGH SCHOOLERS into this

jesus christ????

what the fuck.

#the worst is when a kid fucking dies #and his parents try to raise awareness that your kid could fucking die #but all they get is other parents telling them their kid died because he was bad at football

I cannot stress enough that all those things in sewing pattern instructions that seem pointless are actually very important

Yes, how you fold your fabric before putting down the pattern pieces and cutting matters, because it influences how the fabric drapes, and ignoring that can cause fit issues in ways you wouldn't expect

Yes, cutting an entire separate piece to sew to the edge to finish it is going to be better than turning the edge and stitching it on its own, because there are geometry issues in play that make it actually harder to just fold a curve to the inside.

Yes, cutting clips or notches into the seam allowance around curves should always be done, because those geometry issues will work on the seam allowances and keep the curve from laying flat (remember, clip when the curve goes in, notch when the curve goes out)

Yes, interfacing may seem completely superfluous and frustrating and an extra step to work with, but it adds rigidity and stability to areas that need it (especially under buttons)

Yes, using a fun quilting cotton print for lining looks nice, but the point of lining isn't to make the inside pretty as much as it is to make the inside slip smoothly over the layer under it, and quilting cotton is going to instead be prone to grabbing everything under it, so you really should use those annoyingly slippery lining fabrics

Yes, in general, you should use the kind of fabric the pattern tells you to use, because there have been centuries, if not millennia, of people throughout the entire world figuring out what fabric best suits what kind of garment, for reasons beyond aesthetics

I know that a lot of people new to sewing see these things and feel like they're things that just aren't necessary, because they skip them when they sew and the item ends up just fine. And if you don't mind the idea of your clothes looking homemade, then it is fine. But...if you're consistently skipping these things and end up unhappy with how homemade your items look, please consider that that result is at least partly because you're not following the entire directions

"Sewing" involves so much more than just the stitches

rose tyler hated her shitty job, wore £1 mascara, charity shop sweatpants, boxed hair bleach, couldn't keep her room clean, hated rich people, was called a slag by the queen, constantly chat shit about her mum, slapped a guy that made her mum cry, astonished herself when she could do maths, 19 year old runaway, and the most beautiful woman on my tv 2005 - 2006

happy 20th birthday doctor who rose ! ❤️

Mosquitoes actually are not replaceable in any ecosystem that naturally has them and that includes replacing them with any of the non biting species because these are the traits that make them so core to food webs:

All these things combined allow thst ecosystem to make huge volumes of insects from conditions barren to most other macroscopic life. You might think there are other insects that seem to make huge massive swarms out of nothing but there's really nothing that hits all the same qualities *except other insects that also suck blood.*

It's the precise combo of being able to "prey" on things millions of times larger and breed in nothing but a few drops of filthy rainwater or the moisture in a rotten log. That's the most efficient combination for anything that size to multiply that rapidly where nothing else can even survive, except of course the things that can move in because they eat them :)

A lot of people ask "could they just not be itchy though?" and I regret to inform that isn't actually their doing, there's no evolutionary advantage to making you itchy. That's your own body detecting the intrusion of another creature's saliva into your skin, where it doesn't belong, and reacting with histamines.

If you've ever been bit hard enough by a cat, dog or even human you may notice a similar effect!

I remember having a conversation with someone about my hummingbird banding volunteering and how the data went toward support for conservation efforts among other things.

They were all for that, and loved hummingbirds and supported it!

And made a quip about how the only thing they wanted to see extinct were mosquitoes and small biting insects/fruit flies.

40 to 60% of a hummingbird’s diet, and their main source of other nutrients, is small, soft bodied insects.

Including mosquitoes and fruit flies.

They had a massive struggle not wanting to accept that no fruit flies and mosquitoes = no hummingbirds.

Bluebirds also eat tons of mosquitoes!

I've also added this on other big threads about this topic but I should add it here: Being INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS to larger animals, even when they aren't spreading any pathogens (and again, most mosquitoes don't!) actually is another vital purpose. Ecosystems need biting and stinging things to keep big, stompy, hungry beasts from getting too cozy. Mammals are the most resource-hogging animals in almost any biome but parasites can inhibit their growth a little (a good thing), discourage them from spending as much time in the same area or ward them away from whole areas to begin with. Mosquitoes in particular breed in filthy, stagnant bacteria-rich water. You know what leaves behind conditions like that? ANIMALS! Animals eating all the plants, wallowing in the mud and shitting everywhere! A herd of ungulates can turn a lush and healthy marsh into just a cesspit if nothing stops them. But it's mosquitoes that find a cesspit an appealing nursery. And then you get a cloud of mosquitoes so dense that the ungulates move on! There used to be a great BBC documentary that actually showed "mosquito season" driving a mass migration of African megafauna but the shittified search engines right now are only showing me articles about mosquito control no matter how I try to find this again, gee thanks, maybe someone else can find it? So while the "mosquitoes are bad" all the big animals leave for months. Months of the plants growing back, months of the water clearing up until it's drinkable again (and the mosquito larvae themselves are filter feeders!), months of the mosquitoes becoming food for tiny birds and lizards and arachnids and amphibians, and the beautiful wetland is back again strong enough to survive the repeat of that cycle the next year. Everything you hate in nature - the ticks, the territorial wasps, the stinging plants - are pretty much nature's immune system. Obviously this doesn't mean the big mammals are "bad" either. The cycles of destruction are themselves also something ecosystems come to rely on as a regulatory force :)

.

a lot of stories treat romance like it makes the relationship between two characters self explanatory and to be honest it doesn’t

story: they're in love :)

me: why?

story: what do you mean? they're in love :)

me: what do they bring to each other's lives? what do they admire about one another? what draws them to each other?

story: love :) :)

me: ok... so what is that going to look like now?

story: like love :) :) :)

me: are their personalities going to clash at all? are they going to have arguments? learn to compromise for each other? will they need to adapt to sharing their life with another person? is it going to be smooth perfect harmony from day one? are they going to be always together? see each other sometimes as their occupations allow? how does this relationship affect their lifes.

story: they're in love :) :) :)

oh i have a name for this.

Heomeopathic Romance, sometimes less charitably Homeopathic Comphet, but lets be fair, in this day in age gay romance can also be absolutely fucked up and boring. Equality! Why Homeopathic?

because what someones done is bonk two characters together, once, then simply stood them next to each other and gone You See? Chemestry has Happened : ), but fucking nothing has happened and the two substances are completely and utterly unchanged by each other and I want my damn money back.

Vivinos give this girl a break pleeeease