Because Skeletons

Basically, Mr grifter announced that he might be getting into the collecting side of yugioh, which would lead to the scalping hell that now plagues the Pokémon and One Piece TCGs

As a joke, MBTYugioh gave them pointers on what to “invest in”, recommending some of the WORST shit products that this game released in the years

He then followed up with a tongue-in-cheek, clearly trolling video recommending shit like Legendary Duelists sets, Duelist of Deep and Synchro Storm, and the Platinum cards, and exclusive COINS before ending the video with “Don’t invest in yugioh. You will lose money due to this game’s reprint policies”

Like, it was very obvious for anyone with half-a-brain cell and is familiar with Yugioh that the video is a joke

BUT a bunch of scalping bots took the video at face value and bought out these doodoo, worthless products immediately after his fuckass video came out

The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.

Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.

But you want the other end?

I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.

For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)

Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.

I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.

Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.

There used to be a common, horrific illness that sailors would get, which was mysteriously cured by limes. People know about this one, it's scurvy. But there are other horrible ways to be sick from vitamin deficiency that weren't considered curable at all, and people had no idea what caused them.

Rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency where your bones get bendy and grow in the wrong shape (it is most apparent in children). It causes permanent deformity and very easy fractures, along with debilitating pain and persistent dental issues. Historically, it was known that milk, and later, cod liver oil, would improve or prevent it, but the reason was not understood until the vitamin was discovered.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a complication of alcoholism that leads to psychosis, dementia, and death if left untreated. Severe alcoholics used to just go completely mad before dying, basically. It ultimately results in permanent memory loss (retrograde amnesia), as well as the inability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia). It is caused by the fact that alcohol prevents the absorption of vitamin B1 (thiamine). It is treatable and preventable by giving the patient thiamine shots - if caught early, before permanent brain damage has occurred, it is fully reversible, although the underlying substance abuse issue still needs to be addressed to prevent recurrence.

Pernicious anemia is caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (in turn ultimately caused by an autoimmune issue causing poor absorption). It causes blood cells to be the wrong size and too few in number, resulting in dizziness and fatigue. It also causes neurological symptoms like tingling in the extremities, poor coordination, confusion, and, in late stages, dementia. There was no cure for pernicious anemia in the past. People would simply become anemic and die from it. That's why it's called "pernicious" - that's an old-fashioned way to say "insidious and deadly," named for its slow onset and then-incurable course. Now it is curable with vitamin tablets or periodic injections.

Cretinism, or, less stigmatizingly, congenital hypothyroidism due to iodine deficiency, is a developmental disorder caused by the inability of the thyroid gland to function properly without sufficient iodine. it causes short stature, intellectual disability, infertility, hair loss, and a large lump in the neck known as a goiter (i.e. a hypertrophic thyroid gland). It was historically associated with poor inland populations living far from the ocean (due to the protective effect of consuming seafood, which is naturally high in iodine). We now simply put iodine in table salt, and this disorder is virtually unheard of in regions where this is the case.

Neural tube defects are a leading cause of birth defects, infant mortality, and stillbirth. The most common nonlethal forms of neural tube defects include spina bifida, hydranencephaly, and encephalocele. These defects are caused by a failure of the embryonic structure that becomes the spinal canal to close properly during development, leading the central nervous system to have a distorted shape that may impair cerebrospinal fluid drainage and put pressure on the brain. In severe cases, e.g. anencephaly, the brain/spine essentially develop outside of the body, which is not compatible with life (anencephalic and iniencephalic babies typically die within hours or days; fetuses with more severe forms are usually stillborn if they are not terminated). The risk of these defects is drastically reduced by taking supplemental folic acid (vitamin B9).

Vitamin K is perhaps the most amazing one on this list. Newborns often have very low vitamin K levels due to the fact that it does not cross the placental barrier easily and is not found in high levels in breast milk. It is only produced by gut bacteria, which babies do not have when they are born, and it takes time for them to acquire the right flora from their environment. Deficiency impairs blood clotting, and in infants, can lead to brain bleeds and sudden, unexplained death. Tiny babies would simply die of brain hemorrhaging for no good reason at all. But if they're given a quick shot of vitamin K at birth, that doesn't happen.

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

Angel on my shoulder: we're extremely fortunate. You shot him in the side of the head and you're wearing gloves. Place the gun in his hand and set the house ablaze. Officer Goger's tragic suicide will be the perfect cover story

Devil on my shoulder: Goger was always eating stuffing and spelt wheat and steel cut oats. Bet he'd taste reeeeal good on a spit with an apple in his mouth. Come on, i've seen the way you've looked at him..

a lot of my ritual behaviors are "checking"

self-guided ocd exposure therapy can be as simple as resisting the urge to check if your door is locked more than once and sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

it can look like sending an email and resisting the urge to re-read it over and over again obsessing over your wording, sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

some of my rituals are also "avoidance"

in which case it can look like checking your email inbox you've been obsessively avoiding because you're anxious about receiving a specific email you don't want to see.

and YEP! ☝️

!!!

it might be hard to believe, but learning distress tolerance for things like "checking" with emails and door locks actually prepared me for the Big Ones like harm and sexual OCD themes.

I think this article from 2007 is a good introduction to the basic concepts of exposures:

that SAID, a lot has changed since 2007! the idea that exposure therapy can (or even should) prevent fears from every happening has come into question!

now the conversation about OCD exposure has turned to training distress tolerance:

...rather than aiming for the decline of anxiety (habituation) during exposure, the inhibitory learning approach to ERP teaches people how to be open-minded toward experiencing anxiety and fear when these experiences inevitably show up. Indeed, fear and anxiety (and other emotions in OCD such as disgust or guilt) are universal and even adaptive experiences, not something that need to be “fixed” or gotten rid of. Most importantly, even if they can be unwanted, intense, and distressing, these emotions and thoughts are safe. From an inhibitory learning perspective, fear extinction (and long-term improvement in OCD) depends not only on learning that feared stimuli are safe, but that it is also safe to experience the emotional response that is triggered by these stimuli.

And remember at the end of the day I AM NOT a specialist. I am discussing my own OCD journey and referencing the available material on OCD exposures.

I'm not always right, and I can't know what's best for you.

Which is why I haven't recommended any of the old workbooks I've completed, because some of them are old enough that there are better ones to follow that I haven't gotten to trying yet!

I recommend doing your own reading from OCD-aware organizations:

Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT): Overview at Tourette.org

A lot of tic disorders are like OCD, in that the person feels an overwhelming need to do the action, but the tic disorders lack the feeling that anything bad will happen elsewhere because they don't do it (the "bad thing" with a tic is generally the feeling of not doing it)

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to multiple porn bots catfishing using the same stolen pictures of the same trans woman on the same page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags. note that despite neither the image nor video in the posts in this screenshot being marked as mature content, this screenshot of them is going to mark this post as mature content as soon as I post it

here's some of the lovely messages of positivity you can expect to get if you're a transfem on this platform! I cropped the real-life gore images out of the first one, the person in the second one has made multiple posts like this + pedojacketed me and still has that same account and does that same shit, and the the person in the third took weeks for tumblr to do anything about, because:

here's tumblr staff stating that making explicit death threats towards transfems is not a violation of the ToS or user guidelines!

and here they are stating it again! and while we're on the subject of who the user guidelines apply to:

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a year-old post with 15,000 notes being flagged as sexually explicit (over 100 times in case you thought it was maybe a fluke) despite the image in the post not actually showing anything, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a heated rivalry gifset showing two fully nude dudes fucking center frame getting flagged as sexually explicit, which it is according to tumblr's definition, but despite that it has tens of thousands of notes and in fact is so popular and shared that if you look over to the third image you can see that same gif as one of the trending tag thumbnails! and on that note:

here's an episode of an anime available on youtube with a TV-14 age rating that I posted a screenshot of that got flagged as sexually explicit, had the appeal denied twice, got fully nuked off the site, and then got my entire blog marked as mature for posting!

and here's that same already-marked-as-mature blog curiously being marked as mature a second time out of the blue 15 minutes before they dropped the age verification update that would hide mature content!

and here's my first blog of 13 years getting a SPECIAL type of mature flag that marks all of my posts as mature content individually and separately from the actual mature content label!

you don't get to appeal these terminations btw! they automatically and instantly deny your appeal and send you the rejection before you even get the email telling you they got the appeal and will carefully review it

not that appealing will do anything anyways! here's tumblr staff terminating me for explicit content when I appealed the explicit flag on a post that they accepted the appeal on after terminating me for it,

and here's tumblr staff denying my appeal on that termination, lying about why i was terminated, terminating my already-and-still-terminated blog a second time to change the termination reason to one i can't appeal, which they then upgraded from an account deactivation into a postmortem full account nuke! isn't that wild?

here's them doing it to me a second time

and here's tumblr staff terminating me FIVE TIMES in multiple weeks it took them to do anything about a burner blog and a post pedojacketing me and encouraging people to harass me forever over completely fabricated claims that everyone spreading it around admitted were false on the post itself by the way! note also how only the burner blog got deleted - but the main account? just a post removal. after weeks of it being reported and spread around. the fastest of my terminations during this period was three hours after making the account by the way!

which isn't an isolated occurrence, either! they'll pass over multiple open, avowed nazis posting swastikas and slur-filled nazi race science shit about how they think black people are biologically inferior subhumans for months on end to nuke some random transfem off the site in as little as 10 minutes after account creation, then take MULTIPLE MONTHS to respond to your report of someone sending you harassment messages to tell you that the content you reported has already been removed (because it's an ask in the inbox of an account they already terminated along with four others in the time it took them to respond)!

And to really send a clear message about where they stand, they've REALLY ramped up the termination of transfems since the start of pride! And everybody will act like you deserve it and are a subhuman unworthy of life if you don't openly support the multiple ongoing harassment campaigns against transfems, all enabled and quietly endorsed by tumblr staff and moderation!