Doomed Boston Yaoi

@vividaway​ Randall Munroe is an internet cartoonist who runs the ‘xkcd’ online comic series, which has run from 2006 up to today, with new comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Xkcd isn’t an ongoing story, just a series of funny, wholesome, depressing, or oddly scientifically informative comics.

In 2010, Randall’s fiance was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. He didn’t share too many details at first, but things tended to bleed into his comics: sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

Often in this time, other cartoonists would write in guest comics for Randall, or he’d put in short filler pieces, to try and fill space while nonstop cancer treatments took up most of his time.

In 2012, he posted a comic called ‘Two Years’, about the time since the diagnosis. It’s the one that hasn’t yet been posted here (although parts of it are included in the other comics), and it commemorates some of the things that had happened in the two years since the diagnosis.

There are representations of Randall and his fiance being together for her treatment, worrying together, traveling the world, and getting married. It’s still depressing, but it’s a lot more hopeful, showing how they’ve still managed to have happy moments together, and things will still get better.

Themes of cancer continued in xkcd, but they increasingly became less about fear and nihilism, and more about hope, or just cool facts related to cancer.

At the top of this post is the comic posted in 2017: Seven Years. In it, Randall and his wife are traveling more, trying to have fun and continue old and new hobbies, with cancer ever-present in the background of it all. At the end, the two of them observe the 2017 solar eclipse, and despite all the uncertainty that comes with the thought of another seven years, agree to watch the 2024 eclipse together too.

There are just about no cancer comics between that one and the most recent comic, the one I posted: Ten Years, written in 2020. It’s by far the most hopeful of the three in the little series: the two of them are happy, they’re playing with rabbits and riding on handcarts and going out hiking and stargazing, together. At the end, Ten Years breaks the format with a conversation in which they talk about how unbelievable it is that it’s been so long, and share their worries as well as their hopes. It even ends on a much more lighthearted joke about immortality.

It’s a good comic. Definitely in my top two comics wherein internet cartoonists express emotions about an illness suffered by their wife.

The first time I reblogged this it was three years after large bastard's heart attack and quad bypass and one year after his transplant.

Now it has been five years since his transplant, and seven years since his bypass.

eclipses and drove to see

the aurora too.

sadly I am a Castiel whump enjoyer 😔💙

^ this is the original poll. it only got about 1800 votes. OP has moved blogs so I don't have the source on this anymore but they made some follow up posts explaining that they worded the final answer that way bcos they'd had some people complain about a previous poll they made on a different subject being insufficiently inclusive and they wanted to make sure all bases were covered. this is also presumably why it has an exasperated tone to it.

if you think you remember seeing and voting in the OG poll you probably didn't, just statistically.

^ somebody thought the wording was funny and posted a screencap with a caption. THAT post has just under 70,000 notes and counting.

people agreed that the way it was worded was funny & start applying it to various fictional bald people

(source)

(source)

YEAH ppl will confuse 'I'm not sure where this came from' with 'people just randomly started saying this'

especially frustrating with Goncharov bcos it didn't just blow up when it did at random either. it blew up bcos tumblr user beelzeebub made a poster:

there's plenty of reasons that many other animals can't vomit! the act of vomiting is actually fairly complicated biologically speaking, and requires:

a) a neurological path to detect unwanted material and trigger the rest of the physical process of vomiting, which needs

b) a reversible entry between the esophagus and stomach, and

c) a diaphragm muscle powerful enough to contract the entire midtorso hard enough to empty the stomach violently backwards up the esophagus without accidentally getting anything into the lungs (this is why vomiting kind of feels like you're dying)

animals that don't have access to the vomit ability tree for lack of any of these systems tend to just have really REALLY beefy digestive processes that can break down most harmful things they could reasonably eat by mistake, or else they do something else entirely to purge their system.

for example! frogs cannot vomit, true. but they CAN just evert their entire stomach inside-out out of their mouths, scrape the offending insect off with their little frog paws, and slurp it back down into their torso!

those are all domestic horse issues that were introduced by humans when we bred horses to be taller and faster and hence more fragile. wild horses do not have these problems.

this thing doesn't need to vomit because a) it doesn't have people feeding it weird shit sometimes, b) it doesn't even have ACCESS to the weird shit like parsnips that can give a domestic horse colic, and c) they're sturdy enough to survive most mild issues that accidentally eating a bit of the wrong plant could give them.

I promise you that the steppes of eurasia were never filled with the corpses of wild horses that died tragically of tummy hurty. they evolved to be functional and competent animals until humans started fucking with them to make these things

I live in the Southeast United States which is definitely the opposite of a desert & I have a very easy time with my Arabian. We have extremely hot humid summer days & wet cold winters, she handles it in stride. I know people who live far further north than I & likewise have a very easy time (even in the winter).

The dish helping the respiratory system on the other hand; I've yet to see actual proof. I won't retread old ground & will instead just link my rebuttal to a previous time this claim was made:

But suffice to say there's no actual evidence of a concave nasal plane aiding in breathing (and in more extreme cases it can actually harm the horse).

I, also, have yet to see evidence of the dish being anything other than a show ring invention for the aesthetic ideal of westerners. Yes, the horses have gotten more extreme, but even 100 years ago we see a preference & selection of head shape that is opposed to how the Bedouins defined a beautiful head. Not to mention, the complete erasure of Bedouin culture regarding their breed in general as to how the Arabian has been 'improved' by Americans & Europeans.

Here are more examples of Arabian heads:

That last one is the important one. Colic is actually a symptom of dehydration. And in cases of domestic horses dehydration is the leading cause. Colic and dehydration are synergistic. Lack of water in the system causes dry matter to get stuck in the gut (impaction) and extreme dehydration causes peristalsis (the movement of the gi tract that pushes food through) to slow. And of course a horse experiencing abdominal discomfort in many cases isnt going to want to drink. In feral horse populations impaction of the gut is something noted in deciesed animals in the us and Australia during droughts.