Shortstack Flamer

Hairless Bat or Naked Bulldog Bat (Cheiromeles torquatus), family Molossidae, found in SE Asia

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

I made a new flyer for my research project 📋

LINK TO THE SURVEY

The survey will be open until at least the end of 2026 if not beyond. Only these 14 measurements are required, all the others are optional:

If you have been on HRT for at least 3 years, have half an hour and a measuring tape, consider taking the survey!

If you don't qualify or don't feel up to participating feel free to share it :)

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

- Re: the shoulder injury above - if someone sewed up the skin but didn't reattach nerves, tendons, etc. that were (fully) severed those things still will not work! Look up the anatomy of the area you're injuring and what the things there do

- Even if things aren't fully severed the pain and swelling in an area can make healthy muscles unable to contract as a protective mechanism (ask anyone you know who's had an ACL tear about their quads post injury/surgery). That's why an injured leg "gives out". If the situation is important enough (like your character is running for their life) their brain miiight override that but not necessarily

- Most nerves carry both sensation and motor signals so if you damage a nerve you will likely have numbness/tingling/maybe pain (in specific distributions that you can look up) and also weakness or paralysis of specific muscles depending on the severity of the injury

- Nerves take for freaking ever to heal (axons regenerate at ~1mm per day or ~1 inch per month) and sometimes they just don't (especially if they're fully severed and not surgically reattached)

- For most common injuries you can look up healing timelines but be careful with what endpoint you're looking at - for example you might be back to ADLs (activities of daily living like walking, dressing, maybe cooking and cleaning) in as little as a week but that doesn't mean you're back to running or sports or fighting bad guys

- Also with timelines there's a limit to how much you can push them. Like yes a pro athlete (or spy or superhero or whatever) might be pushed to go back "too soon" but if you're cutting 3 months off of a 4 month recovery timeline either they're 100% going to get reinjured because the tissue isn't healed yet or they're straight up like not even walking yet

- Pain, especially chronic pain, is super complex and interesting, and so often misunderstood or misrepresented (in medicine, not just in writing). If your source for how chronic pain works is more than ~5 years old it's probably wrong. There almost always BOTH physiological/biological factors and psychosocial factors in chronic pain and reducing it to just one or the other is both probably wrong and also likely not as interesting to your story - for a while we kind of thought it was all biological and then the pendulum swung to it being all psychological but it probably is both for most people

- A note / expansion on the above point about adrenaline: the phenomenon described is totally accurate but it's not just because of adrenaline. Pain is at its core an alarm system that your brain/nervous system uses to protect you. So if the most dangerous thing for you right now is the bear chasing you, it might not produce a pain experience to alert you about your broken leg, but once the bear is gone the broken leg is now the most important thing and your brain will make sure you're in enough pain that it's your top priority

"I got stabbed in the abdomen but LUCKILY it didn't hit anything important!" drives me completely fucking insane as someone who knows anatomy, just saying. You've got your intestines in there; try stabbing a sausage and sewing the skin back on, go on. Sausage skins are literally intestines. Look how thin they are. That shit is DELICATE!

Along those lines if you get stabbed in "the side"... your large intestines are there. That's where all the poop is. You get poop in your open wound you are dying in agony without surgery because it's poop and it's riddled with bacteria. Because yeah your bowels will have to be stitched up.

Abdomen wounds are agonising because if your bowels don't open up and drown your wounds in poop, it's your intestines or stomach drowning your wounds in acid. Also you need your abs to sit up. You need your side to twist the around. Nothing in your body is redundant.

A lot more wounds need surgery than you think. A lot of broken bones need surgery. Pre-modern medicine this meant disability. Pre-modern medicine a compound fracture was a death sentence.

Sometimes pain takes a few days to REALLY kick in. My dad broke seventeen bones in a car accident and kept declining pain relief because he was totally fine. He eventually gave in because different doctors kept suggesting it. Four days later, even with that pain relief, he could barely talk, he was in so much pain.

Which reminds me, what's with the sheer amount of fantasy stories with no pain relief??? Everyone focuses on healing the wound but nobody acknowledges pain exists except for the, like, first five minutes, and then after they get medical attention it's just a bit sore at most. A lot of stuff people treat like bruises will actually drop your character for weeks.

Your character doesn't just have to worry about broken bones if they get tossed against a wall, their organs might get hurt as well. And if they have benign cysts on their organs, those could burst. I've seen a lot of kidney cysts in ultrasounds, if you wind up in a bad enough car accident those are bursting. Have fun!

Stuff often hurts either more or less than you'd think. I met a guy a few weeks ago who didn't know he broke his fucking NECK for thirty years because it was just sore now and again. Meanwhile my dad - most of his breaks were ribs, which authors tend to treat as a mild inconvenience. He had spine breaks too (and a burst kidney cyst, see above) but he said the ribs were worse. That's because just breathing moves them and you can't just stop breathing... and even if you could, your ribs will heal wrong because they'd heal too rigidly.

Someone further up talks about how pain is an alarm system and adrenaline is only part of the reason why pain signals are suppressed. Well, that is, in fact, how adrenaline works. Your unconscious mind isn't going "wait until the bear goes away THEN we'll hit her with pain signals!" because your brain is not that smart. What's actually happening is that the adrenaline is suppressing the alarm system. That's literally how it works. It's not separate, it's part of it. Different neurotransmitters and hormones can enhance or suppress pain. Adrenaline is one of the more powerful ones.

Minor injuries can be more deadly or disabling than you think. You can fall over, hit your head and die. Major injuries can also be more survivable than you think. People have shot themselves in the head with a shotgun, blown off their jaw and face, and lived. There's a lot of myths about which parts of the body are the most and least valuable. As pointed out above, a shoulder wound is a lot more deadly than you think.

"My character got a horrible injury but LUCKILY it didn't hit anything important so they are back up and running around like nothing happened after a short rest!" just give your character a stubbed toe. a stubbed toe is what you want. just give them a stubbed toe. George R R Martin was such a breath of fresh air because he never chickened out of disabling his characters, killing them, or giving them extended recoveries, and he didn't treat prosthetics as 1:1 replacements for the limbs they're standing in for. the tendency of authors to chicken out of hurting their characters has completely destroyed the drama of characters getting hurt for me because every time I read a story and a character gets hurt I KNOW the truth is author is going to cop out because they ALWAYS cop out and just pay lip service to pain like they just had a fucking stubbed toe. just give them a stubbed toe istg.

Now, I think the answer is yes as long as Murderbot doesn't run out of power. The real question is at what point would Murderbot force Jonathan to escape/kill Dracula and the other vampires to protect him? (Because of course Murderbot is there to a protect a client.)

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sentient Dildo/New Owner Who Bought It as Gag Gift Characters: Original Trans Man Character, Sentient Magical Dildo Additional Tags: Modern With Magic Setting, Sentient Dildo, Magic & Enchantment, Humor, Safe Sane and Consensual Sex With a Nonhuman Entity, Crack Treated Seriously, Logical Worldbuilding Explanations For Silly Horny Nonsense, Trans Male Character, Wet & Messy, Penetrative Sex, Front Hole Sex, Anal Sex, Ballfucking, Double Penetration in Two Holes, Fantasies of Somnophilia, Orgasm Delay, Sex While Doing Household Tasks, Multiple Orgasms, Orgasm Control Summary: