The Slow Dance of the Infinite Stars

Like. Oh yeah. I recognize this one. Someone else dresses you. Someone else feeds you. Someone else, who's just like you, but they get everything. The little toys and the waffle party. Helly is desperate and suicidal, but she still has to go to school work. You have to do work that doesn't make sense, but you'll understand eventually. The meaningless, manufactured rivalry between departments. The rumors??? “they have larvae that eat them?” “I’m livestock grown for food” “I’m a bodybuilder who has loads of girlfriends, but you don’t know them they go to a different school?” Punishment in the form of apologizing over and over, having to use all the right words, until you are believed. Endless hallways. Scary authority figures. "Are you mad at me?" Religion being the only type of media you see, until you read some shitty book that changes your life. Confusing, sudden camping trips that are supposed to fix you. Condescension. The words "innie" and "outie" are brought up multiple times as infantilizing. Of course his innie's voice is higher pitched????

Yeah. Reminds me a lot of a kid's Hypothetical Adult Self.

Your future self will understand. Your future self will thank me. Your future self will want you to have done this. This is for your (future self's) own good.

The appeal of severance, at least as we've been shown it so far, is that subjects can have unpleasant experiences (childbirth, a tedious workday, a dental exam) already having happened, to skip directly to the "afterward" and have the unpleasant experience actually experienced by another, lesser version of yourself. Right?

Which is also how a lot of adults feel about children -- either their own retrospective child selves, or the children currently in their lives (whose lives must be structured to best serve their future adult selves). The purpose of childhood is to get unpleasant experiences over with so that the Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) can have them already over with.

It's so telling that the boss at the door factory who interviews Dylan compares severance to circumcision -- a surgery commonly performed on infants, without medical necessity, based purely on the justification "They'll want/need it done as adults." Now, that's not necessarily true (the world is fully of happily uncircumcised adults), but even if if were, it would raise the inevitable question "Then why not wait until they want/need it as adults?" and the answer is "Because surgery is unpleasant and we assume adults don't want to go through it. The Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) will want this surgery to already have happened, to have been experienced by the Lesser (childhood) Self."

"The Food and Drug administration has approved the U.S.'s first at-home alternative to the Pap smear, a procedure generations of women [and nonbinary and trans people with uteruses] have dreaded and often found painful.

The new device by Teal Health will offer a "much preferred experience," the company said in its announcement, and also aims to increase screening rates by making the procedure more convenient.

Traditionally, gynecologists have inserted a cold metal speculum deep into a woman's vagina to scrape cells from the cervix.

The Teal Wand — "built with empathy," the company said — uses a swab to collect a vaginal sample. Women will then mail the sample to a lab that will screen for HPV (human papillomavirus), the virus that causes nearly all cervical cancers. A growing body of research has found HPV testing to be highly accurate.

The FDA approval Friday [May 9, 2025] follows a U.S.-based study that found at-home screening was just as effective as that done in a doctor's office. The study also found women overwhelmingly preferred self–screening at home, and said they'd be more likely to stay up to date with cervical cancer screenings that way.

Every year, about 13,000 cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed, and more than 4,000 women die from the disease. Rates are down dramatically since Dr. Georgios Papanicolaou published a 1943 paper on how to use the Pap smear for screening, and it then became common.

But about a quarter of women in the U.S. are behind on such screenings, and medical experts say reducing that is key to the ultimate goal of eliminating cervical cancer. There's also a racial gap, with Black and Native American women far more likely to die from cervical cancer than white women. The HPV vaccine for teen and preteen girls, introduced in 2007, has also led to a global push to tackle the disease that way.

At-home cervical cancer screenings are already available in several other countries, including Australia and Sweden.

Teal Health says its self-testing device will be available starting next month [June 2025], in California first and then expanding. It will be by prescription, through a telehealth service, for women 25-65 years old who are "at average risk." The company says it's working with insurance companies to provide coverage."

YOU: yeah? any news on my cavalier’s name? how about my mother?

How many AO3 accounts do you have? Include shared accounts, inactive accounts, and accounts whose login info you can no longer access.

“Consider: Instead of killing a black woman so that a white girl can replace her and raise her children, we kill the white man. Yuri-ify Eloise's season, too. Fuck it, EloisexMarina endgame for s5, why the hell not. Think about the absolute power move that would be back-to-back lesbian bridgerton seasons”