Be the Change You Want to See in the World :D

(What if they had fishbabies o,o )

Also, source!  This is real, and even more crazy and sweet and adorable than it seems at first!  :D

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”

“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel: https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/01/08/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel

Caring For AIDS Patients, ‘When No One Else Would: https://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368530521/caring-for-aids-patients-when-no-one-else-would

And a final quote from the first article:

She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.

Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.

it's rooted in a sort of warning that tumblr functions differently than other sites in that the number of likes on a post doesn't necessarily contribute to an algorithm that pushes forward certain content (algorithms which, tbh, create a weird sort of feedback loop in which content that is already popular becomes even more popular by getting boosted on the merits of already being popular, but I digress), and so reblogging is the only way to actually spread a post. likes don't make a post "breach containment."

but if likes are equivalent to "positive emotional response" and reblogs are equivalent to "exposure," then discouraging likes in favor of reblogs is discouraging enjoyment of your post in favor of promotion of your post. okay... why? to what end? if the only "correct" mode of engagement is an expanding fractal web of reblogs, and the point of a reblog is only to beget further reblogs... what's the goal?

you've deemed the like as an expression of pleasure useless, so it's kind of difficult to argue that "reblogging a post means they enjoyed it more than if they'd just simply liked it." the quantity of pleasure expressed doesn't matter if you've already devalued the concept of "expressing pleasure and doing nothing else." you can't earnestly say "expressing pleasure is important to me but only if it's accompanied by exposure." so your goal isn't for more people to delight in your content; it's for more people to see your content, and for each of them then to make even more people see your content in turn. and so on. infinitely. just sharing. just exposure.

is that how we got to this point wherein people are genuinely writing essays about how liking a post is actually a backhanded passive-aggressive insult? you think I click the little red heart because I hate you? the logic is so contorted. it relies on the assumption that everyone around you is operating in bad faith, that everyone's intentions are bad until proven good.

This entire culture of exposure exposure exposure is also constructed intentionally by capitalistic entities: silicon valley corporations in the case of social media, and hollywood and other art companies in the much older case of putting the burden on the artist to “make it big time” (to afford to not be starving artists).

We have instincts for social contact, but just like instincts for salt and sugar, companies can try to game them and reconfigure us for their own profit.

You know, every so often I think I should update my pirated copy of CS2.

Then I see things like this, and remember that I don't need it more than I need it, you know?

Don’t apologize at all.  Just update the fic without any note at all.  You don’t owe anyone an apology for not updating a fic during your free time.  It is your gift to the world, and we readers should be nothing but grateful for that!

YOU NEED TO ASPIRATE BEFORE INJECTING.

I’ve known many individuals who were never told by medical professionals to aspirate, which is unacceptable on behalf of endocrinology. This is an extremely important step because if you accidentally inject into a vein, you can literally die.

“I’ve never aspirated and I’ve been fine” until you’re not.  “My doctor never told me to aspirate” because trans healthcare has yet to be standardized and is a work in progress. “The area I inject in has little to no blood vessels” but there are so many people who don’t know which areas are safest and it’s better to be safe than sorry.

How To Aspirate: Stick yourself with the needle and then draw back on the syringe. If your syringe fills with blood, you need to reposition your needle. If it doesn’t fill with blood, you’re safe to inject there.

Signs that you’ve injected into a vein: — Stroke — Shortness of breath — Coughing — Chest and/or abdominal pain — Low Oxygen — Blood clots — Slurred speech — Headache — Swelling — Tenderness

Literally just aspirate because it takes 2 seconds and can save your life.

Oh wow yessssss :""> I feel like my identity is like, a conscious cartoon character transported into the real world sometimes \:D/  XD

And years ago.. I would dream that I could be someone's imaginary friend   :"" j And it would be great because I could spend time with them irl :’> (Since other people couldn’t see me, and so I could be there with them and go with them whenever and wherever they wanted :”> ) (And it would be sweet and they wouldn’t have to worry about me or be afraid of me and we could be sweet and platonically affectionate <3 )

(I also wished I was someone’s plushie sometimes too ^w^ XD )

..For me at least though, I have since learned that, at least with certain friends on the internet, I can be genuine and sweet and unthreatening and honest enough even without that, that people can trust me..and I’ve made at least a few of the kind of friendships I always wanted to make :”>