I'm Fucking Aro and I Hate You

Teen guy, looking teenish: Can I get a pack of cigarettes?

Me: I need to see your ID

ID: 01/02/2001

Me:

Download Pokemon Smile. You don't need to know jack shit about (or even especially like) Pokemon to use it, and it is free. You only need a functional front-facing camera and the ability to read (or someone with you who can).

You pick a starter Pokemon and then, as you brush your teeth, the Pokemon battles purple plaque clouds in a little mouth setting for you. It uses your front-facing camera and some AR to see how you're brushing and tells you where to brush and for how long. It shows you yourself as you brush and puts a chosen hat on your head.

A wild Pokemon obscured by the clouds appears partway through and your Pokemon cleans it off as you brush.

At the end, it lets you throw a Pokéball in an effort to catch it, which you have an increasingly better chance at successfully doing the better and better you brush!

You also win little hats that get put on your head while you brush!

You can adjust settings for the amount of time it has you brushing, what hat you're wearing, and things like that. It is friendly to people of all ages and addresses that children should be surpervised. Best of all, when it asks for your gender at the very start, it has a "something else" option! It's trans- and nonbinary-friendly!

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

You can upload literally any file at that URL

You can upload someone else’s art

You could upload the same file to 20 different URLs, and sell 20 different NFTs of the same art

You could load the page for a token someone else owns, download the file, and directly re-upload it to the page for a token you own

The whole server could go down, and the URL from your token could be a 404 error for the rest of forever

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

First you can’t do it with just spare processing power from your main device, you need to buy a new one that’s fully dedicated to mining if you want to keep up

The extra power usage is enough to put a notable spike in your electric bill

One computer won’t do it anymore, you need two

Then four

Then eight

You have a warehouse full of computers

You have the electric bill that it takes to power a warehouse full of computers

Plus the storage rental costs of the warehouse space

The internet bill to keep all your computers in touch with the blockchain

The air-conditioning bill that it takes to keep the warehouse from just flat-out melting

Ongoing maintenance costs

Replacement parts

Not just any parts, you are buying up high-quality graphics cards and computer chips that can do the fastest processing

So much that it’s contributing to a global computer-chip shortage (this is not an exaggeration; Wall Street Journal source, Tech Republic source)

And the power demands are so high that defunct power plants are being re-activated to fill them (also not an exaggeration; Ars Technica source)

And the processing requirements just keep going up and up and up….

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

So even if your target is only cis girls who "fetishize mlm" and you explicitly support trans mlm/nblm, the outcome will always include hurting, shaming, and repressing young trans people as well! It is quite literally unavoidable. Those feelings of shame will not suddenly go away the moment they realize they are trans, it just adds a new layer of complexity to their feelings about their gender and attraction to men.

I have seen trans artists and writers get accused of fetishizing/oppressing themselves for art they've made, about themselves, especially if that art features trans bodies or sexual content, and that's kinda fucked up.

Like, one person might find an erotic depiction of a feminine non-op trans guy fetishizing, while someone else might find it affirming. The creator might've simply wanted to explore their own body type as something desirable, something many trans people intensely struggle with, but risk getting swarmed by the purity police for it.

So often, queer artists and writers end up having to out themselves because they get accused of being cishets fetishizing/misrepresenting queer identities, when they're really just trying to explore and express themselves through art.

The solution to stopping fetishization has never been to obsessively check if the creators of "potentially problematic" content have the "correct" identity, and are therefore "allowed" to produce it, or that the audience has the "correct" identity to be "allowed" to consume it.

Saying "if you aren't gay, you shouldn't be consuming or making gay content" has the same kind of energy as telling a kid "if you aren't a girl, you shouldn't be interested in girl stories"; both hold this idea that the experiences of different groups of people are so fundamentally different as to hold no genuine connection to one another, so the only interest across lines has to be some sick voyeuristic fascination. (Who does that sound like?)

And that's just so wrong. And actually a little dehumanizing?

Many groups of people can relate to feeling like your love is forbidden. That your sexual desire (and wanting to be desired) is shameful and wrong. That you are considered inherently lesser or even dangerous for some part of who you are. There are a lot of thoughtful articles out there about why queer themes might resonate with other groups of people (and vice versa), because we can in fact relate to each other even if we're also different. And maybe that's a good thing?

Basically, Thomas Sanders (who, btw, is gay) used to be basically the celebrated Unproblematic Fav Uwu of Tumblr and Vine. Everyone loved him, everyone praised him for being inclusive and positive, making fun and unique vines that were appropriate and enjoyable for any age group.

Then one day he got an aphobic ask (I honestly don’t remember what this was even in response to, I think it was some really innocent one-off “I hope asexuals have a good day” type of post or something like that, idek), to which he wrote a long and sincere response that basically summed up to “Hey, that’s not a nice attitude to have, please take a moment to think about how other people must feel and why it’s so important to you to shut them down”

Within literal hours (and this is something I witnessed myself, I was online when it all went down), a smear campaign against him had started. Suddenly even people who had previously been huge fans of him were shit-talking him left and right, declaring him cringey, and grasping at straws to make “callout posts” for him. One popular argument I remember hearing was- And I shit you not, I am not making this up- He was a “pedophile” because he made videos for a family demographic and has a young-looking face, but was 29 or whatever and therefore “pretending to be a kid” or whatever the fuck. He even, gasp, made vines about high school, despite not being a high schooler himself! (Dan Green voice) That’s called “acting”, children!

His popularity never really recovered, and these days he’s mostly considered “cringey” by a large portion of the internet due to the main demographic most of his fans fall into, because you know it’s hip and cool to shame young girls and queer kids for the things that bring them joy.

1. He has tags for not quite safe for work selfies on his blog (#nsfw and #tsbutt) (not nudes or even lewds, just pictures including his clothed butt.)

2. He accepts nsfw fanart from fans, but ONLY if the artist is 18+

3. There was ONE time where an underage artist submitted a nsfw art piece and Thomas posted it, because said artist removed their age from their bio, so Thomas had no idea it was made by a minor. He deleted the post as soon as this information came to light.

But exclusionists took all of this, mashed it with their “oh but he’s so childish, he acts like a kid even though he’s nearly 30, he must be hiding something!” And ran so far with it that Thomas Sanders severely suffered for it. Even his fans got shit for liking him. A lot abandoned him out of fear that a similar campaign would start against them.

But I always think of growth like plants.

Aspens grow tall to reach the sun, for sure. But dandelions grow deep, understanding themselves fully so that if some misguided fool tries to uproot them they'd have to try damn hard. And then there's thyme and other creeping plants, which spread themselves out so much that if you chop a part of it off it roots wherever it can find dirt to root in.

The concept is that a worker is really good at their job, so good that they clearly deserve better compensation for all they bring to the company, but business is structured so that the only way to get more money is to be promoted to a higher position. A new position comes with new job requirements, but not everyone is going to be right for those. Example: an amazing computer programmer might be useless at managing staff, but if you promote that programmer to head of the department they’ll be required to manage staff. It seems like the best thing for everyone, the company included, would be to put that employee back in their original job and let them keep the higher salary since they clearly do the job well enough to deserve it. However companies want those lower level jobs to be seen as undesirable so workers will feel upper staff deserve their higher wages. Because of this, putting the employee back in the job they’re right for is considered a demotion, so instead companies let the employee keep the upper level job they’re bad at forever or until they have just cause to fire them. Clearly the company was better off with them in the job they were good at, but the illusion of hierarchy to justify higher waged employees is more important

Houses in my city go for, like, $500k. I can't. Housing prices in the US have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated. That is in fact the problem--most people cannot afford to buy a house, and many people pay more than half their income in rent. Ever saved up for a down payment on a house while doing that?

"mOvE iF yOu DoN't LiKe YoUr LaNdLoRd"

Moving is expensive and stressful. There's no guarantee of finding another place within reasonable distance of where we work, where we buy groceries, etc.

"bUt If LaNdLoRdS dOn'T rEnT oUt HoUsInG wHeRe WiLl PeOpLe LiVe?!"

If landlords/property companies all were forced to sell every place they owned except housing they specifically lived in, the market would have such a glut of housing that prices would nosedive in nearly every city in the US, possibly to the point where normal, average working people could buy one. Houses and apartments do not blink out of existence because a landlord stops renting them out. Why do I see this dumbass line of logic so fucking often.

People literally cannot wrap their minds around the fact that landlords (and I include property companies--the kind that own multiple apartment complexes--as landlords) don't create or do anything of value. "But when I need the water heater fixed, the landlord fixes it." Except for some mom'n'pop landlord operations that insist on DIY'ing everything, your landlord is not the one who is fixing it. The person who physically comes to your unit and fixes it is the person who fixes it, and your landlord is just an expensive gatekeeper who decides for you whether you actually need your water heater fixed. If you owned the place you could have insurance against that kind of thing, you could put money in a co-op that pays for that kind of thing (like condo associations do), or you could just pay out of pocket for it if you have the money. If you did take on the risk of repairing it yourself, the only person who would suffer is you. But you wouldn't be at the mercy of some dipshit who tries desperately not to get your water heater fixed (even though that's illegal), or who hires the cheapest person they could find (who might suck ass and make it worse), or insists on doing it themselves (whether they know what they're doing or not).

HUMANS REQUIRE SHELTER TO SURVIVE. The modern standard for housing includes things like locking doors, ceilings and windows that don't leak, walls that aren't covered in mold, and working electricity, plumbing, and hot water at a bare minimum. On top of that, we need shelter that's near enough to our place of employment and places to buy food, etc.

Landlords do not provide housing. They hold it ransom for as much money as they think they can get, because they know we need housing to survive. They buy up as much housing as they can (reducing the supply of available houses for sale) and then rent them out at a profit (which means more than they're paying on the mortgage, if they have one). They are hoarding housing, creating a false scarcity, and then profiting off of it.

hint

you are unable to see past your elementary understanding of why cis men have so much power over us and you will always, always, hurt queer people more than you'll ever deconstruct the patriarchy and male privilege in your spaces.

Contrary to what the US health industry would have you believe, your teeth are NOT luxury face bones. You need them. Healthy teeth are a cornerstone of good health in general for a lot of reasons. You can’t eat well without them. You need them to speak. And tooth bias is real.

This makes me very sad because I love teeth. I am not a dentist. I’m a biological anthropologist whose expertise is oral disease and the evolutionary anatomy of teeth. My dad’s an oral surgeon and I worked in his office from the tender and illegal age of 8 to the ripe old age of 18, which is when I went to college. At 12, I was assisting with the disposal of biowaste, aka packaging up the teeth to send them to dental schools. I live, breathe, sleep, and occasionally eat teeth. I found a human incisor on my floor this morning and wasn’t even surprised. I study how teeth go bad partly so that I can help living people protect the teeth they’ve got. It’s my goal with this post to teach you about a couple of different types of procedures and oral injuries, as well as what you can do to help keep your teeth functional. So in this post, what I am going to do is outline a few common things that can go wrong with your teeth, how they happen, and how to catch them before they get bad. A lot of the advice in this post is for people who maybe can’t get to the dentist for a cleaning and checkup every six months. This post is also gonna be LONG AS HELL and there is going to be a separate post called “luxury face bone hacks for the busy/broke/b’mentally ill” or something like that, so like. If you don’t like super long posts, just hit this one with a like and actually read through that one.

First, let’s talk about dental anatomy.

What Are Teeth?

Teeth are extremely cool. They’re these amazing little packages of dentin pulp, protected by enamel, nestled into the jaw like truffles in a box of chocolates, held in place with a teeny tiny ligament. They’re gorgeous– enamel is a beautiful substance, translucent and opalescent. Teeth are also extremely weird when you think about them. You have these weird not-bone things emerging from holes in your jawbones. They’re snapped into place with a biological bunjy cord and you can actually SPRAIN THEM if you put too much pressure on them.

Here are some important things to know about teeth!

First, the nerves in your teeth were never meant to be exposed to the air. They only process stimulus one way: pain. This means that when you get a cavity or do anything else that exposes the nerve, it is going to hurt like a bitch.

Your teeth may come loose! Usually they stay put and go back to normal in a day or two. Don’t panic. This is usually the result of you spraining your dental ligament that holds the tooth in place.

Root canals suck but they can prevent dental abscesses. Dental abscesses can kill you. If they spread and get into your sinuses, they can cross the blood/brain barrier and you will die. This doesn’t happen much any more, but in rare cases… it can.

The phrase “like pulling teeth” is a misnomer. Pulling teeth is extremely easy if you know what you’re doing. Extractions are usually a very simple procedure. What’s complicated is things like root canals and setting up implants, which, in the case of implants is the literal opposite of pulling teeth.

Pregnancy will fuck up your teeth because a.) the fetus is leaching your vital essence and other nutrients and b.) your hormones are telling a lot of ligaments in your body to loosen up to get ready to give birth. Sometimes wires get crossed and other ligaments at non-mobile joints get the loosen up message, too. Just be sure to keep up your dental hygiene regimen during pregnancy and you’ll be fine.

Your gum tissue isn’t just weird wet skin. It’s a mucous membrane that protects the mouth. It can get diseased and inflamed, so pay attention to it! Also, there’s a lot of blood vessels so if you poke yourself with something, you’ll bleed like a stuck pig for a minute. The kind of bleeding you should be worried about is prolonged bleeding, where you see blood welling up around your teeth for no apparent reason.

Now that you’ve been equipped with some fun facts, lets talk about diseases and procedures.

Braces: if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need them

First: Pediatric orthodontia is largely a scam. People who put standard braces on their child before that child has lost all of their baby teeth are stupid and causing their child needless pain because those teeth are going to fall out anyways and the alignment of the adult teeth was decided long, long ago. The kids who NEED orthodontic intervention are kids with bad crossbites/underbites/overbites. This requires specialized headgear most of the time and is more intense than the standard braces because they are made to solve a much bigger problem. The standard bracket-and-wire braces? Don’t put those on a child. They won’t help. Also, your kid doesn’t have their third molars yet, and those are the molars most likely to come in twisted anyways.

As an adult, you may want braces for cosmetic reasons or for comfort reasons. This is a CHOICE that is YOURS TO MAKE. If your dentist suggests you need braces, ask why. You don’t have to get them. Now,If you have certain kinds of dental overlap- like, your lateral incisors have been pushed behind your frontals- then yeah, you should get braces. But is it the end of the world if you don’t get braces? No.

Wisdom tooth removal: you might not need it

The human jaw is in a state of evolutionary mismatch right now. Basically, our last molar, the third molar, doesn’t come in until we’re an adult. Unfortunately, thanks to ten thousand years of agriculture, give or take a few millennia, we have much more gracile jaws than our ancestors. There’s not always enough room for it. Now, this isn’t true for everyone, because no two skulls are identical and all, but sometimes there is a condition where you really should get those suckers out. If they are impacted, or coming in sideways, they can push your other teeth out of alignment and cause jaw issues down the line. If they come up straight, don’t worry about it.

Cavities: you need to get these taken care of

Cavities are a pain in the ass and are honestly the main reason you should go to the dentist for checkups, so that they can take the x-ray of your mouth and see how any potential trouble zones are progressing. You should call a dentist and seek help if you notice pain that persists over three days, as that’s an indicator of something more serious than just a sprain.

Tooth Grinding: this is a problem

If you grind your teeth, your dentist may recommend a night guard. Actually listen to them about this. Grinding your teeth can cause major jaw alignment problems that are a pain to fix, so just bite the silicone and suck it up. Also maybe talk to a therapist if you can, because grinding can be a result of stress/anxiety.

Whitening your teeth: bad idea

First off, your teeth ain’t supposed to be white. Enamel is not white. Enamel is translucent and pearlescent, so its actual color is very hard to pin down. Your teeth are naturally going to look more ivory-colored over time. That’s just part of being human and having teeth. Embrace it. You are a badass omnivore with thirty-two gorgeous enamel teeth. They weren’t put in your mouth to look pretty, they were put in your mouth to feed you.

Second: Whitening your teeth weakens your enamel. Once your enamel’s gone, it ain’t coming back, baby. There are some gentler whitening methods, like whitening toothpaste, but these are only going to give you about one to two shades worth of improvement. If you have extremely stained teeth and you want to whiten them, make sure you talk to your dentist about all the risks. Unfortunately, there is no truly safe and effective home-style (read: not a million gotdang dollars) remedy for whitening teeth.

There are a few that are kicking around, but seriously, some of them are dangerous. Do NOT rub wood ash on your teeth. That’s lye. Don’t put that in your mouth. Do NOT use actual bleach, hair dye developer, or non-dental peroxide gel. They are poisonous. DO NOT PUT ACETONE ON YOUR TEETH i have seen this exactly once and the person came into my dad’s office with chemical burns on their gums and lips. I do NOT want to see this again.

It is a misconception that brushing your teeth keeps them looking white. Brushing your teeth removes plaque and biofilm, but those buildups don’t actually stain the enamel itself. Instead, really the only way to keep your teeth looking light is to pay attention to what you’re putting in your mouth. If you’re a tobacco user, vape! Tar is a major staining agent. Coffee’s also a major stainer, and the big trick there is to put a little milk in it. See, enamel staining doesn’t come from the color of the food. It comes from chemical properties. Acidic foods stain because acid damages enamel. Food with high levels of tannins, like coffee or tea, stain because the tannins change the PH of the mouth. So what you should do to avoid staining is balance your mouth PH by eating something basic after eating something acidic. Add a lil milk to your coffee or tea to weaken its acidity just a bit. Swish with water afterwards to help clear the acid. Don’t eat lemons or any other acidic food after drinking coffee. Why would you want to eat lemons after drinking coffee, anyways? Seems like a weird flavor combo to me.

And while we’re on the subject…

MOUTH CHEMISTRY

What’s in your mouth? Your teeth, your gums, your tongue, your spit… yeah, your spit. Saliva’s important. It’s probably THE most important thing in protecting your teeth because salivary production constantly washes the teeth, clearing off as much bad bacteria as possible. If you have an issue with saliva production, you should drink as much water as you can throughout the day, and get a bottle of dry mouth tabs for nighttime. Or daytime, if they don’t bother you. This is really important because dry mouth is a major side effect for a lot of drugs, like anti-depressants. This is actually a huge part of my research- the population I study used a natural painkiller, but in the end its use caused them more pain because the way it works, it decreases the efficacy of the salivary glands. They stop making sufficient saliva, the teeth dry out, the mouth PH changes, and the bacteria that destroy enamel go buckwild. If you can’t make your own spit, store bought is fine. Water for the day, tabs for the night.

Now, you might think that ok, acid isn’t great, let’s eat more basic foods to balance that out. You can, but it… isn’t great. Your saliva is naturally acidic for a reason, and if you neutralize it completely, that ALSO messes with your teeth. You should be drinking plain water as much as possible.

Seltzer and Soda

Some people think seltzer may hurt your teeth, but it really won’t… unless it’s citrus-flavored. Reason: citrus seltzer uses citric acid as a flavoring agent, and that messes with your teeth. So if you want to drink citrus seltzer, drink it with a meal or with food. Don’t sip it slow over the day.

Soda, on the other hand is a goddamn nightmare. The acid’s kind of a problem but the sugar… dear god the sugar. So. your teeth are covered in a bacterial biofilm. Some of these bacteria excrete acid, and that’s what gives you cavities. This is another part of my research- looking at how cavity prevalence changes as sweetening agents and sugar availability changes. As different carbohydrates enter the diet, populations’ disease responses change. I know more about this than probably anybody else in the world, and here is what I know: the best thing you can do for your teeth is stop drinking American soda.

It’s the corn, you guys. The chemical compounds in corn make the cavity-causing bacteria kick into overdrive. Sodas sweetened with high fructose corn syrup create the perfect environment for these dudes to excrete out a storm. Sugary beverages in general promote cavities, but NOTHING does it like sodas sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or any other corn byproduct. Try to limit your soda and juice consumption and if you can, make sure that when you do have them, you’re getting some food,too.

Other Acids

Ok this next part is going to deal with eating disorders. I’m going to be talking about some of the side effects of bulimia, what they can do to your teeth, and how you can take care of them. Eating disorders are serious business and I hope if you need this section you are in supportive recovery and have the love and support and resources you need. If you don’t want to read about what this can do to your teeth, scroll real quick until you seen the big green text.

If your teeth are in frequent contact with stomach acid, acid etching can be a real problem. Your enamel is tough but stomach acid is gnarly, and your gums don’t have that same protection. If you find yourself vomiting frequently, for whatever reason, try to swish water around in your mouth afterwards to help clean it out. I know that’s not the thing that’s likely on your mind after that, but a lot of what we’re doing here is damage control. I’m not here to judge you in the slightest. I’m just here to help you with your teeth.

Do not brush your teeth immediately after vomiting. The enamel is weaker, and you can cause even more damage by brushing too hard. Wait for at least an hour until after you’ve rinsed your mouth to avoid spreading the acid around.

You can also add some (1-2 tsp) baking soda to the water you rinse with, if you feel ok with doing that. It will taste gross and salty but it will help neutralize the acid. You just rinse with this, you don’t swallow.

ok that part is over

TOOTH HACKS

This is the funnest part, I get to tell you good ways to take care of your teeth that require very few spoons and very little money!

Brush ‘em twice a day. Once when you get up to clear out whatever happened the night before, and once before you fall asleep. You can brush more but you don’t have to. Use a soft-bristled brush and whatever toothpaste you like. If you hate mint, kid toothpaste that tastes like bubblegum or berries is totally fine!

Don’t want to get out of bed? totally fine. Use a finger toothbrush! these are designed for babies which is actually great because they are SUPER soft. If you have sensitive gums, these are going to be really helpful.

Don’t have access to a finger toothbrush? honest to god you can just dip your finger in water (though a mix of water and baking soda or water and salt is better) and brush your teeth with just your finger. The point of this isn’t to freshen your breath or anything, it’s just to get the biofilm off of your teeth and protect them.

Floss. This gets the biofilm out from between your teeth and promotes good gum health. Don’t just run it between the teeth- you need to floss below the gumline a little bit to help clean out plaque.

If you don’t have the spoons to do your whole mouth, floss between your molars if you can.

There’s lots of products that are great for people who can’t go through the whole flossing routine. Pre-threaded flossers are ideal because they’re designed for minimal effort and maximum gain. These are also killer for people with physical disabilities that affect hand dexterity.

If flossing hurts because you have sensitive gums, a water flosser can really help. This is more expensive but will last a very long time.

You can also get topical numbing gel that you can smear on your gums when flossing. Just be careful that you’re not flossing too hard because you can’t feel it. This brand is kind of expensive but it has a nice minty flavor. If you have a dollar and a way to get there, I saw Orajel at Dollar Tree yesterday… when I was buying a bunch of those pre-threaded flossers to throw in my car. I oughta do a Dollar Tree field trip to show you like, what products are available at the absolute cheapest in the US. Dollar Tree has a LOT of good dental options.

There’s a tiktok that says you can use a strand of hair to floss. This is a bad idea. A single strand of hair is likely to break and can cut into your gums. If you want to use hair as floss, you need to use a couple of strands twisted together. Go slow and gentle if you’re using hair. Obviously actual floss is better but this isn’t “perfect dental tips for perfect people,” this is “life sucks but your teeth don’t gotta.”

If you can’t floss or can’t brush, gargle. Put two tsp of baking soda in a glass of warm water. Swish it around, spit it out. If you can do that, you’ve helped clear out biofilm and bacterial waste.

Prioritize your teeth. You only get two sets and you lose the first one by the time you’re twelve. If you can only do one hygiene thing today, make it be your teeth.

Eat some pineapple. Bromelain, which is only found in pineapple, is super good at protecting enamel.

In regards to night guards.....I recommend getting a second opinion if you can.

Obviously not all dentists are like the ones I know but the ones I know WILL try to get as much money out of you as possible.

Night guards are extremely cheap to make but they sell them for hundreds of dollars.

My dentist bought a machine to make them in office a few years ago. He started telling all his patients that they need night guards. Including my mom. Who worked for an oral surgeon and was in contact with his office a lot at the time and knew he just bought this expensive ass machine.

My mom told them no but still went and asked her boss to look at her teeth because if she really did need one it would be cheaper for her boss to get it made for her. Her teeth were fine. She does not need a night guard.

Like if you really do need one, get one. But get a second opinion first if at all possible. Night guards are RARELY covered by insurance and are super overpriced (in the US. Idk about outside the US.)

for one dollar.

DURING AN OPEN commission meeting Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously to enforce laws around the Right to Repair, thereby ensuring that US consumers will be able to repair their own electronic and automotive devices.

The FTC’s endorsement of the rules is not a surprise outcome; the issue of Right to Repair has been a remarkably bipartisan one, and the FTC itself issued a lengthy report in May that blasted manufacturers for restricting repairs. But the 5 to 0 vote signals the commission’s commitment to enforce both federal antitrust laws and a key law around consumer warranties—the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act—when it comes to personal device repairs.

?!?!?!?!?!

Literally every single warranty I have ever read says “lol void if u tamper w/ this shit”

And you’re telling me that’s a rule violation the manufacturer can be reported for?!?!

I would love to see the anti immigration conservatives do this for at least 30 mins..