inquisitive spirit

And I felt it. I understood the pain.

If you're someone who uses multiple pronouns sets which include they/them, then I'm sure you understand the pain as well. You understand the subtle transphobia of people only calling you they. It's a way to sterilize you, to separate you from your gender, all while technically still using the correct pronouns. And it's exhausting.

I use any pronouns but she/her. I mainly use he/they/it but I am fine with any and all neopronouns. I have this stated in my carrd and I make this clear to people when they ask. And yet. I can understand the people who call me they because they don't know my pronouns, but there are so many people who do know my pronouns and refuse to use them. They/them is my second least favorite pronoun set to use and it's the only one people use for me.

This was only 2 years after the repeal of Section 28 in England and Wales banning the “promotion of homosexuality” in 2003.

And yeah, he was doing better bi/pan rep on the first season of the reboot of Britain’s most popular and iconic family program, with an actual kiss. In 2005.

Like imagine if Disney got Star Wars to reboot and then in the first movie of the reboot Finn kissed both Poe and Rey. Like. That’s what he did. Doctor Who is a hugely iconic property with a lot of intense fans who’ve been watching since 1963 and RTD was like “I want to do this. I’m doing this.”

I work in an obstetrician and gynaecologist’s office. we have to tell patients on a regular basis that they are binge drinking weekly when they think they are simply consuming a normal amount of alcohol on the weekends.

having more than 3 drinks in a single sitting if you have an estrogen based endocrine system is a binge that is medically significant.

having more than 5 in a sitting is a medically significant binge for someone with a testosterone based endocrine system.

every time you do this, it significantly impacts your risk of getting breast cancer, and damages your liver. it takes time to recover from that liver damage. if you’re having a 3-5 or more drink binge on a weekly basis, you are an alcoholic, medically speaking, and your liver is not recovering.

again: the bar for what binge drinking is, medically, is so much lower than what you think it is.

alcohol is a really toxic substance and not something you should fuck around with.

again: if you have an estrogenized hormone system (common for most women), then 3 drinks is a binge. if you have a testosteronized hormone system (common for most men), then 5 drinks is a binge.

anything above that number, consumed as frequently as weekly or more, and you’re medically a binge drinking alcoholic.

also, if you’re drinking any quantity of alcohol 6 days a week or more, that’s another threshold at which, medically speaking, you meet the definition of alcoholism. your liver needs more days without alcohol in your system than just one a week to recover and be healthy.

I don’t say any of this to shame anyone—to me, alcoholism or substance use disorders aren’t a sign of weakness or moral failing. and most of us genuinely don’t know this stuff.

The exclusionist rabbit hole goes deep and for some flat out leads to TERFville at the end.

The normal level of daily pain for an able-bodied person is ZERO, without needing to take pain medication, not even off-the-counter meds.

Not a little, definitely not enough to be "distracting but tolerable" with or without Tylenol. ZERO. (I'm shocked too every time I remember that the norm is to live pain free unless something happened to you, I know.)

if pain from the thing keeps happening over and over it’s likely chronic pain. gaps in the pain don’t stop it from counting, if it’s a reoccurring problem for over 3 months it’s chronic.

A word of warning from this old goat: if you’re considering putting anything that can be construed as involving a Disney intellectual property behind a paywall, don’t. The Mouse doesn’t fuck around. Don’t think, “oh, my work wouldn’t matter” - trust me, it does. They’re ruthless when it comes to protecting their IPs.

From the Dark Ages of 1989 - they went after a daycare chain for painting their characters on walls. They don’t play. It’s not worth it.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1989-04-08-8904090009-story.html

Disney

The Olympics

The Burroughs Estate (look, I know Tarzan is considered ancient, sexist, and boring. And the first several books are in the public domain. That has not stopped the Burroughs estate from going after anyone who tries to make new Tarzan content, which is why there is no innovative progressive retelling.)

After that comes, in no particular order, Time-Warner, the Doyle Estate (which is frantic to track down the last few infringements they can before their whole canon enters public domain in a few years), Paramount, the RIAA, and Nintendo.

When indigenous ppl complain that their sacred sites are being destroyed and they say stuff like "we have a cultural connection to this place" "if we can't come here it's like ripping off our roots" "we need this place to communicate with our ancestor spirits" etc., white australians are conditioned to handwave statements like that away with shit like "oh well they're just saying that, it's just a random tree, they'll get over it, obviously ancestor spirits aren't real, sacredness of trees isn't real", and that is total bullshit.

Aboriginal sacred sites are integral parts of highly sophisticated mnemonic techniques that have been proven to preserve information for (i know this sounds hard to believe but) at least ten thousand years (they accurately describe coastlines that are now underwater, or dry areas that have since been rainforests for 7000 years, or extinct megafauna etc.)

Like how fucked up is it that it’s just….. gone.

I tend to forget about it and then when I remember it again I’m like “Oh yeah! There’s like an entire country sized stretch of land that’s just fucking GONE.

well…. “gone”….

The running theory (I can’t remember if it was definitive proof or not but I try not to make concrete statements on history any more) is that what caused the sinking of Doggerland was not the slow heating up of the Earth leading to a gradual melting of ice and snow causing the rise of the ocean….

What flooded Doggerland was a massive fucking CHUNK of Norway FELL INTO THE OCEAN and it caused the largest tsunami we have physical evidence for on earth and it fucking flooded Doggerland IN ONE SINGULAR DAY with a rush of water so strong, large and powerful it literally had the force to rip people to shreds when it hit them

CAM ON DOGGERLAND

*BANG BANG*

KILL SOM FACKIN MAMMOTHS

I think you may not be envisioning how big “a fucking chunk” would be to cause this

That illustrated area is the landslide deposit when it eventually evened out. Notice its size compared to…. uh…. the British isles…. at the bottom there.

A word of warning from this old goat: if you’re considering putting anything that can be construed as involving a Disney intellectual property behind a paywall, don’t. The Mouse doesn’t fuck around. Don’t think, “oh, my work wouldn’t matter” - trust me, it does. They’re ruthless when it comes to protecting their IPs.

From the Dark Ages of 1989 - they went after a daycare chain for painting their characters on walls. They don’t play. It’s not worth it.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1989-04-08-8904090009-story.html

Disney

The Olympics

The Burroughs Estate (look, I know Tarzan is considered ancient, sexist, and boring. And the first several books are in the public domain. That has not stopped the Burroughs estate from going after anyone who tries to make new Tarzan content, which is why there is no innovative progressive retelling.)

After that comes, in no particular order, Time-Warner, the Doyle Estate (which is frantic to track down the last few infringements they can before their whole canon enters public domain in a few years), Paramount, the RIAA, and Nintendo.

Europe is currently being burned alive and people still think climate change is a joke. It’s warmer in North Europe than in the middle eastern deserts.

(X)

So yeah, as funny as it is that it is a salmon snake, that’s not really it.

ps. Finnish also has a similar word to the Swedish drake: traakki. It is not widely used but it appears in some plants’ names for example.

Unlike in English, in Finnish compounds are very normal and widely used. I personally like this since it makes many words easier to understand ‘cause they are a lot more describing than their englsih counterparts. Let me give you some examples:

plane - lentokone (fluing machine)

concussion - aivotärähdys (brain jolt)

conspiracy - salaliitto (secrect alliance)

There are also some comppunds that Finns don’t usualy even recognize as compounds (although they most certainly are).

garden - puutarha (tree enclosure/farm)… it was hard to find a translation for tarha…

world - maailma (land air)

Also in Finnish compunds are ALWAYS and I really mean always written together. This also gives the opportunity to make very usable new words.

You know that “German has a word for everything” meme? I am not 100% sure but I have understood that the German works in a similar way. Of course there is a word for “the happy feeling you get when you eat cauliflower” because that can just be maybe up by compounding the keywords: kukkakaalinsyönti-ilo (cauliflower eating happines).

plane - lentokone (flying machine) - Flugzeug (flying thing)

concussion - aivotärähdys - Gehirnerschütterung (brain jolt)

cauliflower - kukkakaali - Blumenkohl (flower cabbage)

And also:

dictionary - sanakirja - Wörterbuch (word book)

railway - rautatie - Eisenbahn (iron way)

So yeah, we have a word for everything for this exact reason! And there are a lot of words you can just translate literally into finnish and it’s still a valid compound word, which is nice when you’re German and learning Finnish! Basically,