Kavaeric

as in, a loooooooooong piece of steel cable with the sail at the end of it

of course it's ~basically a sailing ship~ but you can't stick masts on a container ship, that is a disaster waiting to happen for so many reasons

you'd only really get one point to anchor the mast, and that is right where it meets the deck, the containers get it the way of any ropes you might wish to use further up

you'd have to build entirely new container ships or some sort of ... mast container frame to account for the fact that the ships are built to exactly fit the containers, and sticking a mast in the middle of it will mess with that entire system by not being the size of a container

loading and unloading around the masts is going to be hell for the crane drivers and there will be damage to everything given the speed they usually work with, so every harbor will hate you if their cranes even have the height to work around the masts

and if you still decide to stick masts on a container ship, they won't be easily and quickly removeable, so you have to recertify and reclassify the entire ship, and it's going to take ages and ages to do properly, and they'll have to figure out how to do it so it's either expensive as fuck or they may refuse entirely. a steel cable on a winch is by definition removeable (that is, uh, uprollable?) so you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense. hell, if you calculate the pre-determined breaking point properly, it'll even fail safely

this isn't ~ooooooooooh we invented sails! we're the smartest~

"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)

via ThoughtCo

Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.

I don't think that there's a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn't understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.

But "medicine from plants" and "herbalism" are not the same.

The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you've got a headache.

What you can't do is control the dose. You can't do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you're measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it's not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.

That's not a huge deal if you're using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you're using aspirin as a bloodthinner.

And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn't* a big deal. The example they *don't* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that's a medicine from a plant that you can't fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it's done wrong it'll just straight kill you.

And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn't diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn't on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.

And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).

There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for "Hema Ketha" for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)

Are you attempting to take therapeutic doses of turmeric? There's some evidence that it can help relieve joint pain. However you need to take really, really high doses because the medicinal compound in turmeric has low bioavailability. And because you're taking high doses you may be swapping out the risks of NSAIDs for the risk of lead poisoning, because it is unfortunately very common for turmeric to be contaminated with lead.

One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than "allopathic" medicine. They think "it's better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea." But midol doesn't interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they're taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.

There's this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John's Wort tea that has "NOT FOR PREGNANT" on the label. It's good that they're recommending that pregnant people don't select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.

But it's just tea. And what could just tea do, right?

(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That's what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn't steeped as long doesn't hurt, so you drink it and you think it's fine, it's not a problem, and it isn't a problem until it is but you don't know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)

This is also why I'm extremely leery of the "you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor's care and you do what the doctors say" thing because that is relying on:

People reporting every supplement, tincture, tea, etc. that they are taking to their doctors (which they often don't do because what's the big deal it's green tea extract and billions of people drink green tea every day)

The ingredients in the supplements being exactly and ONLY what is on the label (which is a long shot - it seems like every three years there's a study or a report that finds that supplements - usually in the US but also around the world - don't contain what they are supposed to and often contain stuff they are not supposed to)

Doctors being aware of all of these possible interactions (which is a stretch; pharmacists are likely to have a better handle on it but even then, there are all kinds of supplements being labeled all kinds of things all the time; medical woo scammers LOVE to rebrand their supplements)

So long story short I'm not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you're recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.

Because that's the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren't held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don't have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that's in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they're not committing malpractice because there's no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there's no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.

I have pretty much limitless tolerance for things that people want to do to themselves. If you want to take valerian because you think it helps you sleep (in spite of essentially no evidence that it does so and more adverse reactions among natural sleep aids than things like camomile - which also has no evidence that it's an effective sleep aid) I don't care, just make sure to check for drug interactions first.

Hey everyone! As I have probably mentioned in one of my previous posts, Boosty is currently not working with PayPal which makes the process of donating to us especially tedious - you either need to pay with your credit card directly or, if that's not available, look somewhere else.

So currently there's two options you might pursue:

Option number 1: Commission either of us via EasyStart. It's a bit of a process, but you get beautiful art and/or high-quality digital LEGO designs for your trouble. Contact either me or @demitsorou via our work E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]

Option number 2: buy my artbook from Hipolink. Hipolink is a sort of Linktree/Carrd married to a simple digital storefront. I will try to add more stuff there, like instructions etc, but it will take time and focus.

Hipolink is going to have a tipping service added in the future, but at the moment only the storefront function is available for me.

Important note:

pretty cool head lighting ref thing

• AIs have already been scraping data from sites for free for years

• Companies got pissed at this a little too late and are now trying to put it behind a paywall by offering things like data packs in paid partnerships

• Your data wasn't safe before or now

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

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Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

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We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

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this basically says, "sorry our CEO is being a dipshit, we really don't like it and we were overruled on decisions that made things worse. now that he's blown this up we can finally do the things higher-ups didn't let us do earlier."

the note about being thankful for "matt's strong commitment to freedom of expression", i'm not sure how sincere it is, but it reads to me like "thanks for not firing us for making this post, and thanks for listening (or being strong-armed into listening) to us when we told you that you're fucking things up and you should let us fix it."

In all my career, I have never seen a corporation issue a public statement written by line employees like the post above on an official account. A corporation will always issue an apology or something like this from the highest level - the CEO itself or speaking on behalf of the corporation as a whole, written by their lawyers and/or PR team.

For Tumblr to allow and issue a statement written by employees speaking on behalf of themselves is incredibly rare and frankly shows tumblrs commitment to it's queer staff and users.