shel's zone

So, backing up, many people say that they suddenly "feel their age" around 30 because their body, if they keep using it like they're 20, will stop healing faster than they can hurt it. Many chronically ill folks deal with this slowed recovery starting at a much earlier age, and more dramatically. When we die of 'old age' that's in large part due to your healing factor being slowed down so much, the act of being alive wears you down faster than your body can heal.

Robots can not heal.

Sure, they can have parts replaced, but all mechanical parts are installed with an expected number of uses and hours of operation, not even accounting for any traumatic damage.

These legs are rated for three years of use, or 20,000 miles of walking. I'm one year and 3,000 miles over, and can no longer hit my top speed, and tend to veer left if I'm not careful.

These eyes were supposed to be good for 5 years, but the bright lights of the desert and the frequent sand storm mean that after two years in, some of the sensors are burnt out, and the lenses are scratched and difficult to replace, and the same thing is just going to happen to the next pair, so is it really worth it?

My oil tank is cracked, and until I get a new one, I need to drink a new bottle every morning instead of every two months, and I can't bend over forward without spilling some.

This heart has 3 million beats in it. At 60 bpm, that will last me over 11 years. At 120 bpm, it won't last six, until I need a new one.

My CPU was made to last for 5 years with average use. At 3 years, I can think at 65% of the speed I started with. How slow do I have to be before it's worth it to replace that? Every robot is built dying in a way that a healthy able bodied person cannot fully understand. The idea that every part of your body is ticking down, that taking a rest day only delays the inevitable, that once something is broken, it stays that way until you can get it fixed.

Sure, some cars are brand new, owned by someone with a garage and nearly infinite money to pour into upkeep. Some of them are old beaters that are just trying their best to get their 20-something owners to class and back, desperately hoping that it can hold its timing belt together until they can afford to replace it, but please drive slow until then?

Do you think that old beater car might also be worried about the day it becomes cheaper to replace than maintain? That "being bale to afford it" might refer to a new car, not a new belt?

Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.

If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.

As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.

But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.

There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.

I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.

STEP 1: Take a screencap of the video, preferably while it's playing so that the PLAY button isn't blocking the image.

STEP 2: Reverse image search of choice. To my chagrin, I tend to end up resorting to Google's Search by image because Tineye keeps failing me and I haven't gotten around to doing a deep dive into currently available reverse image search services.

If you use the Firefox desktop web browser (untested: other desktop web browsers, Firefox mobile web browser) you can combine STEP 1 & STEP 2: Feel free to repost the video to Tumblr first, preferably as a draft or private post to prevent people from reblogging the uncredited vid, because this method doesn't work as well on Reddit videos.

Right-Click on the video. In the right-click menu, look for "Image Search Options" and hover over it to bring up a list of search options. I'll have to try out some of the other options later, but for this demonstration I used Google.

The search engine should open in another tab.

STEP 3: The Search. This part will be a mix of luck, tenaciousness, and deductive skills.

For Google, I recommend going to the "Exact matches" tab because it presents matches and their information in a much more condensed format than the other tabs. "Exact matches" is a misnomer, as is apparent in the screencap below. This search actually pulled up images from at least two separate videos by the same woman hanging from the same tree: one where she's wearing a slate grey pencil skirt and blazer (as in the video reposted by OP) and one where she's wearing a pale grey long-sleeved dress.

Ideally, a functional search engine would let you sort results by useful variables such as "date posted". Google is not such a search engine, and with its progressive enshittification you may or may not be able to bully Search by image into limiting results to certain date ranges. Luckily, these videos have been less flagrantly reposted than some, so I didn't have to scroll through too many.

When searching for a source, one of the primary things to pay attention to is date. Obviously, the original source has to be older than any of the reports. Unfortunately, not all the Google results have dates, so the earliest dated video isn't guaranteed to be the original.

In this case, the earliest result was of the grey dress video variant posted on Instagram on Jan 17, 2026. However, upon checking the link it became apparently that the Instagram account was not the originator of the video and their repost was unsourced.

If the date check fails you, keep an eye out for any undated results that clearly stand out from the rest. In this case, I picked up on the following:

Which has the following unique traits:

A new outfit! This is the only result that features the woman in a pale brown blazer and pencil skirt.

Dimensions. This result is 1080 x 1920, while the majority of results were smaller in size. Reposts are more likely to be downscaled from the original than upscaled, so if the initial date-check fails you, you're better off checking the largest undated results first.

Specific username (Liang Li (@liangli521)). A lot of the other results just have captions or titles in various languages. Depending on the website, these are usually either captioned reposts or random search terms that don't even link to the actual video. Results with specific usernames are rarer and thus worth checking out, though some of them may turn out to be reposters.

In this case, I hit the jackpot! There they all were: OP's video, the grey dress video, the brown blazer & skirt video, and many, many more!

Legitimately, Liang Li's whole thing seems to be going ham in skirts, dresses, and frequently heels. Possibly for advertising purposes? Very beautiful. Very powerful.

Bonus videos:

Cool lights!

Obstacle courses and playgrounds with friend!

H-hot damn, ma'am...

(If that doesn't work right: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7550 )

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

Much Merganser drama today