Rookie Cookie 23

Ed Sheeran does have struggles and he’s been through some rough shit.

I'm an American living in Germany. I've lived here for four years as of this week (June 2021).

Two and a half years ago, I had a medical emergency in the form of gallstones and an infected gallbladder. I tried to tough it out, like a True American Who Can't Afford Treatment, and ended up in the hospital getting the gallbladder removed. I was brought in on Thursday, had the gallbladder and five gallstones the size of macadamia nuts removed on Saturday, and was home by Tuesday. Total cost, 200 euro.

Back in March, 2021, I saw a visual distortion in my right eye, like an afterimage of looking at something bright for too long. Got seen by the eye doctor that day, got sent to the hospital that day to get a diagnosis--ocular vein occlusion--and spent the following three days getting followup diagnostics, including a full blood panel. I got diagnosed with having elevated levels of homocysteine in my blood, and that turned out to be caused by a genetic disorder that runs in my family (MTHFR-5 mutation) where I can't metabolize B vitamins correctly. And now I'm on modified B vitamins and the difference in my daily life is amazing.

Total cost for the hospital stay and all of the blood tests and eye examinations and other tests?

250 euro.

In my old city in the US--which has a nationally renown hospital--the gallbladder removal costs a year's salary for a minimum wage worker.

Due to insurance fuckery here in the USA, despite my primary eye doctor wanting me to see somebody within a few weeks, by the time I am seeing the specialist it has now been 10 months. And the person I am seeing is the one (1) person they said BY NAME not to see because they're shit, because this is the only specialist of the correct sort my insurance was willing to approve (after approving multiple WRONG specialists). The poor ladies at the referral department were getting so used to talking to me because we spent months going back and forth and them trying to find a way to get insurance to cooperate, bless them truly.

My insurance also decided to no longer work with my psych at the start of the year. I was told the DAY BEFORE my usual appointment. It is now 9 months later that, again, due to insurance fuckery I am finally seeing a new provider. I have been unmedicated for my debilitating depression and anxiety the better part of the year and all attempts to start medicating my ADHD have ground to a halt as a result leaving me struggling to function in day to day life for 9 fucking months

My family is, thankfully, able to help me with medical costs or I'd be dead in a ditch.

And medical care is still a goddamn joke because insurance fuckery is all about screwing the patient for as much money as possible instead of making sure they can access the care they need.

When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  

If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  

This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  

Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  

This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  

Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  

This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  

Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  

However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  

Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  

we’re all familiar with the Sperm Whale of our modern seas, largest of the Toothed Whales! it’s also completely specialized for eating squid and squid ONLY, a comfort to anyone who’s ever managed to get just a bit too close to those enormous razor jaws.

but this was very much not always the case! the earlier members of the Sperm Whale lineage were much less… discerning.

early Sperm Whales all resembled our friendly modern swimming school bus to some degree, but the main difference was in the jaws- early Sperm Whales like Acrophyseter and Zygophyseter all had wide, powerful jaws with ENORMOUS teeth suitable for snacking on fish, dolphins, aquatic sloths, and pretty much anything else they could fit down their enormous gullets, kind of like a modern Orca.

and from 12 to 7 million years ago, these things RULED the seas. Megalodon who?

but the greatest of these was Livyatan Melvillei, which was the size of our modern Sperm Whale. 

reaching up to 60 feet long and weighing well over 60 tons, it this thing was a Sea Monster in every sense of the word. 

it is so BONKERS huge that they named it after the Hebrew name for the Biblical Leviathan (and also Herman Melville, who would have gotten a real kick out of it). I cannot overstate how unsafe it would be to share an ocean with this thing. Moby Dick would have been an entirely different book if it was still around. 

so what does a 60-feet hyperpredatory whale eat?

*Groucho Marx voice* WHY, ANYTHING IT WANTS. 

(but mostly other whales.)

Livyatan spent most of its time cruising around looking for delicious smaller whales to shove into that nightmare maw up there, a lifestyle choice we call macroraptorial. though in a pinch, anything else would also do. 

(basically, if you were a mid-sized baleen whale in the paleozoic seas you were just SHIT out of luck, between Megalodon and this thing.)

Livyatan may have died out as little as 5 million years ago, meaning it might even have been around to make the early ancestors of Orcas regret their life choices! (Livyatan is the only animal that could possibly make an Orca regret anything, but God, at what cost)

See the monster whales eating the giant underwater sloths

what can be proven is that in no situation under united states law is an individual legally obligated to lend their body or organs for the sake of another life. 

4.5 million people each year are in need of blood transfusion, the entire process of donating blood takes a little over an hour, it’s free, and a single pint of blood can save up to 3 peoples lives, but there is no legal obligation or requirement to donate blood in place. 

it is illegal to take organs from deceased peoples’ bodies without permission. CORPSES. bodily integrity is prioritized by law, even after death.

it doesn’t fucking matter whether a fetus is a person, whether a fetus is alive, whether a fetus has a soul. it literally doesn’t matter. pro-lifers set up the argument through that lens (hence their name) to evoke empathy and pity and take the focus away from the actual process of pregnancy, which changes a person’s body FOREVER. that is not an exaggeration. whether the pregnancy is complicated and high-risk or totally smooth sailing, the birthing person will physically never be the same. if they’re lucky, they’ll come out of it with weight gain, differently shaped breasts, and changes to the cervix/vagina. if they aren’t, there’s a fucking laundry list of potential complications that could arise, that may eventually fix themselves, need surgical or therapeutic intervention, or never go away, like varicose veins, separation of the abdominal muscles, incontinence, prolapse, diabetes, postpartum depression, and chronic pain, just off the top of my head. and this makes no mention of the very real possibility of income disruption, as well as the financial cost of giving birth, and the chance of fucking death, which is even higher for underserved communities like black women.