"How do you say goodbye back home?" "We don't. We do this."

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

1. cup one testicle at a time using both hands, best performed during or after a warm bath or shower

2. examine by rolling the testicle between thumb and fingers, use slight pressure

3. familiarize yourself with the spermatic cord and epididymis, tube like structures that connect on the back side of each testicle

4. feel for lumps, change in size or irregularities, it is normal for one testis to be slightly larger than the other

He's primarily known for appearing in the 1932 cult classic Freaks directed by Tod Browning.

However what I'm mostly obsessed with is this account of a magic trick he did with his non-disabled twin brother (text under the cut)

Like this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine

Lesson #10 dreams

By popular demand here is one about dreams!! I’ll definitely do more about specific aspects of sleep since it’s such a huge biological difference!!

Thank you everybody for the countless ideas in the inbox!!

Because I think there is a much better and much more... realistic twist to this?

I'm aromantic. The idea of falling in love or being in love is so alien and so weird to me, I cannot begin to really even imagine what it would be like.

I think if an aromantic character fell in love when they're not able to fall in love would be a very distressing situation.

Whenever I've seen people describe what it's like to have a crush and to be in love, it just sounded like absolute hell to me.

I can torture Grace so much with this. Maybe it's some... experimental food the Eridians have him try, maybe it's something up in space when they're traveling to erid, it doesn't really matter. But if there was something that made Grace temporarily fall in love with someone, I think he would have a really bad time.

No funny or cute moments where the characters forced romantic infatuation turns sincere, or where it turns out it was there the whole time- just the absolute horror of feeling something you're not supposed to be experiencing. Grace wasn't built for that kind of love, he doesn't really want it, he's never been interested, and he could never understand what it would feel like. Grace feeling sick to his stomach, feeling like something is horribly wrong and being distressed and just anxious.

Him throwing up when he realizes what he's feeling- the knowledge of what the feeling is and feeling so wrong just makes him nauseous. This is apparently what everyone claims is the best feeling ever, this is what everyone is apparently chasing after. This is such a "universal" experience for humans and yet, here's Grace, shivering in the corner, trying not to throw up again or crawl out of his own skin.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

Our idiots at home ministry came up with the fucking idea to start a register for all transgender and nonbinary people which would mean every person working at some public position could always at any given time see your assigned gender at birth, your deadname, your address and who knows what else.

We had been there in the past. Hitler Germany called it the "Travestite Law" back then. Our politicians didn't learn.

We all know this is unacceptable.

Please, if you are German, sign it. If you are not, spread it wide and far.

This had been stopped once a few years ago. It needs to be stopped again.

It looks like the vote was postponed but I can't find to when and if they're still working on it. My German isn't great however and I'm certainly not familiar with bureaucratic speech so if any German speakers see this and would like to look into it, please do.

From: https://www.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/TO/1058/tagesordnung-1058.html#top-57

In the Grunddrucksache file, this is the only thing I could find on the topic: