Cuff is actually kind of clunky to wear. Like, I'm sure one would get used to him, if one had to wear him all the time. But he's larger and bulkier than expected, and I can imagine that the initial "getting used to" period was quite annoying for Frey.

Like, he's not delicate at all. I very much hope she made fun of him for it.

i love reblogging things i've already reblogged like. y'all are going to see this again

Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

You have to find a way.

good LORD the piss is flying all over the place in that comment section! If you're poor do NOT leave your house you're definitely gonna get caught in the crossfire.

UNMUTE!!

POV u are delicious

voter suppression against black people is reaching Jim Crow era levels in the US so please get registered to vote now, learn who's going to be on your ballot in advance, try to talk some sense into your conservative relatives or coworkers (diplomatically), and, when November rolls around, vote to make Republicans lose as many seats as possible. there are many other things to do, of course, but the midterms will have a massive impact on the future of civil rights.

reblog this and put in the tags what kind of content you watch on youtube

This attitude is especially strange to me because childbirth often is a traumatic experience for babies, and the way it is has nothing to do with a pregnant person experiencing pleasure during it. In fact, the relaxation provided by sexual stimulation during birth can lessen the chance of that trauma.

In a birth where everything goes smoothly, a baby's head is compressed in a way that's painful for them even with their soft bones. They scream and cry with the shock of the sensations that come with being born. They're suddenly cold, suddenly hungry for the first time in their existence, and there are lights that hurt their eyes to adjust to. If everything doesn't go smoothly, they can be bruised and lack oxygen and have their limbs contorted and squashed in painful ways. They can get stuck.

Why in the world would you be more worried about a pregnant person experiencing a moment of sexual pleasure which helps them to give birth smoothly and safely than the trauma to a baby that comes with a childbirth involving high stress and extreme pain?

Huge things happening this week 🎉💥💥💥💥💥💥

Person with migraine aura today: Ow ow ow my head hurts and all I can see is TV static :(

Nineteenth century doctors describing migraine aura with the manic horror of a lovecraftian horror protagonist:

At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object; I thought it might be an eyelash in the way, or something of that sort, but I was soon undeceived when it began to increase…

When it was in its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously... All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive. (Hubert Airy, 1856)

the one on the left looks almost exactly like what i see when having an occular migraine. i always described it as "someone crinkling clear mylar in an arc around my vision."

mine starts as a little dot, dead center of my vision, and if i close 1 eye at a time, i can figure out which eye is having the trouble, because mine are almost never bilateral.

as time goes on, the spot of mylar turns into an arc that gets bigger and bigger, while the center of my vision is a heavy gaussian blur.

it takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours for the crinkling mylar to get past my peripheral vision and the blurriness to clear fully.

i've found that if i take an NSAID, it goes faster. but often once it's out of my vision, but still blurry, i get dysphasia and dizzy.

so usually i take some NSAIDS and go sleep it off, because that's more pleasant than trying to remain upright while blurry and dizzy.

How August kinda feels to me

You guys need to recognize that the push to treat ace and aro discourse as stupid infighting that never left tumblr is indeed a manifestation of the continued erasure and devaluing of asexuality, aromanticism, and and ace and aro lives in an effort to pretend that the people who did it weren't part of a reactionary hate movement that completely decimated two entire marginalized communities both on and offline.

Like I try to be nice about this but I have seen SO many fucking people being like "lol yeah ace/aro discourse was one thing" and that is deliberate erasure of real and important queer history in service of dodging blame on the parties that did this who, for the most part, never fucking apologized or owned up to it, or, in the case of a few blogs I still see going around, clearly still stand by all of it and just hope you don't point that out, and ofc, no one ever fucking does.

Stop downplaying the absolute fucking devastation the queer community did to ace and aro people and our communities. If owning it makes you uncomfortable, good, go make it right, and start by not fucking lying about what happened, thanks.

Everyone will think I'm crazy, but I cannot stress that an atrocity was done to ace and aro people, and we never got so much as a fucking apology.

I do want to say if you got caught up in this I don't hate you, especially if you learned and changed, because like most reactionary hate movements ace/aro discourse was always presented as righteous and fun, and also it was EVERYWHERE and the people stirring shit were very well articulated. A lot of us were teenagers joining queer spaces for the first time ever and we wanted to belong and sometimes that means hating who the people who already belong tell you to hate. I get why people fell for it, I came close a few times myself when I was at my lowest and most desperate to feel like I belonged again. I get it.

I can't offer forgiveness or absolution to everyone, but you don't need me to forgive you to forgive yourself and move on, and I do think most of the people who got caught up in it have more than earned moving on.

However, what I want is for everyone to stop downplaying it. Don't call it stupid infighting, don't go "ace stuff was one thing but this with trans men is too far" don't claim it didn't leave tumblr or the internet, own how bad it was. If you were there you know, and your history is valuable, so even when it sucks please be honest about what happened. This part of queer history should not be forgotten, and especially not for the people who never really changed and have an interest in making sure everyone thinks this was just some silly infighting.

That's what I ask, do right by us, don't let us be erased again.

Especially because when you forget, when you downplay it, you downplay what's happened with truscum shit, with biphobia, and now with trans masc exclusion. You downplay it and you disguise that it's the same people saying the same things about a new group. I found out about the rise in trans man/masc exclusion because I saw someone saying that trans men are collateral damage secondary to the real targets of transphobia, trans women, and I immediately knew the person saying it was a shithead I should NEVER trust because that is exactly what they said about bi and ace and aro people. Word for word.

You do those who were hurt a disservice when you downplay what happened, but you also make our spaces less safe because if we pretend what happened didn't we can't stop it when it starts again.

And it always starts again.

Reblogging again after seeing YET ANOTHER person say ace/aro discourse wasn't mainstream and didn't leave the internet. People got kicked out of irl queer spaces behind this, stop fucking lying about what happened. At this point more someone pushes the "ace/aro discourse was bad but not mainstream/offline/as bad as what's happening now with [xyz group]" the more I think you have a vested interest in making it out to be not a big deal and that doesn't say anything good about you.

Like y'all claim to be against oppression olympics, but you're still engaging with it every single time you say anything even remotely like "ace/aro discourse was really bad but nothing as serious as what's happening now" and I'm sick of pretending it's not oppression olympics and also not a manifestation of the continued violence against ace and aro people. If the only way you're going to talk about what happened is through downplaying our suffering and/or spreading misinformation about it, do me and every other aro and ace person a favor and stop fucking talking about us.

Say hello to my little hi

Top 3 things people love insisting they don't have despite it being impossible

Im going to shoot you people with a fucking gun

Everyone has an accent it came free with your language 🙄

Congrats to every reply like this for failing to understand the fundamental definition of an accent. Of course you think you sound normal! It's the way you speak!

Gonna sign language at you in a very southern accent

Sign languages also comes with accents, you can easily watch people sign and tell the difference

You get different sign language accents, you get regional accents, and you even get "second language speaker accent"

and i suspect signed accents can be pretty "heavy" accents because i started picking up on them real early into the learning process

Saying you speak without an accent is like saying you type without a font.

Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish

So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:

"You have fish, right?"

"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.

"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.

I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.

"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."

She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:

He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.

Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.

I think I did alright.

He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.

That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.

Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.

Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).

When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.

Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.

So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).

Friends.

The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.

My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.

Congrats on a most excellent fishson! Do you have any resources you'd recommend for learning appropriate betta care? My niece just bought one and is keeping it in a vase.

My mom and I are hoping to get her a proper tank setup, but we don't know where to start looking for actually reliable information, especially for identifying the middle ground between "lies the fish bowl companies told the underpaid teenager at the pet store to say" and "spending thousands of hours and dollars turning half the room into fully native habitat" where an eleven year old is most likely to need to start.

You are right, a vase is a completely unacceptable place to house any animal, especially a Betta. I am not going to shame your niece or her parents because yes, chain stores, and media have fully lied to them about what fishkeeping is actually like and what it takes to keep fish and other tank animals without torturing them. The truth is that Fishkeeping is a TERRIBLE introduction to pet ownership, but a great introduction to ichthyology, chemistry, ecology, pathology, engineering and animal psychology. Places that will give you good (or at least, better) information about fish:

1. Your Local Fish Store- NOT the Petco/Petsmart/Other chain store, the independent small business that probably feels like a fire hazard and is owned by a Weird Old Guy or if you're really lucky, weird lesbians. These people are in it for the love of fish, and will give you very realistic advice and expectations.

2. The following Youtube Channels have good fish husbandry and advice:

I was writing up an entire materials/costs/instructions on Kevin's 5 gallon speedrun but it got so long tumblr started crashing so I'm going to go finish that post in word and then add it to this tomorrow.