Yeah the bottom one is almost soothing in the way that your eye loops through it.

Fun fact! (Op may already know) but it’s called a lemniscate! I learned this while doing a deep dive on the symbology of the rider waite tarot deck. Fascinating stuff it’s basically a super complicated greco-roman-judeo-christian crossover fanfiction with touches of Egyptian mythology and some stuff from the near east, especially the parts that influenced western alchemy (the academic term is syncretism).

My mother blamed calling it a “spontaneous abortion” for the “confusion” that led my neighbors health insurance company to deny coverage for her miscarriage. Now that I’m older I’m just like no the insurance company just didn’t want to pay and found a reason that would hopefully traumatize a woman out of fighting them on it and were backed by a wider society that just hates women in general. Like I’ve heard people say it’s more humane to call it a spontaneous abortion because “miscarriage” implies the woman did something wrong and idt the wording is actually going to manage to make the experience that much less awful but regardless I also don’t think the wording was actually the issue in that situation. And the word abortion wouldn’t be that stigmatized either if we didn’t consider pregnancy as a punishment for sex that must be meted out no matter the circumstances of the sex itself or the physical, emotional, or social safety of the resulting pregnancy.

I have noticed a trend of people who think working with the homeless is gonna look like a hallmark card and are shocked and appalled when they get called slurs by a homeless diabetic amputee. Its easy for them to come to the conclusion that these people are homeless because they’re assholes. They’re right in the sense that most of the more pleasant people never really wind up completely homeless, they can usually find a couch to crash on and a friend’s shower to use until they find a new or better job.

But it’s also this cycle where having your head shoved back under repeatedly eventually makes you unpleasant so yeah eventually once you start factoring all that trauma you do wind up with somebody who’s paranoid, possibly even psychotic related to drug use (tf else are they gonna do with their time? It’s not like they’re gonna join a pickleball league, and nobody is gonna hire somebody who never showers or has clean clothes, and you need a shitton of calories going into your body to work labor and you can’t work labor at all if being unable to afford your metformin got your legs amputated).

So I meet people who volunteer or even come to do paid work in human services and they’re like wow I’m helping these people and they cuss me out and yell racial and gendered slurs at me when we’re out of turkey sandwiches and I’m just like first of all, learn to appreciate ✨️The Art of The Roast✨️; half the shit these people say is a) true and b) funny asF. And second of all, I know damn well nobody told you to come work in this field for high pay and low stress so we can tell people all we want that we deserve more pay and more staffing and more resources but we all know that ain’t coming any time soon so until then if your plan is to sit around complaining then do us all a favor and just leave because you’re stressing the rest of us out and we have work to do.

Misskey?

Actually now that I think about it the child abuse was more of a secondary reason I cut them off. The main reason was that I accumulated a significant amount of PTSD from working as a nurse (and other, smaller roles during school) both in psychiatry in general and through the pandemic and spent a lot of time working with some very underprivileged populations and seeing how their care was handled during the crisis, and how my coworkers and I were treated while being some of the only people who were willing to stay and keep caring for them, and then they found my PTSD reactions amusing.

My parents always said I’d agree with them more the older I got but honestly I agreed with them much more the younger I was and the less I knew about any of this. The more I’ve seen the more their politics deeply upset me. As a fun side detail, based on what I know about my father’s work, I’m pretty sure those dead Palestinian kids are paying for my nursing degree. The final straw was when I realized the reason I felt the urge to drink every time I spoke to them was because I was medicating the flashbacks. My mother has always enjoyed “debating” and the realization that my mother found my PTSD flashbacks “fun” clarified a lot of emotions that had been very confusing for a long time.

It’s really hard to stay “rational” when someone brings up “was COVID even real” as a “joke” and the first thing that pops into your brain is the face of the guy you were desperately trying to keep breathing for a few hours who finally just started having a stroke too. Or the time you got called to sit suicide watch because the person kept trying to take off the mask of their ventilator off and wheezing out “just let me die” over and over. The only thing that helped was if I just kept talking and I ran out of things to say so I just started telling him the plots of the last five books I read. When my shift hit the 16 hour mark and I was falling asleep they didn’t have enough people to sit with all the patients and when they triaged he was deemed the lowest priority so I handed him off to his nurse but there’s no way she could’ve actually stayed with him continously. I never did find out what happened to that one. At least with the stroke guy I went down to CT with and got to see them infuse the tPA and watch him start to come back out of it before I handed him off to the neuro nurse.

I stopped drinking the day I cut them off and tbh it was actually really easy without them around. It’s been over a year now and I barely even felt any cravings when it was fresh. It turned out they were literally the reason I was drinking. Some people’s families just aren’t healthy. It also turns out that being really self-centered from a political standpoint translates really well to being really self-centered in person. And some parents are just self-centered enough that they’ll worsen their own child’s mental health for their own personal entertainment.

That being said, these people were clearly unwell, punishing them for the horrors brought forth by their poor decisions seems gratuitous.

Prostitution and sex trafficking are also pretty common among substance using women. The lower rate of homelessness among women is mostly just because a brothel has a roof. If we were just housing and feeding them in livable conditions and having them attend outpatient treatment while offering birth control you wouldn’t see this nearly as much. Birth control is pretty critical to giving a woman the immediate safety needed to exit any kind of abusive relationship whether it’s a domestic partner or a pimp / madam. Food and housing don’t hurt either, and if you can get them to break the addiction and not need drug money you’ve done pretty much everything possible to help them break the cycle. It’s actually pretty rewarding to see how many people can figure it out with the right supports in place.

Oh this reminded me of this short (trigger warning for extremely dark / gross nurse humor).

I cut THEM off because of the child abuse LOL.

B

The parents I no longer speak to probably have around 1mil if you include real estate. The fact that they think “tax the rich” applies to them in any actual life changing way is a laughable mindset that actual billionaires use to keep the upper-middle class in line / helping them oppress the rest of us. We’ll need to break that mindset to fully dismantle this shit since they comprise a large number of local low-level bureaucrats. If you don’t either figure out how to get them on your side or come up with suitable replacements (harder than you’d think) it’s actually quite difficult to create any kind of functional new social system, which generally just leaves a power vacuum open for either more or continued dumbfuckery.

The real big one is arctic / cold water distance swimming. Women have a higher % body fat on average meaning they float better and are better insulated. Ultramarathon events overall seem to be pretty evenly matched for the most part, but that specific subset has been pretty women dominated. The g force thing applies more specifically to people who are smaller and in particular shorter, which women are on average so in that one weights being equal, no.

Well, and this what men are getting to when they get upset about men’s rights and bring up the draft right? It’s genuinely something they should be mad about they’re just misdirecting their anger.

I’ve thought about this one a lot; there’s several fanfics I’ve written that touch on this; one is an alternate of historical fictions and the other involves the Drow from the forgotten realms. There’s this tendency (especially in erotic media) for matriarchal societies to have women act more masculine and sexually aggressive and have men crawling around on the floor in excrement and it always bugs me. There’s so many existing negative stereotypes of men and positive stereotypes of women that could just be inversely accentuated to create that kind of society. I could talk for days about that one, LOL.

I feel like it’s less about putting people in power (although it may do that to a certain extent) and more about reinforcing the role of poor and minority men as disposable tools. War is a means for the rich and powerful to squabble over resources, but it’s also a way for them to exert their control over a large population of men. One of my bigger feminist sticking points on the topic of how patriarchy hurts men is that its not just about controlling women, its also about creating a class of men who are disposable by convincing them that it’s either for the benefit of women and / or to help them control women too (which it does a little, it’s just that most of that power is still going to a small subset of men).

This is especially wild when you consider that some of the sports / feats women are often if not usually better at include shooting, distance / endurance events, and withstanding high g-forces without losing consciousness, which are way more useful in a modern military than the high jump or javelin throwing.

Ok fine? The fourth. They’re like sequels, worse every time.

Aaaaaay from SH! Can attest that the mods here are super reasonable; they hit a really good balance of viewpoints while still banning bigots and incivility.

The only thing this makes me sad about is that the ml one was using the supertux icon I made to put on my KDE dock in highschool because the original was too low res (I didn’t consider a new OS “broken in” until I’d beaten the whole thing). Other than that though I’m hyped for you! And you shouldn’t swap at least for now; better to differentiate.

As a nurse who graduated in the middle of COVID (and was working in hospitals leading up to it), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher was surprisingly healing read.

“You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.”

SpellS

I included a link to the book if you’re that interested!

Eh. I’m more into dudes for the most part. Imma Kinsey one-ish if you go by my birth / assigned gender (don’t really have much of one currently). #84 is closer to my needs than anything else here, but even that isn’t a really good fit.