aismallard

You can replace [ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY] with [SCROLLING] but watch out. This sucks bad 👍

one of the coolest things transitioning did is that there's life and joy in my eyes now. i look like a girl but specifically i look like a girl who cares about her life and likes to be alive

"depressed guy with lifeless eyes to prettiest girl youve ever seen pipeline" as my gf put it

if ur "perfect" fantasy etc world purposefully excludes or eradicates disabled people thats not actually perfect i dont think

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

WE ERADICATED SMALLPOX WITH THE MOST AMBITIOUS GLOBAL VACCINATION PROGRAM TO DATE!!!!!!! SMALLPOX! THE VIRUS THAT KILLED BETWEEN 300 AND 500 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE 20th CENTURY ALONE!!!!

obscene: most humans who have ever existed didn't even make it through puberty, much less their teens

sublime: the smallpox vaccine has saved more lives than the entire population of today's USA

remembering all the people who threw tantrums about how they should be allowed to buy the shitty AAA harry potter game without people being mean to them about it and then like a month after the game came out no one, even the people starkly defending purchasing it, was talking about it at all because it sucked ass

I took that sugar cube as a child. I also remember the March of Dimes sign on the easel at many stores, all with dimes stuck on them.

I've told this story more than once, and I'm telling it again because it changed my life. When I was a kid I was terrified of needles, and hated getting all my shots. I was a sick kid with a lot of undiagnosed disabilities, and my gramp picked up on the anxiety I had and decided to talk to me about it. He offered to take me to get my flu shot for a christmas gift that year, and when I grumbled about getting a flu shot he said, "well, I had scarlet fever when I was your age. My parents didn't believe in doctors so I wasn't allowed to get my shots, and so I got very sick and almost died."

It stopped me in my tracks. I was 6. I had heard from adults my whole life that shots were important, but I didn't really understand the consequences of not getting them. I asked him to tell me why his parents didn't believe in doctors. He said he grew up out in the midwest on a farm, and his parents were "a type of christian" that believed people got sick because god wanted them to get sick, and going to the doctor was going against what god wanted. His parents were terrified of making god angry, which was something I could understand considering I was raised evangelical. But I was confused because he HADN'T died. I asked him how he'd made it this far if he had never been allowed to go to the doctor and he'd been so sick.

And he told me that when he turned 15 he'd run away from home, hopped on a train that took him all the way up to New York, and started asking door to door where he could get these new vaccines he'd heard about. Everyone told him the air force base was the place to go. He went in, asked around, and got his vaccines. At 16, he had his very first annual physical. Shortly after he met my gram, who was the telephone operator for the doctors office he went to every year for his checkups. And he told me as we sat there in the doctor's office that he was the ONLY person on both sides of his family to live past the age of 60.

I was both horrified and amazed. I went in, got my shot, and he held my hand and said he was proud of me because what I was doing was important. I was still very scared of needles, but it was easier to deal with the sore arm knowing I was keeping myself safe. He lived to be 90 years old, and he was proud to be the first person in his assisted living facility to be vaccinated for covid. When we went to visit him for his 90th birthday just before he died I asked him what he was proud of doing now that he was 90, and he said he was proud of living this long because as a child no one believed anyone could survive the things he could. He said he was perfectly happy to have married, had kids and grandkids, and eat his Applebees knowing he'd cheated death 15 times over.

i hate how personal information just like accumulates online across various services as you use the internet. its significantly harder to track down and delete all of it than it it is for it to build up

also, its way too normalized for websites to require a name, phone number, or email address. even if its very possible to generate fake ones, make burners, or just give false information, its still far more work than should be required just to maintain a modicum of privacy

and no, i dont want to turn on two-factor authentication for ocean.com/fuckmyasshole. let me use the fucking password that i maid for this service. stop asking. and dont you fucking dare send a text message or email with an authentication token without even asking

fuck you, dont "ask me later". im not saying no "for now". never fucking ask me again

A Bug’s Life, 1998

boyfriend asked what i was doing, told him i was editing a picture, boyfriend asked "is it something like house stretched out with the words 'menstrual blood' on it or some shit?", boyfriend was wrong, boyfriend was also onto something this goes hard

I’m pretty sure job applications are designed to make you want to kill yourself

psa: boobs are beautiful. people with boobs are beautiful. 

official boob post

i think some of you dont like narratives or stories or characters i think you just like fanfiction tropes

protagonists can and will be sexist, racist, insensitive, cruel, stupid, etc, especially towards the beginning of a story. these are called character flaws and they are a surprise tool that will lead to narrative fulfillment later

And sometimes "narrative fulfillment" doesn't mean "the character overcomes their flaws" or even "the antihero is punished for their flaws"! sometimes it means the narrative says "wow was that fucked up or what? anyway i'm rod sterling"

I don't think the current "depiction = endorsement" crowd will ever be able to understand this.

tumblr continues to be purchased by worse and worse companies until it’s finally shut down under the management of the yakuza

Yeah they make people get tattoos.