Til that Benzodiazepines (Anti Anxiety Medication) if taken long enough, can produce a horrific withdrawal syndrome that lasts up to 3 years or more if stopped in some people. It is not recognized by psychiatry or any medical profession.

via ift.tt

what if, pharma industry wasn’t evil

Hey so uh. As someone who was on Klonopin for seven years, this is really genuinely serious. I can’t even get through the first five minutes of the documentary because it’s too emotional to think about, but let me just say the withdrawal is fucking terrifying. Do not go on benzodiazepines long-term. I would even argue don’t take them short term repeatedly, ever. 

I’ve been in the E.R. three separate times for benzodiazepine withdrawal symptom because I wasn’t tapered off properly. It is genuine fucking hell. I am speaking as someone who has had hallucinations, has C-PTSD and Dissociative Fucking Identity Disorder – the worst psychiatric episodes I’ve ever had in my entire life were from benzo withdrawals. The uncontrollable shaking. The uncontrollable failure to breathe. The lack of ability to sleep. The fact that it literally induces a panic attack. 

The professors who were interviewed the documentary include Dr. Heather Ashton, who created the Ashton Manual for benzodiazepine withdrawal. She fucking pioneered the methods of getting off all of the benzodiazepines 100% with the least amount of withdrawal symptoms and the rate of relapse after following the steps was as low as 8%. 

I want you to consider for a second the way American drug rehab works with its 12-step programs and the cold-turkey approach. I want you to consider that if I didn’t literally google a way to taper off of Klonopin made from a country that wasn’t fucking America I would still be on Klonopin right now. I want you all to consider how drug users are treated in this country. 

If you want to do something about it, spread the word of the Ashton Manual. Spread it like fucking wildfire. My psychiatrist is graduating at the end of June and I had a conversation with her in which she asked if I was mad at her or held any resentment for the way the taper schedule worked - I told her straight up, I’m not mad at her, I’m mad at the failures of our system to include this in their resources and knowledge base. I told her to tell her colleagues about this so that nobody ever has to go through what I went through again. 

I’m currently in the stages of weaning off of low-dose Valium but let me just tell you. I am clean of Klonopin. I am fucking free. I’m done with it. It is thanks to Heather Ashton that I am. Nobody in America should be suffering like this because of benzos. There are other treatments. 

God, if you ever can, please avoid Benzodiazepines. I understand needing them for when you have a one-off panic attack. But do not ever take them long-term.  

Florence and the Machine at last night’s Spotify event in Brooklyn. As Florence began to sing Sky Full of Song a literal storm began to hit, she never faltered and embraced the storm.

Watching this was an ethereal experience

this queen literally summoned a storm during her performance when will your fave ever control the weather with such accuracy

@lyllythekitty

one of the things that really bothers me about modern franchises, and in particular over the last 5 years or so, is their refusal to commit. what i mean here when i say this is that it's not uncommon for a major franchise to make a decision, whether about the plot or the characters, that should have had huge, world-changing consequences... and then just never address that again or worse, immediately go back and undo it. and i'm gonna pick on star wars and the mcu here because those are the two big franchises i'm into at the moment (and i think they're kind of the worst at this), but i don't want you to walk away from this thinking that this is solely a disney thing. i've seen this happen with game of thrones and supernatural and plenty of other non-disney franchises. spoilers ahead, you've been warned:

in ant-man & the wasp quantumania, scott and hope make the life-altering decision to stay behind in the quantum realm and defeat kang instead of going through the portal to return to their world. this should have been a huge meta decision for the mcu, and when i first saw it in theaters, my immediate thought was wow, what is this going to mean for the mcu going forward? are we going to get a movie/miniseries about scott and hope helping to rebuild the quantum realm? how are cassie, janet, and hank going to react to the losses of their loved ones (in some cases, for the second time)? is cassie going to become the "first" young avenger because she has to take her father's place among the team lineup (and i only say first because as of this moment, none of the other young avengers introduced to the franchise are official avengers yet)? except nope, because less than 2 minutes later, cassie had fixed the portal that had broken way back at the beginning of the movie and brought scott and hope back.

and it felt like such a cheat. i was so disappointed in that theater, not as someone who was invested in these characters on a personal level (because yay, cassie gets her dad back!), but as someone who has spent years investing themselves in the story of the mcu. what was the point of wasting screentime on scott and hope accepting their new lives in the quantum realm if it was just going to immediately be undone? the entire scene could have been cut to scott and hope making it back bare seconds before the portal closed and it would have had the same emotional impact. there was nothing added by making scott and hope (and us) think that there was no way back only to rip the rug out from under us and go "gotcha! you really thought we were gonna give this movie a sad ending? haha! you're so dumb!"

and this isn't the first time the mcu has done this. one of the biggest complaints about endgame was the decision to set it five years in the future with no consideration for how that would actually change the setting of the mcu. characters were brought back to the exact place they disappeared from with no consideration for how things might have changed in the interim five years (like planes that weren't in the air anymore, buildings no longer standing, even just something as simple as a chair being unoccupied). and then the mcu didn't even really have the courage to address how this would have shaped the world other than a few jokes and making the bad guys in the falcon and the winter soldier people who cared about how the world had screwed them over during the blip.

and things like this happen over and over and over again. the accords are put into place in civil war, but by the time we get to she-hulk, they're gone with no explanation because, as best as i can tell, the writers didn't want to have to deal with the worldbuilding that went into the accords. gamora is killed in infinity war, but heaven forbid quill not have an emotional investment in a film he appears for maybe 10 minutes in so now she's back in endgame. steve got to go live in the past with his ex-girlfriend (which is in itself a refusal to commit after the mcu both gave her a different husband and had the woman herself tell him to move on) but we need to establish that messing with timelines is bad because that's what the entire next phase hinges on so actually his ending was predestined and it's only everyone else who can't change time. whoever took this entire town and also wanda hostage and forced them to live out a sitcom fantasy is bad and needs to be stopped but wait, it's actually wanda and she can't be the bad guy yet, we need her for doctor strange 2, so actually everyone's going to defend her now and say that no one else could ever possibly understand her grief. thor has decided to accept responsibility as king of asgard, but we can't use him for any more movies if he's stuck in asgard, so actually he's decided to pass it on to someone whose entire leadership capability is developed offscreen. i could list more examples but this is making me angry, so let's move on to star wars instead.

with star wars, i look at first the oft-quoted meme, "somehow palpatine has returned." yeah, i shouldn't really need to go into detail on how that counts as a refusal to commit but. the last jedi was a study in how johnson refused to commit to anything that abrams had laid down in the force awakens, but rise of skywalker was almost like abrams had looked at the franchise and said "screw you for taking it away from me, i'm going to come up with the most bullshit stuff just to spite you for doing that in the first place. and i'm going to start by undoing the most important plot point of the first trilogy: the emperor dies." and yeah, disney's kind of tried to salvage this by dropping hints into the bad batch and the mandalorian about cloning, but that only really works if you're watching the franchise chronologically and not considering that both of those series came out after rise of skywalker.

and then there's the mandalorian, my sweet summer child, who is, in my opinion, the worst at backtracking their plot points. i'm not entirely convinced that any of the higher ups for this show really knew what they were doing when they started working on it and i'm not convinced that they know what they're doing now. yeah, there's the tie-in to the last season of clone wars, but the mandalorian has managed to walk back pretty much every single major plot point it's had. din is this legendary warrior who can't be beat, but no one will watch this show if he defeats everyone too early, so he's constantly getting beat up (tbf, sometimes some of the fights he loses makes sense like the krayt dragon and the mudhorn, but a lot of them don't. at all). moff gideon is dead, no wait no he's not, now he's imprisoned, no wait no he's not, now he's definitely dead, you can totally believe us this time guys. grogu can use the force and must be placed with the jedi, but wait, the only person still actively teaching the way of the jedi is luke and all of his students will be brutally murdered ten years from now, and we can't have that, everyone will be mad at us for killing off such a cute character and no one will buy baby yoda dolls (and also we have to set up luke's character degradation from hopeful, believes-in-love cinnamon roll to "i'm going to kill my nephew") so in between seasons let's have grogu decide to go back to din (and don't even get me started on how frustrating it is that a casual mandalorian watcher also had to watch book of boba fett to understand why grogu is back). din has the darksaber now which makes him king of mandalore, that's totally going to be important and what the entire series has been building up to, right? wrong! he might have spent the first two seasons making connections, learning about the world outside his sheltered upbringing, and demonstrating the various qualities that would make for a good leader, but the entire third season will be about din realizing that actually he's super unworthy and the darksaber should actually go to someone who... saw an animal in the water.

and it's really, really frustrating as a viewer! because how am i supposed to get invested in any of these plot decisions when they almost always get reversed? why should i care that mj and ned have forgotten peter when ant-man 3 has shown me that they'll remember him the next time they're all on screen together? why should i care that tech is dead when half of the last season of clone wars was about how echo was actually alive? if none of these decisions have any permanence, then where are the emotional stakes? why should i watch your movie if all you're going to tell me is that nothing matters?

hey i just wanted to put a quick post up for people that may not know, cuz i certainly didnt until a couple years ago, but the whole prescription glasses industry is a massive racket, and i wanted to let people know about the more affordable options for buying or replacing glasses

when you go to an optometrist to get your eyes tested, they take a lot of measurements and will give you a prescription that lists things like how near or farsighted each eye is, spherical and cylindrical measurements for astigmatism, etc, but one measure they almost always leave out of the portion they give you is your interpupillary distance, that is, the distance between your pupils, measured in millimeters

the reason they leave that out is because if you have your full prescription, including the interpupillary distance, you can just go online and buy glasses from a place like zenni optical for less than $20 USD. and if you go and buy them online, thats ~$200 they dont get to bilk from you

so, you have two options, you can either request your interpupillary distance number when you get your eyes tested, which they cant legally withhold from you because its medical information

This Is Specifically Enforced By The Federal Trade Commission!

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2016/05/clear-picture-complying-ftcs-eyeglass-rule

they dont get to withhold this! a lot of them will lie to you, or try to skirt around it, because they want your money. raise a fucking stink. this is an argument you can win.

the other option is to measure your interpupillary distance at home, using either a ruler and a mirror, or a phone app which is made for this purpose

https://www.zennioptical.com/measuring-pd-infographic

once you have your full prescription information, you can buy glasses online, made to your specific prescription, for well under a TENTH the cost of ones you would buy at a brick and mortar store

Indian academia

Recently I have seen a lot of excellent posts in the dark academia tags which call out the euro-centrism of this subculture and also give great recommendations for non-white cultural academia. So I decided to put together works of Indian authors that I read growing up in India as a literature student. Please note this list leans heavily towards works centred on Bengal due to my own heritage, and is by no means comprehensive or meant to represent the entire, varied diaspora of India.

Historical/political fiction:

Societal stories

Retellings/Biographies

Poetry!

Pure self indulgent recs

Like I said this list is not comprehensive!!! But I tried my best!!! I think we should really try to decolonize our reading tastes. And yes I purposely left out Arundhati Roy (because she is literally the only Indian author ever recommended in lists) Vikram Seth (because I do not like him) and Roshani Chokshi (because any one of the above)

I hope you guys get some good picks from this list :)

[** has heavy trigger warnings]

I love this so much, but might I also add

If you’re looking for movies, I recommend 

Junoon: adaptation of Flight of Pegions

Kalyug (1981): adaptation of the Mahabharata in modern times; about family and intergenerational ties, trauma. chef’s kiss. 

Guide: also an adaptation of the novel

Udaan: coming of age story about a smalltown boy who struggles who realise his passion while under the shadow of an authoritarian father; more importantly also about smalltown aspirations and dreams

Feel free to add to the list :))

More Ruskin Bond cuz you can never have enough:

Notes from a small room: a beautiful collection of essays from his very interesting life+a lot of observations on beautiful mundane things

When Darkness Falls: a collection of gorgeous ghost stories and otherwise macabre fiction

Other recs:

The Man Eater Of Kumaon (Jim Corbett): used to be obsessed with this one. Bunch if stories about the days of shikar. After animal welfare and all became more popular the author put down his gun but the stories in this are amazing

Feluda (Satyajit Ray, often translated by Gopa Majumdar) !!!! If you love sherlock you will love it its about a private investigator in 70s Bengal and the various cases he solves along with his cousin Topshe and friend. He wrote about 20-30 novella length stories which are available as 2 big volumes

Comprehensive Torrenting Guide

aka How To Stop Paying For Shit

so recently i decided to finally make use of my 4TB hard drive by torrenting literally every piece of media that i could possibly ever want, and i remembered a post i saw once about how a lot of people dont know how to get Free Shit on the internet. and being a huge nerd, i got the idea to throw together a little guide

so here we go. how to get free shit on the internet/I WOULD Download A Car

Keep reading

King Arthur legend of the sword said “forget the idea of Arthur as a kind, patient king” and gave us an Arthur filled with rage, who is ambitious and driven, crude but friendly, protective of his loved ones, calculating, willing to forgive and forget and make allies. Willing to die to save the life of the prostitutes who raised him. He makes the best of every situation he’s in. He lost everything, gained prestige in the gutter, and lost everything again. I love him. The Mage says “you are resisting the sword. It is not resisting you” because he became a leader, a fucking king, while being raised as a bastard nobody far from his throne

this is extra funny if you know that the show is in fact not scripted, for the kids anyway, so the 3 of them who were on the show were only told a basic outline of the scene so (most) of what they said was exactly what they thought of on the spot and the adults had no idea what was going to happen

The Betrayer God's True Nature

I can understand people questioning the history books and the source books we’ve been given. History is, of course, written by the victors, and the source books are demonstrably filled with incorrect or biased information [intentionally so, I might add, as they are posing as at least partially in-universe texts, relaying in-universe opinions.] We’ve just seen in ExU: Calamity that Orcs, which we were previously lead to believe were created in a fight between Gruumsh and Corellon during the Calamity, predate the war by enough time that half-orcs are common members of society. So it is natural to call everything into question, after all the betrayer gods have a much harder time defending themselves from behind the divine gate.

However, we have seen some of their actions in the present day in canon, not stories told second hand! Namely those of Lolth and Tharizdun, so let’s compare and contrast their actions with those of the Prime Deities.

characters who dig themselves out of their graves (whether literal or metaphorical) are at the top of the list. nothing beats a character who should have died but didn't and comes back to haunt their own life and the world around them, benevolent or violent it doesn't matter, it's enthralling either way

the worst part about having huge autistic fantasy worlds in your head is that it takes like 8 billion years to turn that into something substantial you can show people

like oh yeah man i have these 60 OCs and a whole plot about the ethical and moral implications of meeting your alternate timeline self and if it's worth sacrificing a whole artificial timeline to get back to your own time. no you cannot see them

when georges bataille wrote, “no greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound” & when gillian flynn wrote, “a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort” & when ocean vuong wrote, “sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined” & when lisa m. basile wrote, “did you inherit a sickness? did you blame god? do you believe in god? do you believe in yourself? are you still on fire? did you ever put out the fire?” & when stephen a. guirgis wrote, “why didn't you make me good enough so that you could’ve loved me?”

ada limón, lucky wreck

Shoutout to folk with tooth gaps, crooked teeth, missing teeth, buck teeth, crooked smiles, ‘weird’ smiles, those with underbites, or overbites, those with braces! Those with odd laughs, snort laughs, high pitched laughs, smirk like smiles. And those who can’t move part of their face, or with minimal movement, those with dentures of any type, flippers. Such a pure sign of joy, a smile and a laugh, and all the different ways they look and sound. All so lovely, so wonderful !!

Guy who was wrong and then died and came back fine. Nobody figured out what the issue was but the hard reboot seemed to do the trick

"came back wrong" this "lived wrong" that, what about dying wrong. my death will forever cling to you, leaving behind a slimy trail and a metallic taste in your mouth. my soul will forever drag you down like the heavy corpse of a long-dead god, who somehow still grants wishes. you can't tell which one of us is the one not letting go. you know not even your own death will end this.

“why are you so tired all the time” God is killing me! thanks for asking