cume-as-a-calmcumber

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Big win, I found them for about $25 at a different store

Big win for my asthmatic ass today, I learned CVS in my city offers otc inhalers for a bit over $30 without a prescription and I got them delivered too

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And here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: it occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again — hundreds, even thousands of times — over the course of years. When you are traumatised that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat.

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

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the reason why you see more detrans women then detrans men is because they are funded and pushed by the right and their white feminity and victimhood is being used to push a white supremacist, misogynist and anti-reproductive rights narrative btw. not because ftms actually regret their transitions more. btw.

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why do people think the concept of “thought ‘crimes’” extends to things you post online. you have laid it out for other people to see, it’s no longer just a thought in your head. lol

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i'll say this once and never again: if you use tme/tma (even ironically) as gender markers i'm going to block you on the basis of trying to create new gender essentialism boxes that intersex people like me can't fit in and never will fit in.

you're intersexist (even if you're trans yourself, because being a minority doesn't mean you are exempt from bigotry) and i wish people like you who thought the only genders are cis woman and trans woman and Man(tm) really, REALLY find some kind of therapy or medication or general internal peace tbfh

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"The High Cost of Tobacco," mixed media fiber (needle felting, embroidery, bead embroidery)

I'm an asthmatic originally from Kentucky, with people who smoked in the house and car with me. My grandfather had emphysema and smoked. We think my other grandfather had undiagnosed throat cancer. The tobacco industry profited and continues to profit off addiction, cancer, and lung disease. Fuck that shit.

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Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

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I actually do think that doing magic takes a lot of work and is kinda hard and there aren't very many good shortcuts, and many modern shortcuts actually just amount to leaving out steps, which means you either have to be powerful enough to brute-force it or it fizzles.

Look, I know some people are just much better at magic and witchcraft; anything they do works with little effort, and the lengths some of us have to go to accomplish magic seems bizarre to them. Those people are cool and I wish I was like them but I'm not.

But I also think some of the truth of how to work effective sorcery gets paved over by these "witchcraft has no rules, do anything you want" support posts.

Because A) that is not true, I believe that witchcraft has lots and lots of rules (it's just that nobody else can tell you what they are), and B) I think do anything you want is taken to mean anything you do should work, which is also not true.

I feel like I always see advice given that you don't need to do things (like use physical tools, or cast circles, or whatever). But I never see anyone explaining the techniques and paths of power that are supposed to replace them.

Let's just imagine for a moment that clear quartz really is a universal substitute. Discordians would say that it totally is. So does that mean all you have to do to sub out clear quartz is to just put it on the altar and do the ritual as if it's something else?

Or do you have to do something more?

Do you have to consecrate the stone as being something other than what it is? Do you have to ritually birth it into a new life and baptize it like a baby? Do you have to spend weeks or months honing your technique of focus and beliefs so that you can mentally shift from consensus reality to a personal reality where there is literally no difference between clear quartz and sodalite?

Do you have to raise energies of sodalite and imprint them into the quartz crystal, perhaps working over it for an extended period of time? Do you have to use energy work to tie the clear quartz into Ideal Sodalite so that it becomes like an avatar?

No, you don't have to use physical tools if you don't want to. But that shouldn't be taken to imply that tools are useless or can be replaced in a way that matters by just visualizing that you have them.

A witch spends six months propitiating a tree, ingratiating themselves with the land, offerings and acts of fealty to the tree, a week-long branch harvesting ritual, blood offerings at midnight on a holy day, then another year curing the wood and crafting a wand. Big effort, right?

And you don't need to do that. But if you want that power, what are you going to do instead?

Same with circle-casting. Same with magic on the full moon. No, you don't have to wait until the full moon. You don't have to wait until the moon is in Libra. But there's a really good reason people do those things. So if you want those effects, what actions can replace those effects?

You literally could not do the spell while the full moon is in Libra. That's fine. But then what will bridge the gap? Will you have to raise more energy somewhere else? Include a new aspect? Modify the spell for the moon you can work with?

"You don't have to follow the moon phase for magic" doesn't mean the moon phase is irrelevant and some witches just like to inconvenience themselves for no reason. But it does mean that you can probably adapt your working to overcome the moon being in the inopportune phase.

Every time I talk about how much time, energy, and effort magic can be I feel like someone always replies, "well, it's just not that hard for me! I do what I want with what I have when I need it and it always just works, with very little effort."

Which I think is very great for them, but I also don't think that most people can get results with such low effort.

So anyway my entire point is that I think sometimes the reason people struggle with getting witchcraft to work is because they are operating off of out-of-context soundbites that make it sound like you can just completely cut out some of these foundational concepts of witchcraft.

Maybe you don't have to accomplish those steps in traditional ways. Maybe you don't need all of those steps for every spell you're doing.

But if you've just cut out swaths of steps only because you heard someone say you don't need them (not because of your own experiments working with magic and determining what works best for you), then is there enough left to constitute a functional system of magic?

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social media sites need to start adding a specific 'don't show me any more Harry potter content' button

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real

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(To avoid skewing the results, I'd request that, while the poll is active, that you not put this on a blog specifically about chronic pain; "your personal blog, where you happen to talk about chronic pain" is fine.)

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Putting the term "male gaze" on top of the fridge until everyone remembers that it refers to a cinematographic trend and not the act of looking at things while being a man

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Trying to explain the difference between my pre transition identity of butch woman and my post transition identity of effete boy to my parents at Thanksgiving

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god 50 years ago you really could go see a trashy b-movie and it still had gorgeous cinematography, lighting and set design, fun costumes and makeup, and now a hollywood production could have 80 million dollars thrown at it only for it to look like a drawn-out tv commercial for laundry detergent

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Why Kendrick just drop a song with the word e*kimo in it. I thought it was late 2024 I thought we knew

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My life is fucked lmao

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Sun Center, Ingo Swann, 1975