#but my heart rate Did Not

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

I love when I check my heart rate four times in about five minutes and it jumps from 40bpm to 132bpm to 74bpm to 45bpm like what is my heart doing and why?

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

this is not directed at anything in particular so much as a lament ive made in private several times over the years and am thinking about again now but. i wish that fandom had not conflated the term "zine" with "artbook". because 99% of the "zines" i see are in fact artbooks, chapbooks, or art/writing anthologies. which to me are just so so different as products!!! instead of being fully handmade they are all being professionally bound by an outside company, often come with stickers/keychains/other perks that are 3rd party manufactured, etc... and to be clear i love these and have bought several, but!

they are to me kind of the antithesis of what the word "zine" should actually imply, in the traditional sense. a zine is something you make by hand and then photocopy for the dozen or so people in your circle. a zine can be just a single sheet of paper you folded up into 8 pages and scribbled on with pencil. they can get fancier than this but once you move from using a stapler (or if you're feeling fancy needle & thread) to needing to have things perfect bound & glued by a separate industry then!!!! we have moved up the sliding scale in terms of product, towards art/chapbook and away from zine. that's what those terms meant initially we just have... kept calling them zines anyway i guess, and now i think most younger people don't realize that the origins for "zines" were things you handmade and maybe snuck your school/work's photocopier to help produce for your friends. And they were made by one person, or maybe a small collab of 2-3. Once you start adding more artists/authors, and they're all making separate things (even if on a theme), now we have hit an anthology. you know?

because i would LOOOOVE fandom zines in the traditional sense of the word, just posting photos of short scrappy handmade art/comics and mailing them to mutuals for fun like you would a christmas card. idk. like i've made i think 8-10 personal little zines on all random topics in the past year just for fun and my friends, because they're rewarding and people LOVE getting something like that in the mail. they're little visual shitposts like "rating the 16 crayola crayons i found in my drawer" and "plants i have eaten while taking walks in the desert" and it would be really fun to have fandom equivalents of those too... but fandom these days has moved away from silly rough stuff towards everything being really polished + professional and it takes some of the charm out of it i think

[cryptidwithacopiccollection]

[skitskatstudios]

Some Saikis I drew on Instagram because the brain rot… it’s so strong…

[tj-crochets]

Hey y'all! I am thinking about trying to get back in the habit of hitting the punching bag* more regularly, both because I used to love practicing martial arts and because I am hoping it will help turn slow tigers into fast tigers with this one neat trick** What music do you suggest to hit/kick a punching bag to? So far the best song I've found for it tempo-wise is "I Was Made For Loving You" by Kiss, because the drums/bass work really well to keep me from going too fast*** *once again I am confused about what verb to use for that. Kicking? Attacking? Practicing with???? **aka that one post about ending a physiological stress response by tricking your brain into thinking you'd defeated a short term stressor like a tiger ***because of the sodium Georg issues my heart likes to go fast and if I punch too much too fast it goes too fast and then I have to sit down and the metaphorical tigers win the fight lol

[icewindandboringhorror]

Some (late) holiday photos of the boye~!

[kibibarel]

on that note, everyone was right and Disco Elysium is good

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

oh my god oh my god oh my GODDDDDD i can’t BELIEVE i found these on my little rainy october thrift shop wander this morning. like, one would have been more MORE enough. but both?? at once??? i am quite simply floating and may never touch back down to earth

[arctic-hands]

I always say the shingles saga as an immunocompromised sixteen-year-old was my near-death experience but then my mom will occasionally make musings of the time my heart stopped when I was 8 and I'm like oh yeah that happened

[mamawasatesttube]

tim cries at the timkon wedding btw. i know this in my heart

[cheekblush]

who wants to be mutuals on letterboxd? 🫶🏻

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

1, 4, 21, 25!

1. How many books did you read this year?

127 (according to StoryGraph), but I'm 70% through The Second Sex and will probably finish a handful more before January.

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

I really loved Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant trilogy and am planning on checking out his other works. I also started reading Naomi Novik and am actively resisting her Napoléonic Wars But With Dragons series (Spinning Silver, her latest release, was really tight, but Uprooted was ... less purposeful? And I don't wanna commit to a ten-book series).

Otherwise, I actually did a lot more branching out to explore authors I've already read books by to confirm if it was a fluke or if I consistently like their work — Colson Whitehead (anything that isn't autobiographical is masterfully written), Donna Tartt (this woman has a chokehold on my SOUL), R.F. Kuang (great ideas though sometimes a bit ambitious for her abilities — but she's growing more powerful). I've read stories from Nghi Vo's Singing Hills series and have enjoyed all of them, but I haven't checked out their other works, so it feels disingenuous to say I love them as an author for now, but I'm certainly open to reading their other works based on this. Oh, and I finally read my first Discworld book, so you could say it's all over for me.

21. Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?

lol, not even familiar with those communities.

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

My book club friends this year had soft, no-pressure goals of 100 books for the year, so I set that as a passive benchmark for myself. I guess ... reduce the number of books in my to-read pile on StoryGraph? I seem to keep adding more every time I read another book. ^^;

[thatswhatsushesaid]

we need a fandom palette cleanser to follow up from all the salt, so

cast your favourite mdzs character(s) as any role (support or otherwise) in a different book/tv show/video game/musical/whatever, and ramble about why you picked that show et al. for them in the tags

[anto-pops]

Heard you got covid and came here to drop something. Hope it lifts your spirits in these troubling times 👀

(it's a pov from that bj in you library scene)

I'M HYPERVENTILATING OH MY GO D

[freebooter4ever]

Ngl the best part was how instead of a belly slide celly he scored almost on a belly slide. Geno being geno 😎😎😎