#the befuckening

[thebearcametoo]

I’m 51 now. I’m still not in menopause. The majority of my 40s have had the befuckening of one sort or another. Periods that did not stop. Bleeding so heavy I would flood a post birth pad every time I stood up. Huge clots. I bled out a mirena coil in 6 months. Hormonal tablets would help for a bit but then stop working. I have needed a blood transfusion with iron infusion and then years later when I thought the bleeding was actually manageable I needed another iron infusion. HRT wasn’t mentioned until I was in my late 40s. I’ve since learned thanks to Dr Jen Gunter’s Menopause Manifesto that my bleeding was classic of perimenopause. Knowing what was happening and that I wasn’t ill or likely to die (oh yeah all those scans and the hysteroscopy and biopsies I went through) was reassuring.

HRT has helped with sleep and some of the brain fog. Because of my bleeding I’m on heavy duty medroxyprogestorone as well as oestrogen patches and things so far seem to be ok.

Fun fact. As you reach menopause the lining of your womb get paler. By menopause it’s often as white a sheet of printer paper. Because I’ve had a recent hysereoscopy I know that I am near to menopause. There’s still no was to predict how long that will take. Some doctors will offer blood tests which they suggest are predictive. Hormones in perimenopause are chaos and any blood tests can tell you where you’re at that day but don’t give you the overall picture.

Talk about perimenopause. Inform yourself and others. There are some great resources out now (many that weren’t available end. I started to go through this 10 years ago).

Gather around, my young friends and fellow dinosaurs, let me tell you about some BULLSHIT no one ever tells you about. I'm talking about menopause and perimenopause. Now, menopause has a very stringent medical definition. You have to not have had a period for exactly 12 months and a day to be considered in menopause. All the bullshit before that day once you start going through The Change is considered perimenopause. Here's some bullshit you might experience that people actually talk about when you're in perimenopause:

- shorter time between periods

- irregular periods

- hot flashes and/or cold flashes

- fucked up sleep

- OMG NIGHT SWEATS

- Vagina as dry as the Sahara desert

- lighter periods and/or endless bleeding like it's The Flood but it's in your pants

- lack of interest in Adult Fun Times

This time of joy can last anywhere from a couple of years to a god damn decade and there's no medical way right now to predict it.

Here's some of the REAL bullshit they don't tell you about but your dinosaur aunt is here to let you know:

- You can start perimenopause in your 30s, don't listen to idiot doctors who tell you you're "too young" because they don't know your body like you do.

- Perimenopause will make you HELLA DUMB. Seriously, I'm talking Bigly broken brain. Brain fog? Check. Short term memory? Wave goodbye to it. Ability to make words form out of thoughts? Yeah, good luck to you.

- Perimenopause can cause horrible fatigue because in addition to losing estrogen, you're also losing testosterone. Oh and that also leads to muscle wasting, cool cool.

- Things might suddenly hurt more because estrogen is known to be neuroprotective.

- If you're super lucky like I am, and like to collect rare illnesses, you might even get Burning Mouth Syndrome 💀

- And meanwhile, while you're going through this bullshit, you'll be getting gaslit by doctors who are operating based on 30 year old debunked data about how HRT causes breast cancer (not really) and that they shouldn't put you on it until you're in actual menopause. (Data shows starting HRT early can potentially prevent Alzheimer's in later years.)

- There are entire online clinics right now (I use Midi Health) focused on providing care for peri and menopausal patients and they will happily prescribe you HRT even if your regular PCP or OBGYN do not (if you meet the criteria). I've been pretty impressed with how holistically they view the patient. For full disclosure, I learned about them from my integrative health doctor and they do not accept Medicare (yet).

I'm 46 years old right now and I've been symptomatic for perimenopause for the last 8 years, although it's gotten the most dramatic in the past 2 years or so, which I hope means I'm almost done, holy hell. Yeah I was on the early side, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, so it's never too early to think about these things. And I hope to at least spare some of you the mind-fuckery I've been through because no one told me about most of this stuff, including my own mother who just DOESN'T REMEMBER what happened to her and now I completely understand why. And because I also have a connective tissue disease, I used to just dismiss my pain and fatigue as being caused by that illness rather than the loss of hormones.

Anyways, this is why we need Elders in our lives, so they can do Grandma Story Hour like I just did and validate you when the entire medical field tries to gaslight you. I hope you've found some or all of this educational/useful. Please share with your friends because we really do NOT talk about this stuff enough. (Ewwww Moon Blood!)

Stay well, and don't let the bastards grind you down!

[bitchfitch]

new painting compilation post bc I just realized how ancient the old one is

anyways titles in order: Floral Befuckening, Burning Rash x Damp Spot, Homoerotic Mentor Stabbing, littleshit.jpeg, It's Not a Sin If God Can't See, Monochromacy vs Aposematism

[crimeronan]

the biggest advantage of making a ref for AU vee's humansona is that now i have a face to put to the amnesia timeline "SAY ONE WORD ABOUT MY SISTER AND I'LL RIP YOUR DICK OFF" bit. it's one thing to Say that vee is very nice popular and sunshine incarnate, but it's another to actually See her cheerful smile n go, "oh, WOW. wow. i do NOT want to see you angry."

[magpiesbones]

I hope the fish I put in the rice cooker won’t explode

[wiratomkinder]

I need to finish playing elden ring but also I basically still only care about caelid

[izzy-b-hands]

I may be on day two of being stuck in bed thanks to some of the ✨worst back pain I've ever had in my life✨, but the neighbours are outside grilling, the window is open a bit, and it smells so fucking good. I'm not even hungry rn, but I am v much enjoying the second hand good food smells.

[newvegascowboy]

I gave my dm permission to pilot Sly if it becomes necessary, because hes been haunting the narrative recently and i have an intense hatred for playing 2 characters at once, and we talked some story stuff over yesterday and he mentioned that we would find, but be unable to take, a holy avenger. I was like i get that because we're level 8, but knowing us we probably wouldn't even use it, but it would be a great pawn

[hasmashdoneanythingwrong]

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know, searching for Victorian houses here in Boston on Zillow is depressing for an entirely different reason than I expected

the houses are like $1.5 million and up

but moreover they have all lost several interior walls and doors, been painted entirely white inside, had can lighting installed, caught the Exposed Brick Plague...

[chiropteracupola]

also I think lady kiely and doña juanita should kiss lesbianly

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

So, started playing King Arthur: Knight's Tale.

Gotta admit, the portrayal of the Battle of Camlann is badass, and as someone who devoted a not-insubstantial amount of his time to their previous King Arthur games as a kid, I'm really excited to see what this one does.

[bitchfitch]

I don't know if this counts as a floral befuckening or just a fuck ton of florals

Anyways I'm really liking this piece bc it's very "Yay! bright pretty colors and lots of flowers!" but the flowers are:

Tansy (yellow): declaration of war

Calendula (orange): Nature/sorrow

Briar roses (pink): divine love

Peach flowers (peach): alliances

Yarrow (red): War

Greek valerian (blue): it's war again.

anyways grey version is included bc that's what I'm going to be looking at for the next million hours while I render out all those flowers,

[the-winds-of-kushala]

I wonder how ome might reasonably explain the Skyrim horses being able to report you to the guards for your crimes

The thing I like about the Blood Moon mechanic in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is how it affords game-mechanical transparency to the player.

Like, we all know the reason it exists is because, like any complex open-world game, BotW and TotK periodically need to hit the reset button on all non-trivial changes to the world state; in games that don't, your save file has unbounded growth due to the need to keep track of every little thing you've ever done, and eventually the system runs out of memory, save/load performance goes to shit, or both. It's basic software engineering constraints dictating the shape of play.

The thing is, most open world games try to do this subtly, perhaps by setting individual timers for the consequences of different actions to expire, or by linking world-state cleanup to proximity to the player character, but in practice it never works – trying to be sneaky about it paradoxically makes it more obtrusive to the player by rendering it opaque and unpredictable, often prompting the development of superstitious gameplay rituals to work around it.

BotW and TotK take precisely the opposite tack and make it 100% transparent and 100% predictable. Once a week, at exactly the same time of day, there's a spooky cutscene and an evil wizard undoes every change you've made to the world that doesn't have an associated quest log entry. Why everything at once, and always on the same schedule? A wizard did it. Why exactly and only those changes that don't have quest logs attached? See again: a wizard did it.

And this isn't just a gameplay conceit. Everybody knows about the evil wizard! The fact that the evil wizard keeps resetting everybody's efforts to fix the befuckening of the world is a central plot point. There are organisations whose chartered purpose is to go around redoing stuff that's been undone by the wizard.

It makes me wonder what other potential synergies between fantasy worldbuilding and mechanical transparency are going unexploited.

[catgirl-rose]

Hm. Probably not great how there's just. A whole school district. That faces a greater threat of nuclear annihilation than other school districts. And we face that threat blithely.

[sassysnakedemon]

favorite word?

Well, 'ineffable' has it's moments for sure! But I think some of my other favourites are all the completely ridiculous names they have for things at IKEA. I own so much IKEA stuff, and half the time I swear I buy it for the name. One of my favourites there was 'Vandring Uggla' - it was a bloody stuffed owl toy! Cracked me up for half an hour, and now my whole family calls owls 'ugglas' instead.

P.S. Okay, so new favourite word is 'befuckened'. It's too good.

[belfrygargoyles]

immmmm so fucking tired. someone bring the sun back please