whenthegoldisgone

[whenthegoldisgone]

Oh, and by the way, that Supreme Court ruling is where that Harry Potter money goes.

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how did we as a society move past Daniel Molloy saying “I could be on my knees in a second” and then The Vampire Armand forcing him to his knees without laying a single finger on him. we should be on the floor rocking back and forth replaying that moment over and over and over and over

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The Depths of the Forest, Giuseppe Camino (1818-1890)

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Thinking yet again about the parallels between Trapper and BJ's behavior in Mail Call/Period of Adjustment. Because I do think these are the same story with two fundamental differences. They both get a letter from home about their kids that sends them spiraling on how badly they miss them. They both end up drunk and lash out at Hawkeye for happening to be in the way, injuring him but forcing him to deal with their behavior before he can really take care of himself.

The differences:

One: while BJ lashing out at Hawkeye is accidental—Hawk grabs him and BJ reacts like a startled prey animal and backhands him—Trapper is intentional. Hawkeye gets in his way so he hits him. Yes, it's with a duffle of mostly soft stuff, but Hawk gets knocked flat on his ass.

Two: When BJ realizes he hurt Hawkeye, he apologizes. Trapper does not, and potentially doesn't even realize he injured him.

I think this is a really good way to look at the differences in their characterization. BJ has consideration for his environment and is capable of self-reflection; he feels genuine remorse when he lashes out at his best friend. Trapper... surely he does feel bad, if he realizes, but he's mostly incapable of realizing and definitely incapable of apologizing if he does. It's the same way they behave differently in terms of their wives and the nurses; BJ recognizes that sleeping around would ultimately cause harm to everyone involved—himself, Peg, and the nurse he chose, and acknowledges this in Hanky Panky—and Trapper either doesn't care about the harm or has so firmly compartmentalized it away that he doesn't realize he's causing harm.

In essence: in the same situation, Trapper and BJ are going to have the same initial reaction, but BJ is the one who will make the compassionate choice with someone other than his patients while Trapper fails to do so, not necessarily out of an absence of care but because he's focused more on taking care of himself. Apologizing means realizing he did something wrong, and realizing he did something wrong is going to start breaking down those careful walls he's built to protect himself.

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Excluding the crucial fact that office jobs pay you an income….if staying home to raise children and do chores and bake bread was really so much easier and more joyful than working in an office on some objective level, why aren’t men doing it? Why aren’t they chomping at the bit to be ~leisurely house husbands~ to a working wife? Why aren’t they stepping up to depend solely on someone else’s income in exchange for round-the-clock domestic labor, if it’s really as blissful and their propaganda suggests? Curious.

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getting to that time of the year where the sun will straight up project childhood memories onto your bedroom wall at about 3 or 4 pm

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"freakout girl" literally changed me as a person

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Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.

Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.

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i think about this a hundred times a day

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"For most people, a rat is at best an unwelcome guest, and at worst, the target of immediate extermination. But in a field clinic in Tanzania, rats are colleagues—heroes even.

Far from a trash bin-dwelling NYC street rat, the African giant pouched rat is docile, intelligent, easier to train than some dogs, and for East Africans, the performer of lifesaving tuberculosis diagnoses every day.

400,000 new cases of tuberculosis (TB) were estimated to have been prevented by these rats, whose sense of smell would make a bloodhound take notice. As [TB is] the number-one killer among infectious diseases worldwide, many of those 400,000 can be translated into lives saved.

“Not only are we saving people’s lives, but we’re also changing these perspectives and raising awareness and appreciation for something as lowly as a rat,” said Cindy Fast, a behavioral neuroscientist who coaches the rodents for the nonprofit APOPO.

“Because our rats are our colleagues, and we really do see them as heroes.”

APOPO uses giant pouched rats to sniff out traces of TB in the saliva of patients. In parts of Tanzania, a saliva smear test under a microscope by a human may only be 20-40% effective at detecting TB.

By contrast, a giant pouched rat like Ms. Carolina, a now-retired service rat who worked for APOPO for 7 years, raised the rates of detection on TB samples by 40% in the clinic where she worked.

Pictured: An APOPO employee with one of their trained rats

It would take 4 days for scientists to analyze the number of samples that Carolina could screen in 20 minutes. For that reason, when Carolina retired last November, a party was thrown at the clinic in her honor, and she was given a cake.

TB is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past—a disease for which doctors used to prescribe “dry air,” leading a modern sense of humor to muse at the antiquated, pre-antibiotic medical advice.

But it remains the number-one cause of death globally from a single infectious pathogen, and Tefera Agizew, a physician and APOPO’s head of tuberculosis, told National Geographic that once people see what the nonprofit’s rodents can do to slow the spread, they “fall in love with them.”

3,000 times in her career did Carolina detect one of the six volatile compounds that can be used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and she got a hero’s send-off to a special compound to live out the rest of her days with her closet friend and sniffer colleague Gilbert, in a shaded enclosure dubbed “Rat Florida.”

“We’ve made special little rat-friendly carrot cakes with little peanuts and things on it that the rat would enjoy,” Fast said. “Then we all stand around and we clap, and we give three cheers, hip hip hooray for the hero, and celebrate together. It’s really a touching moment.”

APOPO has made headlines for its use of these rats in other lifesaving tasks as well: landmine clearance.

One of the world’s great underreported scourges (a lot like TB, coincidentally) is landmine contamination. There are 110 million landmines or unexploded bombs in the ground right now in about 67 countries, covering thousands of square miles in potential danger. Thousands of civilians are killed or injured by these weapons every year.

GNN reported on APOPO’s demining efforts using pouched rats back in 2020. One rat named Magawa alone identified 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance across an area the size of 20 football fields.

If at the start of this story you didn’t like rats, maybe Magawa and Carolina will have changed your mind."

-via Good News Network, March 31, 2025

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okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

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Sorry not sorry but there's no "liberal" way to care about collective fertility rates

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i love 90s television all these high quality fabrics got me so turned on i almost passed out

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for april fools day, last night i feminized eminem. i put a loreal logo on him, printed him out on glossy paper, trimmed it, ripped the edge. i’m gonna send this to my friend who’s defended him before and ask if this is a girl from one of the bands she likes.