#pre pandemic

[pinkbirddiaries]

If you were in American public school from 2015-2019 (2020 pre-pandemic) then you remember what I have heard called the “zandemic” basically we (not me) were smoking so much weed in that period that it was a problem. Even in states where it was illegal, we got it and eventually people started to OD on fentanyl. My freshman yr of HS (‘16) I was constantly high from the sheer amount of second had smoke that was in my school. My school was called the “weed school” it was like in the movies, you would walk into the bathroom and someone was like “you wanna hit?”

Anyway I was thinking abt this bc how bad do you think the weed problem was in SBG school?Like do you think no one noticed what was happening with the graveyard kids bc they just assumed that they were smoking in the graveyard?

Teacher: Damn, that group gave in too. What a shame

Mr. Thomas: …Yeah… weed is their problem

[enigmasandepiphanies]

how has it been 5 days and 10 years simultaneously since 2019

[3rdbogwitch2theleft]

Well it's official I'm returning to the burlesque stage in 2025 with a sexy Sauron act. Deepest apologies to the Tolkien estate.

[apprehensive-scribbles]

1:19am

as i walk past dilapidated houses, my mind wanders into dark, starry skies filled with violet clouds and burning red horizons.

i look up, imagining every other human who is also thinking of this picturesque thought, for i cannot be the only one.

the most common failure among humans, i believe, is not connecting with those around you.

its getting so caught up in the wind in your mind that you cannot see outside the glass box you have put yourself in,

its generating hate towards others who often share the same painstaking troubles that have consumed your being whole and burned a handprint in your soul.

walking through former harrowing neighborhoods full of grief and despair,

looking at the old houses that have your fears pouring out of them,

that is how you reconnect.

cutting open your plasticine wounds to fill them with support from the other foreboding figures around you, allowing them to wipe your tears and venture forth from your self made foe-filled community.

that is how you grow and accomplish yourself.

[spongebobafettywap]

I still really miss the pre pandemic times period of life

[elodieunderglass]

Horror isekai where Perceiving the Weird Eldritch Thing gets you catapulted into a nightmare labyrinth of puzzle-solving.

I.e Those Who Perceive The Hunt of the Goblin King Must Partake In The Labyrinth and Can Only Be Freed If They Complete It In One Day and One Night. By Fae Law. For Reasons.

But the definition of “perception” clearly needs to be updated because some normal guy simply films the Hunt of the Goblin King Behind Arby’s, and puts it on Facebook -

No, not instagram or TikTok, it’s important that it be Facebook -

Because the rules are pretty clear, “the rules are the rules” as is carved ominously in elvish runes above the grim gate, and the Contract is Sealed. and so therefore the guy and 25 of their most random real-life acquaintances must run the gauntlet together. It’s Some Guy, their immediate neighbors, their first partner’s mom, their friends from hobby Facebook groups (oh this poor guy and their hobbies; the elderly birdwatchers from Facebook and the young up-and-coming drag king community), their random teen kid niece, college friends, a dog who also watched the video, a couple consisting of a woman who is the guy’s Facebook friend and showed her husband the video, and the husband doesn’t even know Some Guy, so he’s in the labyrinth and absolutely furious about being forced to be involved, and they proceed to break up over the course of the puzzle.

It’s important that the narrative keeps trying to be a sexy dark horror isekai! but within this the comedic reality of Catherine, 52, the guy’s horse-riding instructor, being passionately involved in escape-room-style puzzle solving and grappling with minor goblins. They are in fact speedrunning the gauntlet.

The Goblin King finally has to say: all right, actually, I only really set all this up to fuck with one (1) guy at a time, thanks for your willingness to participate, but I think all 25 of you can consider the gauntlet fully run.

And the group would be quite hurt by that. The rules are the rules. We have a contract, actually. Let Catherine cook.

[mgu-h]

lando nostalgia 44/? • drive to survive s2 preview

[shoku-and-awe]

One thing about dosa is when else do you get to eat something that is the size of the table :)

[philcollinsenjoyer]

obviously he said it in a way that was insane but damon albarn was really pertinent when he said that artists job is to feel the intangible currents of the world flowing around them and react to them accordingly with art this is why i'll never stand for People calling yoko a hack it's perfectly accurate to react to the swinging sixties and the start of consummerism and supermarkets and american wars with blank empty rooms and white sheets and nonsensical instructions idk read ionesco read anything look at any art but as usual it's people who stand in front of rothko canvases saying i could've made that who do it

[luminarai]

Thank you all so much for participating in my ‘help me post old stuff’-poll! To my surprise this was the winner, it’s probably the oldest one of the entire list and it’s just two sketchy studies of Joe and Nicky in historical garb (I can’t even find the ref photos anymore but I know I had some). It’s absolutely itching in my fingers to clean them up and add some light etc but I promised myself not to so here ya go!

[girljeremystrong]

mitch marner media availability from jan 12, 2020.

[wordwizards]

it's that time of the year where i post about the ocs from my secondary story before launching them back into the void for several months

[spooksier]

i don’t love this movie but shocking that Annihilation isn’t on your dopple list

im trying to keep it 2020s only 😔 trust me or id be talking about like 700 different doppleganger stories

[cranquis]

Your recent reblog made me sad, but also makes a lot of sense. I've been following you since I was in medical school, and I'm now in my fifth year of specialty training (I am not American). I did occasionally wonder why I've been seeing less of the kind of content you used to put out.

All I can say is - thank you for the work you do. I've seen enough online to get an idea of what you must face on a daily basis. I think I'm lucky that somehow, the doctor-patient relationship overall hasn't deteriorated to such an extent where I live (yet at least), but I definitely understand the frustration and despair of trying to communicate with people who aren't coming into the conversation in good faith.

You've always been a kind of role model for me in terms of your passion for your work and your open sharing about your faith. I guess I just wanted to say that I hope you find hope and joy in your work, even if those you serve aren't wise enough to appreciate what you do for them.

Hi, my colleague! Hey first of all, thank you for your kind words of encouragement and affirmation. Negative med-related interactions (online or in person) anymore just roll off me, but the positive ones still give my heart a thrill! :) And congrats on your continued journey down the medical pathway.

Second, I'm glad your message gives me the chance to clarify for all my long-time Cranquis Pants* that I still do enjoy my work. I have been doing the exact same Urgent Care job in the exact same location (with quite a few staff turnovers) ever since I finished residency 17 years ago! I still enjoy the bulk of my patient interactions, I continue to hone my diagnostic skills, I feel very confident in my procedural skills, I have a reputation in our local medical community as a reliable and thorough physician, and I have a loyal group of patients who routinely nag me to "quit urgent care and become a regular doctor so we can be your primary care patients". My staff likes and respects me (despite my best efforts to ruin that on the daily, with my puns etc); I like my staff and appreciate the hard work they do in the face of the same administrative and societal opposition that I encounter; I am not distressed when little kids freak out during physical exams (and my success rate of turning those frowns upside down with playful interactions and silly sound effects is pretty darn good).

I am blessed with amazing work-life balance, more than the majority of Family Medicine-trained physicians I suspect. I carry no pager, I take no call, I leave my work at home when I go home. I know my schedule months in advance, I have a shift template that gives me plenty of week-long stretches off, and I have my Sabbaths 100% free to attend church and spend time with my family. My pay is decent and my benefits are solid, my debts get paid and I have a roof over my head. My kids and wife are happy to see me come home. Personally, I really have nothing to complain about.

But the bloom is off the rose for my profession as a whole. The politics and trends of the US health care system continues to disenfranchise physicians, devaluing the years and $$ invested in becoming physicians, over-valuing patient satisfaction scores and inexpensive labor and glitzy administrative initiatives and staff rumor mills more than evidence-based, experience-driven clinical medicine. The power structure is upside down, as if doctors ought to be automatically doubted and disdained by pharmacists, insurance companies, administrators, patients, and APCs because of their systematic educational journeys and reliance upon scientific evidence.

And one of the saddest results is watching medical professionals turn on each other. The fragmentation and super-specialization of every aspect of medical care creates artificial "us v. them" scenarios; specialists and primary-care battling over who does the paperwork for pre-op visits and FMLA, ER and Urgent Care arguing about how much workup should be undertaken by the UC when the patient is obviously going to need ER management, primary-care so overwhelmed with insurance-required goals that their patients can never get same-day/soon-day appointments, pharmacies so understaffed that it's easier for them to tell the patients that "the doctor never sent the prescription" when in reality ...

I could go on.

I miss the old days (said the geezer on the internet), when I could enthusiastically support a pre-med student's dreams of getting into medical school and "helping people as a doctor someday." Now I wince at the idealism in a high-schooler's eyes, and try to find a nice way to say "there's more options for helping people than just becoming a doctor... be sure you have your motivations straight, because medicine is not what it was even 10 years ago..."

So hope and joy in my career? Hope for the profession of physicians, I have little. But I make the joy in my practice when I can make it, and I only expect to find joy in my non-medical time with family and hobbies and travel and friends and the lifestyle which my medical career still does make more feasible than otherwise.

*Probably not the term historically assigned to "fans of this blog", back when I posted frequently -- it's been a minute -- but if not, SHOOT that was a missed opportunity.

[mgu-h]

lando nostalgia 40/? • feb 2020 • "we go again"

[wild-at-mind]

Working title: 'I wish I was attracted to just one gender actually'.

I think a lot of discussion about biphobia really puts it on the level of homophobia or transphobia in a way that's innappropriate. Also the term doesn't really distinguish between how cis straight people see bisexuals, and how intracommunity stuff tends to happen. Fetishisation, assumptions that you will be more likely to cheat, assumptions of your sexual history- it is really damaging. Bi people can end up being vectors of connection to the LGBTQ community for cishets and there can be mistrust on either side, and in the middle a bi person just trying to fucking live and enjoy their relationship. Within our own community it's mainly this awful annoying awkwardness in my experience.

(ETA- I forgot to say but obviously bi people face homophobia, and transphobia if they are trans. The label biphobia isn't a replacement for those experiences so that's why it's more complicated to define.)

Last night during a conversation a friend said he turned away someone for volunteering at the LGBTQ youth group we both help at, or at least discouraged them, because it was a woman who openly said she had been disconnected from the LGBTQ community for 20+ years and had her husband with her. Like....I get it on some level. But it's very weird when the person who set up the LGBTQ youth group in our town is a cis, straight woman! Yes, she is a committed and proven ally, but anyone could be! It sounds like the woman with the husband, from what my friend said, was a bi person trying to connect with the community or give back something to it.

I felt a little defensive on her behalf, and like I identified with her somehow. I don't even really know that she was really trying to touch base with the community after a long time away. Maybe she had terrible vibes and terrible secret motives and my friend was right to discourage her. I wondered: why am I identifying here, I am after all a man now. Am I not? I can call myself gay and enjoy m/m without worrying about being a dirty fetishising fujoshi! Well firstly, I got she/her-ed in group the other day by a trans kid (obligatory 'not her fault' status here, it is my fault for having female vibes /s But seriously please don't tell me it's not the kid's fault because I know that and everyone has told me this multiple times but because I wasn't blaming the kid anyway it didn't make me feel any better and somehow made me feel I was attacking the kid even though I said literally nothing at the time!) So clearly I am not on the passing train. I am not a man in some people's eyes, even if they are in the know.

Secondly it took me fucking YEARS to join up with any kind of bi community. I thought my internal feelings of being clearly bisexual didn't matter, only my external experiences. And my external experiences were straight. I stayed away from any LGBT groups on offer locally, thinking I would just fulfil some stereotype of the girl who says she is bi to seem interesting that everyone fucking loved at my 6th form. I ended up reading an online comment about ways to explore bisexuality in a monogamous relationship with a man through self exploration, and it made me realise- oh my god, maybe my internal feelings do matter! it was so important to me that it probably wouldn't be an exaggerration to say I never would have realised I was trans without that comment, even though it had nothing to do with being trans. You can't come out as trans without coming to terms with your internal self. I spent so many years as a younger person living for other people only, surrounding myself with dominently personalitied queer people in need of a straight cheerleader to make them shine, and never looked internally, never allowing myself my own identity.

The truth is, a lot of people don't really think internal experience matters that much. People try and do jokes about how 'you can only call yourself bi if you have sex with a man and the woman at the same time! You can only call yourself bi if you have had sex with exactly the same amount of men and women!' and like...yeah that's a joke but people really think that shit, and in our community no less. Internally I am of course bi but externally I went from apparently straight girl (once I was out of school, in which I never dated anyone of any gender fyi, I just gave lesbian vibes to bullies), to now a gay guy. (But as we have discussed, I am not passing well including to people who in theory get not to assume pronouns and gender. I always assume I look like a weird woman to most people, so if externals are all that matter then I guess I am a weird looking, straight woman.) Many people in our community pay lip service to the internal stuff but only care about the externals. I remember years ago some controversial-ish twitter person tweeted that cis bi women should have to do some time in the queer mines/eat some pussy before they get to be in the community. Very funneeeee of course, a lot of people got upset. Then other people got upset that she was getting backlash, which I'm sure it did suck because she was trans and trans women always get worse backlash, and those people were like 'what's up with this reaction when she is just saying what we are all thinking!' (speak for yourself, is what I say to that -_-)

I think what I'm trying to say is that this community (the LGBTQ community, the bi+ community, the trans community) is always talking such bullshit when pretending to care about someone's internal experience. And fuck it, just bring it on if you must. We are all fun bitchy queers here, it's fun to be mean! You can laugh at me for being a straight woman by experience if you wish, just don't tell me it's activism and that you're helping the cause. And don't turn around and ask me why I have such a fucking complex when you're done.