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Happy 5th birthday gardenbucket dog!

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Y’all need to see stoat on a trampoline

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Inaccuracies in scientific literature. I'm trundling along reading papers about high pathogenicity avian influence for (reasons) and one prominent, recent review lists species that have been hosts: cats, dogs, foxes (...etc etc...) and even ✨ fish✨

*needle scratch sound effect*

FISH???

So I track that citation down because no seriously WTF since when, does it really?? And sure enough the reference says " ... naturally isolated from cats, dogs (...etc etc...) and fishes. Fishes? But still not a first hand account. THAT reference goes to the USDA APHIS site that tracks detections in...mammals. hm. A search for fish turns up nothing but "fish" isn't a species (or taxonomic valid but that's a different rant). So I comb through the damnable list and find ✨fisher✨. That's a mammal in the weasel family. The paper citing this has a typo that turned fisher into fishes. Maybe autocorrect, idk, but nobody caught it. And then that typo was perpetuated. Who knows how many people have read the recent review and think we have HPAI in fish now?

And this, kids, is why you need to check those references and find the primary paper for any extraordinary claims.

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All bleeding stops eventually ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

if anyone feels bad that their fic might contain medical inaccuracies, be comforted to know that whatever creative liberties you take with your medical scenes can never be worse than the one I just read. where one character tries to stop the bleeding on their friend's head wound by putting a tourniquet around their neck

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I'm in this photo and I don't like it

They hate me for my redundancies. And also for my tendency to say the same thing but in slightly different ways. And for my repetition of phrases. And for my redundancies.

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I knew my blood type in childhood (A-). Yes, I've donated a lot of blood and also platelets, but that was later in life. My mother is an RN and volunteers with the Red Cross, she also worked in OBGYN, and we are both Rh-. She made sure my sisters and I knew to get an injection of rhogam at the end of any pregnancy whether that was miscarriage, abortion or birth. Rhogam prevents Rh- people from forming antibodies to Rh+ blood. Before it existed, the most common cause of late pregnancy loss was Rh incompatibility, where antibodies to Rh+ blood cross the placenta and attack red blood cells of an Rh+ fetus. That's a risk if you are Rh- AND carry an Rh+ pregnancy, but it doesn't happen during the first pregnancy; when a pregnancy ends and things get messy, you're likely to get a little of that Rh+ blood into yours and make antibodies against it because your body recognizes the Rh antigen as foreign. During the next Rh+ pregnancy, those antibodies are already there to cause problems. You can prevent this by getting an injection that stops you from making antibodies to the blood in time (iirc it's within 72h of the end of a pregnancy but don't quote me, I don't do humans).

One other fun fact! Horses have a similar condition called neonatal isoerythrolysis, but it doesn't happen until AFTER birth because foals get zero maternal antibodies through the placenta. If you know it's likely to happen you can prevent it by giving the foal colostrum from a mare that doesn't contain those antibodies for the first 24h (they can nurse on their mom after that because they only absorb antibodies through the gut for that first 24h).

This is also why foals that don't nurse right away after birth don't often survive. Without those maternal antibodies they have zero immune protection and are like bubble babies. We often had some in the large animal ICU during foaling season and their survival rate was depressing.

*if you know/have confirmed from multiple sources, pick the first one you experienced

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Those boil down pretty neatly to:

1. Is it kind?

2. Is it true?

3. Is it necessary?

The answer to at LEAST 2 of those questions needs to be "yes" before the thing is a good idea to say.

banging my head on the wall BEGGING people on the internet to learn what an Inside Thought is. like you do not need to express every nasty opinion you have, and if you do so publicly, you gotta accept that people are gonna get mad at you for saying shit like "i find gay men repulsive". social media is not your private diary, it is public. there are consequences for saying terrible things, such as thousands of people thinking you're an asshole.

PLEASE learn what an inside thought is. you do not need to share everything that goes through your head. you shouldn't.

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No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

Check out my stuff!

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

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Just pause a minute and imagine that you live here

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I am 52. In many ways I don't feel much different than I did at 15. BUT if you can impersonate an adult on paper you don't have to actually be one.

I think mostly what young fandom types (and I guess younger people in general) who are very very invested in the idea that “20 is still basically a minor” need to understand is that the feeling of “I’m just a child pretending to be an adult, and everyone else around me is a REAL adult” is DEEPLY universal (and won’t stop, ever, by the way, sorry!) and also is not, like, praxis.

Believe me, I get it, but the self-infantilization needs to stop, especially when you’re trying to engage in conversations about actual children and the harms they can face. Yes, it is scary to wake up and realize you’re 22 and you still feel like you’re 15, but it happens to all of us. You’re an adult. You have to deal with it.

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I made a Tumblr friend because I heard them say "my beloved" irl.

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

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Behold the sea angel:

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Why do they look like planets and orbits? The pattern has a fractal quality

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

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#artichoke left to open into full bloom

today's warm up: reblog to add to the transplanar being's bouquet, tag what you'd give them! 💐

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Tarantulas…. friends.

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People in the middle class and people before the poverty level DO have the same interests, if only because anyone middle class is one layoff and maybe 6 months (if you're lucky) from poverty at any given time. Making sure everyone has enough to meet basic needs is something that also benefits anyone in the middle class because it makes everyone safer in multiple ways. We all live in the same society. We share space. You know who doesn't, though? Super rich people whose money buys layers of insulation from the rest of the world. Don't be crabs in a bucket, pulling down anyone who might be escaping abject poverty and wage slavery; be ants that support each other to make a bridge and then pull everyone else up.

trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy

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And also? Federal employees who aren't members of Congress are barred from owning stock in any area that the agency they work for has any decision making responsibility. Even if they, personally, don't have access to that information (e.g. those of us that work for USGS in the ecosystems mission area are still barred from owning stock in oil or mining companies).

The stock portfolios of more than two dozen members of Congress outperformed the market in 2024. This isn't due to luck or skill. Lawmakers can use privileged information to trade stocks while they’re supposed to be working for you.