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Anyone else seeing a sudden spike in Bible-thumpy blazed posts?

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"All too often in the past, science fiction writers made things easy for themselves by portraying a white, middle-class, male-dominated universe, even attributing white, middle-class, male values to their 'alien' races. I'm not comfortable writing about such a universe, behaving as though it represented the one true way." -Octavia Butler

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I had a patient come in the other day because she wanted her IUD replaced. It was at the end of it's life and she loved having her IUD, this was her second one. My MA let me know that the patient was very anxious about getting the IUD replaced, she'd had painful experiences in the past with her other replacements and was dreading this visit for that reason.

I spoke with the patient and she was literally shaking with anxiety. I asked her to describe her prior experiences as well as what she liked about her IUD and what she didn't like. She said that she wished she didn't have to get it replaced so often, so I recommended we place a Mirena instead of just inserting a new Kyleena IUD. She was nervous about this because she didn't want an IUD that was big. I explained that the Mirena and Kyleena are essentially the same size but the Mirena lasts 3 years longer and would likely bridge her to menopause given her age whereas with the Kyleena she'd probably need another replacement to get there. She was okay with trying the Mirena.

I then talked to her about pain control during the procedure as this was what she was most worried about. I asked about her prior experiences and then laid out what I wanted to do to try and improve her experience during this procedure. I told her I planned to give her prescription strength ibuprofen, a heating pad, and a very dense anesthetic block in her cervix to hopefully make it a better experience. If she had had someone to drive her home I would've also given her an ativan because we have studies that show patients who report higher rates of anxiety surrounding a procedure also report higher rates of pain associated with it.

She was down for this plan. I gave her a very dense block, she only felt three small injections and then nothing else. She was shocked when I told her that her old IUD was out and the new one was in. She didn't believe me when I told her it was over.

I don't tell this story because I wanna brag about how amazing of a doctor I am because I'm not. I tell this story because this is the way IUD insertions SHOULD go and I want people to know that IUD insertions do not need to be traumatic. And I want other providers who may insert IUDs to know that a paracervical block should be your standard when it comes to IUD insertions.

When people find out I'm an OBGYN, complete strangers, acquaintances, etc. , the two things they like to tell me immediately are their horrible birth trauma story and their terrible IUD insertion story and I'm trying to at least make the latter one a little less common.

If you place IUDs and aren't doing a cervical block, you need to start. This should be the standard but over 90% of OBGYNs in the US aren't doing them and it's unacceptable. We are traumatizing people and it's entirely avoidable. We are scaring people away from one of the most effective and long lasting forms of birth control in a time when people are losing their ability to end unwanted pregnancies all for no justifiable reason.

"It takes too long:" No it doesn't, that visit took me 20 minutes with a highly anxious patient from start to finish.

"It's not worth it for such a short/small procedure." It's worth it for the patient.

"It's too expensive." You can do a paracervical block with just normal saline. You don't even need lidocaine if you use a generous amount of volume. And if you place Nexplanons I know you stock lidocaine in your office, stop being fucking cheap at the expense of women's pain.

"Patient's don't need it, they'll get over it." I'm telling you they do need it and they aren't getting over it as evidenced by literally everyone wanting to tell me about their terrible IUD insertion experience as soon as they find out I'm an OBGYN.

We should do better. The cervix has nerve endings, stop acting like it doesn't.

Make cervical blocks your standard of care, there's no excuse not to.

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You don't understand; it took SEVEN YEARS of pining and banter and Looks and Dating The Wrong People and total idiocy before they even kissed.

gif request meme: The West Wing + favorite romantic relationship → Josh Lyman & Donna Moss (requested by anonymous)

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With more and more Ao3 authors restricting their works to the archive (due to AI scraping), they're going to be losing guest interaction. And probably generally feeling down because. You know. AI is stealing their hard work.

So! Now is a great time to stop by your favorite authors/stories and drop them some comments! They really appreciate it!

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👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

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NEVER. KILL. YOURSELF.

if you guys dont know anything about canadian politics, i dont think you realize how insane this liberal victory is.

just months ago, the conservatives had an almost guaranteed win. Trudeau was insanely unpopular even among his own party, the progressive vote was split between them and the NDP, and the conservatives had gained so much more ground with the up-and-comer poilievre who came in with a canadian trump campaign strategy. We were resigned to losing, canadian minorities were making backup plans for their livelihoods in the likely event that we would be targeted by poilievre and his goons. His victory seemed like a sad inevitability that we could only stand up for so long against

And then trump was elected. and then canadians woke the fuck up from their conservative pipe dreams as we were hit with tariffs and annexation threats. and then trudeau resigned, leaving his bad blood behind. and then the NDP nuked themselves by publicly betraying the minorities they claimed to serve with their "we dont care who you vote for as long as they arent liberal" strategy, ending the split progressive vote as they were left behind. and then Mark Carney, the best possible liberal leader for this moment in time to win as many people over as possible, was elected liberal leader. Not all of these things are good, many are terrible, many are complicated, but politics is incredibly complicated, and it's the system we work on, so it's the hand we have to play.

And it was close tonight. It was uncomfortably, nauseatingly close, even with all these factors at play, even with ridings in the prariries of all regions going red, because that's how guaranteed a conservative win seemed not too long ago.

But they didn't win. We won.

I want us all to take this moment in time and think back on it when it all seems hopeless and like it'll never be right again. An anti-doomerism moment if you will. Because he was going to win, that wasn't a question, he WAS going to win. And then he didn't.

NEVER. KILL. YOURSELF.

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I'm in! Both for higher standards of animal care and processing, and to see more cultural groups have access to & economic success with that part of the industry.

Oooo that's a good idea

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The UK’s first trans judge, Victoria McCloud, brings action against the UK and has appealed to the ECHR over the Supreme Court ruling.

Source.

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I need non-Canadians to know that everything in this thread is true

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My latest cartoon for New Scientist

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I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

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I miss my Outback fiercely and I wasn't even clued into the lesbian thing when I got her.

Lesbian Subaru ads from the mid 90s/early 2000s

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LINK: tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

I'd like to share with y'all a project I've poured my heart and soul into over the last couple of years: a database cataloguing every single older queer science fiction book I've managed to track down, consisting of just over 200 titles with LGBT characters/themes & by LGBT authors, spanning over a century (1880-2000) 🚀

The database can be filtered by representation, subgenre, whether the book is currently in print, and more; additionally, it includes my own ratings & brief thoughts on the ones i have read, if anyone needs a suggestion on places to start! (or feel free to shoot me an ask for a more personalized recommendation)

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David Tennant at The Assembly 2025 ❤

Q: What made you want to start work, like become an ally to the community? What prompted you to say, do you know what, this injustice has gone on long enough.

David: When I was a teenager, there was this thing that Mrs. Thatcher's government introduced called Section 28, which was about stopping the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools, which was a weird umbrella term, which was basically saying it was illegal to talk about being gay in school or to suggest that that might be a normal way of behaving. We look back on that now as a medieval, absurd thing to try and say. And I think the way the trans community is being demonised and othered is exactly the same.

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Social media posts about PublicSquare have gone viral as Trump critics use it to find companies not to support – the opposite of what the site was set up for.

WASHINGTON – A few years ago, Jeff was working for a California bank that asked him to look into getting the business listed on a website called PublicSquare.

The bank’s leaders were big supporters of Donald Trump, and PublicSquare was an ideal place to advertise it: Its website, which bills itself as “the anti-woke online marketplace,” is a hub of tens of thousands of businesses nationwide that want people to know they align with MAGA views and oppose so-called “progressive priorities” like women’s reproductive rights and diversity initiatives. In order to list your business on the website, you first have to confirm that you will “respect the core values of PublicSquare” and agree not to “support causes that are in direct conflict with our core values.”

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Cybercriminals are abusing Google’s infrastructure, creating emails that appear to come from Google in order to persuade people into handing over their Google account credentials. This attack, first flagged by Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a blockchain equivalent of the popular internet naming convention known as the Domain Name System (DNS). Nick received a very official looking security alert about a subpoena allegedly issued to Google by law enforcement to information contained in Nick’s Google account. A URL in the email pointed Nick to a sites.google.com page that looked like an exact copy of the official Google support portal.

As a computer savvy person, Nick spotted that the official site should have been hosted on accounts.google.com and not sites.google.com. The difference is that anyone with a Google account can create a website on sites.google.com. And that is exactly what the cybercriminals did. Attackers increasingly use Google Sites to host phishing pages because the domain appears trustworthy to most users and can bypass many security filters. One of those filters is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), an email authentication protocol that allows the sending server to attach a digital signature to an email. If the target clicked either “Upload additional documents” or “View case”, they were redirected to an exact copy of the Google sign-in page designed to steal their login credentials. Your Google credentials are coveted prey, because they give access to core Google services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube, but also any third-party apps and services you have chosen to log in with your Google account. The signs to recognize this scam are the pages hosted at sites.google.com which should have been support.google.com and accounts.google.com and the sender address in the email header. Although it was signed by accounts.google.com, it was emailed by another address. If a person had all these accounts compromised in one go, this could easily lead to identity theft.

How to avoid scams like this

Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails or on unexpected websites.

Carefully look at the email headers when you receive an unexpected mail.

Verify the legitimacy of such emails through another, independent method.

Don’t use your Google account (or Facebook for that matter) to log in at other sites and services. Instead create an account on the service itself.

Technical details Analyzing the URL used in the attack on Nick, (https://sites.google.com[/]u/17918456/d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/edit) where /u/17918456/ is a user or account identifier and /d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/ identifies the exact page, the /edit part stands out like a sore thumb. DKIM-signed messages keep the signature during replays as long as the body remains unchanged. So if a malicious actor gets access to a previously legitimate DKIM-signed email, they can resend that exact message at any time, and it will still pass authentication. So, what the cybercriminals did was: Set up a Gmail account starting with me@ so the visible email would look as if it was addressed to “me.” Register an OAuth app and set the app name to match the phishing link Grant the OAuth app access to their Google account which triggers a legitimate security warning from no-reply@accounts.google.com This alert has a valid DKIM signature, with the content of the phishing email embedded in the body as the app name. Forward the message untouched which keeps the DKIM signature valid. Creating the application containing the entire text of the phishing message for its name, and preparing the landing page and fake login site may seem a lot of work. But once the criminals have completed the initial work, the procedure is easy enough to repeat once a page gets reported, which is not easy on sites.google.com. Nick submitted a bug report to Google about this. Google originally closed the report as ‘Working as Intended,’ but later Google got back to him and said it had reconsidered the matter and it will fix the OAuth bug.