for-the-ninth

[for-the-ninth]

i really don’t think we talk enough about john keeping myriad-old resurrected dead on standby JUST IN CASE his current colonies go to shit. imagine you die during nuclear apocalypse and then get resurrected by some guy from new zealand and then spend ten thousand years in not-quite-alive hibernation stasis in a bone coffin on a spaceship and then you get shipped off to pluto because everyone else on pluto is either old as hell or dead. basically the plot of a bethesda game

[for-the-ninth]

literally the reason online discourse is Like That is cuz ppl havent found real problems yet

[for-the-ninth]

re-reading the twilight saga because I'm gonna write a wee silly little wee fanfic and it really is criminal they didn't include the blood typing scene in the movies

[for-the-ninth]

i just need someone to tell me why the second we hit 30 people stop caring enough to make consistent plans with their friends and/or still have yet to develop the skills necessary to manage life stress and time in order to maintain friendships

i am so tired of meeting people where they are. i want someone to meet me where i'm at

[for-the-ninth]

The healthcare strike in Portland, Oregon is in its third week with no clear end in sight. Front-line caregivers with the Providence Healthcare System negotiating union contracts at multiple hospitals that would improve employee working conditions and protect legally-mandated nurse:patient ratios so nurses don't get assigned an unmanageable and unsafe number of patients per shift. There's been some progress with negotiations, and the governor of the state is putting pressure on both sides to end the strike soon, but Providence continues to hold out on key issues.

As a float pool nurse, every shift I go to whatever floor is understaffed. In nearly every unit I've been to, there have been patients who still be in the ICU, getting one to one care. But because we don't have enough critical care staff, we transfer This is not safe for patients or staff. And it's not just medical safety. It takes time to talk out a problem instead of calling security, or to help someone with severe mobility issues go to the bathroom, or to sit with someone crying. The kind of care that makes you feel like a person, not just a patient, takes time. The more patients I have per shift, the less time I have for each of them.

A strike is our strongest negotiating tactic. And as long as we're on strike, we're not getting paid. The longer you don't get paid, the harder it is to not cross the picket line. We're already out two paychecks so far. A lot of people cannot afford to lose that much income. As the primary income earner for our household: GOD I would love to make money again. That is what Providence is banking on. They're losing a TON of money during this strike, but they've got deeper pockets than their workers. They are betting that they can survive the strike longer than the union can.

You can support the strike by donating to the Oregon Nurses Association's hardship fund which provides money to caregivers so they don't have to scab. (I'll put a link in a reblog I'll make right after posting this.) There's also a public petition you can sign that I'll also link. And if you're in the Portland area, we've got picket lines at like nine different places at any given point. Even just awareness is helpful. Providence wants people to be angry at the striking healthcare workers, not them.

[for-the-ninth]

maaaaaaaaaaaan am i the only one

who just... does not understand the very specific brand of Monogamy™ that cishets practice? it's the ones who have rules for each other. no friends of the "opposite sex" (this has to be a Heterosexual Exclusive because wtf does "opposite sex" even mean when you're genderqueer lmao), or - even weirder, imo - you can have friends of the Opposite Sex, but you can only hangout with them in public??? and if you do hangout with them in public, it can't look like a date. lunches or coffee only! anything else is "disrespectful to the relationship." if you ask them what is disrespectful about this, they literally cannot articulate it. because it's made up. there are certain events the partner must be invited to, like vacations. an all-girls trip or all-guys trip is fine. but heaven forbid you take a vacation with a friend group of mixed genders without inviting your partner. no weddings without your partner either because "it's important that we look like a unit" (yes, that is an actual thing i've seen said, and i'm sorry you had to read it too).

apparently, it is also frowned upon to talk to friends (this is, again, mostly true of Opposite Sex Friends) about anything involving sex or other forms of physical intimacy. because i guess just talking about sex will eventually lead to actually having sex with this person, maybe?? i don't pretend to understand the logic. no comforting your Opposite Sex Friends physically either. even if someone dies or gets broken up with, it'd better be a quick non-lingering hug and nothing else! (yes, i've seen this too.)

it just boggles my mind. and you question them on it and they can only recite one line: "it's just disrespectful to me/the partnership." okay, but how? why are people suddenly expected to give up their autonomy just because they started fucking you? it's weird!!

[for-the-ninth]

Pup interrupts soccer match, gives interview.

[for-the-ninth]

Nah sis you most definitely ARE a fool if you don't think we didn't already snatch that shit off rebels and dhm literally yesterday.

[for-the-ninth]

damn ok lake superior

[for-the-ninth]

no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder

[for-the-ninth]

My deepest fantasy is to be mercymorn's stupid underling who she treats like I'm useless but due to my many years in customer service and my blatant autistic tendencies I pretend I'm too oblivious to notice until she has to admit her days are much easier when I'm working versus admiral sarpedon and gradually my combination of feigned innocence, ability to empathize without technically agreeing to anything, genuine human emotion peeking out from underneath several tantalizing layers of deflection, and let's be real my status as a nonthreatening gay friend remind her of the past she's left behind and she finally imprints on me to the point where she's left broken when I leave for $2 more per hour at a different job and has to confront who she truly is in a way she hasn't in 10 thousand years

[for-the-ninth]

[for-the-ninth]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[for-the-ninth]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[for-the-ninth]

meanwhile she's in the replies calling everyone entitled for complaining rightfully criticizing her instead of engaging with her posts kissing her ass.

saying shit like "all they do is take" to people who download shit for free is so wild. modding in the sims community has been a fun, free hobby for far longer than it's been monetized in this way.

Winterfest 2024

Happy Saturday Everyone!  I'm so happy to be able to release this set in time for Christmas. I have been thinking of doing a Christmas set for quite a while now and it was one of those things that I just needed to check off the bucket list. I would love to be able to add to this set in future years to come.

I have been sharing progress of this on Instagram, but just in case you missed my ongoing commentary there, I will also point out here that the contents of this set are purely decorative. I would have loved to be able to make functional presents like from the seasons EP, but unfortunately its a very complicated item with many different elements to create, which would be extremely time consuming and I just couldn't dedicate that time when there were so many other essential items required this month.

Now go forth and use all these tasteful swatches to your hearts content! :)

Set Includes:

Holiday Tree w/ Ornaments

Holiday Tree w/ Giant Bow

Large Gift Pile

Tall Gift Pile

Short Gift Pile

Gift Box

Fireplace w/ Candles

Fireplace Surround

Garland

Wreath

Church Candles

Tea Lights

All items are Base Game compatible. They can be found by searching with the keyword WINTERFEST in the b/b catalogue.

Now Available On Patreon Early Access

Public Release: 14th February

[for-the-ninth]

the sims 2 is such a weird game to be fixated on. how do I explain to my friends that the things that've been occupying my mind daily are a bunch of low poly characters all named some stupid shit like Gas O'Line or Impregnator Alien 300 from a game that's almost old enough to drink

[for-the-ninth]

soooooooo true buddy