fortunatelydarklyfoxy

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

lying down for 50 minutes to imagine in real time the experience of walking to trader joes and buying a single pea and walking back home and getting out a cutting board and a knife and skinning and chopping one pea and sprinkling it into a tank with one fish in it

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

HELLO????

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

Knowing that trans women of color started the movement in the united states and were literally immediately erased and excluded from what they started is the most deeply jading knowledge.

It is the original sin of the so-called queer community and it damns it from the cradle.

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

Gather around, my young friends and fellow dinosaurs, let me tell you about some BULLSHIT no one ever tells you about. I'm talking about menopause and perimenopause. Now, menopause has a very stringent medical definition. You have to not have had a period for exactly 12 months and a day to be considered in menopause. All the bullshit before that day once you start going through The Change is considered perimenopause. Here's some bullshit you might experience that people actually talk about when you're in perimenopause:

- shorter time between periods

- irregular periods

- hot flashes and/or cold flashes

- fucked up sleep

- OMG NIGHT SWEATS

- Vagina as dry as the Sahara desert

- lighter periods and/or endless bleeding like it's The Flood but it's in your pants

- lack of interest in Adult Fun Times

This time of joy can last anywhere from a couple of years to a god damn decade and there's no medical way right now to predict it.

Here's some of the REAL bullshit they don't tell you about but your dinosaur aunt is here to let you know:

- You can start perimenopause in your 30s, don't listen to idiot doctors who tell you you're "too young" because they don't know your body like you do.

- Perimenopause will make you HELLA DUMB. Seriously, I'm talking Bigly broken brain. Brain fog? Check. Short term memory? Wave goodbye to it. Ability to make words form out of thoughts? Yeah, good luck to you.

- Perimenopause can cause horrible fatigue because in addition to losing estrogen, you're also losing testosterone. Oh and that also leads to muscle wasting, cool cool.

- Things might suddenly hurt more because estrogen is known to be neuroprotective.

- If you're super lucky like I am, and like to collect rare illnesses, you might even get Burning Mouth Syndrome 💀

- And meanwhile, while you're going through this bullshit, you'll be getting gaslit by doctors who are operating based on 30 year old debunked data about how HRT causes breast cancer (not really) and that they shouldn't put you on it until you're in actual menopause. (Data shows starting HRT early can potentially prevent Alzheimer's in later years.)

- There are entire online clinics right now (I use Midi Health) focused on providing care for peri and menopausal patients and they will happily prescribe you HRT even if your regular PCP or OBGYN do not (if you meet the criteria). I've been pretty impressed with how holistically they view the patient. For full disclosure, I learned about them from my integrative health doctor and they do not accept Medicare (yet).

I'm 46 years old right now and I've been symptomatic for perimenopause for the last 8 years, although it's gotten the most dramatic in the past 2 years or so, which I hope means I'm almost done, holy hell. Yeah I was on the early side, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, so it's never too early to think about these things. And I hope to at least spare some of you the mind-fuckery I've been through because no one told me about most of this stuff, including my own mother who just DOESN'T REMEMBER what happened to her and now I completely understand why. And because I also have a connective tissue disease, I used to just dismiss my pain and fatigue as being caused by that illness rather than the loss of hormones.

Anyways, this is why we need Elders in our lives, so they can do Grandma Story Hour like I just did and validate you when the entire medical field tries to gaslight you. I hope you've found some or all of this educational/useful. Please share with your friends because we really do NOT talk about this stuff enough. (Ewwww Moon Blood!)

Stay well, and don't let the bastards grind you down!

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

So I tend to put on a youtube video most nights to fall asleep to (laptop on a shutdown timer.) And lately, my recommendations are a lot of videogame speedruns or videogame hidden facts.

Last night I pulled up youtube and got a "I played the 10 worst wii games ever" kind of video. ~30 minutes long. Fair enough! Show me the terrible wii games.

I'm paying attention for the beginning, since hey I'm still awake. And maybe like, 6 minutes into the video the guy starts going into heavy detail about how to pirate and copy wii games.

And I'm like, shit, bold, considering this video has 500,000 views. Bravo and all that.

The terrible wii games go on. I fall asleep.

I wake up to the sound of like... mechanical grinding?

Look at the laptop. There's a guy in a hazmat suit mixing dangerous chemicals, going "hey don't mix these dangerous chemicals."

I'm like, "Oh, the video ended. And the algorithm put me on... chemical mixing Youtube I guess."

I look at the video Title. "I Played The Worst Wii Games Ever Made"

....Oh.

It's still the video.

So surely he is... mixing chemicals to clean off an unplayable wii disk? Trying to touch up the lone copy of some forgotten game bought off ebay?

No...

He's just.

Mixing chemicals.

I hover over the video sections.

The 10 worst wii game sections have ended. He played them all.

The last 10 minutes is just dedicated to... him in a hazmat suit mixing dangerous chemicals.

....????

I fall back asleep.

....

I need to go back and check this video to make sure I did not imagine this all in a half-asleep stupor

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

I fucking hate game apps. I wanted to play tetris the otherday so I figured there must be a simple tetris app out there its the most basic game. But every app is like heres your daily log in bonus of 10 gold! You get 5 free plays a day. Here's an ad. To replay a level costs 1 diamond. You can eart gold by earning points in levels. 1000 points = 1 gold. You can exchange 550 gold for one diamond but we have a sale right now that they only cost 500 gold. Heres an ad. You can buy a loot crate of diamonds for 5.99$! You leveled up! Heres 1 free diamond. Youve run out of free replays for today, would you like to buy some more diamonds? Heres your daily tasks, make sure to log in every day this month for a free reward chest. its free! Heres an ad. Would you like to sign up for this credit card to recieve 10 free diamonds? Invite a friend and you can earn points! Ding! Youve leveled up. Heres an ad. This is our special bonus play weekend, you get one free replay and a pack of diamonds only costs 4.99$. You can use your gold to purchase new skins for the tetris blocks. This ones shaped like cats! It costs 100 diamonds. You need to collect them all. Free to play, may be some in-app purchases.

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

think of things you have to look forward to

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]

IT SPINS! Handmade electric motor! Entirely out of wire! They said it couldn't be done, but I have proven -- it merely shouldn't be done!

Photos don't really capture how ridiculously complicated this thing was to build, so I managed to film myself assembling the components too! Very proud of that.

In total, I've been working on this project on and off for roughly two years. This motor is my third version, though I went through something like seven designs of the commutator section (not counting how many failures it took to build a working example of a given design). I'm very proud of getting this to work at all.

Some close-up photos of all the components:

Six-way commutator. As the motor spins, this delivers electricity to only the correct pair of magnets at a time, leaving the other four off.

Magnet coils. I wound these by hand from very thin insulated wire. The center is a spiral of thicker insulated wire (darker orange) that protects the thin stands from the steel core and then wraps around the outside to hold everything in place.

Spring-loaded arms. These deliver electricity from the stationary frame into the rotating axle. They also have to hinge up out of the way or else there's no room to fit the rotor in place during assembly.

All the components laid out together before assembly.

And the full motor in all its glory!

[fortunatelydarklyfoxy]