leigh | STEM academia | fic writer | usually obsessed with a show or two
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I believe this whole heartedly with my full chest
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Went to a cute thrift store in small-town Alberta and didn't realize they were cash only, and they closed in an hour so I went looking around town for other stores which might give me a looney. Ended up trying three places but when the first two said no I felt bad for asking and bought something small anyway before the pet store gave me a looney with a dog treat I bought (I don't have a dog). Went back to the thrift store, handed the nice lady the looney for a pair of boots and asked if she had a dog so I could give her the treat, turns out the place is an spca partner so the treat would definitely be used. That's how I ended up with two crystals from the crunchy herbal grocery store, a fancy brownie from the local coffee shop, and a pair of boots I bought for one gold coin and a dog treat. I feel like I completed a side quest in a video game.
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hey i know everybody on this website is geriatric by now, but if i have any younger followers, even just a handful:
you do not need those full-body deodorant products. i promise
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James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has just died and I am seeing a woeful lack of crab raves on my dash.
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Today I was trying to chat up this girl standing with her friend at a lesbian bar and said “oh are you two together?” meaning were you friends before being next to each other at this bar and one turns to the other and goes with all the venom of a black mamba snake “I don’t know Cara, are we?” and I was like you know what? not my table
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Lesbians dressed as clowns disrupted a "gender-critical" panel last month at University College London. Participants were surprised when trans and cis dykes from The Dyke Project obstructed the proceedings while in cheerful clown attire. Julie Bindel, one of the panelists, has been a major voice against trans, bisexual, and SWer rights. The protesters chanted, “you’re not feminists, you’re all clowns!” while interrupting her. More of these protests, please! Read the full story on Dazed.
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man i'm so sick of seeing clone ocs or whatever with tā moko. please stop drawing tā moko on your characters if you aren't māori. i promise your māori character can have a deep connection to their culture without having tā moko done and you are not going to draw it correctly if you don't know what everything MEANS. each individual line has meaning to māori and at best you'll get the individual designs right but won't understand the meaning behind them so you've created a meaningless moko and, much more likely, you'll just butcher an incredibly sacred art.
i'd say to pay for a tohunga tā moko (moko artist) for a design if you literally cannot keep your hands off of it but in reality? please don't. you still have to draw the moko every single time and you are gonna mess it up. ESPECIALLY FACE MOKO. THOSE ARE SO SACRED STOP DRAWING THEM
i have a set design for my character's moko that i essentially take hours setting up to trace every time i draw ia and even my character having tā moko is iffy culturally as a tohunga tā moko didn't create it! it's one thing to simply create kōwhaiwhai, it's another altogether to depict tā moko. i plan to pay a moko artist to design moko for my oc eventually as well.
just, don't please? it's contentious and you are going to mess it up and look stupid at best.
(and DON'T trace an existing moko. that's even worse. tā moko is unique to the individual with the moko and you essentially just copied someone's identity and family line onto your oc for an aesthetic design)
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im literally forever obsessed with this because it implies the following:
The Rapture, as described by Christian Evangelicals, has happened
Parents witnessed their son disappear during The Rapture, but remained atheists anyway (based)
Instead of sinners and nonbelievers going to hell or getting killed, they just... stay on Earth.
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Week #2 on fieldwork and #3 away from home. Last thing I needed was the rental owner being a total control freak and awful communicator who charges us for random shit, but at this point I'm so used to everything falling apart on fieldwork that I kind of don't care anymore (I'm lying anxiety is through the roof)
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"Nostalgia bias has become a bigger and bigger part of our politics, thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s largely successful ability to leverage a collective longing for a supposedly better past. (After all, it’s called “Make America Great Again,” not “Make America Great.”) But it’s hardly the domain of one party: A 2023 survey from Pew found that nearly six in 10 respondents said that life in the US 50 years ago was better for people like them than it is today.
Fifty years ago was the 1970s, and it doesn’t take too much historical research to see how that decade doesn’t match up to our happy memories... But what about a more recent, seemingly actually better decade? One that’s suddenly surfing a wave of pop-culture nostalgia? A decade like…the 1990s?
One 2024 survey from CivicScience found that the 1990s were the single decade respondents felt most nostalgic for (while the most recent decade, the 2010s, finished dead last). Nor, to my surprise, is this just the product of aging Gen X-ers pining for their flannel-clad youth — another survey found that over a third of Gen Z-ers were nostalgic for the 1990s, despite the fact most of them had not yet been born then, while 61 percent of millennials felt the same way.
As collective memory goes, these were years of steady economic and productivity growth, of reduced existential threat thanks to the end of the Cold War, and of really, really good movies. Compare that to today’s fears of AI-driven economic disruption, the renewed threat of nuclear conflict, and the general death of the movies.
But look closely, and you’ll realize that our memories of the 1990s are fatally blurred by nostalgia. Here are four reasons why the 1990s weren’t as good as the present day.
1) A far more violent country
I’ve written before about how Americans have this stubborn habit of believing the crime is getting worse even when it’s actually getting better. But holy cow, was America violent and murderous in the 1990s!
In 1991, the highest violent crime rate in US history was recorded, with 758.2 incidents per 100,000 people. And it didn’t get better for a while — 1992 holds the record for the most violent crimes in a single year, while 1993 had the highest number of murders nationally.
Compare that to 2024, when the violent crime rate fell to 359.1, the lowest in 20 years and less than half the rate of 1991, while the homicide rate this year [2025] may well hit the lowest level ever. And while the 1990s as a decade saw a historic drop in crime, the violent crime rate in 1999 was 524.7 per 100,000 — still well above last year’s level.
2) A much poorer world
At the start of the 1990s, nearly 40 percent of the entire world was in a state of extreme poverty, living on $2.15 or less a day. What that meant in reality was that for almost half the world, life was lived on the edge of grinding subsistence, much as it had been for centuries, with seemingly little chance for change. In China, for instance, some two-thirds of the population was in extreme poverty. The idea that the world’s largest nation would ever become rich would have been laughable.
Today, as I’ve written before, that picture has utterly changed. Just 8.5 percent of the world’s now much larger population lives in extreme poverty, which translates to over a billion people escaping near-total destitution. While you might want to go back in time to the 1990s, I can almost guarantee that none of them would...
3) A nearly unchecked HIV pandemic
There are countless ways in which health statistics globally have improved since the 1990s — the child mortality rate alone has fallen by 61 percent since 1990 — but the most striking one to me is HIV.
At the dawn of the 1990s the HIV epidemic looked unbeatable: The US lost 31,196 people to AIDS in 1990, and by 1995 it was the leading killer of Americans aged 25-44. Global AIDS deaths were racing toward the 2-million-a-year mark, and even when the first truly effective multi-drug cocktail debuted in 1996, it reached only a tiny share of patients globally.
Today the picture has flipped. About 30.7 million people — 77 percent of everyone with HIV — receive treatment, and global AIDS deaths have fallen to around 630,000. In 2022 there were fewer than 20,000 AIDS deaths in the US, and many cities are realistically aiming to zero out cases and deaths in the near future. There’s even real hope for an effective vaccine.
4) A less tolerant, less educated population
Though it might not seem like it in our highly polarized present moment, a number of important social attitudes have flipped since the Clinton years. When Gallup first asked in 1996, just 27 percent of Americans backed legal same-sex marriage; support now sits at 71 percent, and it has been legal throughout the country since 2015. In 1991, fewer than half of adults approved of Black-white marriages, yet by 2021 that share had rocketed to 94 percent. Together these shifts mark a dramatic expansion of everyday acceptance for LGBTQ people, interracial families, and other forms of diversity.
Opportunity gaps, while far from closed, have narrowed. Women earn about 84 cents for every dollar a man does today, up from roughly 76 cents in 1998. College attainment has surged: Only about 20 percent of adults held a bachelor’s degree in 1990, versus nearly 39 percent of women and 36 percent of men in 2022.
As decades go, the 1990s did have a lot going for them, though as someone who was in their late teens and early 20s during much of them — precisely the ages we’re most nostalgic for — you can’t take my word for it. And our current moment has no shortage of problems, including some that 30 years ago we would have considered dead and buried. But don’t let your inaccurate memories of the past distort your ability to see how far we’ve come."
-via Vox, August 12, 2025. Paywall free link here.
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in law school, my mom took me to this stress retreat because my family was vaguely aware i was a suicide risk. and they didnt allow phones, so i brought this huge bag of books. and one of the options for "destressing" was this fake cave grotto thing, where they'd decorated a room to make it look exactly like an underground cave and the air was like -10 degrees, but there was a like 4ft deep pool in the middle that was kept super super hot, so you would just switch between the hot and cold. and they would bring you an endless supply of this weird syrupy drink thing that was like super caffeinated and tasted like sugar and mint. and so i spent multiple days sitting half submerged in this fake grotto drinking mystery liquid and reading. and i have to be honest i really did feel less stressed
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Always thinking about how black women originated the long acrylic nails look and were mocked and insulted for them for years, the look was called ghetto and disgusting... And now the same look is just the default fucking style of nail in middle class America lol
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I can't articulate how utterly inhumane it is that we've not only normalized, but valorized, sleep deprivation. We treat it like an achievement.
Sleep deprivation increases your risk for a myriad of serious illnesses like heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and stroke.
And that's just to name a few.
Some of the most important cellular work we do all day happens while we're sleeping. When we don't get enough quality sleep and rest, our cells literally can't effectively repair themselves.
It literally damages every system in our bodies.
Capitalism lies.
Getting enough sleep is actually one of the most meaningfully "productive" things we can do.
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everyone else, including the italians who invented it, needs to adopt the spanish spelling of the word “gnocchi.” ñoqui is linguistic perfection. no more fucking around with ‘gn’, letters which even when you suspend your disbelief do not produce the necessary sound. the ideal tool for the job exists and it is the ñ
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today i overheard a girl say "no, f*ck that. i will be lovely to everyone. maybe some people will remember they have a heart."
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