phifalling

[phifalling]

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

[phifalling]

So I would like to make a post about food allergies given the information I've been taught by my allergist regarding my food allergies.

The difference between food allergy, sensitivity, and intolerance.

Allergy. This is the classic anaphylaxis.

Sensitivity. This is caused by allergies, but the risk here isn't anaphylaxis. It's inflammation in gut that can cause fatigue, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, generalized ick feeling.

Intolerance. Your body is literally unable to process the food. It lacks the ability to, which means the food causes inflammation in the gut, causing similar symptoms as sensitivity.

Sensitivities will show up on an allergy test. Intolerance has to take a different test specific for that type of intolerance.

I mention this because I see a lot of fake claiming food allergies that's like "Yeah but I cross contaminated the food with eggs and that didn't kill her. She must be lying." Yeah food sensitivities can be pretty mild. Where if you give them an egg salad, they're gonna be having a bad day. But if you rub egg on their burger, they may not even notice.

Also like there's a lot of medical conditions that can affect a person's diet. They may have stomach issues that means they can't eat a lot of acidic foods, and if saying "Hey, I'm allergic to pineapple" gets you to not put pineapple juice in their drink because it'll cause a flare-up. I'm all for people doing whatever they need to make sure their health is taken seriously. Even if it's outright lying because food allergies is the only fucking thing people seem to take seriously in this world.

Anyways take people's "I can't eat this food" seriously. And don't fake claim them if they go "I can't eat this food but I'm not at risk if there's cross contamination"

-fae

[phifalling]

my prof just explained on the syllabus that he’s included more pionts in the class than we needed to pass, so we could skip up like?? 20 small assignments/quizzes/participation!! and still get a very high grade!!

the idea was that we could focus on assignments that played to our strengths - only do the participation stuff if we like to talk out loud - only do the quizzes/readings if we want to do the class remotely - only do online discussions if we like to talk and share opinions but struggle with anxiety in class ect.

and that’s cool enough but then he pulled up DnD character sheets with drawings he’d done of these hypothetical student player classes and how our various accessibility needs could be gamified to ‘max out’ different aspects of the class to get high grades and like!!!!!

hell yeah!!!! let’s treat accessibility in higher education not just as a necessity but as the fun, engaging, and creative aspect of learning that it is!!! I love this!!

[phifalling]

You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. "Hedonism" is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radial rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.

[phifalling]

May I present: Leda and the Swan Princess! It's based on this post about a swan princess who refuses to go quietly in obscurity when cursed. (If you liked this one you will probably also like my other comics which you can find on my pinned post).

If you enjoyed and want to support a queer art student, you can tip me over on my Ko-fi! Tips help me out dramatically while I'm still in school!

[phifalling]

btw part of what's at stake in accepting that the family form is inherently unjust & harmful to children is, you don't have to have endured an anomalous degree of violence, coercion, or abuse in order to have been traumatised by your family & your childhood. it is an inherently violent & terrifying situation to be completely at the mercy of people who have total material and financial control over you. it is inherently violent that they have the legal right eg to hit you or deprive you of privacy, whether or not they personally exercise these rights. all of this also applies to the other most obvious population made vulnerable by the family form, the elderly

[phifalling]

i wish ppl on this website, and within leftist circles in general, were a little less gung ho about making jokes or statements like "billionaires arent people" "nazis arent people" "police arent people"

there is no level of evil where a human stops being a human. if you decide to kill them for their crimes, then you are killing a human. and sometimes that is justified! oil execs and war profiteers have destroyed countless lives in service of their own sick greed, and given the chance to enact that same violence on them, id probably pop their heads like a pimple.

but it is important that we do not shy away from the reality of that choice. it is a human life that is being ended. a person with interiority, feelings, family.

if we stop considering any group as people, even a group defined by their own evil actions, then we are drawing a line to divide society into persons and non-persons, and stating that those non-persons do not deserve to live.

i hope i dont need to explain why that is a dangerous position to take.

these people and all of their evil, their greed, their hatred, are just as much a part of humanity as art, culture, language, food. they are a part of us that has grown malignant and cancerous, and like a cancer, they must be excised for the sake of the whole--but they are still a part of us, made of the same stuff as us, down to their cores.

evil humans are still humans.

[phifalling]

Astarion lectures of disappointment >>>

[phifalling]

Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”

[phifalling]

Reblog if reading someone else’s fanfiction has helped you get through a hard day

[phifalling]

[phifalling]

I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.

I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.

At least give me a fucking transcript.

[phifalling]

I’m losing it over this twitter thread. this is the post-digital hellscape

[phifalling]

if I am doing something somewhere in the house or yard that is not dog related (these are fake activities) Glimmer will come and try to entice me into a dog related activity to do instead, and if I ignore her, she will begin to do what I have come to think of as Dog Infomercials. she will go get a favorite toy and bring it to me and begin MELODRAMATICALLY playing with it by herself in a really exaggerated way, then she will periodically pause and look at me to see if I have noticed how much FUN she is having with WUBBA(TM) and how much fun I COULD BE having with WUBBA(TM) if only I would CALL THIS TOLL FREE NUMBER NOW 👀👀👀👀

[phifalling]

Unmute !

[phifalling]

okay so one of the big arguments you hear against moving away from prisons as a society is that there’s always going to be some % of folks who have no interest in improving their behavior & would always be a danger if ever allowed to walk the streets again. and like, yeah, that % is probably low after you factor in all the other ideas ppl have for solving the root causes of crime (and the number of ppl right now who are imprisoned for incoherent ass reasons to begin with), but it’s never gonna be zero

but today I thought of a very stupid but also very funny solution to that problem: if the # really is as low as has been claimed/estimated, then even if there’s no prisons you can still put those people under house arrest

totalitarian regimes that are facing international pressure for political imprisonments do it all the time. sure, the number of political prisoners they have to treat that way is usually pretty low; it’s not a scalable solution. but you don’t need a scalable solution. we’ve already established that we’re dealing with the exceptional case, here! and in exchange, by using a non-scalable solution, you avoid all the costs of building something scalable. you never build  infrastructure of incarceration. this has several benefits:

nobody’s phoney baloney job relies on there still being a certain number of people imprisoned. you can scale down, even to zero if you get lucky, without that being a political football.

people under house arrest will be able to use normal ass things to live, instead of using special “for prisoners” stuff that’s secretly designed to be off-the-books torture. no special concrete buildings. no special phone companies that turn every phone conversation into a roll of the dice as to whether your recipient can figure out how to get quarters into its collect call wallet. no need for the state to suddenly being responsible for wiping a guy’s butt just because he’s in custody. and for the state, this is cheaper than the alternative! even the savings from cruelly bargain basement economies of scale can’t beat the savings from “that isn’t my problem in the first place”.

scaling it up is costly. yes, I mean it when I say that’s a benefit. consider this: it means that anyone who comes after you & wants to do mass incarceration is going to be bad at it. they’ll have to start from scratch. they’ll have to put in the startup costs and build the infrastructure. the thing you’re building will be harder to use for evil than it is to use for good. that’s the kind of legacy you want in politics.

[phifalling]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"