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When Vessel said "I wish that i could leave myself alone" i really felt that

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i knew vessel was a weird theater kid just due to the fact that he knows what vore is. the stage theatrics don’t matter, if you know what vore is ur automatically a theater kid (this is coming from an ex-theater kid)

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can we add time bending to the list of Really Neat Things Sleep Token Can Do because i swear none of their songs quite feel like the actual length they are

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Why did I just see someone on instagram tattoo my tumblr post onnsomeone

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things I would do if you're a nsfw/kink creative now because I've been eerily prescient about every single wave:

a) get a personal site with your own domain you own. now. not a carrd or third party squarespace. not next week. now. get it online with ugly-ass html but get your links there.

b) if you have the money: join one or multiple of eff.org / cbldf.org / freespeechcoalition.com

partly because they're actively fighting this, partly because they have members-only Lawyers You Might Need. Hint. Hint. Canary.

c) Write Down Those Lawyer Contact Numbers in meatspace. phone number of a real human being especially on paper, On You.

I have been in contact with lawyers for a few months now as my doujin circle knows. this should be telling you Many Things.

d) www.ecrater.com is where i'm going to be tentatively testing a shop because i like the fact you can *not* have payment processes and order digital/physical products via purely mail order.

(... be prepared for this to fall through too in the next 1-6 months.)

e) friends and followers of nsfw artists who earn most of their income through it: now's the time to support them. they're going to need the grace and financial flexibility especially mental health wise. domain/shop transfer/refund/therapy bills ain't free.

check in on them, and often.

f) get a VPN, use it daily to acclimatize, have them on your hard drive, several VPN's preferable. this is for the age verification laws coming. Start reading up on secure, privacy-focused infrastructure (prioritize email > website > shop in that order).

eff.org has a *ton* of resources.

g) prepare for discord and tumblr to be hit in the next wave. have alternatives *and actively start using them* if they're mission critical platforms for you.

I've played with matrix though I quite fancy IRC. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I say these things not to fearmonger but to give yourself the maximum amount of time to prepare. the pendulum *will* swing back. it did with the 80's moral panic. it will for this too.

you just have to outlast the bastards.

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something very fascinating about discworld as a setting is how the books are mostly set during a period of after

the color of magic and the light fantastic are set during the waning days of barbarian thug heroes. cohen and his cohorts are either old or dead, and the incoming generation isn't finding much profit in the hero business. tax fraud is more profitable than pillaging.

the mention of horrific wizard wars that are so old that even the aftermath of them are relegated to allusions instead of explicit description.

lancre is haunted by the spectre of black aliss, who never appears on screen and has been hansel and greteled by the time of granny and nanny being the witches of authority, and even they feel like their time coming to a close.[1]

uberwald is the remnants of a fallen evil empire.

ankh-morpork had kings, then despotic tyrants, but on page is governed bureaucratically by a man who, i will always argue, was working to ultimately get rid of his own job.

we are introduced to a city watch that has been defanged and recovering from several failed revolutions.

moist von lipwig is a reformed con man being forced to repair the damage done to public institutions by other con men, but we never truly see the shell games played by moist or others.

even small gods concerns itself with the reformation of a fire and brimstone religion.

basically, if epic fantasy is a party, discworld is the story of the people who have to clean up afterwards despite not being on the guest list for the event.

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[1] the way that shepherds crown is not only an explicit conclusion to granny weatherwax's tenure, but quietly implies nanny receding from prominence herself is an aching sadness i wish pterry had the time to explore. tiffany is the person who arrives first to an empty but clean dance club.

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this isn’t the first time the DHS has tweeted literal nazi propaganda but uuuhhhh I feel like things are going to get Very Bad unless we do something. about the nazis. who are running the US government

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oh we are never getting out of the learned helplessness cycle are we gang

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Stop shaming people for their body count

Who cares how many people she's killed so long as you love her and she looks pretty with blood on her face.

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still not over the stephen colbert thing, the way they're punishing him so much by not only essentially firing him but cancelling the show he loves in its entirety, which means also punishing all 200 people who work for and with him on the show.

it is setting an example. it's saying, "this is what happens when you speak truth to power. we will not only punish you. we'll punish the people around you that you've led and loved. is it worth it now, stephen? would it be worth it, other late night talk show hosts? if you don't keep quiet, we will quiet you". the other late night talk show hosts are not all under paramount (iirc, it's just the daily show), but this sets a precedent that tells them they are all vulnerable.

"it's not a big deal" idk man it really seems like it is

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Post on my dash about medical debt reminded me of the time tumblr saved me two grand. I don't think I told y'all about it because I am out of the habit of posting everything I do on tumblr lol

So. Last December, I had a bad cavity filled, and about a week later, I woke up with half of my face paralyzed. Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, freaked me the fuck out. Fortunately I had some level-headed Discord friends who a) told me what Bell's palsy was so I could look it up and b) reminded me to call my dentist for an emergency appointment. Dentist was also pretty sure it was Bell's palsy, but urged me to go to the emergency room to get checked out, because one-sided facial paralysis is also a possible indicator of a stroke. And you don't fuck around with strokes.

Bell's palsy, if you, like me of 6 months ago, don't know, is a harmless paralysis/muscle weakness on one side of the face that can be caused by a variety of things. It usually goes away on its own after a few weeks but also you can speed up the process with steroids.

I was pretty sure I was not having a stroke, because I'm Red Cross first aid certified and I know the symptoms of a stroke, and while one-sided facial paralysis is one of them, I didn't have any of the others. Also, I had quit my shitty job in October, which meant I had a shiny new marketplace health insurance plan and hadn't even touched my deductible. But I called my parents from the car and they urged me to get checked out and promised to help me pay off the emergency room bill if I needed it, because they're good people and they love me even if they drive me crazy sometimes. So off I went to the nearest emergency room.

Emergency room staff also didn't think I was having a stroke, because I waited ALL AFTERNOON, periodically having a new person come up to me and ask me to smile, hold both arms out to the side, press down on their hands, and tell them what month and year it was. (They don't ask who the president is anymore. Hmm, I wonder why.) One guy had me drink a cup of water while he watched. I cannot stress enough that I did not have any medical tests other than a physical examination: no CT scans or MRIs, no IV drugs or blood draws, nothing.

I get diagnosed with Bell's palsy and given a prescription for Prednisone. And then they give me a phone number and tell me to talk to this person about administrative stuff. So I call, and the dude on the phone verifies my name and date of birth and insurance information, and then he says, "It looks like your copay today is going to be $2400. How would you like to pay?"

I am, to this day, kind of impressed that he didn't even stutter over that number, but I assume working in a medical call center drains your entire soul. At this point, it's about 7pm, and I've been in the hospital since 2pm, and I'm stressed because half my face doesn't work, and I know that I can't afford $2400 because I quit my shitty job with nothing lined up back in October. But, I still remember every tumblr post I've ever read about health insurance and the medical system and how you can negotiate down a bill. I am not looking forward to this process, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but the alternative is paying $2400, so I say the magic words: "Send me an itemized bill."

I kinda expected the guy to try and get me to pay up front, but he just says "Ok" and finishes up the process. I get discharged, go to the only open pharmacy at that time of night to get my Prednisone, have the pharmacist tell me the prescription isn't written right and he can't fill it, go home, and have a screaming sobbing meltdown because I have used up every single milligram of cope in my entire body. (I got my steroids eventually, and the Bell's palsy cleared up in a couple weeks.)

A few weeks later, I get the bill in the mail. I brace myself and open it...

$300.

Turns out, after going through insurance and processing and everything, they couldn't actually find $2400 worth of stuff to charge me for. Shocking! Who could have predicted!

I might have been able to argue it down even more, but I was fed up with entire thing, so I paid the $300 just to be fucking done with it. Sometimes the cheapest way to pay is with money.

What if I had paid that $2400 up front? Do I think they would have been like, "Oh, oops!" and refunded me $2k? Well, possibly, but I am not optimistic.

So, thank you to everyone who has ever posted about navigating the US healthcare system on tumblr. Because of you, I knew how to handle this situation even when I was tired and stressed.

Don't forget to ask for an itemized bill, folks.

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do you feel like you need coffee (or another caffeinated beverage) every morning?

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i think it's important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency

in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn't have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don't have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can't just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion