shadesofbrixton

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so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

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You can't just casually mention garlic cock man and not tell the story that's against the law

Are you sure you know what you’re asking of me? Are you sure? Well, okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This post is long and contains description of genital injury.

So as you’ll know, I worked three and a half long, hilarious years at an NHS sexual health and contraception clinic. I loved that job, and packed it in because the Tory cuts to the service meant running it became hideously untenably stressful, but that’s a story for another time. 

One of my duties at the clinic was to take phone calls. Patients liked me on the phone because I have a nice voice and I’m basically completely unflappable, and they felt happy to tell me things. A vital skill in the wang biz.

One day, a man called. This was not unusual.  “Hello,” he said. “I need to see one of your nurses about my, er, my chap.”

“Righty-oh sir,” I said, “are you experiencing any symptoms that you’re concerned about? It’s just a yes or no kind of question.”

“Well,” he said, and I instantly felt a dark and terrible energy pulsate down the phone.  “Well… sort of. But, uh, it’s not symptoms of anything, it’s just…”

I would come to regret what I said next. “Is everything all right, sir?”

“Well.”  There was a pause. I heard fidgeting.  “I got a yeast infection.”

Phew, easy peasy. Yeasties are easy to fix. I sounded reassuring and buoyant. “Well that’s nothing to worry about, sir - if you don’t want to get anything over the counter from the chemist, we can-”

“No, no, that’s not the problem. Listen -” he sounded serious. “Listen, I’ll just tell you what’s the matter, and you’ll see what I mean.”

This is where, whenever I tell this story, I like to ask the listener to play a little game with me. The game is “Where Would You Tap Out?”  I’d have already tapped out by going to the chemist and getting some Canestan.

“I didn’t want any chemicals on my chap, so I decided to go for a home remedy.  Internet said garlic was good for yeast infections, and I’ve got a lot of garlic, so I figured that’d be all right.”

I made sympathetic noises.  Home remedies for yeast infections are normal, and garlic is actually quite effective.  “Oh good,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure how much to use, but I figured, I have a lot of garlic usually, so I minced a whole bulb.”

The dark energy wafting down the phone intensified.

“I packed it all over my, you know, knob, made a poultice.  Packed it all over the head, like a hat.  But, uh, I wasn’t sure how to keep it on..”

I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to scare him off by sounding judgemental.

“..so I just duct taped it all on. Wrapped duct tape all round it.”

Still with us?  Tapped out yet?

“So er, that worked, kept it on nice and tight, and I left it on over night.”

Over night. All night with your cock mummified in garlic paste like some sort of fiendish chicken kiev.

“But, uh, when I took it off the next morning, well… garlic is…”

“Caustic,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Garlic is caustic.”

“Yeah! Yeah, it is!” he said, sounding cheerful that I, too, understood the Way of Garlic.  “So I unwrapped my dick and, well, it looked kind of like… melted.”

I sat, silent, on the phone. Already I’d missed 6 other calls, watching them sail by on the other line while this saga unfolded. 

“So I figured,” he continued, the terrible juggernaut barrelling unstoppably through this phallic disaster, “I should probably exfoliate it.”

“Exfoliate,” I echoed weakly.

“Yeah,” said this abject human disaster, misinterpreting my echolalic expression of horror as hearty encouragement.  “So I had a look around the kitchen -” he was in the kitchen for all this “- for anything I could use and got my brillo pad-”

For anyone not in the UK, that’s what we call one of these:

I must have betrayed myself and given a gasp of horror at that point, because he quickly reassured me - “No, no, no, it’s okay - it was a new one!” before going on to describe scrubbing the affected area to remove the alkaline chemical burn that he’d inflicted on his poor, blameless cock.

“So you want to come in because of… this?” I said, assuming he would want a new dick by this point.

“Oh no, no -” he said, jovial again. “No, it’s all fine - it just, my knob’s gone all… well, it kind of looks camo print now.  I was wondering if you could do anything about it looking camo print.”

No, sir. No, neither we nor anyone else can do anything about your camo print garlic cock mistake.

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I saw this post on tiktok and as soon as I opened the comments I started sobbing

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things actual women i know have done to survive when they're in need:

dumpster diving

charity resources (food bank, church, etc)

sold blood/plasma

sold furniture

sold car

sold clothes

borrowed money

shoplifting/stealing

signed up for studies that paid cash

sold drugs

paid housekeeping

paid childcare

gig driver for uber / etc.

factory work

amazon picker

crowdfunding

gone hungry

couch surfed

slept rough (in car, in public locations, etc.)

sex work (it is what it is)

things the male-written women in roleplay do to survive, period, the end:

sex work (and feel shame about it)

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someone mentioned waffle house in front of the baby and he said with sudden excitement "I want to go to waffle house" and we were all like "oh! yeah, sure, we can go there sometime! have you ever been there?" and he got this thousand yard stare and said "I don't think so" and then, after a slight pause, in a hushed almost-whisper, "is it shaped like a giant waffle"

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If you are so inclined, I think it would also be interesting if you put your answer and age in the tags. My habits have definitely changed--but I would say I give kudos to any fic/chapter I finish; a.k.a if I see the kudos button, its getting kudos, and I am in my early 30s

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The Murderbot tag is sadly still low on memes, so heres my contribution to the cause. (sorry if someone else has done these ones already)

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the best commission client you can ever get is always going to be this specific guy: he wants you to draw an oc he's had for like 16 years, he has a folder of references, she's like a catgirl who is also a magician or something, he has 3 paragraphs of her lore that he gives you + an exact pose, he's extremely polite and tells you to take as long as you need, and then he tips like $160 on top of the asking price at the end. and he always looks exactly like this

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Mulder will be trapped in a train car with a bomb and an assassin and still thinking of lines to amuse Scully

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Aside from my very important wagon building this weekend, I also helped with a wood firing at the studio! I didn't have ware in the kiln but there's something halfway holy about maintaining the fire in the kiln for three straight days, feeding it slow and steady to 1300 degrees Celsius. There were thirty potters working together and in shifts, camping and potlucking and feeding the fire. Soon it will cool enough to find out what survived.

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if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

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at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress