By the way... Equine Epics, the artist behind SSO's loading screens and book covers before SSE stopped working with independent contractors (which she was) and started using 3D renders for their loading screens, has a store where you can buy her designs on various physical items. Think t-shirts, mugs, posters, notebooks, mousepads, so on and so forth. Some of the old SSO loading screens are on there, plus some other designs in the same style.
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genuinely a lot of you need to sit the fuck down and think about whether you actually support transfeminine people or you're just chasers. cause a lot of this site's support seems to be "uwu fuck me big strong dommy mommy" "I want a sexy trans goth gf so bad" etc etc and it's so gross. like i dont think attraction the inherent problem here or anything but when every single post asking "do you actually support trans women/transfeminine ppl?" has some chucklefuck in the notes going "haha yeah, I support her ON TOP OF ME!" it gets really obvious that you do not actually know how to support them without sexualizing them. and that's. really incredibly not okay.
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so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.
first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.
it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.
and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.
you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.
and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.
your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.
in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.
in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.
so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.
you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.
once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.
and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"
you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?
hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!
you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.
we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?
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Various ways in which I have underestimated my chickens (callout post to myself):
cognitive abilities (memory): I dropped some pasta while making a salad earlier and Louise was nearby so I opened the door and invited her into the kitchen to come clean up. At first she just meandered round the room glaring suspiciously at furniture because she's unfamiliar with the inside of my house, then I helped her locate the pasta and she pounced, but before she could eat all of them Morille came zooming across the room with Pandolf zooming behind her, which freaked out the hen who noisily flew-ran out of the room. She stayed away long enough that when I called her inside again I expected her to have forgotten all about the pasta, and that I would have to show it to her again, but instead she went straight for it, resolutely, having clearly kept this important goal in a corner of her teeny tiny mind this whole time.
hunting abilities: before getting chickens I didn't realise they actually hunted? (sometimes.) I pictured their search for food as quiet foraging, busily scratching the dirt for worms, but a) hens are never quiet they're always chattering to each other so already that part was wrong; b) when they find a worthy prey they hunt it with the fierce determination of a mountain lion. I once saw Dru chasing a grasshopper across half the pasture, running at full chicken speed and sometimes boosting herself with her wings Mario kart-style while the grasshopper desperately hopped for its life, until eventually she pounced with her beak wide open and managed to catch it mid-jump. With an action movie soundtrack this scene would have been every bit as intense and gripping as a cheetah hunting a gazelle in a wildlife documentary.
social abilities (empathy): one time Cordélia had a little bit of grass stuck in her eye and she kept rubbing her head with her claw to try and dislodge it unsuccessfully, and then she seemingly asked Dru for help, placing her face very close to the other hen's face like "see that stupid twig?" and Dru removed it with her beak. Again that's not something I would have expected from a hen... they're very disloyal creatures, so it was fascinating to see. They would stab their grandma for a dusty rigatoni but leaving a friend with something stuck in her eye is apparently a level of antisocial even chickens won't cross.
social abilities pt.2 (romantic sensibility): sometimes when the night sky is clear and you can see the Milky Way, instead of tucking themselves in at sundown like they usually do, they'll fly to the roof of their coop and sit there for a little while to watch the stars together. Okay this one may be a tiny bit less scientific an observation than the others but I don't have an explanation for this behaviour; I've never noticed anything wrong with their coop on these particular nights, the door is open, they can go in—and the girls don't seem stressed at all, if anything they look like they're having a nice peaceful moment and I feel bad for bothering them.
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