toffie-the-fox

[toffie-the-fox]

Coming into a fandom late

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every year I post this meme and every year people get more mad at me than they did the previous year

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Carnival glass lookin hair

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thank god im aromantic. i think everyone should get more aromantic

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The sun is a deadly Lazer and I am it's victim

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i dont WANT pride months to be over,

on the other hand...

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PSA: Tumblr DMs Art SCAM

This scam has been widespread for a while now and many of you likely already know about it, but I've seen a few people fall for it recently so I thought I'd make a PSA explaining the scam and how to recognize and avoid it. Please share this around so that more people can see it!

How the scam tends to work:

If you post art here on Tumblr, you may have received comments that read "Hello, do you offer commissions? Dm me!" or something similar. Unfortunately, these comments are scams.

If you DM the scammer, they will request artwork of something fairly generic, such as a family pet, before asking for contact information such as your email or PayPal.

If you give them this information, they will then send you a fraudulent email claiming to be from PayPal that claims the scammer accidentally sent you too much money. They will then request that you "refund" the extra money that they sent. In reality, the scammer has not actually sent you any money, and they are hoping to trick you into sending them your own money so that they can cut contact and run off with it.

Please keep in mind that the scammer's tactics may vary from case to case! I've seen some emails that claim you don't have the right kind of PayPal account to make or accept the transfer, or that the amount being sent is greater than your account's max limit. Keep an eye out for scams regardless of an email's content! Please also note that, while many of the indicators I will mention are not proof of a scam on their own, a combination of these indicators should definitely raise suspicion.

How to recognize and avoid these scams:

If you offer commissions, have your request form readily available on your blog and only accept commissions through that form.

Check a potential commissioner's blog for activity. Scam blogs will often have very little activity, and that activity will often be very recent. They may also have generic profile pictures or usernames, such as selfies or first/last names followed by a few numbers.

If you believe that you have been contacted by a scammer, do not respond. Instead, block their account and report them to Tumblr staff.

If you receive an email claiming that there has been an issue with a commission:

DO NOT CLICK ANY LINKS IN THE EMAIL. This is the easiest way for a scammer to access your information or install malicious software on your device.

DO NOT send any personal information such as your legal name, bank name/numbers, passwords, etc via email.

Carefully check the sender's email address, as well as the grammar, capitalization, and punctuation of the email itself. Scam emails often have strangely formatted and broken wording, and the sender's address will be very slightly different from the actual address of the person or company they are attempting to impersonate.

If the email urges you to act immediately to avoid consequences such as losing your PayPal account or encountering legal trouble, it is almost definitely a scam. Scammers use urgency in order to make you panic and think less critically before acting.

If you believe that you have been scammed or are in the process of being scammed:

Cease all contact with the scammer immediately. Ignore any frantic messages or threats they may send you.

Record information such as the scammer's usernames and email addresses, as well as screenshots of any conversations you've already had with them. These should be shared with any customer service representatives you contact.

If they have requested money, or you have already sent them money, contact PayPal customer support through their official website and explain the situation to them. Again, DO NOT click any links in the scammer's emails themselves even if they claim to link to PayPal's website!

Block and report the scammer on any site that they have contacted you through.

Stay safe out there, fellow artists! <3

[toffie-the-fox]

NOTICE: As more and more fanfic writers are using generative AI for their works (you uncreative dweebs), I hereby swear on everything I hold dear that I have not and will NEVER use generative AI in ANY of my written work. Everything I post will be organically and creatively my own.

[toffie-the-fox]

Comic #261: - Growing up Ace - Website links: here!   Being pride month I wanted to dig a little deeper into what it was like growing up Asexual, too many people gatekeep and suggest that an absence of something doesn’t qualify as queer.  I was definitely treated as abnormal or broken by well meaning friends & strangers alike.

[toffie-the-fox]

to whoever needs to hear this: give yourself the gift of a new pair of scissors. I give you permission to get new scissors. buy a new pack of scissors, even. it is okay to throw away those rusty dull pieces of shit and take $8 out of your budget to buy new ones.

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"The first modern attempt at transferring a uterus from one human to another occurred at the turn of the millennium. But surgeons had to remove the organ, which had become necrotic, 99 days later. The first successful transplant was performed in 2011 — but even then, the recipient wasn’t immediately able to get pregnant and deliver a baby. It took three more years for the first person in the world with a transplanted uterus to give birth. 

More than 70 such babies have been born globally in the decade since. “It’s a complete new world,” said Giuliano Testa, chief of abdominal transplant at Baylor University Medical Center.

Almost a third of those babies — 22 and counting — have been born in Dallas at Baylor. On Thursday, Testa and his team published a major cohort study in JAMA analyzing the results from the program’s first 20 patients. All women were of reproductive age and had no uterus (most having been born without one), but had at least one functioning ovary. Most of the uteri came from living donors, but two came from deceased donors.

Fourteen women had successful transplants, all of whom were able to have at least one baby.  

“That success rate is extraordinary, and I want that to get out there,” said Liza Johannesson, the medical director of uterus transplants at Baylor, who works with Testa and co-authored the study. “We want this to be an option for all women out there that need it.”

Six patients had transplant failures, all within two weeks of the procedure. Part of the problem may have been a learning curve: The study initially included only 10 patients, and five of the six with failed transplants were in that first group. These were “technical” failures, Testa said, involving aspects of the surgery such as how surgeons connected the organ’s blood vessels, what material was used for sutures, and selecting a uterus that would work well in a transplant. 

The team saw only one transplant fail in the second group of 10 people, the researchers said. All 20 transplants took place between September 2016 and August 2019.

Only one other cohort study has previously been published on uterus transplants, in 2022. A Swedish team, which included Johannesson before she moved to Baylor, performed seven successful transplants out of nine attempts. Six women, including the first transplant recipient to ever deliver a baby back in 2014, gave birth.

“It’s hard to extract data from that, because they were the first ones that did it,” Johannesson said. “This is the first time we can actually see the safety and efficacy of this procedure properly.”

So far, the signs are good: High success rates for transplants and live births, safe and healthy children so far, and early signs that immunosuppressants — typically given to transplant recipients so their bodies don’t reject the new organ — may not cause long-term harm, the researchers said. (The uterine transplants are removed after recipients no longer need them to deliver children.) And the Baylor team has figured out how to identify the right uterus for transfer: It should be from a donor who has had a baby before, is premenopausal, and, of course, who matches the blood type of the recipient, Testa said...

“They’ve really embraced the idea of practicing improvement as you go along, to understand how to make this safer or more effective. And that’s reflected in the results,” said Jessica Walter, an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who co-authored an editorial on the research in JAMA...

Walter was a skeptic herself when she first learned about uterine transplants. The procedure seemed invasive and complicated. But she did her fellowship training at Penn Medicine, home to one of just four programs in the U.S. doing uterine transplants. 

“The firsts — the first time the patient received a transplant, the first time she got her period after the transplant, the positive pregnancy test,” Walter said. “Immersing myself in the science, the patients, the practitioners, and researchers — it really changed my opinion that this is science, and this is an innovation like anything else.” ...

Many transgender women are hopeful that uterine transplants might someday be available for them, but it’s likely a far-off possibility. Scientists need to rewind and do animal studies on how a uterus might fare in a different “hormonal milieu” before doing any clinical trials of the procedure with trans people, Wagner said.

Among cisgender women, more long-term research is still needed on the donors, recipients, and the children they have, experts said.

“We want other centers to start up,” Johannesson said. “Our main goal is to publish all of our data, as much as we can.”"

-via Stat, August 16, 2024

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Reblog this post to ask mutuals to tell you their weirdest theory about u

EDIT: Fair warning this post is cursed and predictions are 7/10 times correct, play at own risk

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How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox

*deep, calming breath* On the plus side, the steps at that link were very clear and easy to follow.

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the human mind is prone to catastrophizing when left unoccupied. And that’s why it’s important to always have a little Blorbo to rotate in your head. It acts as a protective charm of sorts to redirect your imagination away from harmful spirals

thoughts without Blorbo: oh my god I was so cringe in seventh grade why did I do that

thoughts with Blorbo: I haven’t considered the interactions with bleebus; I must rectify this immediately

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I think the song Confessions of a Rotten Girl by Sawtowne is FTO Devin coded.

I think he should have religious guilt.

See the way he acts in the bloopers of the Salode episode don't help either. He is just constantly yearning throughout half of the season.

[toffie-the-fox]

3 components of worldbuilding:

1. The author’s kinks

2. The author’s power fantasy

3. The author’s political agenda

Plot and logic optional