ultragenta

[ultragenta]

in 50 years the mcelroy brothers are still doing their podcast and they release an episode ending it early "because justin is getting really old and we don't want to have to do a sad one" and then justin starts coughing a lot and everyone starts talking faster

[ultragenta]

hey so if you have secret prejudiced thoughts about an oppressed group. and you feel guilty about those thoughts. to be honest it isn’t very swagilicious when you go out of your way to turn a member of that oppressed group into your own personal confessional booth. I don’t need to know that you were secretly ableist about your wheelchair using coworker, actually. I don’t need to know that you used to hate trans people. you don’t need to make that my problem please

[ultragenta]

This is a hard thing to hear but i genuinely say it with care and best wishes:

Keep using your brain and trying that hard thing no matter how foggy. Feel stupid! It's ok! I promise you are not stupid. I promise your brain will appreciate it. And that with time it will be valuable that you tried.

It's so easy to lose a whole week to brain fog. But your brain and body don't just stop existing that week (though it can feel that way). It's so important to try to incorporate puzzles anyway. Cook a meal from a scratch, do a jigsaw, the wordle, sudoku, use your other hand, learn a new card game, watch a brand new show, do simple math equations, write words backwards, learn a new language (or even just random phrases from a few), play a podcast, read a fun article or magazine, try a new creative project. Something! To help you feel better longer and keep your brains synapses synapsing.

Find a way to push yourself into it. Ask a friend to do it with you, set a timer, build it into your routine, have a bunch of fun games on your phone, puzzles by the bed, set your google to open straight to wordle.

TO CLARIFY: neuroplasticity is magic. And CONTRARY to prior belief it does not just stop after like 25. The brain can recover in exceptional ways so if you feel behind, or feel like you lost so much of what you knew due to a deep spell of illness or depression or injury; it's never too late. Never too late to nuture your brain to a better state of health.

So have a glass of water, take a deep breath and please join me in feeling really stupid trying to finish a "simple" puzzle and know we are all doing a very good job. ❤️

[ultragenta]

if you can accept that there will be trans men who look virtually indistinguishable from cis women, than you can accept that there will be trans women who look virtually indistinguishable from cis men. either by choice or by circumstance. and if you can't respect them the same as you would anybody else, you need to examine why that is

[ultragenta]

in order to unlearn racism u have to be willing to accept that u are racist. it’s not a bad thing to want to change for the better. it’s not a bad thing to say hey, the way i’ve been acting is racist and i don’t want to be racist anymore. when people of color are telling u ways in which u have been racist, it’s actually not cool to brush it off and say, well i didn’t mean it that way.. u actually have to make an effort to stop doing those things if u want to be able to actually say ur anti-racist. u can’t just say ur not racist because u don’t wanna be seen as racist. that’s not how unlearning racism works.

[ultragenta]

I got a mental health wellness app and decided my first entry was going to be about a videogame I played that day

[ultragenta]

This article is so damning. What seems at first about the suggestion that there's something wrong on an individual level with the health profiles of adults in the US that should very much not be the case, it ends up throwing a lens on the fact that a high mortality rate amongst our nations non-senior population suggests one thing:

America is literally a dangerous shithole to live in.

Excerpt under the cut.

"About 3 million Americans die every year. Compared with other rich countries, we die at an alarmingly higher rate: One-quarter of those deaths wouldn’t have occurred if America were only as deadly as its peers.

Zoom in, and things get even more concerning: Among Americans younger than 65, almost half of deaths wouldn’t happen if we had a death rate that matched our peers. Among those aged 25 to 44, a group we call “early adults,�� it’s 62 percent—nearly two out of three deaths at those early ages.

We’re mortality experts, and these facts stem from an analysis we did of death rates in 22 countries from 1980 through 2023 (the last year with reliable data). When we set out to do this research, we expected to find a story about the COVID-19 pandemic. America’s pandemic experience was much worse than that of our peers, with three U.S. deaths for every two in peer countries. Nonelderly Americans in particular were hit harder than nonelderly populations in other rich countries. This disadvantage only grew as vaccinations became available but were adopted by Americans at lower rates.

But what surprised us was that, from today’s postpandemic vantage point, the American health disadvantage doesn’t look like a pandemic story at all. The U.S. mortality disadvantage has been growing at about the same rate for years, and while it spiked during COVID-19, it still continues to rise.

Here’s another way to put this: In 2023 there were about 700,000 “missing Americans”—those who died in 2023 but would be alive if they had lived somewhere else. And that 700,000 is almost exactly the number that we could’ve predicted back in 2019, based solely on prepandemic trends. COVID and relatively low vaccine adoption are a problem for Americans. But our country seems to be, at a deeper level, a deadly place to live. What’s more, all of the studies we have stop before Donald Trump began his second term with enormous cuts to medical and health research and, now, to Medicaid.

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There is a heated—and productive—debate about exactly why the U.S. is so much worse than our peers at keeping its populace alive. One influential theory focuses on deindustrialization and the way that Americans without a college degree in particular have been left behind. Another focuses on the way that social safety nets in this country, such as for unemployment, sickness, and pensions, remain small and insufficient compared with other wealthy countries. Others point to problems in the U.S. health care system, such as uninsurance, underinsurance, and high co-payments and deductibles, and to underlying trends in chronic diseases that might be caused by nutritional policy failures. Still others highlight America’s permissive gun laws and the large amount of time we spend in our cars.

These theories, which aren’t mutually exclusive, all predate COVID-19 and offer plausible explanations for the growing U.S. mortality disadvantage.

[ultragenta]

Saw this on Pinterest but wanted to share bc actually I have had a physio recommend this to me and it’s been amazing!

Walking backwards strengths the muscles around your knee (esp the quadriceps, which you will definitely feel if you do this) but doesn’t put the same strain on the joint as forward walking or running. It’s very good for your balance, coordination and patellar tracking, all important to reduce knee pain, support your knees and can help rehab knee injuries.

I do it on a gym treadmill, usually at 1.2 km/h (but I’ve seen anywhere from 0.8-1.6 km/h recommended, which is like 0.5-1.0 mph for the Americans). You can start with a very slight incline and then slowly increase it 5% as you get more comfortable, and to help engage the muscles. I usually do this for 5 to 10 minutes, 3-4 times a week. My understanding is that you can also do it outside, either on flat or sloped ground, because just walking backwards itself is useful as hell (the incline is just useful to engage muscles more as you get more used to it)

If you have even a spare 20 minutes a week, this is seriously useful to support your knees, because there is nothing worse than injuring one

[ultragenta]

Me to me when I repeat past mistakes when I know better

[ultragenta]

““The mannerisms that help define gender - the way in which people walk,swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space - are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.””

— Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

[ultragenta]

when i first moved in with my roommate, she was constantly throwing up and attributed it to some unexplainable chronic issue. after a year with me here, she's learned a lot about proper food preparation and storage, as well as having me sort of on top of managing groceries, and she almost never gets sick like that anymore.

anyway i think that woman might be one of a kind but just in case she's not: if you find yourself having frequent tummy troubles with no clear explanation... maybe just. try refreshing your food safety knowledge. (also don't forget to wash your water bottle). like, chances are you've been doing everything right and there's some other reason. but there's a nonzero chance that something you assumed was common sense is actually incorrect and you've been repeatedly making yourself sick.

people think kitchen management is totally easy and intuitive (prolly something to do with it being degraded as "women's work" but i digress) but there's science to food safety. and the people who raised you may have failed to teach you properly, whether through negligence or through not knowing everything themselves. it can't hurt to double check your knowledge here, just in case.

[ultragenta]

iDigBio's amazing new chatbot starts lying literally immediately

it took one (1) question for the amazing new agentic LLM iChatBio to start fabricating information out of nothing. I asked for a list of clam shrimp in Florida, and it skipped a whole genus. when I told it that it was missing one, it confidently replied that Cyzicus also lives in Florida (it doesn't).

Here also is the GBIF listing for a specimen of Paralimnetis, the genus it skipped. There are no exact coordinates, which is probably why the robot skipped it, but I would hope a person could properly interpret "Florida" to mean Florida:

I sent these screenshots to the team, I wonder if they will respond?

[ultragenta]

the astonishing magic of a percentage symbol, capable of transforming a population of several million living breathing working people with families and histories and aspirations and music and food cultures and expansive expressive languages and artistic traditions into a 1 or a 2 we don't have to think about

[ultragenta]

the biggest lesson im learning is that nothing is as extreme or as permanent as our emotions convince us they are. nothing is certain and things are always fluctuating and there are always exceptions and there are always mistakes. there is always pain and there is always love. everything is a delicate touch away from changing

[ultragenta]

okay so if you need more veggies/fruit, protein or fibre (bc most people do NOT eat enough) in your diet but you struggle to do so, hear me out:

look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly

i can guarantee there is a woman with a cooking blog out there who has found away to pack a bunch of vegetables into a surprisingly delicious little snack for her kids. this process has never failed me when i feel like i am not eating enough fruits and veggies. my entire flat is eating spinach muffins at the moment, which doesn’t sounding particularly appealing to most people and yet somehow. they’re delicious.

[ultragenta]

ilove when someone posts about an issue that's supposedly plaguing society and it's painfully obvious that said issue is not a thing that matters if youre not on tiktok

[ultragenta]

me: i really dont get why non-floridians lose their fucking shit when they see a beach. it’s just sand and water. who gives a fuck

also me: *sees one (1) mountain* ohohohoohohohohoh holy SHIT holy fuck that’s a big fuCKING ROCK