I have scavenged furniture for years. Furnished houses and apartments and squats and warehouses and busses.

Have never knock on wood had bedbugs.

Learn what they and their eggs look like and inspect the shit you’re grabbing first.

Once passed on a really nice couch in a nice neighborhood, because I spotted a half of an ass of one.

The stained old victorian style couch in the winco parking lot was fine though, lol

Four exposures!

puffs pipe Three brain cells

still runs after her

So! There’s a place in Philly called the Mutter Museum. Filled with all manner of human specimens of various ailments.

Absolutely fascinating. Like $20 admission. 100% worth it.

A couple of the pieces on display are the skulls and jaws of mouth breathers. I don’t know if they had an issue that required surgery that wasn’t available in the 1800’s, or if it was just bad habits, but.

Literally changes the shape of your bones. And therefore your face.

Fucking wild.

There’s a ‘free zone’ in Belize that ahh… It’s like a pustulant blister of capitalism. It’s gross. Feels gross. Everywhere that isn’t actively selling shit is a literal garbage dump, and there’s a ton of building carcasses with faded signs falling off of them. Looks like in its heyday it was at best a sleazy strip mall.

man we are all gonna end up in Gain Ground

no

You know, fairy tales for children generally involved horror, murder, dismemberment and worse.

To get the kids to be aware of the actual horrors of the world, which are worse.

Hearing a story about, or seeing a fictional or even actual video of some of the fucked up shit people do to each other for stupid fucking reasons is still not actually traumatic.

Experiencing depictions of such shit should absolutely bother you. Should absolutely put you a bit on your toes, in real life, on the daily.

So you can avoid those situations. So you know shit like that’s possible, and fucked up fuckers have done it and will do it, and they’ll think they’re right the whole time.

Because when it does actually happen, that’s when it is traumatic, and not just being smart and aware

Ruining your day isn’t ruining your life.

Life sucks. Get a helmet

eh, shit i’ve read and seen on a screen, while it may have bothered me at the time, isn’t actual trauma, which does not fucking ask permission.

And yeah, there’s media that triggers that-but it’s media. I close it. I leave. I can. it’s not actually happening to me, right now.

I think it’s a decent notion, to annotate. It’s for sure people trying to be good for one another, and that’s laudable.

But. As I said, the worst of the world does not ask permission, and I think enforcement of content tags or what have you would likely lead directly to even more oppression and censorship in the storm of that which we are currently in.

I will say ao3’s pretty on point about it, from what i’ve seen-it’s voluntary, and it’s actually voluntary. How you keep that across the ages is anyone’s guess

Sounds like a fuckin banger of an existence

whoa there einstien, jam your big fat brain back down on this dollar shaped toast

*not a dig at you, btw. It’s the obvious answer, I just hate the world right now

ugh. Living in vehicles can work-I’ve done so most of my life-but not in a fucking toyota corrola

So your parents are landlords.

and are raking in the rewards of their tenants paying rent

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when i was younger and stupid and in the (glass) closet i was dating the son of a pharmacologist. this man had made millions developing medications. he was fond of me and privately told me i was too funny and smart to be dating boys.

he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are “for women” - will not be clinically tested on my body.

the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved.

to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant.

once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about “the effects of New Medication on the body.”

instead, the trial would fail - the results would be “the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient.”

it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus.

that’s how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.

at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this -

• that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.

i remember him shrugging. “that’s not to say it doesn’t happen,” he said. my ears were ringing.

i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant.

when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.

how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment.

how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.

it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to “save” our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren’t we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can’t get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually. who cares about you and your actual safety. think about what you could be carrying.

Freedom is something you take. Whether for yourself or another, and it’s always from some fucking duechbag who wants slaves and not equals

You are a fucking chode

Well I don’t know, but have you had six separate $150+ appointments with your doc who asks you questions ranging from “well what does your boyfriend of two weeks want” to “are you really sure?” to “we’re going to have to ask you attend this six week course on why it’s important to produce a legacy before we can sign off on this. Then we’ll see what your insurance has to say”

if they assume he’s the inferior parent, why do the men win custody almost every fucking time they try, whereas the woman involved gets the kid dumped on her, completely, with no child support orders unless she fights for them, anytime the guy doesn’t want anything to do with the kid he knocked her up with?