My guinea pigs have figured out where their kibble is 😂❤️

My small horse has also figured out the kibble situation

My small horse is currently curled up croissant style on top of one of my feet. I can’t feel my toes.

Apparently ICE now has agents posing as utility workers to get into people's homes. The electric and gas companies have posted information on how to tell if it's one of their workers, and numbers to call to confirm whether they've sent someone to do utility work on your house.

Stay safe, friends.

The Hiveworks Artist Guild has released a public statement alleging years of labor abuses, financial mismanagement, and misconduct at Hiveworks at the hands of Xellette “Xel” Velamist and Isabelle “Isa” Melançon. Read their full statement HERE

Attached image is their logo, no credit (artists asked to not be credited).

Hey remember the Tigers books one crowdfunding that Hiveworks handled years ago? I'm still waiting to be paid for it.

This was one of the many reasons why I left Hiveworks this year. Thank you for the artists guild, and cartoonist coop for the tremendous help during this time. Tigers would not habe survived without your help.

If you want to support the artists affected by Hiveworks mismanagement, a bunch of us made a collective called Chimera Comics!

My guinea pigs have figured out where their kibble is 😂❤️

My small horse has also figured out the kibble situation

Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.

more heads of state should vanish mysteriously into the ocean i miss that

more oligarchs and billionaires should vanish mysteriously into the ocean let's make it happen people 👏

why did my screenshot vanish mysteriously into the ocean

Gaud your first reblog turned into fucking onions

yeah the screenshot wasn't loading so i replaced it with a pile of onions

You couldn’t publish this today.

You’d have to hide it under seven layers of metaphor.

FFS Cap I KNOW D:

for those wanting to help venezuelans affected by the bombings through donations, these are currently the best ways to go. will add more links as more is set up

cruz roja (red cross)

doctors without borders

AFSC has launched a call to action! Stop illegal attacks to prevent another endless war

also adding Save The Children. whilst they haven't specifically put out a donation page, they do have a donation page for Venezuela in general!

world central kitchen

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

“Smallpox was.”

Fuck. That hit me hard.

death and the stars

I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse

One of my friends was a university lecturer who had worked in the lab where the final smallpox case escaped from a lab and killed Janet Parker, a medical photographer who worked in the room upstairs. He was a very funny man, always "on", but once a year when he taught the lecture about smallpox and about 'swiss cheese' risk management, he looked like a dead man walking.

I’m sure I’ve reblogged this before, and I’m sure I’ll reblog it again.

But scroll up and look at that first graph. Really look at it. For 2000 years, for every society for which we have data, roughly 1 in every 2 kids died. I have two kids – statistically, one of them would have died (to be fair, my daughter was medically complicated in utero and the medication that saved her was developed in the 1960s, so in my personal case, there’s no “statistically” about it). Do you have a sibling? One of you probably would have died. Are you from a big family with lots of siblings? Your parents would have probably buried more than one of you, assuming that both of your parents had managed to make it to adulthood in the first place.

And to be entirely fair, there are reasons beyond modern medicine why childhood death rates have dropped in the last 200 years. Obviously, medical care is not the only place where we’ve made significant advancements in ways to reduce mortality rates in children. Like, 100 years ago children were still sent to go work in mines and factories in an era where OSHA did not exist. The fact that we don’t do that anymore also helps.

But medicine is a HUGE contributing factor to the childhood mortality rate plummeting. And some of it is big, exciting stuff, where a child is obviously dying, and a doctor gets to be a hero with a life-saving medication or procedure. That’s what happened with my daughter. And in cases like those, it’s super easy to draw a line of cause and effect. Child’s life was in danger -> medication given -> child’s life no longer in danger. Medicine saved the child.

But it’s actually much more common for a child’s life to be saved by the quiet, everyday work that primary care pediatricians do. Some of that is education – SIDS rates were cut nearly in half in the first ten years of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, which was just doctors telling parents that it’s safer to put your infant to sleep on their back rather than their stomach. But a lot of it is vaccination. Like, A LOT a lot.

I went looking for exact numbers, and I found this study from 2024. And I just want to quote the findings section of their abstract:

Those numbers are huge. 154 million lives saved. 10.2 BILLION extra years of healthy lives. And the study didn’t even account for smallpox. Because as mentioned above – smallpox was. But the cause and effect line is much harder to draw. It’s easy to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles makes the baby cry, and potentially get a little sick for the next few days and these things all seem negative. It’s much harder to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles will keep them safe from a disease that they may or may not get in the future. And it much harder to see how stabbing my healthy baby with needles helps protect that other baby who is too sick to get stabbed.

But we are all being chased by a very slow tiger called “vaccine preventable disease.” And getting yourself/your children vaccinated is how we build tiger proof shields before the tiger ever gets close enough for us to notice him. Because if you can see the tiger, it’s already too late.

Without modern medicine, all four of the past four generations of my mom's family would have either died young, or never even been born. Including me.

--

My Great-Grandmother

I don't know much about my great-grandmother's childhood.

But I do know that when my grandmother was born, in 1934 in rural Eastern Europe, something went very, very wrong. Specifically, I believe, it was uterine rupture during childbirth, where the uterus tears open. Today, the risk of death is approximately between 1% and 6%. Then? It was much, much higher.

Luckily - very luckily - they managed to save both my great-grandmother's and my grandmother's lives. They then told my great-grandmother that she could never, ever get pregnant again, or she and almost certainly the baby would both die.

--

However, this was the 1930s in rural, extremely Catholic Eastern Europe. Birth control and condoms were not exactly widely available. This is why birth control is healthcare.

And tubal ligations ("tying your tubes") had only been invented 50 years earlier, in Ohio, and had not spread widely to rural Eastern Europe.

So, two years later, however it happened, she became pregnant again. The doctors told her, "If you have this baby, you will not survive, and the chances the baby will survive are incredibly, incredibly small."

This was the 1930s in rural, extremely Catholic Eastern Europe. Abortion is technically possible, but not legal. (Well, as far as I can tell. Regime changes, national borders moving, I don't speak the language, etc. etc.)

Her doctor convinces her, just barely, that she has a husband and a two-year-old daughter that need her. And that the baby almost certainly would not survive, either - she could not give her life to save the child, it would not work.

This is why abortion is healthcare.

As a result of that doctor, my great-grandmother's life is saved. She is excommunicated from the Catholic Church for choosing to save her own life. She gets to raise her daughter, my grandmother.

--

My Grandmother

If my great-grandmother had not survived, there is a significant chance that my grandmother would have died as a teenager, before my mom could ever have been born.

This is because, during the Communist takeover of the country, both of my great-grandparents were arrested and thrown in jail as political prisoners. It is the late 1940s, and the country is just barely out of WWII, during which it was subject to an incredibly violent and bloody Nazi takeover and puppet regime.

My grandmother had no family she could stay with. She was 14 years old, and alone in a boarding house.

My great-grandmother was held for two years (before she forced the regime to let her go in a story of massive badassery), at which point my grandmother is able to go back and live with her. My great-grandfather is held for seven years, before the brutal conditions and hard labor paralyzed his legs (temporarily, thankfully), and he was dumped on the roadside, eventually to be helped home by a series of passersby.

Would my grandmother have survived seven years by herself in a time and region of great political upheaval, most of those years as a teenager? I hope so. But there's no way to know for sure.

--

My grandmother, thankfully, managed to give birth to my mom and my aunt without any major complications, so far as I know. My mom is the first person in her family to be born in the United States.

Then, when my mom was oh five years old or so, I think, in the 1960s, my grandparents went to a neighborhood barbecue. There, due to an incredibly, incredibly shitty accident, an entire can of propane caught fire and was quite literally dropped on my grandmother's lap.

My grandmother was covered in severe third-degree burns all over her body. She was rushed to the hospital, where none of the doctors expect her to survive.

But, amazingly, amazingly, thanks to modern medicine, she did.

Thanks to burn care and surgical techniques and IV rehydration and antibiotics and high-grade anesthetics - none of which had existed even a hundred years prior - my grandmother survived, and would live for another forty years.

--

My Mom and My Grandmother

Unbeknownst to almost anyone at the time, the sleepy suburban community my grandparents have moved to was the site of a highly classified, highly experimental nuclear reactor with absolutely horrific safety practices, and the surrounding area is filled with radioactive contamination and cancers to this day.

My grandfather died of liver cancer in the early 1980s.

My grandmother was diagnosed with uterine cancer in the early 1990s. Thanks to modern medicine, they were able to (a) know what cancer is, (b) detect internal cancers like uterine cancer, and (c) safely perform the hysterectomy that saved my grandmother's life.

My mom was diagnosed with brain cancer in the early 2020s. And thankfully, thankfully, with state-of-the-art modern medicine, they were able to diagnose her cancer early and remove it completely.

We are celebrating one year cancer free for her tonight.

--

My Mom and Me

When I was born, I missed my due date by three weeks.

When my due date came around, my parents were waiting and waiting. And nothing happened, for three whole weeks. No water broken, no false contractions, no signs of labor - nothing.

After three weeks, when it was no longer safe to wait, they induced labor in my mom. Which worked to start labor, but not to induce childbirth. 40 hours later, I had still made little if any progress toward being born.

Ultimately, three weeks and forty hours late, I was delivered by C-section.

Cesarean section, or childbirth via abdominal surgery, has been around for at least two thousand years.

But it wasn't until the 1900s that Cesarean sections became something that the mother could also survive.

If it wasn't for modern medicine, my mom would not have survived - and depending on how things ultimately went, I might well not have either.

--

My Mom and My Sister

If my mom had died giving birth to me - one of the most common causes of death for women throughout all of human history, until the past hundred years or so - my sister would never have been born.

When my sister was born, just under three years after I was, she missed her due date by two weeks.

Once again, no sign of childbirth. So once again, they induced labor. And once again, inducing labor did not induce child birth.

This time, my mom was only in labor for 20 hours before they performed the C-section that delivered my sister into this world.

My mom and my sister are both alive and healthy today.

--

Me

When I was less than a year old, I came down with a 104 degree fever.

Fevers become fatal between 105 and 107 degrees, in humans.

So, my parents took me to the hospital, and the doctors rushed to treat me, with IVs and fever reducers and rehydration therapy and possibly antibiotics (I don't know if it was viral or bacteria) - none of which had existed just 100 years prior.

Thanks to modern medicine:

I survived.

--

This, or something like it, is the story of millions and millions of families all around the world.

In a world without modern medicine, far, far more than 50% of the people alive right now would never have been born.

Because survival is cumulative. For every single person saved - by modern medicine, by OSHA requirements, by the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and so much more - not only is their life preserved, but the lives of every single one of their descendants are able to come into being.

--

What Diseases Will We End Next?

I follow a lot of news for this blog, including medical news. I work in science communication, among other things. I was trained in research methods by a professor who specialized in the history and ethics of science. One of my closest friends has a degree in genetics and a master's in public health from one of the world's leading medical schools.

So, trust me when I say this:

We have regained and in fact exceeded the losses in public health, disease elimination, and vaccination rates caused by the COVID-19 pandemic across almost all ranges, diseases, and sectors. Less than six years after COVID-19 first appeared.

Barring a catastrophe on the scale of WWIII, it is incredibly, incredibly likely that in the next 50 years - if not much sooner - we will be able to say not just smallpox was, but also:

Polio was

Guinea worm disease was

Cervical cancer was

And, if we're very lucky

Tuberculosis was

and

HIV was

(HIV elimination sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x - there are so many different recent breakthroughs and avenues of hope I couldn't find just one link to summarize them all)

And, with the medical revolution brought about by the development of genetic sequencing, CRISPR, fMRI, MRNA vaccines, electron microscopes, immunology advances, and so much more,

Who knows how much more progress we will some day make?

There's no way to know, yet. And I so, so look forward to when we get to find out

I was literally sitting on the couch eating popcorn when this popped up in my feed!

new years eve!!! wooo!!! go crazy go wild! 🥳🥳🥳

add knitting on the lap and cooking shows instead of the fireplace and that's me.

Have a gay new year, y’all

we don't credit rebecca sugar enough for making the episode with the first gay wedding in a kids show extremely plot relevant so it could not be skipped or cut.

#rebecca sugar has gone on record saying that they knew from the beginning they wanted ruby and sapphire and they put every inch of planning#in to make sure that the studio could not take them out. sugar has said they’d compromised on hundreds of things they’d wanted for steven#so that they had the bargaining power specifically to keep ruby and sapphire’s relationship#and a number of ‘filler’ episodes were created just to establish counter-arguments that might come up when they pitched the wedding episode#the one that comes to mind is the episode about steven and connie getting lost in rose’s room steven’s central conflict about liking their#fave book series’ romantic ending was later weaponised when producer’s were like ‘oh but steven’s a boy he won’t be too interested in them#getting married’ sugar was able to be like ‘no. in this episode it’s established he loves romance and specifically weddings. and in these#episodes it’s shown how much steven cares about ruby and sapphire and their relationship and happiness. you cannot convince me this is not#good and necessary plot development#and they wrapped it up in the season finale and the big climactic point of the diamonds finally coming to attack earth to make the#episode integral to the series no skipping it without confusion. and had ruby wear a wedding dress because international censors took#advantage of her design to give her a masculine va#and sugar made certain that everybody knew This was a queer love story that an entire town supported and admired and that any child watchin#it at home would know they are not alone and that that support is waiting for them out there somewhere#sugar sacrificed the wider story they wanted to tell for that and it was a horrible decision to be given but they made the right choice

here’s to all the things you survived quietly and privately this year

here’s to all the things you survived loudly, to the dead horses you beat to death, to the shit that makes you scream

🥂

I would like to wish everyone an uneventful new year

It's only November and this is already getting notes again, you guys are really manifesting this energy early for the new year