I don’t know who needs to hear this but it is actually normal for your pussy juices to bleach your dark colored underwear sometimes. It’s a sign your vagina is maintaining a healthy level of acidity and it’s nothing to worry about and not a sign of bad hygiene. I’m making this post because I mentioned this happening to me once in high school during a conversation with a group of girls about gynecological complaints and one of them made me feel disgusting about it but there is nothing wrong with it and it’s just a sign I have good PH. So, if it happens to you, do not feel ashamed.
I doubt you wanted a serious answer to this but many common compounds (including some clothing dyes) are PH sensitive and can change color when exposed to an acid, like when you add lemon juice to butterfly peaflower tea.
(My underwear bleached neon pink and I was baffled.)
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
“What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?” - But the Americas and Australia weren’t inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that’s because this isn’t a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it’s a metaphor for finding out how much of a person’s religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
“What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?” - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don’t have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers… - Yes, but that’s all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like “Death of the most obvious metaphor” - If you couldn’t reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It’s a trend I’ve seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.
I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I’ve lost count of the times now where I’ve seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone “Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author’s inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people.”
There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that’s because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you’ve projected onto it. If that’s how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn’t solely about real world historical events? It’s clearly not for you
And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don’t like the way people have started going “I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I’m ever so smart” and acting like they’re the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.
Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we’re going way too far to one end of that spectrum
The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they’d love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can’t enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can’t, because they don’t want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.
And like. What an incredible shame. That we’ll lose that, because they’re already afraid of the “I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY” crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with “So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?”, never stopping to actually think “Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist.”
Anyway sorry I’ve rambled here, not sure how coherent I’m being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.
“Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft’s substantial AI investment.
Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it’s not making much money from its AI products. That’s because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports.”
-via Extreme Tech, December 10, 2025
The ads I see for Copilot and Gemini always seem really cringe to me, because they look like they were made by people who couldn’t actually come up with a situation where they would need the thing they’re supposed to be advertising as essential.
i went into the tattoo parlor and i was like ‘i scheduled a piercing’ and they were like ‘piercing’s are upstairs’ so i went up the stairs and there was a barber shop and i said i’d scheduled a piercing and they said ‘upstairs’ so i went up the stairs and there was a second tattoo shop and it was rly classic trad with two cartoon buff guys and they didn’t even let me talk, they said, ‘upstairs’ before i asked and then i went to the fourth floor and it was one single room the size of a closet with the piercer and the apprentice in the doorway like 👫🙂🙂
For healing that stems from being unsafe, out of control and/or powerless: yeah, this definitely checks out, feeling safe, in control and capable is an essential part of healing.
Unfortunately, that experience isn’t always available. If you’re in a country at war, or an undocumented migrant in the current US, for example, feeling genuinely safe is not going to be on the table and the cause of that unsafety is beyond your control.
In such situations, you can trick your nervous system a bit to give it some of those experiences anyway.
For experiences of safety: try to cover your basic physical needs if possible (food, drink, warmth, rest, caring for physical injuries) and try to build routine, rhythm and familiarity into your life if possible. That could be making tea every morning, or praying at set times, or playing your favorite song every evening before bed. Whatever fits your situation: routines are gonna help your nervous system feel stable and less constantly unsafe.
For experiences of control and capableness: try to regularly do little things that affirm your sense of accomplishment. Fixing your bike, doing a crossword puzzle, learning to play a new song on your guitar, putting on make-up in a way that makes you feel stunning, finish a level of a video game. Again: whatever is available to you. Little moments of ‘fuck yeah i did this’ help your nervous system feel like you are capable of things and less constantly powerless.
This isn’t going to totally save you from the constant stress of your situation, but it can reduce the worst of the stress and make life a little more manageable in the situation that you find yourself in.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite newspaper quotes from the expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022:
