fun medicine fact: sometimes eating more salt can lower high blood pressure!

for people with low blood volume, high blood pressure can be caused by the heart trying way too hard to pump their tiny shitty pathetic amount of blood!

for example: many patients with untreated POTS (and other forms of dysautonomia) are, at all times, missing on average a standard coca-cola can's worth of blood! this is why blood volume expansion (consuming salt+water, having saline IVs) is so critical to POTS and POTS-like dysautonomia. patients literally do not have enough blood, they pee it out faster than they can keep it, and that can result in normal blood pressure, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, and any combination and anything in between.

source: forget which specific dysautonomia international medical conference presentation I am thinking about but they talk about blood volume vs blood pressure constantly, especially during "POTS/dysautonomia/orthostatic hypotension 101" type presentations. also vimeo presentations outside of their medical conferences. blood volume is some of the most basic shit about dysautonomia

also I personally have blood volume issues and I can eat more salt than you and look really sexy doing it.

dysautonomiainternational.org

vimeo.com/dysautonomia

your doctor can be the person you trust the most in the world

you can think they are genuinely doing everything they can

and they can get on the ground on their hands and knees sobbing and tell you that your symptoms or conditions have no treatment, and that they super promise they looked, and they could wail while they say they wish they could take your pain away from you but there are no more tests or treatments anywhere

and still be lying to an extent where googling your own damn medical conditions or symptoms will readily pop up a shitload of already existing, well-known treatments that can boil down to a pill or few a day. or that diagnosis relies on some specific but relatively straightforward tests

and in fact I have heard probably hundreds of stories that boil down to exactly that. if your doctor tells you the only treatments for POTS are salt or propranolol or exercise, or none at all, or that it can be ruled out without a tilt table or nasa lean test (especially if they say "your blood tested negative for POTS" when there literally is no POTS blood test), your doctor fucking SUCKS

by the way, back when my doctors promised I had POTS and nothing more severe: my actual tilt table test results showed orthostatic hypotension and autonomic failure, conditions that are significantly more deadly, from the very beginning. I had orthostatic hypotension and bradycardia (low heart rate) instead of just heart rate go up, which was a big indicator that I was fucking dying. on the tilt table my blood pressure was 70/30. I almost died multiple times due to misdiagnosis and lack of appropriate treatment and my length and quality of life will now forever be worse because of how long it took me to get treatment. I can never get my life back and will likely never be able to be fully independent in the way others can, and I will likely remain in pain every single day for the rest of my life while my conditions continue to get worse over time, as has been the case for a very long time.

DO NOT BECOME RUNE. I COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED FROM MOST OF THE HELL I WAS FORCED TO LIVE. GET ACCESS TO YOUR MEDICAL CHART AND LOOK AT IT ASAP

when you ask a knowledge keeper something and they say "good question"

No it's actually just that this post was specifically about me learning from older Native people whose role in the community is often referred to as a knowledge keeper in English, for their extensive cultural wisdom and knowledge. I'm okay with other people relating to the concept as well but please refrain from making fun of how we cherish those who are a core part in resisting genocide.

Jews and their rabbis 🤝First Nations/Native Americans and their knowledge keepers

Discussions of trans women in sports often focus on elite/professional sports which honestly I find it hard to care about but the more common scenario of “we’re going to legally ban a high school girl from playing sports with her friends because she’s trans” is just profoundly evil

i remember when utah's (republican) governor ended up vetoing a law banning transgender students from playing high school sports when he looked at the numbers, and there were only four trans students in the state playing sports at all. he released a clumsily worded but surprisingly compassionate statement about the decision.

of course, it didn't amount to much. they overrode his veto. it's just so cartoonishly evil. an entire state's political body so desperate to terrorize this one little trans girl.

watching a video about this cargo ship that blew up in texas in the 40’s and it’s like . i know that with a lot of incidents especially older ones like this the reason that the safety standards were so shitty was because they literally did not know that these kinds of disasters COULD happen (and in many cases these disasters are what MADE the safety standards better) but sometimes you just learn about this shit and you think. how could all these people be so stupid

- cargo of the ship consisted of twine (flammable) peanuts (flammable, oily) and cotton (FLAMMABLE) from houston and POST WAR AMMUNITION (OH MY GOD) FROM CUBA

- additional cargo they were picking up in texas city was LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE that the dock workers described as being ANOMALOUSLY WARM UPON BEING LOADED INTO THE SHIP ??????

- small fire breaks out in cargo hold, instead of putting it out with water that could damage the cargo the captain decides to close all the hatches to try to make the cargo hold airtight and smother the fire (stupid but you can kind of understand how they got there)

- the heat of the trapped smoke in the cargo hold instead causes the aforementioned LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE to undergo a chemical reaction and turn into nitrous oxide, massively increasing the pressure inside of the airtight hold

- one of the hatch covers fails

- mfw all the pressure in the cargo hold is released at once causing an explosion that fucking levels everything in the port within 2000 feet

- mfw the shockwave shatters windows up to a hundred miles away

- mfw on-fire twine and peanuts and fucking grenades are raining down over texas city

- mfw some of the pieces of the ship got launched into the sky faster than the speed of sound

- mfw they found the ship’s anchor inside of a ten foot wide crater over a mile and a half away

- mfw this was one of the largest and most devastating non-nuclear explosions in world history

- mfw this could have been avoided if they’d just taken the L and put the fire out with water

also worth a mention: the SECOND boat that exploded in a very similar manner the next day which was an even more violent explosion, but less devastating because most of the port was. you know. already leveled and evacuated

someone running rescue and recovery after the FIRST boat exploded noticed that the second boat's cargo was on fire and reported it....and this just went. ignored. for several hours. until someone was like "oh shit better get this under control" and tried to move the boat to no avail and they just gave up and evacuated

next day it started raining glowing-hot metal boat chunks all over the city. AGAIN.

Today's problematic ships are the Grandcamp (first explosion) and High Flyer (second explosion).

https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2013/04/the-texas-city-disaster-the-explosions-of-the-ss-grandcamp-the-ss-high-flyer/

#othin the link seems to be dead :(

huh. let's try this again

tom felton saying he’s “not attuned” to JKR’s politics (despite the fact that she’s made it her entire personality) fucking loser.

we love you daniel, rupert, and emma!!!

Cannot consumption of AI be considered an art expression?

Of course it can, and performance art is art, but I feel like it's important to know that the art being eaten was a series of AI generated images reflecting the artist's experience of AI psychosis and commenting on the way that AI use changes the users' interactions with the world. The images were generated by someone who has been using image generation tools in their art since 2017 and who was educated as an artist using traditional techniques.

The piece that the protester ate was made by an MFA student and wasn't an attempt to "pass off" generated images themselves as art, the art was the presentation of the images and their sequence and variety (there's an element of obsessive iteration visible even in the remaining images - an empty room, the same room with different light, the same room with a smiling woman on the bed, the same woman standing in different poses, which speaks to me of someone furiously attempting to construct a comforting reality and finding the tools in your hands inadequate, but that's just my interpretation of what remains).

For the record, Nick Dwyer was the MFA student whose art was eaten. "The intersection of art and AI" is a huge theme in his work.

Like. He made a ceramic sculpture of an AI girlfriend, then generated an AI image of the sculpture and called them one and two in a series.

He made ceramic "phones" and inscribed them with cuniform and ai image hieroglyphics that he carved into the clay.

I've talked a lot about how I think that AI has a place in the creation of art and I think Dwyer's work is genuinely a perfect example of someone using AI to create art.

Again, I also think that performance art is art and eating a portion of the gallery piece is certainly an interesting statement, but I wonder if the protestor would be as outraged by the ceramic phones with AI images engraved on them. How much human touch or human intention does "slop" need before it's art, or is it fruit of the poisoned tree and must always be considered slop because AI was part of the process?

perhaps controversial opinion but when answering the question 'should you destroy someone else's property' neither the artistic merit of the thing you destroyed nor the artistic merit of the act of destruction are really dispositive

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spending millions to turn the chronically online into deportation agents, according to internal communications reviewed exclusively by the Washington Post.

The agency's $100 million marketing strategy, detailed in a 30-page document distributed to ICE officials this summer, includes a massive push to flood the digital market with geo-targeted and content-based advertising. The plan even names specific platforms, like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Rumble, a popular "alt-tech" video platform frequented by conservatives.

FAFO IN MINNEAPOLIS

fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper

update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen

Here's a picture of her, by the way

And her super supportive wife

The championship, it should be noted, is unisex. Apparently being a trans woman gives you an innate biological advantage over both cis men and cis women.

The innate biological advantage of being cool as fuck

A lot of people genuinely believe that permanent disability isn't a thing that happens to good people who work hard and make responsible choices. A lot of people genuinely think that we get the life we work for and deserve. And this is definitely part of the explanation for why ableism is so prevalent

we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.

if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane

briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.

In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.

Ronald Wimberly's comic essay, Lighten Up, stays evergreen