“it’s okay to disagree” is for things like “i like chocolate and you like vanilla” not for whether or not people deserve fundamental human rights, what the fuck
Campaign 2: The Mighty Nein, Episode 97: The Fancy and the Fooled // Exandria Unlimited: Calamity Wrap Up // Campaign 2: The Mighty Nein, Episode 112: Dinner With the Devil // Campaign 3: Bell’s Hells, Episode 121: A New Age Begins // Campaign 2: The Mighty Nein, Episode 75: Rime and Reason
Everyone’s going on about having a ‘traditional, old-fashioned Christmas’, but when I burst into the house covered in green paint and demand a champion strike my head from my shoulders with my own axe so that I may return the blow next year, I’m ‘scaring Grandma’.
Becoming sorceress-pilled, standing atop my obsidian tower and cackling maniacally, hurling bolts of black lightning at well-muscled adventurers, wailing in agony when my crystal orb is shattered
Not sure where to start with this lifestyle, gonna put in a down payment on a Fell Beast and go from there
Kind of an hard field to break into these days, the romantic images of it are all solitary shewolves scheming alone but without significant starting magical capital you’re more likely to end up a no name hag getting killed for a small bounty in the woods. And that’s to say nothing of the women who started with divine assistance acting self-made. Unfortunately it’s about who you know these days. If you’re looking to strike it big and don’t have a demonic patron or supernatural ancestor to lean on I can’t recommend enough worming your way into positions of power or heroic quests for powerful relics then betraying someone at a key moment to start up.
so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things
openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’
I’D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.
Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there’s this phenomenon called a “fast radio burst”, a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They’re still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.
In the 2010’s, astronomers working at Australia’s Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.
However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal…. as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.
The signals tended to be clustered around midday… hmm…
Further evidence that the signals were man-made… this trend also followed daylight savings!!!
(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely…)
They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.
The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.
I imagine they must have a big sign reading “LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING” hanging in the break room now.
TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.
Sometimes I think you just have to do your laundry and the dishes and take out the trash and put clean sheets on the bed and hope that tomorrow is kinder
So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community.
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it.
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
