Just An FYI For Those In The US With Insurance Issues

Question for the day: how many people in history of civilization have been as bad or worse at sex as Stalin?  I don’t mean in the “physical sex life was bad” sense, i.e. he’s a notorious P&V kind of guy.  I mean in the “hardcore statism sex is bad and this is why people did horrible things” sense.  Stalin had the best sex life of anyone in history.  (I mean, last I checked, anyway.)

(He also invented the kaleidoscope, for some reason.  I dunno.)

In an attempt to remember the tune to Old Macdonald, I just ended up with this:

Old Macdonald had a farm.

On the feast of Stephen

I used to believe exactly this. A couple was two, several was seven, and a few was three.

Flashing back to when I was a child riding in a car with my grandmother in the Texas Hill Country, insisting to her that just as having “a couple” of something meant you had two of them, having “several” meant you had exactly seven

01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 01110011 00111010 00101111 00101111 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110100 01110101 00101110 01100010 01100101 00101111 01100100 01010001 01110111 00110100 01110111 00111001 01010111 01100111 01011000 01100011 01010001

Of the many marvels a lifetime offers, this experience was truly my favorite so far.

I’m sure I reblogged this before but doing it again as the brainweasels were very bitey today

scrupulosity in These Uncertain Times

do you think you are a bad person? do you feel like you constantly have to do something, anything, good to balance out your miserable existence? 

does Chidi from The Good Place hit home to the point where he isn’t funny, because you see too much of yourself in him? 

are you constantly worried about the impact your actions have on others–  to the point where you avoid your friends, deprive yourself of things you want or need, or outright starve yourself? 

you may have scrupulosity.

scrupulosity is a mental health issue that crops up with a lot of different diagnoses- c-ptsd, ocd, autism, and adhd are some of the most common, but a LOT of ND and traumatized people have it. 

scrupulosity makes you overly concerned with morality. you feel like you are Bad and have to do Good things. you obsess over your own Badness and the Badness of the world. you feel like you, personally, need to fix everything that’s Bad, and that if you don’t, you’re Worse Than Twin Clones Of Hitler.

you might try to expiate your badness by becoming a doormat– letting other people walk all over you. you might donate money to charity or GoFundMes, even if you can’t afford it, because You Need To Be Good. you might avoid Problematic things, to the point where you can’t enjoy a bar of chocolate or a children’s cartoon.

and that’s in fairly normal circumstances where the world is not actively on fire.

at times like this– where the world is full of legitimately horrible shit, where it seems like everything is fucked up beyond repair and everyone needs your help- scrupulosity can fucking kill you. 

 this post is already too long, so I’m going to reblog with some suggestions for how to help take care of yourself for people with scrupulosity, and some advice on how people without scrupulosity can help support their friends rn. 

tldr: constantly obsessing over the Badness of the world and feeling like you need to fix it can be a brainweasel called scrupulosity. it is normal to be scared and want to help, but your brain can take that to an extreme that isn’t healthy. 

"Francis" makes me think you might be a Catholic — a Franciscan monk, to be exact. Is this true, or are you just a big fan of Sir Francis Drake?

I might be a Catholic, but I don’t actually go to friars — the closest I’ve ever been to being a monk was an 18-hour lay nun called Rose. (I’m way into fantasy novels, so that’s probably a common background.)

Your D&D class based off of your Hogwarts house

Ravenclaw: Wizard

Gryffindor: Wizard

Hufflepuff: Wizard

Slytherin: Wizard

OMW I always thought the well-known nebula images were some sort of false-colour, invisible-wavelength stuff. If asked I'd have said the first one was how we'd see it. You've no idea how happy I am to discover the iconic photos are of visible light, it's like the person who thought narwhals were imaginary and discovered they were real

Sometimes… there’s more than meets the eye. 👀 You’re looking at two very different takes on an iconic image. ⁣

Human eyes can see only a small portion of the range of radiation given off by the objects around us. We call this wide array of radiation the electromagnetic spectrum, and the part we can see visible light.

In the first image, researchers revisited one of Hubble Space Telescope’s most popular sights: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. Here, the pillars are seen in infrared light, which pierces through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar — but just as amazing — view of the pillars. ⁣ ⁣ The entire frame is peppered with bright stars and baby stars are revealed being formed within the pillars themselves. The image on the bottom is the pillars in visible light.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team⁣

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it