I spent so much of my life romanticizing the Great and Powerful Enormity of the Sea, reading about the salt and the sweat of the sailors straining to haul the sails or anchor while dreading the monsters in the cold, icy deep fathoms below…and now you tell me that a fathom is only 6 feet deep -
Six feet is still more than enough for a grave.
Hi, that is the most metal addition you could have possibly made to this post
For every fathom you descend into the ocean the pressure around you increases. By five fathoms down you’re experiencing two atmospheres of pressure. At about ten fathoms, a human can no longer survive on their own, and must have supplemental oxygen to continue their descent. With specialized diving gear, we can go to perhaps 60 fathoms under our own power. By that depth, even the clearest waters are dark. Perhaps one percent of visible light remains, mostly in the blue range. The water is blues and greys around you, shadowy like the last minutes before nightfall. The water below is darker still, impenetrable. But life still lurks beneath you, in the untold fathoms of the darkest sea, in an environment so hostile even our machines struggle to reach them.
I love that he apparently got the job because he looked so pathetic that children truly believed he would be unable to solve puzzles created by a cartoon dog without their assistance.
ALL of the replies are people going “Mental is hocus, health not pocus” until OP turned off replies, and that is the stuff that keeps my mental hocus healthy and pocused
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black night. This dude swam towards a lure, slapped at it with his glove, and when it got caught; he let himself float and tugged on the line so the fisherman thought he had hooked a 100+ pound salmon. Once he was finally up to the shore, he turned a flashlight on in the guy’s face and walked out of the water, saying “good morning, gentlemen. State fish and game warden, you’re under arrest.“
At this point, the guy who had reeled him in had literally fallen over in shock, and the other people with him were scared shitless. The warden whipped some citations out of a plastic bag in his wetsuit, made the trespassers sign them, asked if they had any questions, and then gathered all of their fishing gear. And he just. Walked back into the river. And quietly swam away, without another word.
This man is a legend.
warden coming out of his river to shame fishermankind
Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s 3 years of constant hormone therapy, 4 years of voice training, 12 sessions of facial hair removal, bottom surgery by the best surgeon in the country,
London-based student Lewis Hornby is a grandson on a mission. When he noticed that his dementia-afflicted grandmother was having trouble staying hydrated, he came up with Jelly Drops—bite-sized pods of edible water that look just like tasty treats.
Each of these colorful “candies” is made up of mostly water, with gelling agents and electrolytes making up just 10% of their composition. Available in a rainbow of colors and presented in packaging reminiscent of a box of chocolates, Jelly Drops are an easy and engaging way to avoid dehydration—a common problem for those suffering from degenerative neurological diseases.
“It is very easy for people with dementia to become dehydrated,” he explains. “Many no longer feel thirst, don’t know how to quench thirst, or don’t have the dexterity to drink.” With this in mind, Hornby set out to find a solution. In addition to seeking advice from psychologists and doctors, he opted to “experience” life with dementia himself through the use of virtual reality tools and a week in a care home.
Once he was familiar with what dementia patients need, he brainstormed what they want. “From my observations, people with dementia find eating much easier than drinking. Even still, it can be difficult to engage and encourage them to eat. I found the best way to overcome this is to offer them a treat! This format excites people with dementia, they instantly recognize it and know how to interact with it.”
Case in point? Hornby’s own grandmother’s reaction: “When first offered, grandma ate seven Jelly Drops in 10 minutes, the equivalent to a cup full of water—something that would usually take hours and require much more assistance.”
Second of all, I’d like to remind everyone that Jell-o counts as a fluid.
That is, many doctors prescript Jell-o, and Gelatin treats to children and adults who, for whatever reason, have trouble keeping hydrated. Maybe they have jaw issues. Maybe dementia, or they are on a fluid-only diet and drinking broth for weeks is mind-boggling boring.
Jell-o brand in particular has a lot of sugar added to the packets, however it’s quite straightforward to buy plain gelatin and make low-sugar jelly blobs to snack on for that sweet fruit-pop of hydration.
Soo~ Here we goooo~
2 cups juice – Orange juice, grape juice, whatever you want.
Fuck, you could even use your favorite blend of tea, or coffee (though coffee,
in my experience, needs a little more gelatin to set properly)
Low heat until juice is hot, but before it starts to boil – once
you see a bit of bubbles rising, add 2 tablespoons gelatin, and stir gelatin into hot
juice until totally dissolved.
Turn off heat
Add another cup and a half of juice (or whatever), stir for
another minute or so, then pour into a mold.
You could pour it into ice cube trays, a Tupperware container,
or any sort of silicone candy mold.
Cover it, stick in the fridge overnight, and viola~
Bite-sized taste snacks, full of water.
Gelatin is broken down very easily and put to use once in
your gut, so it’s fine to eat loads of it, and otherwise you’re just taking mouthfuls of juice… or tea or
whatever.
If you want it a bit more sweet, feel free to add sugar or honey to your hot juice… or hot…whatever…
I was pondering about the guy’s electrolytes worked and now I’m paralyzed with the idea of turning Gatorade into jell-o.
Don’t use pineapple juice for this!!! The enzymes break down the gelatin and you’ll be left with soup.
Right on, forgot about that! Kiwi, Pineapple, Figs, Ginger, Guava, and Papaya have an enzyme that flips the bird to gelatin.
Apple, Grape, Strawberries, Orange, Cherries, Blueberries, Blackberries, Lemons, Peaches, Raspberries, and Cranberries all make great gelatin snacks, though.
i firmly believe that information like this needs to be shared, especially in any situation where the future is brought into question. as someone who’s grandfather had advanced dementia, i know first hand how difficult and devastating this can be.
seeing inventions like this come into existence is uplifting!
~ mod abalone ~
reblogging for both this amazing inventor’s story, and for the DIY alternative that anyone who struggles with hydration needs can utilize.
“All your tests/labs came back clear! Isn’t that great?”
American healtcare is a business, and you are the customer. Here’s something you can say:
“It’s great that we ruled out X, Y, and Z with these tests. However, I’m still having these symptoms, and they’re effecting my daily life in these specific ways. So what’s next on your list of differential diagnoses?”
And if that doesn’t get you anywhere, you can say something like:
“Okay, we’ve ruled out all of the common causes for my symptoms. So when do we start exploring more rare explanations?”
And if that still gets you nowhere, you’re going to document their refusal to do further testing in your chart, because they don’t want to have to put that in writing. Keep going, you’re worth it. I love you, mean.
END VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION.]
Transcription edit: After they say “I Love you” they blow a kiss to the camera and make the “mwah” kissy noise, not “mean”
Anonymous said:
Hey if you're not physically disabled and just ND, please don't say "cr*ppling," or any variations thereon, since it's ableist toward physically disabled people. "Disabling," and "incapacitating," are two better words to use instead.
(It took me a while to figure it out; anon was bothered by this post.)
Okay, sure, I’ll try to do that. That said, I want to encourage people engaged in anti-ableism efforts that take the form of asking people not to use certain words to put their energies elsewhere. Firstly, I think they make the disability advocacy community inaccessible to a lot of people, since having to relearn which words are “allowed” is overwhelming and particularly difficult for people who have limited access to words in the first place.
Secondly, every time I’ve seen this implemented it…hasn’t made anyone less ableist? People who scrupulously remove “crazy” from their vocabulary in favor of “irrational” still treat the people they’re talking about like unpersons. Often the recommended replacement words are just as good at suggesting “less valuable person” as the words they replaced. I think there’s some value in asking “does our use of words surrounding disability to mean ‘bad thing’ come from a place of treating disabled people like tragedies?” and often it does, but that doesn’t mean that challenging that mindset is as easy as changing out the words.
Thirdly, I think it emphasizes the wrong concerns. I saw a newspaper headline the other day saying “the president’s plan will be a crippling blow to the economy” and one about the “crippling burden of student debt”. I’d think that the fact the president’s plan includes making it harder to get SSI, or the fact disabled students are way less likely to graduate and likelier to end up in debt, is a much more urgent problem than the turn of phrase used in the headline.
Lastly, it seems like the anti-words advocacy often pretends at a false consensus in disability activism. There are physically disabled people who are bothered by that newspaper headline and those who are not. There are mentally ill people who are bothered by use of crazy and some who couldn’t care less. But no one ever says “hey, that word bothers me personally because people have used it to be mean to me”, they say “it’s ableist towards physically disabled people,” as if all physically disabled people agree on this (or as if the ones who disagree are just obviously confused poor souls and don’t merit a mention). “There are physically disabled people who dislike the phrase ‘crippling anxiety’ and there are physically disabled people who don’t care and there are physically disabled people who have, themselves, described their anxiety as crippling” is much more accurate, but less compelling.
Not to mention how constantly making previously common words or terms into ‘bad’ ones discriminates against older members of all kinds of communities, from queer people to disabled folks. So they suddenly become the enemies of younger community members over the use of words rather than behavior.
But yeah, treating any group like a monolith is a bad idea.
I’m 40 years old. This is relevant because in my lifetime, I have seen multiple renaming/rebranding efforts to find words that are not as hurtful to disabled people.
And each and every one of them failed. Within a very short time of going mainstream, the words that were supposedly neutral and less pejorative became, in practice, every bit as nasty and horrible as the word they replaced.
If someone thinks a group of people are scum who shouldn’t exist, and you tell that person “please don’t use [old word] for that group, use [new word] instead” you have not actually changed their mind about the group they hate one bit. They still think they’re scum who shouldn’t exist! It’s just now they have two words that mean “scum who shouldn’t exist,” [old word] and [new word]. There is no vocabulary change that will make them think about the group they hate any differently. You can shame them into not publicly discriminating (if you have the social buy-in from other people) and sometimes, sometimes if you have a relationship with someone you can over time influence them to be less hateful*, but just changing the word they use does absolutely nothing.
*If you want to work to change peoples’ perspective, the Hidden Brain podcast has an excellent episode on how to handle conflict that touches on “how can you influence people who disagree with you to move their position closer to yours.” Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling
So while I try not to use words that will hurt people (because knowingly hurting people is a jerk move), I also don’t put that much effort into policing mine or other peoples’ language. Because there are so many other things that are more important to spend my time and energy on.
frankly the harder my disabilities are hitting me the more appreciation i have for the word ‘crippling’
honestly, the ableist word stuff makes me so angry nowadays.
Which. Historical context.
I cannot prove this, but I am about 90% sure that the way we talk about ableist words and ableist language has strong roots in the Ableist Word Profile series run by FWD, a blog by feminists with disabilities that ran 2009-2011. I was hanging around there from the start, guest-posted once, and not only was it the first time I had ever seen anyone call out the ableist underpinnings of some common terms like that, I remember it taking off wildly from there through the social justice sphere even at the time. By now it’s gd everywhere, but hey, things do start somewhere.
At this point I would like to quote the bloggers who contributed to the column:
Here’s what this series is about: Examining word origins, the way in which ableism is unconsciously reinforced, the power that language has. Here’s what this series is not about: Telling people which words they can use to define their own experiences, rejecting reclamatory word usage, telling people which words they can and cannot use. You don’t necessarily have to agree that a particular profiled word or phrase is ableist; we ask you to think about the way in which the language that we use is influenced, both historically and currently, by ableist thought.
It was never about saying “these words are bad, don’t use them”. Nor was it ever the main focus of the blog. I’d ballpark estimate that it was less than 5% of the overall posts. And my friends, there was so much cool stuff on there, media criticism, awareness raising, intersectionality guest posts, information on web accessibility, so many incisive thought-provoking posts that stuck with you. The site’s still up, you can check them out.
Even back in 2010, people noticed that there was a… weird imbalance… in exactly which of those incisive thought-provoking posts were getting spread more widely and which stayed consigned to a smaller readership. Anna’s post Why Writing about Language Isn’t Enough is still absolutely worth a read over a decade later:
And yet, when trying to have discussions about ableist language, we’re back to the silo of disability. Instead of talking about ableist language as part of the manifestation of the disdain and abuse of people with disabilities, it’s treated as isolated – the problem, instead of a symptom of the problem.
Ableism is not simply a language problem.
and yet, and yet, of that amazing blog, the thing that seems to have made the absolute most impact in the social justice sphere in the long run is… language.
and not even in the nuanced, let’s examine how ableism influences our language historically and today, way it was intended as. In the incredibly reductive “hey, these are Bad words, use these Good words instead” way that the original bloggers actively wanted to prevent. The way that can make spaces hostile to non-native English speakers, people with specific verbal or cognitive disabilities or some people with OCD. The way that is both incredibly punitive and, at the same time, has ceded such important ground in the fight - oh, it’s a simple replacement, say Y instead of X, it’s just that the etymology is ableist you see, it’s that the word is triggering. It’s not like you need to worry that the concept you are trying to express in and of itself might have ableist underpinnings. no need to think about it that deeply.
ableism is just a language problem, don’t you know.
Even the goddamn web accessibility stuff hasn’t gone big to the same point, and that contained some serious low-hanging fruit for improvement. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone be publicly berated for no image descriptions, no subtitles on video, or non-descriptive link text the way people get over language. and when’s the last time I saw someone talk about whether a website was screen-reader accessible.
But really. Every time I see the “X word is ableist, don’t use it” it’s like I’m seeing the horrible bastardized knock-off version of the beautiful work my friends and community put so much of themselves into back then. And yeah. It makes me angry.
If you use Google Docs for your writing, I highly encourage you to download your work, delete it from Google Docs, and transfer it to a different program/site, unless you want AI to start leeching off your hard work!!!
I personally have switched to Libre Office, but there are many different options. I recommend checking out r/degoogle for options.
Please reblog to spread the word!!
Crypt Pad can be an option too!
I don’t use Docs very much at all, but this looks like a good moment to take a sweep through my account and delete anything that’s in there.
Jesus Christ not this again.
First, note how many times this person says “I take this to mean…” I support people reading the terms and conditions but when you’re this wildly off base about what it means you’re not helping anyone.
Second, the feature that Google Workplace Labs is referring to is basically an advanced search engine. It is a feature you can use to ask questions (the prompt) and receive answers (the output). How do I know this? Because the data it refers to is specified: your prompts and input, prompt and input refinements, generated output, generated output refinements, and feedback. You have to specifically give the Lab information - it is not grabbing the info from anywhere else.
It is up to YOU to not input information you don’t want Google to retain. It works exactly like a Google search - which for the record Google keeps records of and what result you ended up going with. If you don’t want Google to have access to your omegaverse fic then don’t input it into the big box that is set aside specifically to give it to Google.
Third, I mentioned this in a previous post but I am the human reviewer mentioned in “To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Workspace Labs data.” We’re not supposed to guess what AI we’re working with but I’d bet every dollar I have that the one I review for rhymes with ‘Lard’.
Here’s what we get:
Prompt: What is a good way to start a story?
Response: I can help with that! Stories work best with a strong start. You should introduce a major component of your story such as the setting, a main character, or a plot hook. Which you choose will depend on your genre. A mystery, for example, may start with the discovery of a body while a romance may introduce one of the main characters.
Feedback: Dissatisfied, I wanted it to give me first lines.
Now I have the info. I can see what you asked (although I have no idea it was you), the response the AI gave you, and why you didn’t like it. I rewrite a new response taking your feedback into account. That response is submitted to the AI so it can learn what it did wrong. If you don’t give feedback I may only get the first two and then I decide if it was a good answer and either accept it or rewrite based on my understanding.
Fourth, I already wrote a whole screed on this so I’m not going to repeat it but take twelve seconds to think of the implications of a company using all of your data. Google has a vested and immediate interest in being able to use your data. No one denies it. But it doesn’t because they cannot pivot their business model to taking all of a person’s data. It will ALWAYS have to be opt in. Too many major players have secrets stored in shit like Google docs (the number of federal agencies and law firms alone would make you wince).
Fifth, this is not to say a BRAND NEW platform might not try to pull some shit. TikTok famously. But Google and Microsoft have a business model based around storing secrets. They are not going to jettison that.
A good article about all this, I get that it’s a valid concern rn but the fact is that there’s absolutely no way if Google did this that they wouldn’t get sued into oblivion. The amount of private and proprietary information stored would simply be grounds for every single company that uses drive to well. Do what companies do.
I will say that I think having a backup is good, and will be looking for one myself. But please please please do research when it comes to stuff like this. Everyone is vulnerable to misinfo. I’ve done it before, so rule of thumb: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. If it’s too evil to be true, it might be. Always double check.
Also please don’t spread misinformation like this! I’ve heard many a people have panic attacks over having to transfer thousands of documents, and spreading misinformation can cause more anxiety for people and more harm to Google.
Do research and check to make sure before jumping to conclusions!
I was playing Assassin’s Creed: Origins last night (61 hours in, level 31. Not sure how far I am into the story) and I tamed this hippo, because I thought it would be amusing to have a giant hippo waddling around with me. I named them Hungry Hungry the Hippo, because I am perfect.
I have this cool chain assassination skill, so I like to wait for Romans to ride by in a line, grab the one at the end and follow up with the one in the middle before any of them realize what’s going on. More often than not, the one in the front keeps on going and doesn’t notice his two buddies aren’t with him.
(SIDEBAR: Unless you want to kill an entire village, don’t poison the corpses. I’m real sorry about that, formerly-populated tiny village against the mountains.)
But last night, the guy in the front turned around and threw a spear at me … which REALLY PISSED OFF Hungry Hungry the Hippo, who charged the guy, knocked him off his horse, and proceeded to murder the fuck out of him.
So I’m like, “Hungry Hungry the Hippo, you are such a good friend! Thanks for helping me fill the streets with the blood of my enemies. I’m going to set you free to celebrate!”
And that’s when I discovered that Hungry Hungry the Hippo has two states: tamed and aggro. I was like, “Here you go,” and she was like “THANK YOU NOW I WILL MURDER YOUR FACE TO DEATH!”
I want to tell you that I ran away and climbed up a tree or something, until she calmed down and went on her way. But we all know that wouldn’t be true, and Bayek needed some hard leather to upgrade his armor, anyway.
So I thanked Hungry Hungry the Hippo for her service and sacrifice, looted the corpses, and went about my business.
Every villain is the hero of their own story.
When my husband was playing Origins, his main weapon automatically put a poison DOT on whatever he stabbed with it.
He was in a big city (Alexandria, maybe?) and he wanted to show me that Bayek could pet the cats, and as happens so often in Assassin’s Creed games, the “interact” button and the “stab” button were the same button and either the cat or Bayek moved just enough to turn “pet” into “murder” and the cat ended up with the poison DOT.
Fun fact, dogs and cats in Origins have health bars, but they’re very very small, and they will almost immediately respawn if you accidentally stab one with poison.
Fun fact 2, if something dies by poison, it gets a little poison cloud around it for a while and will poison anything that walks through the cloud.
Fun fact 3, my husband has now inadvertently created the sort of torture you normally find in Greek mythology, where a cat dies of poison, immediately comes back to life in the cloud of poison, takes a few steps and then dies of poison again.
This was existentially horrible, and got worse when Hissyphus made it to the main road through town, because now there are people and horses, which have longer health bars, so once they walk through the poison cloud, they’re getting a little farther away before dying of poison with their own little poison clouds.
And then respawning and carrying on with their very important business, only to die again a little bit further up the road.
As you can imagine, the green cloud of certain death started growing exponentially until much of the city was the world’s worst NPC time loop.
Of note, Bayek was suffering zero consequences because he’s immune to his own poison and because the only thing he’d killed directly was the cat, who didn’t count as a civilian. Everyone else technically died from environmental damage, which doesn’t count towards Bayek’s “Bayek did not kill civilians” naughty list. So his actions, which have resulted in a mass casualty event, aren’t threatening desynchronization, which would boot him back to the last save point and reset the city.
Having utterly destroyed a major population center, my husband had Bayek scamper over the nearest city wall and run like hell.
![do-you-have-a-flag:
“ hoseph-christiansen:
“ theawesomeadventurer:
“ ultrafacts:
“ Source: [x]
Follow Ultrafacts for more facts! ”
okay but this is a power move above any other
”
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1fd447caa3b037691cd21fe9101a7388/tumblr_oyqfosuqIB1rhavdko1_500.png)
