Mens Tits

i was preparing a wet specimen one day and my dad was like this reminds me of my work buddy who ties dollar store balloons to roadkill and watches them fly away. and i had to drop everything for a second and say no. no i dont think this is like that

my bf and I have the same fucking brain

My one friend group can't stop saying, "See you in hell!" in a cheerful voice instead of, "Talk to you later!" and my other friend group can't stop calling things "penis" instead of "cool" or "good", so I just unironically uttered the phrase, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," as I got off the phone.

me: hey man welcome in what can i get you

guy who jerks himself blind every night to the characters from a flossing based gacha game where all the girls are bits of food stuck in the teeth of the demiurge and you can like feed the demiurge different meals to change the pool of waifus you’re pulling from and their names are all like “stringy chicken” and “wet cheese crumb” and shit: just a black coffee please

Thanos Car wins piston cup

Cant have fucking shit in Detroit

Earlier I was scrolling Reddit and I come across a post in r/shrooms, a sub reddit dedicated to psychadelic mushrooms and frequently featuring entries from users who are posting during a trip.

A guy posts, freaking out, that the delivery person who dropped off his food had a huge snake wrapped around his neck and the snake was talking to him and tripped him out.

He shares a picture ne sneakily took of the delivery driver.

The delivery driver actually does, in fact, have a live 7 or so foot long boa constrictor draped across his shoulders.

Can you fucking image. Being blasted out of your gourd on hallucinogenic substances, getting a random knock at the door and the guy has a live gigantic snake just chilling. Your head would explode

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.

So uh….some dude apparently recreated Adobe Photoshop feature-for-feature, for FREE, and it runs in your browser.

Anyway, fuck Adobe, and enjoy!

the thing with me is that ive seen over 30 film adaptations of dracula and therefore Should be a great person to ask for recommendations when it comes to film adaptations of dracula, but the thing with me is that my standards are well below sea level and my taste in movies is insane so if you ask me which dracula you should watch the first one ill suggest is a movie made on a literal $1500 budget thats so faithful to the book its borderline unwatchable and the second one ill suggest is the insane pakistani version which has absolutely dick to do with the book and features multiple musical numbers, a car chase, and an inexplicable scientist origin story. if neither of these suffice then i have to bust out my graph upon which ive documented everything from coppolas travesty to the porno