Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver except it’s playing from your neighbor’s radio that you can hear from your back porch, which you sit out on to relax in spite of the loud buzzing from the lightbulb and the hoards of moths that flock to it on summer evenings like this.
i love that every pokémon is someone’s favourite pokémon. it doesn’t matter how much you dislike a pokémon or how forgettable you you think a design is, out there is someone who thinks it’s their baby. my coworker who only discovered pokémon through pokémon go absolutely loves tangela and has a small army of fully powered up ones. at an expo once i saw a woman at a booth desperately trying to find an onix plushie because it was her daughter’s absolute favourite. i talked with someone recently who announced sudowoodo as their tippy top favourite. every single one is loved by someone and idk, i think that’s gotdang heartwarming
as ur friendly Neighborhood Nursing Student™ i feel somewhat compelled to remind everyone with the hot weather:
every liquid except sea water and alcohol hydrates you. It’s not CHUG WATER OR DIE. in fact, gatorade and the like are designed to hydrate you efficiently.
yeah, this includes coffee and tea and soda. the diuretic is not enough to cancel out the liquid. juices and milk have solids in them, sure, but they’re also mostly liquid! it counts.
your body can only absorb so much water at a time, so chugging 64 oz of water at noon and calling it good will do a wonderful job of flushing your kidneys, but not so much of hydrating your tissues. it’s more important that you’re getting consistent fluid throughout the day.
there’s a lot of fancy ways to determine How Much Water (Liquid) I Should Drink but honestly? 8 oz (1 cup) every other hour on cool days and 8 oz every hour on hot days should be fine (assuming you sleep for a normal amount of time per day…. i’m assuming ur awake 16 hours a day.)
figure out how many oz each of ur favorite cups is. it’ll help your guesstimation.
if ur urine is darker than light yellow, you’re dehydrated.
if u pinch the skin on the back of ur hand for a couple seconds and it takes more than a second or two go to back to normal then ur dehydrated.
In regards to #1, don’t take this as an excuse to drink the sugar water that they call sports drinks. They aren’t bad for you per se, but please choose water.
actually this entire post was written in the spirit of ppl using it as an excuse to drink sports drinks and soda etc
ppl have been commenting abt sodium levels in soda and sugar levels in sports drinks and thats all well and good but what i’ve noticed is that people who internalize “well, ONLY WATER hydrates me” but who HATE WATER remain horrifically dehydrated cause they dont drink anything.
so like. if ur a person who haaaaates tap water, this is absolutely me giving you permission to drink whatever fluid you can stomach. please take this as a direct excuse to drink nothing but gatorade if that’s what it takes to get enough fluid into ur body.
it’s not the healthiest for you, sure, but you’re a smart enough person to know that. please drink fluids anyways.
if u like water thats gr8. if you can stomach water that’s gr8. if you can’t, that’s okay too, and you need to stay hydrated just as much as anyone else, so pleasedrink.
I used to hate tap water, and in some places (looking at you, Iowa) it is legit disgusting, but one thing I do which helped a ton and was long term cheaper than buying soda or juice was to get a bottle of Angostura bitters. It’s a cocktail additive with a strong distinctive flavor, so although a tiny bottle is like $6 it will last you for ages. Put a small drop or dash in your glass then fill with water. It has a pleasant sort of herbal metal taste (I understand that those words don’t seem like they should go together but it’s hard to describe) which masks tap water. It also helps me smooth an upset tummy but your mileage may vary. It’s not something that will get you drunk, just a flavoring like vanilla extract.
If that all sounds like too much bother, dropping a lemon wedge into water also helps.
I am learning that lemon wedges are magical in almost everything I like to drink.
here is the magic that made me stop being chronically dehydrated:
because yeah, i can’t STAND plain water – it tastes like the inside of my mouth. it tastes like spit. imagine drinking a glass of ice cold spit. ugh. but add a squirt of this stuff to your glass of tapwater, and now it tastes like apple, cherry, lemonade, whatever.
i also got a bunch of these
and pre-prep them with flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, whatever (or ask my helper to do it), and then when i’m thirsty but distracted and want to just grab some kind of liquid without thinking about finding a clean glass etc., i can just grab one of these.
because yeah, hating water is a thing, and dehydration SUCKS. so drink SOMETHING, don’t be a water purist. better to chug iced coffee than go without.
mio was a damn genius for comin out with that shit
can I just speak up here as someone who has been a nurse for 17 years? I heartily endorse this post and also give you permission to DRINK WHATEVER THE HELL IT TAKES TO KEEP YOU FROM BEING DEHYDRATED
especially in the summer, you can’t play around with that. drink something. seriously. for the love of kittens. DRINK SOMETHING.
I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.
Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!
I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.
i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.
rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character.
then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story?
and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues.
so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr.
I’d been trying to put into words my issue with the idea that genderbent versions of characters are somehow automatically, innately transphobic, and I think you pretty well nailed it.
Originally, it was called ‘genderswap’ or ‘genderswitch’, which was rightfully criticized for reinforcing a binary view of gender. Hence why it is now ‘genderbend‘. Things can bend in many directions.
Yeah basically.
Rule 63s can be transphobic and gender essentialist, no question, just as m/m slash can be misogynistic, but it’s not inherent to the genre.
The way I see it, rule 63 and trans/nb headcanons are two subsets of what I call “gender AUs”, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Girl!Sherlock Holmes is an example of one, trans!Holmes is the other, and trans woman Holmes is both. All those would be worthwhile explorations.
Yes! And all sorts have their place because all of them are exploring the experience of an under-represented group (or two) in a different way.
Thank you for writing this 🙂 I never want to tell people that their feelings are invalid, but sometimes I think those feelings come from gut negative reactions that deserve to be re-examined. Like in this case, trans people have every right to be wary of something that could – and admittedly, sometimes does – re-enforce difficult gender stereotypes, and they also have every right to say genderbent art/fic isn’t to their taste or ask people to tag it.
But there’s nothing inherently transphobic about art that explores gender – quite the opposite, I think – and that’s what genderbends are about. It can be hugelybeneficial to imagine male characters as female in order to explore roles that aren’t traditionally given to women (I would really love to see a genderbent take on, say, Stacker Pentecost for that exact reason).
i just want to point out that i know at least five trans people who have referred to the place they see a doctor about HRT as “the rule 63 clinic”.
Yes, to all of this, and oh my god “Rule 63 clinic” has me rolling. I’m going to see one myself sometime in the next year. so.
I tend to back out of mediocre storytelling pretty fast, but some of the best fics I’ve ever seen were doing EXACTLY what Roach said… using gender bends and gender swaps as lenses to examine shitty canon through a feminist lens.
Some of the best had now-female characters who were actually saltier and harsher than their male alteregos, specifically because of sexism, rather than having characters become caricatures of femininity.
Is there a rule that says “A good writer can break all the rules and make people happy they did?”
Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing 