tbh im kinda glad that a lot of the realistic pokemon in the detective pikachu trailer are high key teetering on the edge of uncanny valley because like.. these are fantasy creatures that sort of talk and shoot fucking electricity and vines and fire and psychic energy out their eyeballs, they SHOULD look weird and alien. psyduck is a pokemon defined by the fact that it is experiencing an unending headache that motherfucker better look like he has seen the rise and fall of civilization itself. mr mime is literally like three brain cells away from being straight up human the sight of one should make me uncomfortable.
basically what im saying is we have been spoon-fed woobified anime pokemon for too long. put the monster back in pocket monsters.
a girl i know told me how a guy she knows once moved out from his parents, ate nothing but fries and meatballs for HALF A YEAR, and got scurvy. imagine the doctor’s face when this guy shows up with like his gums bleeding and the doc has to fucking say DUDE…. THATS SCURVY…. in this day and age
this is turning into a “how a person i know got scurvy” thread and im so here for this, please share your scurvy stories if you have any
the other day someone posted pics from the reddit page r/zerocarbs where these fools only ate meat and 0 vegetables or fruits and all the posts were about various symptoms of scurvy. i died when one literally read ‘i don’t want to start the vitamin C debate again but’
THE VITAMIN C DEBATE
My mother told me all about scurvy when I was five and trying to resist eating pumpkin and let me tell you it’s been 35 years and I still get nervous if I go for two days without eating a green vegetable.
I told my own little picky eater about scurvy, rickets etc and now one of her most frequently requested lunch items is baby spinach, closely followed by carrots.
I’m not saying everyone should mildly traumatize their children to make them understand that vegetables are vital to ongoing possession of your teeth and organs, but.. no, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Go for it.
some guys i used to know went on a boys only road trip. they decided they were only going to eat things they could cook on the engine block of the car.
two of them got scurvy. one of them drank so much jagermeister + red bull that he temporarily lost the ability to see in colour.
Y’all know free condoms is a result of gay activists who worked towards safer sex practices after the AIDS crisis right? Because if not it’s one google search away
If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
I can’t stress how important this is. When my father and I were arrested in Seattle some years back for agitating for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we were greeted outside the jail by the event’s organisers. They cheered us, had cokes and munchies for us. They drove us to our car and, during the drive, asked if we wanted to stay the night in Seattle with one of the organisers, they filled us in on what had happened after our arrests, they asked about and listened intently to what we experienced from arrest to release. They did so much so well that when another call went out for potential arrestees, we were amongst the first to raise our proverbial hands.
Read the post. Re-read the post. Remember it. And, when the chance comes, do it.
When I was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest a few years ago, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice were doing Jail Support when I was finally let out of One Police Plaza at around 6am.
They had gotten a klezmer band to stand along the hill you have to go up to leave the jail, and as I walked to where the volunteer lawyers were waiting (they were there to make sure all 200+ people who were arrested that night would be represented at their later hearings. They also were surrounded by volunteers who had food, phone chargers, directions to all the nearby subway stops, and one of them let me borrow her phone to call my mom when I got frustrated with how slowly my phone was charging) the band played music, cheered and applauded.
Honestly? That band playing klezmer for me as I left jail, cheering me on and making me laugh… it’s a memory I really treasure.
It’s also one of my mother’s favorite stories. Before I told her about that band, she got so upset and agitated whenever anything reminded her of my arrest. She’d freak out, cry, start fussing over me, and so forth. After I told her about the klezmer band though? It became something she’d tell her friends about, over and over again, laughing each time. She stopped calling me to beg me not to go and protest every time she knew a big one was happening, and instead would call to make a joke about how if I want to listen to klezmer she has some CDs I can borrow.
When I think about that night, rather than any of the many many terrible things that happened from the moment the cops grabbed me onward, the first thing I remember is the klezmer, and how it made me laugh, and the popcorn someone gave me as I gave the lawyers my name and info, and the kindness of strangers.
After the dehumanization of even a few hours in police custody, those volunteers made me smile, and gave the night a new fun and funny angle to be remembered from. I actually laugh when I think about that night, thanks to them.
Jail Support is a beyond vital part of protesting. It really really is.
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.
after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.
these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.
but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.
triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:
– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.
– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.
Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.
Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.
For those who are interested, EMDR has been shown to be able to lessen the effects of triggers.
SO it looks like what happened is uh. this. IF YOUR CHATHAM COUNTY ABSENTEE BALLOT WAS RETURNED PLEASE CONTACT GPB SAVANNAH they’re still looking into things
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 