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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • You’ve clearly never worked in a university biology lab.

    Out doing fieldwork Graduate student: “Hey [my name], smell my finger!”

    Turns out, certain species of ant smells like blue cheese if you crush it.

    My favorite was a post grad that let a tick feed off her for a week to prove it could prey on humans.

    RFK Jr is the kind of unhinged mind that did deserve better. That doesn’t make the perhaps thousands to millions of deaths that we will be able to trace back to him both directly and indirectly less reprehensible, but I really have had very similar conversations to the one you just tried to “reductio ad absurdio” describe.





  • his brother’s widow

    Tamar is an interesting character in her own right, and worthy of being named.

    After this, she’s supposed to marry Judah’s (Onna’s dad’s) third son, but considering he just lost two, he doesn’t want it to go through. He sends her home to her parents and blows her off when she asks when the marriage is going to happen. (The Bible has a lot of verses about leaving parts of your field unharvested for widows. Not having a husband = hellish poverty.)

    She eventually gets fed up with this, disguises herself as a temple prostitute, Judah shows up, has sex with her, and gives her a family emblem as an IOU.

    Later, she ends up pregnant, so the village elders drag her before Judah for punishment (he’s her father-in-law still technically.) They are going to put her to death, and Judah asks her who knocked her up. She produces his family emblem, and he has to be “well, you got me, I guess I have to take care of you.





  • stay there for decades

    Yeah. I read that book 20 years ago, and I can still vividly remember someone microwaving some meat and discovering that it was their own ass cheek, or a cis woman being accused of being trans and being sexually assaulted, someone falling into a spring at Yosemite, and of course, “Guts.”

    He has a schtick with memorable twists, similar to Fight Club. I think Choke was the only novel of his I remember not really having a giant record scratch moment - Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, etc have huge twists. Like discovering the orgy heaven at the end of Haunted which really just serves to punch you in the gut - absolutely all of the fucked up things that the characters were doing to try to be famous was absolutely pointless, because everyone on Earth is killing themselves anyways.

    The only fiction authors I can think of that have given me the same level of intense shock and revulsion would be Ágota Kristóf with the Notebook trilogy (which is spectacular and everyone should read) and Samuel Delany’s Hogg (which no one should read under any circumstances.)


  • The short story collection/sorta novel Haunted by Pahlanuik ends with the discovery that the planet Venus (I think? Might have been Jupiter) is essentially an eternal awesome orgy heaven, which everyone will eventually end up reincarnating on when they die. So everyone on earth essentially decides to kill themselves. Stores have to start locking up suicide kits because people will just take them in the store and die before paying.

    That entire thing is fucked up. I read it somewhere around sophomore year of high school and existentially traumatized me. There are stories in there that somehow 4chan shock image level in just written words.




  • There’s an evolving strain of US Catholicism, exemplified by weirdos like JD Vance, who like the aesthetic of Catholicism (especially the Deus Vult thing) without really caring about any of the actual Catholic beliefs. It’s more like they have a childish misunderstanding of Catholicism as just being a more serious Christian. Which is not uncommon a misunderstanding in the south/Midwest, oddly enough - the desire for fundies to create a coalition to fight abortion in the 70’s/80’s really ended a lot of the more typical anti-Catholicism of the south.

    Similar to the “American Orthodox,” which is the same idea with more of a Russian flavor.


  • Religious hospitals in the US have certainly historically had problems reproductive health care. But they by and large exist to provide medical services. I imagine far less than 1% of a typical “St Such and Such’s” daily operations are telling women than abortion will cause them to have breast cancer.

    Ectopic pregnancy is also one of those things that was until recently understood to be “yeah that doesn’t count as pregnancy and you shouldn’t die because of it” as an objective fact. I know a hardline pro lifer who had an abortion for because it’s not viable and you die.

    These are things ran by small, local, powerful churches. These fucked ideologies are the type that are preached by the pastors some of the highest up in the nation - the congregations and preachers that states like Texas Oklahoma and Arkansas exist around.

    It’s a warped death cult that wants more soldiers in its war against the world, which it calls Satan. Fundie evangelicals hate sex, music, dancing, art, and most pop culture, to the point where they need to publicly acknowledge they are Christian ™ every 20 minutes.

    They make their own history textbooks, tv shows, etc, etc, which is justified under the idea of being not worldly, but all of it is bad and only exists to reinforce specific messages to them. all of it is obnoxiously polemical in a way the gamergate crowd always pretended the Last of Us Two was.

    But to practically answer your question - services that solely provide pregnancy counseling that don’t explicitly offer abortion as an option are bad. Abortion is a standard part of reproductive healthcare, and if you are going to someone specializing in reproductive healthcare they should be frank with you about it.

    The “how are the motives of the people running these facilities different” part - St Such And Such’s wants to keep you alive by and large as its primary and professional goal. These crisis pregnancy centers exist to talk people out of abortion, first and foremost.







  • That’s why Oklahoma does emergency certifieds! Any bachelor degree gets you in a classroom. You can fail your tests for up to three years, and then usually they’ll extend that deadline anyway! So you get people who can’t get hired to do anything else, and realize that they can just get away with sitting at a desk/ignoring everything they’re supposed to do.

    Actual teachers walked out half a decade ago because it’s 60+ hr/week of being a social worker/punching bags. (Fun fact: teachers are exempt from overtime!)


  • Yep! Parents can pay to have their child kidnapped and tortured. Fuckers like Dr Phil even broadcast kids getting shipped off to rape camp to audience applause.

    The US refused to sign the UN convention on the rights of the child. There’s really an understanding that parents own their children. You can deny schooling (my brother was “homeschooled” for years - he played video games and jerked off while my mom nodded on benzos -and my attempts to get intervention were laughed off), you can deny medical care (how many dead JW kids from the blood transfusion bullshit?), do anything short of causing obvious bodily harm.

    Child liberation is a necessary civil rights movement.