feral, she/her or she/they, see about page for more. see also: art blog. this space is worksafe but please don't follow if you're under 18. icon was drawn for me by @insertdisc5.
spitfire chapter 27 “before one of us bleeds” is now up!
spitfire is a queer, poly fantasy romance novel that i post to read online for free on AO3 and wattpad! (if you are 18+)
it’s super weird and gender-fucky and i love it so much! please give it a shot!
an excerpt from this chapter:
“Caed, I believe that you believe that you love me, even though you seem hellbent on only acting on it in the worst way possible. But the way you treat me? It’s so fucking weird. I’ve realized that recently. Ever since—” Feon stops and shakes his head again. Exhales a loud groan. Raises his hands and slaps his cheeks until they’re a bright, stinging red. “The point is, you don’t think about me, not the way that I think about you. You’ve always been more focused on hurting yourself than you ever have been on not hurting me.”
“I know that whatever I am to you, that whatever I do, it’s not enough.” He’s whispering now, his breath like steam on my face. “It will never be enough. I could die for you the way Yuen did for your father and it wouldn’t be enough — your hatred for yourself outweighs any love I could give you. And Allene? She’s fun. She’s new. But she won’t be enough either.”
He tracks my eyes with his own, traps my gaze whenever I try to look away. His face is contorted with emotion — with pain, with scorn, with pity. He’s close enough to kiss me, to do so easily, but he doesn’t.
“She’ll never be able to fix what you want her to,” he says.
“Feon—” I choke out, but he silences me with a finger to my lips.
“I’m going to give you a gift,” he says. He looks away from me, his gaze falling downwards, and only then does he release me. “There was a while when I thought — maybe you chose her because she’s human. Because she’s a woman. And I — I could be those things. Human, in appearance if not in actuality. A woman…” He sneers, his ire turned inward. “I thought if I just tried hard enough I could be anything, anyone you wanted, and that would be enough. I even thought about killing Allene and taking her place, but—”
“Feon,” I say again, my voice pushing out of me forcefully.
Feon doesn’t look up. “Don’t worry, I didn’t think about it that seriously.”
tbh i think y’all (mostly cis and binary trans) are just. devoted to misunderstanding, suppressing and bullying nonbinary ppl.
y’all tried to obliterate “joyfriend” y’all tried to spread shit about “enby” being unilaterally infantalizing, you’re coming after “folx” (which isn’t even necessarily a nonbinary thing) and “mx” and making jokes about it and creating this “yxll” meme. y’all try to shuffle us into neat little boxes, push labels and attraction categories on us, exclude us from communities we belong in (LOOKING AT YOU, EXORSEXIST MLM BLOGS), create an innaccurate, fatphobic, racist, exorsexist image for nonbinary people to “conform to” you refuse to respect our pronouns and our experiences with gender, you refuse to look past your basic, exorsexist view of the world, you try to exclude us from trans spaces, we face endless scrutiny.
none of you actually care about nonbinary people and it fucking shows
binary people can rb but don’t add any bullshit or fucking else. i encourage ppl to reblog this post
(edit 9/22: added “unilaterally” for more clarity. please reblog this version!)
whilst i am always and forever just begging doctors to properly check interactions before they prescibe things (@ pharmacists: fuck everyone else i respect you i love you xoxo)
i am in fact also begging everyone to read the leaflets you get with your medication. if you have difficulty reading or understanding those leaflets that’s fine just like… ask the pharmacist. never met one who wasn’t happy to explain drugs.
but like…
“SSRIs make you less tolerant of heat” should not be a shock - it’s in the leaflet. they make you sweat, give you hot flashes, and make your skin more sensitive to the sun. that’s all in there.
“mixing alcohol and benzos is a Bad Time” is not a shock. it’s in the leaflet to avoid alcohol.
“my ADHD meds made me not want to eat” is not a shock. it’s in the leaflet that they cause appetite suppression and weight loss.
you do not have to “find out the hard way” you really don’t.
and bc doctors are fuckin useless at bothering to actually read and/or understand and/or explain interactions like… ever, apparently? there are plenty of places you can check for yourself or, again, just ask the pharmacist if there’s anything to watch out for.
i mean asking a pharmacist about interactions is basially asking them to infodump about their hyperfixation. you’re asking someone who thinks drugs are really cool to talk about drugs they are not going to be upset about this.
oh hey my grandma was a nurse too!
the amount of people who don’t read them and then later are like “WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS”
*pinches nose bridge* they did. it was in the leaflet.
And if you lose the leaflet, or can’t read the print, or whatever, DRUGS.COM
It’s got, like, every medication ever, with pictures and everything, and all the side effects, AND a really handy interactions checker.
love drugs.com for that. only site that has the full full list of side effects (go to the ‘for professionals’ section) and their interaction checker is great as well bc it does also include supplements and recreational drugs in the database.
i personally prefer the go.drugbank.com checker but only because i’m a supermassive nerd and gives you all the technical mechanisms behind the interaction. plus you can go full nerd and look at the complete pharmacology of anything. which is probably only parsable by, like, 5 people who follow me but it is really cool though
anyway if, unlike me, you’re a normal person drugs.com is absolutely your best friend outside of an actual pharmacist
Cannot stress enough how important this is. I’m allergic to an antibiotic & was once given another medication that was not that medication but was contraindicated for ppl with that allergy. My allergy info is up to date with my pharmacy… but their computer missed that, or they didn’t check. (My doctor DEFINITELY didn’t.)
That kind of mistake can kill a person. Always check.
[Image: Tags reading, “My grandma was a nurse and always read the pamphlets for any medicine. Even medicine we’d taken before. And now the habit is so ingrained I’m kinda surprised not everyone does it.” End ID.]
I have seen doctors talking shit about people who read the leaflets. Even Sidnee McElroy, who I completely respect, kind of snorted about people who read the INFORMATIVE LITERATURE and then get concerned about the rare, weird side effects. I got mad on Twitter about it in comments to the direct to consumer drug advertising episode (otherwise good) because she’s usually better than that. You can’t say you want patients who are engaged and then look down on them for taking advantage of the FREE, ACCURATE INFORMATION that comes with your meds.
Educate yourself, and always double or triple check the work of any doctor who even blinks funny when you ask questions or mention reading you’ve done.
Pharmacists are great. Loads of love for y'all.
I feel like the original post is shaming people for not knowing something, in a way I really don’t like.
A lot of people are never taught to read the medication information, and a lot of people are actively discouraged from advocating for themselves - especially in a medical setting, and REALLY, SERIOUSLY in a mental health setting.
Particularly as an adolescent on psych meds, I was actively discouraged from reading the literature and asking about side effects because “The only one you need to be concerned about is the increased suicidal ideation part. Definitely tell someone if that happens, otherwise don’t worry about it”. (This was 1000% Not True.)
Now, do I read it NOW? Well, yeah, but I’m in my 30s and I’ve had more than 20 years of experience being fucked over by the medical and mental health systems. Most people HOPEFULLY don’t have that.
Even then, suicidal ideation wasn’t listed in the pamphlet for the blood pressure med I tried last summer - it was an unusual interaction, and I had to go online to find that, and my doctor was pretty freaked out about it. (It was fine, because I know to be vigilant about starting new medications. Sometimes bodies are weird. I also get the opposite reaction when I’ve tried ADHD meds - stimulants make me want to eat EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE.)
On the one hand, yes, it’s in the leaflet that you shouldn’t drink while taking benzodiazapines, and there’s probably a sticker on the bottle too.
On the other hand, it also says that with ibuprofen and virtually every antidepressant I’ve ever been on. (The big risk with NSAIDs is that it increases the risk of a bleeding stomach ulcer, but it’s more of a “most people will probably be okay if they don’t do it frequently” situation. It’s generally not GREAT to drink when you’re dealing with mental health stuff REGARDLESS, but for some psych meds the big issue is a risk of “increased drowsiness”. In contrast, mixing tylenol and alcohol can seriously damage your liver. Mixing alcohol with benzodiazapines can SUPER kill you.)
There’s not a lot of nuance or degree there, and I think some people - younger people, especially - are used to authority figures/older adults harping on the “Don’t drink and don’t use illicit drugs” thing, so they may not realize no, really, there may be an ACTUAL REASON THAT CAN KILL YOU that medication may say not to use alcohol while you’re taking them.
So yeah, if you didn’t know before, now you do. Read the leaflets that come with your medication, ask your pharmacist if there’s anything in particular to look out for, and pay attention to how you’re feeling - good and bad - when you start a new medication, and how that changes.
Hell, I’ve had doctors discourage me from reading the leaflets because “it’ll only make you anxious.”
And like like I KNOW that’s bullshit advice. Thirty years of medical negligence, abuse and weird drug interaction fuckery have primed me to be aware of how awful that advice is. But if you’re not someone who deals with chronic or long term problems that require regular advocacy, if the authority figure who you’re trusting to take care of you is telling you to dismiss the literature then yea, I can kinda see how people aren’t aware of these things. They’re being conditioned to be “good patients” by bad doctors. And in my experience, it’s depressingly common.
So yeah, read the literature that comes with your meds, either on the leaflet that comes with it or by looking it up on Drugs.com. And if you’ve got questions or concerns, 100% ask the pharmacist or call your clinic; they’ll usually put you through to a nurse or physician’s assistant to talk to. You’re not bothering them or being bad; this is part of their job.
anyway shout out to transhet men and transhet people in general. you’re amazing and you didn’t “betray” anyone or “abandon” anyone or “become the enemy” - you deserve love, respect, and happiness
Trans men have been demonized completely by the very community that’s sposed to protect an love them.
hi! i've been following your blog for a couple months now and im just so impressed at how much you know about bugs! id really love it if you could share a couple of the weirdest/most interesting bug facts that you know? thank u!!
There are just too many! How about I just share one super interesting one that I learned recently? Warning for graphic descriptions of reproductive anatomy and mating, if that squicks you out! But I promise it’s interesting and absolutely wild.
Females of cave-dwelling Brazilian barklice in the genus Neotrogla have penises and males have the equivalent of a vagina! This is, as far as scientists know, entirely unique in nature. There are some species where females have penis-like organs, but they don’t use them the way this barklouse does. The penis in Neotrogla species is an entirely new organ and not an adaptation of an existing one (i.e. the penis-like clitoris of the hyena).
The male has an internal chamber into which he ejaculates his sperm. The female then inserts her curved, erectile organ called a gynosome into the male’s body and takes his sperm into her body via a duct in the gynosome.
Their mating sessions can last 40 to 70 hours during which they are locked together by tiny spines at the base of her gynosome. They absolutely cannot separate during mating, and forcing them apart will cause fatal damage to the male.
As if all this wasn’t wild enough, the typical roles of male and females are swapped as well. In most species, it’s the male that seeks out multiple females in order to spread his genes as far as possible and the females are choosier about mates. In Neotrogla, females try to mate with as many males as possible and males are choosier. This is likely because in the cave systems they live in, food is hard to come by, and the male spermatophore also provides females with a burst of nutrients that helps her produce offspring. So she wants to get as many of those as possible, and uses her spined penis to keep males from leaving mid-mating.
These lil dudes are the size of fleas so photos are hard to come by, but here are some!
348 notes 
sofd-maybe
nztsume
