"we need to bring back x" it starts with YOU
empowerment does not and should not mean “what makes me feel good.” empowerment is what gives you power, i.e. knowledge, autonomy, liberation. gaining knowledge doesn’t always make you feel good, it can be the most exhausting, terrifying, distressing thing you’ll experience.
New tin foil hat theory: the rise and propagation of minimalist home decor is meant to manage expectations for a desired culture of renters.
here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.
so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.
It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.
"Men's sexuality is visually oriented women's sexuality is relationally oriented" I really resent the idea women don't care about looks or the idea that women prioritizing warm relations and emotional safety over looks is "natural". Maybe hetero men should get systemically raped and sexually violated for 10,000 years and then we check back to see if they are still only primarily visually oriented or if they start caring about good relations and warm, safe feelings more too. Men just being able to focus on what aesthetically pleases them sexually is not "natural", it's a privilege afforded by social domination and having less to worry about safety wise.
"Tim Friede’s YouTube channel is home to a collection of videos depicting the Wisconsin-native truck mechanic subjecting himself to purposeful snake bites, blood slowly dripping down his arms.
For the past 20 years, Friede has been one of the most notorious “unconventional” medical researchers, undergoing over 200 bites from the world’s deadliest snakes — and more than four times as many — 850 — venomous injections.
He did it all in the name of science.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 100,000 people are killed by snake bites each year, with countless more being disabled by the venom of the deadly reptiles.
While life-saving anti-venom is available, very few countries actually have the capacity to produce it properly, given that most bites occur in remote and rural areas, and anti-venom requires arduous sourcing and accuracy.
But Friede’s blood is now full of antibodies, following decades of strategic exposure to the neurotoxins of mambas, cobras, and other lethal slithering critters.
His blood is now the source material researchers are using to develop an anti-venom capable of neutralizing a broad spectrum of snake bites...
Friede started this hobby — which he is indeed adamant no one else tries at home — out of sheer curiosity in childhood. After playing with harmless garter snakes in his youth, he began keeping more dangerous species of snakes as pets. At one point, he had 60 of them in his home basement.
In 1999, he began extracting venom from his snakes, drying it, diluting it, and injecting himself with tiny doses — keeping meticulous records as he went.
He had one major hospitalization in 2001, when he was paralyzed and in a coma for four days. But instead of giving up, he doubled down.
“In hindsight, I’m glad it happened,” Friede told The Times. “I never made another mistake.”
Jacob Glanville, an immunologist and founder of biotech company Centivax, stumbled on Friede’s videos.
Now, Friede is the director of herpetology at Centivax and serves as something of a “human lab” to Glanville.
“For a period of nearly 18 years, [Tim] had undertaken hundreds of bites and self-immunizations with escalating doses from 16 species of very lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse,” Glanville told The Guardian.
“It blew my mind. I contacted him because I thought if anyone in the world has these properly neutralizing antibodies, it’s him.”
To develop the new anti-venom, Glanville and his fellow researchers identified 19 of the world’s deadliest snakes — in the elapid family — which kill their prey by injecting neurotoxins into their bloodstream, paralyzing muscles (including the big, important ones, like the heart and lungs).
The trouble is, each species in the elapid family has a slightly different toxin, meaning they would each require their own anti-venom.
But Friede’s blood contains certain fragments of each of these toxins; protein molecules seen across the various species. Because of his decades of service to science, his blood also contains the antibodies required to neutralize these toxins, preventing them from sticking to human cells and causing harm.
Combining the antibodies LNX-D09, SNX-B03, and a small molecule called varespladib that inhibits venom toxins, Centivax has successfully created a treatment effective against the entire range of 19 species’ toxins.
Their work, which was recently published in the journal Cell, will soon be tested outside of the lab.
Trials will start with using the serum to treat dogs admitted to Australian veterinary clinics for snake bites. Assuming that goes well, the next step will be to administer human tests.
Researchers also believe that because the serum stems from a human, this should also lower the risk of allergic reactions when being administered to other people.
“The final product would be a single, pan-anti-venom cocktail,” Professor Peter Kwong of Columbia University, a senior author of the study, told The Times.
Or, he added, they could make two: “One that is for the elapids, and another that is for the viperids, because some areas of the world only have one or the other.”
As for Friede, he maintains his affinity for snakes, though his last bite was in November 2018, when he said “enough is enough,” according to The New York Times.
By then, he had certainly done enough. His pursuit of immunity could feasibly save countless lives.
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity,” Friede told The New York Times, “to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”
-via GoodGoodGood, May 2, 2025
Okay I answered my own question:
I couldn’t find the link that goes with the above image, I reverse image searched and only found twitter posts, not the article it supposedly comes from. Advocate.com does have an article (link below) which lists the transgender people killed in 2024, but has nothing about the trans-identified males currently serving a prison sentence.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation also has a report on the above (https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2024) of the 30 reported deaths, 3 were trans men (female) and 1 was a nonbinary afab person (female).
So, really the statistic is more like
Trans-identified males killed in 2024: 26
Trans-identified males serving a prison sentence for a sexual offence: 609
who are you when you are not watching tv or movies? when you aren't playing video games or reading a book or fanfiction or listening to music or whatever other kind of media that you engage with? who are you when your mind isn't in another world or story, when you are forced to sit with yourself and the only experience you have is your own sensorial life? can you define yourself outside of what you consume? who is that person? do you like them? can you bear it? can you bear it?