I Have Never Forgotten, Have Donated (right Now I'm Poor, Sry), I Still Read News - But Rembember, Everyone!

I have never forgotten, have donated (right now I'm poor, sry), I still read news - but rembember, everyone! War in the middle of Europe has lasted 2 years. And Ukraine protects everybody. Everybody.

Will never forget how long the 2-metre walk from my bed to the window in the morning of 24.02.2022 felt as I was desperately trying to persuade myself that the booming, earth-shaking sound was just an unusually vicious thunder, and simultaneously thinking 'what if I pull the curtains open and there is no rain?' I pulled the curtains open, and there was no rain. No thunder clouds. Just the faces of neighbours also woken up by the missile explosions looking out of the window. That's when I understood that the war began.

Here's a reminder that Ukraine still needs donations badly to fight off the invasion.

United 24 and Come Back Alive are both verified charities that support the Ukrainian military. They offer various options, for example, collecting money for medical equipment, humanitarian demining and rebuilding Ukraine if someone doesn't feel comfortable donating towards weapons.

Just ... Sanji. Perfect, because he is so imperfect and so vulrnebale and ... when I think about him, I touch myself.

baratie arc sanji is sooooo. he's such a snarling dog leashed to a post except that post is a lighthouse he swore his life to guarding. and then you find out he was the one who made his own leash. everything about him is so "give a wild thing food and it'll never leave". he was a wild thing zeff fed. gin was a wild thing sanji fed. some people love with their teeth bared. some people are just all teeth and therefore just all love. everything is a cage to him btw (he makes it so). the baratie is a cage. zeff's bond is a cage. his body is a cage. four walls and a ceiling over his head - like he learnt the dictionary definition of a home and misunderstood. he's always hungry. he'll make sure you never starve. the door to the cage is open and he's looking at it ravenously, pacing just behind the threshold, never eating and always starving

Story time:

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.

Obsessed with this post

It is so because of dopamine. Dopamine fills my/your body, when facing Real Trouble. Minor inconvenience does not open up dopamine tap.

People aren’t the only ones with vivid imaginations