aikokima
Things My Brain comes up with...
159 posts
Latest Posts by aikokima
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call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.
I'm hard of hearing and always have the captions on, I'd rather know what the heck someone said is the same as the captions.
Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.
I actually have a post about something like that for hearing aids!
Hey as someone who isn't disabled and has never used or needed mobility devices, I just wanted to let you all know that it is so fucking cool when people accessorise/decorate/style their mobility devices to match their outfit and style. Like this one time I saw an older lady dressed entirely in yellow and her cane was yellow and had daisies on it and I still remember that sometimes with joy! Yay yellow lady! Or the punk kid I once saw with skull stickers on their wheelchair and a studded wrap on the back of the backrest.
If you've got a mobility tool of some sort and you've wanted to do something to jazz it up somehow but felt too self-conscious about doing it because what if it doesn't look good, I'm gonna tell you that you 100% should. It's so neat to see people personalise their devices, like they're telling you "this is not a foreign object, this is an extension of my body and outfit and will be styled accordingly."
And I just think that's neat.
Definitely not June but HAPPY PRIDE!!!
Happy pride. Reminder there is still a big echo chamber underbelly of conservative bigots within the LU / greater Zelda fandom here on Tumblr. This includes many who claim to "love everyone" under their religion, but happily interact with open bigots (such as those on That Conservative Server who think the queer "movement" is inherently predatory in nature. Such rhetoric is incredibly harmful and dangerous toward the queers you supposedly "love").
Reblog this post if you would like to fire some shots in the backyard and remind your followers you are 100% queer (or an ally) and do not tolerate intolerance!
So that's what I heard... Being hard of hearing and not sure what you think you heard is always wild 🤣
Yes, this!
Hey hey, as a librarian, can I just say don’t pace yourself at the library. I get a lot of customers saying “oh I shouldn’t get too many books out at once” but like you should!!!! Max out your card, take everything we have on a subject you’re interested in, make a book fort in your home. We love that shit! It doesn’t matter if you read them or not; just take them for an adventure and bring them back whenever they’re due!
For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!
Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!
This is useful!
Handy reference chart showing the difference between blossoms (ume/plum, momo/peach, sakura/cherry, anzu/apricot, ringo/apple). Note the colors, how the buds sit on branches, and of course petals shapes.
Apricot and apple are veeeery rare as kimono/obi patterns. Morover, what I usually simply call “plum” (ume) is in exactly the Prunus mume (or Japanese apricot/plum) and come with red/white/pinkish flowers.
As into fiber arts as I am, I will always support something like this! ❤️
going to start researching sheep breeds that are like endangered or need conservation and then seek out their wool to use, preferably buying directly from the herders, so i can support them
No matter your answer, you have another opportunity right now.
We are a group of LGBTIQ+ refugees struggling to survive in Sudan. Every day, we face unimaginable persecution, violence, and rejection. On top of this, we are battling severe shortages of food, medical care, and shelter.
Hunger is a daily reality. Many of us go days without food, and medical assistance is nearly impossible to access. Our shelters are small and inadequate, leaving us exposed to harsh conditions. For lesbians, even basic sanitary products are out of reach.
With your help, we can change this. Your donation will go directly toward food, medication, and urgently needed tents to provide safe shelter. No amount is too small every dollar makes a difference in our survival.
🌍 Please donate today and be part of our fight for survival. Your kindness can help improve and even save our lives.
https://gofund.me/4d80b32c
If you can’t donate, please share this post to help spread awareness. Thank you for standing with us!
I don't, but I do believe that it is important to share!
i feel like this is important enough to put on here.
if you have any videos on youtube make sure this is unchecked
Absolutely good to know!
12 museums that you can visit online
www.hermitagemuseum.org
britishmuseum.org
www.louvre.fr
www.museodelprado.es
collections.vam.ac.uk
www.moma.org
www.khm.at
www.digitalsculpture.org
www.tnm.jp
artsandculture.google.com
collections.lacma.org
collections.rom.on.ca
I have done this before 🤣🤣
People with shit eyesight whenever they're around other people with shit eyesight start passing around their glasses like it's a blunt rotation just to see how blind everyone else is.
This ☝️, because I may not have paid much attention to any school work but I did find this one fascinating.
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Mister Rogers
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The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline. Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.” “Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies. “Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted. The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.
There's over 9 million users on Tumblr now. Reblog if you're one of the few who's never EVER left anon hate in somebody's ask box.
This ☝️, because we don't have a nifty little best reads to let us know that you liked it and want more, but also be kind.
Fun Story to Share.
I got my (now 18-year-old) daughter into Ao3 back in 2021. I taught her she should always comment - even if the fic looks old or abandoned or whatever. She did.
Well - she got this email this morning:
The fic was written in 2014 and essentially abandoned.
Bethy read and reviewed in 2021 (and was actually the only person who had commented at all).
Today in 2025 - the final chapter was posted by the author and this was her reply to Bethy’s comment.
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Never question whether a fic is too old to comment on.
This is one of the best set of 'rules' I've read yet for any shipping options. For example, one of my favorite pairs is Link/Revali from BotW. There is so much that you can create and do with whatever ship you want to.
the first rule of shipping is get aromantic with it. the second rule is that gender and sexuality are what i want them to be. the third rule is have fun and be yourself
As a crafter myself, this is super helpful!
Hey, if you do crafts (especially things like crochet, knitting, embroidery, etc), make sure to look up how to identify when a listing is AI generated. You do NOT want to waste money on an incredible looking kit or pattern that is physically impossible to make, especially if you're on sites like etsy hoping to support an actual artist.
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Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community.
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it.
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
it’s really scary how unaware the average person is of the climate crisis. and that’s not their fault, it’s very deliberate
This needs to spread so much, so much of this I only learned about a few years ago at age 30!!
Kids, we know how interest works, right? A while back I made a post about how credit card interest can screw you, but we know how interest can be good for you too, right?
I suspect we don't know about this because on one of the posts I made about it someone said something about how it is evil that money can make money, but you know that's not just for the ultrawealthy, right? That is legitimately something that you can and should take advantage of in some kind of retirement/savings/investment account.
Let us say that you are twenty years old, have no money to put into a savings account, but have a job that pays you well enough that you've got twenty dollars to spare from each paycheck.
Let us say that you put that into a normal savings account; normal savings accounts have an average interest rate of .56 APY. Let us say you are going to be working until you are sixty, and that you will add forty dollars to that account every month (twenty bucks from each paycheck) for a total of $480 per year.
At the end of 40 years you would have about $21.5k.
That's a pretty good chunk of change! twenty thousand dollars is a lifechanging amount of money. But look at the total interest. In forty years you would have accrued only $2300 in interest.
Now, instead, let us imagine that you are a member of a credit union that offers you a free, high-yield savings account with a decent APY. Everything else being the same, but putting that money in an account with a 4% return does this:
Your total contributions that you put in stay the same, but the amount of money you have at the end of forty years more than doubles.
Let's say you have a thousand dollars to put in the account at the beginning and run it again.
Low interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $1200 at the end.
High interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $4000 at the end.
There are many, many very stable opportunities for savings that will grow your money. Fifty thousand dollars isn't a retirement plan, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you would have if you just stuck cash in a savings account or if you didn't save any money at all.
I know how hard it can be to save. I know it feels impossible to put money aside, but even if you start with no money and can tuck away five dollars a week you can get a LOT out of that five dollars a week.
This certainly isn't "you can't buy a house because you get coffee at the cafe," but it something that can HELP.
Now, let's suppose you're not twenty. Let's suppose you're in my boat, and you're (almost) forty and you're going to be saving for twenty years. You still don't have a lot of cash, but you know it has less time to grow interest, so you double your contribution and you put in forty dollars for each paycheck for a total of $960 a year.
That is extremely very much not the same thing as putting in forty bucks a month for twenty years. Instead of your interest being nearly one and a half times the amount of your contributions, it is around half.
If you are a young person (honestly even if you are not a young person) and it is in any way possible for you to start putting money into any kind of an investment account, you should do so as soon as humanly possible. The earlier you do it, the more interest you will have and the more money you will end up with when you are nearing retirement age.
This is how individual retirement plans work. This is what a 401K does, but sometimes it does that with matching contributions from your employer (so your employer matches whatever you put into the account up to a certain percentage of your pay). 401K accounts also often have higher APYs than high yield savings accounts, though they have more limitations on how and when the money can be pulled out.
If you are broke as fuck and never learned anything about investing or interest from your family because your family was broke as fuck too, now is the time to learn. r/PersonalFinance is a reasonable resource (and if you ever happen to have a windfall that's the first place I would point you for figuring out how to make the most of it) for learning about this stuff.
Thinking about money sucks! Being afraid you'll never be able to retire sucks! Having to figure out how to save sucks! But there are tools out there that even very fucking broke people can use to make that suck less.
Honestly, I doubt that is all of them but they are the sort for too stupid to live or up for a Darwin award.
I just love it when video games let you do really stupid shit that kills you immediately. I love being like "oh this is a terrible idea" and being able to do it and then die. It's good game design.
While my disability isn't something easily DIY like this, I do think this is something to reblog and share.
In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…
And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…
Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.
He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.
Now this doesn't translate directly for emails, but a lot of it does. If you get an email about something concerning, DON'T REPLY BACK! Double check the sender and then go to the website or whatever and check on it through that, not the site the email sent.
Hey so fun new scam just dropped! I got a call earlier today from someone spoofing the local police department's desk number, asking me if there was a reason I'd missed my jury summons this morning.
Friends, I had not received a jury summons for this month. Which I told him, at which point his previously clear diction suddenly turned into a rapid mumble, only becoming clear for scary words like 'federal' and then asking to confirm my address, at which point I hung up and decided to call the police department later.
When I called the police department the desk officer sounded so tired y'all. All I had to say was "Hey I got a call earlier saying I missed jury duty this morning?" and she immediately sighed and told me that yes it was a scam that was going around and thanked me for calling to confirm.
So this is your periodic reminder that law enforcement agencies will not call you to tell you that you're in trouble. If you need to pay a fine of some sort they will mail you a physical invoice. Anyone calling you saying they're from the police or any other law enforcement organization (up to the CIA and yes I have heard of scammers attempting to impersonate CIA agents over the phone) who then tries to get financial information from you over the phone is a scammer.
I know I actually bang on about this a weird amount, but it is my fervent hope that the information will stick in peoples' brains if they get randomly selected for the adrenaline spike lottery. Scammers use scary words to get you to panic in order to shut down your critical thinking, and if even one person's brain spits out "Tumblr user waterhobbit said the cops/CIA/federal marshalls don't call about this shit" before their bank account routing number is in the hands of assholes I will consider it a job well done.
I get nauseous really easily but I also make sure to have something around that I know I can still eat even if I am. Not only do I not register hunger, but I get really bad headaches if I go too long without eating something.
I am, like, a long running proponent of the "eat something and you'll feel better" crowd and am often one of the first people to suggest "maybe it's time for a snack before I get whipped into a frenzy" but I really do resent how instantaneous it is. like it'll feel like I'm having my worst day in months and then I'll start eating and literally before I even finish I'm like oh yeah the world is beautiful
Breaking pots, since I played three different Zelda games....
Reading this, I realized that I am older than corn mazes...🤯🌽
corn mazes were invented WHEN???