US SUICIDE PREVENTION HOTLINE IS CHANGING ITS NUMBER
Taking effect July 2022, the US Suicide Prevention Hotline will change from 800-273-8255 to the three digit code of 988. Especially with families and communities reeling from back to back tragedies, it is super important to share this information!
Repeat: Starting July 2022, the US Suicide Prevention Hotline will be 988
Important add-ons, though, as someone who’s done policy work on this:
It’s July 16, not just the start of July.
988 can not only be used as the suicide hotline, but for any sort of mental health or substance use crisis situation. As opposed to 911, the goal of 988 is that when dispatch is necessary, you’ll be met with a trained crisis response team rather than the police. The police will only be involved if there is an immediate threat to safety, which has almost never occurred in pilot programs - in one of the most well-known, Denver STAR, (which a lot of y’all seem to be familiar with) the police has actually never been called for backup. We’re hoping that this is going to get more individuals directed towards help rather than a prison cell.
Uhm yeah I’ll add more stuff if I can think of anything.
Thank you for the added information. Reblog this version as well, folkz.
my rule of thumb with gender-neutral body language is to try to make as few claims as possible about the people whose bodies you’re discussing. So “cancer screenings for women” < “cancer screenings for people with cervixes” < “cervical cancer screenings”.
This 1) helps prevent over-specifying as in “people with vaginas who can get pregnant” and 2) generally leaves you with the simplest, clearest, and most concise version of what you were trying to say. I’m sure I could also come up with a social justicey way to explain the preference but seriously don’t you just want your language to be efficient and precise?
Of course there are times when you need to make claims about a person (eg. “anyone who has a cervix can develop cervical cancer”) but you can still make things easier by asking yourself ‘am I specifying anything here that I don’t need to?’
Hard truth that I’ve had to confront that I’m honestly not proud of:
Constantly voicing your abandonment issues lead to more people abandoning you.
I do not mean in Serious Conversations about what you need in a relationship or anything like that - I mean when your friend plays a video game with a different friend for a few days and you feel like your world is crumbling, that is not the time to talk about them.
I understand the fear that someone will decide they are done with you. I live that fear every single day, but here’s the rub.
If you tell people “you’ll probably leave me anyway” or similar things every time you feel that fear, people will leave you.
Not because they don’t want to be your friend, your partner, your roommate, whatever. Not because you aren’t deserving of friends (you are), but because it is exhausting to be constantly told by someone you like/love to go away.
Because that is how it feels on the other end. I don’t say this to make it worse, or to make you feel like you’re at fault. Your brain is hurting you, and it’s okay to feel things. But if you find that it’s hard to keep people around you, then you need to hear that outside of things like conversations about boundaries and triggers and such, it would be to your benefit to change your language.
Instead of telling people “you probably don’t like me”, try asking. “You like me? It’s much easier for them to reassure you when you don’t start with a negative, because it puts your brain in a different mindset, one that finds it easier to believe their response.
Sit with your issues. Parent them. And when they’re done screaming, hold their little hands and dry their little faces and try to remember that you are worth being loved. I won’t say it’s easy, because it’s really fucking not. I won’t say you’ll get it the first time, or that you’ll never fuck up. I still do. But you deserve friends and partners and love, it’s just that so do they.
Another thing about this is that you are waving a red flag.
Because here’s the thing.
When your friend plays a video game with a different friend for a few days, and you talk about how that hurt you? You’ve just created a situation where you’ve placed the onus of your emotions on your friend, who did nothing wrong. Now your friend has to worry about what other perfectly reasonable activities are going to get them accused of hurting you, which is what you were doing whether you meant to or not.
And here’s the other thing.
When you tell someone “everyone always leaves me”, they wonder why. And it’s very possible that they’ve dealt with someone who complained about this, then proceeded to demonstrate why. There is a particular kind of social parasite that will completely use up their friend group, then move on to new friends while shit-talking how they were treated by the last friend group.
Ok, so, as most know hobbits LOVE mushrooms, but what if they love ALL mushrooms, even the poisonous ones. What if a hobbit’s body is able to handle more of the poison and it doesn’t affect them at all. And they love it!
And then they nearly give Aragorn a heart-attack when they’re heading to Rivendell.
Pippin, just being pippin: Look, MUSHROoms!!
The other three, running at full speed: MUSHROOMS!
Aragorn, who is a skilled ranger who knows every plant, tree, and flower to survive: No those are poisonous!
Frodo, who’s mouth is stuffed full: No they’re not. We eat these all the time back in the shire.
Merry, speaking with his mouth full, spitting mushroom everywhere: Yeah, they’re definitely not poisonous. Do you want one?
Aragorn, now having an existential crisis: No, n-no. I’m good.
Sam, mumbling under his breath: Well I wasn’t gonna share anyways.
@penny-anna this seems like your kind of hobbit lore
… OKAY NO WAIT THIS IS IMPORTANT
What if that’s the reason Sam and Frodo survived in Mordor?
What if all those references to noxious fumes and tainted water and everything were completely literal? They avoided eating anything made there, but they had to keep drinking and breathing.
What if part of Mordor’s defenses was that it’s literally poisonous to any creature not specifically bred to live in those conditions? What if Faramir was so careful about warning them about drinking the water because he knew it was fatal? What if Sauron’s general lack of concern about shit going down inside his own borders (aside from treachery, which apparently happened a lot) was knowing that any Mortal Man or Elf or Whatever that wandered in was gonna be stone dead in a few days, and his desire to catch any infiltrators on the borders was to keep them alive long enough for questioning?
And then these two hobbits who have spent their entire lives merrily ingesting enough poisonous fungi for breakfast to give Shelob a stomach-ache trot into Mordor and drink the poisonous waters and breath the poisonous fumes and scratch themselves on the poisonous thorns and feel mildly unwell.
Years later Sam gets a pained note from Faramir asking him how the hell he and Frodo survived when all the water is tainted with arsenic according to the survivors of the exploratory party and Sam writes back confused ‘What’s arsenic, it tasted bad and a bit metallic, that’s all I know honestly’ and Faramir goes to rant at Aragorn about how bizarre this is and is really confused when Aragorn goes into full-on flashbacks of watching those four tiny dumbasses STUFFING DEATH CAPS INTO THEIR MOUTHS LIKE GODDAMN CANDY.
Oooooo, I like that!! And it would make sense after Boromir went on and on about how impossible it was to be able to breathe in Mordor.
Death caps are actually really interesting because they kill you (if you don’t receive proper treatment quickly enough) by destroying your cells over the course of a couple days by, basically, blocking your cells’ ability to create proteins. To my understanding the reason death cap mushrooms don’t poison themselves is because their RNA polymerase is structured differently. So it could just be a simple case of “hobbits are inherently immune to some things that will easily kill a human or an elf”—kind of in a similar way to how there are lots of things that humans can safely eat that we have to keep away from our dogs and cats because that food is deadly to them but not us.
So my first interpretation of the original post was that hobbits can eat deeply toxic mushrooms not because they’ve ~built up an immunity~ Princess Bride style, but because they’re so genetically different from humans that it’s like, “no no no, this mushroom isn’t toxic, it’s just toxic to YOU guys,” the same way we don’t consider grapes or chocolate to be toxic even though those foods are very dangerous to dogs.
Maybe like an evolutionary adaptation to their enormous food requirements: Mammals differ in their ability to detoxify poisons in part based on their dietary evolution. Cats for instance, as hypercarnivores, absolutely suck at detoxifying poisons - their all meat diet means they’ve lost a lot of the metabolic pathways in the liver that other mammals like us and dogs use to neutralise toxic compounds. This is why it’s so easy to accidentally poison cats, this is why you can’t use spot on dog flea stuff on cats; the dog version is about 10x stronger as a dog’s liver starts immediately breaking down the compound so the dose must be higher to be effective, while a cat can’t glycosylate the medication and so it just kinda stays in them unchanged till they excrete it.
Plants are full of poisons to prevent things eating them, yes that includes lots of the ones we consider safe. Humans, as extreme omnivores adapted to way more plants in their diet than dogs, can eat all sorts of things that will kill a dog because we’ve got a load more metabolic pathways that degrade or modify toxic compounds we eat. Many herbivores, especially ruminants that have extra microscopic helpers to detoxify stuff, can eat things that will murder a human stone dead: deer will eat yew trees ffs. Rabbits eat death caps with no ill effect.
With how much hobbits eat (probably need a lot of energy to fuel their enormous, overworked livers), there’s got to be a lot of selection pressure for not being choosy, and even for being able to handle accumulation of other things like heavy metals just due to the sheer quantity of stuff they consume. Mordor was a polluted land, heavy with toxins usually present only in minuscule quantities in the air and soil, but hobbits eat their bodyweight in potatoes alone every week and are used to high doses of environmental pollutants and just kinda shrug it off as their liver slaps a few methyl groups on things and fires them off to the kidneys for removal.
Consider this though: Their weird biology makes them stupidly susceptible to something other races are fine with. Like how Sydney funnel-web venom is mildly irritating to most mammals like cats and dogs, but, due to some quirk in primate sodium channels, can kill humans. Everyone gets used to the hobbits just munching away on assorted deadly poisons, maybe flavoured with a little lead, casually drinking hemlock tea and seeing Sam and Merry absolutely lose their shit at someone getting a nettle sting or eating broad beans because “those things will kill you!!!!”.
I mean…this seems completely feasible, if you consider lembas bread, a bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man, Merry ate FOUR whole breads and barely burped, Sam and Frodo ate about a quarter piece of the bread a day plus whatever food they could get their hands on in the wild.
Apparently most Michaels craft stores are just now getting the rest of their Halloween shipments and unlike other stores that just dumped it all Michaels is usually putting it up at 90% off
hi i work at a Michaels! this is a true fun fact, and it goes further than just halloween. all autumnal seasonal decor & crafts are officially 90% off. winter holiday decor and crafts remain at a solid 70% off, and it won’t be long until it eventually becomes 90% off. the store i work at and, from what i can tell through the Michaels employee subreddit, a lot of others are still restocking christmas, halloween & thanksgiving stuff as a result of supply chain troubles. i was queuing things in and restocking today, everything i put on the shelves was either storage or seasonal
in short: Michaelsis desperate to sell their seasonal items and cannot get rid of it all fast enough. they are practically giving this stuff away for free at this point
ALT