aging cw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sigmaleph:

you are offered a choice:

  1. You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.
  2. You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don’t pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.

what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you’re tempted to answer ‘it’s complicated’, round off to trans)?

Choose:

character-creation-vs-150k-poll

My tag ramble was so long that Tumblr cut it off (apparently the current limit is 30 tags), so I’m dumping it into the main post body:

#I’ve been wavering on whether to reblog this for ages

#I felt kind of bad about piling on to Sofi’s notespam like that

#but it being context for the next post has pushed me over into “yes”

#I didn’t realise until after voting that the character creation is one-time-only rather than ongoing access

#which makes the correct answer less *obvious*

#but I stand by my vote of cis | character creation

#(as it happens I *am* considering doing a second puberty through this‚ but they’d both be estrogenic)

#(honestly I’d barely even need the magic ID updating)

#(29-year-old me in 12-year-old me’s body could pass for 29 about as well as I could in 29-year-old body)

#(the two mes look pretty much the same: it’s all a matter of how you act)

#((well‚ 12-year-old me was a little smaller‚ but within the adult range and her face was already more or less stable))

#(((ooh‚ I bet I could tweak it so that I *stay* five-foot-one this time around)))

#(((during my first puberty my body map never updated for my final growth spurt‚ and

#I’m not *dysphoric* about being two inches too tall‚ but it does get a bit disorienting sometimes)))

#anyway my point there is that…a lot of people in the notes are going “money can be exchanged for goods and services”

#but I think in this case that’s actually backwards

#while money and health do both feed into each other

#health can be exchanged for money to a much greater degree than money can be exchanged for health

#money can *maybe* buy you the *appearance* of 9 – 17

#–(depending on how much puberty I can get away with doing again without fucking up my brain)–

#more years of youth‚ but it won’t buy you the lifespan nor the functionality of it

#money can buy you the ability to *breathe* your homeworld’s atmosphere even during pollen season

#and enough of it can buy you the ability to *talk* while breathing it

#but it can’t really buy you the ability to eat and drink while breathing it‚ and that’s a significant handicap in itself

#(not to mention the street harassment you get wearing a prosthetic immune system (to keep your built-in immune system from freaking out))

#likewise‚ money can buy disease *prevention*‚ but not the ability to shrug it off once you’ve caught it

#the ability of money to buy more robust bones is extremely limited

#(have I ever broken a bone? no! but why settle for merely *adequate* bone strength when I can have *optimal* bone strength?)

#((…god‚ why is anyone who is not *actively dying* for want of resources taking the money over the health))

#((I was so very aware‚ that time last year that a ventilation floor grate broke beneath me‚ that if I’d been 80 I would have *died*))

#((but I was 28‚ and I got away without even a broken bone))

#((why would you give that up any more than you have to))

#the list goes on

#meanwhile‚ health can buy you a nice steady low-non-physical-barrier-to-entry job as a farmhand or dockworker

#(not *as* steady as magic income‚ yes‚ and I *do* care a great deal about that‚ but I care about health *more*)

#and I’m not altruistic enough to take more money than I need so that I can give the rest away‚ not given what else is on offer

Tags:

#reply via reblog #tag rambles #surveys #transhumanism #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #aging cw #death tw #poison cw? #injury cw #illness tw?

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

overlyabstract:

tanadrin:

official-kircheis:

skluug:

fucking bizarre that computers heat up while operating. like dude it’s just math

i too heat up doing math. They’re not special

it’s worse than that. the laws of physics require doing math to produce waste heat.

it’s bonkers that the answer to “can i make a more efficient steam engine” is “no, and btw all good is temporary”, but it’s objectively even funnier that the answer to “can my fucking cpu stop throttling” is “no, bc otherwise you could make more efficient steam engines”

Tags:

#that one post with the thing #aging cw #apocalypse cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

colubrina:

7845cc95450ed6a34cef74e6c7320e58db644bbc

​

nevereverbird:

e75cdcad05786e25308555b9760c503554319a45

Tags:

#hmm #I like the aesthetic‚ but…it’s hard to settle this out into words… #…it’s not safe to go straight there‚ even if you could #the single best argument in favour of technological progress is that if we do not‚ we will die in mere decades #I don’t mean the species; I’m not talking about extinction #I mean each of us‚ individually‚ is mortal #that’s a problem #it is the ur-problem #and while I wish we could have the best of both worlds #and I do think we should strive to make this the best of both worlds #when I think about life as a hobbit vs the life I have… #…at least this way I have a chance #seven percent of all the people who have ever lived‚ it is not too late to save #oh‚ I hedge‚ as hard as I can afford to #I do want to buy the mes who are *forced* to adopt non-industrial lifestyles time #every day is valuable (well‚ except the days with colds) #but in the long run‚ to take up that life by *choice* would be to condemn myself to death #tag rambles #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #death tw #apocalypse cw #aging cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

virtualyric:

scientia-rex:

asmrican:

boeing747:

i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this

5b8e90736dabd90c0efe627961848560a8da33ad

I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”

No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.

No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.

Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.

All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.

Be kind.

Most of the responses to this are about how gross bodily stuff shouldn’t be stigmatized, it shouldn’t be viewed as a moral failure, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and it shouldn’t be covered up or lied about, especially since it can be very important information for health.

Which is indeed the important message here, so I’m glad there are so many responses like that!

But I do want to go back to the initial post saying that “grossness is a vital aspect of life” and “we cannot deny ourselves this”.

Maybe it’s just saying that our lives function a certain way right now and we aren’t currently able to change that. But a phrasing like “vital aspect of life” really sounds like it’s going beyond that. It sounds like it’s saying that if it was possible to live a life free of this gross stuff, that in itself would constitute some sort of impoverishment of experience.

And sure, maybe deep grossness (as opposed to just, like, finding the architectural style of someone’s house to be vaguely yucky according to your personal tastes or whatever) is something that some people would miss having in their lives if they somehow didn’t have it; maybe they actually would feel impoverished and would go seek out gross experiences, and I want them to be able to get what they want!

But not everyone would miss that. If it was possible to live without the gross aspects of life that are currently inescapable, that would be a great thing for some of us. I wouldn’t be losing any important part of who I am, if I had the choice to live without that gross stuff and I took it.

Tags:

#…yeah to me the obvious reading of OP is ”escapist fiction is wrong‚ if you’re not disgusted by what you’re watching you #ought to get a different movie” #(I originally wrote ”reading” and ”book” there‚ but actually this is a much bigger issue with video because it’s harder to skim) #the stuff in the comments about the importance of having forewarning about aging is good‚ but… #…are they *sure* they’re actually agreeing with OP? #I’d be a lot more willing to reblog that comment if it weren’t attached to OP #originally I’d decided against it‚ but with this new addition I’m leaning towards #(I guess the main argument I can see for not reading OP that way is that #there’s a difference between saying *more* media should be gross and saying *all* media should be gross) #(but…what media environment are they living in such that the grossness levels are far too *low*?) #(*I* go upstairs in the afternoon and find Mom watching a movie about people dying horribly of hyper-Nipah‚ you know?) #((and that’s if I’m lucky and she doesn’t try to watch it in the living room over the speakers)) #(and honestly I’m still not 100% over the very visceral food-poisoning scene in Minority Report) #(people in movies are *constantly* yelling in each other’s faces‚ making out‚ getting covered in blood) #((sometimes all in the same scene!)) #(yeah‚ yeah‚ I know‚ something something pathogen-stress hypothesis) #–((it’s a different person‚ but I notice the aging-forewarning commenter casually mentions viral gastroenteritis as ”a day”)) #((which‚ uh))– #(but god‚ please‚ don’t make *me* live at *your* setpoint) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #unsanitary cw #discourse cw #medical cw

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

paradigm-adrift:

In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.

At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.

But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?

Right?

I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.

I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.

(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)

I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.

#A good answer! #Thank you. (paradigm-adrift)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #medical cw #illness tw? #injury cw? #venting cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

paradigm-adrift:

In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.

At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.

But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?

Right?

I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.

I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.

(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)

I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #medical cw #illness tw? #injury cw? #venting cw?

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

just-shower-thoughts:

Just broke my personal record for consecutive days lived..Going for the record again tomorrow

Tags:

#it’s my birthday today and I was thinking about this post again #just broke my personal record for consecutive years lived! #going for the record again next year #birthdays #death tw #aging cw #that one post with the thing

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

3liza:

talking about flters and real beauty vs fake beauty and cultural standards etc always makes me think about all the victorian and edwardian novels i read, where the things that people thought about beauty were recorded at length. recently ive been reading a lot of Thomas Hardy (best known for Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) and there’s so much discussion of the beauty of people, particularly love interests, both men and women. and these writers, and their eras, and the culture of the eras, was of course obsessed with beauty and youth and also artificial beauty (being the eras of the really transformative corsets, not to mention some of the earliest industrialized or modernized beauty products or processes), as all human societies are to a greater or lesser extent in their own ways, but the thing that sticks out to me in reading these books is how beauty is not the singular or even the most important aspect of a person’s overall attraction. if someone has a beautiful face or figure, it is mentioned, but never to the obsessive, fixated extent that physical beauty is isolated from and elevated over all other features in modern american/western culture. there are plenty of protagonists or love interests in these books who are described as not young, or not remarkable, or not pretty, or even ugly or frightening, but nevertheless compellingly sexy and attractive, or simply interesting, or worthy in some way. 

its weird that the cultural consciousness has become seemingly ignorant of non-physical attraction. like that anon that was in my inbox talking about how they were “normal looking’ and therefore “needed” filters in order to “compete” with attractive people. it’s a weirdly mercenary and capitalist view of the social economy, first of all, which absolutely is not zero-sum no matter how badly the social networks want to convince us that it is. but there was never a single mention from that person about their ability to charm or entertain or attract using anything except a fake photo of themselves. wild. im fuckin worried about them! im worried about every young person how has brain worms

ee847b93c61ed55d368a606a13e4603e16bd99c2

when i was about 4 and starting to become aware of how much adults were obsessed with my appearance because i was dainty and blonde and could do a passable shirley temple imitation, my parents gave me a very serious lecture about what physical beauty actually meant: i didn’t work for it, it was given to me genetically. and someday, maybe sooner or more suddenly than anyone could predict, it would be gone. if accident, illness, or hardship didnt get me, old age eventually would. so with that being a certaintly, i had better build a life and a personality on something other than my looks. and i said, ok. every day i get older im more grateful for that advice and the fact i decided to take it to heart instead of trying to gamble on Being Hot for long enough to get job security. which is also a valid career choice but it’s a risky one. always better to have a fallback just in case.

Keep reading

Tags:

#you know that one xkcd with the hunting-abandoned-pets-for-sport discourse? #that’s how I feel about beauty discourse #I am *completely* not plugged into this scene #and every once in a while I come across a missive from this‚ fucking‚ dystopic universe #do *all* allos have to deal with this kind of shit?? #I hope y’all get through okay in there #(this also gives me a very different perspective on aging discourse) #(it really rubs me the wrong way how many people assume that if one wants to avoid aging it’s because one wants youthful *beauty*) #(when to *me* it seems obvious to want youthful *functionality* and youthful *stability*) #(I’ve got one of those bodies that doesn’t really visibly change between ~13 and ~30) #(I’m 27 now and I’ve had this face for so long that even my faceblind ass can recognise it!) #(*not* looking forward to the day that I look in the mirror and see somebody else!) #(and more importantly I’ve been acquiring new chronic conditions almost every year since I was 23) #(and I shudder to think how many maluses I’m going to be operating under by the time I’m 40 or 50 or 60) #((…although in fairness it seems like some of them might not be permanent after all?)) #((some of my keloids seem to be fading and almost never give off growing pains or itching)) #((I still often itch *immediately* after sweating but it doesn’t consistently last until I rinse the sweat off anymore)) #((maybe someday I’ll be able to breathe outdoors again‚ or lie on a mattress without feeling every goddamn spring)) #((that would be nice)) #tag rambles #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw

Anonymous asked: Body mod: Unaging preteen girl.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

moonlit-tulip:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).

*

Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.

Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.

(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)

((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))

—

†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.

it’s pretty nuts that some people are almost the same size they were when they were 13 for their whole life

I was probably only like 2/3rds of a person when I turned 13! kind of short and very lacking in upper body strength

(for completeness, note also the existence of this branch)

It’s pretty great! One of the nice things about estrogen is that the physical effects are often very front-loaded: you get them out of the way when you’re about 10 – 12 and then have, like, 20 years of looking pretty much the same. I love how stable my appearance has been for the most recent half of my life: even with prosopagnosia I can look in a mirror and get a visceral sense of “yep, that’s me!”, because I have *so much experience* with this face that general object recognition is enough for that.

(I didn’t feel a visceral sense of recognition in the mirror until I was at least 17, maybe 18! Before then I’d never had the same face for long enough to really deeply get to know it!)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #morphological freedom ask meme #amnesia cw #aging cw #hormones #prosopagnosia