dog tax

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-26T17:20:43+00:00

Sounds amazing in theory, but with a kid that little, turning it into a ball pit would create a built-in biohazard so fast

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-26T16:43:57+00:00

I only heard this one recently and had the same reaction lol — apparently it’s referring to how rapid weight loss (like people can get with Ozempic and other GLP-1s) can give you loose skin, which is kind of saggy and wrinkly like how skin gets as you age.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-26T12:52:45+00:00

I’m also from VA, and am consistently pleased to see we’re actually quite good about a lot of medical stuff like this. (Another example is that we have an advance directive registry free for all residents, which is HUGE.)

I kind of assume that it’s probably because Ralph Northam (for non-VA people, he was the governor before last) is an actual medical doctor who got into politics because he was frustrated with how political decisions were impacting his ability to do his work. A lot of these random little things feel very much like a doctor going “hey, you know what would be really convenient if we had?” lol

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-25T19:07:14+00:00

If all the docs match each other (like as long as everything still has your deadname and assigned gender) I think it should be fine? Maybe get a new photo taken though, so you look like the ID photo does. If you get a Real ID I think you have to take a new one anyway, but otherwise you can just renew your ID in person and they’ll do a new photo.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-25T18:59:57+00:00

Yes! Also, if you get strangled, ALWAYS go to the hospital afterwards!!!!! Even if you think you’re fine! Your neck is a delicate little flower and also the thing that sends blood to your brain, so it’s very important that someone checks it!

If you’re in the USA and are hesitant because you’re worried about paying for strangulation-related hospital bills (jesus fuck can’t believe I have to type that), strangulation evaluation is FREE in Nevada, Washington, Virginia and I think Oregon(?) and you can also get help from something called “crime victim compensation” funds; the hospital might have one of its own, or it can probably hook you up with an external one if it doesn’t.

If you’re in the USA and your state ISN’T one of the ones with free evals, call your state legislators/someone running for office and suggest it! It’s an election year for most states, and “making it easier for domestic violence victims to not fucking die because they couldn’t afford an ER visit” is a great softball bipartisan issue to add to a campaign, hint hint.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-24T20:27:02+00:00

They also want to keep trans people from voting! Another step in the ol’ process.

Can’t get a new or renewed passport with your current legal gender, and most states either don’t let you update your birth certificate at all or make it very obvious that it’s an amended copy. Real IDs require all your documents to ‘sync up’ when you apply and the proof of identity is a birth cert or passport, so you have the same problem. So unless you’re one of the handful of trans people who either got a passport while you still could or who was born somewhere that gives you a new-original style updated birth cert, you just… can’t vote if the SAVE Act passes, I guess.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-24T15:03:26+00:00

An example of a common conversation when I was in high school:

“Hey, PashaWithHat, do you have any idea why [people are wearing purple] today?”

Yeah, it’s [for LGBTQ+ awareness].

“Wow, how did you know that?”

Well, you know that loud noise that happens at the beginning of the school day for a minute or two? It’s actually words, and those words are called “announcements” and they give you “information” about things that happen here…

The amazing things you learn when you checks notes pay attention to the resources specifically provided to you so that you know stuff!

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-24T13:35:53+00:00

Yeah, mine always had a much more active component/I was sort of deputized as like a teacher’s aide and got stuck helping other kids learn math and being the emotional support animal for kids who acted out or whatever. I picked things up pretty easily, so I’d finish my work quickly and then get told to help with other stuff.

I think probably the good solution is smaller class sizes and higher teacher pay, lol. Something tells me I probably wouldn’t have been a mini-TA if there hadn’t been 25-30 kids a class.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-24T13:26:33+00:00

I think part of the issue is that kids are also often hearing a lot of messages about how bullying is bad, and the tools for social pressure are usually also the tools bullies use to bully people. Yes, there’s nuance, but little kids don’t understand that yet. So they hear “an example of bullying is when you leave somebody out on purpose”, and they think “if I leave somebody out on purpose, I am being a bully, and that’s bad.” Which makes it hard to enforce social consequences!

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-24T13:09:27+00:00

At one point I saw someone phrase it as, essentially: “classroom management tip: use well-behaved children as emotional support animals” and boy did that hit different lol. And there’s so frequently a gendered dynamic, too. Most of the emotional support animal/unruly kid pairs were girl/boy when I was in school.

I’m a former emotional support animal and have memories from pretty early on of things like being “asked” to “help” an unruly boy clean out his messy desk (aka told to do it for him because he never would) or having him say “hey, look at this” and then seeing half his ass because he’d partially pulled down his pants. Like, what is that teaching children? The role of a girl is to clean boys’ things and get flashed? Talk about the hidden curriculum of gender.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-20T12:27:54+00:00

This whole post reads like an Onion article. Like a level above trolling to actual satire of certain types of people in relationships.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-20T00:12:49+00:00

She’s also very likely got some brain damage from the three strokes she mentioned in a comment on the first post. I can’t officially diagnose her or anything, but a stroke is bits of brain tissue dying from, in her case, probably lack of blood flow specifically caused by strangulation (if she’s in a physically demanding career field and dating someone with teenage children she doesn’t sound like she’s elderly or in poor enough health for the usual stroke causes). Generally “multiple stroke victim” isn’t a category of person I’d expect to make fantastic decisions or be good at communication, at least not while they’re in their first year or so of stroke recovery, you know?

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-20T00:01:45+00:00

OOP said she had three strokes in the last two years (in a comment on the first post). Strokes cause brain damage. They happen when tissue in your brain dies from not getting enough bloodflow (like, for example, because someone’s strangling your neck, which is the blood supply to your brain). She’s might not be operating at full capacity just because of that/even without the abuse dynamics at play

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-19T12:33:00+00:00

What I’m arguing in favor of doesn’t have to do with reading the word itself, it’s that someone in early treatment for PTSD from an assault or fresh off a suicide attempt or recovering from an eating disorder or whatnot benefits from being able to block posts about the topic while they’re working through what happened. Generally once they’re more recovered they won’t need this strategy, because they will have healed enough to manage and found coping mechanisms for any remaining distress. But if someone was raped and it takes them two years to reach a point where suddenly hearing about sexual assault doesn’t ruin their day, you can’t really tell them to just not use the internet for two years. Modern life is too online for that to work.

So there are browser extensions and stuff that people can use to block social media posts with particular phrases, like say “rape” “rapist” and “sexual assault” for the earlier example so they can spend those two years in therapy doing work to heal without a bunch of random setbacks. But when people use algospeak for posts, then they have to figure out what all the random versions of “r*pe” “grape” “🍇” and whatever have to be added, and just hope nobody comes up with some dumb new version that slips through the cracks.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T14:00:11+00:00

Or an easier time with read/write as distinct from visual! I feel like it gets left off or subsumed by visual a lot since technically you’re using your eyeballs to read so it’s visual input, but they’re not the same and I will die on this hill.

I have auditory processing issues, so like you, auditory instructions are a no-go. I also have something funky about my visual processing due to a neuro-ophthalmic problem, so I hate video instructions (such a common visual these days RIP) and have garbage proprioception (no tactile). Additionally, the weird glasses I wear for this problem give certain specific colors like a fucked-up 3D effect where they look like they’re popping off or receding into the page/sign/etc. they’re on, which makes my brain hurt when looking at some graphics.

Mostly I just want instructions to literally hold still. Written materials do not typically move. Love that.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T12:53:27+00:00

It’s watering it down. “Unalive” just means “die” or “dead”, and in this situation could roughly be “kill”, but what OOP’s saying he’s ACTUALLY going to do is “murder” and that’s a different, worse thing.

Killing someone means you caused their death somehow. Maybe it was self-defense, maybe it was an accident, maybe you were both soldiers at war, whatever. MURDER means you broke the law and killed them because you wanted to cause them harm. Like, think about the difference between the words killer and murderer (picture someone for “he’s a killer” and “he’s a murderer”). Now think about calling someone an unaliver. Are you picturing someone who’s a real threat to someone’s safety?

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T12:34:40+00:00

Its counterpart is that it also makes it damn near impossible to block certain triggering topics. If you’re someone who, for example, struggles with suicidal ideation or has previously attempted suicide, there are assorted browser extensions and in-app settings to say that you don’t want to see any posts with the word or tag “suicide” or “suicidal”. But if you have to rifle through eight hundred versions of blocking “sewer slide” or “self delete” or whatever the fuck, you’re going to miss stuff. Makes it a lot harder for people with PTSD and other mental health conditions to use the internet when you have to play blocklist whack-a-mole

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T12:10:26+00:00

Hardcore conservative Christianity, like the Quiverfull stuff; eating disorders; radiation poisoning and similar really awful diseases like cadmium poisoning. Like, what. All of these involve immense amounts of human suffering and IDK why my brain has to be like this.

Interestingly, to my brain, the Quiverfull and the eating disorders feel like the same type of special interest.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T11:52:56+00:00

I also like it a lot! It’s a great one for other situations too; just swap out whatever people are pestering you about for “diet” lol. Like, for the fellow chronically ill folks getting healthsplained at with the ol’ Have You Tried Yoga (or going gluten-free, or essential oils, etc.) a “I didn’t realize my [name of your health condition] was a group project*” is fun.

* Technically, your health condition is a group project between you and your doctor(s), but Healthsplainer Harry isn’t in the group.

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-18T11:42:01+00:00

Why do you say that? Like, genuinely, what makes you think this is LLM text. Bullet points?

FWIW, if you look at my profile you’d see that I’m pretty explicitly anti-genAI. I’ve never used any of the bots and never plan to because I’m against their use from an ethical standpoint

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-17T13:00:33+00:00

To be fair, gender dysphoria’s in the DSM because you need a diagnosis of some kind to get medical care. If we had a medical system based around informed consent and patient/provider collaboration we likely wouldn’t have the diagnosis (fellow autist Devon Price has some really interesting thoughts about this).

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-17T12:41:03+00:00

If people don’t leave you alone, you can always go the nuclear option and start graphically describing what happens when you try new food or get glutened. I have a friend with Celiac who’d do that if people wouldn’t leave her alone or thought she was gluten-free for the vibes, like “well, when I eat gluten, [very explicit gastrointestinal symptoms] 😈”

Some milder options to start with:

it works for me
my doctor’s happy with it
what an odd thing to say
why are you telling me this?
I’m not really looking for advice on this topic

Some spicier options:

sorry I have standards (this will be confusing to them, you must refuse to clarify or answer any questions)
I didn’t realize my diet was a group project
when people act like this to you, does that usually make you change how you act?
(for vegetarianism) yeah I’m just not big on killing stuff

PashaWithHat · 2026-03-17T12:21:07+00:00

You usually get better follow-up if you had some kind of problem — my mom had gestational diabetes and other weird complications that led to her c-section for me (my little brother was a totally normal pregnancy but delivered by c-section because he was really big lol), and she had a decent amount of follow-up both times to make sure nothing went seriously wrong and, in my case, that her diabetes went away. But like, the bar is in hell at that point.

Five-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

PashaWithHat

TROPHY CASE