a) hate cancer, and

b) live in any of the following countries?

United States of America, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Taiwan (R.O.C.), Thailand, The Netherlands, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, or Uruguay

If you answered yes to both of the above, then congratulations, you may be able to save the life of one of my close friends who has leukemia!

How, I hear you ask?

By signing up for the bone marrow donor registry at bethematch.org

(for outside of the US, use this link instead).

But wait, I hear you say – bone marrow donation? That sounds scary and complicated!

Not so – it’s incredibly easy to get added to the registry, and the process of donating if you match is easy and relatively painless as well.

When you sign up on the website, you will be asked a series of screener questions to determine whether you are disqualified from being in the registry due to age or health conditions. You will then be mailed a free testing kit in the mail. The test consists of a cheek swab, which you do and then mail back to the registry.

And… that’s it! That’s literally all you need to do to sign up!

If you match a patient in need, you will be contacted by the registry, and given the option to donate to that person. If you agree to donate, the process is similar to giving blood with a few extra steps: Prior to donation, you will receive a shot once a day for five days. This is to help your body produce more stem cells. During these days you may experience some symptoms like a mild cold. On the day of the donation, they will take the blood out of your vein like for a normal blood donation. Unlike a normal blood donation, however, the blood you donate will be run through a specialized machine to separate and collect the stem cells, and then the blood itself will be returned to you. This process will take about four hours, and once it’s complete, you can go home and shouldn’t have any symptoms after.

But what if I don’t have healthcare and can’t afford medical procedures?

You don’t have to pay for any of this. The test kit is free, and comes with a free return label. And depending on your location, if you match with someone and decide to donate, you may even get free transportation and other accommodations to help with the process!

But what if I’m LGBTQ+? Aren’t I banned from donating?

Being a member of the LGBTQ+ community does NOT bar you from donating bone marrow, even if you are barred from donating blood. If you have always wanted to save lives by giving blood, but haven’t been able to due to homophobic regulations, this is your chance to make a difference.

Well, I’ve been meaning to join the registry, but just have never gotten around to it…

This is your sign to do so. Even though the process of donating marrow is more like a blood donation, bone marrow donors and recipients need to closely match, much like for organ transplants. Every single additional name on the registry increases the chances that those with leukemia will find a match. You could literally be the only hope for someone else’s life and not even realize it.

Please: join the registry, and potentially save a life. Potentially save my friend.

Apparently the link for the non-US website is not appearing, whoops! If you are not in the US, you can use this link instead: https://wmda.info/donor/become-a-donor/

OP already said it, but I want to highlight it:

The thing with bone marrow is that you can’t just give it to anyone - there needs to be exact genetic compatibility. I don’t know the medical specifics, but it’s much harder to find a donor for bone marrow than for blood. When I donate blood, I just go there and give them 500 mL and can be quite sure that they are going to use it, because there will be more than enough people who are compatible.

With bone marrow, it’s different. If you are registered as a donor, they will only contact you when your close enough genetic match gets leukemia. On the other hand, when someone gets leukemia, there might be a person with enough genetic compatibility in the world … but unless that person is registered as a donor, they will never know.

So it’s important that as many people as possible register as a donor, even though they may never be called upon.

ALSO the Red Cross has recently changed the rules for blood donation 🩸 and I’m going to get to donate again (maybe) for the first time in almost 20 years! Check the rules , queer people aren’t being automatically ruled out anymore, nor are people that lived in Europe during mad cow disease!

my wife z”l had her life extended because of a bone marrow transplant (she didn’t have leukemia but did have another kind of bone marrow cancer).

she had one match. one.

one man in France decided to join the bone marrow registry and gave her so many more years with our children because of it. you literally can save a life with this (especially if you’re a person who isn’t white – Miryam was Ashkenazic Jewish and that made it much harder to find a suitable donor for her).

It’s literally so easy!!! Be the match!

playing w pngs like dolls

Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.

The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.

And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.

I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.

Let me tell you a story.

Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.

Seaside, FL

Seahaven

And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.

Keep reading

Posting this iconic piece of media that I just NEVER found online isolated except in an archived reddit thread

the impulse to hide what I'm doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I'm literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I'll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans

DASHBOARD UNFUCKER V1.0

as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.

HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.

here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:

ALT

and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:

ALT

it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.

the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.

ALT

ALT

@phantommarigold i think you were having issues w this?

omfg its fixed kissing you thank you

wait its not working on my dashboard uuuh gimme a sec

DASHBOARD UNFUCKER V1.0

as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.

HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.

here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:

ALT

and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:

ALT

it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.

the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.

ALT

ALT

@phantommarigold i think you were having issues w this?

omfg its fixed kissing you thank you

@staff if you [change] the [design] of the fucking [dashboard] i will kill you