hi I’m a therapist some people come to me to break down severe childhood trauma some people come to me because their job is super stressful some people come to me because they’re worried all the time about stuff that they know they shouldn’t be worried about but they worry anyway some people come to me because they’re bad at focusing some people come to me because their mom said they should but they’re enjoying the experience anyway what i’m saying is there is no wrong time, reason, or explanation to come see a therapist. we’re ready for you.
think about it like this: if you’ve got a car, you take it in for regular checkups to make sure everything’s doing okay. Even if everything looks and sounds fine, you get it checked routinely.
For those fortunate enough to have a family doctor, you probably get routine physicals – not because anything’s wrong, but to make sure that you know where the baseline is and to check how things are going.
Why should your mental health be any different? Even if you’re completely sure that you’re fine, you can go see a therapist. If you’re right and everything is fine, then good news: you’ve now established a baseline for what good mental health looks like for you. Now you and your therapist know what things should generally look like. And therapy can be self-care, too.
Listen i know tumblr has a very pro-robot attitude but nothing on this earth is scarier than a printer churning out something when it absolutely Should Not Be
I have a wireless printer and my freshman year of college someone connected to it at 2am and printed out an essay on the housing crash of 2008 and I tell you what,.. I have never been more afraid
I reread Battlefield Terra by asukaskerian (which I highly recommend) for the 4/5th time, because I have a hole in my heart. So I decided to post one of my drawing inspired by it.
You know, just an usual johnkat interaction in BT (that I love so much btw)
This ask made me so happy, @tsaagan, and turned out to be really fun to research.
To address your question, we first have to figure out why getting water up your nose hurts! The short answer is: because the water in the epithelial cells that line your nose is way saltier than the water going into your nose, so the sudden osmosis that occurs when lower-salinity fluid comes into contact with those cells is distinctly not comfortable. (It also seems possible that some of the discomfort comes from the fact that there’s now something in contact with an area that doesn’t get a lot of tactile stimulus). The reason it hurts when water gets into your sinuses – versus just touching your nostrils – is that the epithelium inside your nasal cavity is pretty thin compared to what’s in the more distal parts of the nostrils, and while both areas are mucous membranes, the epithelium in the sinuses has fewer mucous producing glands. That means you’ve got more delicate tissue in that area, and less mucous around to provide a buffer between the cells and the invading low-salinity fluid.
While the epithelium of an elephant’s sinus cavity is somewhat different than a human’s, there are still enough similarities with regards to the presence of delicate mucous membranes and the salinity inside epithelial cells that I’m comfortable positing that yes, if elephants got water into their sinuses, it would probably be just as unpleasant for them as it is for us.
However! When elephants pull water into their trunks it doesn’t actually get far enough into their head to reach the sinuses – they’ve got a nifty muscular structure that lets them pinch their nasal passages closed before they enter the skull. (Now, this isn’t to say that a super-fresh baby still learning how to navigate having a trunk might not hypothetically mess up and suck water into it’s face too hard, but shutting off those passages is likely a reflexive action for adult elephants). Here’s a diagram of that structure from one of the most useful elephant textbooks I’ve ever encountered:
(Image Credit: Biology, Medicine and Surgery of Elephants, 2006; p292)
Now, as to the booger question, that’s pretty situational. In general, an elephant’s trunk isn’t snotty even though it’s lined with a mucous membrane: the pink tissue lining it is pretty similar to the inside of your lip. (Actually, it’s very similar – an elephant’s trunk is basically a fusion of their nose and upper lip.) There is mucous secreted from the lining of the length of the trunk, but it tends to stay in one place; it plays a really important role in helping transport odor molecules to a specialized sensory organ near the base of the trunk. Here’s an up-close photo of that trunk tissue:
(Photo Credit: B. Beury)
According to Jessica, an elephant professional I talked to with over a decade of hands-on experience, it’s mostly the older elephants who end up with dribbles of mucous running out the end of their trunk. Our discussions again used the human nose as a comparison – there’s a ton of mucous up in our noses, but they don’t really run noticeably unless something is going on.
Because there’s a mucous lining in an elephant’s trunk, there will always be a little bit of mucous in the water they suck up into it; it’s just generally not going to be a noticeable amount – think similar to what you’d end up with if you swished water around in your mouth for a while. If they sucked water up super far into their trunks, though, and then blew it out super hard? That’s when you get a ton of boogers. And sometimes, in human care, that’s actually exactly what we ask them to do.
Tuberculosis can be a problem with elephants in human care (a lot of the Asian elephants imported decades ago had picked it up from their handlers) and it’s a hard disease to test for in elephants because they’re literally too wide to get a clear x-ray of their lungs. The animal management world has solved this problem by creating something called a “trunk wash”: when an elephant holding a trunk full of water breathes out forcefully, any bacteria expelled from their lungs gets trapped in the water and can be detected in a lab. There’s a great video of a whole trunk wash behavior at 3:50 in this clip, from Wildlife Safari in Oregon – you’ll have to click through to watch it because it’s a Facebook video. If you can’t watch it, here’s how it works: a syringe full of sterile saline is emptied into one nostril of the elephant’s trunk, and then they’re asked to raise their trunk up high (to ensure it gets right up to that point where the nasal passages are closed off) and hold it there for a bit. Then the elephant lowers it back down, the keepers place a plastic bag over the end of the trunk, and the elephant blows all the water out into the waiting container. The whole baggie – water, snot, and all – is given to the veterinary team, and they’re able to test it for the presence of tuberculosis bacteria. (Why is a trunk wash only done with water in one nostril, you ask? Since the two nostrils in an elephant’s trunk are separated all the way up, if something goes wrong with a trunk wash procedure… like an elephant deciding to drink and/or spray the water out instead of putting it in the sample bag… you’ve got another nostril ready to go!) In lieu of a good photo of the steps of a trunk wash, here’s a great photo I was sent of an elephant filling only one side of it’s trunk from a spigot:
(Photo Credit: V. Gagne)
TL;DR: Elephants don’t get water in their sinuses when they use their trunk to drink because they’ve got a nifty muscle that lets them close off the base of their nasal passages, but if they didn’t utilize that muscle, it would probably suck just as much for them to get water “up their nose” as it does for us. When they blow that water back out, it’ll normally have a little bit of snot in it, but if they exhale super hard it’s totally full of boogers.
This post is part of the first Friday Theme Day on WADTT: Elephants! Stay tuned throughout the day for more elephant-related posts.
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As far as I could tell (I do have a well-curated dash), the discussion was roughly 1% sincere antis, 4% wankers, and 95% people talking at length about why the antis were wrong or liking those responses. The posts boosted the drive if anything (and made me personally verklempt to read all the lovely posts talking about how much the AO3 has made people happy. :’)
Anyway, the board, the volunteers, and the members & donors of the OTW are the ones who actually keep the AO3 up, and they are all choosing to give their time and money to support the mission of the org. Antis can’t stop them doing that no matter how loud they yell.
Even if the AO3 stopped being popular, that wouldn’t make it go away. The OTW is not trying to make a big score going public or have a super flashy site. We never wanted to build the one and only archive for fanfic. For-profit companies want monopolies to have the power to squeeze customers. We have no such incentive. We’re eager to have as much fic as possible on the AO3, because that lets us do whatever we can to preserve it, but we don’t want it to be the only place where fic exists. That would make the AO3 a single point of failure for fandom. And a wonderful part of fandom has always been its decentralized nature.
The AO3 isn’t perfect, either in absolute terms or for every user, and never will be. There’s lots that could be improved (and many awesome people actively working on improving it – I highly encourage anyone who can to please make the effort to volunteer).
But what does make the AO3 special is that it cares a lot about fannish history and its preservation and preserving your access to it, and not at all about generating hits or profits or harvesting your personal data, and central to that is maximal inclusiveness of content. It is fundamental to the entire project. It’s literally the first line in the Terms of Service that you agree to when you get your account.
If someone sincerely cannot accept that policy, then they shouldn’t agree to the TOS (which on the AO3 unlike most sites is human-readable), and they shouldn’t use the AO3.
For everyone else, even if you don’t like using the AO3 for your everyday reading for whatever reason, do consider cross-posting your stories there. Because if nothing else, it means that when the site you do like goes away, or becomes inhospitable, you’ll have a backup site with all your stories on it where you can download copies easily to be imported.
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