Having finally gotten around to watching season 2 of Young Royals I have the following thoughts so far:

Omar Rudberg is brilliant

Calling your wlw friend because you need to up your atlethic skills, for you to end up running around in a football field in the darkness while it snows, is the real gay experience

The music is BRILLIANT

So many words exist in both swedish and danish and mean the exact same thing, and the subtitles on Netflix somehow still manages to be subpar and downright wrong at times

Your 30's are for shit talking the concept of cis het men with women you meet at outdoor bingo night.

how does haiku bot recognize all the haikus? an algorithm?

Today I discovered that, if left to their own devices, my 2-year old will try to start a circle pit during a Korpiklaani concert.

INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO DENMARK:

THIS is the direct link for joining the danish registry. In Denmark you'll be compensated for any time you'll have to take off work, so you won't have to use sick days or vacation to make time for donating. This is also the case for any sick days you might have leading up to or after the donation. Your transportation costs will be covered as well. It's a joint registry for stem cells and bone marrow, and the national registry for blood donors in Denmark estimates that 75% of donations are stem cell donations given as a blood sample, while the last 25% are bone marrow donations which involves a short procedure under full anesthesia with soreness and tiredness being the main after effects. It's all anonymous but it might be possible to exchange anonymous letters with the recipient, if both parties are interested in doing to. It's only possible to donate twice, but they strive not to use the same donor more than once, unless it's absolutely necessary. So, in a way, getting to donate stemcells or bone marrow is a once in a lifetime experience. The chances of being a match as a donor is only 0,1% i general. If you're male (I'm just repeating the very cis-normative language from the source, I'll update if I find any info on how trans people can best navigate this system) and under 30 the chance rises to 1%, and if you have a rare type of tissue your chances could be as high as 10%. You can register if you're between 18 and 55, and you'll stay registered until you're 61, unless you decide to leave the registry (or get to donate twice). You can always opt out of donating if it's a bad time for you, and it won't affect anything. You'll simply be contacted again next time there's a potential match.

I was about to hide a lot of this in the tags, but decided to put it here in case it helps just one person to join.

Do you both:

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.

Pros of having a brain that makes very fast associations: Good comebacks and jokes.

Cons of having a brain that makes very fast associations: that story about how you broke your foot reminded me of a fun fact about lizards.

ADHD drugs are fun. Like, I can just take an extra pill if I need Extra Brain today.

Slept like shit and feeling tired? No problem, just fix it with DRUGS AND COFFEE.

Not feeling like Having Brain today? Just skip the drugs and see what happens! Will you hyper focus on a 1000 piece puzzle? Dig a very large hole in your garden? Scroll TikTok for 16 hours? The possibilities are endless!

Not today Satan! But how about Saturday? We could do brunch.

To be honest, at this point I'm getting by on Ritalin and nihilism.

I keep getting ads for tiny high-vis vests for chickens.

Okay, so, growing up with undiagnosed ADHD did a number on me. As a result of this I dropped out of high school (or, what is most easily described as high school - it's two or three years that you need to be able to go to university and some trade schools). I finished the first year before dropping out and spending four years flapping about and working different jobs. At some point I decided that I needed to get my life back on track, and found a place where I could enroll to finish the second year. Which meant that I ended up in a class full of people who had known eachother for a year. One of the first things I heard was "Oh, you remind me so much of Søren, who dropped out after six months", which, like... Yeah, big Drop Out Energy, I get it. But then I met Søren a few months later, and... No. It's not the Drop Out Energy. I literally just have the same intensely weird energy as him. We've not met up since even though we clicked incredibly well, because having to people with that much Galaxy Brained Swamp Goblin Energy in the same place at the same time would pose a risk of simply breaking the universe in two. And this is why I think fucking your own clone would be a bad idea. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I don't actually care about actors needing to be queer to play queer roles because that leads to very bad outcomes with forcing people out of the closet BUT I do think we should hire a more out gay people to play straight roles. And they should be vocally disgusted with it in interviews and visibly bad at it on screen. You know, to balance things out

I recently started ADHD meds and I can only describe the effect it has on my brain like this:

Before

After

Okay, long form time!

This springs from this conversation with @bizarrelittlemew about the "Danish" village Solvang in California and them serving æbleskiver and medisterpølse for breakfast, and the question of "how did they even come up with that?" tickles my historian brain.

Places like Solvang and Elk Horn (see also the Spise Med Price episodes from Elk Horn) give me such an uncanny valley vibe and I think it's worth examining why and how stuff like this happens.

For some light context, both Solvang and Elk Horn are examples of places in the United States that were founded by danish immigrants in the beginning of the 1900-hundreds (we'll go with "roughly 100 years ago"). While Solvang is a tourist attraction now, Elk Horn is a pretty standard small town and home to the Museum of Danish America.

I think the reason why these places seem kinda off to Danes is due to the fact that these places "split off" from Danish culture more than a century ago, and has since slowly evolved in one direction while Denmark (and thus Danish culture) has evolved in a different direction. Sort of two finches getting separated on different islands.

To me, a Dane living in Denmark, places like these are WEIRD! It feels like those paintings and drawings of lions from the middle ages made by people who had never actually seen a lion. Sure, æbleskiver and medisterpølse are still culturally significant in Denmark today, but they're not breakfast foods (æbleskiver are a christmas thing, and medisterpølse is for dinner or the occasional christmas-/easter lunch). But do you know what IS breakfast foods in the US? Sausages and doughnuts. And medisterpølse is indeed a sausage while an æbleskive does sort of fit in the category of "fried dough".

What has happened is this: the culture in Solvang and Elk Horn has picked up pieced of US culture while keeping parts of the Danish culture from around 1900. Some of the original context has been lost, and this results in the US cultural context filling in some of the gaps, since the places are located in and surrounded by that culture.

It feels sort of like the Whalers On The Moon episode of Futurama.

In the end I think the people of Solvang and Elk Horn adore Danmark and Danish culture. They seem proud of their cultural heritage and I can't imagine that they mean harm in any way, even if looking at pictures from Solvang reminds me more of the city of Duloc from Shrek, than anything you'd encounter in Denmark.

This is a very surface level take, and someone with a degree in social sciences or something similar might be able to write something a lot more cohesive and in dept.

But my point is: this happens, it feels weird, but it's how culture (and language and people) evolve and develope. Does it feel weird when something so far removed from Danish culture purportes to be Danish? Absolutely. But as a former (some would argue still...) colonizing country I don't think it would be appropriate to call it cultural appropriation. The founders of these places were Danes, and besides that Denmark has been forcing it's culture on other countries for way too long for us to complain about cultural appropriation. That ship sailed in 994.

@bizarrelittlemew, I'm so sorry I wrote this wall of text at you. My ADHD-meds kicked in and it just sort of fell out of my brain. I've made you this as compensation:

There is no slut shaming in this house, only slut encouragement

The Onion’s journalism is the only journalism that matters. Holy fuck.