A Humble Peddler of Weres

ID: a picture of TV presenter John Oliver holding his arms wide with a sardonic expression saying, “Welcome to whatever this is...” The image is surrounded by a gradient rainbow frame.

Welcome to the blog of international bestselling author Joy Demorra, aka the Crucifix Nail Nipples Editor.

This is my personal blog where I commit word crimes.

If you’re looking for my chronic illness and disability advocacy posts, or you want to block them (fair), the tag I use is #chronic health tag.

You can also peruse my FAQ.

ID: A promo image showing the two different book covers for Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites side by side. One is blue, one is red. Both show three characters juxtaposed in a bisexual parody of the "distracted boyfriend" meme. At the top, white text stands out against a purple/blue gradient. It reads: Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites, Book one of the Hunger Pangs Series. Beneath that it lists qualities of the book: queer paranormal romance, vampire x werewolf, gaslamp fantasy, mutual pining (the love is requited, they're just idiots), slow burn and happily ever after, for now.... The bottom line of text reads: both medium and high heat versions available in eBook, Paperback and Audio. The image is surrounded by a rainbow gradient frame.

My international bestselling debut romance novel, Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites (Phangs), is out now and available in eBook, Paperback, and Audio.

Set in a pseudo-regency meets fake-Victorian Gaslamp Fantasy world, complete with gothic castles, enchanted forests, and just a smidge of industrial coal dust. Phangs has been described as “like reading the queer, goth love child of Terry Pratchett meets Jane Austen,” and no amount of marketing buzzwords I say can ever top that.

If any of that sparks your interest, you can:

Why are there two versions and what’s the difference between them? Glad you asked! You can also check out individual content tags and heat ratings on my website at www.joydemorra.com

ID: A small tan and white Shih Tzu with dark eyes looking directly into the camera with her tongue hanging out. She looks like a teddy bear. The image is surrounded by a rainbow gradient frame.

If you’ve seen my dog, Holly Mop, trending around the place and would like to see more of her, her tag is #holly mop. You can also now follow her blog at @holly-mop; we just use it to upload pictures.

Other places you can find me online include: Ao3 , BlueSky Pillowfort, and Instagram. If you like what I do and would like to see more of it, you can support me on Patreon, Ko-Fi, Payhip, or through my Throne Wishlist.

You can also find me hanging around Twitch on Sundays, where I co-host @theayesphere podcast with @ayeforscotland and sometimes play games. Feel free to come hang out; we’re always happy for new people to natter with.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and happy scrolling!

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reasonablywittyatbest

neonriver1

hgkitten

metautske asked:

I wanted to buy generic pepcid today (accidentally bought name brand last time) decided to read the labels, and the generic has aspartame instead of sucralose 🫠
Why in the world?
Anyway, not toward you but a reminder to your followers to always read the label and double check meds and food

thebibliosphere answered:

Yeeeeep. I can’t remember when they changed it but it’s one of the reasons I can’t take the generic anymore.
I don’t do too well with sucralose either but at least it’s not an instant migraine trigger for me like aspartame is.
As much as I miss the old Zantac formula (rip Ranitidine you worked so much better even if you were allegedly causing cancer) the new one without flavor is just Famotidine without any sugars. The mint one has sucralose.
Pepcid AC unflavored also doesn’t have any sweeteners.

trekbec82

These specific brands won't be relevant everywhere (I don't recognise a single name that's been mentioned) but it's a good general reminder to check ingredients lists on meds as well as food and beverage packaging.

thebibliosphere

Famotidine is the generic universal name for this type of h2 blocker that some countries require a prescription for.

Pepcid and Zantac are brand names. Just in case that helps anyone.

hgkitten

Are you fucking shitting me?!?

Why are there artificial sweeteners in pepcid?

I can't have ANY of those.

Now I'm fucking pissed.

thebibliosphere

It’s only in the flavored ones, as far as I can tell. But still always worth checking the boxes because sometimes something is “unflavored” but it’s there to cover up the flavor of the med.

trekbec82

metautske asked:

I wanted to buy generic pepcid today (accidentally bought name brand last time) decided to read the labels, and the generic has aspartame instead of sucralose 🫠
Why in the world?
Anyway, not toward you but a reminder to your followers to always read the label and double check meds and food

thebibliosphere answered:

Yeeeeep. I can’t remember when they changed it but it’s one of the reasons I can’t take the generic anymore.
I don’t do too well with sucralose either but at least it’s not an instant migraine trigger for me like aspartame is.
As much as I miss the old Zantac formula (rip Ranitidine you worked so much better even if you were allegedly causing cancer) the new one without flavor is just Famotidine without any sugars. The mint one has sucralose.
Pepcid AC unflavored also doesn’t have any sweeteners.

trekbec82

thebibliosphere

Famotidine is the generic universal name for this type of h2 blocker that some countries require a prescription for.

Pepcid and Zantac are brand names. Just in case that helps anyone.

metautske asked:

I wanted to buy generic pepcid today (accidentally bought name brand last time) decided to read the labels, and the generic has aspartame instead of sucralose 🫠
Why in the world?
Anyway, not toward you but a reminder to your followers to always read the label and double check meds and food

Yeeeeep. I can’t remember when they changed it but it’s one of the reasons I can’t take the generic anymore.

I don’t do too well with sucralose either but at least it’s not an instant migraine trigger for me like aspartame is.

As much as I miss the old Zantac formula (rip Ranitidine you worked so much better even if you were allegedly causing cancer) the new one without flavor is just Famotidine without any sugars. The mint one has sucralose.

Pepcid AC unflavored also doesn’t have any sweeteners.

robertmitchum

robertmitchum

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN dir. Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly

Source: genekellys

I can tell my period is coming because my mental health is taking a nosedive from the brewing PMDD* but it’s so funny because I was talking to someone new today who knows me through a friend of a friend, and at one point they just said “you’re such a happy person, it must be nice” and I had to take a moment to pause because I’ve spent the last five years struggling with suicidal ideation and it just struck me that you never actually know what people are going through unless they tell you.

Like yes, I am slowly getting better. Years of intensive therapy have gotten me to a place where I don’t wish for my demise.

But I’m not… whatever this person’s perception of me was. Which after the pause in conversation went on too long for I said, “thank you, I work hard at it” which I could tell they didn’t understand.

They didn’t understand that hope and positivity are skills you can cultivate and require daily practice to sustain.

Are there some people who are naturally happy? Yeah, probably. But I’m not one of them. I’ve had diagnosed major depressive disorder since I was about eight years old. That’s thirty years of fluctuating hopelessness and never ending, sometimes debilitating sadness that doesn’t respond to medication. I have to practice hope and resilience or I’ll do something horribly irreversible that will hurt the people I love.

And perhaps it speaks well to my progress over the last five years of intensive therapy that this person thought I was someone who is naturally happy and never known strife, but their tone irked me because how dare anyone assume to know someone so quickly based on a surface level impression.

“Must be nice.”

Fuck off.

Anyway. Don’t make assumptions about people’s mental health based on what they choose to show you. It might make you look like a twat.

- -

*Before anyone tells me to take an antihistamine about it: I have MCAS, I’m on doses of antihistamines that make the Hat Man hallucinate me.

chronic health tag mental health

ears-and-eyebrows

casties

OOK.

miss-kitty-fantastico

*Ooks sadly*

unreluctantone

*Ooks sadly* *pats you comfortingly on the shoulder from the other side of the room*

felren13

jimhines

Meme of Indiana Jones punching a Nazi atop a tank. Text reads, “I came here to study the humanities and punch Nazis, and they just cut funding for the humanities.”

I know I’ve featured this scene on the Nazi Punch of the Day, but this version seemed particularly timely given the ongoing attacks on education.

morgynleri

dailyhistorymemes

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

paula-of-christ

im-the-princess-now

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

dresshistorynerd

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

trickstertime

Then in 2020:

Irish people donate €2.5m to Native American tribe devastated by coronavirus

Navajo Nation say Irish generosity is the ‘good in all of the bad that is going on’

The Irish Times

jennybobenny73

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own:

Eternal Heart Sculpture to Honor Choctaw/Ireland Relationship to be Unveiled at Choctaw Nation Capitol - Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

A sculpture honoring the relationship between the Choctaw Nation and the people of Ireland will soon be erected on the Choctaw Capitol groun

Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

imperiumwifestrikesagain

thebibliosphere

We finally caved and turned the heating on after the house started to dip toward the 50s and my nerve pain couldn’t take the cold anymore and now the house is warm but has that “new car smell.”

You know that oily chemically smell that for some reason you can buy as a perfume because some people like it?

Yeah. Blegh. Hopefully it burns off soon because this is nauseating.

Even with all of this I’ve had fewer headaches this week. So that’s suggesting some worrying things about how long things were broken before I was finally able to smell it. I dunno. Might be a fluke. We’ll see.

imperiumwifestrikesagain

I was actually thinking about all the things you’ve been posting, because my FIL picked up his new car today, and I opened the door to sit in it and immediately noped out and thought about how you haven’t brought up the new car smell, and here it is.

thebibliosphere

I hate it. Even when I was a kid I’d refuse to get into any car that was brand new because the smell made me want to hurl.

I found out a few years ago that some dealerships will actually spray the interior of cars to make that “new” smell last longer so whenever we swap our lease for a newer model we always tell them not to spray it, otherwise I won’t be able to ride in it for at least a few weeks.

elfwreck

gaydragonwizards asked:

if this is too heavy to answer that's totally fine and you don't have to but
how do you keep going when the world is as awful as it is? it's getting harder for me to find reasons to do that because the US government clearly doesn't want me to live and I can't go anywhere else because I'm broke and disabled and so I just feel trapped and I've been in tears about it for the last hour.
and you've had to deal with so much more health bullshit than I ever have but you keep going and I just... how?

thebibliosphere answered:

I hope this doesn’t come across as trite but in all sincerity: because I know there are other people out there fighting to keep folks like us alive because even though they don’t know us, probably won’t ever know us, they care for us anyway and want us to survive.
They might seem vanishingly few right now, but you need to remember, hatred is loud because it’s the only way these dipshits can be heard.
The people screaming the loudest right now? Are not in the majority. They are afraid of the progress that has been made over the last few decades and want to drag us back to a world where they feel in control. And to do that they need to be as loud and intimidating as possible because they are not the majority, they know they are not the majority, and that frightens them.
They’re playing a fascist game of chicken, hoping the rest of us will blink first, and I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen. I won’t pretend I’m not terrified. That the things happening all over the world right now don’t feel hopeless and lost. But I refuse to blink first.
For myself. For you. For everyone.
And I take comfort in knowing I’m not the only one. I know I’m not. And I’m so incandescently furious at the state of the world right now that even just hearing some people speak makes my blood pressure spike so hard I syncope.
The last time I heard the vice president speak, my vision turned literally red then black and I woke up on the couch with a thudding headache and a heart doing its best to escape my rib cage.
But I pick myself up because I have no other choice, I take care of myself. I do what I can to avoid that level of overload. I avoid the news if I have to because there is a fine line at present between being informed and being overwhelmed. And then I go out of my way to be kind and help the people I can because it’s something I have control over and by god if I can make the world better for just one person, it’s worthwhile.
Take comfort in your people. Protect yourself and your community as best you can. Even if sometimes that means letting others comfort and take care of you for a bit.
I’m sorry you’re struggling so hard. But I promise you are not alone 💖

elfwreck

Your #1 assignment for the next four years is SURVIVE.

We can rewrite laws. We can re-appoint judges who are fair and just. We can rebuild property, transportation lines, education systems.

We can't re-alive people.

They want us all too frightened to act, too confused to concentrate, too outraged in too many directions to work together. Every instance of courage or cooperation or kindness is a victory. Every bit of confidence, every moment of calm, every instance of delight is a reminder that they don't control the world.

They're lashing out because they know that. They are brainweasels writ large - they can't actually win; they can just cause a lot of damage while they're losing.

Mitigate the damage where you can, and survive to make a better future. Hold on to hope.

And if you run out of hope - hold on to spite, because defiance and ferocity are also survival tools, and sometimes kindness is being able to say "yeah, it SUCKS" to someone who thought they were the only one who still cared.

However you do it, hold on until we can find each other and build the future we've been working for.

cookiemonstor86 asked:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHHe4mTyudO/?igsh=ZG5pa2FkcDVoZWZ3

Saw this on Instagram and wondered if it was actually something useful and cutesy for you!

Oh that would unfortunately absolutely kill me via my MCAS, but I could see it being a fun POTS treat for folks without my issues!

copperbadge

thestuffedalligator

Person with migraine aura today: Ow ow ow my head hurts and all I can see is TV static :(

Nineteenth century doctors describing migraine aura with the manic horror of a lovecraftian horror protagonist:

At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object; I thought it might be an eyelash in the way, or something of that sort, but I was soon undeceived when it began to increase…

When it was in its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously... All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive. (Hubert Airy, 1856)

faerytale-wings

This is infuriating because every doctor who has ever described migraine auras to me has done such an abysmal job I genuinely thought something else was going on. it took me years to get properly diagnosed.

If someone had shown me THIS!!!!!

literally just the one on the left! exactly that!!!

copperbadge

Because it took me forever to find this out, FWIW these are known as "scintillating scotomas". I get them occasionally though mine arrive and depart without heralding headaches (they seem to be linked, for me, with blood pressure somehow)

If you start to see the scotoma in the center of your vision, sometimes you can head it off by taking aspirin, which will shorten the duration of the scotoma (and apparently may shorten the duration of a migraine as well but I can't speak to that).

To me, they look like carnations, only in neon and slowly whirling.

thesnug asked:

Hi, long time lurker with hEDS, thank you for all your chronic illness information! Could you tell us a bit about the Visible app? I just downloaded it, and it seems great. Do you have their armband? Are there things about it you’ve found particularly useful / not useful? (I may have missed a post about this along the way, apologies if so)

I do have the armband and it’s been very useful for me in pinpointing which tasks burn up more energy than I realized, and also at helping predict and avoid energy crashes based on the data it’s collected.

One example I can think of is that as part of my physical rehab I try and go for a short walk around me neighborhood each day, weather and ailments permitting.

On normal days that walk will use up maybe 2.2 of my allocated pace points, which the armband helps detect and estimate via the constant monitoring of the armband.

On days when I am heading into a flare that exact same walk will suddenly cost me 12 points and the visible app will send me alerts telling me I need to slow down and rest.

I don’t feel any different, and at first I thought it was glitching and went about my day as normal, thinking the app was wrong about the rate at which I was burning through energy, but then a few hours later a major migraine started to develop and I went into a crash.

This has happened multiple times now and every time I’ve ignored it, my migraines have been debilitating/hospitalizing.

Since then I’ve started paying closer attention to when tasks are taking up more energy than usual and adjust my day accordingly, which helps me avoid major crashes. This has helped reduce my chronic migraines to moderate intensity instead of severe, which has led to the realization that there might be a metabolic factor to my migraines, pending further investigation by my medical team.

My pain from my EDS is lower too because I’m not accidentally overdoing it, and while my POTS is largely the same, that too has improved ever so slightly as I have cut down on the amount of over exertion I was unknowingly doing.

The app and armband certainly isn’t for everyone, and I do have to unpair and repair the device to my phone more than I’d like, but it’s genuinely been game changing for me in managing my chronic illnesses.

chronic health tag visible app