i hate you “pair the spares”/“everyone must be paired” tropes, i hate you forced last minute romances, i hate you implication that a happy ending means a romantic partner, i hate you amatonormativity
This rant is brought to you by the sasquatch program I was listening to on the way home from work and how glibly it insisted that scientists were suppressing the evidence. While the theories that the sasquatch advocate threw out there were interesting in terms of story potential, they reminded me how few writers have a science background.
Personally, I have a BS in environmental science, i.e. being shuffled between the geography, biology, and chemistry departments for four years, and I’m currently employed as a microbiologist, so I do have that background. Have 10 (yes, 10) of my pet peeves.
1. The Omnidisciplinary Scientist, or as I like to call it, the comic book scientist. Scientists specialize heavily. You will get a grounding beyond the layperson’s high school coverage of fields related to yours if you go into a science, but it won’t be ALL fields of science. I have a less than high school level grasp of physics due to the fact that it was never required in my field. When you get really deep into technical stuff, however, two people in the same broad field might not know much about the other’s specialty. A particle physicist and an astrophysicist might only have a very basic grounding in each other’s experiments, though they’ve got a leg up on me in explaining them to each other.
A physicist telling a neuroscientist that they’ve discovered consciousness doesn’t read as good science, nor should you cite a dentist as a “scientist” in your argument about global warming.
2. Instant Results. CSI and other police procedurals are the primary culprits here, but also scifi tends to give people instant confirmation of what something is. Whether that’s germ identification, a blood test, or a chemical reaction, all experiments require setup time, controlled conditions, correct equipment, and analysis. If the machine does all the work in a few minutes, you don’t need a scientist.
For example: pregnancy tests used to take weeks, because urine samples from the potentially pregnant person had to be shipped to a lab, injected into frogs, and then the frogs had to be monitored to see if they released eggs. Now, you pee on a stick, because scientists spent years finding a quick chemical reaction (actually a change of reactions) that gave you a simple visible sign that specific hormones were present in your pee.
The frogs, presumably, are very relieved.
3. The insanely well-funded science lab. All experiments take money. Whether it’s for materials, equipment, or to pay an undergrad to count fruit flies every six hours, it’s just not plausible for most scientists to have every single piece of equipment they could ever need - and not all of the tools are publicly purchasable to begin with. My brother works with a biologist who has had to design a program to do statistics on bone shapes from almost scratch - when it’s done and they’ve published a paper on it, it will be publicly available, but until that happens, anyone who has to do the same analysis has to put years into developing the protocol themselves.
Also, as an example I’ve actually worked with, a Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer (a relatively common, if fancy, instrument in chemistry that can identify most chemicals with the right person running it,) can cost a hundred thousand dollars used. Routine maitenance (replacing a consumable part like the coil,) can cost hundreds of dollars, and if you use the machine more frequently you have to do it more frequently. And god forbid something goes wrong with the mechanical parts or the programming - it’s hardwired to a computer as old as your undergrad, and the last time they manufactured any replacement parts for the thing was 1986.
(If you want to hack one of these investment pieces of equipment by the way, forget about it - even something with a modern OS probably isn’t internet-enabled, as there is nothing that researchers hate more than waiting for an OS update before they can finish an experiment. Even relatively cheap instruments that run off a cheap modern laptop are pretty routinely debugged by having the wifi disabled, as nine times out of ten your program being messed up is because Windows updated. You have to physically go to the machine, put the files on a jump drive IF they are readable outside the program, and transfer them to something else. Or you can screenshot them and export the pics onto the jump file. Or copy them into excel and transfer the excel file.)
Addendum: hacking does not work like that. If you’ve seen it in a movie, it is either outdated in terms of computer science, or excessively dumbed down.
4. The Work dies with the scientist. If your work will be lost if you should meet with an unhappy fate, you are a supremely shitty scientist. First - very few fields that aren’t pure mathematics or computing can be undertaken solo. Academics have postdocs to do the analysis, grad students to do the specialized lab work, and undergrads to do the prep work. Businesses have PhD’s to do the final analysis, junior scientists to design and run experiments, and lab techs to clean up after them, and provide explanation for why the GCMS is disabled while windows updates. (Full disclosure: the reason I’m harping on this is because it happened to me with a spectrophotometer and I’m still not over whoever re-enabled the wifi.)
Also, though a company or secret shady government agency will not release your work for peer review the way an academic institution will, they will need the documentation of your work to file patents, or replicate it with the rest of their researchers.
If the field has merit and enough funding that other people will actually spend time on the same experiment, no one lone genius is the only person who could ever make a discovery. In fact, discoveries are independently replicated all the time, because most of them are enabled by other discoveries or new technology.
5. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Science is a delicate balance between admitting that something *could* be happening and pointing out that just because I haven’t proven you wrong yet doesn’t mean that you’re right.
A plausible use of the absence of evidence: “We haven’t found any Higgs Bosons yet, but that does not mean that they don’t exist.” (As of 2013 they found some.) It’s plausible because all evidence suggested that the HB was possible, its existence strengthened longstanding theories that hundreds of people had failed to disprove and dozens of people had discovered supporting evidence of, and because it was something they could test for with the available technology.
An implausible use “We haven’t found any conclusive evidence of Sasquatches, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” It’s implausible because we don’t have any credible evidence that they do exist - there is no longstanding theory or model that claims that the pacific northwest can support a significant population of bear sized hominid omnivores, and no plausible physical evidence that such creatures ever existed. It contradicts a whole host of theories in a lot of scientific disciplines: Ecology would posit that we would know about the role of such a large omnivore since they’d have a similar impact on local resources to an equivalent amount of bears, the recent fossil record and paleoarchaeology have yet to find any evidence that homonids other than anatomically modern humans have lived in north america, statistics would argue that if the creature is common enough and lives close enough to humans for sightings to ever be reported it would leave some evidence more credible than eyewitness testimony behind.
6. Contradiction is proof of being wrong. A single data point contradicting a theory is almost never an indication that the theory has been disproven. Science is done by humans, and mistakes are made. Similarly, a single success is not proof that you’re right. You need to do an experiment a lot to have enough data to be certain that what you think is happening is actually happening.
For example, those of you who took a statistics class can attest that just because you flipped a coin ten times and it landed on heads seven times doesn’t mean that you’re twice as likely to come up heads. You need to flip it a hundred times or more to have enough data to really do anything with it.
corporate ppl are always like “i hate email comms they cause so many delays” but those people are fools. i crave communication delays. i hit send on an email and then immediately shoot a prayer up to the heavens that the response may take 2-3 days. let’s slow everything down just a bit thank you.
this is the most productive workforce in history and im just doing my part to dial that back a tad
A photo of a black woman wearing pink eyeshadow, pink blush, orangey-red lipstick, a white flower crown, and a silver and pink bead necklace. She smiles widely and rests a hand on her cheek.
A black and white photo of Amrita Sher-Gil looking directly at the camera.
Carlos Jáuregui, a man wearing thick rimmed glasses in front of a wall covered in newspapers
A black and white photograph of Claude Cahun, a white person with dark hair slick back except for two curls slicked to curl over their forehead. They have dark eye shadow, very thin eyebrows, long, dr
A black and white full body photo of Bajazid Doda wearing a suit, looking at the camera.
Two women, Chavela Vargas and Frida Kahlo, lay together on the ground and laugh.
I was talking with a friend recently about our favourite images from queer history, and while I adore the compilations of photos of people being explicitly and obviously queer, I wanted to share some of the images that have touched my heart. All of these are of queer subjects and I have linked some articles about the people in question below, in case anyone is interested! I have a lot more so tell me if y’all are interested.
Just looked at a blog where the header description said ‘sometimes I reblog posts I like so I don’t forget them’.
And I feel like that, right there, explains so much about how the site has changed in the last few months.
People now think reblogging is an unusual behaviour, rather than a default.
Tumblr newbies, please, for the love of baby Jesus, reblog the posts you like. That is the whole reason the site exists - for you to collect all your shiny fandom objects in a single space. Which you can organize to your heart’s content. Or not organize at all, if that’s your jam.
Our blogs are intended to be collections of posts, not collections of likes.
THE ENTIRE POINT OF TUMBLR IS REBLOGGING.
Liking does absolutely nothing. There is no algorithm like on IG that will use likes to throw content at people. If you don’t reblog, then no one who doesn’t follow that person (or happen to find it in the tags) will see that post.
Tumblr is supposed to be your bookcase where you show off all of your pretties: the posts you like and the ones that you want to promote to support the other creators in your fandom/community.
Ha a lélek vándorlásában hiszünk, el kell fogadnunk hogy ha zenészek voltunk, zenészek maradunk akkor is, ha négy lábbal újraszületünk..
Translation, via Google Translate:
If we believe in the migration of the soul, we have to accept that if we were musicians, we will remain musicians even if we are reborn with four legs.
All of this was done in the span of 5 days because I have no sense of time management and wanted to have something before the convention yesterday ;-;
There’s lots of things to fix (cough cough the legs) and details I need to add that I didn’t have the chance to make (cough cough the wings) but for something done under a crunch I’m really happy with the result!!
id: a digital drawing of gabriel from ultrakill. it’s a redraw of a twitter meme- gabriel is shown on his hands and knees, looking at the viewer nervously. the background is a very light, almost white, gray. end id
All of this was done in the span of 5 days because I have no sense of time management and wanted to have something before the convention yesterday ;-;
There’s lots of things to fix (cough cough the legs) and details I need to add that I didn’t have the chance to make (cough cough the wings) but for something done under a crunch I’m really happy with the result!!
i want to thank you both for turning my biggest wording fumble where i clumsily said mining dwarfer instead of dwarven miner into a post i chuckle at whenever it comes across my dash
Numbers don’t lie but people can sure as fuck pick and choose the numbers they give you and phrase things to make them sound like they mean things they don’t
learn fucking stats or at least how they can hurt
As a wise man once said: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Stats are very important and the only reason I remember what each one is is because of a darn nursery rhyme my math teacher taught me.
full offense but i think a lot of you want to seem like a safe space for ppl w/ demonized disorders without actually being a safe space for ppl w/ demonized disorders. and i think its straight up just because you guys view us as though we need to be “one of the good ones” or else we’re morally reprehensible and need to be excommunicated just on the off chance that we MIGHT hurt someone
like im just saying, if you say you love “all mentally ill people” and then get weird when i say i have narcissistic personality disorder then im going to assume you do not, in fact, love “all mentally ill people”
also for the record. every single time you call someone a narcissist when really you just mean that they’re self-centered or you call someone schizo for being twitchy, thats ableism. you’re being ableist. you can be nd and ableist. you can be disabled and ableist. you are not fucking exempt from being ableist.
i keep thinking about that tribe of baboons where all the alpha males died from eating poison garbage and then the baby boy monkeys were taken care of by the lady monkeys and never got socialized to be aggressive so they all just live peacefully and groom eachother instead of fighting and killing eachother and its been generations of that, it only took 1 wipeout of the aggressive males to change the whole social order of the species i am crying they must be so much happier
……….I have an idea.
don’t we all
You’re missing half the story.
When adolescent males from other groups came to join, they learned very rapidly that being an arsehole baboon wasnot fucking tolerated, and completely stopped the behaviour and integrated with the group.
also worth noting that “abusive” doesn’t actually mean “irredeemable” either.
there’s a lot of people that have done things in the past that were bad, because they weren’t taught any better, or they were in an overall toxic situation where EVERYONE was shitty (like a cult), or they were just at an especially low point and hurt others for it.
you don’t have to forgive them. you don’t have to ever speak to them again. you can be angry with them until you die if you want.
but society cannot function if we don’t allow them to move on. to change their behavior and fuck off somewhere else and build meaningful relationships without bothering you again. we need a path for people to change, or nothing ever will.
Nothing makes me laugh more on this website than when someone asks Neil Gaiman a very millennial/gen-z/chronically online question about his works, (like, the ones about shipping wars and label discourse) and he’s just like “I have literally never thought of doing that, no.”
I know it must be at least a little bit embarrassing for the asker but, like, some of them are so outlandish that I just can’t comprehend what prompted the person to ask it.
so quite a lot of people expressed interest in a guide to lion dance! and since the lunar new year is coming up in a couple weeks, which means everyone’s exposure to lions is probably going to increase, i figured i’d go ahead and make it! right click + open in new tab to fullview, etc etc, i hope it’s helpful, although if you only take one thing away from this powerpoint, it’s this: lions are not dragons
disclaimer: i learned fut san style at an american university, and the senior members of the troupe were almost all from hong kong and taiwan, so most of my knowledge is drawn from what they taught me. lion dance varies widely depending on the style and the country of origin, and many schools do things differently! this is just an attempt to establish a baseline and give you a really basic intro to one of my favorite art forms. :)
Have you found any resources I shared on this blog useful or insightful? Then consider donating to any one of these donation drives below (or all four)!
Would love to get a donation match for each of these GFMs going!!! No screenshots but I’ll be donating the equivalent of $20 USD/Euro to each of these campaigns by the end of Eid Al-Adha (5$/day, since Eid is 4 days long).
Donated to all of these! Can anyone donate 5$ to each fundraiser today?
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