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
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
Me: Okay guys remember that it’s important in improv to establish your characters at the beginning of the scene.
Students: ok
Student 1: Hello. I am the president of the United States.
Student 2: Hello madame president. I’m William Shakespeare and I’m here to assassinate you.
This is the best opening to a scene I’ve ever heard of
Here’s how the scene actually went as nearly as I can remember.
Student 1: I’m the president of the United States. How can I help you?
Student 2: I’d like to make a complaint about the Vice President.
Student 1: Okay let me just get out my chalkboard where I tally complaints about the Vice President. Let’s see, that makes five… hundred! What’s your complaint?
Student 2: Well you see, I’m here to assassinate you, but I don’t think that guy should take over when you’re dead.
Student 1: Okay let me make some calls. Beep boop beep boop beep beep beep. Hello? I’m here with— What’s your name?
Student 2: I’m William Shakespeare.
Student 1: I’m here with William Shakespeare and he convinced me we need to replace the Vice President. When? Let me ask. — When were you planning to assassinate me?
Student 2: I mean I was thinking like, as soon as I was done talking to you.
Student 1: Okay sounds good. Yes we need to replace him right now, one moment. Beep beep boop beep. Hello? You’re fired. Bye. Ring, ring. Oh, it’s my assistant again. Hello? What’s that? Oh, they want to know if you’re the same William Shakespeare who wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Student 2: Yes, that’s me.
Student 1: What’s that? He’s been dead for four hundred years? Okay thank you goodbye. Sorry they said you’ve been dead for four hundred years so you can’t assassinate me.
Have you seen fossilised crabs. They’re hilarious they literally do just
Straight up they are just fully there. Shellfish are really fun like that, i have a shrimp fossil in my collection that’s like. Yeah it’s just 100% a shrimp, legs and antennae and all. When your skeleton is on the outside, it means your outside fossilises really well.
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.
Maybe stop dating in general if you feel the need to break things your partners enjoy
I’ll never understand the people who date someone with a specific hobby that they hate.
Like, if I hated gardening enough to pull my wife’s plants, why the fuck would I date a gardener?
I have a theory about this: A number of people think hobbies (some hobbies more than others) are what people (certain kinds of people especially, but could be anyone) do to fill the space that will eventually be occupied by a romantic partner. So they don’t care about the hobby, because they expect to supplant it
I hate that that makes sense.
Or, to put it another way: “Why are you paying attention to that other thing when you should be paying attention to me?”
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
RATING: RELIABLE
you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here
Dog shows: Hold still. No, more still. Now move your leg. No not like that. Yes the stranger is touching you ignore it. Hold still. Hold STILL ok now walk.
Cat shows: Ooooh baby cute little fuzzy baby baby look at the nice feather toy! Get it! you are such a beautiful kitty can the nice judgy give you a kissy on your widdo head?
Meanwhile, poultry shows:
ROOSTER GONCHAROV??
@madphantom - don’t know why, but feel the need to tag you in this Goncharov related content. Lol
Sometimes I think of how we went from the simple little line “you’re gonna love my boyfriend” in Paranorman (2012) which felt groundbreaking in children’s media at the time (and ticked off a fair number of people who consider lgbt+ content too ‘adult’ for children asfsdf)
To actual gay weddings in Steven Universe and Arthur, to openly gay and affectionate dads in She-Ra…
Progress for lgbt+ representation is slow and there’s always backlash and opposition. But it feels like there’s hope and I’m so happy lgbt+ and queer kids get to see themselves in media.
And the leaks about how terf are creating a Moral panic keeps on coming!
“The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.
The American College of Pediatricians, which has fought to deprive gay couples of their parental rights and encouraged public schools to treat LGBTQ youth as if they were mentally ill, is one of a handful of conservative think tanks leading the charge against abortion in the United States.”
DO NOT CONFUSE THEM WITH THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS
They are basically copying their website but replacing it with like…anti trans bullshit
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
RATING: RELIABLE
you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here
so my sister’s dog is named communist gun, but we call him red. right? and every once in a while when she wants him to jump on someone she goes “red scare!” and recently ive been trying to get him to jump on people when i go “mccarthyism!” but it’s not working yet
oh this is absolutely the wrong blog. please ignore
If 6 year olds were YouTubers they’d be making 35 minute video essays called like “The Problem with Tag” “How Toys get You to Play Longer” “The Brown Cow Chocolate Milk Theory” “We Need to Talk About Pretend”
and she is losing in the most horrific way possible
It’s a straight up one sided smack down, first time it’s like it punched her and is throwing her about and then she’s just crying on the floor, second time it’s like she’s getting fucking choked by an invisible force
This is straight up like if an invisible man was abusing her
WHY DID SHE GO BACK FOR SECONDS
why does she make source engine ragdoll collision sounds
ALT
ALT
