dc blog - @astra-mario (purely dc stuff, although I also reblog the same stuff here)
hi! my name's astra/astro (depending on the day and the mood lol). I use she/her and they/them pronouns, but I don't mind any other pronouns. I identify as an ace butch lesbian!
I'm interested in biology and psychology, but I'd like to study public health as well. I'm a college student and an emt!
Fandoms: DC (Flash and GL comics), Mouthwashing, HTTYD, The Locked Tomb series
Other stuff I like: Hiking, Rugby, Hockey (Ice and Field), Dungeons and Dragons, Snakes, kitschy halloween decor, forensic pathology, anatomy, drawing :D, the colour green
This post is mainly just to chronicle all of my fics lol:
I used to have a lot of httyd stuff on wattpad and ffn, but 14 year old me got embarrassed and scrubbed all of it off of the internet so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
halbarry stuff
this youth is crazy (yeh jawaani hai deewani)
Hal ditches Barry on a train platform after a whirlwind romance during a hiking trip. It's not like they'll have to meet again years later at Kyle and Wally's wedding.
the consequences of my actions (i could get used to this)
He ends up having to restrain Hal's hands over his head with one hand, other hand fumbling with the injection, finally letting his hands down when he stopped thrashing. Now no longer in horrid, bone wrenching pain, Hal finds it in himself to ask the real, hard-hitting questions. "What'll it take for you to let me pin your hands up like that?"
in all timelines, in all possibilities (i will find you)
In astronomy, Parallax is the apparent shift in position of a nearby celestial object relative to distant background objects which is caused by a change in the observer's point of view.
Also known as, Hal and Barry will end up finding each other in every universe.
will powers hope (hope strengthens will)
Barry hates heights and he hates not knowing how things work. Hal thinks that it's unacceptable that he can't take his husband along with him on space missions.
season 10 of intergalactic love in paradise
Make yourself comfortable and welcome to Season 10 of Intergalactic Love in Paradise. A luxurious villa where twenty hot, eligible bombshells from space sector 2814 are set loose upon a lush paradise where all of their wildest fantasies have the chance to become reality, if they're bold enough to take that step.
Or, Hal and Barry get kidnapped and participate in an intergalactic dating show, and the baggage that came before that.
the world may disapprove (but my world is only you)
and if we're sinners then it feels like heaven to me.
Hal Jordan didn't expect to meet the love of his life while throwing up in the back of an ambulance. Barry Allen didn't expect to find love at all.
OLDER WORK: Murder Aboard the Sagitta Verdis (hasn't been updated in a while but I do eventually plan on finishing it)
A luxurious trip to Monaco takes a dark turn as Barry and Hal’s vacation is interrupted by a murder on the Sagitta Verdis. As more of the passengers turn up dead, it’s a race against the clock to find the murderer before one of them is killed.
halbarryiris
please don't leave me here alone
Day 3: Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family
It would be a shame if this is how he dies, he supposes. After all of that, after beating crisis after crisis, the Flash dies in a freezing shipping container. After all of that, Barry Allen dies alone. He'd laugh if he could.
eobarry stuff
there's eyes in the woods (nsfw)
He padded into the kitchen, by the clock on the wall, August wouldn't be awake for the next three hours at the very least. He set the kettle to boil on the stove, wandering out into the garden to find the herbs necessary for the brew. Walking back into the kitchen, he ground the herbs into a fine paste, thinking of what August had said yesterday.
It was awfully selfish of him to be so caught up on this mysterious watcher from the forest, especially when he was already promised, it would probably be prudent to create a charm to ward off the evil, wear it around his person at all times.
Truth be told however, he didn't want to do that. He felt inexplicably connected to his watcher, this entity who certainly didn't seem outwardly malicious, but whose aura still reeked of an imminent threat. Would it be entirely fair to dismiss the watcher without going to see for himself, to follow his instincts to the mountains, to follow the call into the lairs of the dragon folk? Besides, the wisest decision here is clearly to confront the watcher before things escalate, to take this fight on on his own terms.
Very fascinating to me how many people are very much not a fan of caves. I fucking love caves. I'm very much a Holy Shit a Cave! Let's Go Inside type of person. I never even considered other people were not like this until the last couple years when i started seeing No We Don't Need to Go In The Cave posts. Y'all really don't want to go to the cave? But like it's a cave. There's so much cool stuff in the cave. If i don't go to a cave at least once every 3 years I feel a deep internal agony. Let's go to the cave!
Ya’ll might wanna grow some hyperaccumulators (such as sunflowers, oyster mushrooms, mustard greens, vetiver, etc) around your house and/or in your garden for a few years before you plant leafy vegetables so you don’t end up consuming heavy metals.
If you’re uncertain, most state universities have soil testing labs that offer cheap, easily understood soil tests that can tell you for sure whether you’ve got lead, arsenic, etc. in your soils.
searching for “university extension soil test [your state]” will probably turn up helpful info!
This is a good thing to note, (also sunflowers are very pretty and easy to grow when you’re first learnign how to garden) but also searching “(nearest university) Extension” and “(your county) Extension” is GREAT because there’s ALL KINDS of cool services out there if you want to get into growing your own food or helping the local enviornment or installing solar panels on your house or buying livestock or-
There’s a lot, it’s AWESOME, it’s usually stunningly low-cost and it’s veyr, very solarpunk so I encourage all of you to take a gander at the programs offered.
The Cooperative Extension System is run in each state by the state’s land grant university/ies (which might not be the ones you think, in NY it’s Cornell rather than any of the SUNYs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_State_Research,_Education,_and_Extension_Service#Cooperative_Extension_System
It’s also where all 4H programs are based!
Some also offer classes! They’re taxpayer funded, so that means the wealthy ones can offer tons of resources. If you can’t find much going on in your state, nearby states may also have excellent info that can apply to your area. Some of the famous heavyweights are Cornell / New York and UC Davis / California, tons of research, plant breeding programs, and all around useful info coming outta those places.
As a botanist I’m contractually obligated to add this any time I see posts about phytoremediation–if you do this you CANNOT let the sunflowers/msuhrooms/etc decompose back into your garden. You cannot add them to your compost pile. That just puts the heavy metals right back into your soil!!!! You need to bag them up and dispose of them elsewhere–traditional landfill waste is probably going to be easiest for most people.
These plants ACCUMULATE metals. They do NOT break them down. You’re pulling them up from the ground and storing them in the plant tissue, so, don’t consume or compost that tissue afterwards.
One thing I’ve become a real extremist about is little girl’s clothing and hair styles because if your kid can’t get her hair wet, hang upside down, climb over a fence or run full out in the outfit/hair she is currently wearing then why not? And the answer better be both extremely fucking good and describe something temporary.
Hope you don't mind a story that also made me extremist about this issue.
Took my friends daughter (2.5yrs) to the park. Dressed her in practical clothing that's ok to get stained, brought an extra change of clothing. She sat in the mud at the water bank and played with rocks and mud. A little girl came over, couldn't be more than 3yrs. She was looking longingly at my friend's daughter. She has her hair in a perfect style and she's wearing a pretty dress with white socks and dressy shoes. The parents say "Sweetie don't go into the mud, you'll get your dress dirty" and pull her away, while giving me a judgmental look as they see the kid in my charge covered in mud and throwing rocks into the water. It felt really weird, like we saw eachother as aliens with completely different ideas on how to raise children. When my friends daughter was done playing, changed her into clean clothing and went back home. She had a lot of fun at the park and a day full of nature and play. The other little girl kept her dress clean.
There's a Tumblr post about someone finding out that "girls" toddler clothes are more restrictive than "boys" toddler clothes to the point that it made it harder for them to crawl, at a stage where they were learning to crawl.
I made one about how my toddler child couldn't climb in girl's TODDLER PANTS.
We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).
Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.
It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.
Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.
They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.
So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.
We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.
YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.
Whoever designed these clothes literally did not care if the baby could MOVE. But only if girl.
my actual vampire hot take is that if you're going to be a 'vegetarian' vampire (a vampire that only drinks the blood of animals) you MUST have hunter education. i'm so sick of people being like oh well predator animals are mean and scary because they kill cute 'harmless' animals like NO they're crucial for the environment and if you're going to hunt animals for blood you still need to stick to regular people hunting guidelines and only hunt things that are in season and abide by your areas bag limits
vampire that did a detailed study about whether vampires can get prion diseases and concluded they can't and preferentially hunts animals with chronic wasting disease. and then incinerates the corpses.
hey did ya'll know that ed sheeran is working on a series of 6 albums named after media player buttons and the first one released last year and the last one is to be released posthumously on the day that he dies
so fucking humbling to be like “no I like that character a normal amount” and then you can literally feel your heart rate spike at a mention of them like a dog that just heard the word “treat”
Perhaps my genuine biggest piece of socializing advice as someone who spent years of my life feeling wholly incapable of positively interacting with other people is to just ask the other person questions about themselves. Like that’s it. People love answering questions. They really love thoughtful follow-up questions. They love feeling like someone else is interested in them, their interests, their lives, their opinions. At some point in your questioning they will say something that reminds you of a funny / interesting story. Tell it. You will be remembered as the person who asks a lot of questions, makes people feel like they matter, and tells good stories. boom. done.
Back when I was in university we were asked to do a brief research exercise on a health condition impacting a community. Can't remember what I wanted to look at now, but it was something to do with the trans community.
Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.
I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.
To keep this brief since I've rambled a bunch - this is a major issue health wise since we have not a lot of literature on what testosterone does to certain bodies. This can lead to major health complications, not because of the testosterone itself, but because there might be an interaction thats missed or a complication that's not noticed (which is the same for any medication that's under researched on certain bodies. This is not me scaring people off of hrt, this is me pointing out its a medication like any other.)
#the therapist who wrote my permission slip for hrt was a trans man#and during that appointment we talked about the erasure of trans men from basically everything#and i talked about an article i had read a week or so earlier about trans people and hiv#it very in depth about risks prevention treatment etc#except that it exclusively referenced trans women with a single sentence at the end basically saying 'oh trans men are at risk too'#less than a year later i saw that same therapist speaking at an hiv organization fundraising event#he talked about how he had just recently been diagnosed with hiv#and had to sit there while this doctor told him all about how the treatment options had never been tested on trans men#none of them#they knew that the treatment would work#but not how effective it would be in comparison to its effectiveness in other demographics#no idea what kind of side effects he might experience#how it would interact with his body and his hormones#what the long term effects would be#nothing#he had to sit there while his doctor told him he would have to be a guinea pig but its not like he has a choice#the only alternative is dying from aids#that whole thing was kind of a wake up call for me#and i started paying more attention getting tested regularly myself and all that sruff you're supposed to do#and over time i befriended the person who did most of my testing#they were also trans masc and we would talk about this kind of stuff#and i told them i wanted to get on prep but every doctor i asked had a wildly different answer on if i even could take it#which verison i could take etc#and they said that only one form of prep has been approved fot trans men but its never actually been tested on trans men#and that one version isnt good for long term use because it has some pretty serious side effects long term#and they said that they regularly go to conferences and meet with representatives from all these drug companies#and they ask 'wheres the data on trans men' 'when are you doing clinical studies on trans men'#and the answer#every single time is: we have not done any studies on trans men and we have no intention to ever do studies on trans men#this is not some passive result of trans masc invisibility it is an active act of erasure that needs to be recognized as an act of violence
Aside from bigotry, the lack of studies on trans men could be related to the difficulty of researching "women of childbearing age"
Because if you're testing a drug or treatment on someone who can get pregnant, then it opens up a whole can of worms if they become pregnant
There's a categorization for medication that indicates the safety of taking a drug while pregnant or lactating. Most of drugs I've ever read about (a lot) have only animal data. Like "this drug has been shown to cause birth defects in mice." Or "there is no data in humans indicating whether or not this drug crosses the placental barrier or is excreted during lactation." Because, ethically, you can't test a medication on someone to see if it harms their fetus.
@/inkskinned explains it better than me in this post but I'll add a little snippet of it here:
the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."
it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.
So it's totally medical discrimination against people who could theoretically become pregnant, and of course trans men will suffer more for that due to the compounding disadvantages of being trans and having a "female reproductive system"/Having been AFAB
I feel like this medical discrimination against trans men doesn't get talked about enough. And A lot of the times when we do try to join that conversation about reproductive rights and medical discrimination against people who were AFAB, we're excluded for being men, even if we still have all the relevant anatomy
vampire: ugh, you mortals simply can't comprehend the timescale i live on. i've watched your empires rise and fall, your cities crumble to dust. i find your short little lives amusing at best. i -
angel: HI, I HAVE BEEN ALIVE SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME AND I NOTICED YOU ARE ALSO SOMEWHAT OLD?
vampire: ...sure. hey what was the dawn of time like?
vampire: oh, man, i feel you. i slept through, like, the entire 14th century it was so boring. everyone was dying of plague and shit anyway so i didn't miss much.
An AI bot made a callout post of a real, actual, flesh-and-blood human code developer. Because the developer rejected the AI's code contribution on the grounds of it being an AI bot.
Not. Not kidding. Not kidding. And the bot did this on its own.
a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project
all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project
if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet
like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.
now
Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.
And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.
But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.
This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...
It's claiming discrimination...
It's a bot.
It's AI.
This is not a real person.
What are we doing. What are we doing. Can anyone hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello is anyone there?
@jackdaw-sprite has pointed out Scott responded so please read his human words, written by a human, which deserve to be read, due to the aforementioned humanity
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened – The Shamblog
