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dualclock

just some skull studies. h?man skulls are weird. adapted for crushing. I'm never consistant with their molars.

asforetoldsobelow-comic

As Foretold, So Below, chapter 1, Suenfield's Son, page 17.

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bunny-lovez

My guardian angels came to visit!

mysharona1987

bekstek

by @gemmacorrell (tagging since she's on tumblr)

caesarsaladinn

I think the university course database should have a filter to only show classes taught by extremely old people who are insane

girljeremystrong

PLEASE watch this. i love chaotic sisters best dynamic in the world

anais-ninja-bitch

1. this should be required viewing for anyone writing young girls, especially sisters

2. she did a good job and totally saved their asses.

mysharona1987

asforetoldsobelow-comic

As Foretold, So Below chapter 1, Suenfield's Son, part 5.

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dualclock

If you enjoy our story and want to see more, please reblog! Word of mouth is our only advertisement, so it helps a lot and means the world!

asforetoldsobelow-comic

As Foretold, So Below chapter 1, Suenfield's Son, part 4.

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mkeanarchytect

If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.

romanceyourdemons

if duolingo is going to insist on having a whole cinematic universe for its characters they should at least provide a chart establishing who addresses whom with the formal you because right now i’m having all of them use informal you to everyone in all relevant exercises and it feels. wrong

romanceyourdemons

if i was a bite-sized child addressing an ill-tempered talking bear i would be using Sie. i would call that thing 您 i would use the most formal register of language available even if the bear said i didn’t have to and i don’t like that duolingo doesn’t account for this

plumslices

If we don’t microdose delusion we won’t make it through this reality babe….

leebrontide

So I remember reading about this study in grad school where they have a bunch of clinically depressed people and a bunch of non-clinically-depressed people a game that was partially chance and partially skill, and asked them to estimate how much control they had over the outcome.

The depressed people were far more accurate in estimating how much influence their actions had on the outcome of the game compared to their nondepressed counterparts, who consistently overestimated the effects of their own choices on their chances of winning.

Then I remember this other study (CW animal testing) where they put rats in a bucket of water that they couldn’t get out of, so they’d have to swim. There was a fairly consistent point at which the swimming rat would falter, and stop swimming, fated to drown.

Except that that’s when the researchers would pull the rat out of the bucket, give it a nice rest warmth and a meal.

When those SAME rats who had been rescued before were put in the same situation again, they swam much LONGER than they had before.

Why? The risk was the same either way- drowning. You’d have thought that the fear of drowning would keep them swimming to their maximum length no matter what.

The researchers conclusion was that the rescued rats had something they hadn’t had the first time- they had more hope. A miraculous rescue could come, and that let them swim for longer, just in case.

I think we do microdose delusion because sometimes that little overestimation of our chances, of our luck, keeps us swimming that little bit longer, just in case something good happens. And sometimes, that little margin really does make the difference.

vanwolffen

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather.

syn0vial

hey, don't just leave the quote there! the last line is what MAKES it!

"YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"

beansprean

Thank you @nitewrighter for your post lmao

whencartoonsruletheworld

in retrospect it is really funny how into the spiderverse was a good and popular movie and the mcu immediately SHIT themselves and threw multiverses into all of their shit as if that was what made the movie popular instead of like. being a good movie

whencartoonsruletheworld

argentconflagration

i might have said this before but ive come to believe that the locked tomb series mostly gets presented as "lesbian necromancers in space" NOT because people think that alone is a sufficient selling point (in the critique's worst form, "all people care about is LGBT representation") but because it's hard to describe the plot of tlt in a way that successfully conveys its appeal.

"lesbian necromancers in space" is just tlt's version of homestuck's "four kids play a game" or 17776's "what football will look like in the future" or everything everywhere all at once's "a chinese-american woman struggles with her taxes".

great-and-small

Do y’all know about Frédéric Thomas? He is a French parasitologist who heard a story about crickets in New Zealand leaping into the water even though they can’t swim, and immediately speculated this suicidal behavior was related to behavior manipulation from an internal parasite. This is before neuro-parasitology was a field at all, and before people really put much stock into parasite’s ability to control animal behavior.

Thomas was certain that studying these crickets would be a huge priority for the scientific world given the implications of a parasite controlling an animal’s actions in such an insidious way. Unfortunately, absolutely nobody would fund Thomas’ expedition to study the crickets, and his grants were all declined. In a wild move that showcases the balls to the wall, near- insanity level passion of a biologist, Thomas declared a hunger strike and wrote a letter to the president of France saying he would not eat until someone took the matter seriously and funded his study on the suicidal crickets. I feel like those of us in research can at least a little bit understand this impulse.

Well the French government actually got Thomas’ message and freaked out a bit at the negative publicity that could arise from a crazy worm scientist starving to death. So they send some government bigwigs to the university to pressure Thomas and his department heads into calling an end to the hunger strike. In the flurry of attention that resulted from this, a Swiss billionaire heard about Thomas’ plight and offered to partially fund the study. The French government was happy to get rid of Thomas and contributed funding as well so that Thomas could head to New Zealand to study his suicidal crickets. He was right about the parasites causing the behavior!

The hunger strike debacle is not even the wildest part of this story. I love biology so much

qwuilleran

What's the wildest?? You can't leave us hangin' like this.

great-and-small

Okay so get this, after all that Frédéric Thomas gets everything together and flies halfway across the world to New Zealand and… he can’t find the crickets. I mean, he finds some but apparently this species of cricket is really hard to track and as a result Thomas’ team cannot capture enough to yield significant results for their study.

Thomas was forced to abandon the project and leave New Zealand, but before he did he sent a photo of a worm emerging from a cricket back to his colleagues in France. Naturally, the photo was posted in the university break room. While the photo was posted there, it was somehow seen by one of the scientists cousin who worked cleaning pools. In a bizarre twist, the cousin recognized the worm. He claimed to see them all the time in a pool that he cleaned for a local resort and also said that he had observed crickets jumping into the pool at night.

By this time Thomas was back in France but he was highly skeptical that the pool cleaner’s information was correct. He gave the guy a jar and asked him to bring some samples of the worms thinking he’d never hear from him again. Well sure enough about a week later Thomas received a jar that was chock full of worms. Specifically the species Paragordius tricuspidatus, which are parasitic horsehair worms and exactly what Thomas had desperately been trying to find inside of his crickets in New Zealand. He had travelled halfway across the world just to realize that the parasite he wished to study could be found at a hotel about an hour from his house.

Thomas’ wife was delighted when he informed her he’d booked a surprise getaway at a luxury resort, but of course she didn’t know this trip was actually a brain parasite reconnaissance mission. Thomas spent time by the pool at night and sure enough he saw crickets crawling to the water’s edge and hopping in, one by one. Thomas and his colleagues were able to use this location to find a thriving population of horsehair worms to study. Their experiments confirmed that the worms were manipulating insect brains to further their life cycle, and the results of these studies were eventually published in the journal Nature!