There Ain't No Me If There Ain't No Caffeine

My theme is "whatever special interest I have at the time."

[prophetic-writer]

I'm sorry but I have one draft that I never finished but I laugh every time I see it

[hellsquills]

Writing Tip

Neither do i

[eviliens]

Unreliable everyone

[notkatniss]

shane was trusting that mute button with his life. if I was getting that crazy sloppy toppy I wouldve accidentally started a video conference call

[virgoprivilege]

the bravest person in the world

[shamebanduk]

im obsessed with her

[anarchistmemedistro]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[anarchistmemedistro]

and you don’t even get to nut :/

[anarchopuppy]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

[badwificonnection]

Blood is what now?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

[badwificonnection]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

[badwificonnection]

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s not my fault you’re human.

[apatheticshipwreck]

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

[elodieunderglass]

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

[nunchler]

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that's beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats

[knottybliss]

Roman soldiers literally spun as they walked using kickspindles

[dangerphd]

every merchant marine I know can knit a rope hammock on broomsticks in a couple hours tops.

[yarnandink]

We have literal photo evidence of shepherd men knitting on stilt stools while watching their grazing flocks. Because knitting or spinning yarn was relatively easy and portable, kept them occupied enough to avoid boredom but also left them enough attention to make sure their flocks remained safe, and resulted in something they could sell to supplement their income from the fleeces, milk, cheeses and meat of their flock.

Once the knitting guilds dissolved as economic powers (partially due to the advent of semi-mechanised knitting machines, which outsourced knitting to "unskilled" croft and cottage-dwelling families rather than restricting the industry to select trained guildsmen), knitting throughout Europe was more likely to be an activity relegated to socio-economic classes than to gender roles, especially prior to the mid-19th century when it was slowly embraced as a leisure activity by wealthy women (in much the same way that embroidery had been embraced in earlier centuries).

And sure, there's an entire conversation to be had about how patriarchal structures have forced women to be more economically vulnerable than men throughout Western history, which therefore meant that once knitting was spread beyond the guilds' tight regulation, a lot of women began knitting because they were poor and it was a relatively portable form of work to earn an income.

Just as there's a conversation to be had about why various occupations and activities are devalued once enough women begin practising them - and especially once the activities are practised by "ladies of leisure", who were seen as being especially frivolous - and why we then collectively develop amnesia about the respect our society held for that occupation or activity just a few generations earlier (think also about teaching, nursing, secretarial and administrative occupations - all previously male-dominated careers that were paid well and seen as respectable, but have been steadily devalued as more women entered the field).

But if that conversation ignores the fact that men are punished and constrained by patriarchal and socio-economic demands, that men have just as much place in the history of fibrecrafts as women, but have been erased from that history by people whose ideology demands that they never have taken part in "feminine" duties... then that conversation will be disingenuous and only half of the true conversation.

[nezreblogz]

[teaboot]

I don't know why this keeps happening but I keep meeting toxic heterosexual couples who experiment with polyamory and are heavily into funko pops, board games, Disney princesses and Burlesque stripping and the man is always a withdrawn bearded dude and the woman is always a passive aggressive control freak with an Etsy shop that sells lawn gnomes styled after Dr Who characters and they don't really even seem to like each other but they're always exactly the same. this has happened four times

[sharkdogsomething-deactivated20]

@niceferatu

[pisara-meressa]

😭😭😭

[ofmd-ann]

FUCK 😭

[tlirsgender]

Yiddish really went off with the specific ass words. Knickknack has absolutely nothing on tchotchke. Complain wishes she was kvetch. Schlep. Chutzpah. And so on. Impeccable vibes 10/10

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

I think the difference is that none of these words have the negative energy that their English equivalents do. A knickknack is a useless piece of clutter, a tchotchke is an adorable souvenir. If you complain you are annoying and rude, but if you kvetch you are, at worst, justifiably venting and at best commiserating over a shared pain that needs to be pointed out. Schlepping is sort of in the kvetch area, where it expresses pain in a way that doesn't imply that you did something ridiculously onerous the way that trek does, but also still acknowledges the annoyance and difficulty of the task. Chutzpah is hard to translate because it is somewhere between stubbornness, rudeness, and disrespect, but if none of those words had a negative connotation.

Honestly, I think a big part of this is cultural. These words come out of a culture where argument and complaint are encouraged and considered to be a regular and healthy part of social interaction. In English, which has historically been spoken in areas with a more inherently negative view of complaint and argument, the equivalent words have built in negative associations that don't exist for the Yiddish words.

[tlirsgender]

^^^ Yes that's it. I think you hit the nail on the head

[counterpunches]

#jews wrestle with everyone including g-d

[pale-chartreuse]

Chuzpah is like hubris, but without the threat of immanent lighting strike.

[goodomensonprime]

We are ineffably elated to confirm that Good Omens will return for a third season! This calls for a round of hot chocolate and sweet treats!

@neil-gaiman

[spamtown-usa]

hello? can we have a quick briefing for a moment.

dont fucking celebrate all disruption of jewish traditions and life because of what israel is doing. dont fucking say all “jewish people this” or “all jewish people that”. dont fucking equate all jewish people to israel. dont fucking equate all antisemitism to anti-israel action. That’s wildly antisemitic. Jewish people are still under massive threat from many sides; people are still ready to kill Jewish people in so many places. Jewish people are still not an esteemed or all that respected part of society. Why do you think world governments really made Israel? To be kind to Jewish people? no. it’s to try and put Jewish people all in one place, and signal support while not really giving it.

And just because the American government supports Israel does not mean they support the Jewish people. Support of Israel is at best a handwavey “yeah i guess we’re okay with Jewish people”. It is virtue signaling, in the actual meaning, the truest sense, of the phrase. It does not indicate any kind of care at all for the average Jewish person.

Jewish people are not your enemy, the Israeli government is. These are separate entities. There are even Jewish people living within Palestine that are still subject to the genocide.

Please do your best to be aware when people are equating a people and a government. it is literally never ever a good thing.

[kurgy]

wheres seasons greasons

[kurgy]

[kurgy]

its that time of year again

[theangriestlittleunicorn]

It doesn’t have to be

[kurgy]

its not optional

[narrie]

jewishvoiceforpeace: This is what genocide looks like. These are the 2913 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military this month, as of Thursday, October 26. As the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza intensify, we recognize with horror and grief that this death toll is already inaccurate.

We demand a ceasefire now to save lives. To stop a genocide. The Israeli military has already erased 47 entire Palestinian families from Gaza's population registry; all members of the family, from all generations, are dead. This is loss beyond measure.

The U.S. is also responsible for this horror. 80% of the bombs that the Israeli military drops on Gaza, that are used to kill these children, are American-made. We are called to do everything we can to stop this genocide.

As we continue to demand a ceasefire and fight for a future where everyone is free and equal and safe, we refuse to forget these lives. We will always affirm that every life is precious.

Every single one of these deaths was preventable. When we say Never Again-for anyone, this is who we mean. Never Again is right now.

Source: Gaza Ministry of Health

[nicostiel]

“I love you.”

[homunculus-argument]

The human body's response to HRT is actually admirable in the sheer indifference. Just pure I Don't Give A Shit, I Just Fucking Work Here compliance to the new instructions. You can get testosterone injected straight into your body and it doesn't even question where that shit came from, coming back from a coffee break and just going

"Okay, everything seems to be in ord- oh fuck now what? Oh huh. Alright fine. New orders came in, cancel the menstrual cycle. Dig up the genetic balding patterns from somewhere, I don't fucking know they're buried somewhere in the dna. I'm greenlighting the growing-hair-on-your-toes thing. Yeah just cancel the ongoing maintenance processes, new orders came in so this is apparently what we're doing now."

[asneakyfox]

people having a lot of feelings about stede killing a person in cold blood but - if you didn't like it you get that the narrative agrees with you, and with ed, right? stede was making a bad choice? that's why there's a flashback to his childhood trauma in there, i guarantee that the narrative of our flag means death does not want us to celebrate stede becoming more the son his father wanted.

it is super important that stede does not need to do it! he is not solving any problem by doing it! i had a moment of being disappointed we didn't get the "stede kills someone so ed doesn't have to" beat but it's absolutely crucial that NOBODY had to kill ned lowe in order to solve any problem whatsoever. stede had already resolved the situation completely in his stede bonnet way, by employing a people-positive management style. that's what makes stede special. the show knows this.

but stede doesn't know it! which is why the first thing we saw this season was him dreaming about a world where he has to become a merciless killer before he can be rewarded with ed's love and he still thinks that. he is going to learn better.