izzy's playlists!
Discoholic 🪩
sheepfilms
shark vs the universe
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Show & Tell
NASA
Misplaced Lens Cap
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Mike Driver
Jules of Nature
Cosimo Galluzzi
The Bowery Presents
Monterey Bay Aquarium
roma★
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
hello vonnie
#extradirty
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@delectablycoolscientist
If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.
Oh hey! Haven’t seen this in forever! Didn’t reblog it when it came across me before, not gonna skip it this time, I need some good vibes.
You've found the Three Fates
Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.
I think a lot of Europeans think that the stadium is in the middle of a city and surrounded by infrastructure, which is why they keep insisting that they can just walk from point A to point B. It's not! It's in the fucking Meadowlands!!!! You have multi lane highways and a literal toxic swamp and that's it!
"Well if there are a LOT of football fans they'll stop for us!"
There's a video online of a trucker who accidentally hits a flock of sheep in the middle of the highway at full speed and splatters them. Has to turn the windshield wipers on to wipe away the blood. This is what every Jersey driver yearns to do once they get on the turnpike.
girl help they're now demanding NJ build a bridge over the highway (???? from where???) or shut down the fucking I-95 (one of the busiest highways in the country that everyone commutes on) for their little soccer game.
I live close enough to the Meadowlands to regularly curse the hubris of the American Dream mall and this is the funniest shit I have read in YEARS. A lot of the European twitter people seem to think we are DEFENDING the Meadowlands and the general layout of the area like we think it was good urban planning. Girl no! It is a shithole, we know it is a shithole! (Although the actual swamp is kinda pretty from the window of a train heading to Secaucus Junction.) We are not trying to express pride, we are trying to save your life!!!!
I MEAN. I know people talk a lot of shit about American arrogance and they're not wrong to do so, but look at this, my fucking god.
New Jersey drivers are like the Atlantic Ocean. They hate you, they hate each other, they drive minimum 20 miles per hour over the speed limit and will honk at you if you don't, and their cars want to eat you for lunch. Good lord I hated driving in NJ.
I absolutely cannot--
Okay, listen, Europeans.
We know our infrastructure sucks. We were set on this path over eighty years ago. And a lot of us would like to change it! But we can't do it overnight, and in the meantime we're fighting car lobbies, oil and gas lobbies, people who vote and have built their entire identity around being truck owners, the political party that uses that identity to control its supporters, inertia, a significant number of people who have never been to another country and can't imagine infrastructure that isn't similar to what we have, NIMBYism (seriously, I live in Phoenix and every attempt to expand the light rail is met by angry racists saying it'll "bring the riff-raff to the neighborhood"), and a concerted fear of anything that looks a little like socialism if you're super-drunk and nearsighted.
We're working on it! But it's going to take awhile! And it's definitely not happening before this year so you can walk multiple miles to get to a stadium for a game that isn't American football!
You are going to have to call an Uber. I'm sorry.
Listen Europeans, if you want to take public transit/walk to the game, I suggest Seattle. The stadium IS just south of downtown and thus walkable from within a couple miles and they finally opened the light rail fully so that option exists. There are also buses but of course those are subject to congestion, which will be bad. I'm sure other cities that are not in New York/New Jersey may also have such options (eg Vancouver, probably), but I'm not familiar enough with them to make a suggestion
“A baby fox showed up to say hi at my grandmother’s house“
Taken from r/aww
It has a friend! 😲
It has a sibling.
I recognize that look of exasperation anywhere.
I love Tumblr because I can look at the timestamps from this post and know that it really happened and isn't AI garbage. A fox this cute and his annoyed sibling really do exist on this person's deck
Ok the US Attorney General says that she will remove ICE if MN drops all our sanctuary laws, complies with ICE, hands over all our SNAP, Medicaid and voter rolls. They demand control over our voter registration so they can "ensure free and fair elections".
They want to control our elections.
I am dead serious people call your representatives. Get volunteering. Get protesting. Get LOUD.
They released a letter full of straight up lies. Spread the truth. MAKE NOISE.
Source
How interesting. How very interesting. They rejected my Blaze of this post.
Well, y'all. Make of this what you will, eh?
Then I guess we'll just have to Blaze it the old fashioned way, eh?
Boosting signal. AGAIN.
The thing about scientific research is that 90% of the labyrinth is dead ends. And therefore, every single dead end that we can verify is important information. You really do need to make a peer-reviewed study to prove that no number of vehicular accidents has a statistically meaningful positive impact on bone cancer, just in case your moron cousin Greg decides to get rich by offering people bone cancer cure tours where you drive a monster truck off a cliff.
Name it "No Shit, Nobel".
This does kind of exist! It seems that these journals struggle though, likely because it is hard to prove a negative and the impact factor would be low
The International Journal of Negative Results
Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (archived)
Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results
Journal of Negative Results (defunct)
Then it seems some big journals and orgs do select issues?
Nature
Microbiology society
Anyway yes, very important work
HERE’S THE THING THOUGH
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport
No okay THAT is adorable and I’m queueing this for next December.
He had me until he said Dominos. Only NYC random shops or Pagliacci on the west coast
Okay two things
1) every time I see something like this, or photos of wild unrealistic landscapes that really exist, or spectacular architecture, whatever it is, I think again that when we write fantasy, we NERF REALITY. That is, here's some dude with a special interest and a brain that somehow lacks basic self preservation mechanisms, and he's out here looking like a super hero. Regular humans are capable of things we seem super human. Real landscapes are more fantastical than our fantasies. Reality is more fantastical than our fantasies.
2) how the fuck did he not kick out any windows that's the most impressive part of the whole video.
this man is his own zombie apocalypse team, adding anyone else would just slow him down
So as someone who used to teach parkour back in the day, this dude isn’t just talented. His technique is amazing.
It’s not just about not kicking out windows. Controlling how you land is about shock absorption, about minimizing the strain on your joints. It also makes you quieter when you move. A good landing should be as silent as possible, because loud landings hurt. That’s the foundation of everything else you do in parkour. So by the time you’re climbing buildings, if you’re breaking windows it means you don’t have enough control to land safely and it’s time to go back to your ground basics.
My favorite part about this was seeing the date, 2019, and knowing that this is a real video of a real-life spider man and not just AI garbage. Actual humans are capable of amazing things
"It may not be high art but everyone's having too much fun to care" Cinematic Universe
The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns
Men in Black
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Pacific Rim
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Feel free to add your own. Please note this is not just "any" fun blockbuster, it's a certain subset where it's a bit of a romp, everyone in the cast is having fun and it's just a joy to watch.
Jupiter Ascending
Spy Kids (all movies)
Muppet Treasure Island
Muppet Christmas Carol
National Treasure
if Charlie Kirk didn't want his death to be made fun of he should have died in seriouser circumstances
his last insta post. man I can't. I can't make a better joke than this
Ok, so just to be clear, the full circumstances of his death were:
-Shot while saying that gun violence wasn't a problem
-While standing under a banner reading "Prove Me Wrong"
-After posting "Play certain games, win certain prizes"
-By a shooter from a rival right wing terror group
-Who engraved his bullets with memes
-And would have gotten away scott free because the investigators were being led by two former podcast hosts
-Except he decided to brag to his family about it
-Causing everyone fawning over Kirk as some kind of martyr to immediately shut the fuck up
-To the point where the President went in less than 24 hours from "he was like a son to me" to "Charlie who?"
This is like something a writer on Law & Order would write to try to give the moral "hey advocating for gun violence is bad".
black with low white spotting (this cat has vitiligo)
This cat looks like the starry night sky and none of us had big enough brains to foretell her coming. I am lost in wonder. Great cat.
The cat looks like she knocked over the ladder her owner was using to paint the ceiling
*releases pack of dads into home depot* go……be free
invasive species encroach on lesbian territory
This is a common misconception because they’re such similar environments, but you should be aware that dads are native to Home Depot, while lesbians are actually native to Lowe’s. At this point, however, both dads and lesbians have made themselves at home in both Home Depot and Lowe’s to the point that trying to separate them back into their original ranges would probably do more harm than good to the delicate ecosystem of large chain hardware stores.
A properly raised and socialized Dad will be perfectly comfortable cohabiting with Lesbians. Its not really “encroaching on another’s territory”. You wouldn’t say that about foxes in a forest that also homes bobcats, would you? No. It’s just two different species that have both evolved to live in similar/the same environment. As long as they recognize each other as equals, Dads and Lesbians are more than capable of cohabitation.
Now, if you were to release a pack of Lumberjacks into a Lowes or Home Depot, that’s where chaos will reign. Being adapted to a far harsher and more demanding environment, the Lumberjacks would simply push Dads and Lesbians both out and also consume far more than a sustainable amount of resources. It would be like releasing bears at a country club.
As a former timber-harvester… I feel this is potentially accurate in theory. But highly improbable in actuality.
Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.
This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.
A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.
Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.
One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.
Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.
Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.
Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.
Please stop labeling Lumberjacks as dangerous roving social predators. They are intermediate level omnivores and remarkably peaceful unless threatened.
As a hardware store worker I can say that this is all 100% accurate.
now how in the FUCK am i supposed to leave tumblr when a god tier post like THIS is just is just waiting for me daily?!?!?!
question where does the “art student” or “DIYer” “crafter” or “soap maker” or “miniaturist“ etc. who has ventured into the store for supplies fall into the ecosystem/what is their impact of said ecosystem?
Most of the above are native to craft and hobby stores (art students, historically, are native to museums, but having been introduced to hobby stores, have found a niche for themselves and thrived), but all can be seen in hardware stores on occasion due to territorial overlap. They are generally low-impact, as they tend to stick to specific small areas and primarily utilize different resources. While a large group of any of them can be disruptive (art students, in particular, are known to travel in packs), in general, they are more likely to have territorial disputes with one another than with the local fauna.
A point of clarity -“crafter” is a bit misleading; while it conjures a specific image, much like ‘fish’ or ‘reptile’ it actually covers a broad array of wildly disparate species, and in general, more descriptive nomenclature is preferred. Fiber artists in particular are a genus to watch out for, particularly in groups. Beware a roving pack of domesticated quilters. They fear nothing, will go anywhere, and due to their social nature, will often seek interaction from other species that thrive best in solitude. They are quite friendly, and will happily adopt members of other species; the concern is that their adoptees do not always wish to be adopted.
#in search of taxonomic precision and peaceful coexistence (via welkinalauda)
I do wonder how lesbian/bisexual lumberjack-mimickry fits into this
I can say as a former craft store worker that if you wish to see true fear, look into the eyes of a Dad who must venture into a craft store. Despite the overlap of familiar beings known to him from his native hardware store habitat, Dads are instinctively aware that craft stores are not for them; they contain unfamiliar perils and even the seemingly familiar may have strange variances and unnerving secrets. (”Why is this airbrush so small? What do you mean nails, why would you… WUT!!”)
Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.
Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.
Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.
Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.
The only truly invasive species that threaten craft stores are Brides-to-Be, who are mere annoyances individually, but like locusts may descend in hordes and lay waste, leaving swathes of destruction in their wake. Fortunately for the Craft Ladies, Brides-to-Be are seasonal and usually only a threat in the spring and early summer.
It Got Better
Man, nobody’s even mentioned the territorial rivalry between Knitter and Crocheter subspecies yet.
Seriously. Guys. Knitter and Crocheter subspecies are naturally armed, either with pinions or hooks, and their battles for resources are legendary.
The idea of inherent enmity between Knitters and Crocheters is a common misconception, but much like hierarchical wolf pack dynamics, hostility between these subspecies seems to occur only in captivity or under unusual stresses.
In their native ecosystems, these two closely related populations rarely advance beyond threat displays over territorial boundaries. When food and nesting materials are plentiful, they have even been known to establish joint colonies, sharing resources and helping tend each other’s young.
Hybrid offspring, while rare, have been observed in the wild. It is unknown whether these hybrids are capable of reproducing, but if they are, it may suggest that their common ancestor is even more recent than previously thought.
Everyone knows the Grim Reaper, the personification of Death. You are the supernatural personification of the other certainty in life: Taxes
Gods are not born of belief. That is a fallacy. Gods are shaped by belief, altered by it, even strengthened by it, but it does not make them. Belief creates, but what it creates is not gods but… personifications, perhaps.
Death is the first and the oldest of us. When people learned to fear death, to see not only a cessation of life but a destruction of being, Death came into existence.
Death, my gentle brother, is an answer to the deepest longing of the human heart. “I am afraid. I do not want to die alone.” That thought was felt before it could be spoken, before speech was conceived. Humans longed for a comforting presence, when they died, not chill oblivion. Death offers it, and leads them on.
I, too, predate speech – Speech, or Language, is a flitting, fickle creature, born of the desire to communicate, mercurial and yet constant, like the air itself. But I am not like her. I have had many names, but what I am does not change.
Fairness, perhaps, was my first name. Long before sounds became words, the thought of fairness existed. It is not fair. It should be fair. I came into being the first time a hungry member of a troop was fed by one who had hunted well, the first time a weaker hunter was robbed by a strong one.
Keep reading
I was skimming my old favorites and came across this and GOD I hope this is the end result for the oligarchs that are bleeding my country dry
I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.
The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.
Ooooh you reminded me of that protocol I wrote about how to reinvent penicilin with only alchemical tools. You know. Just in case I did end up dumped in the past and needed a stable income.
w
what's the protocol?
I am so glad you asked! I unfortunately lost the protocol because it was probably on my laptop, but I remember the broad strokes. So! In case anyone does end up stuck in the middle ages and can find a kindly old alchemist willing to lend you his gear, here's the revamped Penicilin (Re)Discovery Protocol!
0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.
We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.
Find some Penicillium mushrooms!
Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.
First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.
Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?
So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:
Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.
2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms
Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.
First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:
Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)
1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)
1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)
If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)
3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)
Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.
Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.
When you're done, you should have something like this:
Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.
Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!
You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).
3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms
If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:
Well, realistically, it will look something like this:
We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.
IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.
Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.
Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.
The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.
4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom
We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.
(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)
You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.
Ideally you get something like this.
This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.
Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.
Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:
This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.
So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.
The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.
Since I lost the original protocol I'm going to need to do research all over again how to do that with alchemy equipment (or at least a microbrewery), so that will be in the next installment.
Fascinating.
You have ro ferment that shit, it's actually pretty hellish and difficult.
The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html
Being real inventing penicillin is off my list of historical time travel shit to do and I'm going to be inventing a washing machine instead.
I have no idea how accurate all of this is, but I'm reblogging it just for the demonstration of how HARD this medicine stuff was to figure out.
I'm uncertain whether glass of the sort you would need would even be available. That seems like the most difficult part of this process. You might get stuck with pewter, which is, you know, lead.
Meanwhile I'm over here going, "Wait, what do you mean 'if you're in a place where soap hasn't been invented'? If they haven't invented soap, invent soap, that's SO MUCH EASIER than the rest of this."
HOW 2 INVENT SOAP:
INVENT TALLOW. Get some animal fat. Chop it up, add some salt and water, and cook it for a few hours. Scoop the melted liquid fat off the top and filter it through something to get any meaty bits that might still be in there out. When it cools down, it will turn back into solid fat, and you can repeat the process as many times as you want to get more non-fat stuff out.
INVENT POTASH. Fill a container with wood ashes (hardwoods work best). Then pour in rain water. Then let it soak. After a while, collect the liquid, which will now be a horrible caustic alkali solution. If you dry this out, you'll get crystals of potassium hydroxide, but you don't really need to, because the next step is...
MELT THE TALLOW AND PUT SOME POTASH WATER IN IT. This will be stupid hot and there will visibly be chemistry happening. Stir it up good for a while while absolutely not getting it on your hands.
Congratulations, you have now invented soap. Aren't you glad you did this part before you tried the penicillin?
I have no idea why I'm thinking about this post again, but I am, so even without penicillin, some thoughts about how a modern person could be the past's greatest doctor* with minimal effort:
Sanitation: besides knowing about washing your hands, you know to boil water or filter it through several layers of cloth to make it safer to drink. My previous reblog said how to invent soap, and distilled alcohol is also pretty easy to invent- you heat an alcoholic liquid like wine in a container that's sealed other than a pipe/tube in the lid, which is attached to another container that isn't heated, allowing the steam to condense. The first little bit that comes out will be methanol and some other horrible poisons, but after that you'll get mostly ethanol, because alcohol evaporates much more easily than water.
Cholera and dysentery: what actually kills people with these is dehydration, which means even cholera is very treatable even without antibiotics. The most important thing is making sure the sick person drinks as much clean, boiled water as they can keep down and gets some electrolytes and calories in there too, such as by drinking broth, thin soup, or water some sort of grain has been boiled in.
Scurvy: you know this one. Cooking destroys a lot of Vitamin C, and copper stops it from being absorbed. Besides the kind of fruits and vegetables you might think of, rose hips have a crazy amount of Vitamin C, tea brewed from pine needles is pretty good for it, and while there isn't very much of it in meat, some Arctic expeditions managed to recover from scurvy by eating nearly-raw seal.
Rickets: Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe sometimes calcium. You can literally cure the first one with sunlight.
Goiter: often iodine deficiency. Seaweed and eggs are the foods of choice here.
Malaria: quinine is extracted from the bark of a tree native to Peru, which Europeans were smart enough to immediately bring over to Spain when they found out about it. Enough cloth to make mosquito nets would probably be way too expensive to be practical for normal people in most of the world until the Industrial Revolution, but at least you know.
Smallpox: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SMALLPOX, SMALLPOX IS TERRIFYING, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A DISEASE TO KILL AS MANY HUMANS ON THE PLANET AS POSSIBLE IT WOULD BASICALLY JUST BE SMALLPOX. It's insanely contagious and frequently fatal, and you probably aren't vaccinated. However, you can become inoculated, and developing a true smallpox vaccine is way easier than discovering penicillin. People in China were practicing variolation for centuries before it became a thing in Europe- it consists of taking a scab from someone with smallpox, keeping it in a bottle for a week or two to make sure most of the virus is dead, and then having someone inhale the dust or using a needle to prick their arm and get a little of it into the wound. This generally gives them a mild case, which still isn't a good time, but will make them resistant to getting the real thing afterward. Vaccination is the same procedure, but using the much less deadly relative cowpox, which is why the word "vaccine" is from the Latin vacca, "cow." The vaccine that was in use when smallpox was declared extinct in the wild was developed by deliberately passing cowpox between test animals to get it to mutate and selecting for the mildest strains.
Syphilis: the only good treatment for syphilis is antibiotics. However, syphilis is such a bastard that there are a couple of bad treatments that are, somehow, not the worst thing you can do. Insanely enough, this is the one time that mercury actually sometimes helps- like with chemotherapy for cancer today, if you catch it early and poison the bejeezus out of it, sometimes the disease will die before the person does (it's useless once the syphilis goes systemic, though). The other most effective treatment for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin was- I shit you not- giving the person malaria by injecting them with blood from a sick person. Malaria causes extremely high fevers, which kill off a lot of the syphilis bacteria. The drawbacks to this one are, uh, pretty self-evident.
As a bonus, since you probably know how a lot of these diseases are spread, you know when it's worth bothering with the full plague doctor getup! No need to bother when it's cholera or syphilis! But don't skip the mask if there's actual plague though, it's not just the fleas, plague can spread through the air and it can literally kill you in under 24 hours, don't fuck around with the plague-
*Besides time period, how much you would have it made as Superdoctor would also depend heavily on where you land. The Islamic world and China, for instance, were both working off fundamentally incorrect models of health and disease but were still generally a lot more competent than European medicine until the last century or two, while there are Inca skulls with marks from healed brain surgeries from 400 years before European doctors started to consider whether they should maybe consider washing their hands before sticking them in open wounds.
As a person in the biomedical field who also writes for a hobby, I’ve thought about these scenarios a lot. Now I know how to make soap!
A lot of people hate to hear this, but they in particular really need to understand it.
If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.
But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.
Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.
This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.
I'm posting at 10:30pm US Pacific time on a Sunday night, and fucking nobody is going to see this. Or reblog it. But I feel better having said it.
Consider this:
Every culture has implicit biases that are taught to the children who grow up in it. Specific things like region and ethnicity and cradle religion and familial mores and more can alter the specific biases that are taught, but the overall culture of a country will influence how a child thinks all their life. It's not a matter of infection or corruption. It's a matter of chairs.
Imagine that every country has a specific style of chair, and that children will be made to sit in them in ways that conform to the shape of the chair. Sitting in the chairs every day for years will shape how the children's bones grow, and every country's style of chair will shape children's spines and sitz bones and musculature in different ways. Some chairs will be in styles that cause more change from the median than others. Some of the change can be dealt with and corrected for, if they get treatment or physical therapy in adulthood. All of the children are changed, are shaped, by the chairs, and some of them are damaged. Some damaged children are damaged more or less than others, and some of that damage can be healed so that it is no longer a problem, or can be a chronic but treatable condition, or can be mitigated in other ways. Within a country, there's variation in the exact style of chair, and the chairs are all individually made so that no two chairs, and no two children, are entirely identical. But an expert can look at x-rays of an adult's skeleton and see the marks of where they come from. And even adults who weren't damaged, but only shaped, will find other culture's chairs awkward to sit in at first, some styles more than others.
The implicit biases we learn as children shape us all our lives. They don't corrupt, they don't infect, but they do shape. Maybe they do damage as well, and maybe they don't. If you're damaged, maybe you can fix it, or maybe you can mitigate it, or maybe you can manage it, but you're not likely to heal or mitigate or manage it without treatment or aid of some kind, and treating it means acknowledging it. And some of the shaping will always be there.
Acknowledging that we are permanently shaped by something is not the same as original sin, which according to John Calvin (selected because Calvinism has had an outsized affect on American Christianity) is not only something the entire human race inherits and something that makes one inherently bad ("total depravity" is the term he used) and remains even after "regeneration" (being "born again" by accepting the "grace of God"), regeneration and grace being things that a human cannot even choose for themselves because they are corrupted by original sin, but which can only be chosen for them by God. Which is really fucked up, what the fuck John Calvin. But you can be shaped or even damaged by something without being made bad, and even lasting or permanent injury does not make you a bad person.
Sometimes, in real life, how you have been shaped mentally and emotionally will lead you to hurt others, and sometimes it will lead you to hurt yourself, and much of the time it's neutral and hurts no one, and that's true of any way a person can be shaped. And in real life, how children sit and stand does affect how their muscles and bones grow. Doing or not doing certain activities can change how a child grows. Particular injuries can change how a child grows. How they eat can change how a child grows (I'm thinking of things like nutritional deficiencies). What diseases they catch can change how they grow. Even how much physical touch they get from others while growing up can change things. So much can.
And so much can change how a child's mind grows. Minds are more plastic than bones, definitely, but some things (including psychological and physiological things) can permanently change the physical brain and/or the personality and behavior. We know ways to correct for or mitigate some kinds of change, and are constantly learning more, but some things just are. Maybe someday we'll find a way to completely correct for the shaping eighteen or twenty years of living in a Christian hegemony does in a relatively short period… but right now we don't even have the theory for identifying all the ways it affects each of us except by encountering each thing and identifying it with knowledge of where it came from. We identify these things and change them piecemeal, over the course of our lives, if we choose to do it at all. And we never know when another piece might show up. But changing them at all requires acknowledging them in some way.
If you think that anything that shapes you is automatically corrupting, an idea which necessarily holds that there is some ideal default from which one is corrupted instead of just variation in how the world affects us, then perhaps you should look at how you have been shaped by ideas of original sin.
A shower thought before I sleep...
The human mind has no ideal state to be corrupted from, no default psychology that is "right", no blank slate to be fucked up -- a newborn begins having to experiences that shape them before the umbilical cord is cut.
There are only many, many elements that make up a human mind, any of which can have many, many variations. And we invent more of them all the time. Any aspect of a human's psychology, whether created by the physical operation of the brain or shaped by experiences, can be more or less functional for that human's individual life, needs and desires. There is not any one position that must be held by every person alive. To consider any experience, including having one's biases shaped by their culture, as corrupting is to misunderstand how a mind develops. One can have experiences that shape one in ways that hurt oneself or others, but any human that can suckle can hurt someone, and any human that can move can hurt themselves. Any human that lives long enough absolutely will hurt themselves and others. There is no human psychology that can prevent it. No human can stop themselves from absorbing cultural biases, and some of those will always be harmful to someone. There are so many biases, and which ones hurt people will change over time, and there will always be some that go unexamined. There are simply too many there, and no one can spend all their time doing it, and no one can spot all of them without help.
This is Money Marge. Reblog for a miracle of finances to come to you
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