[Audio transcript: Ben Galpin voicing Jonathan Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker. He says, "There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face," followed by a cartoon "bonk" and the Wilhelm scream. End transcript]
Not necessarily headcanon, but I do have some Thoughts on Spider-Noir swirling around the ol' noggin, on the subject of food:
I think one of the human things he definitely had to relearn was how to chew and swallow solid food. Spiders do not have mandibles, they do not have chewing mouthparts; instead they have chilicerae, which (in most) species are used to envenomate prey and inject digestive juices to liquify it. They then slurp up this liquid diet through their mouth, a tiny opening to their esophagus just behind the chilicerae.
In Ben, this would present as pseudodysphagia, though I'm almost certain that term hadn't been coined yet. When the Army tries to feed him any kind of solid food, his mind is absolutely, 100% convinced that he will choke if he tries to eat it. Given the aforementioned certainty that this was before pseudodysphagia was a diagnosis (1918 is decades before the first DSM-I [EDIT: verifying this fact led me to the Statistical Manual for Use of Institutions for the Insane published in 1918, which as suspected does not contain dysphagia, pseudo- or otherwise])... where was I?
... right, given that, it is difficult to know what treatments they would have prescribed. Hypnosis seems likely. Whether they would have used aversion relief therapy as it is practiced today, I'm not qualified to speculate. Subjecting him to electric shocks does seem on-brand and period-typical. (The fact that his spider tics would be indistinguishable from shell shock to physicians of the time is the topic of a later post; here I want to focus on food)
tl;dr Ben would have put a lot of effort into relearning how to chew and swallow his food, and doctors of the time could have tried a variety of treatments to get him there.
Point the second, and very unrelated to the first: during the 'Spider Island' arc of The Amazing Spider-Man comics, Peter at one point recommends that anyone with organic spinnerets should eat starchier foods and drink plenty of water (ASM #668). Not going to fault the comic writers for not looking up the exact amino acids most prevalent in spider silk protein, lol. But if you want to get really nerdy, spider people with organic spinnerets should really be filling up on alanine and glycine.
I'm not going to cross reference multiple sources for this, just using the first likely-looking lists for "foods rich in alanine" and so on:
Alanine can be found in: milk and dairy products (yogurt, curd, cheese, etc.), eggs, meat (chicken, pork, etc.), fish (hake, conger, etc.). Plants, in decending order of alanine content, include watercress, soy, beans, aparagus, spinach, seeds of watermelon, lentils, cauliflower, pumpkin seeds, peanuts, broad beans, corn, sunflower seeds, green peas.
Glycine-rich foods include: bone broth, chicken, dairy products, eggs, tofu and soy-based foods, lentils and legumes, pumpkin seeds, spinach, sesame seeds, quinoa. Lots of overlap with alanine!
During the Great Depression, many of these were not readily available, or were too costly for families with reduced wages or lost jobs. From tastingtable:
At the time, most American meals were limited to bread, canned goods, beans, and potatoes because those were the easiest foods to find. According to a factsheet that shows Depression-era prices, created by the Van Buren County Iowa Genealogy, the cost of a 16-ounce loaf of bread in 1933 was 6 cents, and butter was 24 cents per pound. Comparatively, one pound of chicken cost 18 cents, putting butter among the more expensive foods. To save money, Americans made butter at home with the cream from bottled unhomogenized milk delivered by a milkman.
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1954219/foods-people-ate-great-depression/
So, as good as eggs are, they are not something people living in the 1930s could get reliably. Milk was a bit easier to get, and Ben Reilly drinking milk amuses me greatly. Splurge on a milkshake, he deserves it. Then there's some period-appropriate Popoeye jokes to be had at him needing to eat a lot of canned spinach. He can also get ahold of beans, also good for both amino acids.
Peanut butter was a popular Depression source of protein, and a good source of alanine, though I think the stickiness of it would not interact well with his pseudodysphagia if he was eating it as a spread. Blended into a shake or baked into a bread would be better. Peanut butter stuffed onions might give him some trouble, it sounds like the baking process would change the peanut butter's consistency but I'm not sure to what degree.
Slugbugers, I just learned, were made with ground beef or pork, mixed with soy and flour to 'stretch' the meat further; and hey, soy is also on both lists!
whew, this ended up longer than I expected! Gonna go watch Dylan Hollis try Depression-era desserts now
I hc that the Kronides had a system in Kronos' stomach that whoever was before would take care of the next person in the birth order.
And uhh....
Hestia does not follow that rule. Theyre all her babies.
Demeter was at first pleased she got a two for one deal on babies because Hera and Hades are only a few months apart, but now she is annoyed by to dislikes both of them and wants a refund.
Hera and Hades were lowkey annoyed that they had to share with each other, so maybe thats why Poseidon's like that😭 Like Demeter, they want to get rid of him now and keep playing hot potato about who's problem he is. (Which is funny cus i hc Oceanus and Tethys fostering him alongside Hera so technically they dont need to do this no more)
And no one told Poseidon that A. People could be younger than him and B. They didnt have to continue that system outside of the stomach so Zeus got snatched up real quick (dw he was chill with it)
Part about this is that Hera and Hades are actually really funny. For example both of them complain about Heracles to the extent of Hera explaining how Heracles shot Hades in the war, when Hades was defending Pylos, and Hera also adds that he does not like the people who go to the underworld very much, not only Heracles but also Orpheus. They're so similar that it can make them clash a lot. This is now my new theory or head canon based on your own and what's written.
My Hera and Hades are almost like twins. Hera hates it more than Hades does but they keep ending up being so similar against their attempts to be different😭
Shoutout to Disney’s Descendants for having the most vibes based worldbuilding I’ve ever seen in my life. Legitimately thinking about any of it for more than two seconds makes everything crumble apart logistically and I think there’s an art in that.
So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.
I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.
Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.
(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)
(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)
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