Here there be Dragons

I'm Alex, bi, trans, portuguese guy. I am a developer, linux enthusiast, gamer, digital artist, and fantasy/romance writer who seems terminally incapable of specializing.

[memewhore]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Tumblr being the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension site makes sense when you realize that 79% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Same goes for Twitter and TikTok.

that's a real high number, sport. where'd you get it?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hey anon

please tell me you didn't google "US literacy rates" and then make the funniest possible mistake one could make in that situation

[arctic-hands]

When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

[evilsoup]

[gilliagandy]

Truly thrilled to finally find this post on my dash.

[depsidase]

[tuttle-did-it]

People need to be told this more often. Especially the wankers who keep supporting the billionaires. They're not going to give it to you.

[ritual-and-chaos]

I am the only grad student in a class of undergraduates, a contemporary art class.

I made reference to an artwork - “oh, it’s like that piece thats three feet of air above a pedastal that contains a curse or a blessing from a witch.”

I sure baffled a bunch of students, right then.

Tom Friedman, “Untitled (A Curse),” 1992

They are required to pack it for shipping with room for the curse.

[imsrryoisin]

trans unity

[justsheerfilth1]

Why would you use duct tape to hold hands ?

[justsheerfilth1]

Wait I’m a fucking idiot

[rosettyller]

Behind the scenes of PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

[vulcartist]

I translated the Ea-Nasir complaint into vulcan and engraved it in on a cooper plate

[tournevis-real]

The tumblrest sentence I have ever seen

[kaijuno]

[starry-eyed-darling]

[naidje]

[tijdvoormemes]

Danku lesbiennes!

[weirdmageddon]

i know most people have seen it but i cant emphasize how much this is literally my favorite breath of the wild clip of all time. also i can never fucking find this clip when i need it especially in high definition so here it is

[houndmother]

deriding things as performative is anti third space

[houndmother]

im sitting on a patio at my favorite cafe rn and im hand stitching them hem of a dress im working on. and i can see why someone would say im being performative by working on something like this in a public space. but frankly theres no element of that. i just want to work somewhere that isnt my apartment. i want to be in public, i wanna chat with strangers, i wanna see the world. it’s nice to hang out somewhere that isnt my home!

[houndmother]

what i mean is when you say people are being performative you discourage them from doing shit they love in public. and thats no way to foster the world we want to see.

[dilfhershellayton]

there's nothing more performative than only doing Normal Things in public

[thememedaddy]

[xanaxfarts]

A tiny insect clinging to the head of a horned viper

[nattousan]

#ratatouille

[nattousan]

rejoice everyone, this one seems to be legit: Nimish Peter Photography

[scienceyoucanlove-deactivated20]

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

read more from A Mighty Girl

[thejunglenook]

Reasons you should adore Elizabeth Holmes:

She is featured as Forbes’ youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Her tests will revolutionize the public health world as we know it; Making diagnostic testing accessible and affordable for more people (and potentially saving Medicare and Medicaid ~$100 billion each over the next decade). (x)

She is a coauthor on 82 US and 189 foreign patent applications. (x)

Her fear of needles served as a motivator for launching Theranos. (x)

[magnetic-deflection]

i love this post so much. i wonder how shes doing

[skul-the-terf-slayer]

hold on i have to Google something

[no-shit-sherlock-yall]

… Welp, in case some people still don’t know what happened here.

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos president Ramesh Balwani claimed that their supposed Edison machines would only require a few drops of blood to run hundreds of blood tests.

They lied.

They kept it up for over a decade . They even built a fake lab when they invited then-Vice President Biden to tour their facilities.

People started getting suspicious in 2015, when Stanford professor John Ioannidis wrote that there had been absolutely no peer-reviewed research published when it came to Theranos. And then, it was reported that Theranos used traditional blood testing machines, not their Edison machines, to run tests.

Theranos eventually doubled down on their claims, and so all hell broke loose.

Holmes is serving 11 years in prison, and Balwani is serving 12 years.

[viralfrog]

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.