18+ (MDNI)
Mostly random fandom stuff.
Current Fixation: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Main Interests: Jane Austen, Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Period Dramas, DC Comics, A Song of Ice and Fire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, & Jane Austen (again)
Earth & Stone is a high design bathroom set built around raw stone: black lava, white limestone, and warmer earthy tones that feel pulled straight from the ground. The kind of bathroom that looks like it belongs in a boutique hotel but somehow also in the middle of a rainforest.
Heavy stone meets lush greenery. Sharp lines meet organic texture. High end plumbing meets the kind of luxury clutter that makes a space feel lived in. This will be perfect for rich sims, architects or designers. Hope you'll like it 💖
Description
This set is basegame compatible and includes 30 maxis match new items
Plumbing: Bathtub, shower, toilet, sink and double tile sink.
Too tired from traveling to really review Persuasion, but it was constantly on my mind how much Anne was like...luggage as an (assumed) old maid. I would have hated to be an upper class spinster; if your family sucks then you're just alone and have nothing to do and can't pick anything. She never got to even decide where she'd be going, people were just shipping her around to various people's houses because they couldn't toss her out on the street. She couldn't even use any transportation on her own, if she wasn't bumming a ride with someone already going somewhere she had to walk.
But remember—her sister Elizabeth is an upper class spinster, and no one is treating her that way. Elizabeth gets to control where she goes, not to as great an extent as a man, but just about as much as a married woman would. Elizabeth is consulted by her father on travel, housing, furniture, finances, etc. She gets to make decisions about her own life. So the problem is not really that Anne is an upper class spinster, it's just that her family doesn't like her. Which is gonna be a problem for a woman of any age and marital status.
fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"
The “nobody” scene in the odyssey is absolutely not just a clever pun—it’s a character defining moment for Odysseus because he refuses to be nobody. He devised an incredible plan that worked and he could have saved his men and returned home much sooner but he just had to yell to the cyclops that he isn’t nobody—he’s Odysseus, king of Ithaca so now Poseidon knows who to curse which severely fucks up the rest of the journey.
The “nobody” scene highlights both Odysseus’s cleverness but also his arrogance and those two traits define Odysseus throughout the entire story. It’s a foundational aspect of Odysseus’s character and cutting the scene displays a shocking level of ignorance and disregard for the themes in the source material.
the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.
@velvetdemon I'm doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.
The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.
The long answer: The one side of the equation you're focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it's not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to...a living thing.
But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.
Drug trials don't just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you're trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson's disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.
If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:
We didn't know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.
We didn't know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.
We didn't know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.
We didn't know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.
I could go on, and on, and on.
The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.
These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that's heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.
But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients' hope, after you've failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.
hi, i’m an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.
animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.
not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.
let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.
research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the "lesser" animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i've cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the "three Rs" - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say "b-b-but elon musk--" his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).
research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.
some research animal fun facts (US edition):
all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.
institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.
institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.
a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.
some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.
so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look at this wikipedia page if you think “ethical” human experimentation can exist.
If you want to reduce animal testing - or at least, reduce the amount of things we need animals to be tested with - there is some growing traction in regards to mathematical modelling (also known as in silico studies), in vitro studies (i.e. test tubes), and 3D printing of organoids.
At the moment, this is not a substitute for animal testing. Bodies are incredibly complex and interconnected environments that we're still scratching our heads about, and animal testing is in a lot of ways the most efficient and least harmful way of testing things like medications.
If anyone wants to read more about these subjects, here are a few starting points (you will probably learn some new words, this is okay!):
Advances and Applications of Predictive Toxicology in Knowledge Discovery, Risk Assessment, and Drug Development research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
Novel methods and technologies for the evaluation of drug outcomes and policies research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
Spotlight on Artificial Intelligence in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
The Emerging Discipline of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
PDF Drug Combinations: Mathematical Modeling and Networking Methods by Vahideh Vakil and Wade Trappe
PDF Machine learning-based drug-drug interaction prediction: a critical review of models, limitations, and data challenges by Flaviu-Ioan Gheorghita et al.
PDF A review of 3D bioprinting for organoids by Zeqing Li et al.
3D Bioprinting for Engineering Organoids and Organ-on-a-Chip: Developments and Applications by Yuqing Ren, Congying Yuan, et al.
3D bioprinting of human iPSC-Derived kidney organoids using a low-cost, high-throughput customizable 3D bioprinting system by Jaemyung Shin, Hyunjae Chung, et al.
PDF Advancing organoid development with 3D bioprinting by Wenping Ma et al.
"Ignore the verbiage, and look at what they're doing. What they're asking you to do. What sort of world they'd have you build, and how they're going to pay for it." < Literally my favorite line in all of fallout 4. Thank you Deacon, I love you Deacon
Gale is a human colored by a disdain for his humanity. He goes into detail multiple times about how his humanity is a dissatisfaction. He wants to go further into the Weave, to know divinity completely.
Mystra is the Weave. She is magic, full stop. This is explicitly stated.
But when Gale held her, kissed her, there was nothing there to touch. Skin more like marble in its flawlessness. Eyes more like crystal in their luminance. She always smelled of sharp rosewater, always tasted of mild sweetness. Never a hint of sweat, of saliva, of any of the unclear oils and bacterias that infest the mortal form.
Somehow, I can't imagine Mystra ever laid with him as a man. Why would she bring herself low, to get in a human's actual bed? What would even be the point, when an ocean of cosmic perfection lay above?
Did it disgust him, then, to travel so high, lay with the very form of Magic, only to return to his meager human body? To be the owner of skin that smelled of sweat, skin that had scars and wrinkles and marks, skin that aged?
When Mystra cast his aside for his folly, did he long for the divine from the confines of his humanity? Did he hate the needs and limits of his body, the various hungers that cried out to be sated, when all his mind craved was that glittering perfection?
Mystra loved Gale's magic. Mystra loved him as a tiny expression of her own self.
Gale is his mind, certainly. His mind is where the magic is. His mind is remarkable. His mind is worthy of love. But this human thing, this temporary human thing that is a body, is not him in the same way. It's needy, and he wants so badly to escape from it into the divine.
And maybe that's what surprises him so much about being loved by a mortal. That someone would lay with him, Gale the man. Would bury their nose into his neck and breathe deeply the scent of him, would kiss the crows feet at his eyes and relish in the taste of his mouth.
Gale knows the touch of perfection, but the embrace of humanity has a deeper flavor, one that grounds him to the earth. One that makes him realize that flawless, perfect love is a distant thing, an inhumane thing.
As much as I love TOS, there are a few episodes I hold in deep contempt, and sometimes I just feel the need to try and articulate how deeply, deeply stupid "Wolf in the Fold" is.
Well, okay. The premise is that Scotty has contracted misogyny because a woman was responsible for an accident he was involved in, though physically he was either easily patched up with no harm done or never injured at all. Obviously that's not something you can just leave to fester, so they basically force Scotty to get medical treatment for misogyny: exposure therapy to hot, unthreatening women. The idea seems to be that Scotty can get his head straightened out in a controlled environment, then go back to behaving normally around hot crew women on the Enterprise (who have probably been justifiably contemplating murder, tbh).
Kirk and Bones take Scotty to visit a planetside cafe that has lots of drapery and gorgeous, decorative, hedonistic women (in sexy red outfits) scattered around as a matter of course. It's not exactly a strip club—nobody even slightly strips and the inevitable sexy dancer is a belly dancer with back-up drummers and various other musicians—and it's not a burlesque, it's not just a restaurant with belly dancers, but it's not really a brothel (the women don't seem to have any incentive whatsoever to do anything they don't want to, at any rate). But the mood is a bit of all of the above, if the obligatory sexy women were super into it and there for their own enjoyment (surejan.gif).
Anyway, it turns out that Kirk talked to the sexy dancer of the moment, Kara, beforehand and he and Kara had already arranged for her to hang out at their table and generally be unthreatening and appealing around Scotty. To cure the misogyny.
But there's also a guy into her who's jealous and pissed-off about her going off with Scotty, and one of her musicians is behaving Suspiciously. It turns out that the latter is a man she's danced for her whole life: her father.
So the whole dancing musical number that he is part of seems ... probably less exclusively sexual in the Argelian cultural context (hedonism notwithstanding) than it's initially framed as by the camera, given her father's direct involvement, though the episode is too shallow to think too hard about that. My vague impression is that the hot hedonistic cafe women who want to go further with willing guests generally leave the cafe with them; it's not a place with facilities for literal sex, but more of a place to find agreeable potential partners.
It's very slightly funny because Scotty gives zero indication of the (alleged) kneejerk loathing of women this is (allegedly) a treatment for; perhaps James Doohan just didn't have it in him to play Scotty that way, who knows? Regardless, Scotty is nothing but good-natured and stupidly agog from his first moment onscreen, in much the same way that Scotty usually behaves around women he finds attractive. We repeatedly get the "Scotty POV" shots of her ... let's say, waist, cutting to shots of him just staring with his mouth open.
Bones seems like, well, might as well enjoy the show since I'm here, but not as cringe about it. Kirk is simultaneously admiring, courteous, and managing to maintain another variant of his closed-knees/hands folded/straight-A polite schoolgirl sitting style on the edge of a pillow.
While Kirk is cordial to Kara herself, it becomes pretty clear that he finds Scotty's whole deal somewhere between vicariously embarrassing and hilariously stupid, and McCoy seems privately less than thrilled with the whole thing too. This is them responding directly to Scotty:
So after Kara takes Scotty for a walk like he's an over-eager puppy who needs extra training, Kirk dryly says to Bones, "My work is never done," and they have a little conversation about how all that was totally on the clock. It turns out that this particular cure wasn't Kirk's idea but McCoy's (who among us is surprised, lol) and the two of them were primarily overseeing it to make sure Scotty is 100% cured. Now that they're actually off the clock, Kirk proposes going to a different place in the city "where the women are—" and Bones just responds, yeah, I know that place too, let's go.
Given that the women here are already staggeringly gorgeous and decorative, the impression at the time is that this other place has to be some kind of brothel or something that they've visited separately, right? Like, the cafe is Pleasure Planet Sexy Lady Place Stage 1 and then this other place is more Pleasure Planet Sexy Lady Place Stage 2, the real deal. Or something. They never actually get there because of the plot, and we only hear about it again at the end, so more on that later.
The even stupider main plot involves murder cloud alien Jack the Ripper framing Scotty for the murders of various women. He targets women because he feasts on fear, and (allegedly) the spike of terror women feel right before being murdered is more intense than men in comparable situations (yes, this is actual Jack the Ripper's motive according to Star Trek, though he also just hates women). That whole plot happens, everything's resolved, everyone's pretty chill throughout, RIP to the various murdered women no one seems to care all that deeply about in the end.
The crew had to be drugged into unconcern to starve Jack the Ripper Murder Alien Cloud of his preferred diet, while Kirk and Spock beamed him into space via the transporter to dissolve the cloud into millions of tiny fragments that will gradually die off. Everyone else on the ship is fairly loopy. Scotty and Bones, definitely loopy, wander in to the transporter bay, leading to Kirk being like, well, not much is getting done for the five or six hours until the drugs wear off.
Spock, always ready to peer-pressure his captain into taking a break, points out that Kirk didn't get leave in any meaningful sense in all this. So maybe he should go back down to the planet and chill out for real!
Kirk, not beating the bi4gay allegations, responds by inviting Spock to come with him to the 2nd sexy lady location he and McCoy had been going to visit before the murders. In the process of the invitation, he reveals that this other place is also a cafe, something he mentions multiple times in just a couple of sentences.
Spock certainly wasn't along for the first, on-the-clock cafe adventure, so it seems like Kirk specifically wants him along when they're off-duty for real, but no explanation is given for this or what's special about the women at Cafe #2.
It's certainly not illuminating when Bones and Scotty enthusiastically want to tag along this time too—Bones insists again he knows the place in question, i.e. Sexy Cafe #2 and not the lesser Sexy Cafe #1 we've already seen—and Kirk immediately shuts them down and says they're not in the right shape to come along.
Not going to lie, I got the feeling that he mostly doesn't want them, or at least Scotty, along on his actual leave. It was one thing to hang out with Scotty at the sexy lady cafe as a professional matter, but they're work friends at best. Kirk doesn't want to spend his precious free time with subordinates who aren't really personal friends.
After that interruption, Kirk invites Spock to come to the planet with him to appreciate Cafe #2. And at that moment, we get the single highlight of the whole episode: Spock's wordlessly bitchy gay head tilt as Kirk is eagerly urging him to share shore leave with him at the sexy lady cafe. Spock's level of baffled disdain for the idea pervades this single reaction to a degree that has to be seen to be believed, and immediately stops Kirk mid-sentence. Even his hand drops.
So Kirk just interrupts himself with, "No, I guess not" and a disappointed look. He glances at Bones and Scotty doubtfully, then back at Spock while hanging onto the transporter console, and plaintively says "Alone?" with puppy dog eyes and zero enthusiasm.
Kirk then visibly gives up, heads towards the door, says "Gentlemen" to Scotty and Bones and gestures for them to leave first through the doors out of the transporter bay. Scotty, Bones, and Spock all go through the doors before Kirk follows after them, apparently uninterested in beaming down to Argelius without Spock, or at least in going alone.
Things we don't know by the end:
Since all Argelians are hedonists, including the (gorgeous) ones at Cafe #1, and both places are explicitly described as cafes, what makes Cafe #2 so distinct that even a vague reference immediately identifies the place Kirk is talking about? Like, the women are so what? Are they just extra turbo sexy? Are they empaths like Sybo? The world will never know.
Why is Kirk so deeply unenthusiastic about going to any of these places alone? And particularly prefers to go to Cafe #2 with Spock in particular?
btw do Argelian cafes have... names? Do you just describe everything by the vibes? The women?
Why is Kara's father part of her dancing number at a sexy lady cafe?
Are we supposed to think Scotty always had more-than-usually misogynistic leanings that were amplified by some random woman being responsible for the accident, or that someone who isn't misogynistic could just spontaneously develop it via explosion (that didn't even hurt him)?
I can imagine why Uhura is not in this awful, sleazy, misogynistic episode, but known appreciator of female beauty and shore leave Uhura being in "Wolf in the Fold" would make it slightly less obnoxious. Maybe she was at Cafe #2 the whole time.
What is with the weird tone of this episode about *checks hand* women being brutally murdered?
Yeah, it's probably the most firmly "Bloch" of the episodes he wrote. Apparently his draft of "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (an early episode I do largely like for what it is, actually—and it's one of the only times Chapel gets any significant limelight without it revolving around her being desperate and creepy about Spock) had to be heavily overhauled in editing to function at all, with multiple rounds of revision from Bloch himself, and then a bunch of last-minute edits from Black and Roddenberry to make it filmable. So it feels quite different.
Incidentally, Black's and Roddenberry's own difficulties with editing led, very thankfully, to recruiting Gene L. Coon to do the exhausting showrunner work of TOS and Dorothy Fontana phased into full editing (at which she was superb, I suspect even more than as scriptwriter—and she wrote one of my favorite TOS episodes of all time, "Tomorrow is Yesterday"). It was the dream team of Coon and Fontana who overhauled Bloch's "Catspaw" into the delightfully silly Spirit Halloween extravaganza it is rather than whatever the hell is going on in "Wolf in the Fold." I unironically love "Catspaw" as a maximally campy, ridiculous episode that still manages to have some edge, but it took some heavy lifting from others to make it work including Actual Woman DC Fontana.
"Wolf in the Fold" was heavily revised by both Genes (Coon and Roddenberry) to function (and definitely has Roddenberry all over it, as with their "Breads and Circuses"), but ... well, you certainly feel the difference between the editorial teams of Coon-Roddenberry and Coon-Fontana even when Bloch is the main writer either way.
Don’t talk to me about buffing or debuffing stats either. The only stat that matters is the enemy’s HP, and I am going to debuff it all the way to zero.
pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
amandla
titsay
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
