Drinking Insani-tea

"You want some lemons in there mate?" "No thanks, there's enough for a lifetime."

[felicialovescats]

Finding a new fandom is like having the <insert fandom name> dragon sitting at the front doors of your castle

And like, your people can still go in and out to do important things like work/study, but there's this huge ass distracting dragon there

And you need to constantly feed it fandom things like fan arts fanfics videos screenshots fellow castle-havers' crazed posts about the fandom, because the fandom dragon is HUNGRY

And after a while the dragon finally felt full enough to leave, and so you're saying 'finally'

Only for the dragon to join the other dragons in your map, and NOT LEAVING

And every once in a while a random dragon will come to your castle front door, park itself there and demand food

[mellifluouscountess]

When I was drunk one night and watching the Jellyfish livestream, I reached out to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a dumb question about their jellyfish... And they actually emailed me back.

(yes, these are actually my own screenshots, I am in tears laughing)

DO YOUR ANIMAL EXPERTS HAVE TO UNTANGLE THE JELLYFISH

AND THE ANSWER IS FUCKING YES, THE JELLIES GET TANGLED SOMETIMES LMAO

[alanaisalive]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[iguanamouth]

oh shit

[throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight]

[alanaisalive]

As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.

[docd666]

Y'all know what to do Tumblr.

[supermilkshakebanana]

@thecrazyalchemist

[kateammann]

Happy International Asexuality Day!!! 🖤🩶🤍💜

[cungadero]

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

[thrice-the-nobling]

prev's tags are too good not to save

[felicialovescats]

When you've lived for years and years

And eaten tonnes of good food

But you swallowed your own saliva wrong

And you were dying for 5 minutes which felt like 5 decades

[hempkitty]

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

[gremlin-pattie]

reblog to let prev know you’re proud of them

[ahungeringknife]

Let's talk about Aspec characters and relationships!

I'm aroace. I write a lot of characters who are aspec in some way. I have a lot of aspec friends. And this is why your aspec character is driving me crazy. There's also sex talk in here so if you're not mature enough to handle it please scroll past.

Edit: Allos also should reblog this if you found it helpful.

First lets get some terms right:

Aromantic (aro) and Asexual (ace) are two distinct things. Aroace means you're both aromantic and asexual at the same time. It is generally referred to as 'aspec' (aro/ace spectrum) when you fall on one or both spectrums. If you are not aspec you are allosexual/alloromantic (allo). It just means someone who isn't ace or aro. You can also be aroallo or aceallo (aromantic allosexual, asexual alloromantic). All these terms are neutral and not used in derogatory ways similar to trans/cis. It's a descriptive word not a put down.

Now about those characters and their relationships. Because that is the most :))))) to me as an aroace is when people just don't know how to handle an aspec character. Usually because they're allo. But that's okay you probably don't know and we're all here to learn from each other. Here's some things to consider when you want to make or write an aspec person.

Ace's do sometimes have sex. They just aren't motivated by sex. That's it.

Along with sex your ace character may also masturbate and feel good being touched. They also might only like touching themselves and hate when other people do it. They usually also know when someone is hot/sexy and will comment on it. Finding someone sexy =/= we want to fuck them. Thinking someone is hot =/= we want to fuck them. We're still human. We know what a hot human looks like. Your ace character might be attracted to someone's appearance aesthetically but have no interest in their bits. Your ace character might fall in love with the most beautiful person in your story and never show any interest of wanting to bed them.

They can have boyfriends/girlfriends/romantic partners they do or don't have sex with. But they can be anywhere on the spectrum of sex repulsive, to sex positive, to absolute sex hound. Some of the horniest people you know are probably ace. Some of the horniest people I know are ace, and I have a lot of ace friends.

And we're not all virgins. Some ace's had sex and realized 'nah fam. Didn't do it for me' and never did it again. Others are virgins and have no intention ever of having sex. Others are virgins but don't care either way? It just hasn't happened. Others enjoy sex with their partners. Some are parents! You can be ace and had enough sex to procreate. Some also think sex is icky or it squicks them out. Some might be squicked out at the thought of sex with another person but they're fine looking at porn or doing it themselves. There is a wide range of what asexuals are into just like allos.

Aros also sometimes do the sex. They are not motivated by romance. That's it.

That being said your aro character can have a boyfriend/girlfriend/partner and it can be 'romantic'. It doesn't have to be a queer platonic relationship. Your aro character also might not want to be in a relationship at all. It is not weird for your aro character to call their partner their partner or bf/gf or if they're married their husband/wife.

Aro people do not get butterflies. They don't really get flustered around people they like. There's no spark. And they don't feel that romantic attraction allos do when they meet someone and fall in love with them. I've found that aro people are also terrible at flirting or picking up flirting cues. At least in my own personal experience when it took my aro ass 3 years to realize some girl was flirting with me and I just thought she was being nice to me. Take the 'useless lesbian' trope and take it to 11. We just don't know. Aro people also know when other people are hot. Just like aces just because we're aro doesn't mean we don't know a baddy when we see one. We just probably won't realize said baddy is flirting with us...

Aro character still love. They love their family, they love their friends, they love their partners. And it's all real love. The love is still there. Aro characters also probably know what they should do to mimic being in love. Even if we don't love someone more than platonically they may still do the things romantic partners do with their partner. Some don't! And that's fine too. Sometimes you're boyfriends and you share the same bed with him, and sometimes your girlfriend is just your roommate. Both are totally valid aro relationships. Maybe your character kisses their partner passionately and they like it, or they might only kiss during sex, or they might not kiss on the mouth. All valid and correct, still no romo. Kissing =/= romance for aros. Sex =/=romance for aros.

Aroace characters do all those things! At once! They can do the sex, and the boyfriend/girlfriend/partner and loving their friends. They just are not motivated by sex or romance. Kissing =/= sexual attraction. Sex =/= romantic love.

Being aspec is looking at the most beautiful and delicious cake in the world and going 'neat, cake' and walking away not even wondering what it tastes like, not even for a second considering having a bite. It's a cake. Neat. You are not motivated by cake. You don't even really care about cake. It's nice that other people fucking loooooooove cake but it's just not for you.

We also know what love is supposed to be like, what a 'healthy sexual' relationship should feel like. It's everywhere. All around us. Constantly. It's also sometimes fucking exhausting! It's why some aspec people can be a bit agro. We get it you're in love/got a new partner/are sleeping with someone/really sexually attracted to this person/keep spamming us with your celeb thirst pics/etc. It does get tiring sometimes. We don't care about the cake and sometimes listening to you talk about the cake drives us crazy. Consider that too when writing aspec characters. Sometimes their friends and their cakes are annoying no matter how much they love them platonically or romantically.

Anyway just some things to consider for your aspec OCs from an older aroace. Should be said aspec is a wide spectrum and I'm drawing on my own experience as an aroace with aspec friends, and my writing of those characters. If you have more questions about writing characters on this spectrum feel free to ask!

[charlataninred]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[meraarts]

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

[eater-of-hopes-and-dreams]

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

[blitzlowin]

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Goblin Men (Canines)

[charlataninred]

I am in love with you /p

[the-thread-of-the-infinite]

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

[death-of-the-endless]

Oh, love that story, adding it to the list: 20. Princess Talia and adding a few more contenders 21. Thyme 22. The Monster under the Bed 23. A Meaningful Death 24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t 25. The Monster under the Fridge 26. Antler Guy 27. Cleric slamming healing spells

[death-of-the-endless]

Adding a few more I remembered:  28. The Frog and the Scorpion 29. HSTHETE 30. The First Witch in the World 31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests  32. A Faerie taking a Name  33. The Dragon on the Farm  34. Synovus & Menace  35. Raising the Anti-Christ  36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)  37. Doctors without Borders…in Space!  38. The Villain-Wrangler  39. The Last Contact  40. The 100 Parent-Point Children  41. And the Heavens Wept  42. The Night Gentleman  43. The Serpent God and their Priestess 

[knottahooker]

44. No One Showed Up for the Last Storytime

[adamskiiii]

Wow! @writing-prompt-s contributing to like half of these!

[writing-prompt-s]

I can hardly take any credit for these stories! But I love sharing them. Unfortunately I cannot read all the prompt responses so please tag me if you want me to reblog a story that resonated with you so I can give it a little boost :)

[snototter]

A male common agama (Agama agama) basking on a rock in Cameroon, Africa

by Bernard Dupont

[william-snekspeare]

[beekeeperspicnic]

🐝 The Beekeeper's Picnic 🐝

Explore a seaside town in the 1920s and solve cosy mysteries as the (retired) Great Detective in this point and click adventure!

Wishlist on Steam | Itch.io Demo | Discord |

The game will be available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

🌸 Features!

Visit and explore a seaside town It's the  day of the village fete, a suspicious new neighbour has taken a lease on  a long-abandoned cottage and something strange is happening down on the  beach...

Interrogate and befriend a cast of eccentric characters

Make deductions and decisions. Puzzles often have multiple solutions, some of which may please your neighbours more than others.  What path will you choose? Who will you enlist  to help you?

Shape one of the most beloved literary partnerships of all time by choosing the form which the relationship between Holmes and Watson will take: are they dear friends, platonic partners, found family or a romantic couple?

Phone for help of you get stuck! Your older brother Mycroft is always ready to act as your consultant, just give him a call at his club if you need a hint. 

The lovely cover artwork is by @gooolabatooo Music by @sandygarnelle

[clowniconography]

wait ok this is actually one that has caused some contention before when I've talked to people about it. reblog and tag whether or not you check the weather prediction every day before going out

[rlyehtaxidermist]

one of the best academic paper titles

[rlyehtaxidermist]

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

[imightbeobsessedwithsocks]

I still don’t understand

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

[bobthebenevolentpirate]

Ok so this is...not exactly accurate.

They ran the fMRI testing on the dead salmon to test the MRI machine before doing an experiment looking at humans' response to social stimuli. They wanted something "with good contrast, but also with several clearly defined and distinguishable types of tissue..." (1), so they got a fresh salmon from the grocery store. Having tested the machine, they laughed at the absurdity, set aside the results, and did their regular study. Years later, one of the authors was doing a seminar on analyzing fMRI data and used the salmon data they already had as a goofy example of improper analysis, and they found something interesting!

So when you do fMRI imaging, you get a lot of data. Like, 40-130k voxels (small cubes of your brain, like a 3D version of a pixel on a screen) showing changes in blood oxygen levels (which does seem to be a good indicator of mental activity, based on research like optogenetics looking at whether blood oxygen levels indicate brain activity*). (2, 3) From all over the brain, because the rest of your brain is still active and doing different things while the subject is answering your question or looking at the image you're showing them or doing whatever task you've asked them to do.

So now you have this fuckton of data, what now? Well, now you look at the information you got from each of the voxels from the duration of the scan, and you compare the data you got from each voxel at different times to see which ones are "activated," where those voxels are (are they clustered together or spread out randomly?), and what physical activity or stimuli it's correlated to (i.e. which question was asked or image was shown or task was done).

Figuring out what qualifies as a significant change in blood oxygen levels for each voxel is done using "a fair bit of stats" because it's a shit load of data, and picking out significant changes can come down to a fraction of a percent change. So now you're doing thousands of comparisons between voxels, and you can run into a well known issue called the "multiple comparisons problem," which basically means that if you run a lot of tests, some of them will come out positive even if they're not (i.e. false positives). They really fuck up research and are a problem when you're trying to figure out, say, "new MRI protocols to use with adolescents and adults" (4), so you have to correct for that when doing the "fair bit of stats" to make sure you aren't reporting on the false positives.

What "The Dead Salmon" study found was that among all the false positives (which is to be expected, as "just about any volume with 65,000 voxels is going to have some false positives with uncorrected statistics" (4)) there were 3 activated voxels that just happened to be clustered together right in the middle of the salmon's brain, which gave the appearance of brain activity in a dead fish because they hadn't used the proper corrections in their statistical model.

That's what led to it being an actual story instead of a fun anecdote, and it's why they submitted it to the conference. It was all to show support that the minority of researchers at the time who reported their statistics from fMRIs without correcting them to should stop doing that, but then neuroscience blogs discovered the poster and wrote about it, which led to it going viral (before the authors could publish their commentary on it) and being awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012.

Ultimately, it "doesn’t add anything to the technical discussion of how multiple comparisons correction is performed, it is simply a salient reminder of why proper correction is always necessary" (5), and it didn't invalidate that many previous studies or the entire field of neuropsychology (although it going viral did seem to have the desired effect, since by the time they got the Ig Nobel Prize 3 years after the fact only 10% of papers in the field of fMRI reported no multiple comparisons correction where before it was closer to 25-40%). It provided a goofy example for why it's important that researchers do the proper statistics to analyze fMRI data that has been widely used since the 90s and which most of them were already doing. (6)

Since tumblr hates reblogs with links I will reblog again with sources and additional information.

*The difficulty with using brain imaging to make any kind of claim about the way humans think or act or interact with others is more in how the data is interpreted, since brains are complex and several parts of the brain can be involved in a single thought or action, and a whole host of other things that can complicate it that would be an entirely different post. Typically tho, the "men think of women as objects because the same part of the brain is activated by women as by tools" type of reporting comes from journalists who are trying to interpret scientific papers that might say something more like "images of women, tools, and elephants elicited activity in the same areas of the brain in men...this may indicate a commonality between these images, but determining what that commonality might be is beyond the scope of the current study and further research is needed," the journalists just picked out the part that would be most sensational so people would read their story.

[bobthebenevolentpirate]

Fun facts:

The original Dead Salmon Study was originally a poster at the Human Brain Mapping Conference in 2009, which was later written into a paper and published in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results

Also, it doesn't appear that the activated voxel cluster in the dead salmon necessarily correlated with any significant part of the experiment, which they ran all the way through as if it were a human subject with the fish because they were also training their research assistants.

Sources:

(1) Scientific American (blog), IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study

(2) National Library of Medicine, Global and local fMRI signals driven by neurons defined optogenetically by type and wiring

(3) National Library of Medicine, Optogenetic fMRI sheds light on the neural basis of the BOLD signal

(4) Prefrontal.org (personal blog of Dr. Craig Bennett, one of the original Dead Salmon Study authors), The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon

(5) Prefrontal.org, The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon

(6) Neuroskeptic (blog) (via the WayBack Machine), fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish

Additional reading:

NPR, Study on Dead Fish's Thoughts Snags Ig Nobel Prize

Scientific American, New evidence that fMRI experiments are valid measure of neuron activity

Scientific American, What's a Voxel and What Can It Tell Us? A Primer on fMRI

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, The principled control of false positives in neuroimaging (a paper written by the original Dead Salmon Study authors on the same topic)

Prefrontal.org, Human Brain Mapping 2009 - Presentations (links to what Dr. Bennett presented at the 2009 conference along with the Dead Salmon Study poster)

Nature (scientific journal), Functional neuroimaging as a catalyst for integrated neuroscience (paper published in November 2023 talking about fMRI as a tool for measuring brain activity, its strengths/weaknesses, studies that have successfully used fMRI in different subdomains of neuroscience, and how to use it to integrate these subdomains to promote interdisciplinary cooperation--specifically mentions criticisms of fMRI and cites the Dead Salmon Study as an example of the need for caution and advances that have been made in the 15 years since that study was published)

[bobthebenevolentpirate]

Additional fun fact! They baked the Atlantic salmon and ate it for dinner, so were not reimbursed for it. In the blog post The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon that Dr. Bennett made at the time, he also lists some of the funniest comments he'd seen about the whole thing, and they are delightful:

[felicialovescats]

Rebloging because science

And also because of that last addition with all the fish puns

[deseos-de-la-via-lactea]

source

[utah-mountain-drifter-deactivat]

[blindbee]

[avodaco]

me when i get my student loan

[g8dtier]

this is the money cat. reblog in 30 seconds and you will find yourself with more wealth

[strikercorbie]

#this is the only money cat i will reblog because it’s actually doing the manekineko pose151,646 notes (via lolwhutninja)

OMG YOU’RE RIGHT

[nonespark-blog]

and it has its right paw up! the correct paw for this. and from the markings on its ears, it looks like it might be a calico cat. which is the luckiest kind!

[carrionbeast]

extremely lucky cat

[ladynorbert]

I don’t even care if it actually works, I’m mostly reblogging because it’s freaking adorable.

[sweet-cherry-fairy-deactivated2]

cute cat and need money, good post, 10/10

[allthenamesilikearetaken]

in case anyones interested in the other versions

http://www.namaii.com/manekineko/maneki-neko-types.html

[mmusclechan]

Y’know I reblogged this a bit ago and was saved from financial probation and getting kicked out of school because of it, just mere months from graduation. Got a call from the financial aid advisor telling me that they made a mistake with filing my account (or some other sort of clerical error) and said that, basically, they owe me money. Welp.

[winjennster]

Last time I reblogged the money cat, I won two $100 gift cards at work.

[kaepop-oppa]

Damn.

[mmusclechan]

KITTY. YOU CAME BACK. AGAIN. YAYY.

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[inthefallofasparrow]

[weaselle]

these exchanges and this fiddling about for the collective to appreciate in passing is, to me, true artistic spirit. I don't know what the past was truly like to live, but in my heart i know that humans have always been... like this

[chimeride]

Éphéméride des Chimères, fourth Aqva.