I'm the clueless one. (The name says everything...

Nope. I refuse to put anything useful here.

[shrugsinchinese]

A lifetime of waiting for us to meet

[kyleesarthell]

Recollection (2/2)

[kyleesarthell]

Recollection (1/2

[cottoncandylesbo]

[fuckthisappinparticular]

Explanation: those are vulnerable juvenile box fish being raised in the same aquarium as bigger predator fish (i.e. their parents). The basket is hanging in a bigger aquarium.

This is sensible, as a bigger aquarium always has more stable water parameters and temperature.

The holes prevent the predators from eating the smaller fish until they're big enough to be uninteresting as prey and also allows for water flow and good oxygen saturation

[gay-mormon-wizard]

maybe orpheus always looks back because his very effort to reverse death means that he can't look forward. if he could look forward, he could accept eurydice's death, grieve, and keep moving in life. his refusal to accept her death is looking back. his going down to the underworld, asking hades and persephone for her life, trying to lead her out... it's all 'looking back'. he does nothing for the entire story except look back. orpheus! looks! back! it's his entire thing! the story ends the same way it begins: orpheus looked back.

[maroonwithonem-reblogs]

AUGHHHHHH

[homunculus-argument]

We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.

[deoxyribonucleicacids]

As a geneticist and microbiologist who has worked with plastic-degrading microbes briefly, this is theoretically possible. The most difficult parts would be finding a microbe that could take plastic in it's unaltered (or slightly stomach-acid degraded) form.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

Although, I assume cats (and some people) would not find that a challenge.

[homunculus-argument]

...holy shit.

the only research I did for this post was 30 seconds to double-check on wikipedia whether or not bacteria have DNA.

[hiveswap]

Not now, kitten, m- da- m- your parental figure is in the middle of a gender crisis

[montereybayaquarium]

🪼🌙 Moon jellies are more than pretty faceless beauties—they play an irreplaceable role in the ocean food web. Healthy jelly populations sustain beloved endangered species like the Pacific leatherback sea turtle.

These turtles migrate 6,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean all the way from Indonesia each fall when jellies bloom here in Monterey. Their jelly-heavy diet makes them especially vulnerable to plastic pollution, as they may accidentally mistake drifting trash like single-use shopping bags for their see-through seafood of choice. 🪼

We can protect ocean life like leatherback sea turtles, moon jellies, and countless other species by cutting single-use plastic use out of our lives and standing up for science-backed United States laws like the Endangered Species Act.

🌘🌕🌒 Protecting the ocean isn’t a phase—ride the tide and sign up for Ocean Action emails for advice on how to break up with single-use plastic for good!

[stupidrehab]

that’s just my nightstand knife don’t worry

[chongoblog]

Youtubers who just cover horror content are a godsend because horror is incredibly fascinating for me to analyze but also I’m a baby who hates getting scared

[chongoblog]

I've gotta help out here, since Wendigoon sucks and you deserve better

Night Mind is good at covering various ARGs and Youtube horror series. Been a fan of Nick Nocturne for a long time now, and definitely recommend his stuff

Lately I've been checking out Nightmare Movies, who tends to cover obscure horror/exploitation movies including a lot of foreign stuff. I've got a couple minor gripes with his presentation (I may post a clip thats accidentally really funny later), but definitely good for branching out and finding something new and creepy

One channel I can't recommend enough is Dead Meat. They have a series called "Kill Count" where they go over every death in a horror movie, and while doing so, go in-depth as to how the effects were done. It's a fantastic channel with a high production value and a lot of very clear adoration for the genre. With over 500 Kill Count episodes, I can't recommend it enough for any horror fan.

[tsunflowers]

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

[prokopetz]

I guess the reason all that Backrooms stuff has never really fazed me is because I worked in on-site networking support for a while, and literally every city's downtown district is just Like That once you get off the beaten path. Not just the really big cities, either; the one I'm currently living in has a population of less than 250 000 – metro area included – and a downtown area about six blocks across, and the service corridors still manage to do some House of Leaves shit. At one point I was trying to map the route of a misbehaving network cable, started out in a shopping mall parking garage, and ended up surfacing in the basement of the casino across the street. Totally unsecured – apparently neither the mall's administration nor the casino's managers knew that particular service corridor existed.

[prokopetz]

Like, I once bumped into a fully stocked and operational Coke machine in an unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level. Its display lighting was the only illumination for a hundred yards in either direction. I don't even know what it was plugged into.

[prokopetz]

Somewhere below this city there's a room the size of a high school gymnasium filled floor to ceiling with rotting mattresses. I've seen it with my own eyes – and, more importantly, smelled it with my own nose. I can't recommend the experience.

[prokopetz]

(That last one isn't even mysterious. The room in question is within easy walking distance of the basement of a major hotel, if you know where you're going; I imagine the hotel started stashing their old mattresses there at some point rather than pay to have them hauled away, and over the ensuing decades the situation got out of hand.)

[prokopetz]

In response to a couple of recurring questions in the notes:

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.

No, I did not drink the Morlock Tunnel Coke. What are you, nuts?

[yorgen-sh]

[sayhelloanimalfriends]

this is the first time in my life i thought oh i hope there’s music

[local-dragon-haunt]

Has this been done yet

[s0fich]

me and my wife plumping our way to work (we're both seals)

[bob-artist]

A battle between good and weevil

[deadgravity]

You don't have to grieve alone.