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d e v o n
Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosimo Galluzzi
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
ellievsbear
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Peter Solarz
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Discoholic 🪩
JBB: An Artblog!
No title available
Stranger Things
Xuebing Du
seen from Israel
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seen from Türkiye
seen from France
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seen from United States
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seen from China
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@greenjacketwhitehatdocmui
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
you’ve heard of vitamin B, now get ready for bee vitamins
Babylon 5 Survived an Industry That Wanted It Gone
One of the reasons I have such a persistent chip on my shoulder about Babylon 5 has very little to do with fandom tribalism and everything to do with how hard the television industry worked to kneecap it before it ever had a fair shot.
This was not a case of two similar shows accidentally arriving at the same time. This was a deliberate and coordinated attempt by Paramount to undermine a competing series that dared to exist outside their control.
J. Michael Straczynski pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount first. They sat on the series bible and the pilot script for over a year before finally passing. Only after the show was sold elsewhere did Paramount suddenly announce Deep Space Nine in the trades. Not only that, they rushed production so DS9 would hit the airwaves first, ensuring that Babylon 5 would look like a cheap knockoff to anyone paying half attention.
That was just the opening move.
Paramount then used its weight to pressure local stations not to carry Babylon 5. This was not competition. This was strongarming. In the syndicated television landscape of the 1990s, that kind of pressure could absolutely determine whether a show lived or died. Paramount knew that. They used it.
And this is not paranoia or JMS reading intent into coincidences after the fact. Walter Koenig had lunch with a Paramount executive long before either show aired. That executive openly described the strategy. Koenig relayed that conversation to Straczynski. Later, there was a lawsuit that was quietly settled out of court. Corporations do not settle lawsuits like that unless there is something they do not want examined in daylight. What often gets left out of this conversation is that this was not a case of two creative teams independently arriving at similar ideas. Paramount had access to the Babylon 5 series bible and pilot script. They did not just know the premise. They knew the structure, the ambitions, and the long term storytelling plan. So when elements that Babylon 5 was built around later surfaced in Deep Space Nine, it is not unreasonable to question how those ideas migrated. No one is claiming DS9 copied Babylon 5 wholesale. But it is impossible to ignore that one studio had early access to another creator’s roadmap, and that access came before DS9 was fully defined as a series.
You do not have to hate Deep Space Nine to acknowledge this history. I do not hate DS9. I like DS9. But pretending these shows were born into equal circumstances is historically dishonest.
What really gets under my skin is that Babylon 5 was not just another space show. It was doing something genuinely new. At a time when The Next Generation trained audiences to expect a reset button, where no matter what happened you knew the characters and their relationships would snap back into place by the end of the episode, Babylon 5 refused that safety net. It told a long form serialized story with planned arcs from beginning to end. Consequences actually mattered. Characters evolved and sometimes broke. Friends could become enemies and stay that way. Characters could die and stay dead. Moral ambiguity did not resolve itself neatly in the final act, and nothing was guaranteed to return to normal just because the credits rolled. It was not comfort television, where part of the appeal of The Next Generation was spending an hour with familiar characters and knowing everything would be basically fine when you left them.
It challenged the narrative space that Star Trek and Star Wars had dominated for decades. And instead of allowing that challenge to stand on its own merits, the established powers tried to crush it before audiences could make up their own minds.
So yes, when people casually dismiss Babylon 5 as a ripoff, or refuse to engage with it at all, or act as though it only exists in the shadow of Star Trek, it makes me angry. Not because I need my favorite show to be validated, but because the history is being rewritten to favor the winner with the bigger marketing budget and the louder megaphone.
Babylon 5 survived sabotage. It survived network indifference. It survived budget constraints that would have killed a lesser show. And it still changed television.
And it is worth remembering who tried to bury it, and why.
Fresh from @comfortandadam is the latest commission, this one of two Superboys clowning around like a family. Kon-El/Conner Kent is balancing young Jon Kent on his finger using his tactile telekinesis. Jon is having a ball.
I do enjoy commissioning pictures like this. It's lighthearted and fun, but tells a story all the same.
I'm not sure if Lois would be panicking in the distance or not. It's 50/50 on that. As always, this has been reduced in size and watermarked to discourage art theft.
Oh, the things we could have had.
--Doc
sxf fanart backlog! 🤲 (doodles included)
Out of Touch
Out of Touch Thursday
OUT OF TOUCH THURSDAY
but im out of my head when you’re not around…
happy birthday.
this is the only out of touch thursday you can reblog this
Captain America Fanfiction, "Dancing at Last" Updated!!!
Since @melliabee has been trying to be a bit vague about her wonderful story, "Dancing At Last," I think that I should at least announce that she has posted Chapter 16! Here's the link:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/22475776/chapters/226197701
Alas, while there have been valiant efforts to read this same story on ff.net, the site is being a bit of a bugger and is steadfastly refusing to display the latest chapter. So, for now, it's exclusively on AO3.
So go, read, and enjoy! You will have, as the kids say, the feels as the other big reunion is at hand.
(What, you thought that I'd keep a lid on this story? No chance!)
--Doc
Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate
Nothing reminds me what a goddamn miracle modern medicine is more so than hearing stories about people who contracted the black plague in the 21st century and were prescribed antibiotics for it.
Like yeah man you got the disease that wiped out half of Europe, like, a couple separate times within written history, and we have no clue how many times before that. To cure it you have to take 14 pills and drink lots of juice. You’re gonna feel kind of crummy for a while. It’s vitally important you take all 14 pills.
the thing that blows my mind is blood transfusions. for literally all of human history up until about 100 years ago if you lost enough blood that was it, you were dead, and then people just figured out how to take blood from other people and successfully give it to you and now you can come in to the hospital with a blood pressure of ohfuck/nope, the same color as the linens and they just pop a tube in your arm and casually give you some stuff that another person donated on their lunch break, and you live long enough for the doctors to find and treat your gastric bleed. Insanely cool.
Honestly even more, just . . . IV fluids.
The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.
Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.
But you want the other end?
I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.
For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)
Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.
I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.
Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.
Modern medicine isn't perfect; there are many things we're just as helpless against as we were in the Days of Eld, and there are many ways its practitioners fail us. But also we can make a thing that goes into my body and says "hey stop self destructing you MORON!" and I have a much better chance than at any other time of not dying young of bowel cancer or bowl impaction! This is fucking insane.
Vitamins and micronutrients.
There used to be a common, horrific illness that sailors would get, which was mysteriously cured by limes. People know about this one, it's scurvy. But there are other horrible ways to be sick from vitamin deficiency that weren't considered curable at all, and people had no idea what caused them.
Rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency where your bones get bendy and grow in the wrong shape (it is most apparent in children). It causes permanent deformity and very easy fractures, along with debilitating pain and persistent dental issues. Historically, it was known that milk, and later, cod liver oil, would improve or prevent it, but the reason was not understood until the vitamin was discovered.
Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a complication of alcoholism that leads to psychosis, dementia, and death if left untreated. Severe alcoholics used to just go completely mad before dying, basically. It ultimately results in permanent memory loss (retrograde amnesia), as well as the inability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia). It is caused by the fact that alcohol prevents the absorption of vitamin B1 (thiamine). It is treatable and preventable by giving the patient thiamine shots - if caught early, before permanent brain damage has occurred, it is fully reversible, although the underlying substance abuse issue still needs to be addressed to prevent recurrence.
Pernicious anemia is caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (in turn ultimately caused by an autoimmune issue causing poor absorption). It causes blood cells to be the wrong size and too few in number, resulting in dizziness and fatigue. It also causes neurological symptoms like tingling in the extremities, poor coordination, confusion, and, in late stages, dementia. There was no cure for pernicious anemia in the past. People would simply become anemic and die from it. That's why it's called "pernicious" - that's an old-fashioned way to say "insidious and deadly," named for its slow onset and then-incurable course. Now it is curable with vitamin tablets or periodic injections.
Cretinism, or, less stigmatizingly, congenital hypothyroidism due to iodine deficiency, is a developmental disorder caused by the inability of the thyroid gland to function properly without sufficient iodine. it causes short stature, intellectual disability, infertility, hair loss, and a large lump in the neck known as a goiter (i.e. a hypertrophic thyroid gland). It was historically associated with poor inland populations living far from the ocean (due to the protective effect of consuming seafood, which is naturally high in iodine). We now simply put iodine in table salt, and this disorder is virtually unheard of in regions where this is the case.
Neural tube defects are a leading cause of birth defects, infant mortality, and stillbirth. The most common nonlethal forms of neural tube defects include spina bifida, hydranencephaly, and encephalocele. These defects are caused by a failure of the embryonic structure that becomes the spinal canal to close properly during development, leading the central nervous system to have a distorted shape that may impair cerebrospinal fluid drainage and put pressure on the brain. In severe cases, e.g. anencephaly, the brain/spine essentially develop outside of the body, which is not compatible with life (anencephalic and iniencephalic babies typically die within hours or days; fetuses with more severe forms are usually stillborn if they are not terminated). The risk of these defects is drastically reduced by taking supplemental folic acid (vitamin B9).
Vitamin K is perhaps the most amazing one on this list. Newborns often have very low vitamin K levels due to the fact that it does not cross the placental barrier easily and is not found in high levels in breast milk. It is only produced by gut bacteria, which babies do not have when they are born, and it takes time for them to acquire the right flora from their environment. Deficiency impairs blood clotting, and in infants, can lead to brain bleeds and sudden, unexplained death. Tiny babies would simply die of brain hemorrhaging for no good reason at all. But if they're given a quick shot of vitamin K at birth, that doesn't happen.
We have cured or prevented so many diseases just with vitamins/minerals.
We wiped Smallpox out. One of the worst diseases in human history and we wiped it out completly.
Also, the key to blood transfusion was blood typing - without that, blood transfusion will just hurt or kill you. People kept inventing transfusion, then a third or more of the recipients would die.
Nephlyte takes his show on the road–to Riverdale!
Riverdale ships Neph and Naru!
Time to bring this back!
🥚
Reblog this to give Sam Vimes a hard-boiled egg.
My best advice for people new to adulthood: keep emergency food around.
I don't mean like those prepper type people. I mean keep a granola bar in your purse or backpack. If you have a car, keep a jar of peanuts in there.
This is good for if you miss your bus, or forget your wallet somewhere, or get stuck in traffic. You never know when you are going to feel shaky, and it's better to have something quick and easy on hand, in case you need it.
Having emergency food around is your best friend. Trust me.
Just finished reading your recent comic, Supergirl’s Family Vacation, and just wanted to thank you for the uplifting read. Really brightened my day (very Kara-like effect). You da best!
Oh, thank you for the message and supporting the book! So glad that it was an uplifting read. I'm a liiiiittle biased XD but I think it's a really fun, positive story, so it's my hope that folks have a good time with it. :) Again, thank you so much!
today is not my birthday
reblog if your birthday is not today
I agree with this statement.
I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.
Love that this is well beyond 7000 people now and still going
@leavescrown Exactly! It’s a beautiful gift. Martin and Bosco out there travelling around the Tumblr community, continually making new friends.
@sseanettles
#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)
Reading your tag made me laugh out loud. It’s like two old friends unexpectedly stopped by your porch for a quick visit. XD
I’ll always reblog Martin and Bosco when they splash across my dash, because of Reasons.
What’s loved, lives.
Starry Kara that I did for the Joseph-Beth Booksellers virtual event! Had a really nice time chatting with Brandon and Mary about the book. :)
