Me and my obsessions

28, something vaguely human shaped reblogging fandom and things, any pronouns

[cattoonxd]

Xmen hyperfixation is back guys

[butchtoks]

[sibyllance]

Apparently someone got their car stuck on the light rail tracks at Mt. Baker. For those unfamiliar this is 35 feet up in the air

[officialboredom]

First test flight of a flying car by Mazda partially a success

[tuulikki]

I feel like the Arizona license plate should take some place in our analysis of whatever in the goddam fuck we’re looking at here

[weirdstrangeandawful]

Much like Springfield before it, Seattle is one of the few major cities in the world with a monorail. That, combined with a more conventional light rail system, makes Seattle the rare U.S. city with two different types of train for public transportation. On Tuesday night, the rail system briefly had a third: a Mazda CX-5.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a71483251/mazda-driver-seattle-pulls-into-elevated-train-station-on-tracks/

[nicky999doors]

[grimeclown]

I don't know which of you needs to hear this but "narc" is not short for "narcissist" when someone calls you a "narc" for snitching they are calling you a "narcotics officer"

[gaesnek]

[monkey-mulch]

technically narc isnt even short for narcotics officer its just cant for Cop, I believe Roma in origin

[red-mercer]

I read years ago in a book that it was derived from nakk, Romani for nose, as in someone who always has their nose in other people's business

[grimeclown]

ITS DERIVED FROM "NARCO" AS IN "NARCOTICS" WHAT FUCKING BOOK

[grimeclown]

Okay you know what pulling back on my derision because i can see how this mistake would be made but narc and nark are etymologically unrelated

[headspace-hotel]

Etymology is always doing some shit like this

[bogleech]

Convergent evolution.

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

Linguistic crab

[backofthebookshelf]

Two entire linguistic traditions have merged to remind you not to be a fuckin narc

[shencomix]

[thebibliosphere]

Mark the electrician has been here for five minutes and he’s already said “well that’s…weird” twice from the other room and frankly I’m afraid to ask.

[thebibliosphere]

It’s not good when skilled tradesman are standing in the middle of your room pinching the bridge if their nose, is it?

[thebibliosphere]

Mark just referred to the wiring in our bedroom as “creative” and “interesting”.

This is fine.

[thebibliosphere]

And now he’s taking apart the ceiling. I’m not worried, are any of you worried? I’m not, haha, it’s not like this house was previously owned by someone who would do something stupid like try to wire their house themselves…or store tins of varnish under the furnace behind a secret alcove…

Ha ha…

Ha.

Hm.

Fuck.

[thebibliosphere]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO NEUTRAL WIRES??!?

[thebibliosphere]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GROUNDED INTO THE SCREWS HOLDING UP THE CEILING LIGHT???!?!!

[suspiciouscoconut]

This post crosses my dashboard every so often and every time, I’m reminded of when I discovered that my whole house was grounded to a gas line.

Good times.

[the-sapphic-raven]

IT WAS WHAT?

[nznaturalkiwi]

For some people, it’s not DIY, it’s DDI - Don’t Do It

[hjartasalt]

See him sweeties

[hjartasalt]

He's so sweeties!

[hjartasalt]

Now see him fabulous

[hjartasalt]

Now see him. In the dark.

[hjartasalt]

My pet comma/kidney bean/some sort of slug

[noodle-the-queen]

Ao3 does not need an algorithm, you're just lazy

Ao3 does not need a 1-5 star rating system, you just want to bring down authors writing for FREE

Ao3 does not need automatic censorship, it is an archive, therefore anything can be posted

Writing or reading about something illegal does not mean the author nor the reader condones it, if that were true, you could never read a story involving anything negative

Purity culture is ruining fan culture and you all are fucking annoying

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

Clip of Lucy Dacus on the Las Culturistas podcast.

[vaspider]

I played this for SO many people when it came out a couple of days ago. She's so on-point here.

[gay--dog]

i love seeing my friends interests mentioned somewhere. its like woaaah. thats My Friends interest. from My Friend. wow. epic friend reference

[kosmogrl]

found a new bookstore today and the owner has the cutest chubby cat sitting on a little chair by the door

[kosmogrl]

went back today!! this diva was sunbathing and is looking pretty and chunky as ever 🤎

[vero-niche]

adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

[vero-niche]

none of us are making those appointments huh

[princesssokphanny]

A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕

[beemovieerotica]

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.

[beemovieerotica]

@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.

[manslaughter]

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.

[prismatic-bell]

Listen, y'all. In my home county, there was a dude with cancer--a longtime radio deejay, John Kanzius. (Yes, I just violated a major rule of internet security by telling you this. I don't live there anymore or we wouldn't have names on this post.)

He threw himself into cancer research because traditional methods weren't working--they were just making him sicker. That's not to say "oh nooooooo, Big Pharma wants you sick," it's to say that chemo is no walk in the park, and for some people the cure can be worse than the disease. So he read an absolutely insane amount of cancer research, taught himself, and invented a way to treat cancer with radio waves. His cancer went terminal. He begged for the chance to test the treatment on himself. As he put it, he was going to die anyway--if it killed him quicker, so be it. And if it gave him a few more years, a few more months, a few more days, well....they'd have their Patient Zero to show it was safe to go into clinical trials. The research team said no. And they said no because even though it'd successfully killed cancer cells in petri-dish testing, it hadn't gone through requisite animal testing yet. Everything researchers stated above? True. Correct. They will not put a human at risk, even a dying human, even a dead man walking, until they know the risk is minimal. John Kanzius died in 2009. Want to know when first-in-human trials started? July of 2021. That should tell you a lot about how human experimentation is viewed in medicine. He--and others who'd heard him mistakenly claim he'd "cured cancer" before he understood just how much research still needed to be done--was ready to die for the chance to live. People offered to sign every waiver, release every legal liability. And the answer was still no. Because without seeing how his treatment would work on an actual living being as opposed to just some cells in a dish, there was too much chance someone could spend their final days in unspeakable agony if things went wrong. And unlike a mouse, you can't provide compassionate euthanasia to a human. It's illegal. Yes, even if there's 0% chance of recovery. (Look up Jack Kevorkian if you want a bit of understanding as to why.) There is a reason animal testing exists. I'm not a fan of it. I wish it didn't have to be a thing. I also recognize that if we want to successfully research a lot of cutting-edge medicine, it has to be a thing. It is possible to hold both of those positions at once.

[racethewind10]

i mean all of this but like. they very much have 'just done human trials' like i understand where you think you're coming from tumblr user velvetdemon and others with that perspective but that was a pretty significant thing that has happened. multiple times. and almost every single time it was a case of horrific abuse of vulnerable populations. they very much have done human-only trials.

[stuckonaglacierwithmacgyver]

I present for your consideration, some of the human trials they 'just did':

Nutrition experiments carried out on Canadian Aboriginal children in residential schools between 1942 and 1952, in which various control and experimental groups were deliberately malnourished. Also the Qu'Appelle BCG vaccine trial.

Basically everything the Australian government has done to the Aboriginal people, but especially experiments in the 20s and 30s, which tested basal metabolism by forcing subjects to lie still and breath through a rubber tube for hours, or those testing their response to pain.

Testing of a new antibiotic* on children in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak, by Pfizer. The lawsuit the families and the Nigerian government brought against Pfizer also alleged that this further reduced the public's trust in vaccines and contributed to poor uptake of the polio vaccine.

The Tuskeegee Syphillis Study, which is a landmark in medical ethics fuckery that everyone should know about. The US has also carried out variations of this in so many places

Southam's experiments on prisoners using HeLa cancer cells** without their informed consent.

The Rawalpindi experiments carried out on members of the British Indian army to test mustard gas.

I'm not even going to talk about the Nazi ones.

*In this case they actually did do animal trials beforehand, which contraindicated its use in children, but I included this because it demonstrates how unethical research practice can impact public health.

**HeLa cells in themselves are also a colossal fuckup of informed consent!

[brighteyedbadwolf]

Another lab animal facility staff member here, as a vet tech

FunFact! The facility/company is SO dedicated to the welfare of their subjects that techniques to reduce mental and emotional stress on the animals brought on by repetitive tasks, interpersonal/colony stressors, industrial setting, and a shitload of other work-related stressors that they EXTRACTED THAT SHIT OUT LATERALLY INTO HOW THEY SCHEDULE AND ORGANIZE THEIR STAFF.

My schedule is fucking amazingly calibrated. I've never had burnout ONCE because my breaks and days off are timed almost exactly when the average person hits a fatigue point.

[bogleech]

Laboratory researchers in shitty media: bwahaha, how I love injecting acid into kitten's eyeballs until they explode

Laboratory researchers in real life: put up memorial statues to remind humanity how much it owes to the lives of even mice

[all-made-of-stardust]

Thank you so much for adding the examples of unethical human experiments cuz jesus christ people sometimes don't even know about that stuff.

I briefly almost worked with mice, and my cousin frequently does, and i can confirm all of the above is true. He also confirmed that yeah man, some of these mice can be valued the same as a luxury car - we don't want to fucking hurt them.

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

Reblogging this version because the additions are important - even outside of the conversation about animal testing, it is important to be aware of the history of unethical research on vulnerable humans.

However, prismatic-bell's addition about John Kanzius is nonsense, and I can't in good faith reblog this without addressing that. He did not invent a device that treats cancer and then die because no one would agree to use it on him. He had an idea about using radiowaves to heat metal nanoparticles to kill surrounding tissue, which got caught in the same issue every single cancer treatment gets caught in, which is: how do you kill cancerous cells without killing non-cancerous cells? For his device to work you would need to be able to successfully target nanoparticles into cancer cells, which was simply not possible at the time.

The companies working on his device got bogged down with legal issues in 2015 and went mostly defunct. However, in 2020 one of them did emerge with a device that has entered human clinical trials. The treatment is called hyperthermia and the idea is that it might possibly help other treatments like chemo and radiation be more effective than they would be on their own. And for those of you not clicking through to the National Cancer Institute link: It is not clear if it actually helps people live longer. Searching for clinical trials on hyperthermia produced one result: Chemoimmunotherapy Combined with Deep Hyperthermia and Spatially-fractionated Radiotherapy for the Treatment of Advanced Biliary Tract Cancer. This is a Phase I trial, so the primary objective is determining safety. Note that even if it does work, this is a treatment that would be used in conjunction with other cancer treatments for a very specific type of cancer, because cancer is fucking complicated.

Any time someone tells you about a singular guy who invented a method of treating cancer by doing his own research, please remember that cancer is fucking complicated and you have to actually test things before claiming that they work (with peer review/oversight to make sure you adhere to ethical standards and that you're not making stuff up).

[talesfromtreatment]

This was 30 minutes of surgery time

[krakensdottir]

[arcanumnyx]

getting older is all about getting weirder and sexier and more perverted and gluttonous and intelligent and blunt and eloquent and spontaneous and skilled. i love that for us.

[illyadarling]

[that-house]

how about you look at Penny + her Xmas gifts Dec. 25, 1966 and maybe you’ll calm down