I Must Know the Taste of Uranium Glass

Ion/Doc 💜 They/them, Xe/xem, He/him 💚 Love overanalyzing, science, gothic lit, space, magic, and my fellow queers 🌌 Currently studying chemistry in university 🧪 TW will be tagged as needed 🔭 My ask box is open; anon is off ⚛ pfp picrew: https://picrew.me/image_maker/166225 (edited)

[ionthevoid]

Welcome to my laboratory!

So nice to see you here! I hope you are doing well. Do not forget to drink water, take breaks when you can, and embrace the curiosity of the world.

I guess I'll tell you a bit about myself. My name is Dr. Ion Void, AKA The Science Boi (they/he/xe). I'm a scientist in training who's very interested in chemistry, astronomy, and modern physics. I'm queer, white, and disabled. That is all you need to know about me.

I post whatever I want, but the most common posts are lgbt stuff, aro/ace positivity, trans/nb positivity, cool science stuff, mad science, sciencecore stuff, cool things about recent science research, unreality, and the relevant political thing. Most of these are reblogs, but I write my own stuff when I feel like it.

All potential triggers will be tagged. If I miss anything or mistag it, feel free to let me know :3

I would put a DNI, but I really don't think they work. Just don't be a jerk on my page. I have and will continue to block people who are rude on my or other people's posts. This blog is feminist, sex worker positive, pro choice, in favor of bodily autonomy for everyone, ACAB, supportive of all ranges of abilities, pro vax, lgbt positive, trans positive, pre-med/no-med trans positive, nonbinary positive, MOGAI positive, m-spec lesbian/gay positive, aro/ace positive, radically accepting of all queer identities, and blasphemous to the Catholic church. If you don't agree with me on any of those points, you probably don't want to follow me anyways.

Anyhoo, we're currently hiring for lab assistants and lab rats. I'll sweeten the deal for you: team members get to eat the green goo.

[tastefullyoffensive]

[prismatic-bell]

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.

[kuroba101]

This is my new favourite story.

[therobotmonster]

When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring. 

[arctic-hands]

Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.

[voroxpete]

But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

Source:  http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport

[arty-ari]

No okay THAT is adorable and I’m queueing this for next December.

[kurgy]

wheres seasons greasons

[kurgy]

[kurgy]

its that time of year again

[theangriestlittleunicorn]

It doesn’t have to be

[kurgy]

its not optional

[seravph]

being so fr when I say that transmisogyny has put feminism back like 50 years

[seravph]

what i thought we had distanced ourselves from was the reduction of women to vaginas and wombs and the ability to bear children. i thought we had progressed past ‘dresses are for women and pants are for men.’ i thought we progressed past the idea that someone is less of a woman if she does not adhere strictly to beauty standards. i thought we progressed past the idea that naturally being comfortable adhering to highly feminine standards is vulgar. but i (sarcastically) guess no one could have predicted that trans-exclusive feminism would be the downfall of all the progress we’ve made

[autoenucleate]

“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”

— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

[libraford]

The people who police your gender will police your gender even if you're cis.

Eat them.

[libraford]

"OH those body builder women with pancake breasts arent-" eat them.

"This woman has a beard, thats not-" eat them.

"That man has a baby face, that's not" - eat them with barbecue sauce.

Eat them. You will never be gender enough for their definition of gender. Eat them.

[symbiotic-slime]

[boybeetles]

I’m actually a unbiological man. I’m made of metal and shit. Sorry,

[paging-possum]

All I’m SAYING is that if you’re making up fucked up little fictional scientists u should throw a medical illustrator in there. They’re useful they’re versatile they’ll make kickass diagrams to record how u did ur evil little science procedures for future mad scientists. They might even draw rouge the bat with tits wide as she is tall if you’re lucky

[johannestevans]

the thing is like. i get that it's scary and makes people who do desire to get pregnant uncomfortable when we talk about the brutality and violence of pregnancy and the damage that pregnancy can do to your body

but you deserve to give informed consent to that process.

the lies around pregnancy - that it's inherently safe, that it doesn't do you permanent damage, that it's only extremely rare for people to die of pregnancy complications, etc like

all of these are lies constructed so that more people will get pregnant w/o knowing all that

there needs to be more talk about the impact of miscarriages and how common they are, how different abortion processes are and how accessible they are

but also like. talking about how pregnancy fucks your body up should not be taboo

this is a process that permanently changes most people's bodies, and that's even if the pregnancy doesn't do them like. severe illness or injury

and i just think everybody should have a right to KNOW that

bc to live in a society that intentionally obscures and hides facts about a completely optional and dangerous process does so for a reason, and that reason is based in a very sinister ideology that does not value bodily autonomy or informed consent

[thelittleblackfox]

the number of people who are pregnant and don't know about what induced labour entails and what post partum bleeding is horrifies me

[zenaidamacrouras1]

Here is a story about the depths to which pregnant people are seen as a vessel for a baby, and the importance of finding prenatal care that assumes you are a human and not a baby holder:

When I was pregnant I was in a million forums for pregnant people because (cough adhd hyperfixation) and I had something called SPD (Symphysis pubis dysfunction) (not Sensory Processing Disorder though I also have that) which is where your pubic bones separate early (more or less) because they get all loosey goosey as your body gets ready to crank that baby out.

Except my pubic bone got confused and got misaligned at like 3 months pregnant. I could barely walk. I couldn't roll over in bed. Doing something that required me to shift my weight from one foot to another like opening a door knob was like an excruciatingly painful knife being stabbed into my pubic bone, I can't express how intense and blinding it was.

So I am in one million baby forums like "am I dying what is happening why is there a knife in my pubic bone" and all these people are like "I have that too! my doctor says it's normal and not to worry because it doesn't hurt the baby. I just deal with it by laying in bed for months in excruciating pain and think about how lucky I am to be having a little miracle growing in my body."

So lol nope. I went to my midwife and they are like, "Oh squeeze a can between your knees look up a physical therapy youtube on SPD" and I did that can-squeeze thing and it CURED THE PROBLEM in ONE DAY. I had been SUFFERING, y'all, it felt miraculous.

And I was so full of rage (flames, flames on the side of my face) that people are being told "Oh, it's NORMAL just deal with it" "It doesn't hurt the baby." Like, look, yes it's NORMAL but it's 100% treatable!!! SPD (again, not Sensory processing disorder) affects 1 in 5 pregnant people.

I was lucky to have amazing midwives (need a gender neutral term for that profession, but they see pregnant men and women)(side note highly recommend midwives if you are gender nonconfirming/a man/etc) and I have DOZENS of examples of shit like this.

(Another example is post partum friends being like "oh I am peeing my pants 900x day after giving birth" and my doctor says it's NORMAL so I just dealt with it for decades. My midwives were like "Oh that's normal and also physical therapy cures that in like 2 sessions")

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

When my sister was looking to get pregnant she was given the best advice. She was told that being pregnant is an experience akin to being in a moderate sized car crash, in terms of risk and lasting injury.

Some people in moderate car crashes are very lucky, and walk away with zero injury. Some are very unlucky, and die. But most people fall into the third category, where they'll be injured at the time, then heal, and then for the rest of their life they have some minor and liveable complication from the injury. Like a knee that lets you know when the rain is coming, or a back that doesn't like seats without lumbar support, or a shoulder that never quite gets its full range of motion back.

The vast majority of people survive and thrive, like. But their body is never the same again. And people should know that when they make the choice of whether to put their body through that or not

[haledamage]

my mom had a complication postpartum that caused pain and swelling in her left leg. at the time she was told it was "milk leg" and that it was normal and she'd be fine, but it never went away or got better. she finally found a doctor recently who was willing to do some tests and found out it's a condition called "May-Thurner syndrome" and had surgery to fix it

she's been suffering with this since she gave birth to me. I'm 38 years old. she had that surgery last week.

there needs to be more dialogue about the things your body goes through during pregnancy. "that's normal" or "everyone goes through that" need to stop being used to shut down conversations about the horrific, permanent damage that can be done to bodies during pregnancy and childbirth. just because it's "normal" doesn't mean it needs to be endured

[academicssay]

[hopepunk-humanity]

It’s not over. It’s not fucking over. Until they steal the breath from our lungs and the last of us has given up or given in, nothing is finished.

Today’s to-do list:

1) Take care of yourself.

2) Take care of each other.

3) Start planning.

[saintmelangell]

to be fully honest this new trend of remaking and sanitizing not only gothic fiction and its genres (hill house, dorian grey, turn of the screw) and horror movies more generally (carrie, the exorcist) point to much more serious cultural movement than the death of art or the death of horror as a genre in the mainstream. specifically it is gesturing to a sanitizing effect in which cultural authority has now deemed the subversive as worthy of living but only if it is a) commodified and b) divested of all its subversive elements. we can play-act at feminism, trans inclusion, and anti-racism as long as it serves a corporate interest and does not actually challenge cultural authorities. we can adopt its aesthetics as something to be sold without actually inhabiting it ideologically. it is the newest manifestation of cultural authorities anesthetizing effect on anything that threatens it and it is becoming more and more prevalent. anyway i want to beat mike flanagan with hammers

[nostalgiathriving]

This? A sex thing? No you don’t understand— it’s actually a gender thing. Sex and gender are different, you know!

[nostalgiathriving]

The “this” in question is my mad scientist gimmick

[romancerepulsed]

i keep seeing misinformation about this, so: queerplatonic relationships do not have a set definition. the name comes from the idea that it's "queering" the platonic relationship, tailoring it to the individual relationships' own desires. it isn't necessarily romance lite, but it also isn't necessarily whatever definition you want to impose on it. the point of queering the platonic relationship is to break away from strict allonormative views on friendship, romance, and sex, not to make a new categorical box to fit in.

the answer to "what is a qpr?" is "whatever you want it to be." sometimes that is romance lite. sometimes it's a deeply committed friendship. sometimes it's friends who have a sexual relationship. sometimes it's based on an entirely different mode of attraction. sometimes it's fluid and impossible to put into words. it's whatever you want it to be. it's queer.

[semiferalstreetcoyote]

there’s something that’s incredible about the intersectionality and flexibility of werewolves as metaphor.

anger issues? werewolf. intrusive thoughts? werewolf. unresolved trauma? werewolf. rejection by society? werewolf. autism? werewolf. transgenderism? werewolf. queer expression of any sort? werewolf. plurality? werewolf. dissociation? werewolf. repression of any sort? werewolf. abuse cycles? werewolf. emotion so strong it physically changes you? werewolf!!!

really doing it all

[supergameboytwo]

As a society, we need to bring back the Nintendo 3DS

[supergameboytwo]

Everybody tagging and commenting "original ds too" on this, I have great news about the functionality of the 3DS,

[supergameboytwo]

[paperpalooka]

You're more right than you know! Did you know the current state of 3DS homebrew makes it so that:

You can install and make your 3DS hacked with about an hour of work.

There is no risk of bricking

It is 100% undetectable by Nintendo

You can play the games online

You can download and install any 3DS, DS, or GBA game and run them perfectly (the 3ds still has the GBA hardware in it!)

You can emulate the Playstation 1 on a new 3ds!

And an absurd amount more.

I've actually made a guide about what to do after you homebrew your 3ds so you can really understand how much nonsense you can do.

You can find it here! It's still early, but if you have any questions or comments, I've left comments enabled so I can get feedback.

Happy hacking!

[meta64]

OI OI.

IF YOU'RE GOING THROUGH THIS PERSON'S GOOGLE DOC ON WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH A HOMEBREWED 3DS, THEN IT'S ASSUMING YOU ALREADY HACKED IT

LEARN HOW TO DO THAT HERE:

3DS Hacks Guide

A complete guide to 3DS custom firmware, from stock to boot9strap.

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

yeah okay, ill reblog that!

[metamatar-deactivated20250401]

one thing that really gets me as someone embedded in the production of scientific knowledge is that very few scientists truly interrogate what it means to work for the public good when science has long been unable to answer the whitey on the moon problem. ie, many known public health interventions are cheap and would save lives. they don't get deployed for political reasons. what does it mean about you that you still locate the public good in scientific research funded by the same political incentives that denied those same public health interventions? it means you're a mark.

[strangestcase]

I think it says a lot about Jekyll’s character how passive he is to violence and yet how uncomfortable he is with its consequences.

By the end of the Full Statement, at his most obsessive, his phobias and intrusive thoughts mostly revolve around the possibility of not being able to control Mr. Hyde (control he has willingly relinquished by third-personing him!), not about violence; Hyde spends his time trapped in the laboratory going out of his way to assert dominance, as if to further prove to himself he isn’t dependent on the potion like Jekyll is. When he cries after the Carew murder, yes, it’s partly out of regret, but also partly out of relief, because now he has a good reason to not consume again.

It’s interesting how Jekyll doesn’t fear hurting Utterson and Lanyon because he would never do that, even at his most selfish (being Hyde) (they’re his friends!)… at least not consciously. In my opinion Hyde only wanted to flaunt the potion before Lanyon, well aware it would shatter his worldview, but unaware that it could very much kill him! No, he fears being caught, being found out, being tried and imprisoned. But mostly, losing his reputation. Ending up at a dissecting table and not under a marble slab.

And later he fears Hyde is acting on his own volition, watching him, standing too close to him, the only person in the world that knows of his sins— that knows Dr. Jekyll isn’t the saintly figure he so desperately hopes to be remembered as. What makes him hate his creation so much is that it knows him intimately. Jekyll’s last lucid thought is that he will never again be in control of what happens to him. That now it’s all up to Hyde, and who cares if Hyde is him— he doesn’t look it, doesn’t even act it. And Jekyll is fine with suicide as he is fine with murder, because that’s what Hyde does the instant he gets the chance or feels he has to.

The one fear that is always, constantly, consistently in his mind, invoked regularly in Jekyll’s narration, is Hyde being executed…