Be a flame, Ducky

Erin. she/her. 30. Australian. proudly queer.

[hypotenussy]

the number 1 rule of fanfic is have fun and be yourself. the number 2 rule is the average healthy adult male can lose roughly 2 liters of blood before dying.

[thecharmingquirksofothers]

incredible prev tags

[snakeater-deactivated20260130]

is that a nothing in your pants or are you just normal to see me

[elksewer]

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: tat a tg at a t a t Aa, a ! g a a.

Closest match: Facelina auriculata genome assembly, chromosome: 15 Common name: Slender Facelina

(image source)

[hes-the-stallion]

emoji kitchen is lowkey beautiful guys…

[dragon-in-a-fez]

am I doing this right

[totally-cis-offical]

Important tags

[chokedqwerty]

Tabloids for the Project Hail Mary mission, c. 20xx. (The Sunday Times, The Times Magazine.)

[creekfiend]

many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think

[everydaylouie]

cat game

[transformativeworks]

The OTW is Recruiting for Open Doors Technical Volunteers, Tag Wrangling Volunteers, and Translation Translators

Do you know programming languages like SQL or Python and want to help rescue at-risk fan archives? Want to wrangle AO3 tags or translate them into English? Are you fluent in other languages? The OTW is recruiting: https://otw-news.org/2p94jnbf 

[pineappical]

thinking about statues of Grace being built all around Erid years after his passing so he can continue to watch over Eridians as they sleep

[pmamtraveller]

Bat vase by Richard Freiwald

[slowspinningredemption]

pretty sure i just lost my editing gig to ai. hate and fucking war on planet earth.

[slowspinningredemption]

like they've already made it very clear by a) ghosting me for months and b) getting my colleagues to train their stupid new ai. like i only know about this because one of my colleagues tipped me off. i imagine they're waiting to get it working before they formally let me go and fuck that. i am literally drafting my resignation lmao

[slowspinningredemption]

[slowspinningredemption]

guys. there has been an update. my spy colleague has informed me that my ex-boss is backtracking. the ai was supposed to speed things up because apparently i was unavailable too often but it turns out that another colleague has been lying about me telling him i was unavailable. i have email receipts proving this never happened.

this colleague also has beef with me because his documents were always garbage and i came back with a million corrections and called him out for mass copy-pasting. so he was just skipping the editing and saying i said i couldn't do it. and i lost my job because of it.

[slowspinningredemption]

ex-boss backtracked and ended up asking me if i'd come back not as a freelance contractor but on an actual employment basis.

[slowspinningredemption]

i declined.

[slowspinningredemption]

shoutout to all the people reblogging the version of this before my rejection letter. and especially shoutout to those people saying they're happy for me and that there's justice on this earth. i regret to inform you that my version of justice means choosing violence.

[dovewithscales]

This is a thing of beauty

[vamptits]

why is it so hot. why is it so hot. I am being punished.

[vamptits]

I'm having my first 24/7 dom/sub relationship with the entirety of the fucking sun

[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.

[aristoteliancomplacency]

New stoic text just dropped

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever bein

(Preprint here)

[enki2]

[escuerzoresucitado]

[nostalgicfun]

Looking through a Toyfare magazine from 2004 and found what might be my favorite ad ever

[c3rvida3]

I put a collar on him since you can wag his tail. :)

(made with an antique celluloid fawn toy and an articulated fishing lure)