musicalhorsefreak

changing my bio for the first time in 8 years woooooo the damn things overlap, but we stay silly

[thebibliosphere]

Every now and then I think about one of the ER visits I had for a migraine attack that was so severe my hip dislocated from the force of my convulsive vomiting, and I had to hold my head up with my hands because shortly after that my collarbone popped out and subluxated my neck, so I couldn’t lift my head up without help. All while in excruciating, radiating pain and continuing to throw up uncontrollably.

I had two nurses in that room with me that night, one who thought I was lying about my hip dislocation and thought I was being difficult on purpose until she actively saw my neck subluxate, and then she turned white as a ghost and ran to fill my script.

And the other who helped me up onto the bed out of the wheelchair, all but carrying my full weight as he murmured over and over again, “it’s okay, you’re okay, we’re going to help you, you don’t need to be sorry” as I kept apologizing for being difficult.

I’m sure I was one of many, many people he saw that night. He looked exhausted. But he still chose kindness. I think about him a lot. I hope he knows it made a difference.

[solarpunk-nightbird]

Do the kids these days know that the traditional payment for "having your friends help you move" is "order everyone pizza after"?

Feed your friends. Feed your loved ones. Feed the people who help you. Feed your neighbors. Feed your community.

Seriously though, with a lot of people, especially friends, you can shamelessly and blatantly trade pizza / food for help and labor <3

[feminist-space]

[liberalsarecool]

"We need trilllions to replace all workers" is quite the ask for an industry that has no profits.

[redarmyscreaming]

[partingglances1986]

If you enjoyed this book you should read every other book in the world for extra textual context. All things are intricately related to one another.

[parkchanwoohoo]

[chingaderita]

similar problem but we tolerate this one, also we don't quite sing it, it's also spoken

[zephyr-zephyr]

Once i had a teacher who was OBSESSED with

A) resource guarding

And

B) Harry Potter

So naturally, every time someone didn’t have a pencil she would charge them 10 house points (which, even in schools where there is an actual house point system, probably doesn’t fucking happen). She openly held the belief that she had to ascribe value to these precious writing implements or else no one would appreciate them, a concept evidenced by, i kid you not, how when homeless people are given houses for free they let them fall into disarray, because they didn’t pay for the house and therefore didn’t care about it. I, a pissed off 13 year old with a vendetta against power hungry teachers and also JK Rowling, brought a 100 pack of pencils to school so that whenever someone had to ask for one, instead of being charged a fictional currency and upsetting their fellow, deeply competitive students, i would just give them one. If the pencil didn’t come from the teacher, she couldn’t charge points for it.

This upset her. She couldn’t assert her power over the 1st period Advanced 8th Grade Math Class anymore. For i, The Pencil Liberator, had come to put an end to her tyrannous behavior.

She told me to stop about 30 pencils in.

[teaboot]

You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit

[myboyrozanovv]

If people knew what a fucking atom is and how molecules are defined, at least a quarter of all health related cults like movements and scams wouldn't work.

"Ohh it's a different sugar than refined sugar" it's the same molecule.

"Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water" Water is H20. What you're doing is reverse osmosis, and if it's alkaline then there is a substance that's not water in there to make it alkaline. You can't purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.

"Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms." That's called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren't created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.

"Low toxin" what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. "They are endocrine disruptors" what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn't try to sell you something?

"Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits" you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don't have much chemical property. That's a science fair vulcano. And doesn't have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. "My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup" yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.

"There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years" what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? "Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls" what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?

"Just use vinegar it's magic" it's a mild acid. Like, cool, sure, it works for several things, but it doesn't have magic properties. It's just a mild acid. Lemon juice is too. And once again, if you mix it with baking soda, they neutralise each other and you get water. Which cleans a lot of things but you dont need to do *all that* to get your hands on some plain water.

[holmoris]

do not get me started on how bad people are about basic electrical principles, especially this abomination

warning : that link does psychic damage

[acearchaeologist]

Those bracelets that say they'll fix all your health problems using negative ions?

I always assumed they were a scam because ions (an atom with an electron imbalance) really really hate existing and are hard to make.

Lots of ions are ok in water because water is super polar (oxygen hogs all the electrons so every molecule is like a tiny magnet) and therefore they'll soak up all the imbalanced charges.

Go pour salt in water right now. If it dissolves you've created negative chlorine ions! (And an equal number of positive sodium ions)! Good job on being a scientist.

But in air? Nothing polar to stabilise them.

Go pour salt on your table. It stays a solid? Good job. You've proven the atoms in salt prefer being bonded to each other than being free flying ions. You're half way to a chemistry degree.

The only way to force the creation of ions in air is a fuckton of energy. This can be electricity or radiation.

Go attach leads to a 9V battery. Put both into a cup of water. If you see bubbles you've successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen will be on the positive lead because oxygen ions are negative. The hydrogen will be on the negative clip because hydrogen ions are positive. There will also be more bubbles because water has twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen atoms. These bubbles won't be ions though, because again, ions hate existing so they recombine into oxygen and hydrogen gas almost instantly. Still. You did technically make negative ions for a split second. Good job.

But most of those negative ion bracelets don't have batteries (which again, only make ions for a split second and require a renewable resource like water to do that with). So they must be a scam right? They're just rocks!

Nope. Remember the other way to make ions? It was radiation! Those bracelets and necklaces you're supposed to wear 24/7 to keep yourself healthy? They're made of mildly radioactive stone.

So they are splitting the air into ions (for a split second. You now know that ions hate existing so they recombine. Although sometimes they'll recombine into ozone (O3) rather than breathable oxygen (O2). Ozone isn't great to breathe in but you also presumably have been near a car so like... It's not a big deal in the scheme of things).

But more importantly!! They're also splitting your body into ions! Which are stabilised by the water in your body (remember the magnet analogy?) and therefore last a lot longer and can get up to more fuckery.

To;dr the negative ion bracelets do what they say on the label. They just do it by dosing you with radiation. And unlike just walking past a radioactive rock or getting an x-ray or a particularly sunny day, they're doing it on a concentrated part of your body, for as long as you're wearing it. And you're supposed to give these to children!!!

[silvereyedowl]

#and if everyone was taught how to engage with and create art then we wouldn't have such an issue with ai slop now

#where people simply do not understand what the creative process entails so they devalue and dismiss it

#striving to be a well rounded person educated on as many things as possible is good actually

#and in this era of intellectual incuriosity being normalised it is absolutely crucial

[rohirric-hunter]

I was homeschooled but for some high school classes I went to an accredited co-op, and one of these was high school AP Chemistry

So while I was taking this chemistry class I walked into a health food store one day and saw a bottle of "alkaline water"

Well I bought it and brought it into class the next day and asked the teacher if we could PH test it, since we were learning about acids and bases, and she loved the idea of IRL applied science so we took ten minutes to do a quick PH test on the alkaline water

Guys it was so fucking acidic. It had a PH rating of 4. Don't ever buy alkaline water it is such a massive scam. I don't even know what they did to it or how you get that to happen. That's the PH rating of wine

[solarishashernoseinabook]

I saw a bottle of water in the store advertising that it had a "perfectly balanced pH." Well, yeah, duh. It's water. Its pH is 7. You didn't have to do anything all that special to make it that way. You're being asked to pay extra for a basic feature of water

[valtsv]

recurring dead wife flashback where it becomes increasingly apparent that the person remembering her has dishonestly claimed a romantic dynamic to their relationship that never actually existed and erased any conflict that ever existed between them now that she's no longer able to say no to them

[valtsv]

dead wife flashback where each time we see her she looks more confused and upset by how she's remembered, then desperate and furious, until she's hammering on the glass screaming to be let out

[valtsv]

this isn't how it happened. you know this isn't how it happened. but you still keep coming back, keep disturbing my grave so you can play out your fantasies. voyeurs crowding around my autopsy, straining for the best view; pawing through my entrails like grubby butchers trying to find some golden meaning in blood and shit because you can't bear to face the cold light of truth. you just can't bear the thought of never having really known me at all.

[depsidase]

[headspace-hotel]

[katacala]

Something that gave H.P. Lovecraft nightmares is the work of my favorite artist. In "At the Mountains of Madness" he specifically mentions "the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich."

This is what Roerich's paintings look like:

[chaifootsteps]

#hp lovecraft thought penguins were grotesque and horrifying#he was not a difficult man to frighten

[vocifersaurus]

Hentai would straight up disintegrate the man.

[trangoldin]

Gamergate did not actually matter at all wrt USAmerican politics or culture and its funny how the meme is being kept alive by people who want to imagine that youtuber drama can change the world

[trangoldin]

LIKE COVID??? girl a million people died, the global economy tanked, and you are comparing that to a think that Toddintheshadows made a couple tweets about

[trangoldin]

Like if you want to pick a flashpoint in the first half of the 2010s, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the following shitshow are right there but then the conversation would have to be about deeply embedded racism rather than like, fucking forum lore about video games

[trangoldin]

#I'd say the beginnings of BLM and colin kapernick kneeling were real cultural turning points#people wanted (and still do!) to kill that guy bc he didn't stand during the stupid national anthem#idk being 14/15 when Micheal Brown was killed and seeing the response to it radicalized me

The actual "how do people not know this" issue here is the fact that so many people seem to think BLM sprouted out of nothing after George Floyd's murder rather than that being the most recent instance of a series of highly publicized police killings starting with Trayvon, extending into Ferguson, and then snowballing into the 2020 uprising that now is so often just dismissed as "Woke 1.0"

[crabussy]

doxxing myself. I’m on a boat in the middle of the big blue sea near some islands and dolphins and other random nonsense

[mrsandman42069]

-28.531560,175.309976

[crabussy]

DUDE

[gallusrostromegalus]

Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish

So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:

"You have fish, right?"

"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.

"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.

I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.

"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."

She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:

He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.

Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.

I think I did alright.

He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.

That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.

Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.

Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).

When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.

Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.

So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).

Friends.

The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.

My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Pictures that are paintings, to me:

They're both so curious about each other.

(Kitty Fishtank Time is closely supervised and the room is closed off when we're not there. The tank also has a heavy glass lid that covers the whole tank and has anti-kitty safety clips)

[amateur-enthusiam]

Reminds me of my betta! He likes to sit and watch the shrimp the same way I sit and watch the tank. They don't seem to mind, either.

You can also just barely see one of my neon tetras at the top, he's not interested in them like yours is but he'll generally chill in the same area of the tank (and it's a 40 gallon so he has plenty of space to avoid them if he wants to)

[gallusrostromegalus]

LMAO THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE DOES. I haven't been able to get a good pic of it because the shrimp are still skittish and nyoom away if my phone gets too close to the tank but like. He watches the shrimp the same way I watch him and I hope it gives him a sense of joy and wonder as well.

[crabussy]

I don't understand how cis people obsessed with gender norms think trans people are the weird ones. they're going around believing that your name has to correlate to your genitals. your fashion has to correlate to your genitals. your behaviours have to correlate to your genitals. your hobbies have to correlate to your genitals. who you date has to correlate to your genitals. whether you can put sparkles on your eyelids or not has to correlate to your genitals. and then people like me go "hmm. I might not do that. maybe I'll just do what feels fun and okay instead" and they LOSE their MINDS

[prokopetz]

Kink scene rescheduled because halfway through me explaining the scenario my dom asked a clarifying question that uncovered a howling logical inconsistency and we ended up spending the next three hours workshopping the worldbuilding.

[depsidase]

[powerbottomblake]

i think when we used to point out that a story didn't need a sex scene what we meant was "this story reduces its women to mere sex objects and gives them no interiority so the sex scenes are gratuitous and geared towards the male gaze" it wasn't the sex that bothered us per se it was the objectification of female characters while givig them little to no consequence to the overall story but nowadays people mean "sex is icky and gross and has no merit to ever be portrayed in our arts which should be good and pure and never ever make ME feel discomfort" and it's like. i bet a bowl of unfrosted flakes looks real good to you rn