Untitled @myriad-thoughts - Tumblr Blog

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwydx34kzlvo

"Vanderhorst had been under the influence of MDMA and three litres of vodka she had consumed on the night of the offence last September, her lawyer Michael Hill told the court."

three. liters.

anais-ninja-bitch

i support women's wrongs

olderthannetfic

Ran into a funny fic disclaimer just now:

"Warning: Don’t try this relationship at home. This relationship was conducted by completely fictional characters, under the supervision of an author who wanted hurt/comfort with a happy ending. Your results may vary, either due to people having feelings you can’t control or having an author who delights in torturing characters."

Hahaha

#writing

murdercore-powerfuneral-deactiv

We know that Facebook is brainscorching your parents and tiktok is brainscorching your cousins, but some of you refuse to admit that you got your brain scorched here. However unlike those sites there isn't an algorithm here you just make bad choices.

kyraneko

That's all we ever wanted. To arrive at Hell as a result of our own dubious navigation skills instead of as the result of Satan owning all the road sign companies.

tim-ee-sis

"To arrive at Hell as a result of our own dubious navigation skills instead of as the result of Satan owning all the road sign companies."

This is my favorite quote of today.

dunesdayiscoming

Imagine looking at each other this way even when body swapped and not being in love. I choose not to believe that. These women are gay as fuck. And it’s amazing.

#wenclair #more in character than most of season 2

captain-price-returns

transmechanicus

Revealing the ignorance of my youth here, but who is this and what is she known for?

boybeetles

Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate

flurrin

Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.

boybeetles

Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. I’m still learning about this.

mixupmycota

Gamergate never ended as a movement, is in a state of active resurgence and is globally implicated in the rise of the hard right. Steve Bannon, guy who works directly with Trump and ran the hard right website Breitbart, was CEO of a WoW MMO gold farming operation, actively looked towards radicalizing the sexist young men, and are targeting gamers to replace federal employees over there (also in that article link). Now they use LLM generated gamer memes to recruit for ICE.

In terms of what to do about this:

Begging folks to: 1: Start taking memes seriously, look at where the New Lingo you're getting is coming from online because the answer is almost always either:

Appropriated AAVE, which also serves the far-right agenda in multiple ways. Participating in Digital Blackface and the active destruction of different facets of Black cultural tradition (queer spaces do this SO MUCH. SO MUCH of "gay people talk" is bastardized AAVE and that causes serious harm and erasure of history which is inexplicably linked with histories of resilience and joy and culture making in the face of oppression and enslavement. We owe much of our ability to track what gamergaters are doing At All to the work of Black feminists who paid attention to how the far right started to mimic and impersonate Black women online to seed controversies designed to discredit feminist movements, but I digress (barely))

Far right memes designed to push the overton window on acceptable behaviour and things to say more firmly into their wheelhouse. This is something far right governments are both aware of and actively engaging with.

All those Virgin v Chad comics; the incredibly ableist lobotomy reaction images; the resurgence of the R slur; the push of tradwife content and Girl Math and such all either originates back in those cesspits or has been firmly weaponized.

2: Continue to educate yourselves on game development and call for systemic change at shareholder levels. Get loud and write in proper complaints about racist and sexist and ableist design choices. Call for crediting and fair pay for everyone who worked on games, including contracted staff on the other side of the world who provided art assets or quality assurance.

Video games are increasingly recognized world over as one of the most profitable and effective modern shapers of culture. A truly obscene amount of money is constantly changing hands, and where development studios are allowed to form at all impacts what stories are told.

A lot of gamedevs want better than this, but we need audience support and participation. There's huge efforts to unionize the industry - but the same underlying problems are at play in organizing too. Devs, not just white devs in the global north, all over the world need support. Unionization won't fix underlying culture issues, and there's also a lot of people who have no interest in even starting to address those. Please support the Game Devs of Colour expo, look at indie titles, check out independent games journalism efforts who are able to call out the links between the mainstream industry and the numerous active war machines.

Sorry for the huge add-on but as a developer myself I have followed along with this from the start and kept abreast of how the situation has continued to metastasize and develop. It's genuinely so important to talk to kids and young people about this history that's still in motion and provide education on what to look out for, especially if you know any who come from conservative homes. Many of the kids are NOT alright, and they're getting swept up across the world into states of profound alienation and taught to view anyone different than them as less than human.

The industry could be better than this, we could see a world where the medium flourishes into a beautiful international art scene and is used as a vehicle for active cultural exchange instead of increasingly being encircled and weaponized for propaganda purposes. But it won't happen unless a lot more people become aware of what is happening and actively push back against it.

lordsmaf

I will forever respect Animorphs for tricking kids who are just really into animals to read a book series by going “Hey you, you daydream about what it’s like to be a dolphin or a bird or a wolf? Have I got a book for you!” and then slowly radicalizing them with 50+ books of “There are no winners in war. Whatever ‘victory’ you perceive comes at the cost of sacrificing your own morals and killing the part of you that is human. In the end you will resort to murder, torture and war crimes and the knowledge of what you have done will haunt you for as long as you live.”

banannafan

So the amazing thing is that after the release of the last book, the author K. A. Applegate was interviewed and asked about why she wrote such a super dark ending for the series. She responded (I’m paraphrasing here, I read this when I was like 11) “This is what happens when kids are forced into war. There are no fairytale endings for them. And if that upsets you, then go to the polls and vote to prevent this from happening to real children.”

I got to ask her about that rebuttal years later at a book signing event for her newer One and Only series. She laughed and said that her publisher had no idea she would say that, and if they knew they probably would not have let her do so. But she genuinely meant what she said and was proud it left an impression that lasted 20+ years.

Support authors with real morals, guys. It’s not hard.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

“Why did you write such a dark ending to this series?”

“Oh you’re right I’m sorry maybe I should have had everyone happily generically married off and revealed that one of them named their kid Visser Three instead”

myriad-thoughts

That is a different bad ending - you have become the system you were fighting against.

tuesday-is-a-good-day

“there’s no platonic explanation for this”

Well there is actually, they’re friends. They’re friends and they love each other and it doesn’t mean any less than if they were dating and they loved each other. They’re friends and that means devotion and affection and loyalty and love, and there is no point in which that love reaches a level that immediately indicates that their relationship must be romantic.

midnightskywrites

writers really will spend twenty minutes pacing around the kitchen thinking “this scene is genius” and then sit down to type and suddenly remember approximately three words and one emotional vibe

#writing

queenofghost

Incorrect K-pop demon hunters quotes part 90

More incorret quotes

#kpdh #(in)correct quotes

smol-blue-bird

all STEM students should have to take humanities courses, and all humanities students should have to take STEM courses

smol-blue-bird

@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”

the-grey-tribe

The English language really whiffed on that one. Should have called it largepox or at least regularsizepox.

myfootyrthroat

The whole "-pox" making system could use some work. Are we doing sizes? Animals? Get it together.

imjustusingthistolikeartists

One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination

smol-blue-bird

Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!

There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):

Smallpox:

Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)

There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)

There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.

Other relevant viruses:

Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.

Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.

Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.

So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?

There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.

Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)

Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.

Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).

Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.

Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.

TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).

(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)

Sources & further reading under the cut!

sew-birb

I have been to Edward Jenner's house (for my birthday, because I am a nerd) and it's a truly emotional experience. Jenner used his garden's little summer house, which he nicknamed the Temple of Vaccinia, to give people the first ever vaccines himself, for free.

Here it is:

Imagine, if you will, a queue of people who have lost children, parents, siblings and friends to smallpox. People who don't really understand how the vaccine will save them but don't care, because it'll mean they never have to grieve another smallpox death again.

Upstairs in Jenner's house there is a framed certificate from the World Health Assembly that declares the total eradication of smallpox. When was this momentous event, you ask? 1980.

History and STEM are vitally important to one another. If you're interested in one I urge you to look into the other.

geekysteven

A Betazoid character who isn't in a nurturing profession, but is a tactical officer.

"Captain, I sense they know they're about to get their asses handed to them"

macko-99

Also, a Klingon character who is in a nuturing profession instead of tactical.

"You are a true child of Kahless for confronting your fears and I am honoured to have helped you."

asimovsideburns

Klingon therapist: the battle against mental illness cannot be won decisively. It is a long campaign against an enemy who never tires, whose forces swell to twice their size whenever you look away. Battle against a foe of such magnitude, who occupies your very mind… every moment you survive is a triumph against all odds. There is no more honorable combat.

trekheritageposts

star trek heritage post (March 31st, 2021)

the-rain-on-your-dandelions

Now I've seen this piece in several places, probably best illustrated by @theshitpostcalligrapher and would have bought one were it not for The Tariffs, but I didn't know it originated here on tumblr.

This information would have been rather hilariously useful a couple years ago when ~my fuckin therapist~ quoted it to me when we were talking about Star Trek, and she admitted she used it with other clients who weren't fans at all. (It's apparently very effective, according to her, regardless of fan status.)

theshitpostcalligrapher

oh it's more than just that!

For one, I figured out the tariff thing doesn't really affect my field too much since art on paper as fine art, even as prints, aren't in an HTS category that generates duties. Yall can get 'em whenevs, they're sent using stamps in envelopes.

anyone can get their own print!

but not only that, @asimovsideburns is not only aware that this is a print I sell, but they get a courtesy cut of every sale I make with these!

It's kinda lesser known, but if a print design I make and sell has an OP that is contactable, I make sure they're aware and that they have a cut of the sales.

foxes-in-love

so-much-for-subtlety

star-mom-selkie

abusing the rules of time travel and using the tardis to forcefem young peter capaldi

star-mom-selkie

i have nothing against force femming old peter i still think estrogen could fix him. the real joke of this post is that he already looks like the he/they in the pipeline meme.

haileys-dreamland

I'm pretty sure they did already use the tardis to forcefem peter capaldi. like that was a pretty important part of what happened

myriad-thoughts

The Doctor has been shown to canonically chose what they regenerate into (not always and Romana was better at it). So it may not have been forcefem. Still not ginger though.