Hello! (Finally getting around to doing this lol.) Iām fairly new to actually using tumblr, and not just viewing other peopleās posts, so have mercy on me as I learn what the hell Iām doing lol. DMs, feedback, and advice welcome!
ABOUT ME š
Name: Ren or Rune
Pronouns: They/Them
Age: Physically tired, mentally still kicking (20s)
Hobbies: Writing, reading, drawing, photography, video games, and Iāve dabbled in cosplay. I love crafting things and learning new skills.
Favorite punctuation: Ellipsesā¦ [Iām sorry, in advance.]
And Iām aroace as fuh.Ā šš¤š¤š¤š
MY WRITING ā
Primarily write new adult or adult fantasy of the character driven variety, and include many human and non-human characters (vampires, demons, fae, and other immortal beings...). [Disclaimer that the demons I write are not of the religious variety, and could just as easily be called fae or aliens. I just chose demon as a catch-all term. They are non-human and quite varied and/or inspired by mythical creatures.]
š³āš Naturally, many of my characters are LGBTQIA+ in some way. And a good number of my non-humans do not necessarily follow human constructs (of sex and gender and all those lovely things).
š„ Iāve started dabbling in romance and spicy content. I may not be sexual, but some of my characters definitely are, so, yāknow. Tumblr of spice: https://www.tumblr.com/runewilde.
Twitter of spice: @RuneWilde. [18+ only, please]
I do try to post content warnings for any potentially sensitive topics. Feel free to let me know if I miss any.
Many of my current WIPs take place within the same universe.
I actually do like poetry in the times when Iāve been forced to write it lolāwhich might sound strange. Itās not something I typically write in my spare time, but sometimes it just happensā¦Ā Ā
WIPS
š„ Playing with Fire
(1st person retrospective, character driven, adult, fantasy) Includes morally grey characters galore, dark themes, and family struggles. Alcanderās younger years as he grows into a notorious killerāwith the help of a few bad influencesāand digs himself into a deep hole he may never escape.Ā
šŗ The Hunterās Dog
(1st person retrospective, character driven, adult, fantasy with some slowburn romance) After the events of Playing with Fire. It took nearly 200 years, but Alcander starts to realize how deep of a hole his past self dug. Just when he can no longer see any way out, he meets a Hunter willing to give him a hand [kinda sus]. Can the Hunter pull Alcander out or will Alcander drag the Hunter down with him? [I do have 2 chapters of this posted on Medium, but I plan on majorly reworking it, soā¦ lol.]Ā Ā Ā Ā
š§āāļøš Untitled
(3rd person, adult, fantasy, historical romance) How Alcanderās parents, a demon and a vampire, fell in love in the early 1800s despite opposition. Claudia Revell was never one for doing as she was told. So, when her father tell her demons should be avoided, the headstrong vampire waltzes directly into the demon district to find out why. Little did she know she'd find herself entranced by the very beings her father despises and doing everything in her power to keep it a secret.
It can only end well.Ā Ā
Various Shorts:
I have a few different short form projectsā¦ Most are character driven, many are episodic, and so far all connect to the same main world (all the main characters tend to know each other in some capacity).Ā
Reluctant Service [18+] (3rd person, M/M, erotic fantasyā¦ I hesitate to say romance for reasons lol) Another spicy short fic, involving Leon (asexual) and Eras (some sort of sexual). There will be other shorts with them, but I havenāt decided a āmain titleā for the stories involving them. They have a rather dark dynamic at itās core, so be warned.
Untitled [18+] Tales of an incubus sex worker [Alcanderās uncle, Lysander]. Will be spicy and potentially have dark themes at times. Definitely will be more episodic. [I need more confidence with this genre and subject matter, before I feel capable of writing this lol.]
Definitely some shorts involving Alcander, spicy or not, that arenāt necessarily going to be included in his main WIPs.Ā
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a ācommon childhood illnessā 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 āsmallpox isnāt that bad.ā) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, āarenāt they the same thing?ā
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
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 ā1500 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 humansāit has no animal hostsāwhich 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 variolaāEdward 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 poxvirusāchickenpox 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 rashesāthus 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 practicesāpeople 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 onāwhich viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to anotherābut 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 herpesvirusāit 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!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
iām going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you donāt agree with is getting too automatic and itās eating you from the inside out
'Why does every nonbinary person want top surgery' I dunno maybe because having visible breasts immediately makes everyone assume you're female and only female, and therefore put you into a binary. Also why are you assuming every nonbinary person has breasts.
I think people who believe that should also put some thought into whether every nonbinary person with breasts actually wants top surgery, or whether they've just decided that the nonbinary people with breasts who want to keep them don't "count" as nonbinary.
#i know plenty of nonbinary people who want breasts or like their breasts#but they're viewed as either transtrenders or trans women in denial <- prev tags
somehow all these good vibes have washed back on me and it's great. y'all are manifesting writing mojo for each other and me and I love it. keep going. don't stop.
But wait this is actually freaking me out though, it raises so many questions about the otherwise incomprehensible meaning of life as a collective whole versus personal sustenance and longevity
Imagine if one day you were given a choice: Become immortal and indestructible for eternity, unable to be harmed by anything ever again, and get to live forever.
However, in order to achieve that you must give up whatever your purpose in life is. Whatever it is that you were always meant to do, what you were supposed to contribute to the overall scheme and future of the life of the universe, your purposeā¦ the whole reason you were even created, even born in the first place. You must give that up. You donāt know what that is. Youāll never know; But, regardless, you say yes.
Perhaps you assume you wouldnāt have made any sort of significant difference anyway. That butterfly effect theory or whatever they call it? Nah, you call bullshit. It doesnāt matter - you donāt matter, at least not to anything outside of your immediate connections - and itāll all be fine, and youāll just live forever with minimal (or maybe even no) consequences.
So, yay! Youāre now immortal. Youāll never die or get hurt ever again. Wee!
But then, centuries and centuries later (not to mention that by this point youāve gone through horrible heartbreak and misery and despair because every loved one you ever had, every friend you ever made, ever person you barely got to know, has passed away, died as you lived on long without them, helpless to do anything for them as you watched them perish, unable to ever go with them or ever see them again. But I digress), now, you learn you actually were important in the grand scheme of things. You were supposed to be a key factor in the worldās survival, long ago; but, because of the choice you made (immortality over individual purpose), you were never given the knowledge or awareness or resources or ability to save the world that you were always supposed to obtain, before you unknowingly made the wrongest choice to ever wrong.
Needless to say, youāve fucked up big time.
The entire universe as we know it is destroyed soon after this horrifying revelation. It implodes, collapses in on itself, essentially forming a massive black hole or something. Stars, nebulae, galaxies, solar systems and planets, worlds and worlds of living people and things, and light-years of time and space and life, all sucked up into absolute, indefinite nothingness.
But you remain.
Just you. Floating amongst, spiraling around, rocketing through, suspended inā¦ nothing. With a feeling of such unbelievable loneliness that your feeble brain can hardly perceive, canāt possibly hope to comprehend. Not only are you the only living thing left, you donāt even have one inanimate object to keep you company. You have literally. Nothing. And you are literally nowhere. I mean, technically, you are now the universe - if it would bring you petty comfort to think about it that way. You. Only you. With nothing, no one, nowhere. Forever. And ever. And ever.
All because you thought you didnāt matter. That you had no real, meaningful purpose. That you could never possibly make a difference.
But you did. And now look what youāve gotten yourself into, you silly nugget. Youāre gonna be pretty bored and lonely for that eternity, huh?
Or maybe it was out of selfishness. Maybe this wasnāt because you felt useless, but because you simply only cared about prolonging your own life and nothing else. Hm.
The moral here? Be selfless, and always know and remember that you matter.
Or else, one day, you might destroy the universe. And be left to suffer, and be tortured horribly and endlessly by the void of nothingness that has consumed you. With no way to escape. Ever.
Other moral because I got sidetracked from my initial point - all things considered, would you choose longevity over purpose? Immortality over meaning?Ā
OR, IDK, MAYBE SOME IDIOT JUST LAMINATED A STUPID PIECE OF PAPER TOWEL FOR NO GOOD REASON
AND MAYBE I SHOULDNT BE LOOKING FOR THE ANSWERS TO THE MEANING OF OUR SHORT, FRAGILE LIVES IN
the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13Ā½ years now
Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:
This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after Iāve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, āUm,ā from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.
And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. Weāre justā¦ in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?
She didnāt even have garlic bread in her cart.
I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.
Well, the registers donāt like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but sheās not by her pager.
At this point, both myself and the lady are justā¦ dumbfounded. Sheās not even mad. Iām not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. Thereās a bit of laughter, but itās mostly justā¦ confusion.
I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because sheās not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.
āWhatā¦ did you do?ā
āI genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.ā
She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasnāt scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.
My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, āI think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.ā
And thatās when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didnāt take a damn picture, because she has proof and I donāt. But I swear to God it happened.
TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.
A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
As of June 29, 2026 the law discussed here is a recently passed California state law (AB 1043) that requires age validation before using a computer connected to the internet. This is expected to happen at the operating system level, when you login to Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc.
Ageless Linux intends to force the issue before the California state supreme court, then ultimately (probably) the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). It's a stupid, dangerous law, voted into place by legislators who either don't understand the core issue OR knowingly voted for it because they're assholes.
California is an influential state in the US. Many laws & regulations passed there eventually trickle out to most states. That's why it's worrisome to see this kind of thing rammed through, and why it's important to fight it.
Also, it doesn't matter if you use Linux or not. Or whether you live in California or not. Visit their site, read the text, learn what's going on with access to computing in this hellscape timeline.
Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
