this video deserves at least three views per viewer, because there is no following both the belly dance and the added text at the same time while still giving either one the attention it needs for full appreciation, but watching only one or the other will miss more than half of the artistic intentions here
Here's a "fun" fact. Epi-pens are a vital, life-saving emergency medication for many people. They work by injecting epinephrine into you, which temporarily reverses the life-threatening symptoms of an anaphylactic allergic reaction. They're also single-use devices, and most people who need them only carry one (because they're expensive and kinda big and they expire).
Dosing is also really important for them to work! Guidelines recommend 0.01mg of epinephrine per kilogram the patient weighs.
So with that in mind, how many different dose sizes do you think there are?
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.
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That's right! There's two sizes! One for adults and one for children.
(More info under the cut)
Now that looks pretty bad, but it's actually far worse if you run numbers. An adult epipen is designed for anyone over 30kg/66lb. The dose that it gives is 0.3mg. Using dosing guidelines of 0.01mg/kg, we can do some easy math to find out what the expected "average" weight of patient is expected to be: just divide the dose by the guideline and get the weight!
Okay, great. (0.3mg/kg)/0.01mg = 30kg
Ah.
So if you weigh 60kg (132lb), you are getting a HALF dose according to guidelines.
(Final technical note. In theory, you can also get a 0.5mg pen, but most countries don't offer it. Also, even at that much higher dose, you'd still be getting less than a full dose at 60kg)
Need yâall to know that in the 1970âs a letter to the editor was published in Daily Telegraph where the author offhandedly used the phrase âTolkien-like gloomâ to describe an area with barren trees and JRRT himself wrote back an incensed rebuttal at the use of his name in a context that suggested anything negative about trees.
âI feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying âgloomâ, especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemiesâ
He was like how dare you sir I am the biggest tree fan out there
A tree tried to eat the hobbits. Tom Bombadil had to save them. There's Mirkwood, "The Forest of Great Fear." I'm on the side of the writer of the letter to the editor.
This is the best thing in the entire world. I love how much Tolkien loved trees and how fiercely he defended them. Here is a transcript:
Beautiful place because trees are loved
From Prof. J.R.R. TOLKIEN
SIRâwith reference to your leader of June 29, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying âgloom,â especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.
Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two-legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries.
Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things, but it was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.
It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because, as you observe, it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Merton College, Oxford
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but itâs a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I donât think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if youâve played or enjoyed this game. Itâs just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.Â
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.Â
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesnât. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like itâs above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. Itâs so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something âproblematicâ that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.Â
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an âexplorerâ is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, itâs ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, youâre gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldnât just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be âthe good guys.â All of the âproblematicâ aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..Â
(Donât worry guys thereâs no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Donât worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this districtâs points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novelâs worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just donât have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the âradium girlsâ where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just âbad actors who hold terrible beliefs.â Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they donât go anywhere either. They donât belong to any social movements, they donât get organized, they donât push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.Â
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? Theyâre under assault.
Thatâs right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of⌠uh, âOtherwhere.â (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) Thatâs where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the âcolonists.â With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on âtens of thousands..â You get the picture.) So, whew, glad thatâs over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldnât want to hear its thoughts on Israel.Â
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, âperform questionable acts in the name of the common good,â and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
Itâs actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaireâs society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. âGay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!â
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscuraâs gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create âactual-playâ shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, thatâs more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because itâs not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. Itâs intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesnât want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscuraâs approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Donât have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Donât have actors say foreign words they donât know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Donât show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
Weâd like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that âthey donât want to be disrespectful by playing itâ because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - donât buy or support their game!
I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"
âWe can bomb ten thousand people from evil backwards countries as long as our cops and nuke engineers are diverse đđâ rlly sums up the American liberal worldview in a beautiful way
The FDA has upgraded an egg recall issued last month to âClass I,â its highest risk level, as it warns the public that consuming the products could cause âserious adverse health consequences or death.â
The recall of 1,589,577 dozen white-shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs was initially issued by Midwest Poultry Services in late July, which warned they might be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis.
According to the company, the eggs were produced and distributed from farms in Texas between June 6 and July 3 and have sell-by or best-by dates between July 20 and August 17. The recalled egg cartons have either the code P-1950 or 0840962 and Julian Dates between 157-184.
once a week i close at work and then open the next morning, so when im rly tired and wanna go home i just do the bare minimum closing tasks and get the rest done in the morning. so when i get there and things aren't done i say 'jeez. who closed last night?" and no one laughs, partly because i'm the only person there, but first and foremost because it's not really that funny.
Daddy Long-Legs: unlike spiders, these arachnids can eat solid food, and they have an omnivorous diet that includes mushrooms, berries, and seeds, along with invertebrate prey
Harvestmen, otherwise known as daddy long-legs (not to be confused with the cellar spiders of family Pholcidae, which are also described as daddy long-legs) bear a striking resemblance to spiders, but they actually belong to a separate order of arachnids known as Opiliones. These strange-looking creatures have eight legs, but only two eyes, and their body segments are largely fused together, giving the body a noticeably rounded, pill-like appearance.
Above: Metagryne bicolumnata, commonly known as the bunny harvestman
There are roughly 6,700 known species of harvestman, but researchers estimate that a total of more than 10,000 species may currently exist. Their physical features vary greatly from one species to the next; some harvestmen have crab-like claws, spikes, thorny legs, elongated bodies, colorful features, or cryptic markings. Most of them are equipped with long, spindly legs, but there are some that have shorter, stockier limbs instead.
Above: Megabunus diadema and two unidentified species from family Sclerosomatidae
Unlike spiders, harvestmen have an omnivorous diet that includes fungi, fruit pulp, seeds, pollen, lichen, algae, and invertebrate prey, and they are capable of consuming solid food, whereas spiders are typically carnivorous and feed only on fluids.
Above: a harvestman from genus Chasenella munching on a mushroom-cap
As this article explains:
Harvestmen consume mushrooms, fruit pulp, seeds, and seed appendages more frequently than spiders probably because they are âsolid food feeders," which means they can ingest solid tissues by biting off small pieces. In turn, spiders are âfluid feedersâ and feed on vegetable matter most frequently in the form of fluids (e.g. nectar, stigmatic exudate, plant sap, and honey dew) rather than fungal or plant tissues.
Above: genus Marthana
When given a choice between fresh fruit or invertebrate prey, some harvestmen actually prefer the fruit:
Schaus et al. carried out a feeding trial in which the Neotropical harvestman Erginulus clavotibialis was given a choice between fresh pineapple and live invertebrate prey. This harvestman demonstrated a distinct preference for fruit over the invertebrate prey.
Above: Dentobunus quadridentatus
Harvestmen are also much more social than spiders, and the males of some species have been known to engage in paternal care, which is a trait that rarely occurs among arthropods:
Single fatherhood is the rarest form of parental care in nature. Still, males are often the sole caretakers of progeny among a number of species of daddy long-legs, also known as harvestmen. In these species, fathers are exclusively responsible for guarding eggs that females lay on the undersides of leaves; the males remain on the eggs nearly constantly for months.
Above: several harvestman eggs and a young hatchling
When threatened, harvestmen often bob up and down erratically in an effort to confuse their attackers. They also have several other defense mechanisms, including pungent, foul-tasting secretions, the ability to "play dead," and autotomy, which is the ability to discard one or more of their own limbs in order to escape from predators.
Above: the photo at the top shows an unidentified harvestman from family Cosmetidae, while the photo on the bottom shows a species from genus Gnomulus
Harvestmen are completely harmless to humans. Their mouthparts are far too small to penetrate human skin, and contrary to popular belief, they do not have the "world's deadliest venom" -- in fact, they don't produce any venom at all.
Above: genus Obidosus
Sources & More Info:
BioOne: Fungus and Fruit Consumption by Harvestmen and Spiders: the Vegetarian Side of Two Predominantly Predaceous Arachnid Groups
Laboratory of Arthropod Behavior and Evolution: Harvestmen
Argo Biology: Citizen Science Reveals How Devoted Harvestman Dads Evolved Again and Again
NBC: Daddy Long-Legs Paternal Care Pays off in Longer Life, More Sex
PLOS One: Paternal Care Decreases Foraging Activity, but Does Not Impose Survival Costs to Caring Males in a Neotropical Arachnid
so back when my little brother was in high school, my mom went as a chaperone for their senior year field trip to an amusement park. which, you know, brave move to volunteer to supervise a bunch of high school seniors let loose in a wonderland of rollercoasters and sugar
my brother and his friends in this field trip group were truly great kids. but they were not above run of the mill teenage boy shenanigans. itâs the end of senior year, you and all your buddies are at the amusement park, youâre naturally going to want to act like a complete moron
there was one kid in the group who was especially prone to goofing around. committed to the bit, some may say. my mom knew that if nonsense was going to break out, heâd likely be at the center of it
so she goes up to this kid at the very start of the trip and says âhey, iâm kinda worried about this chaperoning thing. this might be a lot to ask, but can you help me keep an eye on everyone? you wouldnât have to do anything big, just be an extra set of eyes for me.â
friends, this kid proceeded to run their field trip group like the fucking us marines. everyone is at the meet up spots at the designated time. everyone waits in line for the rides like a bunch of boy scouts. the second the horseplay gets too out of hand, this kid is getting it back under control
itâs incredible how differently people act based on the expectations you set. instead of going to this kid and saying âhey, i know youâre trouble, so iâve got my eye on you,â my mom went âhey, i know you have influence in your peer group, so i think you can help me.â
treat someone like a problem, theyâll act like a problem. but give people a chance to help, make them feel important, and they usually rise far above the occasion. it was a stroke of genius that iâm honestly still in awe of
This story makes me think of the time my school bus was taking us home after school, but encountered some kind of engine trouble on a very twisty, hairpin turning canyon road. It kept going, it was just going veeeerrryy sloooowwww, and that means the regular cars were getting stuck behind it.
I'm really not kidding about the tight, twisty turns, and this road being narrow. One lane each way, drivers frequently at medium to high speeds, but you couldn't see very far ahead in either direction. If you tried to just go into the opposing traffic (lane going in the opposite direction), you were taking a pretty big risk -- if a car was traveling at speed, you wouldn't know until it hit you.
But I'm also not kidding about how slow our bus was going, which increasingly meant some drivers got fed up and took that risk anyway.
Now, me and the other kids in the back of the bus were initially only watching this with passive interest...
...but remember, this is a school bus. It was long, and while the drivers behind is could not see the road ahead, the kids at the front of the bus could.
One driver started to move into the opposing lane, but a kid at the front of the bus (also not initially paying attention) called out, "uh, guys, there's a car--"
And me and everyone else in the back of the bus immediately went đ đ ââď¸đ ââď¸ flailing around to cross our arms at that driver, convinced we were about to watch a nasty car crash happen less than ten feet away from us.
Except that driver stopped.
They stopped, and when the bus inched forward another two feet, they even eased back into our lane, just in time for the opposing car to pass by.
When the kids on the bus realized that all these grown-ups were actually listening to us, it was a sea change. NO ONE was napping at that point. We immediately split up, with attentive kids moving to the front to squint out the windshields while the big (aka most visible kids) went to the back. Everyone was looking outside the bus, we rotated as kids got dropped off, we basically developed a call-and-response check system on the fly. The entire time, all these grown-up drivers behind us were paying attention; not a single one drove into the opposing lanes if we gestured for them to stop. Over a hundred grown-ups in cars put their lives in OUR hands, and when we knew that we respected the hell out of that and locked tf in.
The reason why so many kids teenagers act like overgrown toddlers is because adults treat them as such. If you treat teenagers like the actual young adults they are, they'll usually act as such, too.
The night holds many things... @stranger-nights-ahead - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
