#ghostapop

[nebulations]

so whats this imperial radch and / or (?) ancillary justice thing :0

[ID: A gif of the Grinch smiling cartoonishly evilly. End ID]

Ancillary Justice is the first of the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie! It's a sci fi space opera featuring the violently expansionist Radchaai empire, which perpetuates itself in large part through sentient warships powered by AIs. These AIs are split into "ancillaries," bodies of conquered people who are forcibly modified to house the AIs' consciousnesses and serve the ruler of the Radch, the many-bodied Anaander Mianaai, who has similarly implanted herself in thousands of cloned bodies to enact her will. We follow one such AI, Breq, who has lost her ship-body, fellow ancillary bodies, and crew and is now on a quest for revenge. We ALSO follow Seivarden, a lieutenant who's been in cryostasis for a thousand years and is dealing Very Badly with the loss of everything she's known.

The series deals in themes of personhood, autonomy, and identity, as well as class, privacy, imperialism, and the myriad ways colonialism impacts the cultures it forces itself upon. It is also insanely funny, full of brilliantly detailed worldbuilding (with a focus on music and linguistics!), and will introduce you to deeply queer and aspec relationship dynamics you literally could not have fathomed before and will never, ever be normal about once you've been forced to contemplate them. I seriously-- if it wasn't clear from my impassioned breakdown for the last day or so-- cannot recommend the books enough!!!

[pathos-logical]

https://www.tumblr.com/pathos-logical/782951897750503424/id-copied-from-alt-an-edit-of-an-xkcd-comic-in?source=share hii what does this mean 😭

THRILLED TO ANSWER!!! The comic is based on the comedy routine "Who's on First" by radio duo Abbot and Costello where the gag is that Abbot is coach and manager of a baseball team where all the players have ludicrous names that make it impossible to hold a conversation about their positions when Costello asks about them. To quote the opening-- "Who's on first, That's on second, and I Don't Know's on third." "That's what I wanna find out." ... [much shouting later] "Who's on first!" "That's what I wanna know!"

It's four and a half minutes of pure comedy and I recommend only listening to it in a space where you can laugh out loud ❤️ Here's my favorite rendition of it-- kinetic typography that graphically captions the whole routine and also helpfully illustrates baseball positions for us sports-challenged folk!!

[toadstoolillustrations]

stop rbing the americans n go to sleep

stop rbing snoopy n we have a deal

[zukkaoru]

MAY I KNOW WHO TAKARA IS 👀👀 bc flags member oc (?) sounds so epic

awkwardly looks around. um. so. let me preface this by saying takara was actually created with the intent of making everyone involved here suffer,

takara is a fankid oc born after ranpo and lippmann hooked up at some point shortly before the events of storm bringer. in the canon universe (ehhh well not Canon exactly but, the close-to-canon au where takara exists) lippmann dies before either he or ranpo even know she was conceived and his ability is passed onto her. then ranpo gives her up for adoption after she's born bc what's he gonna do? raise a child? absolutely not. he has no interest in that.

my notes on her copy and pasted from discord:

even as a kid, she's very charming and very good at getting what she wants from people, between being well-spoken and intelligent. she goes too far with it sometimes and doesn't really understand the consequences of her actions are, in fact, consequences of her actions. she's probably got the tism from ranpo. also important to note she has a beauty mark like lippmann's in approximately the same place

name: takara ishi, kanji for first and last name can be 宝石 which was the name of the irl edogawa ranpo's mystery fiction journal. takara meaning treasure/jewel and ishi meaning stone ability name: actor of a hundred faces

- she likes sweets - she's clumsy - her hair is impossible to tame - the bunny is a family pet

obviously in canon-esque universe, takara ends up coming back into contact with ranpo anyway at some point bc she's interested to know more about her birth family (and she's also got this insane ability for ?? basically no reason at all as far as she and her adoptive parents can tell??) so she and ranpo have an amicable relationship but it's more like.. ranpo's her weird older cousin or estranged uncle than her dad. which they're both fine with

but ohhhh in a flags live au...... lippmann would keep her and he would love her so much. and all of the flags would absolutely adore her. and through seeing their love for her, ranpo would end up liking her even more too. because in canonverse he carries out the pregnancy mostly out of a sense of obligation so while he doesn't resent takara, there's still a sort of.. disconnect there that just can't be gapped. but if the flags live and ranpo sees how lippmann looks at her like she's the sun moon and stars, he starts to see her that way too. they actually don't even end up together bc they want different things and they never planned for their relationship to go past a hookup anyway but they're still friendly towards one another. in my mind (said as if this isn't my oc story) there's a stretch of time after takara is born (while the pm and ada are at odds) where ranpo isn't really in contact with either of them, and then after the truce is made, he starts spending more time with takara. but because of the tension between groups it was safest if he just cut contact. also because can you imagine: pov you're ranpo edogawa the world's greatest detective and this new guy with a shady past shows up wanting to be part of your detective agency and you look at him and realize he was previously with the mafia instantly and then you look at him again and. this kid. this guy. demon prodigy mafia executive-turned-unemployed loser. held your daughter as an infant???? i would go insane. and then dazai on the inverse looks at ranpo and is like woah all those insane fan theories were wrong. that's lippmann's baby mama. and he's not a mama. insane. okay i'm done now

[beannary]

hi idk if you were serious or not abt asking you abt evolution but i would love to learn more abt evolution if u want to talk abt it !! :]

I was being so serious!!! This has just taken me so long to answer because I couldnt figure out what part of evolution I wanted to talk about as if this is the only time id ever be able to talk about evolution on this blog askldjhfkalsjhdf

I've been thinking a lot lately about the grandmother hypothesis, which is the hypothesis for why female primate life expectancy is longer than the period in which the female is reproductively active for. (also wait i cant remember if this hypothesis applies to other animals as well or if it only applies to primates? ive really only studied both human and non-human primates so im a little bit clueless when it comes to evolution of other animals)

Like ok so hold on let me back up

So any biological organism has a life goal, and that is to reproduce as much as possible to make as many offspring as possible to ensure that your genes are being passed on to next generations. So when talking about evolution, an organism basically wants to have the best genes that allow it to survive long enough to reproduce, as well as reproduce as much as possible, and to ensure that their offspring reach reproductive age.

Now there are many different strategies to reach these goals, but for female animals that have low reproductive frequencies they have to expend a lot of energy in order to ensure that their offspring reach reproductive age. And when i say low reproductive frequency i mean like ok take humans for example, like you have a single baby and that takes nine full months, in that time the mother has to expend a lot of energy in order to grow the fetus, and then once the baby has been born, the mother then has to expend 18 years of energy raising the child till its an adult. Of course in humans this is different because like we dont live just to reproduce but thats what i mean with like female animals having to use up a lot of energy in order to pass on their own genes.

So basically, if a female animal's life goal is to reproduce as much as possible then why would they continue to live once they are no longer fertile? Basically the grandmother hypothesis is that females live longer than they are fertile for in order to help their own daughters raise their young.

It's super common at least in primates AGAIN CANNOT EMPHASIZE HOW MUCH ALL MY INFORMATION IS PRIMATOCENTRIC I HAVE A BACKGROUND IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND PRIMATOLOGY NOT ANY OTHER SORT OF BIOLOGY but its super common for first time primate mothers to lose their first few infants, and by lose i mean the infants will die because the mother is inexperienced. And that loss of life is like SUPER costly to the mother because she just spent x amount of time growing that baby and during that time she missed out on being able to reproduce so now not only is she back to square one but she essentially just wasted all that energy. BUT that mother that just lost an infant? well she has a mother, and that mother who is now a grandmother has tones of experience raising infants and is less likely to have an infant die on her. So the grandmother hypothesis is basically that females live past reproductive age in order to help their own daughters raise infants, which helps the grandmother ensure her own genes are being carried on for more generations by making sure her daughter is reproductively successful.

there are a lot of other really neat examples of like this sort of mothering? where like females with infants rely on the help of other females to raise their children. i just think its neat :)

[nebulations]

ur orv guys are so . for some reason ive had kdjs gay ass description of yjh stuck in my head . the "his brow was painted by a famed artists brush" or whatever the fuck . i hate them badly . theyre not even my blorbos . ive neevr even touched orv . why did he say rhat

Ghost this ask has brought me such great joy. Let's all look at kdj's gayass description of yjh after not seeing him for a while again... together

For a moment there, I had this feeling that this world's balance of beauty had tilted to one side. A nonsensical amount of cheering erupted out all around us next.... For sure, calling a face like that 'Yogoe' didn't seem all that out of place. Because well, it was inconceivable that a normal human would be blessed with such looks, after all. Eyebrows seemingly drawn by a single, uninterrupted stroke of a famed artist's brush; a nose and a chin shaped in perfect angles that defied attempts to measure them through mere devices of men; a pair of deep eyes seemingly carved out of a beautiful jewel containing all the misfortunes found in this world. If someone saw those features and not get immediately drawn in by them, then there must be something wrong with that person.

I'm glad they're bringing you misery even though you haven't read the book 🥰 consider reading the book at any time though ❤️❤️❤️

[pathos-logical]

GOOD LUCK ON THE LAB PRACTICAL 🫶

THANK YOUUUU I just took it!!! I think I did okay!!!!

[zukkaoru]

HIII GRACE GIN & DAZAI FIC ? 👀👀

this is. i started writing it for gin's birthday and then switched ideas and did something else for my gin birthday fic. but it was spawned off of the idea of "wouldn't it be funny if dazai was having a Gender Crisis and he ended up having to begrudgingly ask to gin for advice". i had it set in my post-doa arc series (all lights turned off can be turned on), sometime probably significantly after the all fics i've posted for that series so far

anyway here's an excerpt:

“I don’t get what your coworkers see in you,” Gin bites back. Anger flickers through Dazai’s eyes, which is good, because when it comes to conversations between them, anger is always a coating for hurt. And Gin wants him to hurt. “You never did give up easily, did you?” “You taught me not to.” A cruel smile stretches across Dazai’s face. “I should have taught you to lie down and die.” “Why are you here?” “I work here—” “No,” Gin interrupts harshly. They’re not an idiot; they know the only reason they have not yet run into Dazai while visiting Lucy and the others is because he knows when they’re here. And he wants to avoid them as much as they would like to avoid him. It’s an unspoken mutual agreement—they don’t talk, because they have nothing of use left to say to one another. They will never see eye-to-eye. “What do you want?”