Heyo everyone, I have been very absent recently! Almost all of this is because of University, and most of it has been this one specific assignment. I've written and illustrated a short picture book about some local bugs for a science engagement class - but now I need responses!
Book Link
Survey Link [CLOSED - thanks for all of the responses!}
It's a super quick survey about the book - if you could give it quick look and fill in the survey I'd be super super grateful, and if you could reblog this post I'd be even more so. Have a great day, and happy bug spotting!
so fun story, I bought a used one I found online because this book was SOLD OUT EVERYWHERE and then this book shop had it avaliable like a day later I bought the secondhand? and now one is gonna be a gift to my friend
Here are some helpful tips that got me through my later undergrad years of level 300 and 400 classes:
**Read your essay instructions to a friend not in your class. When they ask questions on it use the way you phrase your answer as a start to your essay and how your going to answer the prompt. Typically you know more than you think you do and need someone asking you to dig all that juicy info up to the forefront of your brain. They might even discuss it with you... this is great! Really gets the juices flowing.
**If your a creative writer and you are working on another story and you really don't want to work on your school essay because you have this super exciting exposition to add to your story... add it to your story! Don't just stew and procrastinate by staring sadly at your laptop/paper. Write that story out then move on to the essay. You'll be able to focus better on the essay when it's the essay's turn.
**make sure to leave time the day after writing your essay to go back and look over your essay. You'll notice things you didn't see after a late night session of tapping away at the keyboard. If you can waste the paper print it out too. Check the margins and make sure they don't look funky. Read it aloud. Words that don't flow will jump off the page at you when spoken versus in your head.
**give it to somebody you don't know or you trust to be critical of you... but don't get butthurt! You want the best grade possible so it shouldn't matter how bad your comma placement is so long as someone catches it before the professor does.
**we all know MLA...APA... or whatever format sucks but make sure you do it right. Why get marked down for format? Especially for citations? Find a computer tech savvy person (cough cough school computer lab cough), ask the student worker there and have them help you out. Quite often a teacher is overseeing the student worker there and will help you if the student worker cannot. It's in their job description.
**don't leave it last minute unless you are absolutely sure that is how you excel at writing. Don't lie to yourself if this is not your personality type. It's not worth the stress nor the caffeine jitters of a late nighter. Plus you can't use most of the aforementioned tips!
AKA I tell you about Teratomas and you hate me because of it <3
First of all, some etymology! A word ending with ‘oma’ is probably some sort of tumor and ‘terato’ is from the ancient Greek teras meaning monster, and in modern medicine pertaining to a birth defect (which. Yikes. Nice to know what old time-y doctors really think, huh?). Despite the name, they aren’t necessarily a from-birth thing, and they aren’t even cancer*! They don’t too rough, right? Well. That's because I haven’t told you about the teeth.
(*they can, in fact, be cancer. but very rarely, i promise!)
TW: Body horror, medical imagery under the read-more.
(Image owned by the Maude Abbott Medical Museum of McGill University)
So, if you don’t have a set of ovaries and for aren’t freshly born, you don’t need to worry as much about the teeth, because the type of teratomas I’m talking about are ‘mature cystic teratomas’ (also called grade 0 teratomas). These are the most common and the least likely to cause you physical harm, but highly likely to feature in your nightmares <3.
These ovarian teratomas occur when an egg decides it wants to be something cooler than an egg and doesn’t want to wait for sperm, or even to leave the ovarian follicle it was chilling in. This results in some spontaneous parthenogenetic development. Sadly, sperm is a pretty important ingredient in this whole shebang, at least in humans, so a teratoma is not a fetus, viable or not. Even more sadly, the teratoma does not care about this, and starts to develop anyway.
Fun fact that wasn’t really relevant before this - you develop out of 3 different ‘germ cell layers’ as a fetus, the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. The mesoderm makes stuff like blood, muscles and bone while the endoderm makes stuff like the lining of your GI tract or your lungs. Ovarian teratomas are made up of ectoderm-derived tissue - like hair, skin, nerves, etc.
But, you cry, the teeth???? Well my friend - teeth are not bones. Teeth are skin**. Ergo - teeth and hair in your ovaries.
(**this is a wild oversimplification, but you get my point, right?)
The worst part, at least for me, is the fact we don’t really know why they go rogue sometimes? Because of that, we don’t know how to avoid them! Very upsetting. Just another example of the fact we seem to know how literal stars work much better than we understand the human body. A true carnival of horrors, but, admittedly, one I’m pretty glad I have!
