what is THE worst thing you've ever drank. all liquids acceptable. please tell me what it was, bonus points for why

Hey whoa hi. Hello. I am looking directly into your ear canal. What do you mean you drank a tube of virus concentrate.

So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

(for science.)

You have a fitting blog title

this post is getting 50k easy

I've had fairly severe back pain for the last few days. My back hurts most of the time, but lately it really hurts, and it is literally maddening.

Like, I realize that there's nothing I can say that will help you bridge the empathy divide between us. I realize that, as Elaine Scarry wrote, "To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt."

But holy shit when you are really hurting, it is hard to really be anything else. The pain consumes both body and self. The answer to how are you is in pain, and the answer to what do you want to do today is have less pain, and the answer to what are your plans for the weekend is to lie supine in a vain attempt to relieve the pain.

Relief, which is a lovely word, becomes more and more the only thing I want. I don't want to be successful or win the lottery or have a million people read my new book; I only want relief. I want to be returned to the state that the rest of the world appears to be in, a world where you can care about this and about that instead of being forced only to care about the pain.

This is the part of the post where I say, "But at least I am learning lots of important lessons from the pain" or whatever, but no. I am learning nothing from it. It is so boring and monotonous and loud and all-encompassing. I give back pain one star.

Tee hee

I’m almost done with something Ranboo related that has been in the works for a lil bit (it’s the reason I’ve been not as active as I’d hoped the last lil bit) I am excited for it to be DONE

Instantly woke up to a gas leak give me a BREAKKKKK

Hey if you’re schizophrenic/psychotic I just want you to know that you’re a wonderful person and that you deserve so much better than the demonization, marginalization and stigmatization you face in this society.

Please consider reblogging this/other positivity posts for schizophrenic/psychotic people every once in a while. If you have more than 100 followers, odds are that a couple of them experiences psychosis and that they rarely see positivity posts for people with their symptoms.

Saw this on Twitter and I obligatory need to share it

So she actually said that she does not see the appeal in Senshi at all and that the panty shots weren't intended to be horny - she just has a neighbor who looks kind of like him and does laundry in his underwear. Which she finds kind of weird and offputting, and put into his character to be funny.

But that's the thing. She doesn't exaggerate or grotesqueify or alter people's bodies to fit some standard. (Except insofar as she draws different species differently, and those are exquisitely practiced to ensure they have the same diversity of appearances that humans do.) She just presents people exactly as they are, complexities and oddities and all.

It just so happens that when you present people exactly as they are, what you present will be beautiful and alluring to many. Even the things you yourself might find weird and offputting. Honestly I think it's a touching example of how you don't have to see the beauty in everyone for the beauty to be there, simple honesty is enough to let the wonder of people's humanity shine through.

#i think we should put this post next to the interview where she said she doesn't want to eat the food in the series cuz she's a picky eater#and file them both under 'you don't know an artist from their work'#and maybe you don't need to!#maybe all you need to know is that ryoko kui is Good At What She Does#idk I don't like the implication that artists (and women especially?) can only create from personal life and feelings#some people have imagination and craft#kind of a tangent but. there you go.

no but you're very correct

okay let's actually do this properly

My coworker asked me a question about Queer culture the other day and it was a really good question but I couldn’t think of a polite way to tell them that they didn’t have the foundational knowledge required to support full comprehension of the answer

Coworker: So why do some people say they’re bisexual and other people say they’re pansexual? They sound like the same thing

Me: Do you want the real answer or the answer that will make sense to you

Coworker: I guess the real answer?

Me: Do you have three hours and a notepad

Coworker: No

Me: The flags are different

For context,

Torment Nexus : "an idea that is so bad and dangerous in theory and practice that its indistinguishable from capitalist satire".

Luddite event : After the creation of textile machines (which produced fabric at a lower quality but faster rate while being dangerous to operate), textile mills fired a huge amount of their workforce leading to the remaining workers becoming overworked. A Luddite event thus in this context is "an innovation that is exaggerated to excuse mistreatment of the workforce".

Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…

I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!

What do you mean you don’t need an invite anymore???

this is my contribution to the deltarune fandom and why i shouldnt be allowed to wake up at 5am

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

You are an adventurer in a generic fantasy world and you use this weapon!

oh so

“It’s easy to assume”: someone’s misconception is about to be amiably corrected

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

“It’s comforting to assume”: someone’s assumption is going to be read for filth

i go to the shop and I ask if they have any raspberries. they say no, they used to sell raspberries, but they haven't had any in stock in the last 15 years. I ask if there's somewhere else I can go to buy raspberries. They say no, with confidence and pride, they're the only shop around who has ever sold or will ever sell raspberries. Other shops might sell other fruit, sure, but they have a monopoly on all raspberries forever. I ask if they're possibly planning on them selling them again in future? they say they can't tell me that.

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

someone comes up behind us. It's the shop manager, President of Nintendo Shuntaro Furukawa. he hatefully throws a bob-omb that blows up and kills both of us instantly for stealing 200 trillion dollars worth of potential Raspberry Shop That Doesn't Do Raspberries Anymore profits that they weren't making and then he turns around to the camera with a big thumbs up and says don't do piracy or something ok please

a minor headcanon that I will die defending is that reigen initially assumed that mob’s supposed “psychic powers” were just how he rationalized his autism to himself. like here’s an obviously autistic kid, one reigen clocks immediately because he’s, well, reigen, and he’s talking about extra sensory perception and having powers he can’t control, powers that are scary. obviously, he assumes, this is something the kid picked up from his parents, a way for him to rationalize his alienation from other children— that no, you’re not “different”, you’re special (not even going into the parents who think their autistic children are like, aliens) and the other kids can see that you’re special and so they treat you like you’re weird and creepy and they don’t invite you to play and they whisper behind your back but it’s fine, because one day they’ll see how special you really are. and adult autistic reigen arataka, who was also probably-definitely bullied as a child, decides to nip that thought in the bud and gives the whole spiel, that no, “psychic powers” (autism) don’t make you special, and yes, they do make you different, and that’s fine because everyone’s different, and at the end of the day you have agency and you get to decide the kind of person you’ll be, so choose to be a kind one, and he sees this kid hanging off his every word as he tells him the kind of stuff he wishes someone had told him when he was so little and alone, and he mentally pats himself on the back and hypes himself up for another cigarette.

and then the kid makes a teacup float in front of him and he’s like oh. damn. can you kill ghosts

Tell the truth.

Why are y'all single?