birdfrenchforbird

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Using the CMYK colour model

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hot linguistic take on Taako’s speech

I started looking into this after reading several fics featuring Taako where his speaking voice was…kind of jarring to me? Mainly in the usage of vocatives. Taako uses vocatives (my dude, homie, darling etc) but he uses them in particular ways, and they’re often very overused when people write dialogue for Taako. 

Anyway, as I started researching this, it felt a little…mean-spirited? so I stopped lol. but the more I thought about it, the more I was interested in these particular quirks of Taako’s speech and how they add to his character. A bunch of you seemed interested in it too. So here I present the essay nobody asked for but some wanted after I mentioned it: Hot Linguistic Take on Taako’s Speech! Under a readmore cuz it got LONG, y’all. Buckle up.

Keep reading

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3d printed start gate

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Are you kidding me right now

amaury guichon

#he made a fucking choo choo train

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I'm writing a scene where character A gets ambushed by an assassin. A gets injured and starts bleeding out. B swoops in to save them in the nick of time, but A starts fading in and out of consciousness. B transports A using a horse-drawn carriage (setting is 1890's London, so no cars) to a safe place for medical attention. Would the carriage be safe enough for transportation or make things worse? Also, any ideas where the wound could plausibly be located on A? (Stab/cut, no guns.)

Okay, so this is a good news/bad news situation.

The good news is that blood loss is really easy to understand. If someone pokes a hole in you, and you start leaking, you'll generally keep leaking at a pretty consistent rate until you manage to stop the leak, or until you start getting additional holes poked in you.

Now, joking aside, moving around, and staying active can accelerate bleed out. Especially if you're engaging in activity that keeps your heart rate up. For example: Running, or fighting. But, normally, you're going to keep losing blood at a fairly consistent rate. (Now, it's worth noting, as you lose blood, your body will actually increase your heart rate to keep oxygen going to your brain. This means that the rate of loss isn't completely consistent. You'll also start hyperventilating.)

The fun part about blood loss is it can actually turn into a math problem. If you know the volume lost per interval, you can calculate roughly how long it will take to die. Just take 2,000, then divide that by the blood lost in milliliters per interval (so, for example, minutes), and then you will know how many minutes your character has before they bleed to death. (Technically you can go over that two liters lost a little bit. (In sloppy napkin math, this means that you'll slightly overestimate how long the character will last.)

Here's the problem.

Hypovolemic shock has four recognized stages. These stages are bracketed by how much blood you've lost. Stage one is up to 15%, Stage two is 15-30%, Stage 3 is 30-40%, and Stage 4 is 40% or more. You might know that the human body has roughly five liters of blood in it, and if you were paying attention you'll notice that two liters is 40% of five liters.

As a quick aside, Stage 1's only symptom is that you'll be a little paler than usual. Otherwise you're basically fine (even if you don't feel particularly great.) To put this in context, you can (almost) lose a liquor bottle's worth of blood without serious side effects.

Once you hit stage 2 and 3, you'll see some mental issues. Anxiety and restlessness at Stage 2, confusion and impaired reasoning at stage 3.

Loss of consciousness (and comas) are symptoms of stage 4 blood loss.

This is the bad news. If you are losing consciousness from loss of blood, you have already lost so much blood that your body (and possibly your brain) are already dying. Humans can lose a frightening amount of blood before it incapacitates them. And, that fun little math problem earlier, the time to death that you're calculating, is also the time to loss of consciousness, because there's a tiny margin between, you bled to the point that you're drifting in and out of consciousness, and, you have bled to death.

There's still some hope here, but it's not great. First aid for hypovolemic shock is to stop the bleeding. It kinda makes sense, because if you don't, they'll bleed to death and after that, it won't really matter. That means, if you're swooping in to the rescue, the first thing you need to do is stop the bleeding, as best you can. When you're already looking at someone in stage 3 or 4, you're not going to stop it in the field, and the best you can do is buy time. But that is a critical step.

This leads to a really important question. How long did it take your character to lose two liters of blood?

Because, if they lost that much blood duringthe fight (which is, actually possible with some arterial hits), there is no medical science that would keep them alive long enough to get them to a surgeon. Not in 1890, and even in 2024 it'd be touch and go with modern emergency trauma packs.

This is a mortal wound.

Now, if you slow it down, and they're bleeding out over the course of the ride, that's entirely feasible. You'll probably want to read up on the exact stages of hypovolemic shock, keep in mind that the stages do transition from one into the next. And, keep in mind that, “slipping in and out of consciousness,” is basically the end. At that point they're about to die. Immediate surgical attention could still save their life, but they need a hospital. This is beyond the scope of what a back alley clinic could reasonably deal with.

I know I didn't address it earlier, but, “where,” could be pretty much wherever. So long as it didn't sever an artery, because at that point they would be dead. Arterial nicks could result in serious bleeding over time. Really, any serious, persistent blood loss that refuses to clot could create a situation like this. Deep tissue penetration, particularly when it damages internal organs, can be pretty nasty, and surprisingly hard to stop a bleed. If someone is hemorrhaging internally, that's going to require surgical attention to keep them alive, and any effort to stop the bleed will really be wasted effort (because they'll continue bleeding into the chest cavity), though, unless your characters have a pretty solid grasp of anatomy, they're unlikely to know that.

The real issue here, from a practical application, is just the, “swooping in at the last minute.” If you're really coming in at the last minute, you've got a minute to make peace with their death, and move on. If you get there sooner, you have more of a scene. You have more options to spool out the drama, and subvert expectations.

Consider, alternately: Your character comes in to disrupt the assassin, and the pair make their escape. While escaping, the character who's been injured discovers they're bleeding. Leading their rescuer to realize that the situation is much worse than they initially thought, and having to change route to a hospital, while the injured character starts to become less coherent.

In this alternative, you can carefully track how quickly the character is bleeding out, so that they're getting into the hospital right around the time it's starting to become touch and go. With a real possibility that they'll die, either before or during surgery. (Also, with added stress that now your character needs to keep them safe in a public space, while that assassin is still on the loose, and they can't move the injured character to someplace more secure.)

So, you've got options, and now you've got a math problem you can play with to figure out how quickly your characters will expire after you poke new holes in them.

-Starke

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[birdfrenchforbird]

What’s up late night folks? Here’s an eerie shot I took down a pitch black road in the middle of the night

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i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.

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I’m reading a family lore book (on my family!) that contains a lot of information about my relatives up to my 4th great grandparents, and it’s like a fucking reality TV show. 

My 3rd great-grandfather married a woman that was FAR too good for him (causing problems in her family), and then proceeded to ‘behave poorly’ and get himself turfed out of home one night by his daughter and wife. 

The chronolographers are like ‘we never found out the exact reason’ but like. Guys. What are your thoughts on these comments?

“Patrick by all accounts had a lot of friends - all men. Of all his faults, Patrick was hardly ever seen even talking to a woman other than his wife.”

“We suspect Patrick may have been an alcoholic, as he spent most of the evening in the company of his many close friends at the local pub.” ”Rebecca thought they were a bad influence on him.”

“One night when Patrick came home from the pub, there was an awful row and he was ordered to leave the house.”

“Patrick moved in with two of his friends after being thrown out by his family. They were very polite gentleman. I thought it very proper that a household of bachelors should take in Patrick.”

“The household were thick as thieves and very close by all accounts. The other two men never married, which was a shame and a loss for all the single young women in Adelaide.”

“After Patrick’s death, as the family had disowned Patrick, only two of his children attended his burial. They were surprised to report two very well-dressed men who were strangers also attended. They had assumed the two were policemen, but the men wept as if they were Patrick’s family. Neither of them would make eye-contact with the children, and left in a terrible rush straight after the burial. Patrick’s children found that very rude and couldn’t understand why the men would behave so.”

 Okay so I’ve just discovered my 3rd great-grandfather was a poly gay man who got thrown out by his family and now I need to find his grave and pay homage to him as an Elder Gay Dooland. 

[birdfrenchforbird]

Diary of a Wimpy Kid dir. Thor Freudenthal

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what if i *remembers that making suicide jokes is not conducive with my goal of improving the wellbeing of myself and everyone around me* transform into an oyster

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i have a story to tell and it can only be told in greentext format

>be me

>13 years old in a psych ward for the first time

>my bathroom is shitty and small but the only place in my room where i have any privacy

>try to calm myself down post-anxiety attack by hiding in the bathroom

>curl up underneath the sink

>slowly calm down after anxiety attack

>remember that earlier i caught a glimpse of some scribbles and drawings underneath the sink

>wonder what it looks like

>turn around to see

>its “HoNk” “:0)” “hOnKhOnKhOnK” “mOtHeRfUcKeR” “:0) :0) :0)” written in purple crayola marker

>immediately go back into an anxiety attack

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working on something.

guess who?

#i know who >:)

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Every time someone well-meaning suggests I see a chiropractor for my migraines, I have this little moment of "ah, you're new here. You weren't here prior to 2018 when a chiropractor very gently adjusted my neck for my migraines, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI because the ensuing symptoms were indicative of a brain bleed."

It wasn't a brain bleed. The muscles on the entire right side of my neck "just" tore (Spoiler there is nothing "just" about that kind of traumatic injury. I am still in physical rehab for it), and I couldn't hold my head up, see straight, walk or do any of the things I'd previously taken for granted until several weeks later when the area finally started to heal.

This was before I knew I had Ehlers Danlos, btw. But this is true even for people who don't have a connective tissue disorder: Don't let chiropractors touch your neck.

There are a lot of vital nerves and blood vessels there, and even gentle adjustments of the area can have life-threatening consequences.

I know chiropractic care can be pain relieving--I still get it for my lower back and hips because I work with a chiropractor who knows about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and sometimes my hips need to be popped back in at short notice, and it's easier to hop walk in and see her than wait for physical therapy--but it is a short-term relief that doesn't actually correct why something is happening.

If you can afford it, physical therapy will likely help more in the long term. I know not everyone can afford it, and that's why chiropractors have such a booming trade in the US, but please, I'm begging you, don't get your neck adjusted.

The spinal cord specialist I saw after my injury told me the number one reason he used to see people for traumatic brain injuries was car wrecks, followed by other major roadside injuries. He said those numbers were still the highest, but after that, the majority of his patients were survivors of chiropractic injury.

Do Not Get Your Neck Adjusted.

It's been over 5 years, and I still can't move my neck properly on my right side. I still struggle to eat and drink because my muscles will randomly seize up. It feels like my skull no longer fits on top of my spine because of the scar tissue. Please. I just want people to be safe.

And if you are a chiropractor reading this and thinking, "Well, I've never injured anyone, skill issue." No. You Have Gotten Lucky. Rethink how you apply your trade. Please, you can still help people while recommending safer options for specific body parts. Learn to do pressure point release and acupressure. Teach patients how to stretch and relax the area safely. Just fucking stop cracking people's necks like pop rock candy.

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I haven’t talked much about it and won’t because I don’t care to air this pain out so publicly, but long covid and my subsequent dysautonomia have forced me to upend my entire career, my hobbies, my housing, and my life.

I am not physically who I was just two years ago. I look at the work I did in Alaska in amazement of what my body could do so recently and cannot anymore.

And I’m lucky in many ways, because I could still be far worse.

Treatment is difficult—sometimes impossible—to access, and there is so much we still don’t know that the prognosis is vague at best.

The worst part is that not only is recovery not guaranteed, but I could recover and then simply catch Covid again and develop the same issues.

Or I might not. I might recover easily and happily like others have. The point is that it’s a total crapshoot.

I don’t have much else to say. I could warn everyone to continue masking and other precautions—or to start again if you stopped—but the information is out there and everyone is making their own choices.

I just want to remind y’all that we are, globally, experiencing a mass-disabling event that will effect us for generations, and it’s happening to people all around you, whether they talk about it or not, whether you notice it or not. Don’t leave us behind.

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