#and ignoring literal scientific sources anyways

[savefrog]

The Final Boss of Paleontology

Making my own post to rant about the saltiest petty little bitch to ever evolve, SIR RICHARD FUCKING OWEN. This man changed science forever, nerfed the public perception of dinosaurs due to his own pettiness, feuded VICIOUSLY with Charles Darwin, disagreed with theories JUST FOR PETTY DRAMA and literally kept the bones of his enemies.

To start Richard Owen was a renowned genius. He was incredibly skilled at identifying bones and comparative anatomy. He even advocated for museums to be more accessible to the public so British citizens could learn!  And most famously he coined the term “Dinosaur”.

HE WAS ALSO A CARTOONISHLY NASTY BASTARD.

Look at this Ebenezer Scrooge motherfucker

He was SO unbelievably pretentious. Whenever he was proven wrong in anything, Owen refused to acknowledge it, either ignoring it or stubbornly making the same mistakes again.  According to the Natural History Museum, when Richard Owen was presenting his idea that Dinosaurs were their own unique group, “His initial speech to the British Association...allegedly lasted two hours.“ More on his pretentiousness later though.

---------

"A pity a man so talented should be so dastardly and envious" - Gideon Mantell

I’m gonna be honest, I’m not even sure how Owen’s hatred of Mantell started. I see a lot of sources say it was because of religious tension but Owen’s religious position fluctuated and seems to be misinterpreted a lot (This will be discussed later). There seemed to be a lot of scientific debate between them, including this debacle that even wikipedia describes as “Highly Confusing”.

ANYWAY. Gideon Mantell with his wife Mary Ann were the first to publish studies on dinosaur remains and he named the animal whose teeth they found “Iguanodon”. Except, guess that’s not right anymore because Richard FUCKING Owen decided to take credit for the discovery and say that he and his bud were the ones to find Iguanodon. Owen allegedly also used his influence to try and prevent Mantell from getting recognition????

And get this, Mantell had named a dinosaur Hylaeosaurus oweni  to honour Owen!!!????!??! UNGRATEFUL BITCH! The man named a dinosaur after you and you do this??

The Iguanodon drama continued. The world’s first dinosaur sculptures, The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, were built under the advisory of Owen. Around this time, Mantell had made observations that Iguanodon had much more slender forearms and was likely bipedal. He even had pretty advanced views on Dinosaurs having fast metabolisms and being active animals. Owen chose to firmly ignore Mantell’s discovery here and had the Crystal Palace Iguanodons built to be the heavy, lumbering beasts that would fuel the public’s perception of dinosaurs as slow, awkward and inferior for years.

Also he famously held a Dinner Party INSIDE one of the Iguanodons

Gideon Mantell’s life tragically fell to pieces. He had a carriage accident and it gave him an awful spinal injury, making him develop severe scoliosis. His wife left him. He ran low on money. He took opioids for the spinal pain. Yet he still worked on his paleontological discoveries. And before the Iguanodons that represented HIS discovery were unveiled at the Crystal Palace gardens, he died of an overdose.

And throughout this Richard Owen TOOK ADVANTAGE of Mantell’s disability to try and erase him entirely. He apparently even renamed dinosaur species that Gideon Mantell already named ...the PETTIEST bitch move in recorded history.  (I believe my sources are referring to that “Highly Confusing” debacle I mentioned earlier)

And upon Mantell’s death Owen SWOOPED IN like a vulture for one last way to SPITE this poor man. Owen obtained a portion of Mantell’s fused spine and PRESERVED IT as a SPECIMEN in his FUCKING MUSEUM. and labelled it as a specimen with “Deformity to the highest degree” WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!! WAS THIS EVEN LEGAL? WHAT THE FUCK. This single absurd fact alone fueled my morbidly curious obsession with Sir Richard Owens.

The many Beefs of Owen don’t end there. This is an entire category on his wikipedia page:

"No one fact tells so strongly against Owen...as that he has never reared one pupil or follower." - Charles Darwin

Owen was known for being an aggressive creationist and was said to be DEEPLY anti-evolution because of this. This is not entirely true. He was just deeply anti-Darwinian because he hated Darwin’s guts. Richard Owen actually had his own theory that was extremely similar to evolution! He was just SO BAD at explaining it because he spoke SO PRETENTIOUSLY that no one had any fucking clue what he was talking about. Owen agreed with Evolution, wrote to Darwin favorably about it but was Big Mad that Darwin didn’t credit him; meanwhile Darwin literally thought Owen was vehemently against the theory because of how unclear he was!!!

Owen even wrote ANON HATE about the Origin of Species. Like, anonymously published a review saying shit like “it sucked, it was anti-creationism and also didn’t do a good enough job crediting the great and amazing Sir Richard Owen who did this all first.” Ironically, this review was discovered to be his doing because it was ALSO written so pretentiously. Like, everyone knew right away LMAO.

Really, it seems like Owen really did hold Evolutionary beliefs...but put up a stink JUST FOR DRAMA!!!! To quote The Friends of Darwin website “Owen’s ongoing battles with Huxley may well have caused him to appear more anti-evolutionary than he actually was.“ (Huxley was one of Darwin’s greatest allies and also had his own intense beef with Owen).

And remember how he took credit for Gideon Mantell’s Iguanodon discovery? Well, he did that a lot. And finally he got his comeuppance. He got an award for  a paper he wrote on Belemnites and didn’t credit the guy who discovered them, and the resulting shitshow got him kicked off  the councils of the Zoological Society and the Royal Society.

Bringing this to a close, I want to state that I am not an expert in history and I could’ve gotten facts wrong. However, I tried to track down reliable sources, and tried my best to avoid claims that didn’t seem substantiated (Like one article I found that claimed Owen drove Mantell to suicide, even that article itself didn’t have any evidence to suggest Mantell’s death was not an accidental overdose.) Some of the facts are also deeply contested with no clear answer (Like Owen’s own real position on evolution, whether the dinner party inside the Iguanodon even happened (A SOURCE ABOUT THAT THO) and even whether or not Mantell’s wife discovered the Iguanodon teeth (Though like. Of sources I found saying “Mantell later confessed his wife wasn’t there” as immutable proof...were AFTER she left him so like?? Sounds like he ALSO could’ve been trying to distance himself from his ex wife?)

Here’s some of my sources:

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html

http://friendsofdarwin.com/articles/owen/

https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letters/darwins-life-letters/darwin-letters-1860-answering-critics#

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/richard-owen-vs-textbook-cardboard/

https://www.strangescience.net/mantell.htm

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/431867/view/1852-gideon-mantell-s-fused-spine

Anyway, I will end this with my favorite quote from Charles Darwin:

#dullblogging #long post #i had stuff to do tonight and instead wrote a rant about a nasty paleontologist

[sweetenby]

If you are reading up on side effects for medical procedures for the love of god always, always look for peer reviewed sources from legitimate publications (and pay attention to sample size!) and read morr than the abstract if you can.

I've been looking at long term effects of hysterectomies and I keep seeing article after article yelling and gashing their teeth about how "hysterectomies actually have all these long term side effects and doctors are just IGNORING this. And look this study found that women who had hysterectomies had a severe increase in cardiovascular issues!!"

Okay I have a lot of questions and I don't think I have enough information let's read this study that they link as a source for this claim. (Study link x) Here's the paragraph everyone seems to be quoting

Wow that sounds pretty b- wait a second. It looks like there's a sentence that follows the bit everyone is quoting! Let's just erase that bit that I totally didn't cover up on purpose

"After adjustment for demographic variables and CVD risk factors, the effect was reduced and nonsignificant."

Reduced and nonsignificant you say?? And what's this? There is a paragraph directly after that in the abstract? (Bc of course all these people are only quoting the abstract)

That seems uh pretty important information to just completely not mention. Again this study was linked in the blog post by a (cis male) doctor saying that hysterectomies were bad for your long term health. They will put the study that directly contradicts what they say as a source to make them seem more credible because they know no one will click it.

I have seen mutliple top page Google search websites (mayoclinic, webMD) pull different studies with a much much much smaller sample size that literally say at the very bottom of their article "take this finding with a grain of salt other risk factors weren't considered" yet in the first part still said "women who got hysterectomies were more likely to have high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and heart issues probably because of the hysterectomy". Again they don't expect you to read the whole thing they put the part they want to say first and leave the real point until the end.

I understand that reading scientific papers can be extremely confusing and daunting. Honestly if you're someone who wants more information but is likely to back out when you see a bunch of numbers and terms thrown at you, skip reading the findings/methods section. I know that seems like the most important part but honestly that's the part you're least likely to understand if you don't have a statistic background. Look at the discussion and conclusions section of a paper. Those are the real juicy part of a paper anyway. Obviously the full paper is important don't kill me people who write papers for a living. It's hard to understand the numbers when you don't know what they mean. The later bits of the paper are the parts where they literally tell you what the numbers mean and why they are important. It's very efficient and saves you from overloading your head with so many numbers you forget how to read.

Most importantly be incredibly wary of someone using a single study to make wide sweeping statements about a medical procedures being safe or dangerous. All of the studies I looked at mention that the population used to gather the data isn't random and doesn't completely match real world populations. It's practically impossible to get a truly randomized sample size. For example if you're running a normal and ethical study you can't include people who say no and you probably won't include people who are unable to give informed consent. Those are two groups who by default will not be included in studies. But there's more parts to consider- where are they finding people for the study? Are they recruiting from doctors offices? By default people going to the doctor are more likely to have a medical issue, that influences data. Are they recruiting in an area with high college education rates? With low income? An area where coincidentally there's a not insignificant number of people who have some shared trait that sets them apart from the general population? These are just basic issues with any source of data gathering. This is why big overviews that combine findings from mutliple papers have more weight. But even reviews will run into issues, it's a better system not a perfect one.

Conclusion:

There are so many ways to misuse data from a study. You might not catch all the tricky sneaky ways, but it astounds me how many pop science blog posts and major media outlets will just link to a study that just says the exact opposite of what they're saying. Science is full of maybes, we're not sure yets, and we need way more funding to actually look into this please don't quote is paper thats a request for funding as actual scientific "proof" of something. The world we live in is infinitely complex in ways we don't even know how to account for. Try and examine claims that want you to think a single study with a small sample size will overturn all of medical knowledge and doctors just don't want you to know this.

#hysterectomy #medical #long post

[gre7n]

Family

A local Imam said that God created all humans beginning with Adam and Eve and, therefore, all people are brothers and sisters. How do you respond to this view? Do you think it is helpful or good? If so, why? If not, why not?

(paragraph breaks are semi random btw, i had to do it for tumblr formatting and i didnt feel like trying to make them make sense xd)

When considering the question of this viewpoint of Adam and Eve, I think it is useful to break it down into the premise and conclusion. On one hand you have the premise: Adam and Eve are the first humans. This is an extremely bold claim from a scientific standpoint if your only idea was to claim that a man named Adam and a woman named Eve existed and that these events occurred. In terms of how knowledge is sorted in our modern times with thousands of years of experience, there’s simply not enough to give any hint of truth or relevance of these claims, and the discussions end up being based on emotional convictions rather than the hard scientific truth that is required for these very specific claims being made.

That being said, there does appear to be parallels to the overarching concepts of the theory of evolution. It can be said that, indeed, not just every human, but every animal and bacteria and fungi and species known to exist all comes from the same “source”. At some point a soup of primordial molecules started to replicate themselves and started to increase in complexity naturally and became the gateway point for the rest of our current understanding of existence to begin. This is when we reach the conclusion: all people are brothers and sisters. Now, in the literal sense, this appears to be true. But only understanding this idea through scientific and almost nihilistic means reduces the scope and weight of the idea to its most minute points. In functioning families, there is an acknowledgement that everyone is similar in an almost karmic sense that they all seem to exist in similar socioeconomic statuses, cultural interactions, literally born of the same people who transfer their ideals (or lack thereof) down. There is an acknowledgement that even if things aren’t perfect, you all at least understand each other. How could you not? You all endure hardships together, financial, physical, etc. You don’t have to speak a word in the best cases (the truth rests so clearly), but there is no shame in exclaiming out what is wrong either. This knowledge allows those inside the family to be the best suited to actually point out flaws and problems in each other.

But what happens when the bonds in a family break down? When you see the flaws, but have no ways to express what they are to those around you? What happens when those flaws actively make your life a living hell? Tortured physically, mentally, you name it. Kind of awkward to claim that decades of abuse was all for nothing, that at any point someone could choose to stop. At its best family is loving, but when ignored just like every other emotional problem, it leads to limitless pain. Entire philosophical views of the world built on pain and agony at the most personal level. All of these things are painful to talk about on a personal level, especially for those in the middle of said crises (which some last for decades and never end until death, but those problems can be transferred generationally anyway). We never truly escape it. This is the emotional baggage associated with family in our modern world, and especially in America. So, claiming that every person on this earth, every animal, every cell, perhaps even every atom is family means you have to contend with these exact thoughts and your relationship to everything. It's not just a claim but a way to engage with the world. It paints your view of everything. If you aren’t ready to deal with the consequences of being cosmically intertwined with every being we’ve ever known or could potentially even effect in any way through the butterfly effect, there is a great deal of pain that is waiting to be realized by an individual that has been placed upon others by no reason other than true ignorance. And really, what actually separates you and me? My DNA matches 98.8% of a chimpanzee. Imagine how much I share with you.

And how much we let less than 1% difference pollute our perceptions! There is a cosmic exclamation that when I feel pain, others can too. And it's just as real for them as it is for me. Our minds are extremely complex, and in that complexity, we can get wrapped up in stories. Stories of who we are as people, who the first humans were, which religion we follow of the ten options. But ultimately our true identities are so more magnificent than the one person we are. In just the same way you can look up and see that you are a part of the human family, you can look down and see that the billions of cells and bacteria make up the family that is you. They work together and allow something much greater than any one part to live its complex and independent life. Living proof that collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive. Remember, bacteria and cells would eat each other in a completely hostile world. That is until one day a cell took another cell in, and instead of breaking it down, let it live there. It turned out this cell actually was quite good at converting food into energy, so much so that it was more efficient to let it live inside itself and allow it to replicate and exist together. The concept we call family is just the human interpretation of a process that has been going on for billions of years, but ultimately it's the same story. A country is its own organism, its own family. How long until we can exist as one? As one family, as one people. At the end of the day, which religion you follow, which version of history you tell, or what name you call the beauty of truth doesn’t matter. What matters is that you see life for what it is and love indiscriminately. That you look every person in the eye and see every part of yourself that exists inside of them. There is no ignoring the world we live in. Every experience, every thought, it all points here. Stories are what we tell each other to teach valuable lessons. No one is watching Star Wars and thinking “I can’t believe this all actually happened”. You walk away with a feeling that family can overcome even galactic sized evil forces. Why did the story of Luke and Darth Vader resonate so strongly with an entire world? It's just as religious a story as many actual religions tell. So, is it good? The answer is yes, if what is important is kept as the main focus, and if we allow new stories to be told that capture the beauty of the truth in even more detail and simplicity. We should pray for the day that we can join the entire world with one simple story. Easy to tell, easy to feel. But if it hasn’t yet with one story, we can no longer force it to. There will have to be a new story, inspired by those of the past, not throwing them away, but simply understanding them. Taking what worked, throwing away what didn’t. What else do we do with our thousands of years of history other than learn and grow? So long as there are problems, our work is not over. Never will we be able to be complacent in that which we tell ourselves until that day. Will that day ever truly come? Probably not, but at least in the meantime we can make things tangibly better. Better is all we can strive for.

[kaijutegu]

I just saw a post on Facebook of a local taxidermist restoring a mount from the Field Museum. In the description of this mount, she said “Although I do not know its origin, based on how it was mounted originally id say its safe to say this animal died of natural causes.” And that got me thinking, because it’s a leopard. It absolutely did not die of natural causes. The Field Museum, like literally every other big natural history museum, commissioned all kinds of hunts in the 1900s-1930s where animals from across the globe were hunted en-masse. That’s how we got scientific specimens. It’s barbaric by today’s standards, but it was a different era back then and we didn’t have the same standards. This isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.

And there’s no way in hell she doesn’t know this, because she used to be a scientific illustrator at the museum. The Field makes it very clear where these animals came from. They have public signage about it, and it’s even more clear down in collections.

It kinda got me thinking again about my feelings re: ethics in the natural history and vulture culture community. We seem to really like it when we can justify the death of an animal as “ethical.” “It was roadkill.” “It died of natural causes.” “Ethically collected.” “Ethically sourced.” Ethics has become SUCH a buzzword, and it’s... I dunno. It kinda feels like there’s a part of the community that doesn’t want taxidermy to be as conflicting as it is, like they want it to be a feel-good hobby that doesn’t center around the fact that something did have to die to make the art you’re collecting.

To me, that’s kind of the beauty of it, looking at death and repurposing what’s left over.

What does ethical taxidermy mean? Does it mean the animal didn’t experience pain? If that’s the case, then you can’t call roadkill ethical. Does it mean the animal’s death was inevitable, and that it would have died anyways and you’re just scavenging the parts? Does it mean that the animal suffered minimally throughout its life? Does it mean simply that taxidermy wasn’t the end goal of the animal’s death and that its death, whether that was at human hands or natural causes, had a different purpose in mind?

There’s a sister train of thought to this as well. Natural history museums- I’m talking the old ones established in the 1800s-1900s- were colonialist endeavours. In many ways they existed to show off the natural resources of a nation’s colonies and territories. There was a lot of resource extraction for these museums- white scientists would go places, shoot as much wildlife as they could, harvest as many native plants as they could, and then come home to exhibit the stuff. It wasn’t so outwardly egregious as museums that were essentially designed as colonial treasure houses (like the British Museum), but it presented a very... strange way of looking at environments, because a lot of these natural history museums ignored the people who were there. And that meant creating this idealized (primarily African) landscape that was just big game as far as the eye could see, a playground for rich white hunters. When people were involved, they were... basically treated like a different sort of animal, something to be gawked at rather than understood. It was wildly dehumanizing, and it’s a legacy that natural history museums are still grappling with today.

To say that a leopard- one of the African “Big 5” game animals- in a vintage museum collection died a natural death is disingenuous at best and intentionally misleading at worst. I really wonder what she was thinking when she made multiple posts (that nobody has commented on) about how she assumes this animal died naturally.

#vulture culture #natural history #museum studies #taxidermy

[melias-cimitiere]

Careful with Interpretations

All of us walk about with our own mental operating system; this OS is not the same for all, surprisingly enough. You may already be aware of this when you’re trying to speak to someone, and they come across with a totally different interpretation of events. And I’m not talking about conspiracy theories here. Much more mundane things, explained away differently due to different educational, sociocultural backgrounds. Take for example someone trained as a sociologist, or psychologist. They see the world through “borrowed lenses” of those institutions that trained them, and over time, they make them their own.

So far, there’s no problem with that. It’s bound to happen, naturally. As long as we remember that there are multiple interpretations of these same events, it’s all good. Remember how in the past, medical doctors and psychiatrists used their own science in a most arrogant way to determine what is a human being, almost excluding the person in the process? To them, nerves were like cables, and the body was simply a machine. Modern medicine acknowledges a more holistic approach, having enough evidence of the effect of psychology and spirituality on certain conditions. Also, advances in science have shown the nerve cells to actually move and interface with others, making extremely complex processes in the way; so much more than “cables”. With these examples in mind, we should consider other disciplines, like history or archaeology. Like physicists, these types of scientists have also fallen prey to modern tactics of trying to appeal to common sentiment and using trivial expressions to reach out to the general public. In past decades, the effort was to educate the general public, instead of trying to reach out in this way; it only creates trivializing and shallowness, making it look like bad science. I still remember a documentary saying, “black holes are simply gravity gone mad”… what?!

Anyway, back to my point. I’ve seen plenty of examples of historians and archaeologists falling for these tactics. There is a problem here; whereas most people are unaware or uninterested in black holes, superstrings etc, when it comes to history and archaeology, there is a different mindset, because they supposedly show the historical Truth, based on empirical evidence. So far so good. But we have to remember that this empirical evidence is constantly updated and reevaluated, so some of what was originally thought as canon is later proved to be wrong. Remember that even in the 80s and the 90s (not to mention earlier years), the Mayans were considered to be ignorant of the Wheel? Until they discovered a child’s toy in a tomb, which was a horse with four wheels as legs…  They then said that there were no large roads or avenues in the Mayan civilization, and they tried to explain this on the fast-growing ecosystem that suffocate any such work. However, in recent years, the major discovery by modern scientific methods of the giant Mayan metropolis, along with two large roads, and a park, enrich our understanding. Similar things happen to Yonaguni monument in Japan, or the Sphinx in Egypt… I find it preposterous to say, even in the obvious evidence of examiners, that these monuments were sculpted by natural processes (two separate documentaries from “reputable sources” are out there in youtube; one showing the Yonaguni sculpted by sea and geological mineral processes… and the other showing the Sphinx sculpted by the…wind in the desert, and later customized by the Egyptians).

Why is it so difficult to embrace the fact that some ancient civilizations were extremely advanced? Sometimes we may not have an answer; I get that. But usually, when we have no answer, we end up lessening the impact, as if we are fearful to imply something mysterious or outside ordinary definitions. Why do we have to explain away the mystery in this manner? Honest scientists have confessed not knowing something; at least, at the time. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing something; it is part of the learning process, and it’s applied to everything. There are plenty of mysteries around; let me mention just a few. 

1.       Everyone knows that ziggurats were built by Mesopotamians, right? So what is that ziggurat doing inside a lake in China? Obviously, somebody with the know-how built it, or the Mesopotamians stretched much further (or migrated) than commonly thought possible.

2.       Who built the unusual ancient city in Siberia? It bears some semblance to some temples in Indonesia… but it’s thousands of miles away.

3.       The stone avenues found near Cuban waters, and in some parts of the Eastern Coast in America… someone was building roads with stone, at a time that everyone else in surrounding places were using wood only.

4.       The mysterious city in Asia Minor, currently excavated by German archaeologists, featuring strange pillars chiseled with animals facing downwards, towards the earth (each pillar has an animal). It is rather unique and it bears no connection to the well-established civilizations in the vicinity (Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Hittites etc). It is rather inverted, almost as if it’s built to hold something…down.

5.       A plethora of Indian temples, one of which being Kailasa temple, hewn out of rock with such precision and detail that confound even modern engineers.

6.       Two alphabets, bearing a striking similarity, almost identical – but there’s a problem. One is in the Indus Valley, and the other in the Easter Island; they are literally half a planet away.

7.       The Maltese Hypogeum (underground temple) Hal Saflieni acoustics, something that has got many world specialists interested due to its particular configuration.

8.       Let’s not forget our old-time favorite, the pyramid of Cheops (and others as well). As most engineers can testify, there’s no problem building temples up to a certain height, but after certain limits have been exceeded, the entire procedure becomes untenable. Many preposterous ideas have been proposed for the construction of these giant monuments, but all of them have flaws; a ramp that would require an entire forest to be chopped down, rising higher and higher (and while doing so, extending its base more and more). Or another structure using hydraulics, to move up heavy loads that would require thick base walls like a hydroelectricity dam, equally untenable. And so on.

There are plenty of other examples, if someone actually looks out for them, and keeps an open mind. Science, like spirituality, is done best keeping an open mind.

#social interpretations #mysteries #rant #personal opinion #trivializing

[dirk-has-rabies]

Gender variance and it's link with neurodivergency

Okay so this is it going to be another long one

All quotes will be sourced with a link to the scientific journal I took it from

Okay Tumblr, let's talk gender (I know, your favorite topic) my preface on why this topic matters to me is: I'm autistic ( diagnosed moderate to severe autism) I'm nonbinary trans ( in a way that most non-autistic people don't understand and actually look down on)  and I went to college for gender study ( Mostly for intersex studies but a lot of my research was around non-binary and trans identities) I will be using the term autism as pants when I have experience with however when ADHD is part of the study I will use ND which stands for neurodivergent and yes this is going to be about xenogenders and neopronouns.

autism can affect gender the same way autism can affect literally every part of an identity. a big thing about having autism is the fact that it completely can change how you view personhood and time and object permanence and gender and literally all types of socially constructed ideas. let me also say hear that just because Society creates and enforces an idea does it mean that it doesn't exist to all people it just me that there is no nature law saying that it's real and the “rules” for these ideas can change and delete and create as time and Society evolves and changes.  gender is one of those constructs.

Now I'll take it by you reading this you know what transgender people are  (if you don't understand what a trans person is send me an ask and I'll type you up a pretty little essay lmao,  or Google it but that's a scary thought sense literally any Source or website can come up on Google including biased websites so be careful I guess LOL) anyway to be super basic trans people are anyone who doesn't identify as the gender they were assigned at Birth (yes that includes non-binary people I could do a whole nother essay about that shit how y'all keep spreading trying to separate non-binary people from the trans umbrella)  some people don't like to use the label and that is totally fine by the way.

now autistic people to view the world in a way differently than allistic (neurotypical) ppl do.  we don't take everything people teach us at 100% fact and we tend to question everything and demand proof and evidence for things before we can set it as a fact in our brains. This leads to why a lot of autistic people are atheist (although a lot of religions and this is not bashing on religious people at all I am actually a Jewish convert)  this questioning leads to a lot of social constructs being ignored or not understood At All by a lot of autistic people and personally I think that's a good thing.  allistics take everything their parents and teachers and schools teach them as fact until someone else says something and then they pick which ones to believe. autistic people study and research and learn about a topic before forming an opinion and while this may lead to them studying and believing very biased material and spitting it out as fact it can also lead them to try and Discover it is real by themselves.

because of this autistic people are more question their gender or not fall in a binary way at all as the concept of gender makes no sense to a lot of us. “ if gender is a construct then autistic people who are less aware of social norms are less likely to develop a typical gender identity”

no really look: “ children and teens with autism spectrum disorder ASD or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder ADHD  are much more likely to express a wish to be the opposite sex compared with their typical developing peers” That was posted in 2014. we have been saying this stuff forever but no one wants to listen. the thing is gender variance (being not cisgender or at least questioning it)  has always been closely hand-in-hand with autistic and ADHD people I'm even the doctor who did that study understood right away that it all made sense the whole time: “ Dr. Strang said they were initially surprised to find an overrepresentation of gender variance among children with ADHD. However, they later realized that prior studies have shown increased levels of disruptive behavior and other behavioral problems among young people with gender variance”  SEE YOURE NOT WEIRD YOURE JUST YOU AND YOURE NOT ALONE IN THIS!!

5% autistic people who did the study were trans or questioning. it was also equal between the Sexes fun fact. that may not seem like a lot till you realize that the national average is only .7% that's literally over 700% higher than the national average. That's so many! and that's just in America.

 in Holland there was a study in 2010 “ nearly 8% of the more than 200 Children and adolescents referred to a clinic for gender dysphoria also came up positive on a assessment for ASD” they weren't even testing for ADHD so the numbers could be even higher!

now I want to talk about a  certain section of the trans umbrella that a lot of autistic people fall under called the non-binary umbrella. non-binary means anything that isn't just male or just female. it is not one third gender and non-binary doesn't mean that you don't have a gender. just clearing that up since cis people keep spreading that. non-binary is an umbrella term for any of the infinite genders you could use or create. now this is where I'm going to lose a bunch of you and that's okay because you don't have to understand our brains or emotions To respect us as real people. not many allistics can understand how we see and think and relate to things and that's okay you don't have to understand everything but just reading about this could be so much closer to respecting us for Who We Are from you've ever been and that's better than being against us just for existing.

now you might have heard of my Mutual Lars who was harassed  by transmeds for using the term Autigender (I was going to link them but if it gets traction I don't want them to get any hate)  since a lot of people roll their eyes at that  and treated them disgustingly for using a term that 100% applied correctly.  Autigender  is described as " a neurogender which can only be understood in the context of being autistic or when one's autism greatly affects one's gender or how one experiences gender. Autigender is not autism as a gender, but rather is a gender that is so heavily influenced by autism that one's autism and one's experience of gender cannot be unlinked.” Now tell me that doesn't sound a lot like this entire essay I've been working on with full sources…..

xenogenders and neopronouns are a big argument point on whether or not people “believe” in non binary genders but a big part of those genders is that they originated from ND communities and are ways that we can try to describe what gender means us in a way that cis or even allistic trans people just can't comprehend or ever understand. Same with MOGAI genders or sexualities. A lot of these are created as a way to somehow describe an indescribable relationship with gender that is so personal you really cant explain it to anyone who isnt literally the same as you.

Even in studies done with trans autistic people a large amount of them dont even fall on a yes or no of having a gender at all and fall in some weird inbetween where you KINDA have a gender but its not a gender in the sense that others say it is but its also too much of a gender so say youre agender. And this is the kind of stuff that confuses allistic trans people and makes them think nonbinary genders are making stuff up for attention, which isnt true at all we just cant explain what it feels like to BE a trans autistic person to anyone who doesnt ALREADY know how it feels.

In this study out of the ppl questioned almost HALF of the autistic trans individuals had a “Sense of identity revolving around interests” meaning their gender and identity was more based off what they liked rather than boy or girl. That makes ppl with stuff like vampgender or pupgender make a lot more sense now doesnt it? We see that even in the study: “My sense of identity is fluid, just as my sense of gender is fluid […] The only constant identity that runs through my life as a thread is ‘dancer.’ This is more important to me than gender, name or any other identifying features… even more important than mother. I wouldn't admit that in the NT world as when I have, I have been corrected (after all Mother is supposed to be my primary identification, right?!) but I feel that I can admit that here. (Taylor)” and an agreement from another saying “Mine is Artist. Thank you, Taylor. (Jessie)” now dont you think if they grew up with terms like artistgender or dancergender they would just YOINK those up right away????

In fact “An absence of a sense of gender or being unsure of how their gender should “feel” was another common report” because as ive said before in this post AUTISTIC PEOPLE DONT SEE GENDER THE WAY ALLISTIC PEOPLE SEE IT. therefore we wont use the same terms or have the same identities nor could we explain it to anyone who doesnt already understand or question the same way! Participants even offered up quotes such as “As a child and even now, I don't ‘feel’ like a gender, I feel like myself and for the most part I am constantly trying to figure out what that means for me (Betty)” and also “I don't feel like a particular gender I'm not even sure what a gender should feel like (Helen)”

Now i know this isnt going to change everyones minds on this stuff but i can only hope that it at least helped people feel like theyre not broken and not alone in their feelings about this. You dont have to follow allistic rules. You dont have to stop searching inside for who you really wanna be. And you dont have to pick or choose terms forever because just as you grow and evolve so may your terms. Its okay to not know what or who you are and its okay to identify as nonhuman things or as your interests because what you love and what you do is a big part of who you are and shapes you everyday. Its not a bad thing! Just please everyone, treat ppl with respect and if you dont understand something that doesnt make it bad or wrong it just means its not for you. And thats okay.

#autism #actuallyautistic #trans #nonbinary #xenogenders #neopronouns #lgbtq #adhd #nuerodivergent #gender identity

[jordanas-diary]

Seaspiracy

This documentary seems to be the talk of the time at the moment and I have to say that initially, I was super excited to see issues that I have been studying for the last four years, being brought to the forefront of people’s minds after having banged on about them for who knows how long. But boy oh boy was I disappointed in how the issues were being portrayed. Where to begin?

The first thing that frustrates me with this is the science/data/information these people are using. Or the lack of it. Sure it has sources for some of the data being used, but not once do I see the utilisation of a credible science journal with peer-reviewed articles. Nor do I see a lot of scientists providing input on the questions they are posing to ocean conservation organisations. With some googling, you will find a lot of the data isn’t backed up by scientists working in these areas of study in reports or in articles - so what’s the truth? The graphics in this documentary too ... a great white shark on coral reefs? Un-fucking-likely. Two heccing ridiculous claims were made in this documentary: 1. Dolphins are only killed bc they're pests; and 2. Ebola was caused by decreased fish stocks????? I will elaborate on these later. But anyways ...

This brings me to my next issue - the demonisation of ocean conservation organisations. Somehow BP oil came out looking like a good guy in comparison to these organisations. How in the world did that happen? These organisations provide funding for ocean conservation, research, clean up and education - if we stop funding these organisations, how can we continue to learn about the ocean and educate our younger generations?

What's more is the interview tactics used were shady as hell, and just aiming to paint the narrative they wanted. Now I was ok with this in the beginning, but the less they tried to paint a more balanced picture of the industry, the more frustrated I became. The narrative they were aiming for will have some detrimental impacts on these organisations as mentioned above.

Furthermore, this documentary is incredibly white-centric. Sure there are problematic practices across the world, but painting Asia as the worst? Have you ever wondered why? One of the key drivers for unsustainable fishing practices is the demand - but this demand is not only domestic, but international as well. Now, where internationally is the demand coming from? The West. It is our demand for more and more seafood, drives for the supply to become higher and higher CAUSING these businesses and countries to find more seafood in order to turn a profit.

I also had an issue with the spread and demographic of people contributing throughout the documentary. All of these people were white/white-passing, mostly male, majority activists/journalists, all bringing exceptionally similar perspectives and ideas as to what they see as the ideal future. But without diversity of thought - how can we create a truly encompassing and servicing society for all?

Back I will return to the "dolphins are pests" claim. This i n f u r i a t e d me to the absolute max. Why? Because not once did these people even THINK to acknowledge or even explore indigenous practices in the marine environment, or the significance these animals hold to these people culturally. Which then brings me to the intent of the documentary. 

This documentary was not created to explore sustainable modes of fishing - or even the idea of it for that matter - but to stop the consumption of fish. There are so many issues in this. I mean to unpack this from a science perspective - the lack of scientific backing of the majority of the claims this documentary made is laughable - but to go and completely disregard years of research and experiments and exploration is just plain ignorant. Why only tell one side of this complex issue? Where is the balance between science, governments and protection organisations? Heavily weighting this documentary to the side creates the misinformation that has scientists pressed from the get go fam. Science and technology have evolved [and will continue to evolve] to help us better understand fish stocks and populations, as well and feeding and breeding patterns. Genetics can be used to understand where fish are coming from and whether or not their capture was legal or not, making it harder for fishing vessels to lie about where and how stocks were caught. New Zealand is a good place to look at when exploring sustainable fisheries if you are interested in what this might look like. 

AND THEN from a cultural and social perspective - well if all fishing is banned then how do we put millions, if not billions of people into jobs to feed, clothe and house their families? What assistance will be given to these people from governments or international institutions? My guess? Very little. Most fisherman probably get paid dirt nothing and have skills for a specialised field - how can we ask them to go out and retrain? They most likely will not have the finds to do so. Many of these people will live in vulnerable communities, lacking infrastructure and opportunity to provide them with jobs if the fishing industry was to just ... stop. The expectation that Asian nations that make up a lot of international seafood trade will immediately have the capacity to if not give jobs, but provide assistance to millions of people without jobs and their families is so unrealistic that even on an international level this would be a huge ask. 

THEN we come to the question of what happens to indigenous people, coastal communities and island nations that literally r e l y on the ocean for everything? If we ask these people to stop relying on the ocean, not only will they lose their source of income and sustenance, but also lose their cultural practices and knowledge of the ocean that they can no longer pass on through action. Indigenous peoples and coastal communities have such a different relationship with the environment and the ocean, it is hard to comprehend let alone explain if you do not possess this. There is an inherent as well as learned intuition that is passed down between generations where you learn the right times of the year to harvest through the. understanding of the lifecycle and breeding patters, without specific scientific knowledge have the ability to know the difference between mature and juvenile species, and so much more. The knowledge that these people hold is integral to the survival of our oceans, yet not once was this mentioned throughout the documentary. 

Urging people to stop eating fish is incredibly ignorant. Some people many not be in a position to - whether that be culturally, socially, for health reasons - whatever. Sure reduce consumption, find an alternative if you have the ability and means to do so. Don’t do it just because a documentary told you to. The reason why a lot of organisations made no comment on this is because people deserve the right to choice of what they seat - and in some cases, seafood might be their main source of protein and energy. 

What this documentary did do right though, is raise all of these issues by bringing them to the front of public mind. Ghost fishing, overfishing, shark finning - all of these practices take an absolute toll on our oceans - without halting these specific practices, I cannot see how our oceans can survive, let alone sustain the human race.  

For me, Seaspiracy comes from a place of privilege and stubbornness. There is very little attempt to better educate themselves on these issues, lack of will/want to learn about cultural aspects in fisheries, and the spread of misinformation through data and “facts”. If this documentary has made some how emotionally charged you to do something to protect our oceans - WOOO!!! This issue has been so underrated for far too long. However, do not take this documentary as gospel - go and do some of your own research! Explore the topics raised! Educate yourself! Critically analyse every piece of information you come across, check if it can be backed/verified by other articles/reports released on the same/similar topics! 

Happy to answer any questions people might have on this. Hopefully this sheds more light on our ocean issues and that people think more critically about this documentary before, during and after watching it. 

Tagging: @lightacademiasworld

#spoliers seaspiracy #seaspiracy #marine biology #marine conservation #ocean conservation #ocean #fishing #overfishing #ghost fishing #shark finning #jordana rambles: tv show #science #ocean science #long post #i feel like i just wrote an essay lmao #essay #university #documentary #ocean documentary #rip #sorry y'all

[meggannn]

other misc thoughts about hzd that i just got around to typing up

i saw a comment thread on reddit where the op was curious if HZD was meant to be a warning against becoming too reliant on technology.... for example, whenever aloy loses her focus, she panics the way that we might if we lost our phone; she often has a single-minded obsession with the thing. but i don’t think that’s entirely true, that HZD is meant to be simply “technology = bad.” even in the game’s past, technology was not intrinsically “bad.” elisabet created green technology that helped save the planet from during the clawback decade, for example. and technology is literally saving the planet again! so, i wonder if this series will be going in a direction that pushes green technology, or a balance between technology and nature, and living more off the land the way aloy does?

i mean really i think it’s pretty obvious that the ultimate villain is not technology. the plot of this game is how capitalism, war profiteering, ego, and lack of scientific ethics and oversight will be — are — humanity’s biggest threats. i think this game honestly wraps up some of the most important problems we will be dealing with in the 21st century into one neat, awful package. the faro plague is what happens when corporations put money over literally everything else. FAS threw all their chips into green technology when elisabet sobeck worked there because it was financially profitable to do so. they threw all their money at military “peacekeeping” robots as soon as green tech wasn’t the big thing anymore.

i did notice that blue light = friendly robot, and red light = antagonistic robot. that’s not particularly revolutionary, but was is interesting is that the focus’s lights, as well as all of the bunkers and the technology in them, are purple. i assume this was intentional. (what i’m less sure about is why all the daemonic machines are tinted purple, too. did they just run out of colors that looked creepy?)

i think a cryogenically frozen ted faro is probably bordering on stereotypically scifi villain trope, but honestly.... i think there’s like a 50/50 chance that it happened and he will be making an appearance in the sequels in person, lmfao. like i actually believe it of him. the egyptian theme is way too big to be ignored. faro = pharaoh obviously, and then there’s all of the biggest military bots having an egypt theme (horus/scarab/kopesh), and then it turns out his underground bunker was called “thebes.” like, the dude is just ozymandias from watchmen: rich dude having a secret bunker in thebes that he tells no one about to go and live the rest of his life down there in isolation while thinking about his Big Crimes in which millions were killed for which he takes absolutely no responsibility. (also i’m still trying to figure out what the meaning behind giving elisabet the last name of sobeck, if there is any... sobeck was the god of a lot of things, including apparently being a protective force with apotropaic qualities, but iirc he is normally portrayed as being animalistic and aggressive, perhaps because his animal portrayal is the crocodile.)

one thing i’m still thinking about is that to get ted to fund ZD, elisabet threatened to tell the military “the true source of the glitch.” what did that mean? it has to be something more than just “ted’s company fucked up,” because like.... the existence of the killer robots decimating the earth is enough to prove that. the source of the glitch had to be REALLY bad—enough for her to know ted would never want it becoming public, even knowing everyone on the planet was about to die.

it REALLY bothers me that they went with “minerva” instead of “athena.” like i read that the team just preferred the name “minerva” and i do agree it’s a sexy name, and without it, you’d have i think four “a” names for the sub-systems (aether, athena, apollo, artemis) but it still annoys me, lol

my original theory on sylens is that he has some sort of disability or otherwise health concern that prevents him from facing enemies head-on? which could why he prefers to sneak around and/or stay back and let aloy do all the work.... i think he would do that anyway, it’s just his personality, but i thought for the longest time that the blue veins in his skin were like, some sort of vital fluids necessary for him to live. but then i did the frozen wilds dlc and realized that all banuk shamans have the blue veins...... so idk anymore lol

i am torn about if i want them to add romances in this game. i think if they’re gonna do it, do it in the second game or not at all, because it would be weird to just have it in game three. but i’m not convinced this game needs it, personally... though it would be nice to have a few “flirt back” options lmao i think that just might not be who aloy is

have more thoughts on race/racism in hzd but.... will post those thoughts later

while i’m here i need everyone to read this post-canon fic anthropotheism by @arthurpenhaligons which is literally one of the most stunning things i’ve ever read and i still need to write up my review for that

#horizon zero dawn #horizon stuff

[thelightfluxtastic]

30DayTheri 20: Neurodivergence

I see my therianthropy as caused by/a form of neurodivergence, and I’m going to explain why. This is something I have written about before on the old Alt+H gorums, but as I cannot find that post, I will try to rewrite my case, hopefully improving it, rather than copy-paste. Though I will probably cross-post this to the new forums once it’s done. Anyway: Lets start by listing some of the traits that overlap between kin experiences and neurodivergence. Note I use the umbrella term deliberately. While some examples are typically associated with autism, it’s not exclusive (e.g. sensory issues are also present in ADHD, cerebral palsy, and whatever giftedness is). Will link sources whenever I can.

Not making eye contact (therian logic: threat display in many species)

“Improper” facial expressions (grinning also a threat in many animals)

Sensory processing/sensitivity (sensory shifts usually seen as differing attention or sensitivity to stimuli, rather than physically having inhuman senses)

Differences in proprioception and body map (phantom shifts)

Differences in mental state and cognition (mental shifts)

Unusual walking gaits and postures, sitting positions

Feelings of alienation or disconnection from others (autistic and adhd people seeing themselves as “alien”)

Identification with animals more than humans 

This tumblr post covers a lot of these overlaps using hypothetical examples of a person with autism and a person with therianthropy. They seem to do similar things, but for different reasons. For example, “Jeremy likes to sit in strange positions. He does this because it puts pressure on certain parts of his body in ways that feel good and sitting this way helps him stay calm and focused. Jeremy is autistic.George likes to sit in strange positions. He does this because it feels more natural to him to act as though he has four legs and sitting this way reduces the dysphoria he usually experiences when sitting normally. George is a therian.”

That’s all well and good but... can people always tell why they are doing something? The introspection illusion would indicate this is not as reliable as we might hope. I tend to slam my hands down on the nearest surface when I’m excited. Related to handflapping or canine playbows and excited tippy-tapping? Or consider my lifelong chewing behavior- sensory stimming, or dog behavior? And don’t dogs chew for sensory stimulation too?

So is that it? All therians and otherkin are “just [diagnosis]” and mistaking it for something else? Well, no, it’s not that simple. Informal polls have indicated a higher prevalence of neurodivergent diagnoses in otherkin, but it’s not a one-to-one relationship. This scientific research paper found a higher prevalence among therians of self-reporting a diagnosis, and higher scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient. However, the ASQ is not diagnostic, it merely indicates trends and shared traits that warrant further inspection. The same paper also found Therians were no different from controls on traits like personal growth, purpose and self-acceptance, and that the therian identity may have been protective against some negative effects, like anhedonia.

It can’t be ignored that many therians/otherkin do not have a diagnosis of a neurodivergent condition, even having sought one out (i.e. thus circumventing the issue of just not being able to see a professional). A lot of therians and otherkin consider the possibility of mental illness when first questioning. I literally asked my therapist (whom I was out to about my therianthropy) whether I could have been on the autism specturm, and after going over it with me in detail, she concluded I was at most subclinical, and didn’t meet diagnostic criteria, missing an entire subsection of traits. I know other therians who have had the same experiences- finding that they check the boxes on certain traits, but just don’t-quite’-fit clinical criteria.

Now, as a counselor, I know better than most exactly how much diagnoses are affected by culture, norms, and are ultimately somewhat arbitrary and nebulous. But it should also not ignored that mental illness, regardless of diagnosis, is always defined by causing distress or impairing function- something that doesn’t apply to many cases of nonhuman identity. 

This is why I am specific in saying I believe therianthropy is a form of neurodivergence, rather than a mental illness. I see it as emerging from functions and activity of the brain, of being one of many diverse ways a brain can be wired. Because of this, it overlaps in traits with other forms of neurodivergence (like autism, ADHD and others). It’s another circle on the big Venn diagram. So questioning whether a certain behavior like chewing is an “autism” thing or a “therianthropy” thing is a little bit like asking whether emotional dysregulation is an autism, adhd, bpd, etc. thing. It belongs to all of them and isn’t the defining factor of any. Because modern diagnostic labels are based on clusters of symptoms, these overlaps can result in dual diagnoses, though not always (e.g. if a persons symptoms are mostly in the overlap of autism and adhd, they might be diagnosed with both, whereas another person’s experiences may be much more one than the other, and they only get/need one label). So a person can be a therian and have no other label, be a different form of neurodivergent and not a therian, or both a therian and have another neurodivergent label. And all three of these people would share certain but not all traits and experiences.

#30 Days of Therianthropy #therian #otherkin #neurodivergent #mine

[anxiouslyfred]

Reflections in Rooms

Summary: Roman and Remus are both aware that their rooms aren't exactly what people expect from them if anyone visits. When Patton visits his reaction to mistaking Remus's room for Roman's was something neither of them could have predicted. 

Authors Note: I wanted to write something last week and began this with no clue where it was going. Today I finished it and still have no clue where it was going for the entire story. Sorry if it’s bewildering at all. I’m just playing.

/\/\/\/\/\/\

If you live in a room for long enough it becomes a reflection of you in a way people very often won’t understand.

Both Roman and Remus realised this as almost every time a friend came over they’d assume the wrong room was theirs.

Janus visiting was the first time they recognised why it happened. Their remark upon being corrected had been “But you’re so chaotic and have no regard for anything being organised. How on earth can this be your room, Remus?”

Roman was not sticking around to hear the lecture over how organised any important movements were nor how the things Remus hated and rebelled against were conformity and that was never synonymous with organisation. He already had the lecture memorised in case there was ever an instant of a their friends calling while they were out.

“This isn’t quite what I’d expect by a Princes bedroom, Roman. Have you seriously been hiding all the interesting things you love for all this time?” Virgil groused, when he first visited. They’d become friends through a creative writing club and had planned to work on a story together that evening. “Seriously we could have been rocking out together to these bands and you cannot say that you didn’t think I’d like them. Just look at me!”

At least Virgil’s confusion was different to the reactions Roman had gotten before. A few of his friends had gotten very worried over how low some of the snippets left on his desk suggested his self esteem was.

The reaction both brothers were stunned to witness was Patton’s when he first followed Roman home. They’d gotten talking near the end of the work day and it just felt right to invite him over to carry on chatting together and perhaps share some of the creations that he hadn’t shared with the team at work.

Roman had gone to make drinks, giving Patton directions to his room upstairs while he did so when he heard the yell. “Roman your friend isn’t letting me go! What on earth do I do?”

“Let him hug you and then direct him to my room, maybe?” He called back, raising an eyebrow at that reaction. Sure, Patton usually liked to hug everyone in greeting but refusing to let go of Remus was the opposite of how people usually reacted given the unfortunate scent that surrounded him.

“Still not going to free him. This is my new best friend now. He likes kittens!” Patton yelled back before one of his apologetic sounds could be heard, presumably as Remus corrected him to the pronouns for the day.

Once the drinks were finished Roman was finally able to find out what his friend meant. His sibling usually focused on oceanic creatures rather than anything on land so something must have changed.

“I'm drawing catfish, not kittens or cats or anything like that. What's your name anyway?” Remus was explaining, although the picture did currently only have a cats face on it. Patton was hanging off her back, only just letting Roman see the lilac choker that clarified her pronouns.

Entering the room Roman snickered a little, already knowing that from how Patton spoke some of Remus's drawings would probably cause concern. “He's Patton. What's it going to look like when you add the body and colour?”

“It's gonna have mangled limbs of twisted together legs and fins, and a scattered red and yellow mottled pattern mixing fur and scales all over its body. I need to make the eyes bigger though... or smaller, fish have small eyes right?” Remus described already turning to search images of fish so she could decide what size the eyes should be, clearly having decided to ignore Patton hanging onto her.

“Nooo.” Patton whined, reaching clearly with the intent to take the sketch and protect it from Remus's plans. “Pretty kitten.”

Remus still nodded, pushing the drawing out of reach and pulling a folder from beside her desk up. “Yep, it'll be a beautiful kitten, just like these ones.” She insisted, show casing her variety of finished artwork to Patton cheerfully ignoring any upset noises.

Roman was only just close enough to see the pages being turned, but had already seen his sisters art after it was completed enough to know the pages. At the start it would be trips into uncanny valley, all the things Remus saw in robotic attempts to recreate humans or poor game and film CGI designs of people sketched out again as she tried to work out what was so off about them. Then the pages would turn to gore, murder scenes they'd heard described in various books and news broadcasts that she wanted to imagine more vividly. Those ones had Patton almost crying and rushing Remus to move past them without giving any sources or descriptions of her thought process.

After the gore Remus had pages of just normal ocean life as she had wanted to perfect how light works under water before allowing herself more creative attempts. It was her latest project and she'd only moved onto creating her own designs of underwater animals in the last few months.

That was where Roman decided to interrupt again, “So have I lost my friend to you for the evening? I can head back to my room now, if so.”

“Don't be jealous cause I'm more interesting than a Disney fan, Prince Pukey.” Remus immediately countered, raising an eyebrow as she turned. “But you're more than welcome to take your friend back anytime if he'll let go of me.”

“Your friend too, Remus. You are my new kiddo and I need to see everything you've been creating. I love the sharks. They look like puppies, not as terrifying as the movies make them.” Patton tightened his grip, still hugging or clinging to Remus as though she'd run if he let go.

The siblings blink for a moment, Roman stunned that this guy from work essentially has declared Remus as a friend after knowing him an hour and Remus because this guy just walked into her room, seems aghast at any pictures of injuries, war or fighting but has basically just adopted her too. “Where on earth did you find this maniac, Ro, and are there any other I need to prepare to be adopted by?” Remus asks after a moment, folder forgotten in her hands.

“Work. Logan is my main other friend there and they aren't really the adopting type. They will probably criticise any creation scientifically though so I'm trying to avoid inviting him home.” Roman muttered, still taking in what had happened. “Padre, you have literally yelled for hours over anyone suggesting something close to the things Remus has been showing you when we're at work, what...?”

“We make shows for Kids, Roman! That's not an appropriate place for this type of stuff, but there's nothing wrong in Remus exploring such dark subjects as long as she let's people walk away if it gets to be too much.” Patton scolded lightly, grinning as soon as Roman shrugged in response, letting the explanation be left at that.

Patton never did get to see Roman's room on his first visit to their home, but he did make a new friend that he might never have met otherwise.

#creativitwins #roman sanders #remus sanders #patton sanders #genderfluid remus #mentioned nonbinary logan #mentioned virgil #mentioned janus #making friends #human au

[andy-the-8th]

Day Of and Day After - Jess (Part 1)

First part of Creatures That Defy Logic - picks up right at the end of the movie

Read on AO3

There are a lot emotions wrapped up in seeing your best friend transform into a merman

"I finally get a friend, and he turns into a fish; this is so typical."

Damn, there were a lot of feelings wrapped up in the last few minutes. Jess had always been better with facts over feelings - science was straightforward, people were complicated. The whirlpool of emotions over such a quick span of time even more complicated, for him as well as everyone else there on the dock.

Exhilaration and awe - it was one thing to have been alongside Cody for the last few weeks, see his changes, speculate and then know he was a merman, in theory - and another thing entirely to see him fully transform and breach with a glittering tail right in broad daylight. Not exactly every day that creatures (people?) straight out of mythology just appear right in front of you. And the excitement that they'd get to hear about whatever he saw when he was away? New sealife, mysteries of the open oceans, may even merpeople culture? One hell of a prospect for anyone, triply so for an aspiring marine biologist.

Relief - more of a twofold sensation as well. Most prominently in the last few minutes, it certainly was a relief to not be dead. Almost drowning, no vital signs, shocked back to life by merman lightning - that'll do a wild number on your feelings about your own mortality. Still, Jess was kind of surprised that that wasn't the main sense of relief he felt right now.

Much more powerfully, he was relieved that Cody was safe. That boy's lack of self-preservation had scared Jess half to death plenty of times over - risking himself at the swim meets, ignoring the advice to stay away from the water, potentially blowing his cover to Sean or the school or worse. Whether or not it was normal to care so much, Jess didn't know or really care - he had spent plenty of nights unable to sleep, worried sick with images of cruel scientists, cold laboratory tanks, faceless men in black suits, dissection tables, taxidermists, freak shows - all kinds of threats, and the only thing Jess could about them was to try to keep Cody's secret.

So all that in mind, there was the relief that Cody had finally gotten away from all of that. Going off with his mermaid mom (mermom?), another mythological creature as far as 99.99% of the world knew, safely out to sea. Maybe that was merpeople's best protection, that short of having physical evidence, most of the world didn't believe in them - guess that's how they manage to avoid discovery. Most people anyway. On that topic though, the next feeling Jess was dealing with -

Anger. This one didn't even really start to register until after Cody had resurfaced to wave goodbye one last time, but thinking about all the threats he'd been afraid of, Jess couldn't avoid the conclusion that his own father should have been at the top of that list. Hadn't he literally just kidnapped his friend to use him as bait? What had been his plan then, if he'd caught Cody's mom? His dad's mermaid obsession had just been a mundane fact of life growing up - a kind of sad, fruitless endeavor. He didn't like to think his dad was crazy, but it didn't mean he really had believed his mermaid stories and theories since he'd grown out of that. It was just like any parent's eccentric hobby - kind of embarrassing sometimes but ultimately innocuous, right? Jess hadn't ever thought of how dangerous it might have been if his father had caught on - and he mentally kicked himself for not making that connection, for not planning for it, for not talking his dad out of it - Jess had basically caught him at the swim meet, and guessed he'd have put it together when Jess was reading through his mermaid theory papers, talking about the thirteenth year theory - but actually capturing Cody and his mom? The dull, cold fear that had caught in Jess's throat when he'd seen his father testing the giant net, when he'd biked at top speed to the Griffin's house, when he'd found the cove empty, Cody already gone -

Well, at least the upside of almost-dying was shocking John Wheatley into the danger of his actions, to his own son if not the merpeople. Jess was pretty sure his father just hadn't been thinking of the consequences past simply catching the mermaid - was never really much of a realist like that.

This didn't make Jess any less angry with him.

On top of all of these feelings, and maybe least expected - loss?

He definitely wasn't expecting that. Sure, the feeling of loss was all around him - however temporary his departure, Cody going away was definitely crossing a line. He wasn't human, and for each person on the dock, that meant on some level, he wasn't really theirs anymore. Sam was losing her boyfriend, Mr. and Mrs. Griffin their child. In a way even his dad was losing his proof to justify his obsessive search over the last 13 years. Sure, Jess was losing his friend, but hadn't their relationship been built around helping Cody through this transformation? What was he losing, if this was just the logical endpoint? He'd known where the transformation was headed, and he didn't expect to feel anything other than scientific satisfaction now it was done.

Jess told himself it was natural to feel like this; humans are social creatures, empathy has been one of our strongest survival tools over the course of our evolution. To solve problems together. To care about each other. Like it or not, we feel how the others around us feel, in one way or another. It was simple science.

His whole time with Cody had been like the best science project ever - an fantastical extension of the assignment that had brought them together. The thrill of getting to know him had been tied to the thrill of discovering his new abilities, helping him test them, spending hours talking through theories and myths. From a purely scientific standpoint, spending time with Cody was fascinating. It was simply to be expected that he'd want to spend as much time with him as he could - as a scientist.

What Jess hadn't expected was Cody's interest in getting to know him in turn. It made sense - Cody was going through strange changes, and Jess was the closest source of finding answers. And more or less, Jess knew that that was the glue of their friendship. He wasn't bothered by that, really.

Of course Cody would listen attentively when he went off on a string of marine biology theories, whether to get ahead in school or to make sense of his transformations. Of course he'd start asking Jess to hang out when they were free - no one else knew what was going on, and he'd been drifting away from his real friends. Cody didn't trust anyone else with the secret - and that was simple self-preservation, to seek out a scientist, rather than a friend. Especially someone who wouldn't blow the secret.

And there had been a kind of special thrill in that for the first few weeks - Jess got to be the only one who knew. Jess got to be the only one who Cody trusted.

A purely scientific thrill.

Jess suddenly shivered as the salty breeze picked up a bit, snapping him out of his own head and the feelings rushing through it. Cody had probably only been gone a few minutes, even if it felt like hours. Mrs. Griffin was still quietly crying, leaning back on Mr. Griffin, both of them still facing the water. Jess didn't really know if he was supposed to say anything to them, or leave them to each other. Should he confront his dad now? Should he try to talk to Sam? oh god he should apologize for the kissing comment but would that just make it worse?

The silence grew more tense for the next several moments, until Sam finally spoke.

"I - I guess I'll just be going home now." Jess could hear that she was pushing to sound confident after crying. She shook her long red hair back behind her shoulders and readjusted her shirt as she stood up straight.

"Oh hon, don't worry, we can drive you back to your place." Mrs. Griffin looked up, finding her voice again, almost sounding relieved to be able to help someone, do something.

"No thanks, Mrs. G, I want to walk. I want to, uh, decompress. Take some time alone to, to y'know, process this. Just feel like I should get some air" she finished hurriedly, with a half-laugh, at the normality of the statement. She nodded awkwardly as she backed away, toward the steps leading up from the floating dock, a pursed-lips-everything's-fine-fake-smile on her face. "Jess, I'll see you at school then?"

Sam had almost never acknowledged him outside of talking through or next to Cody, so Jess gave a somewhat confused nod and tried to smile at her. They only had one day of school left, mostly to pack up books, say goodbye to everyone, and leave for the summer.

"OK wait then" Mrs. Griffin was quickly more serious, purposeful. "I know this would probably go without saying, but you kids cannot tell anyone what happened here." She was talking at Jess and Sam, but had an uncharacteristically sharp glare at Big John as she said this. He didn't miss that, and immediately looked penitent and cowed.

Clearly, Jess wasn't the only one angry at his father for using Cody as live bait.

"Of course!" Jess immediately responded emphatically, even a bit incredulously. He was almost put out that she felt the need to say this, as if they all hadn't - as if he hadn't, longer than anyone - kept Cody's secret safe.

"We'll, um...we'll just tell the school, um..." she was casting about, turning to her husband, looking for a quick explanation.

"Hon we don't need to tell the school anything right now - it's summer vacation, it's not that weird to leave a day early."

"No, we need to be clear, we need a convincing story -

"If anyone really asks we can say he's doing a swim training camp, and he'll be away most of the summer" Mr. Griffin offered, a slight twinge of his usual humor back in his inflection. "It's not really that far from the truth. We'll say it's somewhere in Australia, far enough away from anyone looking to visit or call. And your sister lives out there anyway." He put his hand on his wife's shoulder - Jess thought it looked like he was reassuring and steadying himself as much as he was for her.

Sharon breathed quickly, calming herself. "OK, perfect!" Mrs. Griffin clearly seemed relieved - not calmed, but at least less frantic. Jess was also happy to have something simple and straightforward to tell anyone who asked.

Not like anyone will ask *me* anyway he thought. Jess always had been used to being more or less invisible when it came to social gossip at school, which he honestly preferred. And furthermore, probably for the better, it wasn't like anyone really associated him with Cody, even the teachers. At least not in any meaningful way beyond biology homework. No one would think to ask the nerd that Cody Griffin got unluckily saddled with for a science project what had happened to him.

"OK. OK, good. I'll see you all later then." Sam was hurriedly wiping her face as she turned on her heel, dashing up the steps to the main pier above the floating dock. She was quickly out of sight.

"Jess, you wanna go home, get dried off?" His dad was looking at him now, worry still coating his words. John Wheatley was not a particularly emotional man when it came to anything other than fishing and sea monster stories, but he clearly had not forgotten how close a call his son had just had. "Maybe go to a doctor?"

Jess could hear Mrs. Griffin's sharp intake of breath at what Cody had always humorously called "the D word." Thinking of Cody laughing at that caused the corner of Jess's mouth to twitch up for a second. But once his dad had turned to him, Jess could still see Mrs. Griffin staring daggers into his back.

"No I'll be fine. I feel fine, really." Jess could hear his anger seeping into his own voice and inflection but didn't really care. John Wheatley may have been more thoughtless than he was malicious, but that wasn't enough for Jess to forgive him right now, and he was still too much of a mess of emotions to process any of that with other people.

"I'm going to head home. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, um, have a good summer?" His inflection put it through as a question - he wasn't really sure what to say but at least that sounded funny enough to deflate the situation as much as possible. It worked - both the Griffins kind of quietly laughed at that.

"You too Jess. We'll see you soon." Jess smiled back at Mrs. Griffin's words, then hesitantly started to walk back up the dock. He was actually surprised that he didn't feel any dizziness or illness after being revived - apparently merman-made hand (fin?) defibrillation worked wonders for the body. He turned and started up the steps roughly, quickening as he reached the top. Big John didn't move to stop him, pausing awkwardly at the foot of the steps, clearly getting the message that Jess didn't want to talk to him right now. Jess reached the main dock and turned across the parking lot of the marina, down the little road toward the family boat yard and sheds, shoulders straight, and not looking back.

#the thirteenth year #mermen #mermaid #dcom #disney #disney channel original movies

[cuntess-carmilla]

Update: I stopped taking psychiatric medication because they turned out to have only ever been of “help” because I have POTS/dysautonomia and one made my blood pressure rise (Wellbutrin) while the other kept it from going up too high (Lamotrigine).

Now that I’m taking meds that are for what I ACTUALLY do have (POTS/dysautonomia) not only do I not need the psychiatric meds, but they were throwing off everything else. I hate psychiatry so much. Can’t believe I turned out to be one of those people who had their physical illness mistreated as You’re Crazy for years haha. :) With that out of the way...

Some Many of my Opinions™ on psychiatry, as a psychiatrized person myself who does take medication, but hates the institutions of psychiatry and psychology, and thinks a large chunk of it is white pseudo-science:

A good amount of the issues that the psychiatric institution addresses ARE absolutely real and, as a society, people who’re afflicted by them should by all means receive help and support so they can live happier lives. I experience many of them and take medication to help myself, I obviously don’t think the difficult experiences people seek help for are made up.

At the same time, psychiatry and psychology as disciplines ARE made up (like every other discipline), making them not infallible or objective, AND they were built on eugenics, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.

Those very real issues addressed by psychology/psychiatry aren’t actual literal pathologies. They don’t need to be literal tangible sicknesses in order to matter or be deserving of help and compassion. Your literal brain as a bodily organ is not physically “ill”, at least in most cases. It doesn’t need to be for your problems associated with an “ill mind” to be real and to matter. Remember, these disciplines were created at a time in history in which (white, male) doctors and theorists were obsessed with turning everything into a material, scientifically tangible subject that could be objectively measured with numbers and shit, hopefully medicalized or otherwise turned into “hard science”. That’s where ethnography came from. It’s called positivism, which is extremely dehumanizing, white supremacist and capitalist.

Psychology should be largely considered as much more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as objective science, which is how most people perceive it to be. It’s mostly pure theory about emotions, thoughts, cognition, relationships and subjective experiences + perceptions -- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on itself. It not being hard science doesn’t immediately delegitimize it. Get rid of the white capitalist idea that only (western, white) science and “objectivity” are real or of value. Actually, holding psychology to the standards of hard science turns it into pseudo-science, so... Yeah. I genuinely think we’d get so much further As A Society™ regarding psychology's potential to aid people who’re suffering if we treated it as more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as some objective scientific truth.

Psychiatrists often are super ignorant of the actual way the medications they prescribe work or affect patients lmao. I had that almost ruin a whole semester at college because a shrink prescribed me meds that in combination she should’ve known would fuck me up. Not that much is known about how the human brain truly works compared to other human organs, you can’t expect psychiatric meds to be well tried and true. The research on psychiatric pharmacy is very lacking + biased in favor of pathologizing and controlling psychiatrized people, besides attempting to make the most profit under capitalism like any other capitalist industry, so of course they’re gonna prescribe you shit. Plus, like doctors of every other field, many psychiatrists arrogantly disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients, who’re the ones taking those meds.

Psychologists/therapists, just like psychiatrists, also disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients.

There’s such a strong element of power imbalance in how psychiatry and psychology function. The more a patient knows formal information about anything related to psychology/psychiatry, the more the shrink can get upset, distrustful and dismissive of them, saying they’re faking it, or telling them “not to do their jobs” when they so often do said jobs like shit anyway lmao no matter how thorough the research and understanding of the patient is.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are just as made up as any other human construct (such as language, race, gender, etc). They’re not tangible realities as if shrinks had ran into a previously unknown objective fact of nature. In the realm of psychology, someone takes a bunch of traits and behaviors that by their observation they consider to be interconnected with one another, put them in the same bag, stick a label to said bag, and ask other psychologists if they agree with the bag being a thing. These considerations are heavily influenced by sociocultural bias. You can’t tell me it isn’t true that they’re made up and very subjective when “diagnoses” such as drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality, gender identity disorder, etc, have been seriously considered at least by part of the psychiatric establishment of their times as legitimate mental disorders. Hell, some still consider being gay or trans to be mental disorders. Don’t get me started on "Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, that shit’s just evil.

A lot of the ideas spread by the psychiatric-psychological institution are legit pseudo-science that researches try time and time again to prove and end up coming with nothing, or they end up tweaking their own research or conclusions to maintain the established consensus that just so turns out to be very convenient to the people who make and sell psychiatric meds.

Many of the traits, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and behaviors that are pathologized by psychiatry and psychology aren’t inherently harmful. If they don’t make the patient or others suffer by their very nature (as opposed to like, homophobic parents “suffering” because their child is gay or a gay person suffering because of homophobia) then there’s no need to alter them. “Correcting” them is a measure of social control that crushes individuality and only attempts to mold people into obedient ~productive~ servants of capitalism. Much of psychiatric medical treatment (not just the diagnoses and therapies themselves) focuses on turning the patient into less of a social “burden”, than on their actual happiness. That’s why you have ADHD and autistic kids being given meds that turn them into zombies and that's been considered a good thing for DECADES. Like, why does the stimming of an autistic person or an “unusual” attachment to stuffed animals as an autistic adult have to be corrected? WHOMST does that harm? Nobody! But it makes allistics uncomfortable because allistics are fucking stupid and can’t mind their God damned business to save their lives like normal people do.

Even non-pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatrized conditions are or can be turned into measures of social control. 

Maybe CBT wasn’t meant to be a tool to control people and shit, but it can be misused as such SO easily! It can go from being therapy to help individuals process inner pain and redirect harmful behaviors in positive ways, to being turned into training someone to react, feel and process abuse and oppression in ways that are convenient to the status quo. 

Don’t get me fucking started on ABA as an inherently oppressive, abusive “treatment” for a psychiatrized condition that does nothing to actually better the lives of autistic people, instead punishing autistic traits, teaching autistic people to painfully repress said traits and ignore their needs, and seeking to appease allistics by prioritizing their convenience and subjective comfort.

Behaviors, emotions, perceptions or traits that on a man or white person would be considered a non-issue or given much more compassionate/less stigmatized diagnoses, are pathologized or given much more stigmatized diagnoses when it comes to female or racialized patients, which reaffirms psychiatry and psychology as subjective tools of social control.

While many of the traits, emotions, perceptions and behaviors of what are considered personality disorders are painful, harmful and real (and thus should be helped, with consent, not hammered down), literal personalities aren’t “ill”. They’re personalities. Pathologizing or medicalizing a fucking personality on itself is ridiculous. It is possible to address those problematic traits/behaviors/etc without saying that a fucking personality is “ill”. So much for “you’re not your disorder”.

What shrinks will deem as hallucinations or delusions can be subjective, and it definitely can be deemed as such out of white-centric cultural bias. Plenty of non-white cultures have considered different perceptions of reality as valid and worthy of respect for centuries, at times related to their sense of spirituality. Not to mention how psychiatry has deemed the real anxieties of oppressed people that they’re being followed, spied on, plotted against and all that, as hallucinations or delusions in order to discredit them.

Many patients are given medication to try to alleviate traits/behaviors/emotions that come from circumstance (poverty, ongoing abuse, trauma, oppression...) instead of addressing the root problems. While I 100% understand using medication as a palliative measure because, bitch, you can’t always fix those problems and you still have a life to live (the same way I take clotiazepam when the insensitivity of the allistics around me causes me sensory overload), this puts the burden of the person’s situation on their own body, as if their body was the essential source of a suffering that comes from outside forces they’re not responsible or in control of. This should ideally be addressed through material change in realities that can be individual (removing the person from an abusive situation, giving economic aid, giving proper treatment to an untreated chronic illness) or social (abolishing white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, etc).

So many times when palliative medical treatments for suffering that comes from circumstances don’t work (BECAUSE THE PATIENT IS STILL TRAPPED IN SAID CIRCUMSTANCES, HELLO?) it’s blamed on a supposed defect of the patient’s body/brain rather than, like... You can give me as many anti-depressants as you want but I’m still gonna be miserable if I’m being abused or suffering from unending physical chronic pain lol. And then, instead of at least having the decency of recognizing the real source of the problem if your shrink can’t realistically fix it, they keep trying more and more different meds on you like you’re a fucking lab rat, keeping on blaming a made up defect you were “born” with. Imagine what that does to a person’s self-image! At least when I loathe my body for the chronic pain, chronic fatigue and more that my chronic illnesses give me, it IS actually true that it’s my body that has a defect that can’t be cured. Why convince a person in suffering due to anything, but especially when it’s due to outside conditions out of their control and your job is fucking supposed to be to help them be happier, that their pain refuses to respond to treatment because their BRAIN is so terribly defective? I don’t wish the hatred I hold for my objectively shitty body on anyone, and causing that to someone when it’s not even true...? Incredible.

Lots of genuine difficulties associated with psychiatric diagnoses are much better helped through accessibility and material considerations, or at least through teaching the patient pragmatic methods to better deal with those, than through pills. But guess what solution shrinks usually give you. Hint: it’s easier for them and they can charge you for it monthly.

Society™ medicalized emotions, bro... WE MEDICALIZED FEELINGS!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!

#antipsych

[codylabs]

Having the Time of My Life Overanalyzing Voltron Science, A Visual Novel

The team’s little mantra in the original show was “ Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go! Let’s go Voltron Force!” And they said this each and every single time their 5 lions formed together into the combined robot.

In today’s essay I will be deeply examining and wildly speculating about what exactly interlocks, dynatherms, infracells, and mega thrusters are, why it’s entirely crucial that these 4 items be part of the Voltron preflight checklist, and explaining why (or at least inferring that) you should take it all seriously.

Interlock

The Interlock is easy. It’s probably whatever system is used to attach the 5 lions together. So what are they? Magnets? Docking rings like on spacecraft? Just mechanical latches? Hard to say. But something as simple as a mechanical latch isn’t something you’d have to ‘activate’ or actively call out during pre-flight, so I would suspect ‘interlock’ is likely a catch-all term for not only the mechanical attachments, but also the control circuit used to synchronize the computers onboard all 5 lions. It would be a complex integrated system within the black lion, which also explains why they refer to it in the singular instead of plural.

Without the interlock, Voltron would just be the 5 lion with their individual brains tied together like duct-taped dogs. The interlock synchronizes them into a common intelligence, under the direction of the centralized black lion.

I don’t know what the mechanical structure of the interlocks would be. Conventional material science would suggest that a robot as large as Voltron wouldn’t be able to even stand, let alone run and jump and fight, so even if we assume nearly-indestructible exotic alien materials, I think you would still want something more than hooks and pins to connect the various pieces together. It would be best if the actual structural elements could somehow fuse at the molecular level. Welding is the most obvious method for that, but there’s also Vaan-Der-Waals forces, which could bond together flat surfaces that could then be slid apart. And maybe if you had superconducting cables running between the elements and then ran a ton of current through them, then you could use magnetic binding? I’m not sure if that would work, but it sounds futuristic enough to be true. IDK.

Dynatherms

I can’t tell if this is ‘dynatherms’ or ‘dinotherms’, but the first sounds less prehistoric, so I’ll go with that. So it sounds like pieces of the words ‘dynamic’ and ‘thermal’ mashed together, which don’t really mean anything except in the context of thermodynamics, so.... What is this? A reactor? A steam engine?

Of all the various components this one puzzled me longest, but I think I’ve got it.

The dynatherms are the cooling system, meant to radiate away the massive amounts of heat its engines and motors would generate. Most spacecraft, heck most vehicles in general, have a system analogous to this. Here’s the one the ISS uses:

Voltron doesn’t have any weird extendo-wings like this, but it’s conceivable that they could be built directly into the outer layer of its armor. The black lion’s little red wings are likely a part of the system too. If you ask me, the surface area of its armor isn’t nearly enough to dissipate enough heat to keep a thing like this cool, but I think I can ignore that.

So anyway. At first this explanation doesn’t seem to fit, since they say ‘dynatherms connected’, not ‘coolant pumps started’ or ‘refrigerant levels maximum’ or something. You don’t ‘connect’ the heat radiators, they’re always connected. You just pump water through them. Right?

Wrong! Here’s my sufficiently futuristic explanation: Voltron’s cooling system doesn’t use coolant and pumps or any type of conventional refrigeration at all! Instead, the ‘dynatherms’ are a network of thermally superconductive cables connecting all its motors and engines to radiative armor panels on the exterior. Thermal superconductivity is a concept I learned from Star Wars and later found out is a real-ish thing. Basically any vibrations in any part of a thermally-superconductive material can frictionlessly travel to any other part of the material. Since temperature is based on vibrations, this means that if a hot thing touches one part of the material, everything else touching the material can instantly feel that heat, and even dissipate that heat. You can think of it as Marvel vibranium or as warmth communism.

Since there’s no fluid flow, the only way to control this cooling system or increase or decrease its dissipation is to connect and disconnect individual cables. Hence why they would have to connect the dynatherms before forming Voltron; combat in combined robot mode is one of the most taxing conditions of the machine’s operation, so they need all the cooling they can get.

Infracells

Now HERE’S where it starts to get interesting. ‘Infra’ roughly means ‘below’. To take the most common example, take ‘infrared’ light, that is, light existing at frequencies lower red light, which is itself the lowest frequency in the visible spectrum. Infrared is invisible, so the only way to describe its color is ‘somewhere below red’.

So as far as I can tell, ‘infracells’ could mean one of three things. They could be some kind of infrared light sensors, like FLIR imagers used for night vision and targeting on modern military equipment (which I consider unlikely, since that’s not the type of thing you would specifically call out during the preflight, or something intrinsically useful to the Voltron assembly process.) Or it could be an armor layer consisting of some kind of cells literally ‘below’ the rest of the armor (which I also consider unlikely, because why would that be important to the Voltron assembly either? You wouldn’t need to even worry about it until you take damage to the outer armor layer, right?) Or, finally and most interestingly, it could have something to do with lower frequencies or lower speeds in general.

Here’s my theory:

The infracells cause time itself to run differently. You all saw the movie Interstellar, where time aboard the spacecraft passed slower for the crew whenever they were inside powerful gravity wells. If you had high buildups of negative energy within cells inside Voltron, it would produce the opposite effect, causing time to move faster inside the cells than outside. Anything inside would experience the rest of the universe in slower motion, meaning lower acceleration, lower forces, and lower stress.

Therefore, if such ‘infracells’ were installed around Voltron’s skeletal frame and motors, it may explain the machine’s great strength and indestructibility. And it would make sense that this would be the type of thing they would call out during the pre-flight, as even one down infracell could spell disaster once that section of the frame is attempting to support the entire weight of the robot; it would buckle and break. Every infracell needs to be up before forming Voltron.

Mega thrusters

Now, this just sounds silly. They’re likely the engines that Voltron uses to fly, but the show creators put ‘mega’ in front of the name to sound cool. Might as well call them ‘super rockets’ or ‘the ultra drive’, right? But mega is an interesting word, as it’s actually a scientific term in the metric system meaning to multiply by a million. Like a kilometer is a thousand meters and a kilogram is a thousand grams, a megameter is a million meters, and a megagram is a 1000 kilograms. You may have heard of ‘megaton’ when referring to nuclear explosives; a three-megaton bomb is a bomb with the explosive yield equivalent to three million tons of TNT. A lot.

So, uh,

Why would you call a thruster a ‘mega thruster’, then?

Well, I know approximately jack-diddly about the original show, but I know that in the newer show, most large spacecraft in the universe get their energy not from nuclear reactors or solar cells, but rather from Balmeran crystals. The crystals are able to produce apparently infinite energy so long as you don’t damage them or overtax them. I don’t know where the crystals get their infinite energy, but that’s not what I’m here to speculate about, so I’ll just treat that as one of the universe’s rules, like bending in Avatar.

So! How do you set that up to make an engine? Well, infinite power is good! Higher power to the engine means hotter, faster exhaust, and hotter, faster exhaust means higher fuel efficiency and higher thrust. So the question becomes, how do you get the most power in the safest and most efficient way possible?

For the sake of some rules, let’s say that you need to give the crystals a little bit of stimulating energy to make them produce energy. That seems fair, I think. Let’s say they produce 5 times the energy they absorb.

So you give a crystal 1 watt, you get 5. That’s great; that means if we need 50 billion watts to run the thruster, we just need to get a big crystal, and feed it 10 billion watts. However! Where do we get that initial 10 billion watts?  Well we could just take a portion of the crystal’s own output and cycle it back around to the input, but that’s a dangerous game to play, since if the percentage you cycle around is even slightly more than 20%, you could create a “positive feedback loop” where more input means more output, which leads to greater input which leads to even greater output, and so on and so on until the crystal breaks or the ship blows up or something generally unfavorable happens. This is approximately the experience of the people at Chernobyl, and is not recommended.

So instead of having crystals feed themselves, you’d instead want them to be fed exclusively by an external source, like a battery or an entirely separate smaller crystal. So the initial crystal would feed larger ones, which would feed larger ones, and so on, each stage in the chain becoming more powerful, but always stable and dependent on some initial external input, so as to never go out of control.

And now, I’m thinking it would be nice from an engineering perspective to have all the crystals together in one shielded location. And from a tactical perspective, it would be nice not to have a bunch of bulky, vulnerable, high-energy cables running around the entire vehicle. So, you would want as many crystal stages as possible in the places where the power is needed most. Namely, the engines.

Therefore, a big part of the engines would be made of armored shells to contain dozens of stacks of crystal beds. They would accept a small amount of power at the top, and multiply it internally to get enormous output at the bottom. Hence, ‘mega’ thruster. It multiplies input by a million.

Boom.

Done.

Headcanon deployed.

So now the next time you’re watching some stupid show and think that something doesn’t make sense, pause to consider that maybe you’re just not using enough imagination, or else I will be with you in spirit to wrong-shame you.

(If you use your imagination and it still doesn’t make sense, then don’t worry. This means that the show is trash and you are right.)

Now go to bed.

#Boom #Voltron #voltron: legendary defender #lion #fan theory #engineering #some cool food for thought #I don't even watch this show what am I doing

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Heyy, so I just discovered your blog and one of the things I noticed was that you often write about what seems to be a religion vs science thing. Don’t you think that religion and science can just exist by each other? Like, I believe in a religion but I also really love science too and I don’t have any problem to accept scientific evidence. I just don’t think it has to be so extremely kept apart yk?

Nope.

They are completely opposed ways of assessing ideas, of looking at the world. One is based on faith, the other is based on evidence.

Science isn’t about “what”, it’s about “how.” Literally anything will be accepted by science if you just explain “how” - how did you form this conclusion, how did you go about verifying this, how can we replicate it. If you can’t, or haven’t figured out a way to do so, then we don’t need to spend time considering it. And you probably don’t have a good reason for claiming it in the first place.

Religion is about declaring things to be true anyway and having no source outside itself to justify the “how.”

You don’t use “faith” to assess any ideas other than (supposed) supernatural ones. Why is that? Why use a different mechanism to assess what should be the most important ideas of all?

If “faith” is an unreliable way of determining a person’s guilt or which snack food is the lowest in fat, then why would you use it to determine your beliefs, your understanding of the world? Shouldn’t you be more meticulous about how you construct your view of reality and how you interact with it, not less?

Any time someone resolves this science vs religion conflict, there is always compromise, created for comfort, not accuracy. A version of a scientific idea that is inaccurate to the actual idea, but which has been created to resolve the cognitive dissonance. You’ve invented your own religion and your own science.

This is evident in our scientific understanding of human origins. Evolution means Adam and Eve is nothing but a myth. Without Adam and Eve, original sin does not exist. Without literal original sin, Jesus, if he existed at all, died for a myth. Therefore, Xtianity has been falsified. 

Under the scientific model, one would have to concede the problems with Xtianity, withdraw the idea and go back and revise, re-explore it, gather new evidence, or abandon it entirely.

Under the religious model, Xtianity is just still “true”… somehow. It can never be falsified. That’s just simply denial. Imagine if science had the luxury of ignoring all the evidence. The shape of the Earth, the nature of matter, the nature of disease (apparently, not demons, whodathunk?)…

I’m fairly certain you’ve already either created or gone hunting for excuses to reconcile the myth with the science, thereby compromising both, and demonstrating you’re not really convinced about either. Instead of considering the possibility one of them is completely wrong, and going back to honestly re-evaluate why and how you formed this belief in the first place, and what lines of evidence support it.

“Faith” allows you to hold onto an idea that is not supported. And that’s intellectually dishonest. You won’t let go of it even though you should.

What would convince you that your “faith” idea was not correct? Anything? What would convince you that evidence-based scientific ideas were not correct? Wouldn’t more evidence do that? Don’t you see the problem here? Your “faith”-based ideas can never be discarded. You can never detect an error and never correct a mistake.

And the world around you says you likely have made a mistake. Every other religion (and many other denominations) say you’re wrong. They have faith that they’re right. Why would you use religious faith as a mechanism to understand the world when it’s unreliable? Every scientist has a consistent understanding of gravity, atoms, electricity, flight and every other scientific principle. But none of you religious people can agree about your “god” concepts.

What’s interesting is that the science is authoritative over the religion. We never use religion to authenticate the science. We only ever hear of people saying that their religious superstitions are (supposedly) validated by science (although it’s invariably either fallacious or trivial). And when they’re not validated, they become “metaphor.”

“But what about the supernatural?” If you can claim it exists, you can show us how you figured this out. We can detect the temperature of planets we will never visit, and calculate the age of the universe itself. To claim that science cannot measure and detect something, that it’s intangible, insubstantial, and affects the world in no way is to concede it’s indistinguishable from non-existent. And that you had no basis for claiming it exists in the first place. And if we ever do detect ghosts or “spirits” (whatever that even means), they will no longer be supernatural, by definition.

There are things we cannot yet explain. But to claim that they are explained by “supernatural” means, when you have no way of eliminating all known and unknown natural explanations, is self-refuting. And the “explanation” provides no explanation, no way forward, no new path of discovery or exploration. The unexplained is unexplained.

So, the reason science and religion cannot coexist is simple. how did/would you go about making sure you’re not wrong about your god? When you understand that, you’ll understand the problem.

Recommended: The War Between Science and Religion - Jerry Coyne

#ask #religion vs science #science vs religion #science #religion #science works #scientific evidence #faith vs reality #reality vs faith #faith #faith is not a path to truth #faith is not a virtue #religion is a mental illness

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

It’s Anarhichadidae, not Anti-hiccup-daisy

Summary: Logan’s ichthyology teacher is a joke. The boy who just called him on it, however, is the opposite. Too bad Logan was going to be dead from Gay Panic within the hour.

Pairing: Analogical Warnings: Stupid/mean teacher, nervous/gay stuttering, mocking stuttering, swearing, mentions of death via gay, this entire thing is basically Logan being gay for a smartie hottie

Wrote partially because my muse has no chill and partially because @vintage-squid really liked the idea and helped me with the Big Fish Words 

"Okay, class, today we will be talking about a species commonly referred to as Wolf eels. They are of the order Perfect-odds, and the class Anti-hiccup-daisy."

Logan sighed a long, long, long suffering sigh as he took his normal seat near the middle of the lecture hall, pulling out his notebook and pen more for appearances than anything. It wasn't like he'd actually be learning anything worth writing down.

When Logan had started the class at the start of the year, he had been excited. His interest in biology was only amplified by the marine aspect. So it was understandable that ichthyology would intrigue him.

Of course, that had been before he learned his teacher was an absolute fool who could neither pronounce any scientific word nor produce any valid scientific information.

Logan had used to fight him, back at the beginning of the year when he hadn't yet been crushed by the homework of other classes and he was, dare he say, optimistic for a chance to actually learn something from that class. Now, the only reason he didn't drop it was because it was an easy credit and essentially an hour of free time- an hour he needed from the work that was cutting into his sleep from his actual classes.

With the first sentence out of his mouth today being so horribly butchered, Logan was sure he could actually sleep through the class without missing out on anything.

As was, the words were already mostly a drone going in one ear and out the other as Logan mentally studied for the test in his next class. He was pointlessly coming in and out of the conversation, rating the stupidity of the comments when he felt he needed a break.

It was roughly half an hour into class when he paid attention again only to hear the gem that was, "Wolf eels are, in fact, closely related to Moray eels. The were forced out of their shared habitat by lack of resources, creating the slight differences in appearance."

Logan tried not to audibly snort. Who gave this man a teaching degree?

Already slipping back into his mental notes, Logan was pulled roughly out of his thoughts by the yell that came from the back of the classroom:

"Bullshit."

The entire class swiveled in their seats, trying to find who had just loudly cussed at the teacher.

At first, Logan couldn't find him, too many heads for him to pick the source of the call (especially since he hadn't exchanged so much as five words with anyone in the class).

"I beg your pardon?" The teacher asked, sounding as startled as his class. Logan was able to locate the student, then, when he responded once more,

"I said bullshit, sir." The student answered, leaning back in his chair and tugging at the sleeves of his patched up hoodie. "I can say it a third time if you'd like me too, but I don't think I'll ever actually say it enough to sum up how much of it you're spewing."

While the class around him collectively hushed in an awed sort of quiet, Logan focused on the hoodie-wearing student. They were a few rows away, but it didn't stop him from noticing the other's black fingernails, his purposefully smudged eyeshadow, the fading purple in his floof of hair, how his pale skin seemed to very well bring out what Logan would have guessed were copper brown eyes-

Logan shook his head and forced himself to look forwards again, back towards the offended teacher, feeling his cheeks already heating up like they were going to be stars.

So it seemed the only other kid in the class with a brain may be a little pretty. Logan would decide how he felt about that in a moment.

Luckily for him, he was able to shift his attention back to the newly emerged fight when the teacher finally got past making frustrated noises and responded with, "I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you're trying to say."

The student blinked, almost seeming to be in genuine confusion. "I thought I made it pretty clear. Everything you're saying? Bullshit. Lies. Slander. Non-facts. Whatever you want to call them."

"And who exactly are you, Mr...?"

"Virgil."

"Mr. Virgil, who do you think you are to challenge your teacher in how they teach their class?"

Virgil scratched at the back of his neck nonchalantly. "I think I'm right."

"Oh, really?" The teacher asked, sounding much too cocky for a man who probably couldn't tell a clownfish from a great white. "Care to enlighten us as to just how right you are, then?"

"Love to." Virgil responded, catching the teacher slightly off guard as he started tapping his pencil on his notebook. "What you said is about as right as saying a human is at all related to a screw." He paused for a second to smirk. "Well, the average human anyways. Screw-brains like you are exceptions."

Teacher spluttered out loud, Logan mentally spluttered in gay, and Virgil continued even more confidentially,

"Wolf eels and Moray eels look similar due to convergent evolution, a concept normally taught in high school so I don't know how you made it to college without grasping that concept. They're even different orders- real eels being Anguilliformes, though considering I've heard you struggle to say dandelion I'm not surprised you tried to skip the extra name."

"That'll be quite enough, Mr. Virgil." The teacher ordered, Virgil pausing with an eyebrow raised in a mix of curiosity and amusement. Logan tried not to feel too annoyed by the way his heart skipped angrily, wanting to hear more of the student's coarse and sarcastic tone.

While Logan lamented the silence, the teacher continued, "Now. Does anyone agree with Mr. Virgil's rather outlandish theories, or can we continue with some actual teaching?"

For a second, no one spoke up. Logan knew for a fact that most of the kids in the class either agreed with the teacher or were taking the class for the credits alone. They wouldn't have any reason to speak up. Most days, Logan wouldn't either.

But right before the teacher could smile, self-satisfied, Logan blurted out (much less professionally than he'd like to admit), "I do."

The teacher turned his attention onto Logan, but he didn't care about that so much as he did the shift he noticed out of the corner of his eye from Virgil. He was staring at him.  Logan pretended that wasn't the reason his next sentence came out as, "He-he's quite right, actually. You're the on-only one spewing nonsense here."

"Oh, am I?" The teacher asked, crossing his arms and looking extremely smug as he continued, "Please, why don't you take a turn doing my job?"

Logan glanced back at Virgil quickly, spurred by an instinct he didn't even know he had, finding the other student tilting his head slightly and- dammit it was possible for him to be even more attractive?

Logan turned his gaze back at the teacher again, who's smug grin had only grown, and he forced himself to meet his eyes, happy to see a spark of doubt in them.

"Why not?" He asked, ignoring the still very much existing tremble in his voice that only grew when he let his thoughts wander back towards the boy in back (so constantly). "I-I'm clearly more qualified."

The teacher looked thoroughly shocked at the blatant implication, and Logan used the slight rush of satisfaction he got from that expression to push on. "What Vir- Vir-" He cleared his throat and gave up at trying to get the pretty student's name out of his mouth. "What has already been stated by any- anyone in this class who is- isn't you is ac-acc-accurate." Logan internally cursed as he stumbled over even the simplest of words. "Mo-moray eels and Wolf eels a-are, in fact, not even clo-clo- remotely related."

"Repeating what others have said does not make you an expert on anything." The teacher said mockingly, before adding, "Especially when you seem to barely be able to say it."

Logan ground his teeth. "You want some 'new' facts?" He spat out. "You earlier called Wolf eels extremely vic-vic- mean creatures, I can only as-assume based on its name alone, which is just ig-igno- stupid given how gentle they often are."

"You can't-"

"They often grow ei-eight feet long, unlike the eight inch length you assigned them." Logan pushed on, ignoring his teacher's attempts to break in. "I'm not quite s-sure how you got seaweed from ur-urchins, crabs, and mol-mollus- not seaweed for their prim-primary food source but that's pr-pretty wrong , too. And as bro-brought up before you can't even pro-prono- say their sci-scient- proper class and order names!"

"Like you can?" The teacher fired back, and if it weren't for the gay distraction a few feet behind him Logan would have said them backwards three times in a row just to prove his point. As it stood, however, he was ready to simply glare the look of the teacher's face.

"Order of Perciformes and class of Anarhichadidae." Virgil spoke up again, the words rolling off his tongue like they were cat and dog. "Order for true eels would be Anguilliformes if you want that one again."

"I wasn't speaking to you."

"What?" Virgil asked, feigning innocence. "I'm just another lowly student in this class. If I can say it, you should be able to say it."

The teacher fumed more, and Logan risked another glance back at Virgil. This time, the other student caught his stare and winked at him with a stupid, cocky little smile.

That was it. Logan was never speaking again. If he thought he was stumbling over his words when he was blushing he didn't want to find out what would happen when his cheeks were literally on fire and he felt very slightly dizzy, somehow in a good way.

If he wasn't still trying to look vaguely respectful in defiance of his teacher, he would have just laid down and screamed into the desk.

"Well, then." The teacher said, barely contained anger in his tone as he pulled Logan's attention away from the important thoughts of 'does Ultra Gay exits because if so I am it.' "Since it's clear the two of you are more interested in disrupting my class than actually learning, I'm going to have to ask you both to leave."

"Wicked." Virgil replied immediately, once more catching the teacher off-guard as he stood up and pulled his backpack over his shoulder, shoving his book and pen into it in one fluid motion as he headed for the door.

Logan berated himself as he got up much less coordinately- not because he cared much for staying in class, but because he was about to leave it with the source of his current Gay Panic. He started to put the notebook away, trying not to bend the edges and failing miserably. He probably looked like a mess- an assessment that would not be totally untrue.

It didn't help when a second later someone was taking the book from him and actually getting it into the backpack, dropping what Logan recognized what his pen in as well before zipping it up and offering it to Logan. Logan took it, glancing up to see who was helping him, and immediately regretting it when he realized it was Virgil, expression extremely gentle as he more or less helped to pull Logan out of the classroom.

Logan wondered if his entire face was red yet.

Logan managed to at least somewhat come back to himself as he heard the classroom door shut, focusing on not tugging at his hair as he adjusted his grip on his backpack instead. He expected Virgil to head off on his way now that they were both out, but to Logan's mixed mortification and delight, he remained standing in front of Logan.

"You good, bro?" He asked, sounding more withdrawn now that he wasn't correcting their idiot of a teacher. But it was still the same voice, so Logan was still trying to not simply pass out from gay (something he used to not believe was possible- he used to be a foolish, foolish man). "You seem a little shaky."

If he had been talking to anyone else, Logan would have scoffed and answered sarcastically. As it all stood, Logan was lucky to have choked out, "Yeah" without a stutter.

Virgil nodded, not looking fully convinced but pressing on anyways. "Uh, thanks for helping back in class there. I know most kids in there don't give two fucks about the material. Hell, I normally don't stand up about it either, but he was going after eels man. They're like the snakes of the sea. Not cool." He said, chuckling lightly.

"Yeah." Came Logan's extremely smart and well put together reply.

Virgil raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you're good? You seem a little... spaced out."

"Ye- I mean," Logan cleared his throat, shaking the one word his mouth seemed willing to work with him, "I'm fine."

"Sure. Listen..." Virgil trailed off. "Oh, uh, don't think I've got your name."

"It's Logay. I mean!" Logan nearly punched himself for that one. "Logan. It's Logan."

Virgil, however, seemed only amused by the slip. "Logan. Got it. Listen, Logan, we've got another twenty minutes before the next class starts, and I assume nothing important to do."

"Yes...?" Logan said hesitantly, confused as to where exactly Virgil was heading.

Then Virgil smiled and Logan's heart skipped a few dozen beats. "Wanna go waste some time at the coffee shop down the street? We can discuss some actual fish facts if you'd like."

Logan didn't respond, too busy short-circuiting. To be totally accurate, actually, he was having a complete system shutdown, the only thing being processed being that sentence and absolutely nothing else.

He blinked in shock when Virgil snapped his fingers in his face, looking a mix of cheerful and worried. "Uh, earth to Logan. You sure you-"

"Yes." Logan responded, very much delayed, before shaking his head as if to clear it. "Um, yes, I'd like to g-go waste time wi-with you."

Virgil's smile grew. "Nice." He said before grabbing Logan's wrist, starting to tug him towards the shop. Logan dearly hoped that Virgil was, alongside smart, beautiful, and absolutely wonderful, strong, because he was pretty sure his legs could no longer be trusted to support him as he more or less tumbled down the hall behind Virgil.

Virgil briefly glanced back, making sure Logan wasn't completely dead weight, still smiling. Despite the complete lack of control over his body (or perhaps because of it), Logan managed what must have seemed to be a drunk smile back at him, holding onto it even after Virgil looked forward once more.

So maybe he was going to have a heart attack caused directly by gayness the minute Virgil left to continue on with his day. He couldn't think of a better way to spend the last twenty minutes of his life.

#lots of gay panic in this one folks #ts logan #ts virgil #thomas sanders #ts sides #sander sides #fanfic #fanfiction

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

I am So Tired.

I’ll be honest, my mental health has not been in the greatest place lately. We've hardly left home or seen anyone for a full 4 months now, my husband and I are trying to do a total of 3 simultaneous full time jobs between the 2 of us, and we have no idea how we're going to get by in the fall once his classes are even more full time and I may or may not be back in the office. But the biggest factor in all of this has been that I've been feeling incredibly alienated from the community here, because almost no one except us seems to remember that there's still a pandemic. Of all the people in the world, I would think that these ones would understand the gravity of the situation given the number of deaths we saw, and yet hardly anyone wears a mask, at least some people are hosting for Shabbos, they don't even change their behavior when medical professionals and rabbonim speak out. I feel almost gaslighted in a way - here we all lived through what to me is a major trauma, not actually over yet, with a very real possibility of repeating itself in full force, and yet almost everyone else seems to have forgotten both that it happened and that it could happen again. The reality that it's not just about this situation - even when the pandemic passes, these same people who refuse to listen to science or common sense, who are willing to risk my life and everyone else's for their own comfort and convenience, will still make up the community.

I've largely been quiet about this with my social circle because I was afraid that talking about it with any given person would result in finding out that that person wasn't being careful either, which would only increase my depression and alienation. But today someone in one of my whatsapp groups brought up that she's thinking about starting a playgroup in her home for families that want to take precautions but can't avoid the necessity of childcare, so I took a risk and opened up a bit about my fears of having to send my son anywhere when it feels like no one here is taking things seriously. A few of the people in the group agreed with me (although all of them are located elsewhere), and it was such a relief to finally feel like I wasn't completely alone.

And then.... We have a family we're friends with who for the most part has been as concerned and careful as us throughout the pandemic. Lately they've been a bit more lenient than us, but at least they haven't thrown everything out the window. And my friend and I spoke back when the pandemic was just starting about how concerned we were when people weren't taking it seriously enough then. So I would've fully expected that she would be at least mostly on the same page.

But instead she sent this long, honestly devastating message about how we should stop talking about this (and she's the group admin soooooo) because while she doesn't agree with the people who aren't taking it seriously, we should have ahavas yisroel, we should be dan l'kaf zchus, we may not agree but there are different opinions about wearing masks, people have been through a trauma and don't know how to deal, blablabla.

There I was finally feeling the very significant depression I've been weighed down by lifting just a little bit, and she shuts down the conversation because G-d freaking forbid we be too judgmental of people who are ignoring science, common sense, the local medical professionals, and the local rabbonim because it's too inconvenient for them to not risk killing other people. Trauma? Don't freaking talk to me about trauma. I lived through the exact same thing as they did, I am still living through it, I AM TRAUMATIZED! And weirdly I am still managing not to risk other people's lives just because it would be easier for me. None of these people are neglecting to wear masks because they have found a legitimate scientific opinion that says it's better not to. I promise you. I have literally tried talking to them, I have been told that it's "unhygienic" to wear a mask because they aren't "sterile" and then when I asked if they could send me to a source to that, been called brainwashed and not given an answer. Because they don't have one. This isn't about different people having different opinions they follow and we all need to get along. Viruses don't work like halacha, where two conflicting opinions can both be right and people can follow either one and we can all get along. They are risking my son's life, they are risking my life and my husband's, they are risking their own lives. THEY SHOULD BE JUDGED.

And to say that those of us who feel betrayed and alone and stuck in an impossible position because of this situation should just continue to suffer in silence rather than speak to others about it because ~dan l'kaf zechus u guyz, ahavas yisroel~ is disgusting and inhumane. We are part of a religion that makes it clear there is such thing as objective right and wrong. Putting lives at risk for your own comfort is wrong. The people who are trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation should not have to take on additional suffering because oh no we can't be judgmental about the people who prioritize their convenience over our lives. There is no "live and let live: when the other party has chosen to live (or actually possibly die) and potentially let die.

---

And then, there's this foolish European trip that my sister is taking, which has now had added to it that she's flying here this weekend because she needs to get her passport and some other things from her apartment. My family has cut out pressuring us overtly to see them since I spoke to them about it, but she made sure to mention that my dad thinks she should come see the baby while she's here, but that she "said no because she knows we wouldn't be comfortable with it," like it was her choice. Here's the thing! I would actually consider meeting her outdoors, with masks, maintaining distance the entire time, if she's going to be here anyway. But I know that if I relax at all on this, my dad will push, and may even be so desperate to see the baby as to hop on a plane he wouldn't have been on otherwise in order to have some similarly distanced visits. And I won’t be responsible for that. So even though I am so tired of never seeing anyone, and we could do this safely (ignoring the existing risk of my sister flying, because she's going to do it no matter what), I feel like we can't because of the likely result.

Did I mention I'm tired?