crystal beptism

Hi newt! There's an alligator at my work with the same name as you.

Love that they named an animal after another animal, like, "This is my cat, Pigeon."

Book: “he licked the roof of her mouth”

Me, aroace:

My dad was dealing with some mixed feelings so I told him "In therapy when something is too complicated to do a simple 'pro and contra list' we sometimes do an excercise where you imagine all these mixed feelings around a table in some kind of conference, letting each tell their bit and you leading the debate."

and my dad didn't really respond and just stared ahead so I kept preparing lunch. Until a few minutes later when he suddenly piped up: "I am having a bad time at the conference"

Jet and Zuko meet on the ferry is TIRED. Jet and Zuko meet after S2E7 "Zuko Alone" is WIRED

what if we were narrative foils & we met? on a ferry ride to ba sing se 😳 & discussed our respective redemption arcs without either of us understanding the full context of the conversation 🤯 not knowing we were doomed for tragedy 😭 & we were both boys?

they should invent friends that do not live so fucking far

“Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised. Their flu vaccine will also likely be delivered in the form of a spray, as many people have an aversion to needles. “Respiratory infections move through the nose, so a spray might be an easier delivery system,” Hai said. Additionally, the researchers say there is little chance of a virus mutating to avoid this vaccination strategy. “Viruses may mutate in regions not targeted by traditional vaccines. However, we are targeting their whole genome with thousands of small RNAs. They cannot escape this,” Hai said. Ultimately, the researchers believe they can ‘cut and paste’ this strategy to make a one-and-done vaccine for any number of viruses. “There are several well-known human pathogens; dengue, SARS, COVID. They all have similar viral functions,” Ding said. “This should be applicable to these viruses in an easy transfer of knowledge.””

—

Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains

This is HUGE. This will fundamentally change how we get inoculated.

I think if you’re going to write period fiction about girls set somewhere in the last two centuries, you should read fiction about girls written during that point in the last two centuries.

For instance, I happen to have a couple shelves full of girls’ books from the start of the 20th century, and I can tell you that–at least in America–Acceptable Young Woman Protagonists of the time tended to do things like

drive cars (some books are about “auto clubs,” which is an especially fun window into the time. I wish I liked my car as much as these girls do theirs)

fly planes (mostly in books about flying, but not only that)

go to women’s colleges (MOST of them do this!)

run their own social lives, very much including dating

get jobs

And that’s not even including the spy/crime book heroines, who also tend to Face Down Criminals and Solve Mysteries and Save The Nation. Which…is not and was never intended to be realistic, probably, but was clearly acceptable in books for girls.

So I really question the Historical Female Characters who absolutely must carve out their own anachronistic ways to get anything done under the Oppressive Social Norms Of Their Time. Like…Betsy of the Betsy-Tacy books was having a fairly modern high school experience and planning to go to college and become a professional writer in the 1910s, with her family and friends’ full support. Maybe just move to Minnesota, girls?

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice

this is like 100% petty all things considered but i just can’t wait until some of u learn that it is absolutely normal for people of any age to refer to their dads as “daddy” in many parts of the south like it isn’t a red flag there. 60 year old women in my family still refer to their dads as “daddy.” and btw i think anyone should be allowed to call their own fathers whatever they want without someone either making it nasty or being accusatory like don’t you get tired of making ppl uncomfortable for no reason

A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it? Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [3] - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy"). One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect. But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a "private" social network, including "end-to-end" encryption of messages. Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of "pre-crime" targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in "pre-crime".