Tomás Sánchez

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

https://staffordsophie.com/

underrated threesome dynamic of herding dog x lamb x wolf

Researchers have created a new device for taking blood samples that works like a leech. The new device is less invasive than taking blood from the arm with a needle. It is also easy to handle and can be used by people without medical training. [...] The researchers came up with the idea for the new device while previously developing something else: a suction cup that transports medication into the blood via the mucous membrane lining the inside of the mouth. “For this earlier project, we had already studied leeches, which attach to their host with a sucker. We realized that we could develop a similar system to collect blood,” says David Klein, a doctoral student in the group led by Jean-Christophe Leroux, professor of drug formulation and delivery at ETH Zurich. After leeches have attached themselves, they penetrate the host’s skin with their teeth. To suck blood from the wound, they create negative pressure by swallowing. The new device works in a very similar way: A suction cup measuring about two and a half centimeters is attached to the patient’s upper arm or back. Within the cup are a dozen microneedles that puncture the skin when pressed against it. Within a few minutes, the negative pressure in the suction cup has ensured that sufficient blood has been collected to be used for diagnostic tests.

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It's a time gun. A gun that shoots time. Not a gun to shoot time, that's a terrible idea. Time is messed up enough as it is without some fool shooting holes in it.

No, it shoots bullets of concentrated time. How much depends on the caliber. This gun is chambered for 24 hours. (Although the weird thing is that despite anti-time definitely existing, this gun has no anti-version: there's no anti-gun of time. Instead you just load the gun of time with anti-time bullets.)

So what's it do? Well, you know the saying that time is a river? Well, rivers have splits and tributaries, where some of the stream is split off and eventually catches up with the main body.

This shoves you off into one of those, as you're given more time than the general world has. You get some time that no one else has, until you resynchronize. You're in a frozen world of no time, with only you and any other simultaneously desynchronized people able to move and interact.

This may seem powerful and useful for those hit by time bullets, but it's less useful than you'd think. Your ability to interact with the world is quite limited. And the length of the time you have is critical: 24 hours is a good amount because it's quite survivable, any longer and you're likely to die of thirst or hunger. You can't eat atemporal food or drink atemporal water. Some nasty chronomancers have been known to build time guns of months or years, meaning their victims are instantly replaced with a shriveled corpse, knowing it wasn't a quick death, but a slow and painful one in a lonely world of unfeeling statues where the sun never sets.

You can still breathe, though. That one is... Well, if you can figure out why, there's a prize from the University of Towers for you. Since the existence of the temporal aether was disproven we really have no idea why that happens.

Still, a short trip into personal time can be safe and useful, if properly prepared. Pack provisions and books and writing implements and take it in short jumps, and you can get weeks worth of writing or studying done in a single night.

Anti-time bullets are simpler, at least simpler to explain. They similarly desynchronize your personal time stream, but it results in you Not Being until the timelines align. From your perspective, that happens instantly, with a moment of the standard temporal nausea. For everyone else, you're just gone until you can make up the missing time. So it functions very much like a time jump forward. A 24-hour bullet of anti-time brings you to this time tomorrow, with no time having passed for you, due to your temporal deficit.

It seems safer, at first glance. No risk of starvation, no isolation, just a blink and it's later.

But there's always the problem of telefragging. The universe doesn't like when two things occupy the same space, and while you're gone, your former and future location are accessible. There may be nothing but air there when you return, or there may be a wagon, a person, or a rock. And the results when you return are not pretty, or even explosive.

It's been experimentally verified* by chronomancers that the end result depends on how much of the returning being overlaps with the existing matter. Less than half, and they merge, in ways that are gruesome and almost always fatal. At best, you might lose a limb or a digit due to the overlap. At worst, you're dead instantly and your body is now merged with some other object in ways that will make the funeral closed-casket, and the casket will be an unusual shape.

More than half... Well, the universe REALLY doesn't like it when matter overlaps with other matter. It explodes, violently. Very violently. One chronomancer even suggested this might be used as a weapon of war, by building a siege engine that collides a large animal like a ocean-whale with a large block of limestone, utilizing a short anti-time trip to overlap them. This idea was shot down immediately, as was the chronomancer who suggested it. She'll be officially censured when she reappears, around 28 years from now.

* the tests were performed on standard laboratory voles**, not human (or other sapient) test subjects. All experiments were done with ethics board approval and whenever possible, time loops were employed to unperform any experiments that resulted in the death of test subjects.

** rats, often used elsewhere in science, can't be used here as their natural temporal abilities interfere with the experiment. See "there is only one rat", V. Tollens, U. of T. Journal of Time, TE 436.

Nana Visitor, Gates McFadden and Tawny Newsome

New paladin oath

Concept art for Cinderella (1950), by Mary Blair

my favorite fucked up character concept is probably "what if a butterfly came out of its chrysalis too early"

Barn owl twins

The world of modern aesthetics owes so much to Jean Pettine yall dont even know

Old Lighters 🤔

Edge of Darkness by Ben J

This artist on Instagram

Dont know if you were joking about needing catboy references a couple of weeks back but here ya go

Theres one for sheep too if you need that

the sacred texts.... thank you for bestowing it upon me