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#so crazy to think about them from an evolutionary perspective
organicmatter · 13 days
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flytrap details - I love these plants
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redinkofshame · 3 years
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Ancient Gods
So as @thevikingwoman pointed out, #1 on the AU list is kinda hilarious from a Solavellan perspective. I did it anyway, though.
I have a story that I’m sure I’ll never write where Corypheus dies opening the orb just like Solas planned (the dragon is close enough to get caught in the blast), and thus he is able to come into power at the very beginning of Inquisition (i.e. before he’s learned that They’re Real People). This would be a dark!Solas AU.
669 words, SWF
For @augustwritingchallenge
Read on AO3
The Dread Wolf Rises
Keria burst in the doors. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. As both a Dalish elf and a mage she had planned to observe the Conclave completely unnoticed but she couldn’t ignore the call for help, or the odd thrum of magic coming from where it didn’t belong. She saw a man — an abomination? — approach what appeared to be a high-ranking Chantry member magically suspended in the air by… Grey Wardens?
She didn’t have time to take it in before the elderly Mother took advantage of the distraction of Keria’s appearance to knock a swirling orb from the abomination’s hand. She lunged for it without thinking.
A mistake. 
As she grabbed it an intense pain burned her from inside, ripping her mana out so violently that her muscles seized up, her hand clenched so tight she couldn’t drop the fucking thing.
A deep angry, “Noo!” was the last thing she heard before her world exploded. Her body was flung into the air, coming to an abrupt stop on ground that still shook beneath her back. Thunder echoed in her skull.
The orb slipped out of her limp fingers and rolled away. Keria didn’t move.
She couldn’t say how long had passed as she laid there, wondering if she would die. The thunder ebbed to a high pitched ring deep in her ears. It hurt to draw breath, hurt to even think about moving. Dying would be easier, honestly.
But then the stillness was broken by the wind stirring her hair. She finally opened her eyes as dust started to pick up around her. Above her she saw only sky, gray clouds where there should have been one of those stone ceilings shems were so crazy about. Where was she?
Keria rolled over slowly, taking in the wasteland around her. Barren rock interspersed with twisted corpses and fire and… broken walls.
Gods.
The broken walls of the building she’d been in. She whipped her head around — the whole damn mountainside was gone.
The wind was getting stronger, tearing at her from every direction now, howling like a pack of wolves.
Exactly like a pack of wolves.
The thought hit her just as she looked up to see a figure descend slowly from the sky, arms spread casually. Boots hit the ground lightly and the wind stilled, and Keria instinctively scrambled away, finding cover behind some shattered stones. She could barely hear the steady steps over the thudding of her heart.
They were coming towards her. They sounded maybe 10 paces from her when they stopped. She held her breath.
Then she felt a strum of magic pulse up from her hand. Fuck! The orb!
She frantically tried to decide if she should reveal herself in an attempt to recover it when the decision was made for her; a crackling green energy, blindingly bright, burst from the other side of her hiding spot and her palm simultaneously, and she cried out in pain, clutching her arm to her chest.
A heartbeat passed, and the pain stopped. A shape loomed over her shelter, blocking out the swirling gray sky above; a man’s shadow.
No — not a man. Definitely not.
Keria had never been a pious woman. She prayed only by rote and performed religious rituals because they made her feel closer to her People and her history, not because she believed the gods gave a damn about them.
And yet she knew somehow — perhaps in some way seeded deep within by an evolutionary need to survive — that this was not a man. This was a him.
The Dread Wolf.
He was watching her with steely eyes in a face sharp and predatory. He held one arm raised to the side, the artifact spinning and hovering above his palm, the green light bouncing off of golden armor. As she stared, wide-eyed, he curled his finger slightly. The orb shone in response, as did her her hand, painlessly this time.
He tilted his head to the side and grinned, flashing sharp canine teeth. “Fascinating.”
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deuce-duce · 3 years
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Am I...?? (Inwardly GASPS)!! Which Part...??
Today is March 2nd 2021 and I got my puter back and went to look at what I had last written on December 16th 2020. When I opened the file, it had been changed… dates had been obscured and certain things had been reworded… So… I have decided to go back through all of my previous posts to ensure the integrity of what I am writing stays that way! During this process I will be putting together a collection of my favorite quotes and post fragments. Which I will dub Rock and Roll’s Greatest Hits, if you live near me go buy airhorns Ill tell you why, When the greatest hits album comes out. What your about to read is primarily from Dec. 16th with a few changes or should I say… restorations?? Probably a little of both to be honest. Everything is still as it happened, I just add better descriptive words and fine tune the analogies so that they are easier to digest… My English teacher always told me that was what I was good at! Along with many others… who have said the same… not only do I understand it… I’m able to explain it in a way that others understand as well. ENJOY
On the seventh of December I woke up not too sure if something had occurred that night or not… as I have mentioned before they use a numbing agent that basically masks the pain until it wears off approximately 12 hours later… When I a woke on this day I was having moments of clarity and for some reason just couldn’t keep them to myself. talking to one of the staff members of the homeless shelter I expressed my destiny that I actually had one, that was going to bring me to greatness… then out of nowhere I just blurted out there is going to be a power shift!!!! And at that very moment I couldn’t believe what it was that had just come out of my mouth. I didn’t even believe it at first because the guy at the desk was like IDK… about… that… but when I went back into my room, the look on my roommate’s face said it all!! It seems as though those who pull strings and orchestrate a lot of this… put all of their eggs into one basket. I don’t know exactly what the terms of thee bet were but I’m assuming it had/has something to do with me not being able to control my compulsivity associated with my dissociation. Unfortunately for them I made a deal with God. It was while I was on quarantine and even though I was in a basement all by myself people kept F$%^&*!> with me. This is when I prayed stating that I would not falter, for my body his temple his craft and his glory. that I need to take care of myself and my destiny, for it is in his hands and I won’t let my selfishness or imperfections stop him from fulfilling his plan. Over and over again I have cried and cried about how fundamental and powerful this is all going to be. EFFIN CRAZY!! And now that I know without anyone telling me and it literally being given to me somehow is what is freaking everybody out. How do I know or how the hell did I figure it out!! I really couldn’t tell you and the only thing that is possible is that our Creator endowed me with such responsibility. Crazy!! (this was before I considered the probability of God being a woman, A mother, A Lover)
Low and behold one of my favorite artists Mr. Kid, Maniac, Rager, Wizard, Pursuer of Happiness Cudi dropped a new album entitled Man on the MOON Three. Ill have to say it’s a wonderfully made album! The album delves deep into who Scott is… I know the Fans are going to love it.
Rewind a little bit sorry for my hiatus just needed to stay focused and well as your aware have been led here not by accident and had some things that I needed to take care of before I started writing again. Not to mention I have been dealing with a lot only to know that I am who I am for a reason Rockstar Knights off MOTM3 has a lot to say concerning who I am and what I have realized as a result to my struggle. The Song is a collab with Trippie Redd and really encapsulates so much, that its hard to describe in words.
I had a very interesting conversation with my mother the other day and came to a pretty profound thought. 1st I was telling her how I was being told that I am too….!!! Smart!! Like WTF!! REALLY!! Is that even a thing?? But I didn’t let it get to me too much as it probably is the reason I face so much adversity, No matter the community I enter into. This is how I have explained it to her and a couple other people in the community as well as the Rasta Man in the PNW. The best analogy I could present is if a plant with a fire burning so big and so hot on one side of the plant, a fire so big and hot that it probably would kill most other plants, but not this plant. This plant had sooooo much drive and will to live that instead of giving up it grew in the opposite direction of the blaze. While the roots could withstand the blazing inferno becoming one with the heat and pain Upon the journey away from the fire (society) the plant developed different characteristics colors and attributes that no other plant had. Essentially that journey completely changed that plants physiology Psychology and possible its genetic makeup altogether. Now that the plant has grown so far from the fire (Society) that its all alone. Now theres a different kind of fire where he once thought was safe. But as he grows back towards the fire to escape the new blaze (tyranny) he realizes he will never be able to be the same as the fire he grew so far away from. Now the only option the plant has with death being imminent is to grow as big and bright as quickly as possible before it is engulfed on all sides.
All this taken into account along with factoring in the two major belief structures in the world one Being Creation or Evolution (The Big BANG) this plant which has defied all odds still shines brightly displaying its colors and unique characteristics no matter how dark the room may be it still continues to bloom! Is this a Divine will and plan or are we experiencing the next step of Evolution??? My honest opinion is its both! For the mere ability to adapt and change and prevail in situations others couldn’t dream of or even have nightmares about is truly remarkable and in my eyes is an act of GOD! Just as any evolutionary step would be. The crazier part is… he has no handle!! Nothing to grab on to leaving no way for anyone to grab hold and control! AYE….
I thought this all might just be me being stubborn or simply an idiot until for some reason I opened up my meme App. Something I never open or even look at and the first thing that popped up was a picture and quote saying that many told Marilyn Monroe that she was only beautiful because of the clothes and dresses she wore. It then concluded Marilyn Monroe did a photoshoot in nothing but a burlap potato sack. The photos and the message she sent were completely opposite of that which was being said by spectators. Now!! As scrolled to the second meme I was expecting something funny!! That wasn’t the case what I saw next was the upcoming alignment of the two largest planets in the solar system Jupiter and Saturn. Not only does their alignment happen only every 20 years but the proximity of this occurrence to the earth as well as the proximity to each other hasn’t been the same for close to 800 years… What does it all mean… IDK but The Christmas Star is what their calling the alignment and if your familiar with the bible is the star that the kings, from other lands followed  to bring gifts to baby JESUS! Who knows what this alignment could usher in.?
So profound thought comes to me on a daily basis now it’s so strange the way that it comes it will just be momentary thoughts that will pass through my conscience and as they go by I latch on to it delve a little deeper and experience an overwhelming amount of… IDK what to call it but it feels very powerful so much so that it brings me to tears… I don’t know exactly what the future holds but I think that is what makes this so great! I just keep my mind open Like apple IOS Systems letting everything come and go as it pleases when something goes by that strikes me, I latch on and don’t let go. Its weird how it all happens.
Steve Jobs once said that if he had never had an acid trip that he would have never of come up with the operating system for Apple and after explaining to you what I do as a spiritual and destiny seeking process I believe was his thought process as well. This in of itself is what I think they mean when they say to keep an open mind. Just so you know I didn’t come up with that little bit about the late Mr. Jobs by plan it just came to me when thinking about how to have, use and keep an open mind.
The reason I explained this to you was because this is how I Pray! After I pray I sit still with an open mind allowing multiple ideas thoughts and perspectives to pass through my brain… until like an IOS operating system, something speaks to me… when I latch on to it, focus on what it means and what it will mean… “I Get Those Goosebumps Everytime” (Goosebumps, Travis Scott, feat. Kendrick Lamar, Birds in the Trap Sing Mcknight, 2016). This is how you know! A little extra for ya, when I went to look up the info for my first Hip Hop citation it was 11:11 lol there they go again… its really a cool feeling!
Can someone tell me if that APA or MLA…?? Ya know what!! Eff IT!! None of my writing is orthodox, besides I kinda like the way I did it haha
Kid Cudi’s new video just dropped and I couldn’t be more amazed with all of the hidden messages that are in there. He is officially the man on the moon. Passion pain and demon slaying like a maniac on the pursuit of happiness. Love that DUDE!!
That’s all I got for 12-16-2020 Five More Days…
LOVE & PEACE
Songs
Heaven On Earth – Kid Cudi
Goosebumps – Travis Scott, feat. Kendrick Lamar
Dirty Heads – Sound Of Change
 Just so you know the only thing I added this time other the cleaning up what I had already written was the praying part. Although I originally remember that being the purpose as to why I wrote what I did looking at it today March 2nd 2021 it wasn’t there… have a great day everyone. Ill post this on 3/3/2021
I've added parts to the story on my business cards and will leave then random places, what you do with them is up to you but I think It would be cool for those who want to stop me to have to work extra hard just like they make me!!  
LOVE
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jomanuworld · 4 years
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Abraham and Ancient Egypt: Historical and Biblical Perspectives
“BLEACHING THE CLOUDY, CONFUSING, TEDIOUS AND PAINFUL HISTORICAL PATHWAY OF GODS CREATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES OVER THE YEARS TO JUSTIFY OUR EXISTENCE IN THE UNIVERSE.”  I'M ALL CONFUSED, BROKEN- HEARTED, AS WELL AS A VICTIM OF RELIGIOUS INDOCTRINATION  EXPERIENCING PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS AND 75% OF MY DENDRITES ARE FRIED!! HUMAN TROGLODYTES HAVE EXPERIENCED MORE THAN 7000 YEARS OF RELIGIOUS TORTURE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION IN THE NAME OF AN ILLUSIVE GOD. NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY ADOLF HITLER WAS TRYING TO EXTERMINATE THE JEWISH RACE FROM PLANET EARTH. FIRST, THE JEWS MANUFACTURED THEIR FAKE NEW GOD BY COERCION AND TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM EXTERNAL ANNIHILATION. SECOND, HITLER DID NOT LIKE THE RELATIVE NEW SOCIAL/REVOLUTIONARY AND RADICAL IDEAS INTRODUCED BY JEWISH  COMMUNISTS TO REPLACE RUSSIA'S DESPOTIC CZAR. THEREFORE, LET'S JUMP INTO OUR IMAGINARY TIME MACHINE AND LET'S BEGIN FROM TIME 0!
 ACCORDING TO BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGIST EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR, (10/1832 - 01/1917), "ANIMISM IS THE FIRST STAGE IN A EVOLUTIONARY TREE OF INCREASING CULTURAL COMPLEXITY SOCIETIES."  IN OTHER WORDS, HUMAN TROGLODYTES FIRST PRIMITIVE RELIGION WAS ANIMISM, FOLLOWED BY POLYTHEISM, FOLLOWED BY MONOTHEISM, AND FINALLY CULMINATING AND EMBRACING SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM. IN SHORT, TYLOR WITH HIS THEORY OF  HUMAN-GOD EVOLUTION HAS MURDERED ALL THE GODS CREATED BY PRIMITIVE TROGLODYTES OVER THE YEARS. THIS MEANS THAT YAHWEH WAS AN ELUSIVE GOD, SATAN HAS NO JOB, UNEMPLOYED FOREVER, AHURA MAZDA HAS NO PURPOSE IN THIS PLANET, BABALU-AYE IS AN ENIGMA,  AND VOODOO PRIESTS ARE WASTING THEIR  TIME  BY SACRIFICING ANIMALS TO FEED SPIRITS.
 DID MOSES REALLY EXPERIENCE A PRIVATE DIALOG WITH YAHWEH, CALLED REVELATION, OR WE AGNOSTICS SHOULD CONSIDER MOSES ANOTHER MISGUIDED PROPHET TRAPPED IN HIS OWN LITTLE WORLD OF DAILY PRAYERS AND STEALING PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AND CONCEPTS FROM PREVIOUS RELIGIONS TO CREATE A NEW GOD BY INTIMIDATION AND COERCION? “IF YOU DON'T WANT TO LIVE BY THE LAW,  YOU SHALL DIE BY THE LAW!” IS THE “LIVE BY THE LAW” CODE OF LAW WAS STOLEN FROM HAMMURABI’S CODE OF LAW BY MOSES OR ABRAM? 
 DID HEBREWS STEAL MYSTICAL CONCEPTS FROM ZOROASTRIANISM RELIGION TO CREATE ANOTHER ILLUSIVE AND MUCH MORE POTENT GOD (BASED ON THEIR NEEDS)? IS AHURA MAZDA MUCH MORE POWERFUL AND CREATIVE DEITY THAN YAHWEH? WHICH DEITIES CONTROLS AND PROTECT THE AKASHIC RECORDS FROM PAGANS AND THE  GROWING MOB OF NON-BELIEVERS IN OUR TIME? YAHWEH OR AHURA MAZDA?
 IS THIS HEBREW GOD YAHWEH CRAZY?????!!!
 I'M SCARED TO DEATH!! THE MORE I LOOK INTO THE HOLY BIBLE, I GET MORE CONFUSED. SPOOKY, FABRICATED, EXTRAPOLATED LIES AND CONTRADICTIONS ARE SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE HOLY NOVELLA LEAVING READERS IN LIMBO AND CONFUSED. I'M DIVING INTO MY THIRD EYE TO REALLY FIND OUT WHO IS THE CREATOR OF THIS PLANET AND WHAT IS INSIDE OUR BRAIN THAT MAKES US THINK AND BELIEF IN A SUPREME GOD, A CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. THAT'S WHY I AM TRACKING AND DECODING THE HEBREWS, MOSES AND THE YAHOO - YAHWEH GODS!!!!! TRACKING YAHWEH'S ABRACADABRA LIES AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BIBLE. TRACKING, DECODING THE JESUS ENIGMA/PARADOX AND THE PAINFUL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS FROM HUMAN TROGLODYTE TO HUMAN GOD BECAUSE PRAYING FOR A GOD WHO WASN'T THERE NOR ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE TO SOLVE OUR HUMAN DILEMMAS IS NOT A WAY OUT TO ESCAPE FROM OUR REALITY! ANYWAY, YAHWEH IS DEAD AND ALL THOSE FILTHY JEWISH CHARACTERS FROM THE BIBLE KILLED JESUS!!!!! THE SPOOKY DIVINE COMEDY NOVELLA CHARACTERS ARE MORE STIMULATING AND REALISTIC THAN THOSE CROOKED CAIAPHAS, RAPISTS, SODOMITES, HOMOSEXUALS, PROSTITUTES, MACHO MEN LESBIANS, BIBLE PIMPS ACTING AS PATRIARCHS, MACHO MEN WARRIORS AND GOD'S FREAKS FROM THE HOLY BIBLE - NOVELLA. DOES YAHWEH UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS?
 ACCORDING TO KARL MARX, "GOD IS NOTHING MORE THAN A PROJECTION OF THE IDEAL HUMAN." NIRVANA, PERHAPS? THE PERSON WHO CAN'T FULFILLS HIS ESSENCE IN THE REAL WORLD, ACHIEVES IT IN THE GREAT BEYOND AND THIS FANTASY LETS HIM BEAR THE MISERY OF HIS DAILY LIFE. KARL MARX CALLED RELIGION, THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE BECAUSE IT LOADS PEOPLE INTO A PASSIVE FORGETFUL STUPOR.
 Sabbath-breaking Punished:
32 Now while the sons of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the sabbath day.
33 Those who saw him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation;
34 and they put him in custody because it had not been declared what should be done to him.
35 Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.”
36 So all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.
37 The Lord also spoke to Moses, saying,
38 “Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue.
39 “It shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you played the harlot,
40 so that you may remember to do all My commandments and be holy to your God.
41 “I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the Lord your God.”
 The Sign of the Sabbath:
12 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
13 “But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
14 ‘Therefore you are to observe the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people.
15 ‘For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely 
be put to death.
16 ‘So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.’
17 “It is a sign between the sons of Israel and Me forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor and was refreshed.”
18 When He had finished speaking with him upon Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God."
 IN CONCLUSION, IN MY JOURNEY LOOKING FOR A DIVINE ENTITY, I ONLY FOUND WARS, HUMAN LIES DESIGNED, FABRICATED AND EXTRAPOLATED TO MANIPULATE HUMAN PUPPETS. HUMAN TROGLODYTES CONTROLLING THEIR ENVIRONMENT TO IMPOSE THEIR AUTHORITY AND GOD'S AUTHORITY TO CONTROL OTHERS. YES, AN EYE FOR AN EYE, VINDICTIVE AND ILLUSIVE YAHWEH. NIETZSCHE FINALLY KILLED GOD IN HIS BOOK. "GOD IS DEAD," AND THEN ADOLF HITLER CAME A FEW YEARS LATER TO TRY TO EXTINGUISH THE JEWISH RACE AND OTHER INFERIOR HUMANS IN THE NAME OF HIS NAZI BIOLOGICAL CLEANSING THEORY. SO, MY FINAL QUESTION IS. WHERE WAS YAHWEH AND THE WHOLE HIERARCHY/ARMY OF DEMIGODS WHO WERE CREATED IN MESOPOTAMIA WHEN HITLER WAS TURNING THE JEWISH RACE INTO ASHES TO CREATE A NEW WORLD OF PURE GERMANIC RACE, THE UBERMENSCH, THAT WILL BE CONTROLLED ONLY BY THE WHITE GERMANIC SUPREMACISTS?
IN MY OPINION, THE BIBLE SHOULD BE DOWNGRADED FROM THE WORD OF GOD STATUS TO A COMPILATION OF DISORGANIZED HUMAN IDEAS, REALITIES, AND FANTASIES. THE HUMAN BIBLE CREATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES IS OUR ATTEND TO RECORD EVERY HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN A CHAOTIC WORLD. A WORLD WITHOUT LITERATURE. THE BIBLE IS JUST THAT, A COMPILATION OF DISORGANIZED PRIMITIVE LITERATURE. YES, THE FIRST COMPLEX HUMAN NOVELLA USING AND EMPLOYING GOD AS OUR CREATOR AND THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE.
 IN THE BEGINNING, WE ALL BOYS, ARE ALL GIRLS. NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY MEN POSSESS TWO NIPPLES IN THEIR CHEST AND LADIES HAVE AN ATROPHIED PENIS HEAD CALLED CLITORIS!!!! NO WONDER THERE ARE SO MANY SISSY BOYS AND LESBIAN MACHO MAN IN THIS PLANET.!!! ALL SISSY BOYS AND LESBIANS MACHO MEN POSSESS BAD, TWISTED, AND DEGENERATED Y OR X CHROMOSOMES. YAHWEH NOR THE HEBREWS FROM THE SPOOKY BIBLE DID NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE X AND Y CHROMOSOMES PARADOX. SO, IN THE BEGINNING, THE HEBREW BIBLE IS ALL A FAKE NOVELLA NOT THE WORDS OF YAHWEH. EVE WAS NOT CREATED OUT OF ADAM'S RIB AFTER ALL.  WAS ADAM A HERMAPHRODITE?
 WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND!!!! LIKE THE WORLD OF DISNEY SONG GOES. "IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL." WE ALL ARE LIVING IN A FAKE WORLD PRE-FABRICATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES TRYING TO MIMIC GOD AND THE MAN WHO MOVED FORWARD WITH THE ULTIMATE THESIS WAS ADOLF HITLER. SO, KARL MARX IS ALSO CORRECT IN HIS STATEMENT REGARDING RELIGION. "RELIGION IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE." "IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL."!!!!!??? AMEN.!
NOW I UNDERSTAND, ADOLF HITLER SPOOKY EXPERIMENT WITH THE JEWS AND REDUCING THE HEBREW RACE TO NOTHING. YES, TO LESS THAN A VEGETABLE BY DESTROYING THE JEWISH COMMUNIST POPULATION AND CREATING NEW JOBS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED GERMANIC RACE. YES, ADOLF HITLER EMBRACED CHRISTIANITY, THE ROMANS MEGALOMANIAC BEHAVIOR AND FINALLY THE IDEAS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE TO EXTERMINATE THE HEBREW RACE TO CREATE THE NEW GERMANY WITH PURE WHITE GERMANIC SUPERMEN THAT WILL CONTROL THE WORLD WITHOUT A MONO-UNIVERSAL GOD.
AFTER ALL THE PRAYERS, TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS, AND MEDITATIONS OVER THE LAST 7000 YEARS, NO DIVINE ENTITY HAS COME  TO THE RESCUE, TO PROTECT ISRAEL AND IN MY OPINION, ADOLPH HITLER AND COMMUNISTS CHALLENGED YAHWEH TO COME FORWARD BUT HE DID NOT SPEAK OUT. COMMUNISTS AND NAZIS HAVE TORTURED MANY JEWISH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD AND YAHWEH HAS REMAINED SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. YAHWEH DID NOT REVEAL HIMSELF TO MOSES AND WHAT HAVE BEEN KEEPING JEWS, MUSLIMS, AND CHRISTIANS ALIVE ALL THESE YEARS IS THEIR FAITH. “IT’S FOOLISH TO ATTEMPT TO PROOF TO INFIDELS THAT THE SCRIPTURE IS THE WORD OF GOD, SINCE THIS CAN ONLY BE KNOWN BY FAITH.”
YES, THE TIME WILL COME WHEN CIVILIZATION WILL NO LONGER BE PAYING ATTENTION TO SOCIALISTS NOR COMMUNISTS OUTCRIES BUT IN THE MEANTIME GREEDY CAPITALISTS WILL CONTINUE INFLATING THE PRICES OF GOODS AND SERVICES TO COPE WITH MORE PERSONAL AND CORPORATE DEBTS AND ULTIMATELY MORE REVENUE  AND ONLY THEN WE WILL EXPERIENCE OUR NEW AND IMPROVED UNIVERSAL RELIGION CALLED "ANARCHISM."  THE WORLD WILL BECOME SO OVERPOPULATED, FRAGMENTED, AND BROKEN THAT THE NEW GENERATION OF HUMAN TROGLODYTES WILL END UP LIKE IN CHARLTON HESTON MOVIE, SOYLENT GREEN. YES, LIVING IN A WORLD OVERPOPULATED AND NO LAND AVAILABLE FOR FARMING AND THE ENTIRE ANIMAL POPULATION DESTROYED OR CONSUMED BY HUMANS ACTING AS PLANET EARTH GODS. A SOCIALIST - ANARCHIST CRUEL WORLD. YES, WE WILL EAT EACH OTHER FOR BREAKFAST, LUNCH, AND DINNER, WORSE THAN IN THE BIBLE STORIES. NO COWS, NO MORE CREAMY HOT CHOCOLATE, NO MILK, NO COLD DRINKS WITH ICE CUBES, NO MORE CREAMY ESPRESSO, NO MEAT, CONTROLLED WATER SUPPLY, A 4 OZ JAR OF STRAWBERRY JAM WILL COST $50.00 (IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY) BUT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO EAT SOYLENT GREEN CRACKERS MADE OUT OF PROCESSED HUMAN CADAVERS. AND FINALLY,  LIKE IN ALL SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS COUNTRIES, THE SOYLENT GREEN CRACKERS WILL BE RATIONALIZED LIKE IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AND OTHER COMMUNISTS COUNTRIES. AMEN!!!
ONLY TIME WILL TELL! THE ONLY THING THAT GOVERNMENTS WILL HAVE TO DO IS TO SLOW DOWN THE OVERPOPULATION PROBLEMS,  BAN ILLEGAL CHAIN MIGRATION AROUND THE PLANET AND SLOW DOWN THE LEGAL CHAIN MIGRATION BUSINESS.
BIRTH CONTROL WILL ALSO BECOME A POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE U.S  WERE THOUSANDS OF LIBERATED WOMEN ARE USING SEX AS AN ECONOMIC TOOL TO OBTAIN LEGAL STATUS, WELFARE, AND FREE MONEY.  U.S AUTOMATIC BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP SHOULD BE BANNED ASAP IN ORDER TO HALT THE POPULATION GROWTH.
CONSEQUENTLY, THE GRANDIOSE, ENIGMATIC AND UNIVERSAL QUESTION REMAINS IN FORCE. ARE WE, THE HUMAN TROGLODYTES SPECIMEN POPPETS OF GODS OR WE REALLY PRETENDING TO BE GODS’ OF PLANET EARTH BY EXTERMINATING THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND FAUNA IN ORDER TO MAKE MORE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE?
ALL MEN MADE RELIGIONS HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED OVER THE YEARS TO ACCOMMODATE HUMAN INSANITIES FOR A LONG TIME NOW, THEREFORE THE TIME HAS COME FOR HUMAN TROGLODYTES TO PROTECT MOTHER NATURE AND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM FROM PSYCHO-HUNTER- CRIMINALS WHO ARE DETERMINED TO DISTORT/ALTER PLANET EARTH ECOSYSTEMS AND THE GLOBAL FAUNA IN THE NAME OF MORE EXPENSIVE REAL ESTATE PROPERTIES IN ORDER TO GENERATE MORE REVENUE. IT IS UP TO US, HUMANS TO BUILD/MAINTAIN OUR PLANET LIKE A GLOBAL PARADISE IN ACCORD TO THE BIBLE PROPHETS AND FANTASIES OR APPLY MOSES' PRINCIPLE IN COMMUNISTS AS WELL AS CAPITALISTS COUNTRIES AS FOLLOW. "IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LIVE BY THE LAW, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE BY THE LAW." A  GLOBAL PLAN MUST BE PLACE IN EFFECT IN ORDER TO HALT/SLOWDOWN THE MASSIVE GLOBAL HUMAN REPRODUCTION IN THIS PLANET OR THE FUTURE GENERATION OF HUMAN TROGLODYTES/YAHOOS WILL EXPERIENCE A RUDE AND CRUEL AWAKENING SIMILAR TO THE SOYLENT GREEN SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE. AMEN!
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND!!!
“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!”
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dramallamadingdang · 4 years
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More non-sims replies. Sorry. :) The good news is that I am playing *gasp* TS2 as I “speak.” :) I have to get my butt to bed once I post this, but maybe I’ll have something sim-related later on. :)
Anyway, these are for @princesspiratecat, @dunne-ias, @snarkysims​, @katatty-main​ and @pensblr​...
princesspiratecat replied to your post “princesspiratecat replied to your post “OMG, I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER!” ...”
I think the question was valid. My grandfather had 8 kids but really disliked kids in general. I question that logic- there are too many people on this earth already and those that don't like kids, just shouldn't have them, period. I grew up in foster care so I've seen the consequences of shitty parenting, and I don't think that people should be forced into it because society says so. I'm sorry that you were, luckily you made the best of it.
I'm currently 8 months pregnant, and I find the idea of anyone being pressured to have kids absolutely horrible! Children, or lack thereof, should be a choice, always and forever.
It was a valid question, absolutely! I wouldn't say that I was "forced" into having kids -- it was still my choice -- but OTOH I was subjected to focused manipulation and, frankly, brainwashing techniques, so it's not like I made a clear-headed and informed choice. I caved to pressure (and it was the last time I ever did so). So did my husband. We were not blameless, but the circumstances were also not normal. 
Having kids is about the most life-changing thing that one can do. Within a committed relationship, having a kid absolutely must be a choice that both prospective parents agree on and are equally committed to and enthusiastic about. And they must maintain that commitment and enthusiasm for approximately 18-25 years per kid. That's the only way it works in modern society, and it’s a tall order
pensblr replied to your post “I was going to do this with “in-line” replies, but it just got...”
By the way, unsolicited religious opinion colleague guy is shocking-not-shocking... SINGLE, but wonders why he can't find a "good woman". Though corporate environments often seem to harbor expectations of marriage, the 2+ kids and pets, weekend soccer games, etc. It's the old 'the more you fit the norm, the more stable you appear to be in life' crock of bs.
Oh, an incel, to boot! Glorious! But yeah, corporate culture is a thing. We all live in little micro-cultures that have expectations, and the urge to conform seems to be built into our species. There’s probably good reasons for it, from a survival/evolutionary perspective, but it is danged annoying sometimes!
dunne-ias replied to your post “princesspiratecat replied to your post “OMG, I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER!” ...”
geez what a question!
No, I think it was a good question, and this sort of thing needs to be talked about so that women who don’t want kids won’t be shamed or manipulated into having them, by religious “authorities” or even just by social pressures. Especially once they have a committed partner. It’s easy for single women to hold their ground, but once you add pressure (even well-meaning pressure) from someone you love and their family as well as your own, then it becomes less-easy. And if a woman feels that there’s something wrong with her and that no other women feel the way she does, then she’s more vulnerable to manipulation, too.
It’s also a good question because it’s true that it doesn’t make sense to have kids when you don’t like/want them. It’s downright insane to do so. But people do crazy things under pressure. 
snarkysims replied to your post “princesspiratecat replied to your post “OMG, I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER!” ...”
Wow, my heart goes out to you. I'm glad you got free of your first husband and are now with someone loving. I really appreciate you candidly sharing your history.
First husband...Yeah, the way he left was a huge dick move, but when you get down to it, he was as much a victim as me. He underwent his own "counseling," wherein he was convinced to believe that all the problems we had were because of me, because I was a "rebellious woman" who needed to be disciplined and that he needed to be a man and do it or else he wasn't right with God and blah de blah. They fed on his insecurity over having a wife who had no problem wearing the pants in the relationship and just made the insecurity worse, turning him into a paranoid, manipulative, psychological abuser. He loved me at one time, but he couldn't handle who I was, and that dinged his masculine pride and made him more vulnerable to manipulation. The pressure was bad for each of us -- probably worse for him, even -- but ultimately I had better coping skills than he had. He cracked and ran. I didn't. But the ultimate blame lies with the leadership of that church. There were cracks in the marriage almost from the start because we just weren't a good match. It's possible that we could have worked things out, but before that could happen, the church leadership barged in with jackhammers and turned those cracks into canyons. That's on them.
And yeah, I share. Possibly over-share. My feeling is that there are some things that ought to be talked about more. It being OK not to want kids if you’re a woman and/or it being OK to not like kids even if you end up having them is, I think, one of them.
katatty-main replied to your post “princesspiratecat replied to your post “OMG, I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER!” ...”
heh, my mum didnt really want kids I dont think, but we have a great relationship! (especially now I'm older) you do you, I'm glad you're in a better place these days
I could just be biased, but while of course there are many women who genuinely want children (and sadly not all of them are able to and they go through a lot of heartache), I think that a lot of women are also at best ambivalent about having kids. It's a huge investment on so many levels, but it was (and often still is) simply expected that you will have them. Many women simply cave to expectations, especially since that's what society grooms people to do anyway. There is a lot of pressure and, surprisingly, it's often women who pressure other women. That being said, most women who don't want kids but have them anyway do step up to the plate and do the best they can to be a good parent, and often have great relationships with their kids, especially once they're older.
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green-co · 4 years
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This Is Why the Color Blue Is Actually Rare in Nature
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The world's most favorite color is blue. According to a YouGov poll, pretty much every country on the planet lists it as such. Plus, it's delighted and intrigued scientists and artists (see: Picasso's Blue Period) alike for centuries, and is a number-one choice for everything from house paint to the jeans you're probably wearing this very minute. Yet it turns out the color is surprisingly hard to come by in nature.
Case in point: Animals come in all variety of colors, but how many can you think of that are actually blue? Maybe the blue jay or the blue whale (which isn't really all that blue anyway). Then there are the less common, but far more striking, creatures with eye-popping blue colors, such as butterflies, frogs, and parrots.
Why is blue so uncommon? Most pigments that animals exhibit on their fur, skin or feathers due is related to the food they consume. Salmon is pink because of the pink shellfish they eat. Goldfinches get that yellow color from the yellow flowers they consume. But while pigments like red, brown, orange, and yellow come from the food animals eat, that's not the case with blue. In fact, that blue you see is not really a pigment at all.
When blue does appear in nature, it's related to other reasons than pigment. In many animals, that blue color is due to the structure of the molecules and the way they reflect light. For example, the blue morpho butterfly (which you might recognize as the butterfly emoji), gets its color from the fact that its wing scales are shaped in ridges that causes sunlight to bend in such a way that blue light, at just the right wavelength, makes it to our eye. If the scales were shaped differently or if something other than air was filling the gaps between them, the blue would vanish.
Blue birds, such as the blue jay, get their color through a similar, but slightly different process: each feather is made up of light-scattering, microscopic beads spaced in a way that everything except blue light is cancelled out. Blue on any animal (including humans' blue eyes) is due to some kind of light reflection of this type. The only exception is the obrina olivewing butterfly, which is the only known animal in nature that produces blue pigment.
Why is the color blue almost exclusively found in blue structures rather than pigments? Scientists can't say for sure, but a popular theory is that as developing a blue color became beneficial (for survival and communication), it proved easier, from an evolutionary perspective, for these animals to change the shapes of their bodies in microscopic ways than to rewrite the rules of chemistry.
A similar situation can be seen in plants, where blue pigment also doesn't really exist. According to David Lee, author of Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color and a retired professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in Miami, less than 10 percent of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers.
Those plants that do appear blue are in fact often using a red pigment known as anthocyanin. Through pH shifts and a mixing of pigments, combined with the reflection of natural light, the plants are able to generate the appearance of a naturally occurring, blue color. That's the reason why plants such as bluebells, hydrangeas and morning glories appear various shades of blue, when in fact, as Lee explains, "There is no true blue pigment in plants." And for more fascinating info about the color wheel, here are 30 Crazy Facts About Colors That Will Blow Your Mind.
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slapaholicrex · 5 years
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As a person transcending beyond the meer illusion
We are beasts with one language, and that is of love. Expressions of companionship, fellowship, nurture, and structure for being is one of the noblest evolutionary traits that we inherited. We are to be and let be.
But, I see a world of beasts, - complete in their apathy for being. They're not being, they're just surviving. Complicating and digging holes just to rot in the grave when it's dug. Full of regrets and recounting the wasted minutes in a system that made a fool. We are the production that fashions our own mental torture. We prey on life's natural ability to suck, slap a label on the placebo that fills that void, and think it's progress turning fiscal slaves out of people not asking to be born or even to be expected to buy into this machine. We're expected to see the world, how it works, and the worth of money to mean access to pleasures and proceed to gleefully live in ignorance until we want out and we're trapped. We are to be and choose what to do with our lives. Not expected to be anything. That is what it means to be a beast. We will figure love out on our own. No religion, no spirituality, no subscription to a noble person on youtube; we get a bunch of people to feel love out of choice 100% of the time, we get a land of happy people free to do anything because they'll always choose the better option. I think evolutionarily, we did awesome growing fingers. Maybe some evolutionary idealogies can guide the future and we can breed good people who don't need money.
on That note, since I feel outside of the superficial facade, I've made discoveries of myself as a beast.
1. it all means absolutely nothing in the void so it's better to do and live without regrets. Jump to do something awesome so you don't hate yourself later for missing out. Our life is basically a video game and this is all a first person perspective. Do the best with that kind of thought. I choose to love, I don't demand I have it, but I still choose to give it because nothing good can come from meeting a person and you're both on 10 about nothing. Spread the joy, meet someone, and ask them for their perspective. That is love. I have been a hypocrite before, but life is also about forgiveness as well. even if your good and bad deeds come to 61/ 60, that one time you did good still counts for something. Just forgive yourself and work on it. But even if you don't forgive yourself; refer to the first statement on this self-clamied 'discovery'.
2. I've learned that standards of beauty don't apply to me. I have found that there are beautiful women that I lust for, but they don't fit anyone's copy and paste blonde hair blue eyed fetish. If they're beautiful to me, really that's my grasp of what's attractive to my experience as a being. To some I may even look crazy.
3. Whatever you're doing, you would be happier where you think you should be in your mind. What's in the way? Money. Jobs. Cars. Phones. Housing. Commitment to your labor enforcers. Why not just cut the middle man. Go where you want to go, create your settlement, and then do your next desire. Explore. Find the view you want to see for the rest of your life, and then start there.
4. But alas I am trapped in this system without the ability to go through with my own advice.
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Alien Anatomy
I’ve kinda been thinking about alien anatomy and here’s some vague conclusions I can come up with.
Insect: so there’s the idea of insect type aliens and if they’re anything like earth insects then their size would be limited by the amount of oxygen (or whatever they breathe) is around. So larger bug aliens could only exist with high breathable concentrations so their planets atmosphere must be a minimum of 30% of their preferred breathing gas. Also, exoskeletons can only be thick to a certain extent before they can’t breathe so larger sized insect aliens would have a thin (compared to smaller insects) exoskeleton; but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have the biological equivalent of steel making up their exoskeleton, they’d still need support if they’re on the larger size, flight could also get a little tricky if they’re on the larger size (basically they might have to go into different methods of it but idk, I’m not a professor on insect flight)
Reptile: so like insects their size would also be limited, but not by air/atmosphere composition but by temperature. The closer to the equator (on earth) the hotter the temperature, and, if you haven’t noticed, the bigger the reptile species. Only the largest reptiles live in the hottest places, you don’t exactly see a saltwater crocodile in Norway. To put it simply, it’s because of their heat regulation; they’re ectothermic. If they live/ evolved on a world with similar temperatures to ours then largest they could be would be a large monitor lizard. And don’t ask “what about dinosaurs? They were lizards��; taxonomically yes but their living descendants (birds) are exothermic, suggesting some sort of transition along the evolutionary line.
Mammalian: size can obviously stay the same maybe bigger/smaller than what we know (for mammals it’s mostly gravity and pregnancy limiting our size) whether they evolved on a planet with more/less gravitational pull. Mammal variations such as marsupials might get around the pregnancy issue since their young are born around the size of a jellybean and monotremes just lay eggs (btw the pregnancy issue is basically that the bigger the mammal the longer the pregnancy and the longer the pregnancy the more time you’re vulnerable to predators) though if you’re a pack hunter, pregnancy might be less of an issue since you are the predator and those in your pack could bring you food so that you wouldn’t be in any danger by hunting (the prey could choose to attack as a form of defense).
Birds: now you can bring in your dinosaur anatomy since they’re technically one in the same (though velociraptors were likely not unnaturally intelligent). This isn’t a rule based off of fact but if you base the bird/dinosaur design off of Jurassic park dinos then you’re out (THE THERAPODS (carnivorous bipeds: velociraptor etc) SHOULD’VE HAD FEATHERS! T. rex might’ve been the exception as they could’ve been big enough to regulate their temperature without insulation but I digress) they would also be able to get around mammals size issues as they don’t have to worry about since they typically lay eggs and have a lighter structure meaning larger size (have you ever held a bird? They’re strangely light, as if they’re constantly inhaling helium instead of oxygen)
Fish: all I know of their physiological limits is that it’s a little similar to the insects limits as oxygen concentrations (or any gas really) is almost always in higher concentrations in the atmosphere than it is diffused in the oceans. As long as they have some sort of propulsion and streamlining to a degree there would be less rules with this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Amphibians: they would have to be heavily reliant on the liquid they evolved from and their skin would be weak to infection (at least ones they haven’t evolved against) they might be able to metamorphose like bugs through their life too.
Mollusks: for those who don’t know mollusks include things like octopuses (yes its octopuses not octopi) and snails. Due to the lack of set bones you could have as many appendages as you please, ones around the mouth are likely as it would help with eating. Early in their evolution basically all mollusks had shells so it wouldn’t be unheard of for your alien to have one too though they could also have lost them (like squid or octopuses) or chosen to adapt them into a bone like structure (like cuttlefish) though that would prevent their awesome ability to squeeze into anywhere. Their skin could also be used to communicate or camouflage as they’re notoriously good at changing their colour and even shape to fit their surroundings.
Plant based life: by this I basically mean a moving plant. If they regularly photosynthesise then their need lots of leaves or their equivalent, they’d likely have a bark like exoskeleton to keep them from flopping about as they move, if they don’t, they’d likely stay small; like bowtruckles from fantastic beasts. If active then they would get rid of rooting into the ground as a method of nutrient extraction for something else, they could have a mouthpiece to transfer water directly to a xylem and have some sort of digestive system equivalent for minerals etc.
Planet: I need to put this in because it sorta affects all creatures. If they evolved on a planet with less gravity then they could potentially become space faring sooner as they wouldn’t have as much of a problem reaching escape velocity. There’s also more potential for flight and bigger “mammals” on these planets. Their orbiting star can affect them too; if they’re around a red dwarf then they’d have more time to develop but their planet could be tidally locked meaning there could be limited habitability on their planet, either too hot on one side and too cold on the other but there’s a small line between the two where liquids could exist and life could evolve, it would also bring in the fun concept of them being like “WOAH, NIGHT AND DAY? WHAT IS THIS?!” Since all the time it would look like twilight/dawn on their planet. If they’re orbiting a supergiant star then they’d have to evolve quickly since supergiant stars don’t live that long before going supernova; this could suggest that they’d have super short lifespans, a year (for us) might be super old to them and they could think were immortal since we live so long (even by our standards) their planet would also have to be much further away to be in the habitable zone so their star may be dimmer from their perspective and, as a result might not evolve eyes. Life on a planet orbiting a supergiant star could also survive with less of a magnetic field (they’d still need one though, but life could still exist with a weak one) so life on their planet could have less geographic activity, therefore less volcanoes and less earthquakes. Other mainstream stars like our own might not differ much when it comes to development and lifespans, it just matters how long they’ve been there/ how long through the stars life it is.
Blood: the colour of an animals blood depends on its needs. Since all animals we know of use oxygen I’m basing the colour on what we know of oxygen breathing life. Hemocyanin (blue blood) would be better used in cold climates so if your creature evolved on an icy planet it’s blood would likely be blue. It gets its blue colour from copper instead of iron. Remember, evolution works as survival of the good enough so if the planet was extremely cold in life’s early emergence then they’ll likely gain this colour and stick with it regardless of whether their planet is cold later in its life. Haemoglobin (red blood) is overall more efficient so if the planet isn’t that cold then red would be more likely to occur. Hemerythin (violet blood) is a simpler structure compared to the first two; going along with the rule of ‘survival of the good enough’ a lot of creatures could possibly have violet blood due to its simplicity. Biliverdin (green blood) is a pigment, it doesn’t carry oxygen and occurs when haemoglobin breaks down but makes animal more resistant to disease meaning that it would be more likely to occur if they evolved in a disease infested environment, likely as a result of lack of predators since disease would replace them in culling their population.
Limbs and organs: limbs such as arms and legs have no real set boundaries though it’s a good idea to make sure that they keep the same amount of limbs or less of them based on the creature they and other creatures on their planet have evolved from (e.g. we have four limbs in total because the first terrestrial vertebrates had four, animals like snakes etc have lost theirs over time but none have gained any limbs because you’d need to have severe evolutionary stress to specifically gain limbs or die: otherwise it’s too much effort for extra limbs). Organs you can go crazy with, you can have as many eyes as you want and in insect like aliens you could even forgo the need of a heart (or heart equivalent) due to their different respiratory system (you could get rid of lungs then too :P) you can have as many sensory organs as you want though you should take into account their planetary surroundings to make sure each organ is necessary (e.g. little to no constant light could mean no eyes/eyes that detect different wavelengths than us)
This has been an unnaturally long 1:30 am shitpost but I felt like I had to say something. Thanks for reading, laters.
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New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/karmic-tools-weekly-forecast-january-20-26-2019/
Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: January 20 – 26, 2019
Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: January 20 – 26, 2019
By Kelley M. Beard
The video version of this forecast, as read by the author, is available here.
The Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast covers the current planetary transits which affect people in different ways and to various degrees of intensity. Take notice when it is a Personal planet (Sun / Moon / Mercury / Venus / Mars) interacting with a Social (Jupiter/Saturn) or Collective planet (Uranus / Neptune/Pluto). And pay extremely close attention when it is a Social planet interacting with a Collective planet because that means something *big* is brewing that will move large groups of people along their evolutionary paths. Tuning in to the energy and rhythm of the planets can serve as a useful *guide* as you move along your Individual Path. It also helps to understand your place within the context of the larger Social & Collective Story. Below, you will find out how these energies tend to manifest, as well as guidance and direction. 
*NOTE*  There are some days when there are NO CONTACTS (besides the Moon), please note that there are no missing entries, we just list the actual Activations of each week + the day they happen.
Weekly Forecast: January 20 – 26, 2019  
1/20 ~ Venus (love, finances & relationships) ~square~ Neptune (illusions & delusions): This energy is great for creative flow. If you are artistically inclined in any way, you will have access to an energy that may allow you to create something amazing. Dig deep and allow your Self to free-flow! This energy can also challenge relationships (personal or professional) to ‘keep it real’ in some way and ones which are not on a true, solid foundation are likely to dissolve under this influence. When Neptune is involved, we see life through a completely different kind of lens, often seeing the potential rather than the reality of the situation. Detach & Trust. If your relationship happens to end under this influence, it’s not necessarily a bad thing because it suggests that it was never on solid ground to begin with. Be thankful and move on. This activation is just helping you align your true values & priorities with the vision in your mind & heart, but you will have to expand your consciousness in some way, follow your inner compass and take practical steps going forward.
1/21 ~ Mars (anger) ~square~ Saturn (restriction):
This is the energy of action being restricted and the anger or frustration that follows. You can either be angry and feel restricted, limited and unable to move … or you can see this energy as an opportunity to define the right actions to take and strategically plan to take them when the Universe is more supportive. This energy requires us to slow down and double check The Plan. If you proceed consciously, your plan has a better chance of success than if you were reckless & impatient. You may experience a blockage of some sort, internal or external. You may feel this tremendous urge to change or move forward in your life but seem to find blockages and limitations with every effort. That is more likely your perception than a reality, but is there any way that you feel inadequate to the task at hand? What are you afraid of? Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real – release fear and choose to be responsible for creating your life. If you don’t, your outer circumstance only becomes a reflection of your inner belief. You will attract criticism and repel support. Take your grand vision and figure out three small steps you can take on this restricted level that is still taking you in the direction of your goal. Don’t try to initiate at this time, this is a time for cultivating, planning, working behind the scenes, doing the detail work and foundational (grunt work) that is NECESSARY to support the grand vision when the time comes to fully express it.
1/21 ~ LEO Super/Full Moon Lunar Eclipse: The Leo Full Moon often illuminates the discrepancies between who you are, who you think you are and who you are perceived to be. Because it is a Super Moon, you may feel it more intensely and because it is a Lunar Eclipse, you get to break a larger pattern, something that may also resonate with the years: 2008-09 & 1998-99. You are supported to do a personal (and major) release with this eclipse. Think 6-months to a year ago, what is culminating or completing now? Think 9- and 18-years ago for what has integrated within your Heart and how have you matured in your relationships. The Leo Full Moon reveals Self-Love issues and where you have been operating from the Outside-In, when Inside-Out is more effective. It may also expose where your ego has gone unchecked and/or where your Inner Child has been neglected and is now *cranky*. Play is part of being Human and something many have forgotten how to do. We must practice integrating joy into our daily lives! It is more fun & interesting to play with a variety of ideas and possible roles of who you are evolving in to (or would like to over the next 6-12 mos) and your place of service within any chosen Community. In what capacity can you shine and share your Light going forward? Use this final eclipse portal (in the Leo/Aquarius series) to release an old self or old desire of the heart so that a new, evolved version of YOU can be birthed to bless the world. It’s time to release anything that doesn’t truly express who you are so the real you can shine brighter!
1/22 ~ Venus (values & priorities) ~conjunct~ Jupiter (truth & story):
This is an extremely powerful energy that brings the two *benefactors* together to initiate a new cycle that makes you very mentally “present” to the fact that both your values and your truth are shifting. This energy encourages you to improve your life in some way. You can also connect to material abundance & wealth of all kinds when these two get together like this. This is usually a pleasant shift because it is about expanding your sense of authentic beauty, as in nature & the interrelatedness of all living things. There’s also an energy of enthusiasm around new or growing relationships which attracts more positive energy. This is the best time to be creative and expect miracles!
1/23 ~ Mercury (lower mind & ideas) ~square~ Uranus (Higher Mind & awakening): This energy challenges you to expand your mind or consciousness in a way, pushing you to think differently and respond to information in new ways. Uranus brings sudden ah-ha moments, personal awareness and radical new ideas, which is great for you adventurous souls who thrive on change and new ideas. However, if you are personally attached to your routine and things ‘going as planned’, then this energy can cause aggravation and tax your nervous system because things will seem sudden (even though it is more likely that they have already been brewing under the surface for some time now). You will have to adjust and be more open & mentally flexible than usual. You may not be able to control the excessive mental activity or information-overload coming in, but hopefully you can direct it a bit. It’s good to activate or clean your personal filters by taking some time in nature to process things at your own pace and generally clear your head. This can be a very inspiring & creative time, so try to tune into that, while keeping in mind that anything you begin or get into, may require a review later so you can check over the details of your revelations (or creations). You’re just cracking the surface, this is all about the revelation or awakening, you will eventually have to figure out the logistics or effective actions necessary to bring your ideas into form.
1/25 ~ Mars (energy) ~trine~ Jupiter (enthusiasm):
This energy is generally positive as you are combining your energy & desires with an expansion of consciousness. It’s especially good for anything physical and bodes well for outcomes to any competition. You will be channeling more energy than usual so be sure to check in with your body and stay grounded. Jupiter often brings blessings that others may perceive as ‘luck’ but it is more of an alignment between inner Self & outer reality. Even if things are hazy or crazy, do your best to visualize success and put your Self in the picture ; -) You will have a great overall perspective of the “big picture” and can plan accordingly. The only caveat with this energy is to avoid being OVERLY confident where you feel invincible. Be confident, not cocky. This energy is very good for knowing what you need and being capable of making succinct decisions about the course which will get you there. Calculated risks are the name of the game!
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toomanybirds · 6 years
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The types of men and their survival
You’re either on team smart or on team strong. And both of them have a strategy to win. And you know which team you’re on. The thing is that the strategy of one team will mean the death of the other. This is only from a Darwinian perspective. The smart people win by being cunning and being able to negotiate with people. They develop strategies to win the game, and they can be many different ones. The strong people win by using tyranny,  intimidation, and possibly physical force.
So it’s manipulation vs coercion/compulsion.
These are just two different routes the evolution of our species can take. This is why these two groups oppose each other and will root for the destruction of the other group when given the chance, or even actively seek it out. So when a male with a position of power is tyrannical, when he can’t be negotiated with, when he is therefore unpredictable and dangerous, team smart opposes this tyrannical figure and try to get rid of him. One of the ways of doing this is labelling this type of behaviour crazy and dangerous. This will lead to social exclusion of this ‘tyrant’, leaving him to die alone (excluded and not being able to re-produce or sustain himself) or change his behaviour. By not allowing these types of figures to take on the roles of some of the highest ranked, team smart will win the genetic race. And if you’re in team smart, this relates immediately to your success of finding a partner and reproducing, obviously, so if you’re in team smart you bloody well make sure your team is winning. And if you’re in team strong you to the exact same. Both of the teams are a real bug for each other. An evolutionary thread even, this goes down to the most basic instincts of survival and reproduction, this is nature.
I would say Jordan Peterson is on team smart. He knows this all too well, so of course he’s going to defy the tyrant. Marry someone smart. Spread the message.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edz7-nWscrQ
Here is Jordan Peterson extremely clearly talking down on ‘pseudointellectually ‘ and rooting for team smart. He is opposing the system and people that remind him of tyranny. They might very well be tyrannical, he seems to be the person to correctly recognise it after having studied tyrannical structures and their rise. So he fights against this group, ridiculing their strategy and beliefs. (wow this is also the sign of a tyrant tho). Did he recognise this incredible shift in politics and took his change to help redefine the system, which is an enormous task and would require an extreme lot of correct manipulation of the situation to do. That does not mean that he is trying to spread lies for his own advantage, quite the opposite, he is spreading had he regards as the utmost truth.
Or did the bill… compel him to take an action, to protest its (future) existence. He was already establishing himself online and spreading material, and self help material. This is his meaning. But is his meaning also to get the most game for him, or team smart. The irony if he turned out to be team tyrant. But I do not think so. His actions will benefit team smart, team tyrant does not like this.
Because these people will be ‘defeated’ by discussion, something that Jordan Peterson is open spreading, something you can involve him in and try to understand each other and figure out which one of you has the best theory, these people result to immediate force to shut him down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsBjbAFQ1e0 (His point after 10:00 very offensive but looked at from purely a statistical and scientific viewpoint. It is also just a thought, not a stated fact. He is just sharing questions he has.)
These people do not use words, these people to not debate with him, these people result to sheer force to oppose his message. Do they not know how to get their point across? Or do they not even challenge their views to such a point where it can be questioned, let alone be weighted with other options which means they cannot completely defend their views at all. How can this be your only world view. This goes for radical left and right. The both ends of these groups are so unable to imagine the viewpoint of anyone else than their own (groups) they must be unable to empathise with other people. Their actions are of pure self-interest. Which is stupid in itself because you don’t survive only by yourself, the species has to survive as well. Both are pure tyrannical, team strong. Team smart realises that both these extremes are not sustainable for the survival of the species and it’s progression. These people cannot be discussed with, they cannot be bargained with. The opposite of what team smart wants. That is why discussion should remain open, always, about everything. When someone is saying stupid things, people will tell them they’re saying stupid things, and explain them why so they can correct them. They do not wave around signs or make so much noise it’s a physical force implied on others. They scream for what they want, instead of explained why they want it. Don’t bend to tyranny.
Jordan Peterson is not vouching against equality. He is vouching for free speech for the survival of his team and humanity as a whole. He is not spreading hate. He is not racist. He is not transphobic. He is unravelling structures and sharing his findings to what seems to work best.
People want new structures. Jordan Peterson is pointing out flaws in these new structures. We shouldn’t stay with what we have, but if there is no better, more perfect structure than what we have developed so far, we shouldn’t change it. Especially not radically.
You might think radical change is needed. I think that. I think radical changes in our food production, consumerism, and overall environmental sustainability is needed. As soon as possible and preferably yesterday.
But changes are happening, they just aren’t always as easy to implement. We implement them by debating, questioning, rationalising, and testing these structures until we know they are right. This will be the fastest way of progression, instead of trial and error without the scientific method which has lead us this far via evolution, but over the span of one million years. The last century we have developed in a pace never seen before. This led to changes, which requires our adaption, quick adaption. The only way to achieve this will be via the scientific method, understanding nature and manipulating it in such a way we are safe from danger, extinction. That is why we debate things. This is why free speech is important. This is why challenging ideas, especially your own, is important. This is why change goes slower than you might like it to, but it is still the most efficient way of implementing change, rather than just taking chances. Don’t silence idiots, correct them. They might correct you back or you might correct them, but you have to listen and really try to understand the others viewpoint, that’s the whole point. Find the truth, don’t search only for a reinforcement of your ideology.
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itsnotresilience · 3 years
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How I Talk About Trauma
Inspired by early 2010 essay “why me and why now”
I recently mentioned to friend that I have nearly 30 years worth of memoir essays stashed mostly in expertly hidden journals and spiral bound notebooks throughout my home. I hadn’t ever really mentioned to anyone, really, ever. I have/had no intention of ever doing anything with my often rambling stories mixed with poetry and observation. This friend gave me just enough encouragement and expressed just enough curiosity that I decided to go back and see if I had enough to cobble together a cohesive creative memoir piece.
I’m not the sort of gal who thinks people are all that interested in reading about my life. I’m afraid of their judgment and wonder how easily my style of oversharing and conversational prose will sit with them. I do know that people are interested in hearing my stories. I’ll often make some self-deprecating comment in passing, only to find myself explaining my comment through some story about a personal traumatic event. In these moments, I’m at my most vulnerable, letting people in to see behind the curtain, hoping for their empathy and secretly desiring that they find inspiration in the “Meghan then versus Meghan now” of it all. There’s an additional must mention element to sharing our stories that didn’t exist to the same extent when I wrote the essay that inspired this one and definitely was an issue for the vast majority of my other still-buried writings, social media. The proliferation of social media and the encompassing issues around what we share, how we share, who sees it and any potential impacts can’t be ignored. The fear of the judgment and ugliness of the keyboard armies can’t be understated. There are people who will define you by what you share and their are people who will use your vulnerability to their advantage for whatever perverse enjoyment they get out of destroying the lives of other for attention. This is a very real fear to me as I write this now, trusting the reader with my feelings and saying always with an asterisk, this is my life as I was/am living it. This is my perspective, interpretation/reinterpretation of events that in some cases happened 30 years ago. Anyone who says they remember something exactly how it happened even 5 years ago, especially a traumatic event, well- I wouldn’t call them a liar, it’s an important piece of my thinking I’m sharing here- but I would say it’s likely someone else from their life remembers it slightly differently and recalls a drastically different set of outcomes and experiences. It’s important I mention that because so often when people publish personal essays or memoirs the colloquial “that didn’t happen that way” or “that’s not what I remember” comments almost always occur. So I say with an asterisk that this essay discusses events and feelings as I remember them, colored by my perspective then versus now and altered by my overall ability to be subjective or objective about what was going on. You may remember me differently. You may have seen me a different way than I actually felt. I may have lied to you (more on that later). I may be lying to myself (lots more on that later). I may be remembering different timeframes and my reactions and confusing them, so let’s talk about that now.
When we talk about trauma, communally, socially or even in mass media, we often hear it, see it, experience it, as a story arch. The beginning is the traumatic event/s, the middle is either the present or the immediate outcome, and the ending is either the present or the big reveal of why present person is who present person is. In the sneakiest depictions, we may not know what the real trauma story is until the very end and you find yourself pointing at the screen ( I did this last week myself) and saying, “I knew it! I knew all along that’s what really happened!” This is called the unreliable narrator. The story is told first person subjective so you are experiencing the events as the narrator remembers and experiences them and possibly not the way they happened. This leads us to feel mislead but there’s an important aspect of how our brains operate at work here. Our brains are designed to help us survive. It’s a hard wired evolutionary instinct. What that means from a trauma aspect is that the brain often finds a way to cope with trauma, whether it sudden or long-lasting trauma. That coping mechanism, often defined in the most simple terms is flight or fight. I’m not a fan of either term because experience tells me it’s not simple to know if your brain is “flighting or fighting”. You may not physically run away and you may not physically fight back. Trauma response just isn’t that simple, it’s hard for me to understand, even years later what my brain was doing and somethings I don’t recall at all or come to me in the most obscure or totally in-opportune times. I will say that what I’m about to share and most of what I share is a form of flight and this flight always makes me an unreliable narrator. Those closest to me have heard me say, likely way too many times, I do not trust myself as the narrator of my own story. That’s a sad and scary place to be. I do think my brain remembers thing in ways that make them easier for me to deal with. Repression has a way of creating a false sense of yourself and the way things were. That’s why we feel tricked as an audience. We feel we weren’t showed what really happened. The truth is we are shown almost always what some observer think happened from their perspective. We can often collect similar observations and determine a set of common descriptions and then say, we now have the factual actual occurrence but it’s still really not what happened. If we had some omnipotent recording system that was unfiltered and unedited by any human then we could potentially see what actually happened all the time but I guarantee at least one person would still pipe up and say, “that’s not what happened at all”. Anyway, as you’re reading and if you see anything that you do think happened some other way, I want to hear from you. Not so we can argue because as I just explained, I’m more likely to believe YOU than my own memories, but so we can share how we both experienced that same event.
Ok. So recently I’ve been doing some pretty deep work on managing my response to trauma. After 20+ years of therapy, I feel like an expert patient who’s finally having an “aha” moment. That moment isn’t refreshing or relieving, it can take weeks of introspection on a tiny realization for me to get anywhere with it but I guess, unluckily, I have lots of time for isolated introspection. This is another important point for my long term friends who know I have a deep fear of alone time. Not the few hours at the end of a work day alone time, but weeks or months of mostly alone time. These kinds of alone time usually send me on the dark and anxious paths of my mind and I start doing whatever I can to avoid the paths and avoid the dark, mainly because when I allow myself to live in the dark and anxiety- very bad things happen. I know that sounds ominous, but it will make much more sense later. For now, just know that being alone means putting my sanity at risk. This year made being alone unavoidable and finding a peace with that, a way to introspect, to accept my darkness and then force myself to sit with it has been my challenge.
Fairly recently, friends have been sending me podcasts, books, meditations, TedTalks, and even virtual webinar recordings focused on mental health issues. I love all of it to be frank. Not the material itself, sometimes it doesn’t really speak to me, but I love that I have that community, one that I know I fostered just by being vulnerable and shining a light on my own struggles with mental health. I wasn’t always receptive to these suggestions- I felt criticized and judged- like am I that crazy people think I need more help? Eventually I realized it’s love. Someone is sharing something that helped them and frankly that’s what inspires this essay on an essay too. This helped me. You may not write but maybe just reading it will help you.
The first line of my early 2010 essay which isn’t dated until page 3 (this tells me I wrote an entire section much earlier based on content, then came back and finished it) was “why me”. This is a common thought pattern well established by a seeming luck to be unlucky. There’s years that I’ve said, maybe next year so much bad shit won’t happen, most of the time maybe slightly less shit happens but I’m likely to remember it all as constant shit anyway. I’ll remember a slightly more nostalgic time frame, only to remember, oh but XYZ happened too, so that wasn’t a good time. The difference in 2020 is everyone had a “shit what else could happen” year so it was the first time I didn’t feel so alone in that. There’s an exhaustion in one crazy whatever happening after another that I felt less alone in. That’s doesn’t mean I’m happy we are all sharing in a long term trauma event but it is less isolating to know we are in this together, even if our individual situations are different.
Any hoo, back to why me. The why me of 2009 to 2012 was cervical and ovarian cancer. The why me was quitting my MBA program. The why me was my marriage falling apart. The why me was finally, my career falling apart too. It’s still hard to talk about how I felt during that time. Most of the time, I felt nothing. In fact, I say that over and over in my 2010 essay. I felt nothing for no one, not even myself. However I know some of my friends from that time, just read that line and thought, no you were all over the place, all the time, emotionally. I felt nothing. It was like I was a walking emotion that didn’t actually exist inside. Let’s call it dissociation or flight from trauma. Things were happening, I was a walking talking person but my soul, my sense of self, were somewhere else. Without even knowing it, I glassed myself off from what was happening and didn’t feel genuine pain or sadness. I did, but really I didn’t, I really wasn’t there for it. I couldn’t today tell you what my body experienced as I just remember the raw emotional expressions but again I didn’t actually feel them. I know if you were there, you remember them too.
I spend several paragraphs talking about how much I’m hiding from everyone and how afraid I am I’ll be found out ( yup! That happened). What’s odd is I’m not sad that I’m clearly isolating myself. I see that so clearly now. My fear of rejection and abandonment created a situation where I was extremely isolated and feeling- rejected and abandoned. I read all the things I thought were good ideas in order to keep up appearances but also know all that was a total failure pretty much the entire time. I had many epic public breakdowns. There was no charade at all. I didn’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes . Absolutely zero people thought I had my shit together. So why? Why did I hide so much that could’ve helped me get through this?!? Why did I lie to my friends and family? Why did I not ask for help, and in lots of cases, refuse help only to drop my ignored broken life shit on someone else to manage? Because I was lying to myself too.
I’ve always believed there’s a “most people” and excluded myself from this category. Not because I think I’m some extraordinary soul, just the opposite. I often think “most people” have this shit figured out and wouldn’t act this way. Well, maybe but probably not. How someone reacts to any given set of circumstances is related to how many and how bad the circumstances they’ve managed have been. What if nothing else bad had happened in my life and I had just gotten cancer in my early thirties? Hard to say how I would have managed if that had been my only big bad thing ever. Maybe I still wouldn’t have coped because I had no learned coping skills. It wasn’t my first rodeo with a big bad thing though and the coping skills I had “learned” were super effective for short term, violent trauma, but completely ineffective for long term can’t check out from life trauma. No one tells you that, by the way, no one tells you that your coping skills suck. When we hear about trauma we are so focused on outcome we rarely talk about the way there.
Page 3 of my essay is pretty bad. I’ll likely edit it out of memoir existence but a few things are clear. In January 2010 I wrote, I can’t do this anymore. Until I read this I recalled my last suicidal expression as being in 2003. This makes me doubt my narration that I only expressed suicidal depression during isolated timeframes. I want to say it’s because I didn’t want to remember I was there in 2010. The other thing very clear on page 3 is desperation. Knowing that I spent another two years in that state isn’t comforting. I wrote, “I feel desperate for love. Desperate for understanding. Desperate for stability.” Just the other day,I said that again, I just want to be and feel normal. But normal is subjective to your perspective and what I’m living could be a good and acceptable life for a good number of people. I haven’t yet learned flipping that mindset. That sense that, god damn it, this isn’t normal. If anything, social media has only made that comparison syndrome worse. The glossy beings we all present on FB and Instagram all have little bearing to our inner selves. I can never win in a comparison to a manufactured brand of someone else. That doesn’t mean I think you’re fake. It means I know I sanitize my life for public consumption so I’m fairly certain others do too. This comparison takes you out of what you’re living and into what you could or should be, so it’s also an escape, a flight from what is happening.
By page four, I’m planning, I’m planning on burning every bridge, breaking every perceived enemy, and leaving my life in ruins. I’m fantasizing about how everyone will regret how they treated me. I remember this feeling. It’s probably the only one I connect with from that time-rage. I was grieving so many things in that space but not working through it. I clearly am mad because I wrote, “fuck this life. I’m sick of all of it.” At this date, I knew I needed a plan to try to get out of everything. It felt like an emergency. I spent the next two years making every bad decision I possibly could. It’s like when there’s a fire but there’s nothing but lighter fluid, so you desperately use lighter fluid. There’s lots of things I know are in another essay for another time about 2010-2012. We have time to talk about self-hatred taking the form of destructive behavior. It’s clear my self hate was already at play here,
And this is the part I wanted to share, I forgot about this until it came up in therapy the other day. Late 2009 I had an abortion. I didn’t forget that I had it, but I told myself, and likely you a different story. A story that felt safe and relatable but I so convinced myself of that story that I knew I was lying when I talked about it to my counselor. The story is there though written on page 5 and it’s most likely the truest one. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t thinking about my diagnosis. If I told you at all that I was pregnant and lost it, I likely said it just like that. I was pregnant and miscarried. However, none of that was the truth. The truth is, I knew my marriage was over. I knew I hated my husband and our fake shared life. I knew I didn’t want to deal with him for the next 18 plus years of my life. I was also plagued by the knowledge I was too fucked up to be a good mom to anyone, likely ever. I was 100% convinced I should never have kids. In a fit of rage, I scheduled to get the pill and then purposefully planned it when my husband was out of town, I went through that by myself as some sort of sick means of punishment for all the bad things I felt I was. So here I am writing this 2010 essay and I write, “I’m a horrible human being that has no soul”. It’s important that you know, reader, I didn’t tell my husband. There’s a part of me that believes I saved that information to tell him at the moment it would most hurt (yes, I did that). That kind of rage, I don’t wish on anyone, ever.
So let’s talk about rage and trauma before I wrap this up and you all walk away disappointed at the resilient image you may have had of me until today. I don’t know if rage is fight or flight. Rage feels like an escape to me, but I was also fighting for my life. Everything felt so out of control and “happening to me”. I felt desperate to escape that and BE IN CONTROL. The lies we tell ourselves are to survive. We tell ourselves this isn’t so bad, it justified, or it will pass. What if I hadn’t lied? I will live with that regret for a long time, along with questioning my basic human decency. I am choosing to not excuse my behavior beyond saying, if you’ve ever felt that scared, desperate and full of rage you may see the desire to lash out or the desire to run away as explainable.
This last little bit may redeem me, so hold tight. You may wonder why talk about all this now. Because then is now. Not on that level of crazy messed up shit, but that girl/woman is still inside me. We are all living through a trauma, a shared one. Many of us read that sentence and think, that’s so melodramatic. It’s really not. If any of the following things happened to you in 2020 raise your hand:
Job loss/furlough/early retirement
Relationship status change
Relocation
Financial hit from work/ revenue loss
Loss of social circle
Loss of a friend/family/significant other
Severe illness/surgery/ injury/medical issues
Isolation
Not being able to go to restaurants/gyms/ or other spaces that give you joy
Anxiety over job/finances
Fear of a pandemic
Difficulty in relationships due to politics, religion or pandemic
Anxiety about the future
Cancelled/rescheduled/reimagined vacations, celebrations, holidays, life events
We really are in this together. We’ve all experienced some level of change and trauma this year. What if we chose compassion? What if I told you we can learn from our trauma? That resilience isn’t just about where I am now and everything I’ve accomplished. What if the trauma story arch finished with me, saying to you, it may take a long time to get better? What if I shared my stories with more people and told them that there’s a more successful way then just getting through and overachieving to compensate for trauma? Do you have to have some major come back to be the hero of your own story? Trauma healing is a journey. Some things take longer than others, some things you cope and have to deal with the outcome later, but it’s not punishment. It didn’t take me 10 years to rebuild my life because I deserve punishment. It took me ten years to rebuild my life because I had and still have other traumas that have come along and forced me to confront my coping mechanism. There’s no hiding and running away from me, I’m always there, getting in my own way. It’s not enough to live, I want to thrive. Thriving is about accepting and forgiving all those younger selves who did the best they could with the tool set I allowed them to have. If you give a young child a new tool, do they know how to use it or do they poke at it and bang it on things trying to figure out it’s purpose? You parents know the answer. Children are innately curious but depending on age, also short of patience. They will move on to something else if they see no use to a tool. What’s required is instruction. We learn to cope by watching those around us and I’m gonna be frank and say American culture sucks at coping. Again, it’s not about the outcome! The journey. The journey. Everyday I get up and I continue the journey. I get pissed off, saddened by setbacks, I fall into old familiar brain paths, I vent, I introspect,I forgive myself and keep trying. Stick with me, we’ll get stronger.
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shaizstern · 3 years
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Article from NYT: Your Brain Is Not for Thinking
In stressful times, this surprising lesson from neuroscience may help to lessen your anxieties.
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Image: Claire Merchlinsky
By Lisa Feldman Barrett
Dr. Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist.
Nov. 23, 2020
Five hundred million years ago, a tiny sea creature changed the course of history: It became the first predator. It somehow sensed the presence of another creature nearby, propelled or wiggled its way over, and deliberately ate it.
This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures.
Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain.
This story of how brains evolved, while admittedly just a sketch, draws attention to a key insight about human beings that is too often overlooked. Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.
And in stressful times like right now, this curious perspective on your mental life may actually help to lessen your anxieties.
Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance. For example, each morning as you wake, your brain anticipates the energy you’ll need to drag your sorry body out of bed and start your day. It proactively floods your bloodstream with the hormone cortisol, which helps make glucose available for quick energy.
Your brain runs your body using something like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. The budget for your body tracks resources like water, salt and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.
The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis. It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise. Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.
This budgetary account of how the brain works may seem plausible when it comes to your bodily functions. It may seem less natural to view your mental life as a series of deposits and withdrawals. But your own experience is rarely a guide to your brain’s inner workings. Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.
This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical. A bad stomach ache that follows an indulgent meal may send us to the gastroenterologist, but if we experience that same ache during a messy divorce, we may head to a psychotherapist instead. At the gastroenterologist’s office, we experience our discomfort as an underlying physical problem; at the therapist’s office, we experience the same discomfort as anxiety — a psychological disturbance, physically manifested.
In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful. Anxiety does not cause stomach aches; rather, feelings of anxiety and stomach aches are both ways that human brains make sense of physical discomfort. There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body. This is one reason physical actions like taking a deep breath, or getting more sleep, can be surprisingly helpful in addressing problems we traditionally view as psychological.
We’re all living in challenging times, and we’re all at high risk for disrupted body budgets. If you feel weary from the pandemic and you’re battling a lack of motivation, consider your situation from a body-budgeting perspective. Your burden may feel lighter if you understand your discomfort as something physical. When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”
This is not a semantic game. It’s about making new meaning from your physical sensations to guide your actions.
I’m not saying you can snap your fingers and dissolve deep misery, or sweep away depression with a change of perspective. I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.
Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opinion/brain-neuroscience-stress.html
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thebibliomancer · 6 years
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Essential Avengers: Avengers Annual #7 + Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2
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December, 1977
A joyous various winter type time period for you and yours!
Due to these issues issues coincidentally falling in December and also wanting to get back to the main book as soon as possible, I’m doubling up issues in this post. It’s a Yule-esque miracle, perhaps.
I wanted to get this out last Friday but I couldn’t make it in time before I had to visit my family for pre-Christmas.
Anyway, lets get into it.
The Avengers and Captain Marvel and some jerk named Adam Warlock team up to fight Thanos.
We’ve seen this before but the Avengers got kicked off the field so Drax and Captain Marvel got to hog all the Thanos to themselves. Maybe they’ll get their asses beat by him personally this time.
Dangit, maybe I should have saved this for when Infinity War came out? Eh. I can always cover Infinity Gauntlet. Its Avengers-adjacent.
Without further ado, let us commence without stealing someone’s catchphrase.
We start with Adam Warlock being moody and in space, the two prime facets of his character.
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In brief, Adam Warlock was created by evil scientists to be the Perfect Man. He was then beaten near death by Thor and went back to his cocoon. Later, the High Evolutionary named him Warlock, gave him the Soul Gem, and sent him to Counter-Earth to become its champion where he gained the name Adam. Then he became involved in a predestination paradox with his evil future self the Magus and had to murder himself in the future to prevent his evil future self from existing. Thanos helped with this for his own nefarious purposes.
Warlock has been tracking Thanos, following the trail of destruction as it were. But he finds Gamora, Thanos’ most faithful servant.
Gamora is a lot different than in the movies. For one thing, she’s dying.
She discovered his secret plan of Stellar Genocide to wipe out all life and so he left her for dead.
Gamora: “He’s quite mad, you know.”
She says, master of understatement.
Gamora also reveals that the only person Thanos fears is... ADAM WARLOCK.
Warlock swears he’ll hunt down Thanos. But he won’t do it alone. bwoop. His forehead jewel eats Gamora’s soul. As it do.
He also scream exposits at no-one that he thought Thanos was a friend but Chaos and Order whispered to him while he slept that Thanos was a betrayer and also that Warlock is the Champion of Life, the natural foe to Thanos, Champion of Death.
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Usually its worrying when voices tell you not to trust your friends but Warlock is kind of intense so I won’t tell him if you won’t.
Shouting into the void done, Warlock heads off to Earth. Which is a good segue for the Avengers portion of this Avengers Annual.
It is a dark and stormy night. Iron Man is brooding by the window. Scarlet Witch is trying to get Vision to go talk to him. And Beast has revised his policy on kissing and telling with Cap apparently into it.
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Scarlet Witch finally convinces Vision to talk to Iron Man by basically saying they’re the same kind of stubborn stoic jerk who hides their emotions and Vision is like fine geez good logic.
Iron Man doesn’t really have an answer to give though. He just has a foreboding feeling.
Iron Man: “It’s just that ever since I arrived here tonight, I’ve had this unexplainable feeling of danger -- of forces at play about me. I don’t want to be here but I can’t bring myself to leave!”
Captain Marvel: “That’s because you are meant to be here this night, just as we are.”
CAPTAIN MARVEL (not those ones) AND MOONDRAGON!
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Coming in through the window. And dripping on the carpet. Because fuck politeness, amirite?
It took all of my willpower to not edit this panel to have Tony say “Iron nipples... rigid! They sense danger!”
Because why would you choose that panel and pose to detail his chest dials?
I wonder how awkward it is for Iron Man and Moondragon to be in the same room. He was kind of an ass to her the majority of the short time she was on the team. And then she sabotaged his new roster by quitting and then convincing Thor and Hellcat to also quit.
Maybe that’s why it seems like they’re glaring at each other. Or perhaps Tony is just mad she’s taller than him.
Anyway, weird feelings are going around because Captain Marvel and Moondragon were also drawn to the mansion with a premonition that their powers would be needed.
This same premonition must have also drawn part-time Avenger Thor here.
‘No, I just wanted to hear stories about Beast’s love life. Now was this hair curling an euphemism or did grooming serve as foreplay in this encounter?’ Thor might have said.
Okay. Maybe I’m curious. Don’t judge me.
Anyway, the Avengers and guests ponder what kind of horror might be approaching that would need such an assemblage to stop.
A few hundred light-years away, a Playstation rendered TIE Fighter shoots a beam at a star and then the star kerplooies.
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And a few hundred light-years back, Moondragon feels millions of voices cry out in terror and then were suddenly silenced.
I’m not being flippant. She basically Obi-wans.
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Beast is being flippant. Doing card tricks and laughing off the idea of psychic screams and talking winds. This from the guy who was on a team with Professor X and Jean Grey. Won’t be laughing once Jean pulls the same shit on a different star, I tell you that.
He also won’t be laughing right now because Adam Warlock appears out of nowhere just to sass Beast.
I truly believe Adam Warlock’s true superpower is drama. He’s even got his own weird speech bubble quirk.
Anyway, he’s another person for this assemblage. But he also brings word of their common foe: THANOS.
Apparently it was supposed to be sort of a surprise? They haven’t said his name until now but if you’ve read any of the stuff Adam Warlock appeared in you’d recognize that Gamora worked for Thanos and the distinctive shape of Thanos’ ship, which is not actually a poorly rendered TIE Fighter. Its actually much bigger.
If you haven’t read any of the previous Adam Warlock stuff well then sucks to be you. He’s barely introduced here in this Avengers book.
But Thanos? Thanos gets a whole page of recap and introduction. By Adam Warlock. His best frenemy.
What’s weird is that apparently everyone is making faces like ‘yeah we know all this already’ and Warlock sees those faces but just keeps plunging on anyway.
So yeah we get through the stuff where he turned into a giant wireframe head in space and Captain Marvel chopped a Cosmic Cube to bits.
Now apparently Thanos is one of those villains who doesn’t think they could possibly lose but sets up some contingencies just in case. See also: Ultron.
Being ungodded left Thanos floating helplessly in space. And apparently he can breath in space. But then his not TIE-ship retrieved him and he began scheming anew.
But here’s the problem (from Thanos’ perspective): Death abandoned him for his failure. So he decided he needed a grand romantic gesture to win her back. Aka: where most of Thanos’ horrible atrocities start.
And on a scroll from a dead world, he found his answer. And the answer is what his answer always is. Gathering the six shiny things.
Yup.
This is the first time Thanos gathers the Soul Gems. Later to be called Infinity Gems once Thanos in a later story realizes he kind of underestimated them.
Actually the Infinity Gems got a bit of play before they were revealed to be Collect Them All Become God powerful. The Elders once tried to use them to kill Galactus because they were mad he was older than they were.
We get a brief montage of Thanos retrieving all the Gems. Stealing one from the Stranger, liberating another from a prison satellite, finding one in a cave, getting one as an epic drop from killing a monster named Xiambor, and finding one on the Moon because of course there’s one on the Moon.
The final one he was afraid to make a grab for because it was Adam Warlock’s Soul Gem and could steal Souls.
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Instead, Thanos pretended to be his friend, worked together with him to defeat Warlock’s evil future self Magus because comics, and secretly siphoned off some energy from Warlock’s forehead bling without Warlock even knowing.
And then he transferred those energies and the energies of the other five Gems into a giant synthetic Gem. A truly, truly outrageous plan.
Truly a better telling of how he collected six things then the full miniseries that preceded Infinity Gauntlet and was just Thanos being smarter, stronger and more handsome than anyone else ever. I heard Thanos was shredded. I heard he had an eight pack. Etc.
When Gamora discovered that he planned on blowing up every star, she tried to backstab him but she was no match alas.
So most of this exposition Warlock learned by eating her soul with his forehead.
Meanwhile, hundreds of light years away, Pip the Troll arrives at Thanos’ Sanctuary ship to pay the “old gang” a visit. Nobody seems to be home so Pip loudly talks to himself, objectifying Gamora and insulting Thanos and basically digging himself into a hole.
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I mean, in fairness, Thanos would have killed him either way. Now that he doesn’t need to pretend to be nice to Warlock, there’s no need to be civil to Pip either.
Lets just assume that something bad happens off-screen. Because we are changing scenes again.
So we have Thanos a) doing something crazy as a grand romantic gesture for Death and b) gathering several powerful gems. What’s next on our Thanos bingo game?
Invading Earth with a giant space armada? -checks- Yup.
And its such a giant space armada its twice the size of the giant Skrull armada from the Kree-Skrull War. These imaginary numbers are way bigger than those imaginary numbers!
(How does Thanos keep getting people to sign up with him if he inevitably leads them to their deaths and then laughs at them??)
The Avengers prepare to go fight an entire space armada by themselves again (seriously, start building space defenses, the Earth). And Adam Warlock just skips out without so much as a goodbye.
As the heroes prepare to go into battle we get some good character beats from each of them. And they each kind of lead into each other. Its good stuff.
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Moondragon ponders how Thanos always shatters any peace she finds. Later on down the line, he even interrupts a date with her girlfriend. Thanos is the worst. Anyway, he also killed her family and caused her to be adopted by Mentor of Titan so really he’s always been screwing up her life.
Iron Man grapples with fear. He’s going to fight Thanos for a fourth time and wonders if he should have his head examined. Each time he’s fought Thanos he barely survived. And the last time the Avengers fought Thanos, they were only able to thwart his schemes. They didn’t even fight the man. Are the Avengers just heading for an unmarked grave among the stars?
(Maybe I should have saved this for Infinity War, geez)
Captain Marvel ponders how little they truly know about Thanos. And also he hugged Death and still lives. Whats the deal with that?
Thor is just thinking ‘man its about time I get to deck this Thanos fellow in the face.’
Vision wondering if decking Thanos will even win the day. Thanos is in effect a mutant demi-god. Because apparently the Titans of Titan are an evolved offshoot of the gods of Olympus. Which I guess makes Hercules and Thanos related? And also, wuh?
Captain America wishes they had more information about Thanos’ firepower and plans. But also suspects that Warlock knew more than he let on. Which will continue to be Cap’s frustration every time he ever works with Adam Warlock, who tends to use the superheroes of Marvel as disposable pawns in his inscrutable chess games.
Beast wonders who Adam Warlock even is. He was skeptical about this whole thing until he looked in Warlock’s eyes, the eyes of someone who has seen life, death, and infinity.
Scarlet Witch though is thinking that Adam Warlock is totally evil and that he and his Soul Gem could one day prove to be their foe.
And hey. She isn’t even wrong. Because Adam Warlock’s Evil side the Magus tries to take over the universe. And his ostensible Good side? She tries to KILL EVERYONE.
I sometimes think Adam Warlock only ever falls mostly on the side of good because of spite against people that side with evil.
And then the time for pondering ends. GIANT SPACE FLEET.
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God. What a spread.
The Avengers really should start evolving their strategies against massive space invasions because the plan is still to send Thor and Iron Man out the airlock to dogfight spaceships individually while the Avengers’ shuttlecraft makes a run for Thanos’s H-shaped flagship.
A massive laser cannon aimed at space would be really helpful right now but some jerk time traveler never lets us have one.
Oh. And this is kind of a suicide mission. In that the Avengers looked at the odds and thought welp we’re boned. And decided to snatch victory from the jaws of numerical disadvantage anyway even in dying.
Wait, where the shit is Wonder Man? He usually has something to say about the Avengers grimly and dutifully marching off to their deaths. Usually of the ‘I wish that were me I me I don’t want to die but I do kind of want to retain dignity while I rush into death anyway.’
Anyway. Thor starts breaking space stuff FOR MIDGARD! FOR ASGARD! FOR LIFE! while Iron Man... has to be more indirect. Since repulsors are laser punches, he uses them to redirect the enemy’s ionic rays back into their allies.
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Although if you think about it, hitting a spaceship going as fast as it is with a punch laser would probably punch a hole in the hull. No sense putting an extra step into it.
And technically with no sound in space, this would be more accurate:
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Just Thor loudly screaming nothing as aliens asphyxiate.
Anyway.
With exactly two people running distraction (even though Captain Marvel can also fly through space I guess they need to keep some muscle to fight Thanos), the Avengers reach Sanctuary II.
Creating a kind of seal with the bomb bay doors somehow, Captain Marvel blasts a hole in the hull.
Beast: “I imagine a small army of aliens is waiting below to massacre us.”
Captain America: “So what are we waiting for, Avengers? LET’S GO!”
Nice.
Just wading hip deep into an army of alien malcontents. Now that’s cosmic.
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If Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t have Vision fist a crocodile man, then the Marvel Cinematic Universe has failed.
Anyway, the Avengers do their Avenger things. Beast acrobats around and makes the wise-cracks.
Vision just stands still and lets someone shoot through him. As I get further and further into this liveblog I realize more and more how much Vision can just passively win battles and realize where Wonder Man got the idea from during his pacifism phase.
Scarlet Witch does a probability hex at a pig/bug/devil alien wearing no pants but wearing boots and a belt and bling to make his gun hand explode.
Moondragon smugly asserts that she needs no help. And she also reaches an armament control panel so she can turn the Sanctuary II’s guns against the rest of the fleet.
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Also, there’s a giant cyborg space ape named QU’LAR THE MASSIVE.
He lasts for exactly two panels before Captain Marvel tells him to sit on it and possibly ruptures every one of Qu’lar’s organs.
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Related to this, it strikes Captain Marvel that things have been a bit too... easy. It was too easy to get through the Sanctuary II’s hull. Too easy to reach it in the first place. And too easy to beat up Thanos’ forces.
If Thanos wanted to stop them, wouldn’t he be throwing worse at them?
He barges into the ship’s central section expecting the other shoe to drop.
Oh hey. Its empty. Well, except for Adam Warlock and Pip the Troll.
Adam Warlock: “His name was Pip, and he was my friend. Perhaps my only friend. He was joy and light to my darkness and damnation. He was unique among the heavens... and Thanos destroyed his mind and left him for me to find. First Gamora, now Pip. All about me those I love are falling. This cannot be allowed to go on. Nor, by my Gem, shall it!”
And Adam Warlock om nom noms Pip the Troll’s soul.
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Alas, Pip. You were. Someone who existed. And who I have no strong feelings about at all. I guess Warlock’s Good side trying to kill everyone makes more sense if Pip was his idea of joy and light.
Anyway, by eating Pip’s soul, Warlock now knows what Thanos is really up to. Because Thanos did the villain thing and monologued his plans before destroying Pip’s brains. And Warlock absorbed that knowledge when he ate his soul.
So why did Thanos brag about his plans and then leave Pip’s husk for Warlock to find and learn from? Shrug. Thanos planting the seeds to his own destruction is ridiculously common even at this point. Its why he becomes a farmer later. He got so much experience with planting.
Anyway, Thanos is in an exact replica of his ship (Sanctuary III?) on the other side of the sun. The flagship and the fleet and all was just a distraction.
Of course, the fleet lured the Avengers out here in the first place. If he had just snuck up on the sun and destroyed it, he might have gotten away with it. More seed planting, perhaps.
But even as Warlock and Marvel approach the apparent real Sanctuary II, it fires its Starkiller at the Sun and starts suncrushing it.
The Sun goes red and purple and begins to flare. Eight minutes later, some astronomers are really going to freak.
But not if Captain Marvel has anything to say about it! He full-speed rams into the ion-laser projector that Thanos’ big synthetic Soul Gem was housed on.
I mean, maybe aim for the big gem next time, Marv?
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Because Thanos is like oh darn I guess I’ll just replace the projector and get back to murdering stars?
Then Adam Warlock finally catches up and proclaims that he’s going to kill Thanos.
He gets one punch in before Thanos counterattacks and mortally wounds Warlock.
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And since he’s dying anyway, Thanos asks if he’ll rely a message to Death.
Thanos: “Tell her I follow shortly behind you, bringing an offering of undreamed of magnitude... the stars!”
-Warlock plops to the ground, probably not going to deliver that message at all-
Thanos actually seems kind of disappointed on how smoothly this is going. He expected the Champion of Life to be more of a challenge.
THEN THOR AND IRON MAN BURST IN
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Because its just one thing after another with heroes.
While Thor and Thanos exchange fisticuffs and... hammercuffs? Iron Man decides to attack the big shiny thing. Because he for one knows you attack the weak point for massive damage.
With the giant synthetic Soul Gem decided, Thanos’ plans and his chance to regain his love’s favor have been thwarted.
He teleports away, vowing that they’ve earned his enmity and will have few remaining minutes of life.
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But I’m sure that everything is fine and will continue to be fine forever.
So now what?
Captain Marvel wakes up, probably with a horrible headache, after his face first tour of Thanos’ projector. And he sees Warlock talking to Warlock?
Whaaaaaaaaaat?
Okay, so context. In the Adam Warlock comic, Adam Warlock traveled into the future to absorb his own soul to keep his future self from becoming his evil future self the Magus.
In-universe, this only happened months ago. And also right now.
But the months have felt like an eternity to Adam Warlock as everything he has ever loved or accomplished has fallen to ruin or died. His whole life has been a failure and he welcomes its end.
So Adam Warlock om nom noms his own soul.
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And goes back to his present to live out the events that will lead him to getting his soul eaten by himself.
All the while having the soul of Adam Warlock inside and outside the soul gem.
COSMIC!
Having watched this all, Captain Marvel is mostly confused. As is anyone else who didn’t read the Adam Warlock series.
Even with Thanos’ plan to kersplode the sun thwarted, his forces still prove a threat so Thor, Marvel, and Iron Man decide to head back over to the fake Sanctuary II to help the other Avengers.
What to do with Adam Warlock’s body? Eh. Leave it. He’s at peace now. And he’ll peacefully rot in space. Probably like he always dreamed.
Or maybe give him a proper burial?
Throughout Marvel’s conversation with the two Avengers, a green-hued Warlock has been coming to terms with life after death.
Being absorbed into the Soul Gem means being reunited with everyone it has eaten. Gamora. Pip. Some other people probably from Adam Warlock’s own mag. And the realm within the Soul Gem is a land of peace where all can live as one and share a collective memory and heart.
A land where hearts are an open book, where understanding is bred, and the ego is muted. In the Soul Gem there can only be love.
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Not bad for a piece of jewelry normally portrayed as evil and voracious.
So a happy ending for Adam Warlock. And a happy ending for the Sun. And a happy ending for the Avengers who decided that they’re not doing any corpse disposal. Happy ending for everyone except Thanos whose grand romantic gesture was thwarted and the idiots he always manages to inspire to follow him who are getting their teeth punched in by the Avengers.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
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December, 1977
I’m not ashamed to say that one of my favorite comic book tropes is when someone hits someone with someone. But only if they’re using said person as a bludgeon. Throwing the person is the coward’s way out.
So last time: Just scroll up. Thanos was going to blow up the Sun but Iron Man blew up his bling and Adam Warlock achieved his fondest desire and died.
This time: Peter Parker’s plot senses are tingling.
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He senses... that a crossover needs him.
His plot sense also recap the events of the Avengers Annual issue and-
is that an upside down cyclops? What the heck!
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Uh, anyway. Yeah. Just a recap of the Avengers Annual. Which is mighty obliging. A less scrupulous writer would have dropped a brief text recap and made you buy the issue to find out what happened.
Anyway, Peter’s dream goes beyond just the events of Avengers Annual #7. He starts dreaming of THINGS NOT ON PANEL. Except now they’re on panel because he’s dreaming of them.
Also, I lied. Its not Peter’s plot sense that's tingling. Moondragon just beamed a recap into his dreams.
After Avengers Annual #7, Thanos teleported back over to the other Sanctuary II where the Avengers were still fighting his diverse crowd of alien jerks (why do villains always believe in diversity more than the heroes do?).
With some actual leadership, they go from being an ineffectual mob mostly existing to make the Avengers look cool to a fighting machine.
In five panels, the fight turns against the Avengers and they all lie defeated.
Well, except for the away team of Captain Marvel, Thor, and Iron Man.
They take an additional page to defeat.
Thanos goes right from organizing his mob in their defeat of the Avengers to an armament control console with no time for gloating in between (which you know is very hard for Thanos) and blasts Thor, Captain Marvel, and Iron Man while they’re flying back towards the fake Sanctuary II.
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I was going to joke that its because this isn’t an Avengers book that the Avengers can be totally stomped in two pages. But that’s just their life, isn’t it? Even in their own book they aren’t free of getting taken out humiliatingly easy, are they?
Thanos then had all the unconscious heroes put in stasis beams. Y’know that thing where the heroes are all lined up in a row but unable to move but there aren’t any obvious restraints? Well this time it works by keeping the heroes a micro-second out of sync with reality.
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Without the giant synthetic Soul Gem, Thanos can’t blow up every star. But with the Soul Gem on the dead deceased corpse of Adam Warlock, maybe he can still blow up a star. And conveniently, he happens to be near a pretty one called Sol.
Maybe just blowing up the one star in Marvel that matters will be enough to appease death.
And then Peter wakes up, the recap portion of this recap over.
He only wonders why Moondragon chose him to send this message to. He’s a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man not a powerhouse or cosmic dude.
And we cut to Master Order and Lord Chaos basically being to blame. Their game against Death goes poorly and they’re forced to put their reserves in play.
I.e. Spider-Man and Ben Grimm, the Thing.
Because Spider-Man realizes ‘hey wait I can’t webswing into space, I need to borrow a spaceship’
And he knows just who to borrow one from.
Cue a funny moment where Spider-Man startles the Thing while he’s engrossed in reading Salem’s Lot causing him to accidentally inhale his cigar.
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Oh what shenanigans you get up to, Peter.
But he gets the Thing to stop complaining about Spider-Man disrespecting the security system by shouting at him to STFU. Ben realizes that maybe Spider-Man has troubles.
So he pours Peter some coffee and listens to his story. And immediately asks what Peter has been smoking. Old tennis shoes maybe?
Which is. Ben knows that real drugs exist, right?
But since Peter is serious about it Ben figures what the heck. There’s an experimental spaceship he was supposed to test-pilot when he got the chance and now’s as good a time as any.
Spider-Peter doesn’t really have... exact directions but the spaceship’s tracking systems will track down Thanos’ ship if its up there.
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Spider-Man: “If? Still have your doubts, then?”
The Thing: “About your story? Perish forbid such a thought. How could anyone doubt the word of a man in blue and red leotards who crawls on walls?”
Police, I’d like to report a murder.
But despite Ben’s skepticism, they find Thanos’ giant H on the very next page.
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The Thing: “Appears like I was wrong about you this time, Spidey. My apologies.”
Spider-Man: “What do you mean ‘this time’?”
The Fantastispacecraft gets caught in a tractor beam and dragged inside the giant H (for Hate?). Ben kicks the door of his spaceship out so he can immediately go out and start punching some space goons.
Thus making the ship nonviable for a return trip. Good thinking, Ben!
Spider-Man joins in the goon punching, although he admits that monster bashing isn’t his usual comfort zone. But if he fights the small fries which basically look like weird people then he should be good.
He’ll let the Thing fight the giant space serpent.
AND USE THE SPACE SNAKE TO HIT PEOPLE WITH. That’s what I’m talking about, Ben!
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Meanwhile, Thanos watches this on a monitor. He must be wondering how many heroes he aggroed today. They just keep showing up.
So he has the gravity turned off in the chamber Spider-Man and Thing are in. That’ll show them.
And Thanos’ men, who I guess trained for just this sort of contingency, waste no time blasting Spider-Man and the Thing while they’re discombobulated.
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Its a bit of a shame. I wanted to see if Spider-Man would try to use his webs. A much later comic than this made the point that without gravity, Spider-Man’s webbing would splurt out instead of thwip out in nice lines. I wanted to see if that would be used here, decades before the first time I saw it.
Meanwhile, Master Order and Lord Chaos continue to commentate on the crossover. Another round goes to Death with Spider-Man and the Thing temporarily out of play. Still, they both expected this.
Summoning Spider-Man and the Thing was a ploy to get Adam Warlock back on the field from the emerald hill zone.
Meanwhile, in the land of emerald skies (they look purple actually) and green hills, Adam Warlock exposits about recent events.
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Yup. He sure died. And now he lives in the Soul Gem, a paradisaical world where he can forget about his worries and his strife. All within the Soul Gem are one and live in harmony for harming another would be harming oneself. Yup, afterlife in the Soul Gem is good and will remain good forever.
Elsewhere and while, Spider-Man and the Thing wake up at the foot of the hero display case and/or stasis beam.
Thanos didn’t get the chance to gloat earlier so he’s seizing the opportunity now.
His henchaliens are preparing stasis beams for Thing and Spider-Man but in the meanwhile, look at how awesome Thanos is. He collected the Avengers better than the Collector ever did. Suck it, old man.
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Spider-Man decides to hear Thanos out, hoping that encouraging Thanos to ramble will give them time to plan. And Thanos knows he’s being played but what the hell, he loves to hear himself talk.
So he explains to the heroes that he’s having another stellar projector prepared which will use the Soul Gem’s power to cause the Sun to go nova (but not that one. Or that one. Marvel has a lot of Novas).
And then he explains that he’s doing this as a grand romantic gesture for Death. Recaps how he fell out of her favor by fucking up his plan to become god with the cosmic cube. But anyway, yeah, thats why the Sun and countless lives on Earth must die. So Death will be really impressed with him.
Ben Grimm doesn’t find that a good motivation so he punches Thanos in the dick.
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Thanos just no-sells it and purple energy blasts the Thing unconscious.
Annnnnd Spider-Man realizes he’s out of his league so when Thanos asks him if he wants a turn, he just webswings away.
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Thanos: “WHAT?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
Spider-Man: “Leaving! This is the Avengers’ hassle.”
For some reason, Thanos takes exception to this and orders his alien mooks to bring back Spider-Man’s head.
Except now what? He doesn’t know how to fly spaceships so he can’t just steal the Thing’s ride (also its no longer air tight). He can’t stay here, he’ll just get killed. But he can’t go back to Earth because if Thanos blows up the Sun, Earth will get a whole lot less hospitable.
So if he’s dead either way, he might as well stay. And if he’s staying, he might as well do something. But he can’t fight Thanos directly. He’d sweep the floor with Spider-Man and probably any hero Spidey knows.
Except.... maybe Thor?
Okay, good plan. Good plan. Free Thor. Save the world. Have everything be good forever. Spidey is glad he talked himself out of that blind panic spiral.
Meanwhile, another Master Order and Lord Chaos intermission. They sure are glad that Spider-Man didn’t let his self-preservation overrule his strong heart.
So Spider-Man loops back around to where Thanos showed him his Avengers collection. And darn, Thanos is still there. And also he changed his mind. He’s not adding Spider-Man to his collection now. So there.
Spider-Man decides the thing to do is smash the stasis beam projector WITH HIS BODY.
So the Avengers wake up and immediately charge Thanos. While Spider-Man limply hangs half out of the machinery. Oh, and the Thing woke up by this point too.
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That’s some quality Assembling! Good job, Spider-Man. Probably fracturing half of your bones was worth it.
Thanos summons his army of mooks and we get down to a real rumble.
Weird that apparently Adam Warlock will be needed to resolve this scenario. Thing and Thor seem to be thumping Thanos pretty effectively while the rest of the heroes keep the small fry off their backs.
And the other heroes are playing it very strategically. Captain Marvel is keeping an eye on the overall crowd composition so that one of the heroes can go and bust up any attempt to build up or consolidate a position.
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Yeah, I’d say this is in the bag.
But just as Thor and Thing are still kicking Thanos’ ass and looking good doing it, Thanos eye beams Thing unconscious and puts Thor on the ropes.
Dangit.
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Spider-Man regains consciousness, still stuck hip deep in some defunct machinery and realizes that he must Do Something. In fact, he feels as if everything depends on the decision he makes next.
In happy paradise green land, Adam Warlock is struck with a terrible migraine and realizes that the plot needs him for one last hurrah.
Spider-Man’s spider-sense spider-leads him to notice Adam Warlock’s Soul Gem, encased in a glass globe.
So obviously he should break that, right?
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Yeah.
And with the Soul Gem freed from containment, Adam Warlock manifests as a naked fire man and proclaims himself the Ultimate Avenger.
(Was Adam Warlock ever in the Ultimate Universe? I can only think if he was, his re-imagining would have been endlessly disappointing.)
And Ultimate Avenger Adam Warlock (with kung fu action grip) could not rest while Thanos remains a threat to the universe.
And Ultimate Avenger Adam Warlock is so very, very tired and wants to rest. So Thanos will have to go.
So Ultimate Avenger Adam Warlock takes Thanos for granite because that’s just something Ultimate Avenger Adam Warlock can do.
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Fuck you, I don’t have to explain anything. Its cosmic.
Which leaves just the cleanup.
Thanos’ army immediately surrenders.
Which is a good decision for them because they’re probably going to get released with no punishment aside from the hits they’ve already taken.
Spidey objects but Captain Marvel asks what he would suggest doing with them? Put them in Earth jail? That’s ridiculous, Spider-Man. You ludicrous radioactive Spider-Man.
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I guess.......... space jail isn’t an option for some reason? They’re kind of accessories to the destruction of a star and conspiracy to commit another star murder.
When Jean Grey and/or the Phoenix did that it was a whole to-do but I guess its just okay this time because it didn’t personally inconvenience the Shi’ar?
Maybe Captain Marvel is just lazy and doesn’t want to do the considerable amount of paperwork it would take to arrest an army.
No Sam Vimes this Mar-Vell.
Perhaps realizing they were dicks before, the Avengers decide to actually have a funeral for Adam Warlock. They bury him on some random space rock.
And they leave his Soul Gem right on his grave for anyone to steal. WHICH HAPPENS AND CAUSES INFINITY GAUNTLET.
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Geez, the Avengers. Geez.
Also according to his tombstone, Adam Warlock was only ten years old. He was a melancholic child.
Later, aboard the fake Sanctuary II which was apparently Sanctuary III all along and maybe you could have mentioned that earlier and prevented a lot of name confusion for me, personally.
Spider-Man mourns the loss of Adam Warlock. He didn’t know him that well but the universe feels much emptier without him.
And the Thing suggests they check to see if Sanctuary III had a coffee pot anywhere. SPACE COFFEE (do not drink in space).
And within the Soul Gem, Adam Warlock resigns himself to living in paradise free of any strife, problems or pain. Or darn. Well he’ll manage.
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And the Thanos statue cries because Death doesn’t love him. And also petrification is often portrayed as a living death so he doesn’t even get to be with his crush.
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Phew.
Two annuals back to back was a bad idea. And almost nobody is even going to read this today because I have almost nobody that even reads these on a non-holiday day and today is Christmas so people are probably going to be with families and singing to the Christmas raptor.
Well. Here it is anyway. The last stand of Adam Warlock.
And that’s the major thing to bring up.
This is Avengers Annual and Marvel Two-in-One Annual. A book about the Avengers and a book about the Thing and his amazing friends. But the story that spans these two issues is about Adam Warlock. The others are just along for the ride.
The giant cosmic space heads even say as much. Spider-Man is only here to get the real star of the show on stage. The Thing is only here because this is his team-up book (and because Spidey needs transportation).
Its kind of a tendency of Adam Warlock to make any story about him. Both in and out of universe. He’s kind of self-absorbed.
Whether you like these stories probably comes down to whether you like Adam Warlock. Because on this day the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Thing took the backseat to the space messiah who hated to wear pants.
Other than that? Pretty good.
A good Thanos plan. An intentional downgrade from his plan to become god in terms of ambition. But possibly even worse because he planned to blow up every star just to get Death sempai-dono to notice him.
This is the end for Thanos for a while. He’s still a stone statue during the Death of Captain Marvel in 1982. Thanos doesn’t stop being stoned until 1990.
People that didn’t read Adam Warlock’s book probably don’t really get why Thanos was most scared of this golden brooder but I think turning into a naked fire man and turning Thanos to stone is context enough.
So happy and merry whatever. Next time I get back to the main book but we’re still going to have the Avengers storming a giant thing in space.
During this time in their lives, the Avengers just storm giant space things more often than typical.
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antoine-roquentin · 6 years
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Until CRISPR, DIY scientists didn’t have an easy, cheap or reliable way to precisely edit DNA. Many of them couldn’t afford the pricey and imperfect tools that professional scientists used for gene editing at the time. “Before CRISPR, there was TALENS [transcription activator-like effector nucleases] and zinc finger nucleases—older technologies that were not as precise or reliable,” explains Sosa. “They were out of the budget and the time constraints of DIY scientists.” Sosa says that if a DIY-er used those other technologies, it might cost him or her thousands of dollars to do a genetic engineering experiment. But with CRISPR, it’s vastly more affordable, especially if you want to attempt an experiment more than once. “With TALENS, you try it once and fail,” says Sosa. “With CRISPR, you can try it multiple times. That alone is a big deal.”
This means that CRISPR gives DIY-ers a whole new way to do science. So far, Sosa and his lab mates have tried out CRISPR in a number of ways: cutting yeast genomes, slicing DNA inside E. coli cells, and attempting to modify the CRISPR system by shrinking it or attaching other molecules to it. Sosa has goals for his CRISPR research. “I want to understand how a cell really functions, and what are all the little things that happen in it,” he explains. “And when something goes wrong [such as in diseases], how to fix it or make it do what I want.”
After several hours, Sosa and I checked to see if CRISPR had cut our yeast DNA. We dyed our DNA-CRISPR mixture blue and ran it through an electrically charged gel, which separates bigger DNA pieces from smaller ones. Tiny channels in the gel run from one charged end to the other, and the sliced DNA strands are pulled through them towards the positively charged side. If our experiment succeeded, we should see two blue bands for the short CRISPR-cut DNA strands in one spot, and one blue band for a longer, uncut piece of DNA (our control) in another location.
Sosa carried the gel into the bathroom, where we turned off the lights and looked at it under blue light. I held my breath while I inspected the gel for markings. One light-blue band gleamed in the dark—the control—and another single band lit up the spot where we should have seen our CRISPR’d DNA. “I don’t know what happened, but it doesn’t look right,” Sosa said, “I don’t think it worked.”
I left the lab feeling defeated, and headed back to San Francisco. Sosa texted me a few minutes later.
Hey, I figured out what happened. There was no DNA to start with, he wrote.
What happened? I texted back.
I think the DNA had either degraded or gotten too diluted, he wrote.
Even if we had got all the other parts (RNA, proteins, etc.) working, it didn’t matter. We hadn’t given CRISPR any DNA to cut. My second attempt at CRISPR had utterly failed.
My own frustrating struggles with CRISPR aside, I wanted to see what professional biologists are doing with CRISPR, so I visited the lab of Nipam Patel at the University of California, Berkeley. After a quick tour of the lab, I sat down and stared into the microscope at a small, writhing marine creature: Parhyale hawaiensis, commonly called a beach hopper. At one centimeter long, Parhyale looks puny—you’d step on it at the beach without even noticing. But under the microscope, this female hopper resembled a giant translucent shrimp with many powerful, kicking legs. Parhyale is the star of this lab. “We’re looking at how you develop an individual body,” explains Erin Jarvis, a PhD student in Patel’s lab, “And also how you build a body form over evolutionary time.” And they’re using CRISPR to do it.
With CRISPR, these researchers knock out so-called Hox genes in Parhyale. Hox genes are found in all animals, including humans, and they control the development of their body plans. Among other things, they determine what appendages—such as swimming legs, claws and antennae—grown on which section of the body. Knock out a certain Hox gene with CRISPR and Parhyale will grow forward-walking legs where it should have jumping legs, for example.
Parhyale has nine Hox genes, and Patel’s team has knocked out seven of them. The researchers also have plans to add completely new genes to Parhyale using CRISPR—they’ve already done it once, by inserting a gene that codes for green fluorescent proteins, which allowed the researchers to visualize where a specific Hox gene is expressed in Parhyale. “From an evolutionary perspective, this [gives] us insight into how body plans evolve between species,” when comparing Parhyale to, for example, the well-studied fruit fly, Drosophila, explains Patel. “We believe that such evolutionary patterns help us understand the general mechanisms by which evolution creates animal diversity.… What we learn improves our knowledge about the function of these genes in other animals, including humans.”
CRISPR has transformed how Patel and his colleagues do their research. His lab has looked at Parhyale for about 20 years now. Before CRISPR they used another technique to knock out genes that required a lot more money, and even then, it wasn’t very efficient. It cost them about $900 to knock out a single gene in a group of Parhyale embryos with their other method. The technique, called “RNA interference,” silences expression of a gene—it doesn’t genetically knock it out as CRISPR does. The problem was, sometimes the method didn’t work at all.
Now it costs them less than $100 to knock out a gene. “Suddenly, with CRISPR, you don’t have to decide, ‘Which one gene do I want to put all my resources into?’” Jarvis says, “You can try a lot of different genes.” And with CRISPR, they’re able to break genes in up to 75 percent of Parhyaleembryos, versus a maximum 25 percent success rate with the old technique. Even better, they now have the ability to mutate several genes at once with CRISPR, which means they can now see how genes interact. When the researchers had tried to mutate multiple genes with their old technique, it rarely worked. (Though Patel notes that the older RNA technique is still very useful for certain applications).
Their research takes less time with CRISPR, too—in a study Patel’s lab published in Current Biology in 2015, they knocked out six Hox genes in about a year. Before that, they had already spent years trying to break a specific Hox gene with their old method, but were never able to do it. “Everything just goes faster,” says Patel, a professor of genetics, genomics and development. “CRISPR-Cas9 is an incredibly elegant system, and it’s very easy to control.” It also makes it simpler to study more exotic creatures (beyond the standard flies and mice), such as animals like Parhyale or butterflies. “It’s always been hard to work with a new organism,” says Jarvis, “CRISPR is awesome because suddenly, you don’t have to spend decades developing a model.” As long as you have the sequence of the gene you want to target, you’re set.
Patel’s lab is hardly the only one capitalizing on CRISPR—scientists around the world are exploring all sorts of different uses for the gene editing tool, like wiping out malaria-spreading mosquitoes, finding new ways to treat cancer, or engineering disease-resistant crops. In July, researchers announced they had successfully edited the genome of viable human embryos with CRISPR; the technique allowed them to fix a disease-causing mutation in the embryos’ DNA (though some are now skeptical of the researchers’ results). Just a few weeks later, scientists in Massachusetts reported they had made a significant advance towards pig-to-human organ transplants. They used CRISPR to inactivate 25 viruses intrinsic to pigs’ genomes, overcoming a big obstacle in making porcine transplants safe for humans.
I had reached the end of my CRISPR experiment—so what had I learned? First, I found out it was not completely crazy for my roommate to wonder whether a DIY CRISPR kit in our fridge would make us sick. This year, German authorities restricted imports of the Odin DIY CRISPR bacteria kit after the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority tested two kits and found them to contain potentially pathogenic bacteria. But even theEuropean Center for Disease Prevention and Control concluded that there was little to worry about—that “the risk of infection by the contaminating strains in the kit is low for the users … assuming that they are healthy people.” (Zayner declined to comment on the record about the incident, but he publicly posted a response on Twitter, where he criticized the methodology used by the agency and denied wrongdoing by his company. The kits are still available for purchase online through The Odin.)
As for my bigger question—could untrained DIY-ers actually achieve scientific breakthroughs?—I asked academic researchers what they thought. Dana Carroll, for his part, believes amateurs could make meaningful discoveries. “In the professional science community, people keep coming up with new ways to use this technology—people are really only limited by their imagination,” he explains. “It’s possible that people working in their garages or their kitchens will come up with a novel application or a solution to a problem that professionals just haven’t gotten around to.” And Carroll says it would be easy for a DIY-er to share any discoveries with researchers, by attending their talks or simply by contacting them through their Web sites. Yet he notes that the DIY community faces limitations, because amateur scientists likely would lack the necessary resources. “It’s unlikely they will bring a major application all the way to fruition,” he says, “But they could certainly get started on something.”
Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. “People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, ” he says. “How big is the risk? It’s not zero, but it’s fairly small.” Gersbach agrees. “Right now, it’s difficult to imagine how it’d be dangerous in a real way,” he explains, “If you want to do harm, there are much easier and simpler ways than using this highly sophisticated genetic editing technique.”
Back in Patel’s lab, Jarvis replaced the squirming female beach hopper under my microscope with a tiny Parhyale embryo. Jarvis told me she knocked out a Hox gene called Abd-B in this one—the embryo will grow jumping legs where it should have swimming legs, and forward walking legs instead of anchor legs. At this point, it just looked like an opaque ball of goo to me.
Next to me, another grad student examined a fragment of a brown and gold butterfly wing—Patel’s lab is also knocking out butterfly genes with CRISPR to see how they build wing color. “An old grad student used to joke that we were genetically modifying the wings to make the Mona Lisa,” Jarvis told me. I laughed and glanced back under the microscope. A puff of my breath suddenly struck the Parhyale embryo. It danced wildly around the petri dish, like a grain of sand caught in a windstorm.
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