#GIVE THIS TO ME SCIENCE

[triflesandparsnips]

Accidentally started rereading Northanger Abbey, and was sudden reminded all over again that Jane Austen is, in fact, fucking hilarious.

NA is her parody/satire of Gothic novels at the time, and she starts the book by choosing violence-- she describes the "tragedy" of the main character, Catherine Morland, a girl Determined to be a Heroine even though ALL ODDS are against her: she has a sane father who doesn't lock up his daughters, a healthy mother who didn't die in childbirth, no preternatural talent for music or drawing through which to reveal her Deepest Soul, and-- most shockingly of all-- absolutely zero love interests for whom she can wander the hills mourning their starcrossed fates until she wastes away from the sheer Sentimentality of it all.

But don't worry! She's got this FIGURED OUT. She KNOWS why she has not yet found her TRUE LOVE:

There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

(SPOILER: She is introduced to a mysterious young man who lives in an ABBEY, which everyone knows means he has a DEEPLY MYSTERIOUS SECRET PAST and is maybe a TRAGIC HERO or even a ROMANTIC MONSTER and either way this is IT this is Catherine's TIME TO SHINE she is going to get a good grade in DOOMED LOVE, a thing that is normal to want and--)

(...meanwhile Henry Tilney-- an ordinary guy who never expected "get cast as the Hero in some Grand Gothic Romance" to show up on his bingo card-- starts wondering when exactly he started finding Catherine's attempts to locate bloody daggers in his linen closet charming.)

[great-and-small]

You know what I hate about the internet? Sometimes people will just lazily slap a “citation” on an infographic and trust that they’ll be completely taken at their word and nobody is going to dig deeper. And it works all the time. As an example, please look at this photo someone posted to dispute my assertion that garlic can be toxic to dogs.

Okay well, kind of a pain to manually type in that link but obviously I am going to look into this study that is confident enough to recommend people feeding their dogs garlic. So here’s the article, kind of a weird journal choice for this graphic to reference from but looks like a legit (though 20 year old) study

Funny thing is, almost immediately this article acknowledges that garlic can indeed be toxic to dogs. The health benefits mentioned in the graphic are referring to human health, not canine. This section is literally in the introduction of the article and one of the first things you read. Emphasis here is mine.

Crazy to me that someone would imply that this article encourages giving dogs garlic when it in fact immediately asserts that doing so has the potential to cause hemolytic anemia. The article does explore the anti-thrombotic effects of garlic components in dogs and humans, but by no means does it say that “contrary to misconceptions garlic is safe for pets”. It is dishonest to assert this in an infographic. However the creator of the image correctly assumed nobody would check, because the person who posted it took it as fact without further investigation.

I am begging you to be skeptical. Check your sources. Check their sources. Check my sources. Learn how to dig deeper and exercise that muscle as much as you can, especially on the internet. You will be absolutely shocked how much misinformation is casually stated and received as pure fact.

[teaboot]

Social anxiety level: Chatting with someone experiencing a schizophrenic episode and becoming increasingly self-concious of how I'm just saying "That sounds really stressful", "I've never heard of that but it sounds scary", and "You must be pretty worried about that" over and over again

[martiniluvr]

the hand placement…the size difference….somebody sedate me

[allastoredeer]

I drew a monstrosity.

[internetskiff]

honestly, and this is coming from a Wheatley enjoyer here, methinks some people in the fandom either forget or consciously suppress the fact that he has an undeniable egotistical and self-serving streak to him that's prominent even before he gets put in the GLaDOS Chassis. Like, let's be honest, when he broke Chell out and assisted her he was in it for himself at least PARTIALLY, and personally I think initiating a core transfer was at least slightly motivated by his desire to retaliate after GLaDOS crushed him like a tin can and tossed him away. He was very clearly enjoying himself as he carved her head up to stuff into a potato. He also like.. blatantly has bottled up resentment towards Chell that he lets pour out after he secured his spot on the Chassis.

I feel like part of the tragedy to it is that a healthy dynamic between him and Chell is literally physically impossible because he only pauses to reflect on his own actions after he has been tossed out into space. Even if he was detached without being sent out into orbit he would be immediately tortured by GLaDOS while Chell is sent to the surface with her Companion Cube. The Companion Cube is quite literally the only object within Aperture that provided Chell with companionship without expecting anything from her in return. Wheatley had her running around sabotaging equipment to further his own plans - the game quite literally makes a point about this during his boss fight, when he rants and raves how in reality he's the one who's been bossed around. He's quite literally spent his entire existence as an object used and passed around from odd job to odd job by Aperture's staff, and unfortunately for Chell she's the only human being left that he can finally take his anger out on.

Let's be honest, much like GLaDOS, Wheatley isn't a good person - that doesn't mean he can't become one, but the whole point of the ending is that that ship has sadly sailed for him, he can't apologize to Chell, leaving him with nothing but an eternity of self-reflection as he floats among the stars. He was designed to be stupid, and that's all that was expected of him. And he only begins to see his own flaws when he's stuck in an environment where he is physically incapable of making stupid decisions.

[vaguely-concerned]

warden antoine 'through the power of love (and arson) all things are possible. zo jot that down' ivo my beloved

[seizethedeansofproduction]

they're like the Beatles for people obsessed with one specific aspect of pop culture

[ofekma]

"noo but this time it's different! Our antisemitism is morally justified! We really do have a good reason to hate the jews!" - every antisemic person at any point in history.

[whetstonefires]

So the thing with the Matrix for me, right, was I could never get past the assertion that the motivation for keeping humans alive was as a power source.

That pinged as so so stupid, and was presented so late and half-heartedly, that I could not understand it as a sincere part of the premise. Like. We're told very dramatically and pretty early that the world was mostly destroyed by humans 'scourging the skies' to block off all solar radiation in the effort to shut down the solar powered robots, evidently forgetting that all life on Earth is solar-powered also. Too comedically dumb to be really tragic imo.

So to pivot from the premise 'there is no life on earth, other than human beings, because the sun is gone' to 'the humans were kept alive as batteries' is an impossibility for me. Our ludicrous mammalian bodies, incredibly inefficient engines entirely reliant on continuous indirect consumption of solar energy to even survive, were somehow yielding a net output? Not only that, but one superior to nuclear or geothermal???? Bullshit.

I mean. Bull. Shit. I cannot. We just underlined in the backstory how all life on earth relies on the sun! Because life is expensive just to maintain and requires constant external energy input! We get milk from cows by keeping them alive, but that's because they turn the grass energy into something easier for us to process; no such mechanism is proposed for humans consuming dead humans and somehow producing a form of energy more useful to the Machines than just waiting for the corpses to dry out and then burning them to run a goddamn boiler.

This makes the direct opposite of sense.

It had to be in-universe propaganda, right? Another layer of the deception? It couldn't be the real reason. It was too implausible. Which meant I was still waiting to find out why the machines were really bothering with humanity and the Matrix.

I would have accepted without quibble the revelation that humans have special psychic energy that the machines were harvesting; that's dumb but in a comfortable, comprehensible, and above all internally consistent sci-fi kind of way.

I would have been quite open to the idea that the machines relied on human consciousness for their own development to true sapience, and the Matrix was primarily an AI nursery with the enmeshed human brains providing complex inputs, that one's actually cool.

There are a lot of explanations out there aside from the dumb official one, or the Occam's Razor one where they were just keeping some humans alive out of sentimentality! I'm really not that picky!

So anyway I never managed to emotionally engage with the Matrix films well because I had this unresolved 'motives of primary antagonist??? cause of fundamental scenario??????' thing making most of the actual plot twist and drama feel kind of boring.

My sister maintains that this is something wrong with me, that I'm refusing to suspend my disbelief and engage correctly with the text, and this constitutes a hostile, bad-faith and therefore illegitimate reading.

(She hasn't actually said this last part and I'd respect her position more if she did, but this seems to be the broad thrust of her emotional position when she starts shouting.)

I maintain that if a central plank of your sci-fi premise relies on going 'fuck the basic principles of thermodynamics and biology this is a vibes-based system' you should be very careful to avoid invoking the relationship between basic thermodynamics and biology in your core worldbuilding.

[catwouthats]

lol I can’t believe Logan was in heat through out the Deadpool and Wolverine movie /hj

Link here ig

[supercalime]

Just thought about sharing this frame right here

Do with it what you will

[almoststedytimetravel]

Arena Manga Epilogue my beloved.

[romanticize-until-you-drop]

Just raised my hand and asked my first question in a seminar!! Killing my social anxiety one step at a time…

[moon-buggg]

not a qiestion just me being insane. I love your haunted AU a lot!!! i need to get chased with a chainsaw. thanks

where did he get that???

[sincericida]

ANDREW GARFIELD

for the Buzzfeed Puppy Interview