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cellarspider · 8 months ago

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13/30 Science interlude!

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We return to Prometheus, where I am taking a break to ramble about my job. A thing that I love. It will be a nice change. Also: weird blood!

I have been informed that some methods of accessing tumblr do not play well with long alt text rambles. To keep the flow between the main text and alt text separate, I’ll be copying the longest ones below the main text and citations. Captions that I think are going to be long enough to need this treatment will be marked with “Overflow Ramble [number]”, so they’ll be slightly easier to find. It’s not a perfect system, but Tumblr is not a perfect website.

And I am going to need the overflow space this time, because we’re getting into genetics!

After electrocuting a decapitated alien head until it exploded into a shower of green gore, the creatures that claim to be scientists stuck a bit of the goop in some sort of very science-y DNA machine, leading to this:

“Let's have a look at its DNA. Isolate the strand. Okay. Compare it to the gene sample?”

“[Overlay… Processing… Processing… DNA MATCH.]”

“Oh, my God. It's us.”

I want this preserved for posterity, because this made me absolutely hoot. They avoided fake science technobabble by going so far in the other direction that it becomes equally meaningless.

What the scene is trying to say is “this alien shares the vast majority of its genetic material with humans, indicating that they are in fact related.”

I will get to how one would actually determine that, but first: The head turned into green goop. Green goop. Humans are notably not prone to turning into green goop. Otherwise Nickelodeon would’ve probably been shut down within a week.

(Image credit: Rich Fury/KCA2021/Getty Images for Nickelodeon)

This annoyed me so much that years later, I dug up a possible explanation that backfills this with cool biology.

Humans, and almost all vertebrates have hemoglobin-filled blood. And on a tangent that I must follow: The only vertebrate that doesn’t is the icefish Channichthyidae family, commonly known as the white-blooded fish.

You’ll never guess what’s special about them.

Yes, somehow these fish manage to live without hemoglobin, their blood only having 10% of the oxygen carrying capacity of their red-blooded cousins. Hell, most of them also lack myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle. The loss of myoglobin isn’t just a one-off event either, genetic studies have shown that these icefish have seen four distinct branches of their family tree lose myoglobin independently of each other. They have a wild series of adaptations to permit this, but basically they were already in such cold oxygen-rich water and moving so slow that they didn’t need all that extra oxygen-having stuff. They lost it, kept going, got bigger hearts, weirder muscles, and just. Kept. Going. They’ve actually expanded their range in the past 30 million years or so!

I love them! Evolution is wild. You know what’s also wild? There’s green-blooded vertebrates. Yes. You read that right. Yes, they still have hemoglobin. What they also have are staggering levels of biliverdin, which human bodies only produce when breaking down hemoglobin–when a bruise takes on a greenish hue, it’s because the dismantling of the blood under your skin has created biliverdin. While it’s generally been thought of as just a breakdown product, some research suggests that it also has protective effects against a number of diseases. In moderation, though. If you have enough of it to actually turn a bit green, you’ve got jaundice, which is not a thing you want to have.

But for a number of fish species, bush frogs, and skinks, they have way more biliverdin.

(Austin, C. C., & Jessing, K. W. (1994). Green-blood pigmentation in lizards. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology, 109(3), 619-626.)

Humans usually don’t have much circulating biliverdin at all, so the table above compares someone with untreated jaundice to a number of other species–fish with two to fourteen times that amount, and the green-blooded skinks have twenty-two times as much! These creatures have green blood and turquoise-colored bones, and we still don’t know why. Maybe it’s protection against diseases, maybe it’s protection against parasites like malaria, maybe it’s to make them really blend in with foliage. Could be all of those at once, could be none of them, we don’t know! What we do know is that, as with the icefish, the green-blooded skinks in particular have independently evolved this feature four different times. (Rodriguez, Z. B., Perkins, S. L., & Austin, C. C. (2018). Multiple origins of green blood in New Guinea lizards. Science Advances, 4(5), eaao5017.)

(https://australian.museum/blog-archive/amri-news/amri-three-tiny-green-blooded-frogs-sing-like-birds/)

(https://web.archive.org/web/20180619143048/https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/09/30/why-do-mysterious-lizards-have-green-blood/)

We have no mammals identified with biliverdin-filled green blood, you would need a lot of tweaks to how our bodies function to make this work. But it’s not literally impossible, like I thought in the theater! I’m quite sure the prop department didn’t do this level of research on the subject, but think about it!

I love biology! It’s! So! Weird!

And because I love biology, you’re not getting rid of me yet. My chosen field is genetics. This movie has presented me with a laughable sci-fi depiction of what we do.

So! What do we actually do, when we want to find out how related we are to another species?

I’m going to get into excruciating detail, so here’s the top-line summary: We extract the DNA, mash it up into readable little chunks, use some wicked cool machines to do the actual reading, and then we compare the target DNA with our DNA, and do some cooler stuff the movie isn’t aware of. A competent analysis would not only be able to tell you how much overlap two genomes have, but also be able to estimate how long the two species have been genetically distinct.

Is this way more than the movie needed for this plot point? Yes. But they didn’t actually have to do this at all, they could’ve just said the truth that science fiction usually ignores for budgetary reasons: “there’s no way these beings independently evolved to look so much like us, we have to be related.”

(Although even Star Trek, despite being the classic example of “putting a rubber thing on an actor’s forehead to make them an alien”, actually does acknowledge this. Precisely once. TNG s6e20, “The Chase”. It has never been mentioned again in the main line series, possibly because Rick Berman didn’t like it.)

Now. Time for me to take you all on a grand tour of DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. You are all getting into the Willy Wonka boat with me. You have no choice.

So! You have a sample you’ve taken from a non-human mammal, one that’s never been genetically analyzed before. You are very lucky. You get to do fun stuff.

But before you get to sequencing, you have to purify any DNA in the sample. Your sample is full of all sorts of other biochemical gunk, and when cells are happy, DNA is packed away in the nucleus–you need to crack those open to get at the DNA.

Next, you need to break the DNA into chunks, that’s #1 on the diagram above. For most of the past twenty years, this has meant chunking DNA down into pieces 25-50 letters long–just enough to probably get something unique over most of the genome, though you will have some areas that look identical at that tiny scale. In recent times, we’ve been getting better and better at what’s called “long read sequencing”, which at this point means fragments of several thousand DNA letters in length–though that’s still pretty short, compared to human chromosomes though: the average length of a human chromosome is 134 million letters long.

Depending on the sequencing technology and its needs, the sample may also need “amplification”: getting copied over and over using a protein originally harvested from hotspring-loving bacteria (#2). I always love that bit just as a concept: it’s one of many places where the modern study of genetics uses the microscopic, biological machinery of proteins for our own use!

After everything’s prepared, Then the sequencing itself can occur. That too is wild–the most common versions these days use tiny little fluorescent proteins to tag each letter of the DNA and read the sequence of lights (#3!). Some use infinitesimally tiny electrical modulations as DNA passes by a microscopic reader. There’s loads of different ways, anything works, so long as it can be read by a computer.

All this takes place in machines that are either small enough to fit on a countertop, or big enough to look like a fridge, and come in Apple White or Cheap Plastic Appliance.

Because you have a new species, you’re building what we call a reference genome. This tries to capture as much of the entire genome sequence as possible. Here’s an interesting wrinkle, though–A lot of samples won’t be just DNA from your target species! You might be picking up microbial DNA along the way as well. That can be really interesting and worth knowing about, though! Some people spend their whole careers studying the genomes of microbes found on people’s skin, or in their bodies. You’ll be computationally sorting out which sequences are in contiguous, mammalian chromosomes, which are from mitochondrial DNA (those cute little powerhouses have their own genomes!), and which come from microbes.

At the end of it, you have sequenced an entire genome. Because you want to find out how related it is to humans, you compare it to our reference genome–The human reference genomes we use is an assembly made from multiple individuals.* We use the reference genome as a common point of comparison that we refer to when studying genetic variation.

*Though if you’re working with data form the Genome Reference Consortium as is usually standard, one anonymous African-European donor, RP11, is still the backbone of the reference, accounting for 70% of the latest assembly.

(https://mk.bcgsc.ca/telomere-to-telomere-human-genome-assembly/posters.mhtml)

So, we’d compare this new mammalian genome to our own–how much overlap would we find? A lot. How you define our similarities and differences from other species can change the answer, but you’ll expect a lot of overlap. Some areas of the genome diverge faster than others, others are highly conserved–generally the more stable it is, the more important it is for our function.

Through many, many, many studies and corroboration with the archaeological record, we’ve worked out how to estimate how long ago two species diverged from each other. Actually, you’d rarely be comparing between just two species at this stage–get out all the other relevant reference genomes you’ve got! Compare them all! Build a phylogenetic tree–the modern version of that “tree of life” idea that Darwin popularized. Then you’ll have a more accurate sense of how your mystery species relates to everything.

(https://www.embl.org/news/science/a-new-tree-of-life-allows-a-closer-look-at-the-origin-of-species/)

I’m going to go off on a tangent to end this post, because that’s just the start, taking the entire genome of a single individual. This is what most people think is what we always do. But no! That’s expensive overkill for most experiments. Once you’re familiar with a species, and you’ve sequenced DNA from many individuals, you can identify areas where lots of them have sequence variants. These can be completely benign, differences that make us all unique, or make an individual more susceptible to disease. This allows us to target what we want out of DNA sequencing: Are we trying to diagnose an illness? Identify a person from a tissue sample? Or are we doing something more exploratory?

Depending on what you want, you select anywhere from a handful of locations, up to tens of thousands. The closest many people have gotten to this stuff is through ancestry services like 23andMe, which uses this kind of sequencing.

But that’s not all! There’s so many different targets to choose from, depending on what you want to do! So many techniques to get DNA in different ways! And we still haven’t gotten to the part that I actually work on.

I’m a computational geneticist. I get all the gigabytes of data that comes out of these experiments and I get to dig into the details, the patterns that emerge between genetic code and the details of the organisms we study, the connections between genome sequence and other, wilder things we can collect data on, the dizzying complexities of what goes on every microsecond of every day in every cell in your body.

I love my job.

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_YuTMDkWfI 2. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.116129 note: this source lists the image as credit to “J.M.B.”, which is not how I’m used to seeing images credited. Those are the initials of one of the authors, but I thought it meant “Journal of Molecular Biology”, so I went on a half hour wander around the internet trying to find where the hell this fish blood came from. 3. https://www.thebhs.org/publications/the-herpetological-journal/volume-13-number-4-october-2003/1729-01-hyperbiliverdinemia-in-the-shingleback-lizard-tiliqua-rugosa 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0264.2009.00952.x 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill#Characteristics 6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dune-part-two-costumes-jacqueline-west-interview 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29564.08327 8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357946568_New_approaches_and_concepts_to_study_complex_microbial_communities 9. https://karobben.github.io/2023/10/30/Bioinfor/PacBio/

Overflow Ramble 1

the fuckin “DNA MATCH” machine. I already wrote a 380-word alt-text about this thing last time. I’m not doing it again. I’m going to talk about things I like instead. Such as Dune: Part Two! Yes! I mentioned it last week and then didn’t ramble about it after seeing it. Well, NOW I WILL. tl;dr it’s good, go see it. I only vaguely remember the book, but I liked the changes they made to center the fact that no, Paul becoming Lisan al-Gaib is not actually a good thing.

Man, it’s nice to see a movie where the costumers and set designers got good time to work on their craft. (cite 6) Even the generic Harkonnen soldiers looked great–reminded me a lot of my beloved Warframe, probably because the costume designer was using H.R. Giger for inspiration there. Everything felt real. Even the stuff that definitely wasn’t–the gigantic spice harvesters and ships felt like living, physically present beings. The sand worms looked great. The movie did a fantastic job visually communicating the massive size of so many things. Especially because the camera remains restrained: no weightless zipping around, the camera itself follows paths and finds locations that make sense.

Chakobsa continues to be a fantastic conlang, now the work of both David and Jesse Peterson. It’s heard a lot more in this movie, and there are some great flourishes with it. While there isn’t as much Arabic vocabulary in it as in the original books, I remember from DJP’s work streams that he definitely was using the grammar of Arabic as one of his touchstones. Most key words remain Arabic though–jihad was removed, but it made me double-take in the theater when Stilgar referred to Paul as the Mahdi.

I’m of two minds about lowering the Arab influences on the Fremen–on the one hand, missing representation, which included some explicit ties to real world anti-imperial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. On the other, these first two movies are about how the Fremen are manipulated by a colonial power, using their adherence to a faith that was manipulated by a different colonial power. They become both hapless victims and also perpetrators of colonial violence, with only Chani seeing through it.

I think the general decisionmaking process on cultural changes was motivated by a desire to remove some of Frank Herbert’s bad ideas–particularly around the Harkonnens, thank fuck. That seems to have been the thinking around altering the Fremen a bit as well. Did it succeed? Not my place to say. On all other notes, I have no reservations recommending the movie. It’s a very earnest attempt to bring that world to life, and I think it succeeds.

Overflow Ramble 2

A figure showing the basic steps of the standard Illumina sequencing method (cite 7). It is broken into four sub-figures:

Library Preparation. The genome is snipped into small fragments, then adapters are attached (“ligated”) to stabilize the molecule and make it behave. This creates a “library” of DNA that will be read from.

DNA library bridge amplification. The adapters on DNA fragments stick to a prepared plate, which is covered in little clusters of molecules that specially attach to those adapters. Biochemical processes are then carried out in repeated cycles to duplicate (or “amplify”) those fragments in such a way that the clusters on the plate are all filled with copies of just one DNA fragment.

DNA library sequencing. The DNA is modified so that the four letters it’s made out of all glow a specific color, with each DNA letter shining in sequence. This is pure awesome and I love it.

Alignment and data analysis. Because of some details on how step 1 is done, you have lots of fragments that create an overlapping patchwork of sequences. This allows (most of) the genome to be pasted back together by looking for overlaps (“contiguous sequences”, or “contigs” for short).

Congratulations! You have just attended an abridged graduate-level introductory lecture on Illumina sequencing.

Overflow Ramble 3

A diagram of PacBio Systems’ sequencing technology, Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing, or SMRT Sequencing, because scientists love acronyms. Pretty much every step is different from how Illumina does it. I cannot find a diagram that’s both brief and also good at explaining what it’s showing, so this is the best I could find. It’s split into four parts with attendant text, which I’ll try and explain as well.

“SMRTbell template. Two hairpin adapters allow continuous circular sequencing.”

Library preparation basically involves taking a longer chunk of DNA and splitting it in half lengthwise, in such a way that the two strands of DNA will form a single-stranded loop. This is called a SMRTbell library. Why? I have no idea!

“ZMW wells. Sites where sequencing takes place.”

Then, these are fed into SMRT Cells, which contain zero-mode waveguides (ZMWs). I was once told what this means, and I have completely forgotten, but it sounds like something from Gundam.

“Modified polymerase. As a nucleotide is incorporated by the polymerase, a camera records the emitted light.”

What I do understand is that at the bottom of each of these little holes, they stick a molecule which the DNA sticks to. This molecule, a polymerase, has precisely one job: make more DNA, an exact copy of what it’s latched onto. So you give it this loop of DNA, feed it a soup of free DNA letters, and it starts cranking out a new strand.

“PacBio output. A camera records the changing colours from all ZMWs; each colour change corresponds to one base.”

Each one of the DNA letters given to the polymerase has a special modifier, on it which flashes a color when the polymerase slots it into the new strand it’s making. A camera picks up this flash. And, because the DNA is a circle, the polymerase doesn’t know where to stop–it just keeps going and going until something breaks or it runs out of letters to work with. This means that even if the camera misses a flash the first time, it will have more chances to see it, and confirm what it already saw.

Wait what in the fuck this figure was from somebody’s thesis (cite 8), but that wasn’t what actually got this into search results. What got it there was a github page with a vtuber avatar sitting in the corner?? What??? (cite 9)

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#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012)#I go rogue and refuse to talk about the movie #or rather I spend 4600 words talking about a quarter of a scene as a springboard to talk about my job and how cool it is #I kind of envy people who work on wild population genetics #but also their sample sizes are tiny and bad for my particular specialty #so I'm giving a broad overview on how reference genome assembly works and I've only ever done phylogenetics on intraspecific variants #yes this is how much I talk about bits of my job that aren't even directly my job #because working in genetics is SO COOL #tomorrow we'll be back to analyzing inexplicable characters and androids poisoning people don't worry

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companionjones · 2 years ago

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The Most Anxiety Inducing Experience of Your Life

Pairing: Pre-established!Beck Oliver x Fem!Anxious!Reader

Fandom: Victorious (Nickelodeon)

Summary: This is based off the episode “Tori the Zombie” where you take the place of Tori. Some things are changed. For example, you are in a relationship with Beck.

Warnings: Cursing

*******

“Baby, relax. It’s just an audition.” Beck tried to calm your nerves as the two of you sat in a line outside the Black Box theater.

His words did nothing to soothe you. “You’ve done a hundred of these, Beck. This is my first one, and I’m freaking out. Maybe I should just head home--” You moved to get to your feet.

Beck put a hand on your shoulder, preventing you from standing up. “No way. Babe, you’re the most talented person at this school. I’m not going to let you go a whole semester without doing one play. Plus, you need it for your grade.”

“This is not a play. This is a musical,” you corrected. “You have to sing and dance in musicals.”

He shrugged. “I don’t usually do musicals either, yet here I am. I’m a little nervous too, but I’m working through it.”

“You don’t need to be nervous. You have a wonderful singing voice, Beck. You should use it more often.”

“My point exactly, except reversed back onto you.” Beck took one of your hands in both of his and kissed the back of it. “You can do this, sweetheart. I know you can.”

***

When the cast list was posted about a week later, you nearly fell when you saw the results.

“Yes, I got Clive!” Robbie fist-pumped as he congratulated himself.

Rex then spoke up. “Yeah, you’re the villain in the play and you’re the villain in my life too.”

Robbie and Rex continued their bickering, and you heard the somehow fainter voice of your boyfriend right next to you. “Oh my god, we got the leads, baby! I am so proud of you!” He gathered you in his arms and kissed the side of your head.

“How the hell am I gonna do this?” You didn’t know if you had thought that inside your head or voiced it out loud.

***

A month later, you were well into rehearsals. Your director had just called to “Take five” because there was a problem with the lights.

“Whoa, guys. Everyone shut up a second.” Jade suddenly got the attention of the crowd. “I just got an email from Principal Eichner.” She read, “To all students involved in this years production of Uptown/Downtown, Sofia Michelle will be in Los Angeles the weekend of the 17th, and will be personally attending your opening performance.”

Sofia Michelle was the woman who wrote your musical. She was one of the biggest playwrights on Broadway.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Beck offered, lowering you to the lip of the stage.

“I think I need a paper bag,” you told your boyfriend.

“To breathe or throw up?”

“Jury’s still out.”

Beck had you lay on his shoulder as he tried his best to calm you down.

***

About a month after that, you were hanging out in Beck’s trailer, trying not to think of opening night of the show, which was the following night. Well, at least one of you was trying not to think about it.

“You know you’re gonna be great right?” Beck commented as the two of you laid in each other’s arms in his bed.

You took a big breath, and tried to think about things rationally. “Yeah, I know,” you finally answered. You raised one of Beck’s hands to your lips and kissed it. “As long as you’re there with me.”

Just then, your phone started ringing. You and Beck sat up in bed as you answered it.

“Hey, Cat--” was all you were able to get out.

“Oh my god, oh my god! I need your help! I took this I took this class for special effects makeup and I can’t figure out how to make people look like scary monsters so I just keep on making them cute and the models keep quitting on me! Please, if you don’t help me, I’m gonna fail this class!”

She was getting so loud that you had to hold your phone away from your ear, yet you and Beck could still hear Cat clearly.

“What do you need me to do?” you asked her.

“I NEED TO PRACTICE MONSTER MAKEUP ON YOU PLEASE!” Cat’s voice sounded even louder through the speaker on your phone.

You and Beck shared a look. Not seeing another option, and not wanting Cat to get any louder, you both nodded.

“Come over my place, Cat,” Beck offered.

“Thank you! Thank you so much!” Cat’s voice went back to regular volume before she hung up the phone.

***

“Hey guys! I got some pizza if you--JESUS!”

A couple hours later, Beck had stepped out to get some food. When he returned, he almost dropped the pizza he was holding.

You had been standing right by the door (maybe, probably, definitely) trying to scare your boyfriend, and succeeding. “What do you think?” you asked him, “Don’t I look hideous?”

Recovering from the scare you had just given him, Beck responded in a sweet boyfriend way, “You’re still beautiful to me.”

“Oh no! Really?!” Cat started to revel in failure again.

Beck tried to backtrack, but he didn’t want to hurt your feelings. “N-no, Cat! Y/n looks...uh...I think I walked into a trap, here.”

“I’ll get you out of it,” you joked to your boyfriend. “You did a great job, Cat. I look like a monster!”

“Yay!” she celebrated.

“Alright, you put this on, you took your pictures. Can you take this off now?”

“KK!” Cat smiled before readying her makeup station again.

Beck put down the pizza, then noticed something in Cat’s makeup stuff. “Cat, what is this?”

Cat didn’t spare it a second glance. “Oh, that’s glue!”

“I know that. Why is it with your makeup supplies?” His voice was becoming more and more concerned.

You decided to take a closer look at the kind of glue he was holding. Your stomach dropped. “Is that Grizzly Glue?!”

Beck was still asking Cat questions. “Where did you get this?”

“I ran out of makeup glue so I got that from my father’s tool box.”

You got mad. “Grizzly Glue is like industrial cement, Cat. It’s not supposed to come in contact with skin!”

“I’m sorry!”

You, Beck, and Cat spent the next hour trying to get the makeup off your face. When that didn’t work, you three spent the next hour after that on the phone with doctors and the Grizzly Glue company.

Beck got off the phone with the doctor first. “Okay, she said it’s not going to cause any damage to your face, just that we won’t be able to get it off.”

“I could’ve told you that,” you remarked sarcastically.

Cat got off the phone too, but she wasn’t relaying any of the information to you and Beck.

“Well?” you asked her.

“Oh, right!” Cat turned to you. “Apparently, they make a solvent. We have to drive to Bakersfield to get it.”

“Bakersfield?!” you and Beck yelled at the same time.

“Relax,” Cat calmed, “Trina owes me a favor. I got her out of a date like a week ago. After school tomorrow, I’ll get her to drive me there to get the solvent, I’ll bring it back, and everything will be good again!”

“Everything will be good again if you get that solvent on my face before the show starts tomorrow.”

“Omg that’s right you guys start your run tomorrow! How are you feeling?” aimlessly wondered Cat.

***

“DarlingAngelSugarLove,” Beck addressed you with every pet name he could think of in this time of desperation. “It’s going to be alright.”

“In what world is it going to be alright?!” you whisper-yelled backstage, “We are going on in two minutes, and I look like a zombie! Cat and Trina still aren’t here!” Your breathing started to get all out of wack. You could’ve sworn that you were going to pass out.

Suddenly, Beck kissed you.

You melted into the kiss, and it lasted long enough for your breathing to get back under control.

Beck broke the kiss. “I love you. You are the most amazing person I know. Now, you are going to go out there and rock this show no matter what you look like. Take a deep breath with me.”

You did as you were told. “Thank you so much for dealing with all my crazy.”

“We’re in show business,” he smiled, “Our lives are always going to be crazy.” He started walking away from you to get into places.

“And Beck?”

He turned back around.

“I love you, too.”

Your smiles matched each other as you stood on opposing sides of the stage.

***

So, you went through the show looking like a zombie. Well, most of the show. During the last number, you glanced backstage and saw Cat and Trina with the solvent.

André was in the band, and he was aware of your situation, as was everyone involved with the show, so you subtly signalled to him to stretch the song out. He nodded, and you all but ran offstage.

You made it back in time for the last chorus of the number, and you were so hyped on the adrenaline of the show and just barely making it on on time, that you kissed Beck during the final pose.

The curtain closed, and Beck picked you up and spun you around without breaking the kiss.

You two had to split up again for bows, and from the shadows, you saw Beck mouth, “I’m so proud of you.”

You were so happy that you kissed him again during your bows.

*******

Author’s Note: Thank you for reading! Fill up that heart and reblog if you liked it. I would also really appreciate a comment, if you have the time. If you would like to read more, check out my masterlist. Have a nice day, night, or whatever time it is for you! <3 <3 <3

#beck oliver #beck oliver x reader #victorious #victorious neckelodeon #avan jogia #companion jones #the most anxiety inducing experience of your life

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ilovescaredysquirrel2 · 9 months ago

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Was Qubo actually coming back?

So I heard a rumor that's been going around that The Qubo Channel, an American children's tv channel that ran from 2007-2021, was coming back in 2023 and this idiot fan did everything they could to make it seem real, videos and everything but it all turned out to be fake. They said that the company E Scripps announced it but they never did and this random person made an entire wiki page of it too. Qubo is officially never coming back, although I hope someone will have a solution or come up with a replacement kids channel. It's sad that kids have nothing that genuinely teaches them good lessons, besides Bluey. Don't get me wrong, I love Bluey, Bluey's awesome but it's like the only thing that kids can watch nowadays that's good for them. In my opinion, you need MORE THAN ONE SHOW! You don't have to have as many shows as I did growing up, but you can't only just have one show either.

I'll admit I was more of a tv kid, but I grew up in a small, dumpy town in Pennsylvania and I had no siblings or kids in the neighborhood to play with. I also never really had close friends at school who I got to hang out with outside of school, because school days lasted long and we were private people. When I got home, I'd most likely draw, watch tv, or take a nap. I did spend time outside but not in the autumn and winter as much because I hated cold, especially when I got older. I did watch a lot more tv than most kids did but it wasn't an unhealthy amount. I also wasn't really a Disney movie kid as much either. Disney channel? Yes, but I didn't really watch much of their animated movies growing up, especially not the older ones that everyone else grew up with. I had older parents and also was raised by my grandma, and no siblings so it's not like we had family movies nights like some families. Being an only child, I was basically the boss of the tv and my mom grew up playing outside and not much of a tv kid, so she just let me watch the kids shows that were playing on tv. Just to clear things up, I was born in November of 2002 and my mom gave birth to me when she was 42 years old, so a lot of stuff from her time wasn't really meant for kids. So yeah, I mostly just grew up watching tv channels. I was lucky enough to have Qubo, Sprout and the Nickelodeon and Disney channels. Lucky for me, I didn't watch much Cartoon Network, which in my opinion was kind of a good thing because a lot of stuff back then was inappropriate. Thank God I had more relaxing and... less unhinged shows to watch on channels like Sprout and Qubo. I know Qubo had its fair share of weird shows like Grossology and Being Ian, but most of the Qubo shows were good. In fact, some of my favorite shows ever came from Qubo!

Let's have a little talk about a well known Canadian show that was based off a book series, called "Scaredy Squirrel". If you were in Canada, you probably watched Scaredy Squirrel on YTV or Treehouse, but us Americans watched it on Cartoon Network, Disney X.D or Qubo. I was the kid who watched it on Qubo because I ignored the Cartoon Network channel growing up and I think around 2013 was when I started to hate Disney so... yeah. I became a fan of Scaredy Squirrel through Qubo and that show means so much to me. Another show that means a lot to me is called "Marvin the tap-dancing Horse" which originally aired on PBS kids for like 2 years, as part of a block called the "Bookworm bunch" which only lasted a short time and plus, I wasn't even born yet. I got introduced to Marvin the Tap-Dancing Horse through the Qubo Channel and I absolutely fell in love with it. Honestly, those are both very underrated shows and deserve an actual FANDOM rather than 3 fans. A few people I know have at least heard of Scaredy Squirrel barely anyone has heard of Marvin the dancing horse (and yes, Marvin is based off a book too). I highly recommend those shows, as well as many others!

Cable tv is kind of shutting down now anyway, and it's sad. All we have now is streaming services and a lot of them just don't have those nice kids shows that Qubo had. A lot of those shows were cute and not too overstimulating for the younger kids, and almost everything they have now is for older kids. Sprout became Universal Kids, which is more for older kids and they didn't need to do that. We need more things for little kids too. Also, as a 21 year old with trauma, I don't like rough adult shows like South park and Hazbin hotel, I want more calming shows like Scaredy Squirrel and Toddworld. (Also, I'll put a list of my favorite shows from Qubo in my last paragraph).

I hope one day I can make my own tv channel or streaming service to replace Qubo or Sprout, but nothing can really "replace" my favorite channels growing up. Also, if you want some relaxing kids shows from Qubo to watch, I'll give you some;

Scaredy Squirrel, Toddworld, Stella & Sam, Timothy goes to school, Marvin the Tap-Dancing Horse, Maggie & the Ferocious Beast, Harry & his Bucket of Dinosaurs, Miss Spider Sunny Patch, Babar, Veggietales, Gofrette, I Spy, My Friend Rabbit, Sandra the Fairytale Detective, Willa's Wild Life, Pecola, Turbo Dogs, Sidekick, and Stickin' Around (although there's a trigger warning).

Tell me what you think and if you agree! Are you too a Qubo or Sprout fan?

#qubo channel #qubo shows #qubo #sprout goodnight show #sprout channel #sprout #scaredy squirrel #toddworld #marvin the tap dancing horse #qubochannel #qubo fandom

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zvtara-was-never-canon · 5 months ago

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https://www.tumblr.com/xabura/752028677741608960/bryke-confirming-that-katara-loves-aang-like-a?source=share

What do you think of this? Apparently Bryke themselves said Katara loves Aang like a babysitter or brother. I don’t understand it? This is coming from the actual creators of the show even though I never got that vibe from Kataang despite what the ZKs say. Does that mean they were right?

If Bryke had said "Ozai is not abusive, he is just strict" it would not suddenly erase the canonical proof of abuse that is literally burned into Zuko's face. Yang can say he didn't write Zuko to be an abusive piece of shit in the comics, but I saw him literally throwing Azula in a place that, by Yang's own admission, only made her condition worse.

I saw Katara get jealous when other girls were paying attention to him as early as episode four of the first damn season, and then ten episodes later looking intrigued and even happy at the possibility that maybe they are fated to get married when they're older.

I've seen her blushing next to him like she did with Jet and Haru. I saw her doing a romantic dance with him. I saw her wanting to kiss him and then getting offended when he said he didn't want to kiss her.

If I saw a babysitter doing that to a child, I'd call the freaking cops. And if Katara had done any of that stuff with Sokka, Nickelodeon would not have let Avatar air (I'm still surprised the bedroom scene in The Awakening didn't get scrapped or at least severely altered).

And speaking of Sokka, I never saw Katara teasing Aang in a sisterly way like she did with Sokka, and with Zuko. I never saw Aang say that, when he thinks of "mother", he thinks "Katara" like Sokka does.

Instead I saw Aang and Katara hanging out, and him reminding her, IN THE FIRST EPISODE, that she was ALSO a kid. And then Katara immediately got attached to him because, in her own words, he had brought FUN back to the vilage.

(And before someone inevitably brings up her dressing up as his mom in "The Headband" - she also dressed up as Sokka's heavily pregnant wife. Read into it if you want, but be consistent. You can't cherry-pick one aspect of the scene and ignore the entire context).

They're children. They're peers. They're friends. Maybe Bryke wanted to add a "But she's also the mom/older sister/babysitter" aspect to it, but if that really is the case, then they fucking failed at it in an absurd way.

Like, if you want her to be "the babysitter" make her baby him, not treat him as an equal even when she's in the role of Sifu with him as the student.

Now, if Zutarians want to use this word of God moment as undeniable proof that Kataang is "weird", fine by me. I'll disagree because I actually DO like "weird" ships and Katang didn't interest me for the longest time exactly because it LACKED any weirdness, but whatever.

But if they expected that shut down differing opinions, once again, they gotta be consistent: Bryke also said that Zutara is toxic, would have no future, and that characters don't like each other like that.

If they want to have the right to disagree with them on that, they can't turn around and say "But you gotta take their word as law when it validates half my point!"

Either everyone is free to agree to disagree, even if they're disagreeing with the creators of the show, or no one is. Either everyone can engage in Death Of The Author when they genuinely think the intention doesn't match the text, or no one can.

If they wanna disagree with Bryke on the anti-zutara thing, but agree with them on the babysitter thing, fine. But they don't get to act all shocked when people do the reverse and pretend it's somehow hypocritical of us to do the same thing THEY are doing.

(Also it's very funny of zutarians to constantly cry "Male gaze" because "Oh, it's just young boy having a crush on an older girl" like they aren't CONSTANTLY using "What girl goes for the younger guy instead of the older one?" as an argument for their ship. Funny how fantasies and tropes are only bad when it's not THEIR fantasy or prefered trope)

#anti zutara #pro kataang #pro aang #bryke critical

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brains4ne · 4 months ago

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— new intro —

Name: Lawrence/lauren

Age: 18-

Gender: genderfluid (any pronouns but try to mainly use he/she

Sexuality: pansexual

Likes besides special interests: painting, listening to music, watching yt, etc etc

Dislikes/dni: racism, homophobia, Zionist people, dsmp fans, anti neo pronouns people who are really annoying about it, ableist people

Special interests: final destination, children of the corn, supernatural, saw, 500 days of summer, ruby sparks, tv girl, Tyler the creator, TONS OF NICHE ACTORS, a bunch of nickelodeon shows and she’s the man

Other info; I’m autistic and shut down very easily, I’m a very sensitive and jealous person, I vent on this blog often, and I reply quickly

Friends and stuff:

@confusedhomicidalrage @candles-space @shakespeareofficialaccount @xxang3l-trapxx @evrybdys-f00l @th3willingvictim0f4c5nnib4l

Uhm if I forgot you sorry I think

#updated intro post #yayyy #children of the corn #final destination #tv girl

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magnetic-dogz · 2 months ago

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The fact that The Modifyers was never picked up for a full show is so homophobic. The main character is literally lesbian flag colored and Nickelodeon was so scared of her dyke magical girl swag that they had to shut that shit down immediately

#cookie.txt

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marshallpupfan · 4 months ago

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Marshall Merchandise Update!

Got some interesting new additions for my collection to show off today! Eventually, I need to show everything off again... as soon as I get things organized again. I still have items I bought from early last year that I still haven't found a spot for yet. I've been slacking! lol

First off, this lapel pin... being graciously held up by Wolf O'Donnell. There's probably a "can't let you do that" joke in here somewhere, but I can't think of any right off hand. 😅

This was actually sent to me by a friend, who recently paid a visit to Nickelodeon Universe (an indoor theme park). While she was there, she seen this and got it for me, hoping it was something I didn't have. Fortunately, it wasn't! A fine item for my collection, indeed! She'll likely see this post later, so if you're reading this, thank you again!

Actually, I believe she also went a year or two ago and managed to find the Meet & Greet Marshall wandering around. She even got a picture & video with him, too. I was quite envious! 😄

Next, this "magic towel" thing. It's also being held up by another wolf - this time, it's Wolf Link, from "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess". Can you tell I'm a bit of a Nintendo gamer? lol

Anyhoo, I was just doing some shopping with my mother in a dollar store when I happened to stumble upon this. It was only $1.25, so... why not get it? The artwork isn't the best, but hey, I still like it.

Next, one of those "Good 2 Grow" snack containers! Actually, funny story about this one. I was at a gas station, not expecting to see anything pertaining to PAW Patrol, when I seen one of these that someone left at the front near the cashier. However...

It was actually one of Zuma, which surprised me, since they usually pass him up to focus on the main four. I meant to post about it on Twitter/X, but like usual, I forgot. In any case, I decided to track one down, and I soon found one of Marshall at Walmart. It was the last one, too! Unless I'm mistaken, they also had one of Liberty, so I guess they went beyond just the six original pups this time. Nice!

As you might recall, we've actually seen products like this before, about a year or two ago. Back then, it was just the pups in their regular outfits. This time, they went with a superhero theme, no doubt due to The Mighty Movie. I'm not sure why they went with Super Paws and not the Mighty Movie outfits, but maybe these were easier to mold. Who knows, but hey, I quite like it when older outfits get brought back, instead of them getting forgotten in the sands of time.

I just wish we could see THIS outfit again someday. It had a brief reappearance in that "Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay" video game, but that's it so far. Sadly, at this point, I doubt we'll ever see it again.

Er... guess I got a little distracted here, sorry!

Last, and absolutely not least, is this brand new item! Something I knew about for many months and couldn't wait to get a hold of one for myself! It's "Storytime with Marshall" by Leap Frog!

(In hindsight, taking these pictures in front of my monitor may not have been the best idea. Hopefully they're not too hard to see. 😅)

This thing is legitimately super awesome! They really got his likeness down so well here! I mean, seriously, just look at it! It's so cute! It's easily one of the best pieces of merch I've got in my collection now!

According to the box, it can do quite a lot. It includes 40+ stories, which I assume are based on various episodes (I haven't listened to them yet, but I also assume they focus on different pups, going by the buttons on the front... yeah, it's a shame there's no Rocky or Zuma again, I know). It has a sleep timer, to help lull the little ones to sleep at night before shutting off and all that. Additionally, it teaches "core learning skills" or something, whatever that means. That's cool and all, but of course, for me, I just wanted it because I absolutely love how it looks. It'll look great on one of my shelves! lol

I'll admit, I'm glad this came out before the new animation style got applied. While I like Marshall's updated season 11 look so far (I might make a separate post about that later), his original design is still my #1 favorite. A part of me hopes to keep collecting more merchandise of THIS Marshall, but I know that, by next year, they'll probably retire this design and start using the new one, permanently. Guess I'll enjoy it while it lasts. 😅

And that's all for now! I currently have another item coming in the mail; Marshall's new Rescue Wheels big wheel vehicle + figurine. It's been delayed, but it's supposed to show up at some point next week. Hopefully, the remaining Rescue Wheels merchandise will show up in stores soon enough, and I'll be able to show them all off soon. I might also have to buy a Boomer figurine, too. lol

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