#anaerobic love

[yuripoll]

CHAMPIONS BRACKET ROUND 1: B1

I Decided To Fake A Marriage [...] is a one volume romance about... a woman deciding to marry her junior to shut her parents up. Pietà is two volume drama about two troubled teens finding comfort in one another.

[kushanna]

Anaerobic Love | Musanso Renai

Naoko Kodama

[lilac-gold]

Do you ever think about how messed up it is that Rococo said he was surviving on "old TOAST and TOFU" while locked in the walls? Because TOAST is what the gang become if they're defeated/killed, and this could quite probably apply to other beings too. Do you think he could hear the prisoners dying around him? How old was that TOAST? Has he been eating the equivalent of literal corpses in this world? And we all know how much the sprout moles love TOFU, I wouldn't be surprised if he could hear them eating it while they patrolled. He has to stay alive, he has to eat, but he can hear people dying and being tortured and has no way out. He refuses to accept Sweetheart doesn't care about him, even if that means staying in the existence he's currently in.

,,,yeah, no, i don't either-

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[cybercity-sunrise]

Microbiology is such a beautiful field. I haven't always seen it that way. Microbes can be gross and working with them can be difficult. Being invisible to the naked eye, the beauty of microbes and their complex functions in the world are easy to overlook.

But y'all, microbes are the connective tissue of life on earth. They are everywhere. I work with anaerobes, which at first might seem more obscure than aerobic microbes considering the prevalence of oxygen on our planet. The reality is there is an anaerobic world within our aerobic one--the soil, our bodies, inside plants and animals, in the ocean. Many microbes that live in anaerobic soils are also found in the human gut. Microbes can make our crops more nutritious, our soils more fertile, our bodies more regulated.

Our gut microbiome is essential to our health. It isn't just this inert mass inside of us, rather it modulates immune responses, mood, digestion, inflammation, and more. We pass our microbiomes onto our babies. It's an incredibly intimate and dynamic relationship, with macroorganisms and microbiomes affecting each other in turn.

There's so much else I could say, but I'll cut myself off here. But please--even though biofilms are slimy and weird, even though nobody is thrilled when groceries go bad--give a little love to the organisms that can do virtually any metabolic process in virtually any environment and make up the foundation for all other life on our planet.

[maybeelse]

Dying on a hill is pathetic. What, you think that anyone's going to think better of you just because you're at a high altitude? Don't be silly.

The bog is right there. The bog loves you.

You think that the wind and rain will lovingly cradle your carcass as it sinks down into the anaerobic depths? No. The wind will whistle a tune through your empty ribs and then get distracted and wander off, and the rain is a two-timing bitch.

The hill will have a panic attack because of a passing storm and ruin your remains. Hills don't know how to apologize for landslides! The bog does, though, whenever it makes a mistake. It learned how to whisper into your ear from all its other corpses. It loves them too, just as much as you. It wants you to join them, down there in its lightless depths. Their bodies are tangled together in its eternal embrace. Yours could be too.

Don't die on a hill. Die in the bog.

[absurdumsid]

I need info on saejun an you obviously know him better than me, so can i have you favorite hcs, theories (how he joined the mtt), or interactions on him w/ the mtt :)

OF COURSE U CAN !! so sorry, it took me a bit to compile all of this from my older notes aaaa have a compensation doodle bc i took SOO long GHGHHHGH

anyway saejun nation pspspspss

saejun !! THE beloved if u will

he regularly speaks korean but learned english after meeting nightmare and killer

i love to think he's very very strong, he can beat the mtt in a fistfight kind of strong (not like he would, but he'd win)

he can cook decently but he'd choose his brother's cooking any day (even if pilsu is still um learning)

he also really likes spicy dishes !! he bonds over that with dust !

he'd forgive ppl who steal from the farm but he wouldn't forgive harming the crops

he HATES pesticides (i think this is canon actually) but also really hates strong smells in general

sleepy 24/7 he lays in the grass to photosynthesize (he just passes out, pilsu wakes him almost every time)

probably knows a lot of offhand herbology/biology trivia (he can explain the aerobic and anaerobic cycle by heart)

his general attitude toward the mtt/bad sanses is not to pry unless they're the ones who open up to him (even now he only rlly learns about their situations through nightmare who doesn't talk that much about it anyway)

he accepts mtt with open arms and its that accepting (almost forgiving) nature that makes them so super attached to him !!

for me, it's the concept of meeting a version of yourself that lives the most peaceful life and being happy for him, but ALSO not being shunned by that alternate version for being violent and hurting the people that you both love

as for how saejun met mtt, my general interpretation of it is that nightmare struck a deal with saejun for food supplies in exchange for manual labour (so mtt and nightmare help a lot with the harvests! the only ones who really know about it is pilsu, saejun, anseung, and suggu)

killer // 고통씨 (Mr. Misery/Grief)

saejun meets killer first and was the only one helping around the farm

i don't think saejun would be the type to pry into their pasts so he doesn't question killer about himself or anything

killer is the one who opens up to him one stormy night after a stage 3 episode where he holed himself up in the shed and saejun found him cold, shaking, and curled up embracing himself

he calms killer down and tells nightmare abt it and that's how he finds out about killer's past (he doesn't bring it up, but he's always there to help killer after his panic attacks)

he likes to do the chores with killer most of the time just in case he has a run in with chorongi or suggu (the kids are very silly and tend to mess with him and he doesn't know how killer is with children)

they photosynthesize together and sometimes nightmare just comes to get killer in the evening and finds them in the grass

horror // 취급주의 (Handle with Care) or 주주씨 (Mr. Vermillion)

he meets horror second (after he gets kidnapped by nightmare) and saejun isn't really scared of him because he figured that he probably has some hidden issues like killer

saejun thought horror was really fragile at first (because he was very thin and had a skull injury) so he actually had him do mostly little chores like going to the market or gathering eggs from the chickens

after a few months killer doesn't come in (was sent to a mission somewhere else) and saejun needs someone to handle the heavy hay bales (<- he could've done it himself but hes lazy) and horror just kinda Does It and surprises saejun

he starts to depend on horror more and actually admits that he was underestimating him out of concern for his wellbeing and horror says its ok because he was also underestimating saejun (until he saw him carry killer AND a bunch of crops home that one time)

they start to cook together and do the heavier chores (while making silly jokes abt killer) together

horror starts to learn korean by talking with dorihye, saejun, and pilsu as well as asking nightmare for some reading material ! (after finding out that dust also speaks korean, he starts practicing conversation with him !)

dust // 유골씨 (Mr. Ashes)

saejun's meeting with dust was noooot planned at all, nightmare just kinda forced mtt into a portal to farmtale during one of errors visits

horror mostly stayed with dust at first who was just dead silent and stayed in one spot (saejun asked if he wanted any drinks and it took ten excruciating seconds before horror had to answer water for him)

its not until pilsu comes into the house and greets killer and horror and makes a remark about a new brother that he starts to actually talk

dust doesn't exactly warm up to pilsu and more like forces himself to because pilsu starts to ask him what his favourite pasttimes are, his favourite food, if he wants any snacks, etc (killer and horror went through the same thing)

dust eventually gets carried off to the kitchen to cook with pilsu and that's how pilsu finds out dust speaks fluent korean even though they have different dialects

saejun goes into the kitchen and has a little talk with dust (where he learns they both speak korean !! and that that's why dust wasn't speaking that much !) and they bond over pilsu's silliness (dust talks about how his papyrus also loved to cook etc etc, saejun notices that its in past tense but doesn't dig any deeper)

dust eventually starts to visit farmtale with horror frequently to exchange makguksu and ramyeon recipes with pilsu !!

dust is also relatively close with dorihye, anseung, and suggu who tend to remark that "the other saejuns dont really talk much" to which horror always chuckles

that's all (for now) !! TYSM FOR ASKING ABT MY BLORBOS BGHGHRGRHG

[basiliomagnus]

Fun game: Every pairing of party members, come up with a minor headcanon about a shared interest or a quirk of their relationship (platonic or romantic, don't matter). Here's the full list: Strohl/Hulkenberg Strohl/Heismay Strohl/Junah Strohl/Eupha Strohl/Basilio Hulkenberg/Heismay Hulkenberg/Junah Hulkenberg/Eupha Hulkenberg/Basilio Heismay/Junah Heismay/Eupha Heismay/Basilio Junah/Eupha Junah/Basilio Eupha/Basilio

long under cut

Strohl/Hulkenberg: Both of them are gym rats. Big into trading training tips and exercise routines. Hulkenberg gives him roussainte methods (high intensity anaerobic workouts), Strohl spots her while she's working on her upper body strength and makes sure she doesn't overexert herself. Strohl/Heismay: They generally are the ones who take care of the chores first. It's a common occurrence for them to be the first ones back on the runner in the evening, washing clothes, cleaning, or making dinner. Strohl/Junah: Strohl often relies on Junah when it comes to understanding art, he's kind of a philistine. As such Junah makes him listen to different kinds of music, drags him to see operas and plays, gives him book recommendations, and so on. Strohl/Eupha: Strohl guides Eupha through learning how to make small talk with people and how to approach unfamiliar parts of Euchronia. He's been around the block more than a few times and understands she's currently a fish out of water like he once was. Strohl/Basilio: Strohl and Basilio often cook together, with Strohl going out of his way to try and make recipes that are sweet enough to stimulate Basilio's muted sense of taste. Basilio's asked Strohl to teach him old recipes from Halia's provence in exchange. Hulkenberg/Heismay: They're big into tabletop. It's a common sight to see them hunched over the board in the dining room and narrating what's happening in their game with overexaggerated gestures and voices. Hulkenberg/Junah: Hulkenberg loves to brush her fingers through Junah's hair while she lays her head in her lap, Junah likes to gently pull Hulkenberg's ears when she needs her attention. Hulkenberg/Eupha: Hulkenberg is always the first to jump to Eupha's defense when someone performs a faux pas in front of her or acts abrasive for no good reason. Eupha looks up to her. Hulkenberg/Basilio: They're big foodies, so they often hit up the restaurants in any town they visit. Basilio likes giving critiques on how the chefs can improve, Hulkenberg likes pointing out the positives and complimenting the methods. Heismay/Junah: The topic of eye care comes up often between the two of them, as well as finding clothes for small sizes. In the event Junah loses control of her glamour Heismay is usually the first to offer her one of his cloaks to keep herself hidden. Heismay/Eupha: Eupha thinks Heismay's grandpa-isms are so cool. She's tried his method of doing laundry a few times and always intently listens to his stories from when he was a knight. Heismay/Basilio: Both of them can usually be found fishing on the deck or at nearby lakes and rivers, making small talk about local fauna and bait choices. Heismay usually knows to hold his tongue here, and they ultimately enjoy each others' company. Junah/Eupha: Junah is usually the first shoulder Eupha feels comfortable crying on when she feels hurt or homesick. Junah is good at providing empathy to those in need and she understands how Eupha feels being away from family for so long. Junah/Basilio: Mourning comes easy to both of them. It's better to be alone together. Eupha/Basilio: Eupha helps Basilio put up his small side-braids to keep his hair out of his face. In turn, Basilio generally stitches up her cloak and hoodie when they get ripped or tattered.

[the-starry-lycan]

Sea of Stars Drinking Headcanons

Zale: A wild, boisterous drunk. He gets crazy when he’s had a lot of alcohol and loves to get in trouble. Enjoys drinking games and all kinds of alcohol. Has burned his own eyebrows off trying to light a sunball on fire by pouring whiskey on it.

Valere: …Not as crazy as Zale, but oh, she encourages him when she’s also drunk. Tends to be more reserved when drinking, but can handle her alcohol better than her partner. Has gotten stuck on a roof trying to howl at the moon and become a “Lunar Were-Monk.”

Garl: He has a high tolerance for alcohol, and can drink quite a bit before he gets tipsy. Finds alcohol to be a culinary addition and much prefers to drink alongside a meal for the best experience. Turns into a happy, cuddly drunk and needs to be walked home.

Teaks: A playful, cheery drunk who gets a little over-the-top when she’s had a lot to drink — but this is rare, as she doesn’t drink alcohol often. Prefers the fancy, fruity cocktails. Sometimes spills a few too many details in stories when drunk, and doesn’t remember it when she’s sobered again.

Seraï: A reserved, more contemplative drunk. Alcohol passes very quickly through her system, so while she gets drunk fast, she sobers up really fast. Tends to become more emotional when she drinks, and because she’s less inhibited, lets out all the pent-up feelings.

Resh'an: His tolerance for alcohol as a human was pretty good, and he used to (still does!) love making all kinds of drinks, as an alchemist. Truly a connoisseur; if you can imagine it, he’s drank it. He’s a flamboyant man, apparent when he’s drunk, and loves to show off and give people Eagle Rides.

Aephorul: As a human, his tolerance for alcohol was nil. Just one or two drinks would have him all tipsy, and Resh would have to carry him home. He doesn’t drink now, though. Why drink, when he could respire anaerobically, and with flesh alchemy ferment the stuff in his own muscles? Resh’an hates this, by the way. Super gross! Or… is it? Hard to know unless you try some!

B'st: Can’t really have alcohol in the traditional sense, but Resh’an found a way to “inject” it into B’st system for a bit. Needless to say, that was a very crazy time. B’st happens to enjoy letting others do body shots off of himself, as well as performing his own glass tricks, laughing and singing when he’s tipsy.. though he feels wistful he can’t experience it in his native body.

The Pirates: All of them love a good drink from time to time, be it sharing some ale or making fancier ones for big occasions. They aren’t fussy and will partake in whatever they get! Yolande is the most troublesome of the trio when she’s had some, and gets into the most shenanigans (she has the dynamite..), probably brews her own equivalent of Moonshine. Valtraid is a very lightweight drunk and it doesn’t take long for him to get tipsy at all, so he sometimes refrains and keeps an eye on the others. Keenathan is a hugger, and gets super lovey with Seraï, often clinging onto her or (to her dismay) sitting in her lap, loudly proclaiming his love for her.

[cognitivejustice]

Kieran, a longtime mechanical engineer, had just invented Ireland’s first micro-scale anaerobic biodigester.

What does one even do with a micro-scale anaerobic biodigester?

Well, this particular anaerobic biodigester takes care of nearly 100% of your food waste.

You feed in all your scraps and waste – even hard-to-compost foods like cooked meats, dairy, cakes and liquids go in. Then the anaerobic bacteria get to work breaking down the waste.

After that, out come two very different ready-to-use products: a biogas for cooking and a nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser for gardening.

Food waste goes in. Gas and fertiliser come out.

‘We were never really into gardening or growing food. That was the biggest thing to change with the digester,’ Kieran says.

‘During lockdown, we set up the polytunnel and started using the fertiliser from the egg to grow tomatoes and courgettes. Because not only have you got a way to get rid of your food waste, you’ve also got a way to grow more food. And the taste was extraordinary. We had loads of tomatoes so we gave them to friends. They couldn’t get over how tasty they were compared to what they were buying from shops.’

Fiona and Kieran have only seen positives come out of using the egg. They love cooking with the biogas they produce themselves, and having no bill for fertiliser.

[master-john-uk]

Although I grew up in rural area, I am not a farmer... although I am getting better at it.

In 2007 I agreed to buy a rundown mainly arable farm in Dorset. In 2018, I purchased the neighbouring, loss-making dairy farm. I did not buy either as a business investment, or as a way of avoiding paying tax. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I acquired both farms for all the wrong reasons. (My business and financial advisors held their heads in despair!)

Both farms were bought to stop them being purchased by property speculation companies, or large organisations that might exploit and underpay their farm workers. In addition, one of the main reasons I bought the dairy was that my mother loved cows... and she had recently passed away.

I have spent a fortune on renovating both farms. Animal welfare is important, as is making our operations more environmentally friendly. After installing solar panels and an anaerobic digestor, we are now almost self-sufficient for electricity, which now means both farms are now returning a small operating profit.

If I sold both farms today, it is unlikely that I would recoup my capital investment on improvements, and renovation work. If I keep both farms for another hundred years I might be rolling in money!!!

When I bought the dairy farm in 2018, I had several ideas on how to generate income from the underutilised land. Now that Plush Manor has closed as a wedding venue... I will investigate these further in 2025.

[academicfever]

26/100 days of productivity!

Lovely day huh?

Hope u are having a wonderful time where ur heart is at peace!

Today I’ve a lot to do but first thing first let’s start with some wellness checks

notes to self:

• Stop hating yourself for your thoughts.

• Stop setting special rules for yourself.

• Quit acting like you don’t know your story.

• Don’t judge yourself without proper context.

• Quit making ridiculous comparisons with other people.

• You can’t be top at every domain of life

Heal Relationship with yourself:

• Stop treating yourself as a burden.

• Don’t withhold praise (humility ≠ degrading).

• Break the cycle of self-criticism.

• Don’t be abusive with yourself.

• Acknowledge your wins: Motivation.

• Take your feelings seriously.

• Validate your trauma, tough times.

• Be the best friend you wish you had.

Now let’s get to the to-dos of today;

Mental health Checkin

Innovation competition prep

Simulink_ practice

Ansys wb_practice

E-mobility_ analysis_ 3.1,3.2…

Journaling

Read for pleasure

Catch up with family

Eat as much as u want_ (recovering Anaerobic)

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Guys I might need to change my research proposal… I’m so lost 😞

Im freaking out about this…

[dailycharacteroption]

Mummy (Pathfinder Second Edition Archetype)

(art by Uriak on DeviantArt)

And it’s time for another archetype from Book of the Dead that lets you play an undead character! This time it’s a pretty interesting one in that we’re looking at: mummies!

Mummies have been in RPGs since the beginning, but their presence as undead creatures is actually relatively recent compared to the age of the culture they come from. That’s right, there are straight up no stories of mummies rising from their grave to torment the living in Ancient Egypt, presumably because a mummy, by necessity, was one that had undergone all the proper rites of death and therefore didn’t have any reason for stories of them rising and complaining about it.

Heck, even The Curse of the Pharaohs, the idea that those that dare disturb the tombs of kings would be cursed with a painful death is fairly recent, with the closest thing we actually have from the various dynasties and periods of the nation being warnings to not disturb or desecrate the tombs and sarcophagi of a pharaoh lest they lose the favor of the gods, but those are more akin to having the awareness to realize that your successor is probably gonna deface any statue of you they can find and strike your name from all records they can get ahold of, because that happened a lot.

The actual undead mummy is actually a creation of foreign writers, going as far back as the 1840s with Gautier’s The Mummy’s Foot, and 60 years later with Bram Stoker’s (yes, that Bram Stoker) The Jewel of the Seven Stars, along with others in that period like Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on.

Curiously, most of these undead mummies were not monsters per se, having no hostile intentions towards mortals, but rather, were often love interests for the protagonists, which smacks of elements of the exotification and sexualization of the East, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, if there’s any online community that can emphasize with the idea of dating an immortal being from a bygone era, it’s tumblr. This focus on desire also explains why even more horror-focused mummy fiction often gives the mummies ways to “rehydrate”, regenerating themselves into a fleshy, lifelike form, if only temporarily and usually at the expense of some poor sap, cursed or otherwise.

Mummies as horror monsters didn’t really start until the 1930’s with Boris Karloff in the Universal Studios The Mummy movie, and even that retains the notion of the mummy regaining a semblance of life, since he only spends one scene of the movie as a shambling corpse and the rest as an offputting older gentleman who politely insists not to be touched.

Beyond that, mummies in fiction have ranged from being similar undead sorcerers to being particularly dusty zombies that may or may not have a would-be necromancer commanding them, and their appearance in tabletop games has similarly varied.

In Pathfinder, the generally accepted paradigm is that mummies range in power from the basic variety, which were typically mere servants or mummified accidentally by extreme outdoor conditions such as bogs, deserts, or extreme altitudes, whereas greater mummies (represented by the Osirian Mummy and Mummified creature templates in First Edition) were a step above, retaining their skills and sense of self. Meanwhile, at the pinnacle were mummy lords, created from the bodies and souls of the most powerful and magically-skilled pharaohs.

However, a detail that was brought into focus with Second Edition was that mummies, no matter what culture they belong to or where they are found, are undead tied to the land, which makes sense due to the way that every mummification process involves at least some level of environmental process, from being soaked in anaerobic bog water/peat to being desiccated by the sun or natron salts, and so on. That connection is what gives many mummies their strange powers over the environments they hail from (like conjuring sandstorms or turning into clouds of sand and the like). Of course, that connection also subtly taints the natural world around them wherever they go, given their status as undead beings.

While it is possible to play a character who underwent the ritual to become a mummy in recent times (either just after death or more horrifyingly while still alive), the nature of this archetype lends itself better to playing a time-displaced undead character who only just woke up from their eternal rest. Whether you’re a millenia-old citizen of a now-defunct desert kingdom or some poor explorer that died in a bog and only clawed their way out a century later when someone accidentally stepped on their head while wading through the muck, there’s a lot of potential there.

So let’s take a look, shall we?

Like all undead archetypes and certain other spellcasting ones, you can technically take this archetype at first level, but must obviously take the dedication as your 2nd level feat. In this case, the dedication provides the basic undead benefits, as well as increased physical durability at the cost of fire vulnerability. Additionally, their unarmed strike becomes stronger as they pull water from their targets on contact. Meanwhile, they also establish a bond with an extreme terrain predominant to the region they were mummified within, which determines the aesthetics of later abilities as well as what terrain certain other abilities function with.

Case in point, most are able to stride through difficult terrain in their bonded environment with ease, as well as see through concealment within it as well, be it the snowstorms of the arctic or mountains, the sand of deserts, or the fogs of the marsh.

Whether it be from their strikes or from another ability, they can use the moisture drawn from other creatures to trigger a transformation, regaining a semblance of life and vitality for a short time.

Many also develop the greater benefits of undeath, as well as resistance to actively harmful aspects of their bonded terrain as well.

Whether they were mummified alive or merely endured the traumas of their soul being bound to their corpse, the process of becoming an undead mummy is filled with anguish, which they can then weaponize in one of their more infamous abilities as an aura of despair. While not yet potent enough to paralyze with fear, it can send foes fleeing.

While this archetype can’t grant true mummy rot, they can inflict a withering necromantic affliction on foes when they get a particularly lucky blow on foes, consuming their vitality and body while it lasts.

Some of these mummies can call upon atmospheric phenomena from their bonded region to summon concealing storms of mist, sand, and the like, making their presence obvious but their exact position impossible to determine, making for a useful defense.

Those of a warrior disposition often learn to channel their lesser curse through weapons rather than their limbs.

While otherwise ordinary cloth, many mummies can infuse some of their malevolence into their wrappings to briefly animate them, following up a strike to entrap foes with them.

Taking their bond with the terrain further, some learn to actually become the terrain, turning into flying clouds of an appropriate substrate such as mist, snow, sand, bog water, and the like.

In a horrific display of their mastery of moisture and life force, powerful mummies can suck both right out of foes in a wide conical area with a horrid inhalation, harming them and healing themselves.

Finally, some refine their despair aura so they can do so more often, and those that are especially affected are outright paralyzed with fear for a few critical moments.

The mummy archetype does a good job of emulating the powers most commonly associated with undead mummies in a balanced way, and can certainly be fun for any sort of character without requiring you to invest super heavily into it. If the game takes place in a lot of set pieces covering their favored terrain, it can be quite powerful if you spec for that, or you can just focus on being an especially tanky undead melee character. Certainly the despair ability is useful for every character, and being able to enshroud oneself or turn into clouds of particulate is useful for close and ranged characters alike. As such, there is no one specific build for this archetype, but you can choose to add it’s benefits to whatever build you’re going for.

Like I said before, it is entirely possible to play a truly ancient undead with this archetype, which opens up some interesting roleplaying opportunities. Obviously culture clash between your original culture and those that exist in the modern era is one, but also consider the knowledge that you bring with you from your old life. After all, undead mummies have included royalty, high priests, mages, and more in fiction, so their perspective can be interesting.

His hairs all fallen out long ago and his husk as dry as an old waybread wafer, Nshantu the Ensnared is the oldest storyteller among the anandi, though that’s hardly an impressive boast since he ventured high into the mountains to become a mummy. Still, the silk-bound arachnid boasts the deepest pool of knowledge in the region, which he will share with those who offer him information in exchange.

In their quest to  defeat the risen pharaoh that has kidnapped their patron, whom he believes is a reincarnation of his lover, the party finds a lead in references to one of his old servants, a jaathoom, or djinn genie who still dwells on the material plane.

Ever since the party made it through Blackwater Bog, something has been following them. They sometimes sense something on the edge of the firelight that vanishes when they try to find it, and just yesterday the woman they’ve been escorting found a muddy handprint on her bag. But is this stalker foe, or friend?

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Hello!

just thought I’d pop in and ask how’s it going? Are you eating/drinking/breathing/homeostasising?

And in the topic of homeostasis, I have learned the biology. Where is my degree? I don’t want to do another year of community college; one should be enough (translation, I have a biology thing tomorrow that I didn’t study for so I’m just going to add this for my ever disintegrating memory)

Without oxygen the body goes into anaerobic respiration (c6h12o6 -> 2c3h6o3 + 2ATP) which produces less atp than aerobic respiration (c6h12o6 + 6o2 = 6c02 + 6h20 + 38ATP) and less atp means less energy means cells won’t have enough energy to retain homeostasis and then they perish

Enzymes need a specific PH and temperature to work right. If a cell is too hot then the enzyme denatures so the active site (the place where it takes the stuff it needs to break down or smth like that) gets damaged so it can’t, so it can’t break it down which means the cell can’t utilize the energy (EX: having to break down a polysaccharide and it can’t) therefore it will not have the material to go through cellular respiration and therefore not get energy and therefore not retain homeostasis and therefore perish.

Osmosis. It’s why you can die from drinking too much water. Water will go into cells because they have more solute in them, and the internal (cell) and external (water) environment will want to reach equilibrium. So more water will enter causing the cell to swell and burst and therefore it can’t retain homeostasis because my is broken so it will perish.

I am so sorry for putting this in ignore that-How are you?

Hello! :) I’m sort of homeostasising, my cells are probably screaming for some more water and my neurons are definitely on strike over lack of REM cycles. But there is a puppy sleeping on my legs so that makes me happy ☺️

Ahhh BIOLOGY :D That was my major in college, I love bio! Let’s add medicine to it!

When this anaerobic metabolism kicks in your body is flooded with lactic acid as the byproduct, decreasing your pH. We can detect the change in acidity and an increased lactate and it can help us determine lots of diagnostic factors in conjunction with context clues. For example, on my unit we get patients directly from open heart surgery, and their lactic is often elevated because they’re so dry from bleeding and insensible fluid loss that their body is struggling to get oxygen delivered everywhere because the fluid that helps carry it is low. Another cause could be simply that the patient’s red blood cells, the oxygen carrying critters themselves, aren’t as multiple as they should be because the patient bled them out.

pH changes in the body, because of what you explained, can absolutely destroy and derail everything. We have a test called an arterial blood gas where we look specifically at pH and its contributing factors (like lactic acid buildup or carbon dioxide buildup) to ensure the body stays within its strict range of operation, which is 7.35-7.45. You can be acidotic (pH < 7.35) or alkalotic (pH > 7.45). Causes roughly break down to being metabolic in nature (like too much lactic acid) or respiratory in nature (carbon dioxide levels in the body), so you’ll hear the terms “respiratory acidosis” or “metabolic alkalosis” thrown around!

Osmosis is a beautiful thing. Too much water can burst cells, yes, though that usually takes an insane amount of intake for a healthy person. Another thing fluids in the body do is called third spacing, where water just seeps into the space around cells as well because of osmosis. You can have someone who has too much fluid in their body but you can’t get them to pee it out because it isn’t in their vasculature to get to the kidneys, it’s third spacing and making them look puffy instead. So your blood has this great protein in it called albumin, it’s a colloid that attracts fluid and often binds with many compounds to help transport them through the body. If you give someone albumin through an IV, it can often suck fluid out of the third space and back into the blood vessels!

HA you’re apologizing about talking biology to me, a complete nerd? I hope you see how silly that is now 😂

I’m doing well, just really freaking tired. It’s probably gonna make me miserable tomorrow lol. How about you?

[novemberthecatadmirer]

My dumb ooc headcanon about Ainur is at some moment when Arda was still unmarred and they just started constructing the world and Melkor hadn’t left them there must be some HUGE debates

The topics of the debates:

Should Arda be symmetrical (I think Mairon was actually in the symmetrical group. Do you think maybe his “eye” symbol was actually inspired by the map of Arda Unmarred?)

Should there be multiple continents instead of one and how about we make the land move from time to time (Suggested by an overenthusiastic Aule, who ironically got his wish granted when Arda was marred)

Should we get multiple seas and maybe a thousand more islands and some exciting whirlpools and beautiful square waves? (Petitioned by multiple Ulmo’s Maiar. Again, wish granted in Arda Marred.)

How many volcanos are too many volcanos and how often are they allowed to explode. (Those Maiar that later turned Balrogs were very active in the debate and were disappointed with the result)

Highest speed limit for winds and should we have tornados and how to plan their regular path.

Ice! We need some place for some nice ice!!

Extreme weather is actually nice and adds diversity to the plate

“Maybe we can have this portion of time very hot and another portion of time very cold and a portion of time in the middle. Create a rotation schedule to make everyone happy.” (Multiple groups were NOT happy about the suggestion for different reasons)

Anaerobic or Aerobic? (Some of Yavanna’s Maiar created photosynthesizing bacterium as an experiment, and accidentally caused the Oxygen Catastrophe, the first and only mass extinction not caused by Melkor.)

Lifespan of animals and plants and how fast and how many they reproduce. (Huge never-ending debate among Yavanna’s Maiar.)

Should we live together with the Children when they come? Do we share everything with them?

How much distance do we keep with the Children?

Do we deserve a place for our own? We are building all this world for them surely we deserve a piece of land for ourselves?

Should we keep a piece of land Children-free to conserve all the plants and beasts (Yavanna and her Maiar zealously supported the idea)

What does “Ruling the World” actually mean (Manwe and Melkor had drastically different interpretation of the concept and there were Valar and Ainur picking sides. Nienna & Namo: We are going to clean up your mess and somehow we suspect it won’t be easy.)

My headcanon is a lot of Maiar left with Melkor due to being unsatisfied with one or more results of these debates.

When they broke the world they genuinely believed they were doing the Right thing Eru always intended. It was the other ones that loved the work created by their hands too much and refused to change.

Melkor revealed his full interpretation of “king of the world” much later, and for many Maiar rebelled and fled with him it was a horrible moment. They got to learn what the sheer power differential between Valar and Maiar really meant. 

(My headcanon was most of the Maiar that used to serve Melkor and repented later refused to be directly associated with any Vala ever again.)

[dreadfutures]

I love all the bridges across the bay... But San Mateo and Dumbarton have a special place in my heart. The salt flats. The industry. The birds swooping near you. The shallows and ten shifting colors of the Bay through its seasons. The salt ponds and their anaerobic bacteria in crimson bloom.

I have dreams about them, the bridges: the low railings, the way the bridge rises up over the water, then dips low to sea level for long, long stretches. I dream of dark shapes near the surface, swimming alongside the racing cars.

I dream about them in the dead of night. Of walking across a bridge with no traffic at all, like walking across the surface of the water itself.

No one loves these bridges like I do.