#and you don't know how or why a combination of frequencies can do this

[abandoned-as-mustard]

why don't we talk about miscarriages more? i'm not convinced it's something that anyone really gets over. it's the mourning of a literal person without any of the closure. the baby wasn't even mine, but i still think about them every day and how cool it would fucking be to just have a new person around by now.

[olderthannetfic]

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could easily determine which ships had the most works updated in 2023.

It turned out to be fairly easy, though a little time consuming. I think these results should be reasonably accurate.

Some points to note:

I did this on my own account, and I have like 2 people muted. So I am capturing the effects of archive-locked works, but my numbers might be off by one or two works due to muting.

Works updated in 2023 is a number that constantly changes as works are deleted or updated again in 2024.

I didn't scrape the entire archive or anything like that, so it's possible I missed a ship that would bump one of these down below 100. I'd take the last few at the bottom there with a grain of salt. But I think we can be reasonably sure the top ones are accurate and that the kinds of numbers that we see at the bottom there (eighteen hundred plus works updated in 2023) are about where the cutoff will be even if we find a ship I missed.

--

As for how I did this, I went to the category tags and the rating tags, filtered for updating in 2023, then excluded ships in the sidebar till I got to 130-150 ships excluded. I also grabbed ships that are big in general from tag search, which you can use to find all relationship canonicals, ordered by frequency.

I combined those lists of ships, cleaned off the works numbers, and generated a list without duplicates. That got me three hundred and something (yes, they were mostly duplicates). I generated the relevant AO3 URLs, opened them in batches with Open Multiple URLs, and copied the works totals into a spreadsheet. Not as tidy as using a script but honestly pretty easy if you know a few spreadsheet formulas to clean up data.

The key here is that if you're only going for pretty good and not accurate beyond a shadow of a doubt, all you need to do is generate a list of likely ships, then check them.

It's possible that there's some much-updated ship that is so evenly spread across these various other tags that it just missed showing up in the sidebar. Hopefully, grabbing more than just the top 100 avoided this problem.

This method also doesn't take into account backdated works. If a whole archive was imported in 2023 but all backdated, there could be some ship that didn't have new works but where AO3 users experience in 2023 was of an influx of content.

I also did this just now, in late March/early April, so some 2023 works have inevitably been deleted or updated again. So the exact work counts don't represent the experience of using AO3 throughout 2023. A fandom active in early 2023 might not have much updating in early 2024, while a fandom active in late 2023 would. This could demote the latter a few places in the rankings since I didn't grab numbers on January 1st.

Even if a person scraped AO3 every day or was monkeying around in the databases, you also have to ask what conceptual answer you're after. Is it works a user could have read at some point during 2023, whether they were deleted by the year's end or not? Is it new-to-AO3 works or only newly-created ones, not including imported archives? Does it matter if the works are fic? If they're in English? What about accidental double-uploads or translations of a single work?

I hope this makes it clear why a definitive ranking is not actually possible.

However, despite these drawbacks, I am confident that the rankings above accurately represent the broad trends on AO3 in 2023. Just don't get too fixated on whether a ship should be at number 73 or number 74.

And, of course, I excluded these from the top 100:

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s) - 20,026

Minor or Background Relationship(s) - 16,187

No Romantic Relationship(s) - 8,052

Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) - 7,195

Original Male Character/Original Male Character - 6,283

Other Relationship Tags to Be Added - 5,618

Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s) - 3,990

Original Character(s) & Original Character(s) - 3,210

Here's a spreadsheet if you want to see the actual numbers not as a shitty screencap. I left the next few below 100 for context.

[electrozeistyking]

You said Beanie didn't activate until three weeks shortly after N woke up. How pillbaby creation works in your au? In other stories I have read the parents transfer some of ther code to the pillbaby and they instantly wake up. So Beanie was just inactive and no one like try to throw her away when they saw no activity. Sounds mean but is like when animals lay an egg and they threw it away when it doesn't hatch when is supposed to. Also where was Beanie being kept and who was watching her while she was inactive.

Ahaha, I am not like other story writers. Just to clarify, I never said that Beanie activated three weeks after N woke up. She properly activated on the same day he woke up, then kinda didn't do anything but blink for three weeks.

So anyway. Since you asked about the creation of pill babies in Ghost Drone, I am going to once again reiterate I am not like other story writers. Forgo most everything you know about pill babies from other stories, because I up and said "haha lmao who says I need to share headcanons with people" at one point.

First off — these lil guys are first built by scratch and have a combination of their parents' code uploaded into them. It takes a few months to "work through the kinks" in their coding before they properly boot up, because they are fucking eggs and I will treat them as such. And it takes a while for eggs to hatch.

I'm not saying that pill babies hatch in Ghost Drone, though, because it's already been established they don't do that. I'm just saying I think it's funny if they took a few months to boot up. Need not question me for doing things for the sake of my own entertainment is always the answer.

I also decided it takes two months for that to happen. Why? You already know the answer, it's my sense of goddamn humour!!!

Beanie, however, was kind of a late booter. Kinda by a week at max. The numbers are not pinned down, all I can tell you is that she booted up December 8th in 3075 and that was also the day N woke up in the medical wing after the laser canon malfunction.

In fact, it should be noted that Beanie nearly didn't boot up whatsoever! Pretty sure it's speculated that N and Uzi's combined code was just that fucky that it took a few extra days for Beanie's code to finish doing whatever the fuck it was doing for two bloody months, and if it hadn't eventually sorted itself out, she'd be dead.

So. The mainline Ghost Drone AU is the timeline where Beanie decided to defy the odds and live.

While we're at it, here's some other pill baby headcanons that I have that I've never gotten a chance to share, which means I am now taking this as an excuse to share them. So buckle up, babydoll, we're doing this now.

As mentioned by the ghost drone known as Norm in the mainline fic, there is a proper way to hold pill babies, as the top of their heads is sensitive and applying the wrong sort of pressure could ruin their delicate components.

Norm also mentions that drones apparently needed a way to let parents know when they're about to fuck with their kids' programming. Hence why that happens.

Baby drones on Copper-9 are built with voiceboxes. Baby drones built by JCJenson were not, as. well. Why would you waste your money on that. JCJenson, a fucky ass company.

Baby drones also giggle at a frequency designed to encourage their parents to bond with them. Sort of rewards the parents for doing parental things, and not throwing their kid like a football the second they find themselves in danger.

Once a drone is named, it is eventually added into their code, very swanky programmer style. I swear I know what I'm talking about.

I like to imagine that the worker drones at one point originally built their pill babies by scratch, but then they needed to save their resources, so they eventually started reusing their kids' pill bodies for new babies.

You kinda just gotta transfer the first baby to their toddler body, ensure none of their code was somehow left behind, then pass it off to the next set of parents and/or reuse it. Yes I understand this sounds fucked up when you put too much thought into this but are you really expecting any less from me. Don't worry about it.

If a baby eventually doesn't boot up, you reset their code, then either try again or grieve. Yes I understand that sounds awful. Don't worry about it.

Also, before she booted up, Beanie was with her parents the whole time because turns out the nursery is optional. And then when she booted up and her dad woke up, she was with N... while he was in shock for a few weeks,

Does this make sense. Did I cover everything. Actually it turns out I don't care. I honestly just hope this answers everything because I am going to faceplant now

fuck i forgot about v. she was watching over beanie while n was out cold. okay i got it now im going to ascend now

[brandwhorestarscream]

Combining these 2 a bit for the Damsel in Disguise cybermorph tf1 au meant to be read after the other ask i already sent

- I had never considered monsterfucker Sentinel. Usually that honor goes to Orion, but! I'm listening... he wasn't terribly interested in either of them when they were cogless, it was a manipulation strategy snd nothing more, but he wants to get into Dee's monster xenovalve? Bet. Poor Dee is not receptive but Sentinel doesn't understand the word 'no' >:3

- Sentinel fancies himself a king? When you day that, do you mean King, capital K, as in the caste of morph? Or just a king in the sense that he's the one fertilizing the little queen? Im down for either interpretation from his bastard, I just wanns know which way he's going

So Sentinel took baby morphling D because he recognises that he's a princess from the knowledge about cybermorphs that the Quintessons gave him, he knows that this thing can give him a loyal army, he's just killed the primes, still high on the rush of it, and already planning how he'll get rid of the Quintessons next

I don't think he would be interested in becoming a morph King (ew icky organics) but he does want the position of 1 to be the commander of a loyal legion, which is why he plants Dee amongst the miners, they're a cast with limited options & movement, spoonfed a constant drip of propaganda, they're basically a psudo hive for Dee to latch onto & want to protect

Drawing on the Sentinel's sparkling au a bit again (part 5 hwen 🥺?) after the race Sentinel sees first-hand how enamored Dee has become with him & invites them to his quarters, he wants to compare the 2 coggless' valves & the knowledge that he's got this monster hanging off his every word is giving him the same powerrush he had when he took Megatronus's head off & took his cog

Speaking of Megatronus's cog the scientists noticed that little morphling Dee responded to it's presence even when he was comatose, they summised that the cog's unique frequency must have reminded Dee of the safety of being inside his incubator causing him to relax & form an attachment to the bot carrying it, reaching out with his EM field because it's the closest he can get to a hivemind connection

Sentinel knows that the sexual activity will probably cause Dee to start laying(it doesn't occur to him that Dee would need a cog to actually lay), which is why he has him & that trouble maker he's attached himself to thrown into sub level 50, organics like warm dank places right? It'll be a great place for Dee to traumatise himself by killing his bestie via eggies so Sentinel can swoop in in the aftermath & make him really dependent, the other coggless in the trash room is just a bonus host, don't want the first batch being too big but the scientists will want one second generation morphling to play with at least

While they're making their way across Cybertron's surface Dee isn't just dealing with cramps from his growing passengers but the new instincts they're awakening, he's having trouble keeping his share of the energon ration down & getting impulses to shove this weird nature stuff Orion keeps pointing out into his tanks instead, maybe he wakes up in the night delirious & hunts some poor mechanimal devouring the whole thing before returning to camp wondering what the fuck is wrong with himself

Anyway skip forward to Dee, after he wakes up in the cave alone, he's not had Sentinel betrayal explained to him, he doesn't know what he is, the last thing he remembers is the terror in Alpha Trion's optics and him grabbing Orion to get away.

He feels drawn to Megatronus's corpse again curling up against the busted chest plate, he really wants to crawl inside so he does to the best of his ability & lays his last egg away from the main clutch ( only the best nest for steve-2 )

That's about when the golden guard turn up lead by airachnid, there's a bit of a struggle when one of them tries to move one of Dee's eggs and he attacks them causing the eggs to hatch & borrow into the wounds Dee has made on them, once the morphlings are safely inside incubators he calms down enough for Airachnid to tranquilize him

He wakes up restrained in a lab in Iacon & Sentinel spins him some tale, maybe about Megatronus being the fallen one who betrayed the other primes because Dee being hosted in his body drove him to it, that's why he's so obsessed with Megatronus Prime because he killed him, but Sentinel knows it wasn't his fault, he was made to be a monster, it's the Quintessons' & they want him back to use him to finish the job and kill the rest of the cybertronians

That's why Sentinel had to hide him amongst the coggless, really he's been looking out for Dee out of the kindness of his spark shouldn't Dee repay that by giving him an army? So just lay back, relax, and Stop Fighting Him.

Dee cant help but be disturbed by how being around Sentinel makes him relaxed, it's something he noticed the first time they fragged when he was still coggless, pressing his helm up against Sentinel's chest plating to listen to the whirr of his T-Cog, so as soonbas they're not in close proximity his hackles are raising again, something isn't right

When he's not restrained down to a lab table or breeding bench or too drugged to stand, he's pacing because his instincts are fixated on the egg he left behind but he won't tell Sentinel that's what's upsetting him, no, instead he tells Sentinel about Orion & Bee & Elita, he should be worrying about them they're his friends it's just, it doesn't seem as important as the egg & he hates himself for it

But "they're probably okay they had Alpha Trion with them afterall", he doesn't notice Sentinel stop caressing his helm after he murmurs that tidbit of information while drugged out half asleep & muzzled laying across the false Prime's lap nor does he notice Sentinel comm Airachnid

He doesn't even know he just sabotaged his own rescue party

I think believing he's responsible for the death of the primes would really fuck with Dee's head that means every miners life being the way it is is his fault in his mind, & Sentinel loves to remind him of that especially while he's deep in Dee's valve

Sentinel probably claims he sent out a search party for Dee's friends & Alpha Trion only to find other cybermorphs had already torn them to shreds, the only thing you have left of your friend is that little Megatronus decal

They have some dispute (maybe about how Dee can feel his newborn morphlings in Sentinel's labs via their budding hivemind), Dee is a little too rebellious for Sentinel's tastes so he says something along the lines of Dee forgetting the deaths he's caused so soon & how they cant have that & that's when he carves Megatronus's visage into Dee's chest directly where they both know he punched his way through Megatronus chassis

Poor, poor Dee... the whole situation is just an endless parade of misery 😞 he's slowly losing his mind as Sentinel's prisoner, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of his wombs (queens have 3 in total) started filling up with drone eggs in response to his stress.

The cybertronians know next to nothing about morphs, so when he gives birth to a clutch of eggs that are only about half the size of the ones prior, they don't know what's going on. The scientists confiscate them, and 🤭 as I'm sure you can imagine, the facehuggers spring shortly after. Whether on the research team or some poor frack they've dragged in to be test subjects, it's only minutes after their birth that the eggs unfurl and release the first stage.

Dee can hear them. He can feel them. They feel so much different from his morphlings. Where the little ones are helpless and afraid, confused and lost without him, the drones are not. They grow insanely quickly, molting out of their first larval stage in less than a megacycle in response to their queen's distress, and within a matter of hours they stand at full height.

Dee hears them, pacing about in their cages. There's 9 of them in total, 3 to an enclosure, peering out of the blasterproof glass and watching the scientists intently. Their presences all weave together to make the first true, proper hivemind D-16 has ever entered, and it's the only truly comforting thing he's had since becoming Sentinel's prisoner.

What should we do, Mother?

Where are you, Mother?

Mother, we'll free you!

Dee puts every ounce of his willpower into keeping a poker face. Sentinel doesn't know about the hivemind. This is the only advantage they have, and he cannot squander it. They'll only have one chance wo they have to do this right.

One of the cybermorphs finest forms of self-defense is their acidic energon blood, able to melt through even cybertronian steel quickly and efficiently. That is their escape route, that will be their salvation.

Idk if you've watched AvP or Resurrection, but something along the breakouts of those movies. In the middle of the sleep cycle, when the monitoring of the morphs is done mostly by cameras and motion sensors, that's when they strike.

They have Dee restrained to sleep, as I'm sure you can imagine, but his good behavior means they no longer strap him down. No, instead, his servos are clapped in stasis cuffs behind his back, but that's no issue.

His pharyngeal jaw darts out with all the force he can bite, tearing into his own shoulders. Ripping off armor and chunks of mesh, and even though it aches and throbs he keeps going, not stopping til both sides have wounds about the size of a credit chip. Then, he rolls his shoulders back, feeling the wetness of blood welling up and dribbling down. It steams abd hisses when it drips onto the berth, and more importantly, onto the stasis cuffs binding him.

In the lab's holding cells, his drones are doing the same, though instead of just turning on the littlest amongst them and tearing them apart in sacrifice, they follow their mother's lead, nipping each other's non-vital areas to get sickly green-gray blood flowing. The first drop eats straight through the floor of their cell, and with a generous downpour, they escape in less than 100 seconds. Meanwhile, Dee's cuffs crumble and break off of him: he slicks his servos with his own blood and slams his palms against the wall, pushing snd forcing the acid to eat through. When his hands reach open air and he knows he's hit the other side, he pulls his arms out and then takes a few steps back. It takes a few tries, but he's able to ram his sore, aching shoulder against the hole in the wall and break through.

Alarms are blaring by now, but it's too late to do anything: the morphs have broken containment 😌

[anadrym]

Extended Author's Notes for Left Behind Ch6.

Spoilers!

Chapter title is from "Burn" by 2WEI and Edda Hayes.

Caitlyn has no context for how big a deal it is for Vi to disobey an order, and she doesn't get a chance to gather much information before Vi is sent to Maintenance. Cait didn't get to see Vi's defiance, and everything she saw after that initial refusal was mindless obedience. Pretty much all the info she has on Vi's mental state is what Renata tells her.

About the "elegance" of the parlor: my interpretation of the Baroness is that she enjoys the finer things in life. Her mechanical arm is made by the very best, it's fully functional but also beautiful and expensive. She chose a mansion with marble floors and carved fireplaces and crystal chandeliers. She wears tailored suits and drinks from fine porcelain tea cups and sets out more food than she can possibly eat. She's even adopted the highborn accent.

"Very soon for another dose" - Vi had a round of injections about a week before this. Normally, they're about once a month. I'm sure the increase in frequency will have no negative effects.

Renata doesn't really even consider that Vi resisted the order because she recognized Caitlyn. It's been five years, and Renata is pretty much certain that she has Vi completely under control. It helps that she sends Vi away BEFORE she learns who Ghost is, because her brain just doesn't quite make the connection between the two seemingly separate events.

The Baroness here is just throwing all kinds of stuff at Caitlyn. Some of it is true, some of it is lies, and most of it is somewhere in between. She genuinely DOES want Caitlyn to work for her.

I really wanted to try drawing the comparisons between Renata and Cassandra AND Renata and Ambessa. She's smart and diplomatic and strategic. It also kinda plays with the whole "does she actually care about Caitlyn and her goals? Or is she just being manipulative and using Caitlyn for personal gain?"

So. How much does the Baroness know? I don't want to spoil it too much, but why would she continue the injections if she didn't need to? If Vi really is just an animal mind in a dead woman's body - and we already know that she's not - then what would be the point of drugging her?

She gambles on what she thinks Cait knows. Caitlyn obviously isn't sure what's going on, she's in emotional turmoil from just finding out that Vi's alive. So Renata tells her a story that fits that: the body is alive, the mind is non-verbal and terrified.

Another reminder that Caitlyn did NOT see a spray of blood or gore or brain matter when Vi was shot. Her brain made up the details later, as brains do when there are gaps to fill in.

I really like the line about reloading a rifle that's run out of bullers instead of discarding it. I think that kinda sums up Renata's...practicality?

The Baroness abruptly changing the subject was to throw Cait off-balance.

She's not lying about cutting ties with the mercenary group, but she is lying about the reason. It basically came down to "group with no particular loyalty to me" vs. "skilled assassin who also happens to be the girl that I've wanted for five years." She also has a way to potentially control said assassin. It's an easy choice.

Renata DOES know who attacked the Kiramman's manor and is absolutely fine with Caitlyn killing them. It's kind of a "two birds, one stone" situation.

The offer to let Caitlyn "use" Vi was two-fold: first, it was meant to completely throw Caitlyn off-balance (and it did); second, it was intended to dissuade Caitlyn from leaving (after all, if Caitlyn's not "using" her, who else might?) I'm not lying in the tags though, there is NO actual non-consensual sex in this work. Vi is a strange combination of pet and weapon and conquered enemy to Renata, and you wouldn't assault a weapon or a pet, at least. And she's way too possessive to let anyone else touch her "property" like that.

Originally, I had Renata inviting Caitlyn to have lunch with her and then offering to send dinner up later when Cait refused the invitation. Then I realized that it was supposed to be about an hour or two after sunset. Glad I caught that and fixed it.

I really need to stop saying that the extended notes will be up on Friday or Saturday. I'm always late.

Teaser for next week:

She can't forget. Not now. Not when she's this close. Not when the woman upstairs... She knows her. She knows her, more certainly than she's known anything since...

The scar on the side of her head throbs, and the girl presses the ring deeper into her flesh. She can't forget. She won't forget.

[bartletslesbians]

CJ Cregg and life-threatening situations

So at the very end of Angel Maintenance (4x19), CJ says the following thing: "I imagined myself destitute, I imagined myself unlucky in love. I never imagined my life would be in danger with really uncommon frequency. It feels a little bit good, doesn't it?"

And I just love that quote so much. She says the last bit so beautifully cheerfully, too. I think, especially in combination with the episode after (where the press room is shot at while she's inside it with Toby and Will), it's just a great insight to her character.

Simply the fact that her life being in active danger makes her a little bit giddy is 1. truly insane and 2. so much fun? This comes right after Will tells her how the plane would've snapped in two if if they'd messed up the landing. "It feels a little bit good doesn't it?" Will tells her it doesn't, and she continues to (again, cheerfully) insist that it absolutely does.

More interestingly, she says that it feels good almost immediately after saying "I'm not sure I'm good at living in a world where that kind of thing is possible." I relistened to make sure the transcript got it right, but she really says "good at living", not good with living. She's not sure she's good at it (Will kindly tells her she is, or perhaps he means that she's living anyway. Both have an interesting implication).

CJ isn't sure she's good at living in this world knowing how unpredictably dangerous life can be, but at the same time it's that same occasional life-threatening danger that we see make her happy.

And that's continued in the next episode! Evidence of Things not Seen (4x20) has Larry telling he that she's particularly upbeat for someone who's been shot at twice in four years. It gives us Toby telling CJ "why on most other nights do you think the world's going to hell in a hula hoop, but tonight..."

CJ goes on a lovely spiel about believing in the good in humanity and all that. That she's cheerful because she has faith in the people in this room, in this building, and in many other places. She might not think she's good at living this unpredictably dangerous life -- where at any point you can die for reasons you never could have seen coming -- but when actually faced with these situations? It brings out her more cheerful side!

(Sidenote: I think this is especially interesting in the context of Simon's death, and these being the first two times her life's been in potential danger since her stalker and his death. But that would be a longer post.)

For now, I think this concept of CJ becoming a more positive person (I really don't think she's that pessimistic in most other momets, though; season 4 and the wake of Simon's death give more context to "walking around like the world's going to hell", but in seasons 1-3 she's really not like that a lot at all) in the wake of her life being in danger, can tie in so so nicely with the sentiment of wondering whether all these sacrifices and effort are actually attributing to something truly important and meaningful that CJ occasionally expresses.

We see that when she talks about not being with her dad as much as she should be because she's here ("jetting around on airforce one"), and also when she's talking to Danny in season 7 about her obituary and knowing damn well that this is the most important thing she'll ever do and the constant question of and what is she doing with it?

There's that question of...am I doing enough to make up for what I've sacrificed to be here? Is this important enough to warrant not being elsewhere? And in that context, I think the fact that her life is occasionally put in danger by doing this work, it almost reaffirms that surely, it really is important enough to be worth it? It has to be, right? No one would risk their life coming into work if the work wasn't truly doing something.

I just think it's a really lovely character trait that being confronted with the fragility of her own life is something that makes CJ a more cheerful person; it affirms her faith in people all over the place when it could so easily do the opposite; it affirms that they're doing something important here, too, (it has to), and that's deeply important too when the work takes so much from you and can be so disappointing sometimes.

There's something to be said too about this being a very different reaction compared to Rosslyn, too; she's shaken there, she's not okay, there's no joy to be found. And I have so many thoughts about how that trauma could've played into how cheerful she is in 4x19 and 4x20 but ALSO about how seemingly dismissive she is about the danger she's in during the final arc of season 3. That takes a lot more time though so !!! later!

But she becomes a little giddy when she realises she could've died today, and she firmly defends that response too when questioned about it, and that's just a great choice for the character IMO.

[ghelgheli]

17! but also using the opportunity of the ask game to get to know more about the effortless worldbuilding in sff :)

from the end-of-year book ask

17: Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

I think Three Body Problem is the only one meeting this condition this year so I'll have no trouble staying on topic :> but I'm gonna specifically talk about "hard" SF as I conceive of it—I haven't read any analysis so this may just be a jumble of improvised thoughts.

SF, being "speculative" fiction, of course has to take on the problem of speculating and of presenting things that don't (and perhaps cannot) happen. On average this is accomplished thru a healthy combination of scientific grounding and good-natured handwaving: I drop a few sentences about "quantum entanglement" and you go along with my ansible, or you tell me about "positronic circuits" and I agree that you can make a brain with them. This is the compact that makes SF work because you fundamentally cannot expect speculation without, well, ceding ground on reality.

But at least a subset of SF readers are of the kind to really want to grok how it is that this or that scientific feature of the world works or may come about. Every contraption and novel technology is like a puzzle to be riddled out. This is the place where speculation becomes sincere mechanical prediction, and it's why I love hard SF.

This subset of readers can be matched to a subgenre of writers who commit fully to filling in as many blanks in their technological, biological, etc. speculation as possible. The rows of astronomical data can't be left vague—tell me what frequency of light we're dealing with here—xenobiology isn't taken for granted—what is the neurology of your aliens??—and so on. The dots are connected, the rest of the owl is drawn for real, the image is made crisp. Like fireworks for the reader's brain.

When this kind of worldbuilding is executed well imo it looks effortless. Looks, not is, because behind every explanation of near-c travel is hours of research into at least special relativity and time dilation, along with calculations by-hand. Behind every account of an exoplanet's atmosphere is probably a few papers perused on the subject and several articles on scientific american. Peter Watts, in the note at the end of Blindsight, includes a fucking bibliography of a hundred or so references as well as thank-yous to many an academic he split handles of liquor with. And this is only the visible fragment of what has to be a library of knowledge accumulated both passively and actively to make a speculated world feel as concretely plausible as possible.

None of this is necessary for good SF. The aforementioned compact means any author can opt out of this commitment at any time. But it's what it takes to make tightly-written hard SF, where your conceptual hands are kept diligently at your side, waving an idea through maybe once every five chapters when you have no other choice.

So anyway, Three Body Problem is a tour de force in doing this and doing it cleanly. It uses a storytelling device a lot of hard SF employs to make it work: rather than stuffing dense exposition into narration (at which point, just read the source papers) it deploys a cast of characters who more than anything else, really know their shit. We get exposition trickle-fed through experts who are trying, along with us, to make sense of their novel environments and unfamiliar technologies using their knowledge of the present limits of human understanding. This is what Watts does in Blindsight too, by the way: a claustrophobic ship crewed by technical specialists makes first contact, so everyone has something encyclopedic to say about everything and it's only natural.

What astounded me about Cixin Liu's writing is that he made it work just when I least thought he would be able to. I was sure I was being shown things completely inexplicable and necessarily supernatural until he went and explained them in plain terms; better yet, he explained them in ways that made so much sense in retrospect that I was kicking myself for not seeing the answer. This has exactly the flavour of a good puzzle.

The trade-off hard SF makes is that you are often limited in the metaphorical/thematic work you can do through your speculation. I think the contrast between "calendrical science" in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series and Asimov's "psychohistory" illustrates this well.

Yoon Ha Lee has mathematical training, and calendrical science is a speculative field consisting of theorems, conjectures, proofs, etc. in the language of mathematics that stand in for cultural hegemony and power projection. This makes for a great operationalization of soft power: space is filled and distorted by the quantifiable effects of whatever regime is dominant there (the "calendar" here being synecdoche for culture writ large). But obviously he can't fill in the blanks of how a calendar causes spacetime distortions that specifically make one side's weapons more effective, or provide certain formations with shielding effects. This is, I guess, semi-hard (lol) SF—you can see how it's supposed to work, but it's clear that it just won't. What you get in return is pretty politically interesting storytelling.

Psychohistory is the converse: a deterministic-enough lovechild of economics and sociology explained in the Foundation series as using all the familiar methods of linear algebra and differential equations together with unfamiliar innovations of just how to quantify human behaviour in order to make reliable predictions. There are entire chapters dedicated to explaining the conceptual nuance that went into developing psychohistory ("the hand on thigh principle" from prelude to foundation is just about how the theory resolves divergence by reducing insignificant terms to zero) and an entire book to exploring one of its limitations. It's fascinating to read. But you also get little narrative depth out of it, because hard SF, even when done well, is not guaranteed to make a story thematically interesting or politically compelling. This is the Three Body Problem problem too: its political commitments are threadbare and unserious because that's just not what it's about. I couldn't recommend it on those terms, but that's not what I like so much about it. I will say the conceptualization goes a little off the rails in the final chapters, but I think most SF authors were in some kind of string theory inspired fugue state at the time.

What I would love to see (and I'm sure exists) is hard SF that also has interesting politics. Unfortunately that's an intersection of two already-narrow intersections.

ty for ask✨🐐

[kiragecko]

How Common Are Various Vowels?

I've been making a bunch of charts of how common various vowels sounds are around the world. Decided to share them with you guys. Information about the source, limitations, and what they're actually saying is under the cut. (Google Sheets document here if you want a text version.)

These charts are based on data from PHOIBLE. PHOIBLE is a repository of phonological data, ie. the sounds used in various languages. While there are 5,000-7,000 languages in the world¹ PHOIBLE only has data for 2,186. Which may make it the largest phonological database in the world, but means it still covers less than half of the world's languages!

So, these numbers do NOT indicate how many languages have each sound. They indicate how many of the languages REPRESENTED have that sound!

Also, where linguists have disagreed about the sounds in a language, PHOIBLE includes both descriptions. So there are actually 3,020 inventories - which is almost 1,000 more than the number of distinct languages! Some sounds may be over-represented if they occur in a lot of debated languages.

Some areas of the world are more represented than others. Specialized databases for South America and Africa were copied over, but there wasn't anything similar for North America. I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to make a chart for voiceless vowels if there had been, and am sad to not get the opportunity!

I've made a chart for almost every type of vowel that's used in 6 or more languages. I didn't include over/under-rounded vowels because I find them confusing for some reason.² I also didn't include nasal dipthongs because I didn't want to design an entire additional chart OR have a giant one that's almost empty. Both groups only have one sound with 6 uses, anyways.

-

The chart is shaped somewhat differently than other vowel charts. I decided to lean a bit more into formant values for its shape.³ I also wanted to include every type of vowel that linguists actually used in PHOIBLE, not just the cardinal ones common to most IPA charts. So it includes lowered, raised, and centralized vowels.⁴

Some numbers are actually combinations of multiple entries I decided were close enough to group together. These are marked with an asterisk ( * ) on the dipthong chart, and are unmarked on the other charts.

For example, the cell for 'ui' shows 72 occurrences. In PHOIBLE this is 55 occurrences for 'ui', 13 for 'ui̯', and 4 for 'u̯i'. (The final two are indicating the sound is 'uy' and 'wi', respectively.)

Another example: On the main vowel chart, 'ɪ̈' is actually a combination of 'ɪ̈' and 'ɨ̞'. The first has 11 occurrences, and the second 8, for a total of 19.

-

Finally, vowels don't actually have boundaries between them. In many ways, these charts are MORE misleading than ones with fewer options. Its a 3 dimensional spectrum, and sounds can be produced anywhere inside of it. The way people will pronounce the 'same' vowel in different contexts can vary wildly, and easily line up with multiple cells.

At the same time, sometimes precise distinctions are necessary. Our ears are capable of hearing VERY precise distinctions. We learn to ignore many of them while learning to speak, but there are dialects of English that distinguish 'ɜ' and 'ɐ', two muddy sounds that are right next to each other. So there IS value in a chart like this, as long as you can recognize that things are actually really messy most of the time.

-

Notes:

⁰ Before we get into the other notes, I want to get ahead of the people wondering about 'ɶ'. Only ONE of the represented languages use that sound. It's on the main chart so you can know what fits in that space, but that's why it isn't coloured in.

¹ The number of languages varies wildly because the difference between languages and dialects is more political than practical.

² They aren't confusing. They make perfect sense. But my brain kicks up a fuss for some reason.

³ The shape of most charts is partially based on the average frequency of the first 2 peaks of vowels' acoustic spectrums - one acting as the y axis and the other as the x. These peaks are called 'formants'. My charts translate these values slightly more literally - which is why 'e' has a little corner to itself. But it's still stylized - the unrounded back vowels and rounded front vowels have both been pushed back towards the edges to leave some room in the centre. There are a LOT of central vowels!

⁴ If you go to the Google Sheet, you'll see that a few edge cases didn't make it in. I couldn't figure out how to fit them into an already packed space!

[vladdyissues]

Prepare some tea and pancakes because I'm gonna share with you my dp omegaverse au. Sorry for misprints, I try to fix them but always miss some of them.

1) Yes, halfas have ghost genders, too, because it's about a soul, not body. Dani? Well, she's too young yet, her personality isn't determinated

2) There are 3 ghost genders: alpha, omega and beta. Betas are the most part of ghosts (80%). As most people tgey exist to serve alphaa and omegas' wishes, ideas. Beta often doesn't even know what they really want or their desires are only a result of culture traditios. Examples: Bertrand, Technus, Bullet, Skulker*, Fright Knight (*hc that he is born ghost, so, he just want to survive being tge best hunter)

Alphas are the strongest gender (several alpha is stronger than several omega or beta). They dominate in a way people see it. They also barely doubt. They don't an appreciation but alphas often gather ghosts around themselves. As possible morpho feature is huge fangs. Examples: Young Blood, Pariah Dark, Danny* (at least we watched him developing as an alpha. Especially in season 3.)

Omegas dominates as well but through manipulations. This is why most omegas are demons (Desire, Ember, Spectra). They need appreciation, it's make omegas weaker. They make a cult from their persona or exist on their own. A possible morpho feature is fangs, too, but a bit smaller. One more example: Vlad.

3) Spirits is out of gender-party game (Clockwork, Valentine, Nocturn)

4) Instead of heat there's the vibrating period. (yea, sounds smutty, i know) It happens once in 4 years and lasts a month. This period is called from omegas' souls become extremely emotionally vulnerable and their core make vibrations that "vocals" all their deepest worries. Alphas of the same kind can apprehend vibrations and the scent of that omega (it's not sounds actually, they feel it by the whole body; more like snakes' bone conduction). This thoughts like a mantra sounds in alpha's mind, so, they try to help omega. Researchers-ghosts say that in the vibrating period increases the mating frequency.

An simple example of how it works on Pompous pep: Danny was 17 when oneday he started to hear in his head "Vlad needs you. He wants to get some love. You must be this one. He wants to love you and be loved by you. Vlad wants his happily ever after and vanilla family things with you. You know how much he's suffered from loneliness. What a hero would you unless you help him? At least one hug, a dinner, a kiss or just once have a..." Wherever or whever Danny is. This thought haunts him. The whole month.

And yes, omegas' emotions changes fast as a rollercoaster during the vibrating period. (sorry: they're purring. meow)

5) Fangs are for: a) mark your beta slaves; b) mark your omega (mate). Anyway, the mark means "you can't touch it, it's mine". It has the owner/mate's scent. Mated omega soul vibrations can't be apprehended by other alphas. Marks disappear after 4 years.

6) Betas lacks of gamets. Alphas and omegas are both isogamic. If they decide to make a child... they actually MAKE it. They form theur gamets and combine. Future parents watch for the egg, corrects the core from time to time. The eggs develops into the new ghost (halfa) after several months. But the child is still vulnerable. It can't survive without parents.

7) Sex? Well, ghosts can form genitals if they like too but it doesn't connect to mating or ghost born. It's like playing the ukulele. Do if you'd like to. However, I wouldn't say the same to halfas. They are half-humans after all.

That's all! Thanks for your attention and patience!

+ I forgot add to omegaverse au: Halfa born from alpha and omega can be connected to sex any way (e.g. the forming process starts a human way but after bones are ready the egg go out)

[elfhunk]

if i may ramble for a moment:

i need to start volunteering in some youth programs again when my health stuff is sorted out.

i have been dealing with a lot. i am definitely pretty sick in the brain. i will remain private about the gruesome detail, but i have had to check in with myself a lot lately. it hasn't been scary. just a new phase.

but i am walking away with a singular feeling of needing to survive so i can be a better role model for men & boys than they have currently. they deserve better than this.

like... what are their options presently? twitch streamers and youtubers who are affable nice boys? grindset libertarian gym rats & supplement shills? or, y'know, fascists?

or in... increasing frequency, a combination of the three!

in an environment where we mock or patronize even the slightest deviations from hegemonic masculinity to declare carrying a tote bag as fruity.

i can't help but observe a tendency to either minimize yourself into a harmless clown, or become addicted to the pursuit of power & superiority.

i can't help but see people who describe their ideal man as a golden retriever and take pause. a feeling of dread that hits my stomach every time i look in the mirror in the gym bathroom.

i often wonder if anyone wants us to be more than that. i don't know what to do with that feeling. but i know what many other men have done with that feeling. you do, too.

it's not an insignificant piece of how we got here.

i've joked with other people who've worked in youth programs that our job was to keep young white boys from becoming nazis.

and i need to be direct. this is an issue white boys & men are facing. this is our problem.

i am looking at exit poll data and remembering how important that job was.

because i have talked to a lot of boys who still feel like there's no space for them to be a complete human being in contemporary culture.

they feel like their existence is fundamentally harmful, and that the only way to achieve a "positive" masculinity is to ask for nothing and to receive nothing in return. to be stoic and stalwart. to be an impenetrable knight in shining armor with nothing inside. they live in a perpetual state of dimly simmering shame, worried that they are only making the world worse by their existence.

most suffer silently. brief admissions of vulnerability shared usually around some kind of fire. they worry they're burdening their partners with the emotions labor. so they shut up. they man up.

or, they fall prey to the ideology promising them that their rightful place in the world has been stolen. there is a reason they're sad. there's a reason they're angry. the reason is that they no longer have the mandate of heaven. and that it must be reclaimed by force.

and that is why am worried about men.

i want to help. even if i can barely help myself out of these cyclical & self-destructive expectations.

i can't pretend that i am above this as a gay man. it's important that i don't pretend. it's important that i acknowledge the parts of me that beg me to be less of a faggot so i could just fit in and get that power back. i have to shut that part of me up. the parts of me that still fetishize images of male power and domination without a second thought.

i have to start having these conversations with the other men in my life.

there's something really not okay with us.

that's it. thank you for listening, if you are reading the thoughts of one horse who has been without ADHD medication for well over a month but has entered a sort of dissociated zen state.

it's just been the one salient thought i have had all day on the matter.

[annabelle-creart]

The Perks of Parenthood

No. 6: sometimes, listening is key

Sissi was making her homework, well, trying. Since she came to the island it was noticed she forgot some basic things and to change that she was gave homework, it is supposed to help her with memory but the only thing it had done with her effortestly was making her want to throw up, even if she doesn't have a mouth, but her vocalizer already made all the chirps and growls she needed to make to show how done she was with math, she tried to put music for distraction but compared to other times it didn't worked, after some time it became most of white noise rather than actual help and that just made it worst. Until finally she started to tap the pencil on the notebook, the first two taps were normal, but on the third tap frustration took her and surrounded the pencil on her palm, making it a fist, tapping, or maybe stabbing, her notebook with the pencil various times before throwing the notebook, then the pencil in desesperation, growling in the process. Surely that was the reason why she maybe didn't noticed the door opening

"Am I interrupting something?" Heatwave asked the young bot with a confused, yet curious look

"No! No, nothing- I was just-" Sissi, making like if nothing happened, got up of the chair to reach the book and the pencil quickly, going to the table almost inmediatly, it was quite fun the size of it, it was damn tiny for him, made only for Sissi because she was the only one with that height, same the twins but they're not usuallt here "just doing homework- nothing from other thing or something- nothing nothing!"

"I don't think so" Heatwave doubted, noticing her strange changes on voice, it was one of the shitty things about vocalizers against voice boxes, vocalizers are more sensible because they're pure frequence "are you okay?"

"I am! I have nothing!"

"Wrong question then" Heatwave left the door and got near to Sissi, sitting next to her "what are you feeling?"

"Heatwave, I'm fine, it's just a weird math problem, nothing I can't solve"

"I don't think you throwed the book that way if you knew how to resolve it" Heatwave's tone was serious, yet it was more soft than usual "nobody does a hate crime for nothing"

Damn, he saw the pencil marks on the notebook

"That's homicide, and I don't think Chase would like one of his cadets is a murderer" Heatwave chuckled, moving his hands like playing with them

"What will you do then?" Sissi replied in pure irritation now

"Confess the crime and I'll not tell him. This will be our secret"

The problem was that Sissi didn't knew what actually happened, she was frustrated, maybe sad? Or that was after, she feeled stupid too, it was way too much things but at the same time she didn't knew how to name them, it all felt like a dizzy combined with a knot on her processor and that strange needing to move when one feels anxious, shaky? Or just strange?

"Sissi" shit, she haven't replied "you can tell me anything, you know?"

That was the problem! She didn't knew what to say!

She never knew what to say

It was like if her vocalizer went offline while her processor tried to think of an answer 10 times slower than usual, and then, her optics became blurry in coolant, hided by her visor. She knew it wasn't that but yet she felt sick

"You know?" Heatwave waited for a long moment, still softly "I used to be like that when I was young too, based on your way to look" carajo "Sissi, do you know what are you feeling?"

That moment was what took all her attention. He didn't said anything else, he just waited for an answer, calmly. It took her some time to reply, trying to evade replying with a shaky vocalizer but it was already too late

"No"

"That's okay, come on" he offered his servo, which with doubt, she took to get closer, sitting aside him and reclining her whole body on Heatwave, as he caressed her gently "I guess you're not in the mood to talk about it"

"No" Sissi replied "but it just feels... weird- like- I wanna do something- I really want to do it- I really want to breath when it doesn't work- I do want to calm down! I try to concentrate on my venting- and counting but I can't! It's too fast! And when I wanna think I had already broke something! And sometimes I heard weird things- not like words but like- if I hear something but is not that and my head just can't think of anything but that and it sounds horribly and I get stuck- is that the ventilation of here? I hate it-! I hear it like half of the time and I wanna distract but then I can't and- I don't know it feels weird and strangeandIwannaconcentratebutcan't-"

"Hey, hey! I'll have to stop you there" Heatwave called her attention "those are a lot of thoughts at once, don't you think?"

"Yeah. It was too much?"

"Is not that. There's no problem on having too many thoughts, but you were talking too fast, and I haven't know no bot that can think properly when talking like that"

"Hm" she just sighed "sorry"

"Don't be. Never be sorry for how you feel. And you're not alone on those feelings"

Sissi, now, as before, didn't knew how or what to feel, but yet she had the need to hug the bot, and she did, like if he was a big pillow. No word was made but somehow she felt, not better, but like, less bad. It felt nice, to have someone to share the feeling, and to vent properly

"Heatwave?"

"Tell me"

"What did you mean when you said you were like that?"

"Well... when I was younger, tinier than you, I also had the bad habit of throwing things when I felt bad, I didn't knew what to feel or how to feel. It ended up the real problem was identifying them, to name them. I knew what I felt, I just didn't knew how to say I felt like that or what to do with them. Do you feel like that?"

"Sometimes" Sissi glued more to Heatwave "how did you fixed that?"

"Not exactly fix. I still feel like that sometimes, but my mentor helped me with it, he taught me how to deal with it, and to name some"

"And it worked? Like, it works?"

"It does"

"...can you help me with that?"

"Sure"

"Thanks" Sissi reclined her helm on him

"No problem, kiddo"

[an-spideog]

this is a more general question that may have been asked before, but do you know of any resources or combination of that would help with learning in a similar way to duolingo? the easy access, repetition, and spoken word was extremely helpful with the beginnings of russian, italian, & irish for me but then they fucked everything up

Sorry for the delay on this one, I don't really have a good answer for you. In general there's a lack of high quality resources available for Irish. I made a post talking about why not to use duolingo and what you can use instead, but they're not really equivalents as much as other paths.

I'm not aware of any good apps which provide comprehensive teaching of Irish along with good pronunciation, but some of the stuff in that post may be helpful.

Oh this is gonna sound like such cheesy self promo but honestly I forgot I made this until someone reminded me of it today lmao. I made an anki flashcard deck for Irish, it features nearly 1000 of the most common words in Irish, if you like flashcards and anki you might find this helpful since it does have the repetition and the spoken word aspects (and unlike duolingo it has recordings of native speakers, not their bad TTS).

Anki is kind of annoying to use for some people, it's a bit confusing and has some setup time, but it's really powerful and can be really good for helping you get that initial vocabulary to move on to watching tv and reading books. (Also you can use it on mobile, the iOS app is expensive but the website works fine on phones).

For this deck I picked the words from a dataset of TV subtitles, so the words are actually common in everyday speech (I've seen a lot of Irish word frequency lists which just don't line up with speech), and it has recordings of each word along with definitions, example sentences and recordings of the example sentence. I also ordered the deck in such a way that the simplest example sentences are near the start and you should be able to understand the examples sentences (mostly) with only the words you've done up to that point.

The deck specifically uses Galway Irish, which I don't actually speak myself, but it's more common on the tv show Ros na Rún (and a lot of Irish TV in general), so it was easier to get clips of it.

There's a load more notes about how I made it on the deck page

[supersoakerfullofblood]

Seeing lots of discourse about the woman with a shelf full of NA erotica, and then the post saying she doesn't read, she just consumes porn, and then the backlash to that post. Imo both sides are right, there's just a communication gap.

There's always been a holier-than-thou sentiment about reading compared to other forms of media, which admittedly is fair when you compare it to like Youtube and Tiktok. But as mediums like those grow in popularity, so too does the reactionary stance of "reading good," and this has muddied what "reading" actually means. People conflate "reading" with just consuming the written word, like the act of looking at a page is itself a healthy thing to do. It's certainly healthier than other options, but this argument misunderstands the original conceit of "writing > other media." People who love literature don't love it because of the physical product of a book. They love it because books introduce them to another perspective, and stylized prose from that perspective (a book as a physical product is also nice, admittedly). Literature exists as an act of empathy from one lived experience to another, but the medium doesn't matter. It could be a movie or a show or a podcast. So then we get to the erotica argument.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying a book for whatever reason you want to enjoy it, just as you can enjoy any piece of art for whatever reason you'd like. But I think when you conflate books meant to be consumed (erotica) with books meant to be really thought over, you misunderstand why people have always "read" to begin with, what "reading" has always meant to people. So you have two groups of people:

1. People who have always read to try to refine their worldview and understand the people and cultures and etc. around them.

2. People who read books for pleasure's sake.

The best novels combine these in some ratio (though usually not with erotica, but erotica isn't incompatible with thoughtfulness). But both of these flags have been flown under the broad banner of "reading," even though each group is looking for different things in a book, which again, is totally fine. But you end up with increasingly polarizing, pretentious groups of people spouting about what a book should do, bragging about the titles they have or haven't read ("I've read/haven't read Infinite Jest" vs. "I have/haven't read The Love Hypothesis"), and just generally being annoying.

It's hard, because the verbiage isn't really there for good discourse. You can't really tell someone whose literary diet is 90% erotica that they don't read books like a literary scholar, because that triggers a knee-jerk reaction of "you can't tell me how to read," which, okay, fair, but let's be honest with ourselves. Your bookshelf is color coordinated, almost all of it is NA romance, and there's literal visual porn next to your books. These books are products more than they're art, which doesn't mean you can't read books for their empathetic value, just that you haven't for some of the books you've read. At the same time, if you tell a lit scholar that these are equally valid books, they'll turn their head up, because their definition of a book has always been synonymous with "thing that triggers deep personal inquiry," when in reality, what a "book" is is quite broad.

Again, read what you want, just know why you read and why other people read, and know that these are equally valid and fairly distinct aims, and that, because of this polarization, these aims are increasingly polarized by publishers so that their books sell well--the market churns out poorly written, soulless romance novels just as it churns out curmudgeonly Oscar bait novels at maybe the greatest frequency we've seen because people like picking one of those sides and snapping at the other.

TLDR: At the end of the day, we just can't equate Colleen Hoover and Kurt Vonnegut, and that's okay. Source: I write "serious fiction" and also (admittedly not smutty) McDonalds fanfic

[justkidneying]

Why You're Hungover on Monday Morning

So you know when you get drunk and feel like shit the next day? Have you ever wanted to be able to drink without getting a hangover? Well, I can't really help you there, but I can at least tell you why hair of the dog doesn't work.

Ethanol (CH3CH2OH): this is normal drinking alcohol. When you drink it, most of it gets dumped into your blood and into the liver. What does the liver do with it? It breaks it down into acetaldehyde (which is very toxic) and then breaks that down to acetate. The enzymes involved are Alcohol Dehydrogenase (in the cytosol) and Acetaldehyde Dehydrogenase (in the mitochondria). These both use NAD+ (which is needed for normal metabolism) to do their thing, which leaves us with NADH.

So why is drinking bad for you? Cause it inhibits gluconeogenesis, causes lactic acid build up, and damages your cells (yes, you can handle it and drinking in moderation is fine, but molecularly, it is bad).

Cell Damage: acetaldehyde damages pancreas, brain, liver, and GI tract. It also impairs memory and coordination (obviously, lol), and makes you tired (wow who could have guessed that??). Basically, this compound is the reason you feel like shit. Acetaldehyde is bad for you, but you have to make it to get rid of ethanol. Some people (especially those of Asian descent) don't have enough acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. This causes a build up, so they feel worse and get that nice red face when they drink.

Lactic Acid Build Up: okay so remember all that NADH we made to break down ethanol? It's making us have a bad NADH to NAD+ ratio. We really need that NAD+ to accept an electron and allow us to make ATP (energy). So how can we make more of that? We are going to convert pyruvate (made from breaking down glucose) to lactate. What does lactate cause? LACTIC ACIDOSIS! That is bad.

Inhibition of Gluconeogenesis: do you know what you do when you haven't eaten in a little while? You make glucose (gluconeogenesis). You can make glucose from all kinds of shit, isn't that cool? One of these things is called oxaloacetate. When you have no NAD+, you convert oxaloacetate to malate. You can't make glucose from that. The high NADH to NAD+ ratio also inhibits the gluconeogenesis dehydrogenases needed to make glucose. What I'm getting at here is hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) because you have no usable glucose and you can't make any.

So why is this bad? Well, because you don't have glucose, but your cells are still working (and getting damaged :() you need to give some energy to them to function. This comes in the form of ketone bodies. This is really only an issue for heavy drinkers, but over time and with increased frequency, drinking can lead to ketoacidosis.

But yeah, the reason you feel bad after drinking is mostly due to how toxic acetaldehyde is. That's what causes head ache, nausea, and memory problems (from all the damage it does to those cells). So no, drinking more won't get rid of a hangover, and hair of the dog does not work. Eating food helps though, so you can finally have some glucose to work with.

Now some more notes:

Fatty Liver: this is going to be more prevalent in heavy drinkers, but it happens because you convert DHAP to glycerol-3-phosphate. G3P can combine with fatty acids to make triglycerides, which can go live in the liver and cause hepatosteatosis (fatty liver). This is also bad.

Methanol (CH3OH): this is also called wood alcohol, and can most commonly be drunk via bootleg liquor. Your body uses the same enzymes to break it down, but this time it is making formaldehyde and fomic acid. Fomic acid causes ocular toxicity (aka going blind) and brain damage. So make sure you trust whoever you get your bootleg liquor from, okay?

Ethylene Glycol (OHCH2CH2OH): this is antifreeze. Same enzymes again, but you get glycoaldehyde. This then becomes oxalic acid and glyoxylic acid. These cause lactic acidosis and calcium oxalate formation, which crystalizes in the kidneys, causing renal failure.

Final note: your body can handle drinking, like 1-2 drinks per day. I'm not your mom, so do whatever you want, but at least now you know why you feel like shit as your friends hold your hair back so you can puke in the shitty bar toilet :)

[notbeingnoticed]

Here's an article that illustrates how I get skeptical and don't know how to react to climate change crises promoted in the media.

So... the images are beautiful and striking. There are six of them.

One is fires in California, used to illustrate how climate change is destroying the world through wildfires.

Except that California wildfires are caused by man doing things like sparking power lines or throwing cigarettes out of a car or arson, and the phenomena has been shown not to be related to climate change. (The Tubbs fire, from the images, was caused by faulty electrical equipment). Some will argue that climate change is making the fires worse, but there is far more evidence that poor forest and brush management combined with increased human activity in general (driving around, smoking, using electricity) is responsible for the increased damage and frequency of fires. It also doesn't show the amazing way nature reclaims burned areas. I live in one such place, where the visible remains of a brush fire have basically disappeared over the course of 8 years.

Another is the Aral Sea disappearing. Very visible. Except the article itself admits the sea is disappearing not because of climate change, but because of bad Russian water management and the building of dams to divert the water. Why did they present it as an example of climate change then?

Then we have the iceberg breaking off. OK, this one I don't know about. I do know it is perfectly normal for icebergs to break off, that's how we get them floating around in the ocean. This is a normal process.

But is this one breaking more rapidly or in an unusual manner? Uh... dunno. The article admits that two other ice calving events in the same area were caused by natural forces (i.e. not global warming). So... is this different? I am confused.

Then there's the receding Barnes ice cap on Baffin island. OK, this I can visually see some change and there is some evidence it might be because of global warming. I think. But given the disingenuous items elsewhere in the article my skepticism is kicking in.

Then there's the arctic sea shore receding. They had to look pretty hard for this one, because there doesn't appear to be much overwhelming evidence that the sea has claimed land in other areas of the world, or even other areas of the arctic. In spite of repeated dire and panicked warnings predicting the contrary, the Maldives are fine, Barrow is fine. The article even states this land is eroding due to storms, not being flooded by sea level rise, though the implication and subtle suggestion is that sea level rise is the thing we need to worry about.

So again, I see the earth is changing, but the reasons for it seem to be muddled. The changes are blamed on global warming, except if you look into it in more detail, it turns out... not really? Or only in some cases?

Then there's the image of solar panels being built in the desert. What they don't mention is how many solar power generation plants have failed to produce the desired amount of energy. That happened to a large solar plant in the California desert, where the contracting electric company has cut off their agreement because they aren't getting the promised level of electricity from the solar plant.

It also doesn't mention the huge land space required by these solar power installations, how inefficient they are, and the disruption to the environment that takes place for these space hungry solar electric plants that don't produce nearly enough electricity. (Conservationists in California scream about the impact of the solar power plants).

So from this article I have several takeaways.

First, there is some evidence that some ice caps have been shrinking, and maybe there is some ice shelf breakup due to global warming. There's some Alaskan coastline receding though it's unclear how much of this is due to global warming.

Second, that it is necessary to lie and say that fires and lakes drying up are due to climate change in order to make your point... uh... because there isn't enough evidence otherwise?

And lastly, they want to illustrate what a great thing solar is but in doing so they sort of forget to mention that it chews up huge amounts of space, costs a lot more, harms the environment, and the example used is in the #1 carbon polluting country in the world.

I read articles like this all the time and there is such a mix of truth along with falsehood and disingenuous reporting it makes me question the stuff that looks real and probably is real. If they lie about wildfires, are they lying about the ice caps? If they lie about lakes drying up, are they lying about the reasons why the Larsen C ice shelf broke?

Sure. Climate change is real, the climate has always changed and continues to change. But how much of it is due to man-made global warming and more importantly, what the actual impacts are going to be? I simply don't trust the media. They are hell-bent on presenting an agenda and will cherry-pick facts to support the agenda, not giving a complete and clear picture.

I am certain that some of the things that are reported are accurate and that global warming is happening. But what exactly is going on? I can't tell because I literally can't trust the news any more.

All this produces what I am. Skeptical. Not a denier, not an advocate, just... skeptical.

[kayssweetdreams]

A "Perfect" Vacation Ch 15

Meanwhile, On another part of the Island...

On the beach, Lucy wanted to capture their new environment in the best way she knew: With a painting. She currently was having Cal stand on the beach with a surfboard, in a very...eccentric outfit that combined surfer wear with his love of chess...and there were a lot of checkerprint.

Cal had been standing in his same position for quite a while now, and...he was getting rather hungry, as well as wanted to use the bathroom, but he was willing to wait until Lucy was finished. "Almost done Darling! Just a few more strokes to capture the sunlight...and..." she said as she could feel the inspiration flowing through her. Cal could feel a wave of relief at Lucy's announcement, but that's when he noticed some nearby bushes rustling in the distance.

Lucy, didn't seem to catch on when she let out a gentle but firm "Hold still now Darling. I'm almost finished." However, Cal didn't think he wanted to know what was coming, so in a flash, he grabbed Lucy's arm and pulled them into a nearby bush. The painter gave a cry of surprise before Cal gave a silent shushing motion as two different figures came out...and one of them was a rather grouchy Ka Lā. And next to her was a person that they had never seen before...but something about them spelled bad news.

"What is taking so long?! You said that you found her!" Ka Lā grumbled, her eyes narrowed at the figure "Yes. I did. But then again, you still have yet to convince Thea to sing those songs. Remember that our little experiment only reacts to the right kinds of frequencies. One that is only achieved by a Bruno's voice. And in this case, that voice is Thea Bruno's. You at least managed to get some of our 'guests' to take their bitter pill?" The other figure asked. Ka Lā rolled her eyes "Yes. I luckily managed to get two if them to take that pill...along with the pink haired Brat." She grumbled.

"Well good then. So when it's time for the rehearsal, just have them sit as CLOSELY to Thea as possible when she sings. That way we can see how well the it'll work in other forms as well...as long as we can isolate the subjects. Just remember, We have a deal, and unless you want to return to your...White walled room, you'll get Thea to sing those songs." The figure threatened. Lucy and Cal from their hiding spot could see fear in Ka Lā's eyes...and she seemed to shiver when the figure mentioned a "White Walled Room."

Ka Lā began to throw a tantrum on the beach, and she was very close to where Lucy was painting "Ugh...What a hideous portrait. Who would dare paint this?" She asked, picking it up. "It would belong to the Wong Painter. And I suggest unless you want to face her wrath, like you did from your last encounter with her, you won't lay a finger on it." The figure said. Ka Lā rolled her eyes as she sat it back on the easel and stomped away "Now come along...You have a rehearsal to get to." The figure said.

Cal and Lucy then heard the sounds of leaves and plants rustling and they slowly peeked out to see footprints from the beach going back into the forest. The two of them were visibly shaken by the close encounter, but they couldn't help but be confused by the conversation. They have never met Ka Lā in their entire lives...so why on earth would that figure from before mention a "Past Encounter?" And what kind of pill were they talking about? "Do you think this might be connected with what happened to Eis and Sana?" Lucy asked. Cal couldn't answer.

"I don't know. But I do know we need to tell the others." He said. Lucy nodded, before they could get back out into the sprawling Flora of the jungle, a sharp jab at his neck made him dizzy...but the last thing he saw was another shadowy figure jabbing something into Lucy's neck, as well as something slipping a small pill shaped item into his mouth "Say Aaaah..." The figure said before it all went dark once more...