Pretending like biological sex isn't real is ridiculously stupid. You say that you believe in science but you think that humans are the one primate to not have two sexes?
Also stop using intersex people as pawns, it's actually offensive
a) I'm intersex. what is with tumblr anons and assuming I'm not in a particular group I talk about with experience? Ffs. First ableism now this.
b) Biological sex *isn't* real. It's a model. Much as species aren't real. Yes, there are "two sexes", but sexual characteristics don't form two pillars on either end they form a reverse bell curve, with much variation in the middle.
c) I don't believe in science. I know science. I am a scientist. which means I know it's not as simple as "two sexes" for any organism whatsoever.
nice try.
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Math
Geologist: I do more math than you might think
Chemist: I mean, chemical equations are basically mathematical equations. If you think about it (I also do math math)
Physicist: Oh, yeah, it’s all math but we just handwave it
Mathematician: YOU DO WHAT!?
Quantum Physicist: *regularly does math that is literally beyond human comprehension* *now resides in a higher plane of existence*
Engineer: If I don’t do this math correctly PEOPLE WILL DIE
Military Scientist: If I don’t do this math correctly PEOPLE WILL SURVIVE
Topologist: If I don’t do this math correctly PEOPLE WILL BE MOSTLY UNAFFECTED
Philosopher: But what even IS math, really? No seriously, what is it?
Organic Chemist: I kinda forgot how to do math, to be honest
Biologist: I literally only chose this field so I wouldn’t have to do as much math. I love stamp collecting
Biostatistician: wtf
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SWTD Theory
Still Wakes the Deep has been a huge brainworm for me the past few weeks, so I wanted to make a post with one of my takes. Someone’s probably thought of this already, but I can’t find anything about it, so here I go.
I’m gonna take this time to shout out a little sub theory of mine that plays a bit of a part in my main point.
For a little background, in populations of organisms, there are limiting factors on their growth and spread. Think of it as a series of funnels of different sizes: the rate of liquid that can flow through is going to be determined by the narrowest funnel. For example. if there’s a population that has ample food, space, and whatever else it needs, but has a restricted access to water, that water is going to limit how large that population could grow.
Before the Shape was dug up by the drill, it was probably dormant in the sea bed, doing its best to survive, the same as any other organism. Down where it was dark, wet, and cold, I think it had one main limiting factor: oxygen.
I don’t think the Shape can efficiently exchange gas underwater. Most of the untouched bodies Caz sees are only underwater, where an organism that thrives in air would struggle to access. Once it gets dug up and brought to air with plenty of organic matter to consume and grow with, its population explodes. When a limiting factor is removed, there’s nothing holding the population back any more until they hit a new limit. The Shape’s old limiting factor was removed, and it would only stop reproducing by running out of space to grow on the rig, running out of organic matter to use, or being killed (like, say, in a giant fiery explosion).
(I could go on and on about how the Shape potentially works, please feel free to ask me about it)
Now, I’ll get to my main theory:
I think Caz was dead the whole time.
Now, I don’t mean that in a “the whole game is in his head, none of it was real” way; I mean it in a “this man got Ethan Winters’ed” way.
So, I started to do a little research into how tall oil rigs are to know how far Caz would have fallen off the helipad. I quickly learned there are many types of oil rigs and not every oil rig of the same type is the same size. I’m studying marine biology, not petroleum engineering like my brother, so I got tired of trying to guesstimate how tall the Bierra D’s helipad would be and attacked the problem with some simple math.
Watching a video, I saw he fell for between 4-5 seconds; the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Plugging that in a calculator while not accounting for air resistance to solve for distance gets me ~80-120m, depending on if I used the 4 or 5 second count, so I’ll guess around 100m. I’ve found many conflicting sources on what the tallest heights you can safely fall into water are, but I can safely tell you that 100m is much higher than any of them.
Now, maybe the devs weren’t going with the mathematical exact timing it would take for a guy to fall off an oil rig, and didn’t mean for it to be implied that he fell from THAT high. Still, we can agree he fell from very high up, high enough to have likely ended in injury. Maybe he’d just fall on and break a leg? Maybe an arm or some ribs?
After falling off the rig, the last frame before Caz blacks out shows the water at the top of the screen, meaning he hits the water head-first. He may be wearing a hard hat (that somehow stays on his head through the whole ordeal since he clips his flashlight to it), but he still should have cracked his skull open or broken his neck.
When they pull him out of the water, he’s cold and not breathing, which wouldn’t be unusual for a drowning victim in the North Sea in the dead of winter, but it would usually be a death sentence. They never explain how they dragged Caz out of the water, but it would presumably have taken a long time to get him out, and time is key when dealing with someone who isn’t breathing. The fact that he’s able to cough up water and start breathing on his own is a miracle, since it doesn’t sound like Brodie or Douglas do CPR when they bring him inside.
So, fall damage, head and/or spine injury, drowning, and hypothermia. By several different factors, Caz should be a very, very dead man. So why isn’t he?
My theory is that, somehow, somewhy, the infection from The Shape healed and brought him back to life. We know for a fact it has amazing generative properties, basically able to double, triple, quadruple the amount of tissue and organic matter in the crew’s bodies with no regard for conservation of mass, so what’s just a little regeneration of damaged tissues in a single body? Once Caz’s body gets someplace with better conditions suited to life (inside where it’s warm and there’s air), it just jumpstarts his body functions. The Shape’s presumably been dormant in the seafloor for a long time, so it could be able to go dormant and kinda “come back to life” as conditions change, similar to a tardigrade, and potentially pass this ability onto its hosts.
And Caz mentions how his head hurts a lot, especially when he gets close to the Shape.
Now, this might seem like baseless conjecture, and y’all might say “That’s a good headcanon, but there’s no evidence that The Shape could bring people back to life!” to which I would say “Oh, but there might be!"
After the helicopter on the starboard side, we get a call from Bruce, who is actively drowning. Through his gasps, he tells us that O’Connor hurt his leg and couldn’t swim, presumably drowning. And guess who we see still kicking as we’re passing through the pontoon? My thought is that O’Connor couldn’t swim, drowned, and drifted to the bottom, landing on a part of the shape. Once Caz and Brodie start working in the legs and they drain, it exposes him to air and allows the shape to start growing again, assimilating him and bringing him back to life.
Obviously, he’s not doing as well as Caz is. My thought was that, if Caz died as he was infected, the infection would’ve had to put a lot of its energy into bringing him back, not leaving much for itself to begin assimilating him into the Shape. Since O’Connor was in direct contact with the Shape, it could hook him up to its network to help supplement that loss. Caz, meanwhile, stays as far away from the stuff as he can and doesn’t even get anything to eat all day; guy's running on empty. He has small things where the Shape affects him, like the colors at the edge of his vision, but most of his hallucinations only happen after the Shape attacks him through O’Connor. Before, I’m pretty sure the largest incident (other than when he’s blacked out) is when we can barely hear Suze’s voice over the speakers when moving through the pontoon. It’s really only after getting attacked that he starts to hear her when he’s awake, near the Shape, or over phone calls. He only hears her clearly over the speakers in administration after he runs into the shape many times when he gets swept away in the flooding.
With my main evidence out of the way, I’ll also mention that Caz sees the “light at the end of the tunnel” from the end of the game in the oil flashes when he blacks out.
But hey, that’s just a theory.
A GAME TH- I have received a cease and desist.
Man, this became a long read. Thanks for getting this far, and I hope you enjoyed!
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wait i’m having thoughts about the sallow
so like it fucks with your dna right?? and like that’s why you start growing fish features? so would that make the features a person gets heritable since it’s part of their genome now?
do you think there are younger ppl in founder’s wake that have fish features they inherited from at least one of their parents
what if both parents have different features? would a kid get both or just one? or something new? what are the inheritance patterns on these spontaneous fish mutations? dominant? recessive? any co-dominance or incomplete dominance?
wait maybe it doesn’t affect the gamete genome at all since the changes are introduced later in life, any effect it had on the reproductive system would probably leave a person infertile tbh
i mean eggs are prepped way in advice during development but sperm are produced continuously so maybe they could be a paternal trait? but also since meiosis 2 completes each month then maybe there could be proteins in the cytoplasm of the egg? no wait actually if that was the case then any inherited features would be very subtle or temporary
epigenetic tags are a thing but the sallow induces genetic mutations not just epigenetic changes. unless we secretly still have some vestigial piscine genes hidden somehow in our genome after millions of years of evolution, but that still wouldn’t explain traits that evolved independently
trying to look at fantasy through a STEM perspective gets confusing real fast
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