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alarajrogers · 3 years

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Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

I wrote a thing. It is a very long thing. It probably contains very little information that most people didn’t already know, but it puts it together in a way I’ve never seen it before.

Most of it will be behind the cut but you get the first few paragraphs out here where you can see them.

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Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

So you know how you read all this bullshit about “X improves your energy” and “Y gives you quick energy but then you crash” and “Z improves your metabolism” and it all just sounds like words? Technobabble from the world of science fiction television shows?

It may surprise you to know that practically everything you’ve ever personally observed about energy levels makes sense, as do a lot of the layperson observations you’ve heard in your life, and that there are really good reasons why being sick makes you sleepy and why exercising hard on weekends when you’re a slug all week is bad for you, and that all of this is very understandable from a layperson perspective. Or maybe not, maybe you know all this. I’ve spent years knowing all this, but recently it just dawned on me that it’s all interconnected. All the things I know are pieces of an amazing whole.

So I’m going to explain this revelation I’ve had, and when you read it, my guess is you’ll come away thinking “But I knew all that already… but now I understand how it all works together!”

Metabolism

First, let’s talk about metabolism. What is it?

We usually use the term to mean something like “the speed at which my body does the things I’m not consciously controlling it to do.” Like, “I have a really fast metabolism, so food just runs right through me!” Or “I have a very slow metabolism so I have to be real careful about how much I drink.”

To metabolize means for a living thing to process something it has ingested. Metabolism is usually used to mean the process of converting food and nutrients into energy. Sometimes we use it to mean the levels of efficiency or speed at which a body does this, which is where we get “a fast metabolism”. Here, I’m going to try to use metabolism specifically to mean the process by which your body converts stuff to energy.

Life Energy

No, a vampire from an alien planet can’t suck it out of you, but you really do have life energy! Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive.

The fundamental molecule of life energy, the thing that if it wasn’t there no life processes would be possible because they would not have any energy to work, is a battery called ATP. Its full name, adenosine triphosphate, is a bit of a mouthful, but it basically means that this is a molecule with three phosphorus atoms.

You may have learned in chemistry class, once upon a time, that chemical reactions can be endothermic – they use up energy – or exothermic – they emit energy. Fire is an exothermic reaction; you get it started with heat, usually, but it generates a lot more heat than it took to make it burn in the first place. Your baking soda and vinegar volcano from the science fair a long time ago is also an exothermic reaction. You didn’t put any energy into it to make it bubble like that. On the other hand, melting ice is endothermic. You don’t get any energy when ice melts. It uses up energy to melt.

When ATP releases one of its phosphorus atoms, it becomes ADP – adenosine diphosphate, meaning just two phosphorus atoms! This is an exothermic reaction. ATP turning into ADP is what powers pretty much every single endothermic reaction in your cells. It’s the battery that you run on.

Charging the Battery

Fortunately ADP is rechargeable! An endothermic reaction turns it back into ATP.

The mitochondria do this. You may be thinking, “aren’t they something the lady who wrote A Wrinkle In Time made up?” And you’d be close. The mitochondria appeared in the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door. Madeleine L’Engle didn’t make them up, but she did make up “farandolae”, little creatures in the mitochondria, which don’t exist as far as we know. (Although, if scientists do discover little thingies in the mitochondria that let it do its work, they’ll probably name them farandolae because scientists are big geeks.)

Mitochondria in reality are organelles, components of a cell that do work. They’re independent organelles, which have their own DNA and do all their own reproduction. The only other things we know that work like that are chloroplasts, which are only found in plants… so far. (Personally I think being able to photosynthesize from my skin would be awesome and I am eagerly awaiting the day that genetic engineering allows us to put chloroplasts in human skin, but this isn’t a thing yet.)

Mitochondria combine glucose – a molecule made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, in the formula C6H12O6 – with oxygen, an element that comprises about 22% of our atmosphere, to create carbon dioxide (there’s that di again, meaning two – carbon dioxide is one carbon and two oxygens), water (our old favorite, H2O, sometimes called “dihydrogen monoxide” as a joke about weird chemical names), and enough energy to put a phosphorus atom on a molecule of ADP. Now it’s ATP again! Glucose and oxygen combine in an exothermic reaction.

(Ever wonder why all life on earth depends on the sun? Converting CO2 and H2O into glucose and oxygen is an endothermic reaction. Plants use their chloroplasts to absorb energy from the sun so they can convert CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen. Then animals, like us, eat the plants to get the glucose, and breathe the oxygen. Without the sun, chloroplasts wouldn’t work, plants wouldn’t make glucose, and we’d all starve.)

The Basic Things We Need For This To Work

There are a lot of components going into this system.

The mitochondria need a steady supply of oxygen, but oxygen, being a highly reactive molecule, can’t just float around in the bloodstream like glucose can. (Glucose is iffy too, more on this later.) Hemoglobin, a molecule made with iron, bonds to oxygen and can carry it around safely. Red blood cells are full of hemoglobin. They float in the bloodstream, which goes everywhere in the body. Vitamin B12 is involved in the production of these red blood cells. The bloodstream also carries glucose, but hopefully not too much of it, because glucose is also a reactive molecule and if you have too much, it starts tearing shit up.

The lungs draw in the oxygen that the red blood cells carry, and expel the carbon dioxide. The heart forces the blood to go around and around in this system of blood vessels. The pancreas makes insulin, the hormone that binds up the glucose and regulates how much of it is available in your bloodstream for your cells to take. The speed with which all of this happens can be regulated by thyroid hormone, which requires iodine, and also a working thyroid.

You need all that and a million other things for the system to work perfectly. If the system does not work perfectly, you’re not making as much energy as you could be. That’s pretty obvious.

But here is the thing that’s obvious once you spell it out, and yet, we so often behave, as a society, like we don’t understand it or don’t believe it:

An optimized system still puts out a finite amount of energy at any given time.

If you were in perfect health, right now, you would still have a limited supply of life energy to work with.

We know this. But we behave as if it’s not true. As if we can power through exhaustion with willpower, because being exhausted is a flaw in the system, rather than a really obvious application of the laws of thermodynamics.

What Uses All That Energy?

We also often don’t think about the systems that use those energy, and what they use it for.

The Brain:

The brain is a huge energy hog, using up a whopping 20-25% of all of the body’s energy while awake and conscious (or dreaming – a dreaming mind is as active as a conscious one.) Asleep (but not in REM sleep), the brain still uses about 85% of that, which, lemme do some math here, is 17% if the waking mind was using 20%. A living being can drop to about 50% of that with certain types of anesthesia, but that – the minimum required for a brain to keep a body alive – is still 10% of total energy consumption.

It's not clear how much energy on top of that a very active brain needs. Estimates of how much energy complex and difficult thought consume range from 100 calories a day to 6000! It’s plainly not much on top of basic consciousness, or there’d be no such thing as a fat person doing highly intellectual work all the time, but it’s evident that it’s something.

The Muscles:

We all know about this one. Hard-working muscles use up a lot of energy. How much? Well, swimming, one of the few activities we do that can fully engage the leg muscles and the arm muscles to the same high level at the same time, can burn as much as a quarter of a normal daily intake of calories in a single hour. Most of the time our muscles are not working that hard, but anything more strenuous than vegging out on a couch does burn resources.

The Immune System:

This guy. This guy is the one everyone forgets. The immune system is hard at work all the time protecting you from infections (and, if you’re one of the zillions of people who have allergies or autoimmune disorders, things like cat dander, pollen, and yourself apparently), but when an infection has actually taken hold, the immune system goes into high gear. Most of the responses you experience when you’re sick – nausea, coughing, sneezing, runny or stuffy nose, fever – are actually things the immune system is doing to you to get rid of the infection. Nausea, to expel it through the mouth. Diarrhea, to expel it through the anus. Coughing, to expel it from the lungs, and sneezing, to expel it from the sinus cavities. Mucus, to trap it so it can be expelled. Fever, to kill it, because germs are a lot more sensitive to temperature variation than you, a large multi-celled creature, are. It takes a lot of energy to do all that. Plus there’s white blood cells and T cells and antibodies, all doing their thing.

The Digestive System:

Ever hear the expression “It takes money to make money?” That’s true of life energy as well. The work of moving your food all along the gastrointestinal tract, breaking it down, squeezing and mushing it, making the enzymes to convert it to molecules small enough to get out into the bloodstream, and then pushing the waste out – that’s a lot of effort. There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

The Reproductive System:

Making sperm costs energy. Making a lining for an egg and then expelling it if it’s not used costs energy. Firing up the hormones that cause libido costs energy. And then there’s all the energy burned by the muscles in actually having sex.

Heart and Lungs:

Typically we don’t think of these things as needing a lot of energy because, quite simply, your body’s going to take the energy it needs to run these essential systems whether you want to or not. There’s no re-allocation of baseline energy away from the heart and lungs. But in exercise, when the oxygen demands and the needs of the muscle cells to get more and more fuel increase, the heart and lungs need more energy too.

This is a rough breakdown. You have other systems – we haven’t talked about kidneys and liver and stuff like that – but we’re going to look at these systems in our simplified model.

Everything takes energy. And you have a finite pool of it. Eating more food does not give you more energy – your mitochondria can only work as fast as they can work. If you weren’t at capacity, then yes, food can give you a boost, but it consumes energy first because digestion is work, and if you’re at capacity, any extra calories get stuffed away as fat because extra circulating glucose is bad for you.

By the way, this is why sugar gives you a quick pick-me-up, and should probably be considered a stimulant! Sugar – sucrose, which is basically 2 glucose molecules smushed together, or fructose, which is glucose but in a different shape – supplies your bloodstream with glucose fast, with very little extra work. And it can start doing it in your mouth, because your saliva can break sucrose into glucose and your mucuous membranes can pull glucose into your bloodstream.

But as soon as you start ingesting sugar, your pancreas revs up your insulin production (assuming you don’t have diabetes, or that if you do, it’s type II and not so advanced that you basically don’t have your own insulin anymore.) Insulin, you may recall, is the hormone that keeps circulating glucose levels in your bloodstream down to the levels where the mitochondria can use all of it and there isn’t a lot extra. Extra glucose that nobody is using damages your blood vessels, making them harder and less elastic, which is why circulation problems are a big thing with diabetes, and why my feet are SO FUCKING COLD all winter, not that I’m bitter or anything.

So. You ate sugar, and your body prepared to balance your glucose levels with a lot of insulin. But then all you ate was sugar. You didn’t add fats or proteins or complex carbohydrates in any significant amounts to keep the glucose coming after the initial burst was over. So now you have all this insulin and it went and picked up all the extra glucose and now you know what? Not only is there no extra glucose anymore, there isn’t even enough to keep the home fires burning! Woo, dizzy. Low blood sugar hits the brain hard, because the brain is the energy hog, and feels any dip in energy levels before any other body systems do.

In short, you may have given yourself a quick burst of extra fuel, but in the long run, it may actually make your energy levels drop. And if you ate a substantial meal to go with that quick snack… now we have to send power to the digestive system. And that is why eating more food does not give you more energy unless you’re starving. (Or diabetic, more on this later.)

Energy Trade-offs:

You know the drill. Finite amount of energy. Many systems competing for it. Brain takes the most. So what happens when one system suddenly needs extra?

1. Complex thought shuts down.

I know you’ve experienced this. You’re overtired, or you’ve just done hard exercise, or you have eaten a big meal, or you are sick. You can no longer brain at the levels you expect. Study? Maybe, but retention and comprehension will suuuuck. Math? Probably not. Reading? Depending on how difficult reading in general is for you, maybe this is just the thing, but the topic’s going to be light and easy to comprehend, like fiction, or maybe this article here that you’re reading. Or, maybe reading’s out of the picture. Watching TV? For most people, this is ideal, but if you’re autistic and have an auditory processing disorder and facial recognition issues, hoo boy. Not that I know anybody like that, or anything.

2. Muscles need to be at rest.

Muscles don’t have to move a lot. You could be sitting on a couch. You could be laying in a lawn chair. You’re awake, but you don’t want to move your muscles because it’s hard.

When what you lack to burn your fuel is not glucose, but oxygen, you can get by sometimes. As long as there’s some oxygen. But the byproduct of making energy without enough oxygen is called lactic acid. Which is acid, and it’s in your muscles. Not good! Nobody likes extra acid in places where extra acid shouldn’t be. So your muscles burn. The good news is, the body breaks down lactic acid pretty fast. The bad news is, you may be building it up faster than the body can break it down.

Hard exercise? You’re gonna feel the burn. But you may run into this same problem attempting to walk to the bathroom if you’re very very sick, because all the energy has been re-routed to the immune system, so there’s nothing there for the muscles.

3. Consciousness itself shuts off.

The unconscious brain still consumes a lot of energy, but we’re cutting what we can, and you being conscious is not helping here. Shut down anything we don’t immediately need to use. That includes consciousness.

If you are bleeding out and there’s not enough blood in your body to carry the fuel –

If your blood pressure is low or your heart has stopped working and so the fuel isn’t moving fast enough to where it needs to be –

If your circulating glucose is too low because there’s too much damn insulin –

If there isn’t enough water in the body, so blood pressure drops because blood is mostly water –

If you have a fever, which makes all the chemical reactions in your body go kind of screwy and inefficient –

-- You pass out. You cannot remain conscious because your body has to cut services to keep the whole thing going, and this is how.

Sometimes stupid shit triggers this reaction. Like vasovagal syncope, which can happen from triggers like extreme emotional stress or the sight of blood. Like getting blood drawn (which is probably also vasovagal syncope but seems to have a more physiological basis than some of the other things that can cause it, given that it can occur in people who are absolutely cheerful and fascinated by the fact that blood is leaving their body and not upset about it at all. Not that I would know anything about that, either.)

4. Or, you are highly encouraged to shut down consciousness.

The digestive system is hard at work. There’s no emergency, per se, but this work would get done a lot faster and with less stress if you would just go the fuck to sleep. Thus, “carb coma” or what the cartoon “The Boondocks” called “The Itis.”

The immune system is busting its ass. Things aren’t so serious that you need to pass out. Falling asleep vs. fainting is kind of like shutting down your computer vs. suddenly losing power. You definitely want to go to sleep if the situation is not dire enough to require immediate shutdown of consciousness.

Your body needs to run nightly maintenance. Several systems that operate in low gear when you’re awake need to rev up, and your brain actually needs to do some shit to organize your memories while you’re not recording new ones, and extra energy is needed for the immune system because it’s doing nightly sweeps. Or something like that. We don’t really understand everything that sleep does for us, but we know that if we don’t get it:

- The pancreas doesn’t work right, resulting in getting fat and maybe diabetes

- Also high blood pressure

- Also memories are kind of shit

- Also the immune system doesn’t work too well

We don’t actually know how your brain would operate without sleep if it wasn’t saturated with the “go the fuck to sleep” chemical GABA, which is broken down while you’re sleeping. GABA does a lot of things, but in this context, GABA builds up in your body to send the signal to your brain to stop using so much damn energy and sleep already. And if you attempt to function mentally with high GABA levels… well, you can’t, okay? Your brain is full of GABA receptors that tell it to turn things off. So those things are turning off. How well does your computer run when it's in the middle of shutting down? I thought so.

(Actually we kind of do. There are chemicals that block tiredness. People who use these chemicals can function on significantly less sleep at significantly higher cognitive levels than people who are not on these chemicals. But the stuff like the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the immune system weakening… all that appears to still be happening. Sleep happens for a reason.)

5. Other systems that are highly dependent on energy levels shut down.

- Exercised your ass off? Now your digestive and immune systems have been tamped down because the energy went to your muscles. Eating when the digestive system isn’t working at full capacity results in stomach cramps or nausea. Forcing the digestive system to work when the muscles need maximum energy levels causes muscle cramps. This is why you’re not supposed to go swimming after a big meal – muscle cramps while swimming can kill you.

- Ate a big meal? I bet you are not feeling like having sex right now. Probably also not winning any chess tournaments. And don’t move around too much!

- Feeling sick? Cough, runny nose, sneezing? You’re probably not too hungry. (Especially not when you have a fever. Fevers burn a lot of energy.) You probably do not feel much like having sex. Your muscles ache and you don’t want to move around much. And you are sleepy.

- Feeling randy, baby? You are probably not also feeling hungry.

What Happens When We Game The System?

I briefly mentioned stimulants above – chemicals that artificially reroute energy levels back to the brain, improving concentration and mental acuity, at the expense of everything else.

Well, not literally everything else. Stimulants suppress pain to some slight extent, increase heart rate and blood flow, and make your muscles more eager to do work. Many people report that stimulant use also makes them horny. So those systems are in good shape too. But you know what took a hit? Your digestive system and your immune system. Now, your digestive system… you can feel that immediately. People take stimulants in order to lose weight, sometimes, because they’ll suppress your appetite. Energy rerouting to brain and muscles means the body shuts down digestion. What’s already there will get processed but let’s not add to it, okay?

You did not feel your immune system slow down and weaken. You won’t, today. But maybe tomorrow you’ll get sick. Maybe the day after that.

Oh, but you gotta work, right? The boss won’t tolerate you not coming in. So you stuff yourself full of stimulants – pseudoephedrine, dries up your nose and keeps you awake; caffeine, keeps you focused – and go to work anyway. With energy being forced away from your immune system to keep your brain and your muscles working. That’s not gonna work out well for you, now is it. You wanna pull the military off the front lines to have a parade, when you’re being actively invaded?

Keeping your brain functioning at full capacity, continuing to use your muscles, when you’re sick, will slow your recovery time, because you took the energy away from your immune system to pump it through your brain. Because the amount of energy you can produce is finite, and relatively fixed.

Oh, you can improve some things. Your blood and everything it does, and practically every chemical reaction in your body, is totally dependent on the presence of water, so stay well hydrated. Stock your body well with the vitamins and minerals you need to make all these things function. Are you getting enough oxygen, citizen? Eat food, but with the right balance of carbs and proteins and fats so that your digestive system isn’t overtaxed, you don’t end up with an insulin spike, and you’re not wasting resources. If your system lacked any of these things, then you can improve metabolic efficiency, and your energy levels, by providing them.

But stimulants can’t give you energy. They can make you feel like they did because the energy is going to places where your conscious mind can feel it… but they didn’t increase the amount of energy you have. Resources are being taken away from other areas. Your immune system is taking a serious hit right now. And you can’t feel that, but it’s gonna fuck you up later.

Brains That Have To Work Extra Hard At Basic Stuff

This is a simplified model, but: all brains are full of little modules that do things. And consciousness, ego, is actually pretty bad at most stuff. The little modules that do things are like dedicated co-processors for specific tasks. Spatial processing. Language acquisition. Basic math. Recognizing faces. Managing executive functions.

The neurotypical mind comes with a basic set of things that neurotypicals don’t even realize exist unless they study psychology or spend a lot of time with neurodivergent people, because they all have them. The thing that recognizes faces. The thing that processes sound into speech. The thing that generates speech from thought. The thing that picks up social rules. The thing that can look at letters and figure out easily and quickly how to pronounce them. The thing that tunes in to body language cues. The thing that’s always aware of how loud you’re talking. The thing that enables you to kind of guess how much time has passed. The thing that lets you control what you’re paying attention to. The thing that does basic math.

Many of these little modules need to be trained – language and math and reading don’t suddenly appear in people’s brains, they’re taught – but once trained, the little modules just… do the thing. The person doesn’t have to think about it. They no longer experience any sense of “I’m doing a thing”, it’s just happening.

Not all neurodivergent minds have these things. Many such minds have found a workaround. Use conscious processing power, not black box processing power, because the black box isn’t there, but main cortex is. You can apply intelligence to solve problems like “who is that guy, I know that I know him” and “what are the words those people are saying” and “how do I turn those letters into a sound”. “How do I keep track of how much time I am spending on this?” “How do I make myself do shit that bores me?” We use conscious mind processing power, not the much more efficient black boxes that people aren’t even aware they have.

But what happens when energy is sucked away from the conscious mind, and we’re reduced to vegetating, still awake but without the ability to perform complex thought right now?

If we’re routing skills through the conscious mind, we will lose those skills in proportion to how much we lose the ability to think in general, as energy is drawn away from the brain. And NTs, using the much more efficient black box modules, have no idea that this is even a thing that can happen. It would take far more drastic energy loss for them to lose the work the black boxes do.

Some of us have black boxes that the average NT does not have. I can do complex worldbuilding in my head when I’m so exhausted I can’t talk anymore. There are people who just know the answers to complex arithmetic problems the way most of us just know the answer to 2 times 5. Some people have advanced spatial processing coprocessors that mean they’re almost never lost, because they’re effortlessly creating a map of their surroundings any time they go anywhere, and something in their head is tracking what direction they are in and what turns they’ve made. But some of us do not. Not all of us get a trade, skill for skill. And some of us get black boxes that turn out to be kind of useless. Like, suppose a person more or less effortlessly memorizes the name of every dinosaur ever discovered. Unless they are a paleontologist, when is that going to help?

The important thing to note here is that even a small drop in energy can cause a noticeable drop in an ND’s ability to fake being “normal”, because they are using a less efficient means of computing to perform those skills, and it cuts out on them when energy has to draw down from the brain to go somewhere else.

Spoonies

People with auto-immune disorders are constantly using high levels of energy to do useless and self-destructive shit (not that they want to, but their immune system did not ask first), because their immune system is always on high alert against things like their own nervous system. Overactive immune system consumes energy; body parts taking damage consume energy.

People with cancer or other diseases that lead them to take chemo are burning a lot of energy trying to replenish vital functional cells that the chemo keeps killing. Chemo destroys fast-dividing cells… like white blood cells, and the ones in your mucous membranes, and the ones in your hair follicles. And you can do without hair, but you sort of need your mucous membranes and your white blood cells.

People with fatigue disorders might be suffering from an auto-immune issue, or they might be suffering from a metabolic issue. For instance, low levels of thyroid hormone will cause metabolic processes across the board to slow down, drastically decreasing the available energy.

People with depression might literally actually have a fatigue disorder that manifests in not having enough energy to process serotonin and dopamine correctly. Also, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are brain chemicals that do energy routing, having an effect on what the body is putting energy into. Failures to produce enough of those or at appropriate times, or spending energy breaking them down when you still need them, will screw with the body’s ability to deliver energy to the right places.

Whatever the reason, if you have a disorder that drains your energy… even if that’s all it does, even if it literally has no other symptoms, having something that lowers your available energy for your brain and muscles makes it literally impossible for you to function at the levels you would like to. Like, the same way it is impossible for a Chevy Malibu to go 800 miles on one tank of gas. The available energy is not there. Either it is going someplace stupid that you’d rather it didn’t, or metabolism itself just isn’t working well.

If you are neither a spoonie nor neurodivergent, odds are, your body’s working at a reasonably high level of efficiency already, so you can get a dramatic improvement when you find one of the few things you lack, and you fill that need. Hydrate? (Everything runs on water) Exercise? (Speeds up circulation, and fitness in general will cause your metabolism to be more efficient) Vitamins? (Sure, if you’re missing some, vitamins are real useful.)

But if the problem is, you’re pouring energy into activities society requires you to engage in but your brain cannot do them easily and efficiently, so they cost you a lot more than others; if the problem is, your body is wasting a lot of energy on an immune response to things that shouldn’t need an immune response; if the problem is, there’s a food your body can’t break down, so you’re eating enough to feel full but never getting enough energy from it; if the problem is, your metabolism is lacking something esoteric that almost everyone else has enough of, so it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s missing… exercise and hydration and vitamins will not help. Or, they may help, if you were lacking them, but they won’t fix the problem.

Expecting you to just push through a lack of energy through willpower is a total misunderstanding of how the brain and body work. You cannot do what you don’t have energy to do, and if you route energy to your brain or muscles to accomplish something that requires really pushing yourself, you are taking it away from somewhere else. Probably your immune system. So you’ll get sick. And then you’ll be even more overtaxed.

It’s amazing the degree to which ignorant people think that all bodies literally work the exact same way. (And yet many of these ignoramuses think that people of a different race are somehow completely different from them in some fundamental way. Make it make sense.) What’s even worse is the number of doctors who believe that the only way bodies can malfunction are the ways they happen to know about, so anything outside their experience is fake.

But if you understand how complex the system is and how variable the things that can go wrong with it are, and you understand the role of energy, and energy distribution, in the body, it becomes obvious. You can’t force yourself to do what you don’t have the energy to do without taking it away from somewhere else.

Weight and Energy

There is no question that it’s possible for a human to get to a place where their weight is a severe drain on their energy levels. But very few people are actually there.

Muscle is heavier than fat. But muscle does the work of dragging the weight of a body around. A body with good muscle tone – fat but fit – is in a much better position, in terms of energy production and distribution, than a thin body with weak muscles.

Fat actively helps with energy conservation in the cold. A fit fat person – someone whose musculature is strong and healthy enough that they have no difficulty moving their own weight – has reserves to burn in the event of a disorder that consumes so much energy, it inhibits digestion. (To be honest, so does a weak fat person, but they’re losing energy every time they move because they’re too heavy for their own muscles. But this is true of physical weakness in general.)

Not everyone can be fit! Exercise, if you recall, is one of those things that burns a lot of energy! If you already have very little energy, you’re going to have a very hard time exercising enough to become fit.

All of this is normal. It’s natural. It makes sense. Why would being fat automatically make you less healthy in all situations than someone thin? Being underweight is correlated with a significantly shorter lifespan than being overweight.

I’m Gonna Talk About Diabetes Here

We’re told over and over that there’s a giant health crisis among Americans of increased obesity, and this is causing diabetes.

Bullshit.

Consider this. Diabetes is a disorder where you don’t produce enough insulin, but many Type II diabetics got that way because their body massively overproduced insulin to the point where they wore out their pancreatic cells. Remember when I said insulin takes circulating glucose out of the blood stream and stuffs it somewhere safe? You know where it stuffs it? Fat cells. Doctors have been telling people that being overweight causes diabetes… when we know for a fact that diabetes is caused by insulin resistance, a condition where the cells don’t respond well to insulin, so insulin levels go up, and the body’s ability to produce its own insulin is worn down by heavy overproduction. Do the math. You had high levels of insulin production for years because your cells were resistant to insulin? Insulin stores sugar in fat cells, as fat? Gosh, I wonder if the condition that led to your becoming diabetic happened to be the exact same condition that caused you to get fat!

In a case like that, losing weight wouldn’t do jack shit for your insulin, but changing the way you eat so there’s less circulating sugar in the first place would, and this would cause you to store less in your fat cells, which would cause you to lose weight. But it’s not the weight loss that helped you. You couldn’t solve your problem by cutting calories, because calories didn’t get you into this position. High levels of circulating glucose did. Exercising super hard and going on a diet and actually losing weight – which would be hard, because super high levels of insulin storing all that sugar as fat, and yet your blood sugar is still high because your cells don’t respond to the insulin, but let’s say you pull it off – that does nothing. Maybe you see an improvement in your symptoms because eating very little produces very little circulating blood sugar… though now you’ve got some other symptoms. Namely, no energy. And any improvement you experienced is temporary, because you’re addressing a symptom, not the problem.

Doctors know that insulin stores sugar as fat. Doctors know that diabetic people with Type II generate higher and higher levels of insulin as their body tries to compensate for not responding to it, until finally the cells give up and the patient needs to take artificial insulin. And yet, somehow, we are still hearing “fat causes diabetes, lose weight and you won’t get diabetes!” There’s a disconnect here.

Overclocking

I’m going to talk about something as dangerous as fuck here.

When your body’s natural systems are not regulating your blood sugar, and so you can have greater than normal levels of sugar in your bloodstream… this can make the pie higher.

Remember I said you can’t increase your energy levels by adding more fuel, because the mitochondria can only work as hard as they can work? Well, that’s not completely true. Mitochondria can apparently work harder than that, if they have access to more sugar. It’s just that more sugar is destroying your circulatory system, resulting in damage to your retinas, the nerves in your hands and feet, your ability to regulate the temperature of those extremities, the speed at which you can grow back skin in an injury, and, oh, pretty much everything else.

Get to a certain level of blood sugar and you feel like absolute shit. But in the range between that – higher than you should be but lower than the levels you can actually feel bad in – you have more energy.

This is fucking awful, to be honest. Everyone wants more energy! Energy helps you get shit done! More energy to the brain makes your brain work better.

And you want the sugar. You want the high glucose. You don’t know that’s what you want, but you know you crave sweets and carbs, and when your glucose is high (but not too high), it’s a stimulant. You’re awake, you can focus, your mental energy is good. Cut down the way they tell you that you need to, when you’re diabetic, and now you’re sluggish and depressed.

It’s killing you slowly but not doing it is depressing and hard and the slow death isn’t causing you any significant amount of suffering, until it does, and then it’s too late.

Sugar is a drug and you’re addicted. But it’s food. There are no regulations to protect you from eating all the food you want. There is no social opprobrium in general against sweet foods or carb-high snacks. (If you are fat you might suffer from this, but thin people are allowed to eat whatever the fuck they want, and honestly if you’re fat you will probably catch shit for eating a nice big steak, which is a lot better for you if you’re diabetic than a piece of toast.)

You’re overclocking your brain, the same way gamers overclock their PCs to get higher performance. Except that when they melt their CPU they can just buy a new one. You are not buying a new brain anytime soon.

I Am Not A Doctor

I didn’t go to medical school. I did study biology at the graduate school level, but no medical degree.

But everything I’m saying is backed up by pretty much any source I look at. It’s just that the conclusions that I’m drawing, while they are logical outgrowths of the things I’m saying, are for some mysterious reason not the conclusion that people who go to medical school are drawing.

Bodies are all different. Bodies are very complicated with many interlocking systems. Many, many things can go wrong with bodies. Far more things than science is fully aware of yet. Therefore it makes perfect sense that if someone is tired all the time for no good reason, there is a good reason and we just don’t know what it is. If someone can’t easily do a thing another person can do, that is absolutely normal and expected, unless that other thing is something that falls into a range that most humans can easily do. Then all of a sudden it becomes impossible to imagine that a human couldn’t do it? Bullshit. We don’t understand the brain perfectly.

It is absolutely normal that when a person’s energy levels are high, they have the resources to accomplish things they cannot do when their resources are low. The notion that if you’re disabled, there’s a thing you can’t do and you can never do it and that is the way it has to be, is nonsensical. Yes, of course some people are disabled in that way. If you have no legs, then no matter how much energy you have, you will never have legs. But you might be a lot better able to tolerate uncomfortable prosthetics when your energy levels are high.

“If you could do it today then why couldn’t you do it yesterday?” I don’t know, Karen, why couldn’t you vacuum your carpet after you’d been working all day, when you were pushing that vacuum around with no trouble last weekend? People can accomplish more when they have more energy. Doing things consumes energy. Once your energy is consumed, the fact that it can only replenish at a finite rate means you have to wait to get more. While you’re waiting, you can’t do stuff, because stuff takes energy, that you don’t have, because you used it up on other stuff. What part of this is unclear?

Being fat is a symptom of underlying conditions in most of the diseases that it’s correlated with. It’s not that being fat is unhealthy, like losing weight would make you healthy again; it’s that it is a symptom of your disorder that shows up before the more definitive symptoms do. It is possible to improve your health by exercising and changing what you eat, and sometimes, this may result in weight loss, but it wasn’t the weight loss that improved your health. It was becoming fitter (more muscle) and eating stuff that isn’t poisoning you because some of your metabolic pathways don’t work. If you don’t lose weight, you may still be getting healthier.

(I suspect it’s actually true that being fat will damage your joints. You’re putting more of a load on them, so it makes logical sense. What doesn’t make sense is to say that being fat causes diabetes and high blood pressure when we know for a fact that overly high levels of insulin cause both being fat and diabetic, and overly high levels of blood sugar cause high blood pressure, heart disease, and general circulation problems, so. Um. All of these things come from insulin resistance? That is the problem? Not the weight, that’s a symptom?)

And sometimes, sugar is an addictive drug. If you’re feeling self-satisfied because you’re not an alcoholic, and you don’t smoke, and you’ve never taken an illegal drug, but you can’t do without your blueberry muffin in the morning and your ice cream after dinner… stop feeling superior to people addicted to illegal substances or well-known vices. The only difference between them and you is that you got addicted to a substance that will kill you but that is safe for most people, and because it improves your mood and your productivity, capitalism is more than happy to let you indulge it until you drop dead.

#alara original post #alara original writing #stand back i'm gonna try science

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randomslasher · 4 years

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Janus and thermoregulation

I want to have a conversation about Janus and his half-snake nature, specifically as it pertains to the way he regulates his internal temperature. Geek time!

I’ve seen a lot of fics refer to him as either cold-blooded or ‘partially cold-blooded,’ but that doesn’t actually narrow it down. There ARE forms of regulation of temperature that fall between exothermic (cold-blooded) and endothermic (warm-blooded) but they seem to function differently and I’m just fascinated to wonder which one Janus would be!

One possibility is Janus is mesothermic--ie that he uses a combination of metabolic and environmental strategies to regulate his temperature. In this case I believe he’d still be a poikilotherm--an animal whose body temperature isn’t necessarily always constant (like snakes). Most cold-blooded animals (exothermic) are poikilotherms, since they basically rely on their environment for their temperature and can function at a wider range of them (which is why they’re sluggish in cooler temperatures).

Another possibility is Janus is heterothermic--he can switch back and forth between poikilothermic and homeothermic strategies of temperature regulation. (Homeothermic means ‘maintaining a constant body temperature’ and is what most endothermic--ie warm blooded--animals do). This would be like hummingbirds, bats, and squirrels: he would basically function at a high metabolic rate when active but would essentially hibernate at night, letting his body temperature drop to preserve metabolic function and entering a state of ‘torpor.’ (Hummingbirds have to do this because if they didn’t, their insanely high metabolism would literally cause them to starve to death before morning).

So we have a couple of options! I mean we can also just wavy-hands whatever we want since he’s a figment of the imagination, but I think it’s super cool to look at some of the possible ways he might regulate his own temperatures. I like mesothermic myself because it gives us a cool option to both wrap him in blankets (metabolic strategies mean that blankets actually WOULD help, since he does generate some of his own heat) AND plunk him under heat lamps to help him stay warm. Of course, if you want whump about him suffering at colder temperatures you’d want him to be homeothermic rather than poikilothermic because a poikilothermic creature would just...slow down in cold, but it wouldn’t harm them unless things got hecking extreme? (Of course THAT could also be interesting...everyone else is warm blooded, entering hypothermia, but Janus can still function and has to save everyone, but is slowing down because temperatures low...hmmm). If he’s homeothermic, though, then he’d not only need extra help regulating his temperature but could also be in real trouble if his temperature got too low?

Anyway idk, just some random thoughts and musings after a bit of google searching on body temperature regulation!

Thoughts?? Especially if you know anything about this stuff, I know virtually nothing and it probably shows here, I just get super geeky excited when there’s something new to learn about.

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fictionalplagueproductions · 4 years

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If The World Was Ending

Part 3 - You’d Come Over, Right?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Story Summary: Gavin is on the hunt for his missing android when the U.S. Government announces the end of the world. The end of his world. A world without his precious Nines.

Chapter Summary: Gavin’s search comes to a heartbreaking discovery and he must now decide what he is willing to lose in order to keep what he has gained.

Pairing: Reed900 (RK900 x Gavin Reed)

Rating: Explicit (NSFW)

A/N: Sorry for the long wait! I know I should be appreciative because I have two jobs that are considered essential during this pandemic which offer great hours and CAT pay, but I feel like a lifeless workaholic rn with school finals in a literal week. Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well during these difficult times. If anyone is interested, I do take requests for one-shots (especially Reed900) for many fandoms. Just PM and I’ll see what I can do. Also, if you have never heard of Detroit Evolution and you ship Reed900, check it out! It’s a 75-minute fan film dedicated to the ship and I HIGHLY recommend it (gif is an actual scene from the film). Cuteness overload. Lastly, I am considering making an actual Reed900 one-shot based on another song. You can check out my work on AO3 or Fanfiction.net! Enjoy!

“Do you have any fucking idea what I’ve been through today?”

The swollen, tear-streaked cheeks on his lover’s face gave Nines a clue.

“I searched for you for hours! You couldn’t have sent me a goddamn text?”

Nines wished communication had been possible. Cyberlife would have tapped his servers within a heartbeat and tracked him down, leaving Gavin’s apartment a mess in the aftermath.

“I even found Connor still blubbering around. He told me about your stupid, little plan.” The pitiful man tugged at his hair mangled in distraught. “What happened to all those times you wouldn’t shut up about androids being superior? What the fuck were you thinking?”

Guilt struck Nines.

He thought it unlikely that Gavin would even bother searching Anderson’s home after the front the lieutenant had elected to put up for their safety. He thought it even more unlikely that Connor, a machine developed for the comfort of his human counterparts, would reveal Nines’ heartbreaking arrangement.

“I…I thought you were dead.”

He almost had been.

Nines’ original intention was to spare his android brother from the inevitable fatality of his species. Two RKs could not exist with the same familiar face. The humans would eventually notice, regardless if they had both relocated halfway across the world and scalped themselves of their LEDs. Even if their charades were believed, Nines was android through and through. Why should he be forced to pretend he was something he was not? No, Connor was more human than himself. He was the one who deserved to make it in this carbon-ruled world.

Gavin’s definitive words came out a dying whisper: “I thought you had left me.”

A churning sensation swirled Nines’ insides as he watched the broken man stumble before him. Sincerity was not an emotion he needed to readily practice, as he did not lie often, but he found even himself feeling rejected by his own words. “I’m here now.”

The response was simple, vague enough to dodge and nullify all of Gavin’s worries.

It wasn’t enough.

He stepped forward towards his human who now leaned heavily into the back of the couch, grimacing in fear of an image invisible to Nines. It cracked the straight face he had framed over his growing trepidation. “I’m here,” he repeated breathlessly.

Gavin seemed to fumble out of his terror, tearing a sharp inhale through his shuddering body and eventually allowing Nines to view his beaten soul through grieving lenses. Words would not suffice this time. It was one of the few moments that it clicked for Nines that words were just not enough.

Humans were such delicate creatures at times – his even moreso. The psychological issues he wielded piled into a mountain of stress-induced rage and caffeine-fueled insecurities. Just a little search through his social media lit up the diagnostic centers of Nines’ CPU in an array of colors far more paramount than the human eye could even begin to elucidate.

But as much as he could prove the dishevelment of his partner and all of humanity, neither could he deny his own deviant chaos rampaging indecision and hesitance in his day-to-day actions. He was slower now, more volatile to his environment, and almost no more could he distinguish subjective constructs now than over his previous machine-like state. He was truly living, as the humans often said, “the worst of both worlds”.

Nines was just as broken as Gavin in his own fashion. Except, despite it all, Gavin mended him in such indescribable complementing ways that none of it mattered.

The android clicked one foot forward, asking silently for permission to embrace him. It still surprised him to this day that there were ways of communicating with just a lift of the finger, but only with others one knew well. And Gavin, he could read like a book.

When Gavin released his clenched eyebrows from their angered posture, Nines presumed the reciprocal. Their “chemistry” had been undisturbed by his absence. He made haste in closing the distance, grappling needily onto the life-form already unfolding beneath him. Hands clenched into balls of fabric against his back and Nines melted under the sticky mess that clung to his neck.

Rarely did Gavin cry, but this time around, a waterfall had already begun to soak the top seam of his t-shirt.

The ability to cry was lost upon Nines. Sadness overwhelmed him, understanding the hurt his human had endured, but unsure if he even equipped tear ducts to perform such an action. Feeling pain was one thing; expressing it was entirely new. The quaking beneath him, nonetheless, wrenched at his thirium pump, and he so desperately wished to quake with his lover.

Eventually, Gavin ceased and unceremoniously dug his fingers through Nines’ hair and pressed their noses side-by-side. His eyes were glued shut as he pressed his wet cheeks against his android. The soggy touch was like velcro against Nines and he chased that feeling of a sobbing solace.

The android copied his partner’s actions and clutched his palms to either side of his head, smearing Gavin’s tear-stained face against his own and absorbing the physical exudations of emotion. The wet heat was so raw on his synthetic skin that Nines didn’t think when it retracted on contact, leaving his pearly plastic to glimmer under the tainted blue water that began to leak from the corners of his eyes. At first, it wasn’t much, trailing faint streaks of cyan behind the aqueous movements. But when Gavin realized the heart-wrenching moan that escaped Nines, he looked to him with such a mixture of pain and clemency that provoked a heavier round of blue artillery.

The android’s face became a painting illustrated by nothing more than his fear and affections to which Gavin happily contributed his own sultry paintbrush.

The resolve came quick for Gavin, and he tentatively watched Nines recollect his own bearings. “I’m sorry, I-”

“Shut the fuck up,” snapped Gavin, though no cruelty met his tone. “You’re okay. You’re okay?”

His android nodded, relishing in the bath that carried away his burgeoning emotions. Gavin held their faces still together, touching his lips stiffly against Nines. He had intended for nothing more than to be replenished by the idea of his lover existing within his grasp once again, but Nines seemed to bite in excess. The android’s tongue slipped between Gavin’s teeth, releasing a burst of iron from his ingested robot tears, and let it run rampant within his mouth.

The kiss wasn’t enough for Nines to convince his partner how much he missed him. He yielded his tongue from Gavin’s taste buds and lapped up the tears along his cheeks, sampling the crystallizing sodium and nibbling down his jawline.

Gavin moaned beneath him, his shockwave of dread dissipating into unhinged eroticism. If he had learned anything from years of failed relationships, it was that emotional turmoil made sex all the better.

The excitement incited within Gavin’s pounding chest turned arrhythmic when his android lifted him into his arms, shoving him against the wall behind him, and pushing into him with the testosterone of a bull. After enduring months of awkwardly finding their way around each other, it was an understatement to say that Gavin was surprised by Nines’ newfound wanton initiative.

Surprised, certainly, but not in the slightest disappointed.

He returned the actions tenfold, forcing their mouths to dance and recklessly tearing at the jacket that restricted his eyes from the beauty of his boyfriend’s bare chest. Nines let go of Gavin, using the wall to balance him against his groin, and tossed his jacket and turtleneck in one swift motion across the couch. The android’s own impatience erupted under a low grumble as he dropped Gavin onto the couch and clambered over top of him, shoving his human’s arms in the air to slip his tee off.

Nines worshipped the skin-to-skin contact. Since activation, he had come to cherish the vivid sensations of heat. Against his endothermic mammalian body, Nines soaked in the warmth that radiated from Gavin; against the words from his boyfriend that endeared him so heavily, he intoxicated his insides in benevolent wildfire. At times, he feared he would melt.

Melting was a fair price to experience the touch of fire.

And fire was what blazed within him as he felt his new component roar to life. It was even more pleasing to watch Gavin’s eyes stretch in wonder as he realized that his hardening member would no longer be grinding alone. Nines, though he tried maintaining his dominant pose, fell victim to the gasps that his lover relinquished underneath the length that overpowered his inferior, human phenotype.

Nines’ nibbling grew into starved bites, sinking lower and lower below his human’s neck. Despite the red blood that pulsed beneath his skin, shades of purple surfaced in splotches beneath the android’s teeth. They eventually created a trail to his waistband, his tongue dipping deep beneath the surface to test the waters. Gavin hummed in permissiveness. Nines palmed between his lover’s legs, unbuttoning his jeans and sheltering the member that popcorned into plaid boxers over his salivating tongue He kept his palate suctioned tightly around the tip of his cock, dampening the fabric and earning a playful tug at his bowed locks.

The soft moans his lover made set fire to Nines’ steadily growing impatience and he pulled the fabric barriers down to Gavin’s knees and inhaled the hardened flesh down to his throat. An unanticipated upward thrust pushed his cock even further and Nines indulged hungrily. Pre-cum was already dribbling onto his taste receptors and he craved to know what damages an entire mouthful would cause to his system.

His curiosities would have to be satiated at a later date, because Gavin – at his most human – demanded his own impatience be tended to. He clung to the android’s synthetic hair and pulled him up to his abandoned orifice. With as much brash force as he could manage, the human kicked off the rest of his clothing, slipping restless fingers under Nines’ own jeans, and winced as the android bucked under the feeling, pinching his dick under the metal zipper. Immediately upon impact, Nines lifted up from Gavin to prevent any more harm, but it only offered Gavin the leverage to shove what little clothing remained between their unappeased debauchery, and eyeing the massive cock that his lover had chosen for himself.

For a moment, he was breathless, apprehensive of the image set before him. Though Nines had not been his first gay sexual encounter, he had certainly never dated a man that could compete against Detroit’s Largest Bratwurst contest.

Nines could feel his stare. “Is it…satisfactory?”

Gavin could only grin his answer. “Ready to take it for a spin?”

Without waiting for a response, Gavin slid down the couch underneath his virgin boyfriend and placed a moist tongue against the skin beneath his tightly-clung balls. He flicked his tongue teasingly against the hairless strip before engulfing a single sac into his mouth and lightly sucking. Nines gave out, falling to all fours and gasping at the strange sensation.

The man wished he could see Nines’ face. He might be a machine built with bells and whistles that only ever sported the most aggressive resting bitch face, but the noises his lover made now were enough to make his own groin boil with pure bliss. Faint robotic mimics of pleasure raced across Gavin’s imagination and he rewarded the plausible responses by licking up the underside of his dick and kissing the soft flesh that fit like a gagball in his mouth. There was something so satisfying about bringing a hard-ass like Nines down to his knees; about having a hard-ass like Nines allowing Gavin to show him the true pleasures of humanity.

Nines hadn’t minded in the slightest. Deviancy had graced him with minimal traces of pride and did as he pleased regardless of what others thought of it. And although Gavin did not share these same traits, Nines was contented, nonetheless, to understand firsthand what tonsils felt like in their natural habitat. The android hadn’t been interrupted by his visual software windows often, but the way his lover hummed along his new member made the pop-ups block everything in sight, turning the world red in a flurry of error messages.

He had lost a good portion of his reserve amounts of thirium from the tears that he had been surprised to relinquish earlier. Now his CPU was requesting permission to tap into his main supply of bodily thirium already coursing through his plastic arteries. He struggled with the proper demand, desiring to feel immense waves of pleasure built contingently upon Gavin’s persistent tonguing, but ultimately he had to decline. He wasn’t sure how much thirium would be released; if there was too much that prevented his function, they were no longer living in times that Gavin could just meander into the nearest convenience store to pick up a bottle of “Blueberry Go-Go”.

Another error message interrupted the magnificent view of his lover choking below him. He was overheating.

Nines ripped away from Gavin, heaving under the frustration of his pulsating, wet cock. A familiar look of hurt flickered in his boyfriend’s eyes, but Nines was quick to place two reassuring hands on his shoulders. “I can’t absolve myself. I would be wasting my thirium…”

Gavin piped in with a pleading tone, “I have plenty.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I stocked up on some last week after…” Gavin blushed, moving to touch his lover’s face. “…you know.”

The android’s first instinct was to feel relief, wanting to continue their relations and experience the sweet pleasure of a human orgasm. Then, a lighthearted afterthought pushed against his vivacious libido. “You were looking forward to doing this again?”

“Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Gavin, realizing the sweet-bitten look his boyfriend infected him with., “I bought you your blue juice. I guess it worked out pretty well considering the circumstances. Do you want to stop? It might be harder to-”

Nines answered his boyfriend by shoving him back into his subordinate position and breaking the skin of his luscious lips between his teeth. He dug claws into Gavin’s hips and gripped them like reins, grinding his monstrous dick against one that dwarfed in comparison.

Gavin, for once, didn’t mind being as small as he was, internally begging to feel Nines’ throbbing cock against his tight hole. Nines read his mind, dropping Gavin completely and demanding him to “suck me” with a cutting stare that made him indubitably obey.

When the android was dripping in saliva once again, he bent over to suck off the warm member below him, dipping to Gavin’s leveled waist and twirling his cock underneath the loose sack that melted over top of him. The android tested the feeling, appreciating the damp nook that his lover exposed to him, waiting for an objection. When none came, he pushed slowly into the puckered hole, staring blankly into the squirming man below him, though desperately trying not to break the dominant persona that had overtaken him.

It took milliseconds for the error messages to pop up once more, but Nines ignored them for the time being. He wanted to watch the pleasure melt into his lover’s eyes as he sunk deeper into the ever-tightening walls. When he thought the moans couldn’t draw out any longer, he extracted himself up to his tip, desiring to hear Gavin’s pleas. The man did not satisfy this desire, automatically slamming his naked ass over the android’s cock and ripping a glass-shattering moan that involuntarily sprung red alerts across his ocular view. If he did not accept to its terms, it would override his own demands, but he was not ready.

No, he wasn’t ready to –

Gavin curled his legs around his waist and clung fervently, grinding wantonly against his biocomponent. Suddenly, the alerts began to flicker statically, and Nines erupted without caution. He growled against his lover’s gasps, indiscriminately nipping at his cheek and shaking under the pulses that charged heavy projectiles into the dark cave of his pleasure.

This only seemed to provoke Gavin’s excitement further, intriguingly enough to Nine’s observations. He slapped harder against the android, thrusting his cock upwards into the heated skin above him and relishing in the liquid that squirted from his ass under each solid movement. When Nines regained some of his strength, he forced himself onto his elbows and enjoyed the unveiled show of his boyfriend climaxing around him.

A flash of anger appeared on Gavin’s face before he made a corporeal demand by guiding the android’s hand over his loaded member. Nines understood almost immediately, sitting up straight and stroking promptly the small dick in his firm grasp.

The man’s waist followed Nines’ towering movements, suddenly coming to touch his sweet spot and focusing his movements on that single area. The android glared down at him expectantly. Did he know how hot he looked when he acted so serious? Gavin assumed he did when he began to buck against him, digging straight into the spot that made his vocal cords weak. The fire in his ass consumed his entire being, releasing audible spasms throughout his body that coated his chest in a familiar sticky substance.

Nines continued to stroke him even after, unbelieving of the pleasurable writhing of which his lover was capable. Gavin had to clench onto the android’s wrist to stop the movements, needing to relax against the frigid state he had experienced for probably too long. He slid off of his boyfriend’s cock, relieving a sigh, and then a sad moan when a loneliness settled within his emptied hole.

“I don’t think I could ever go back.” The look on the android’s face was incredulous as he sat back on his heels.

“Go back to what?”

“Being a machine,” said Nines. “I love you. I love… being with you. I’m not human, but I can’t be… I can’t be a machine.”

Gavin hushed him, only rising to pull his lover into the cushions beside of himself. He pressed his lips gently against Nines, wrapping his body wet from any and all bodily fluids around his and nestling his face into his chest. “You don’t have to worry about what you are. You’re you. That’s all that matters.”

Though Gavin was unable to see the realization that crossed Nines’ expression, the android smiled and hugged his human tighter. All this time, he had been obsessed with labeling himself into either box. He hadn’t stopped to consider that he was just him. Nines was a sentient being that loved working as a detective, that loved beating people at chess, and that loved this man. Nines was Nines.

Why should he deserve less than others to live this life he was granted? Even if he was granted this life in non-traditional ways.

Yes, Nines smiled. He was not human, but he was himself. As he was Gavin’s.

He looked to the unknowingly wise man beneath him and kissed the sweat-stuck bangs along his forehead.

“I love you,” breathed Gavin. His tone was rigidly quiet, signaling the beginning stages of a drifting sleep.

Nines’ smile grew broader. “I love you,” he whispered back, slipping the blanket that hung over the back of the couch over their sleeping forms. “You won’t ever lose me.”

The End? You Decide.

The next morning, Gavin awoke to daylight seeping through the window shades, a pillow crushed between his arms. The body that had entered the darkness with him did not greet him on the other side.

Stumbling to his feet, the gruff man eyed the open floor plan, pacing down the hallway when Nines had not appeared in his view. Hints of panic began to travel through his veins upon the inspection of an empty bedroom. Then, with one last desperate pounce at the bathroom door, immense terror struck Gavin when the site was void. Immediately, Gavin fisted a washcloth over his dick uncleaned from the night before and threw on a pair of boxers crumpled on the tiled floor.

As his fingers wrapped around the doorknob, a red reflection caught his eye in the mirror, and he stopped. The source was circular, pulsing in a dying light of slow movements amongst the mess of toiletries. At the same moment, his front door clicked open and he engaged the guilty suspect in the living room with his respective organ laid in-hand.

“What the fuck were you doing? And what the fuck is this?”

Nines was dressed in one of Gavin’s maroon sweatshirts but wore the same black jeans (assuming he probably could not squeeze into a pair of his).

“I can’t be android anymore. I needed to rid myself of it if I were to ever have a chance of not being spotted. I’m sorry, I know I must have worried you.” The android shifted uncomfortably beneath Gavin’s scowl. “I needed to see Connor and the Lieutenant one last time.”

“What do you mean ‘one last time’?”

Nines visibly dropped. “I can’t stay in Detroit, Gavin. Neither can Connor. I thought you knew that?”

Gavin hadn’t thought of it. He had been too busy trying to find his boyfriend and later trying to convince himself that his boyfriend was still in existence and not some illusion. After that… he had no clue what the plan was. Perhaps, to just continue enjoying a love he had thought he lost.

“I love you,” continued Nines when Gavin had not. “If moving is too much, then I cannot force you to go. But, if I may add, my life is empty without my purpose as a detective; and it is also selfish to keep when it could imperil Connor’s safety. You are why I could not yet exterminate myself, Gavin. You were my first and last thought before stepping into one of those camps. If you say goodbye today, then I will understand, but please, I beg you to reconsider.”

Speechlessness was a rare condition for Gavin. His hand went slack, and he gaped with consternation, letting the LED clunk to the floor. From the first moment he had opened his eyes to this disgusting world, he had been a sour man. Although there were a few hidden gems, none of them compared to the way Nines had made him feel: so important, so loved. Could he really give that up to return to his life of android discrimination? For years, he despised their very being, hoping for the government to come to the consensus that they had finally arrived to. But now was different, now he was hopelessly in love with an android. An android built incapable of love who was now inconceivably begging for Gavin to stay. Was there even a level of shitty that existed within him to say no?

Despite the severity of the situation, Nines did not express a distinguishable emotion. His intense stare locked onto Gavin, nearly piercing straight through him into the void that was preparing for denial. The irony was not lost upon him, realizing that it was the android just last night promising he would never leave the despondent man; the tables were turned now. Gavin could provide it for him, it was not impossible to uproot his life and start fresh elsewhere.

Did he even have that much to lose? His still vocal cords told him he did.

For as much as Gavin hated many things, he would miss the familiarity of the DPD. He would miss the break room’s horrible coffee and fucking with Anderson on a daily. He would miss going on lunches to random places that Tina suggested and spitting out whatever dish she forced down his throat. He would even miss his damned broken chair that never stayed at the right height long enough for him to type up a single report. Yeah, as much as he hated a lot of it, he would miss this life.

But the pain that ripped through his chest when he realized Nines could have been gone forever… it was an unmistakably violent feeling he wouldn’t elect for anyone else to experience. The sheer rawness of his insides tortured his mind to the extent of self-harm. He would never admit to it, not even to himself, but the state of his existence was a questionable case had Nines not confronted him in his own apartment last night. A future without Nines was…indisputable.

That didn’t make the prospect of the change less difficult.

The befuddled man turned away and traveled to the far window, capturing a glance at the skyscrapers framed by the sill in his living room. Then, he turned, crossing his arms and meeting Nines’ line of sight. “Can we just enjoy one day without it all? No politics, no moving, no dumbass decisions like scalping your LED and putting yourself in danger. Just – one – day?”

The floor became a source of answers for Nines when it was made obvious that he did not care for his boyfriend’s. Without another word, the android joined Gavin by the window and folded him into his arms. Neither were unsure how long they could last there without discussing this emphatic problem, but neither wanted to know. And so they stood quietly in each other’s presence; Nines listening to the light breaths of his lover, and Gavin melting into the thrums of his android’s thirium pump.

Nines pressed his palm into Gavin’s tangled hair, inhaling his oily effervescence, and pressing his lips to the side of his temple. The man relaxed into his chest and smiled.

If the world ended right now, all their fears of their future would be completely irrelevant. There would be no reason Nines would have to decide whether life was worth living if Gavin denied him, nor would there be reason for Gavin to worry about leaving his old life behind.

If the world ended, there would be no reason for them to even say goodbye. They would be as they were, encompassing one another and riding out their affections until their beating organs failed.

Nines watched the outside world while he felt his lover inversely lose himself from it. They held each for what felt like hours. They held each other as the clouds passed from one corner of the window to the next.

They held each other and Nines watched coolly as the blue skies were shielded with roaring oranges that blocked out the sun.

They held each other until Nines could feel the ground tremble and he shushed his slumbering human back into his chest.

They held each other until Gavin inhaled a finalized breath, never to be proceeded by a relinquishing exhale.

Nines held on until his own systems depleted and he could no longer hold.

“I love you.”

#reed900 #dbh #detroitbecomehuman #900reed #gavin reed #rk900 #nines #nines x gavin reed #gavin reed x nines #rk900 x gavin reed #gavin reed x rk900 #gavcon #dbh fanfiction #dbh ff #reed900 fanfic

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lalinscursetheories · 5 years

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Theory File 17 (mini file), reptile facts!

This particular fact regards Cody’s unusual meal requirements.

Some species of reptile can go months without eating, this is largely due to their ectothermia (being cold blooded)

Because they draw heat from the environment to drive their metabolism and do not just require food like endotherms (warm blooded creatures), they can go longer spaces of time between meals.

This probably means that Cody, and other reptilians don’t need to be constantly consuming humans on a daily basis. If a reptilian is hunting humans often, it is likely because they enjoy the rewards of the hunting and killing process (AKA humans are tasty)

...........................................................................................................................,

thanks for reading! If anyone’s got questions on reptilians or any other supernatural entity/phenomena, i’d be happy to try and answer them :)

Also, i’m thinking of leaving the submitted theories as just answering and posting them, since most the theories submitted provide enough detail to substantiate themselves. But if I find one that needs more digging that’s when i’ll look into it, it’d also be a lot easier on my schedule that way, haha.

#cody lozano blasco #cody lalin's curse #beanpole Lalin's curse #Kris Lalín's curse #marshmallow Lalin's curse #lalin’s curse #lalin's curse theories #reptilians #reptiloid #reptoid #reptilian facts #aliens #alien #alien facts #lalin's shenanigans

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sindumpster · 4 years

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If you don't mind refreshing my idiot brain's memory hole, what's a pseudo-mammal again? I remembered the term but not the rest of what you said before reeeeeeee

It was in context with my dragons, and tbh I’m kinda realizing now it’s a pretty dated possibly wrong term so internet does not give you a lot of sources for it (or the sources aren’t what I’m referring to). But in biology and math, when “pseudo” is tied to a word, it usually means “partial” (or sometimes “incomplete”), and for a “pseudo-mammal” it’s referring to an animal that is “partially” a mammal. They have some traits of a mammal, but there are also things mixed in that don’t match what you’d see with mammals (like say they had feathers, or a beak, or were cold blooded despite having fur and live birth--basically muddled and mixed traits but some of it is very mammal-like).

Like I borrowed the term from old-ass sources where it was used to refer to the evolution process of mammals, cuz they didn’t just pop up fully evolved and ready to go. It took a long time for something recognizable as a “mammal” to appear, and before that you had animals that were kinda...mixed. Though very much also considered their own thing, calling them “in-between” forms of reptiles and mammals is a dated classification, but I digress.

[[And also this next part is just me going off on my fantasy science bullshit so feel free to skip to the next dashed line if it makes no sense. Partly writing it for myself just cuz I have an excuse to lmao]]

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So for reference, mammals essentially evolved from reptiles, specifically Synapsids (like this guy that might look familiar which gave rise to Therapsids (which gave you these guys: 1 and 2) around 250-200 million years ago which gave you Cynodonts (predecessor to the mammals that evolved along dinosaurs, they’re late Therapsids). Thing with evolution though is that all those traits you associate with a modern day animal don’t suddenly pop up at once, instead those traits evolve in a “mosaic”. So like slowly placing pieces for a mosaic, through evolution those ancestral animals slowly gained different parts of the picture at different times. So esp with the Therapsid examples, you can kinda see some parts look more like a mammal, and some that seem more like a reptile, and it was not a rapid change.

With my dragons, the idea was that, evolutionarily, they hit that morphing stage between reptiles and mammals and decided that worked well enough for them, and shot off into a new branch from there. Maybe there was some unforeseen advantage with keeping it, maybe they needed to focus their energy on evolving/mutating another pair of limbs (wings)--regardless they only evolved traits that aided them in survival, and didn’t bother with the gimmicks that didn’t really help them. Or maybe they did go full mammal and sorta stepped back, like how life came from the ocean, and whales decided “hey ocean kinda worked out for us, so let’s readapt for that” altho imo less likely because doing so would’ve probably disadvantaged dragons, and nature doesn’t select for things that makes survival as a species harder.

And if you wanna get really technical, this would probs then place dragons in an class of their own, or as surviving non-mammalian Therapsids (but most likely a branch that evolved from Therapsids and became their own thing like mammals did). This would mean that dragons are not mammals, reptiles, birds, or anything else. They are their own thing. But with ancestors popping up from that reptile-mammalian split.

(and aside but Gorgonopsia/Gorgonopsids are considered to have been at least partially warm-blooded, so the fantasy bullshit dragon clade prolly would’ve had to arise sometime before or around them)

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ANYWAYS, main reason I opted to group dragons like that is because they never fully screamed “reptile” at me, at least in my canon where they would need certain mammalian traits, or possibly bird-like features. But with the whole bat-wings and the way I drew their legs positioned under them (most reptiles have their legs to the side, like alligators/crocodiles and lizards), and the hair, and certain social behaviors that were very mammalian, it implied to me that there had to be something else in the mix, and all those things pointed to mammals.

This also tied in with Jake and his whole deal with the sweatshirt. Dude wears the thing because his temperature regulation is poor, but if he were a full-on reptile, that sweatshirt would do jack shit keeping him warm. Sweatshirts are designed to trap air inside and let the wearer warm it up with their own body heat. But if Jake was an ectotherm (cold-blooded), he wouldn’t have body heat, so the sweater wouldn’t do anything for him. And I wanted him to have some cold resistance because throwing him in the snow is funny, but also it would be funny if extended cold made him feel gross and sluggish (and hey, defeating a dragon with some very easy thermostat tinkering is also very funny). So he needed to have some level of endothermy (warm-blooded-ness), and the idea was to make it partial. So there you go, legit biological nonsense canon I created just because I wanted to justify my character wearing a sweatshirt.

That said, “partial endotherms” do exist in nature, and they’re called heterotherms. Literally just creatures that are “mixed” warm and cold-blooded, or can temperature regulate only under specific conditions. Animals like certain sharks, tuna, some arctic birds (in their feet), leatherback sea turtles (fins), certain insects, etc...

So it made sense to push that route with dragons, especially with having them tied to those part-reptile part-mammal ancestors where they just, kept a lot of the intermixed traits. And made sense to have that be their source of heterothermy too. Hence, they’d have enough of their own body heat to function in colder places/more varied seasons without completely slowing down or needing to hibernate like a reptile, they can adapt to grow more fur if they need to insulate themselves, but even then extended and severe cold will slow down their metabolisms (make them slow, lethargic, and kinda grumpy), and they still take to warmer climates better, and they will bask to raise their body temps when they can get away with it. (Also hey, maybe fire has a use for self-heating now too).

...and yeah this is a lot more extra than it needed to be, but I enjoy the “merging fantasy with biology” stuff and I do what I want, and idk maybe someone would find it interesting too. But in the most basic sense, pseudomammal was just meant to mean “not quite mammal, but not quite reptile either”, but it’s not a common term, especially now.

#asks #dragon-plier #I felt like a ramble so I did a ramble lol #dragons #fantasy ramblings #canon ramblings

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luckyliesmith · 6 years

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ok so i saw that post that was like “loki: part time snake” and i let that idea run a little wild. Since IW can go fuck itself, i propose an au where instead of all that bullshit Thor and Co end up at the doorstep of Midgard without a plan to explain Loki to everyone (no Thor your word and vouching for him won’t be enough this time) and while Thor has some other descent ideas, they squabble over several with Loki suggesting more and more chaotic outlandish things until their time is entirely fucking up. So feeling pressed and in a pinch Loki turns to one of his very first illusions and transforms into a snake. And that’s how Loki ends up living almost full time as Thor’s pet snake on Midgard.

Peter, being eager, and innocent and curious (and a lil in awe of thor and looking for a good in to talk with him bc !!) asks what his pet snakes name is. Thor, having always relied on Loki to be the one to come up with excuses (lies) in a pinch, blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. Loki’s undercover snake name is now Mr Scales.

Bruce knows because he was there when Loki decided to up and snakeify himself. So it’s not too much of a shock when Loki slithers into one of his desk drawers to prank him. He might be a snake but hes still the god of mischief. Natasha may or may not overhear Bruce taking out residual resentment for Loki by softly admonishing the poor creature. “Don’t scare me like that. It won’t get me to Hulk out. I have more control than that.” She leaves just in time to miss the transformation of Mr Scales zapping back into Loki’s regular body, naked and perched on the edge of Bruce’s desk. That in itself is almost enough to get him to hulk out.

Bruce drags his hand down his face in frustrating trying to not get distracted by how long Loki’s very naked legs are. “What have I done to deserve this torture.” Loki saunters back out of Bruce’s lab on foot, wearing nothing but a smile and may or may not whisper bye, daddy before he transfigures back into Mr Scales and slithers away.

Bruce thinks about taking up day drinking with Tony to erase the fact that his life has come to this, avoiding a pet snake to keep it from flirting with him. He’s also certain that if Thor finds out he may end up electrocuted.

Loki doesn’t adapt well to some parts of pesky snake biology. He can’t hear for shit and sleeping with his eyes open is testing his patience.

He likes having a prehensile tail. It’s particularly useful for hanging from ponytails (wanda, natasha, maria) while simultaneously tormenting Thor about not having a ponytail anymore. Perching creepily on shoulders is great and now Thor feels even more like a fully stoked fireplace because endothermic vs exothermic.

He also gets away with unlimited nips and bites on whoever he pleases. The downside is that biting people as a snake is less satisfying.

Because hes never had to keep up with a consistent shift for this long, every time he changes back into Mr Scales form, his scale pattern is a little bit different. Some people (Natasha, Clint, Bucky and Peter) notice.

Natasha has been keeping tabs on Mr Scales (and has felt more than a little silly following a snake around) but it pays off when she not only hears Bruce, but also Thor calling Mr Scales ‘Loki’. She takes a page out of Loki’s handbook, and uses this information to start a betting pool with Clint Sam and Bucky. She keeps a closer watchful eye on ‘Mr Scales’ from here on out.

Natasha is the one who slyly suggests Thor get Mr Scales a tank when they’re at the compound because it would be normal to have a pet snake in an enclosure and not let it slither around willy nilly, right? This is how Loki ends up on the wrong side of a locked glass cage while a very self satisfied Natasha smirks at him for the second time in his life. He starts to have regrets.

Peter thinks hes hallucinating when he sneaks into the pitch black kitchen one night to steal a snack and walks straight into Thor having a full on conversation with someone. The image of a very shook Thor holding Mr Scales by his neck is forever seared into Peters memory and ends his pattern of staying over so late to play video games till 3am no matter how badass the TV and tech is.

Peter definitely knows now because Thor randomly takes Mr Scales everywhere. Everywhere. He suspiciously explains midgardian things to Mr Scales, almost like a brother taking his sibling sightseeing. Mr Scales always seems to be there when Thor goes out with friends, out to dinner, out for drinks, to the movies, etc.

Someone (Steve or Tony) finally asks Thor why he brings his pet snake everywhere. After a few painful moments of letting Thor struggle to come up with anything resembling an answer (again because that was always Loki’s forte and his tongue is more than a bit incapacitated at the moment) Peter steps in "OH MR SCALES IS THOR'S EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ANIMAL! Ya know he did lose his whole family and hes been feeling a little down and Mr Scales," pausing for dramatic effect, shooting a little glare up at Thor knowingly "reminds him of his brother." Bruce chokes in the background. Everyone has a chuckle because yea, RIP Loki but the dude was totally a snake.

Natasha whispers something in Clint’s ear that no one can hear as he rolls his eyes deeply and forks over a $50.

What I’m saying is that basically the only people who don’t know "Mr Scales" is Loki are Tony and Steve.

And because Steve doesn’t know, he would try and comfort Thor (bc if Thor is sad and depressed Steve has one (1) job) by way of warming up to Mr Scales and offer to feed him because at first he had Not Really Cared For The Snake so offering to feed Mr Scales is A Big Thing from him, so he slips on in to Thor’s compound room like "Hey since you’re here with him, can I feed Mr Scales? I know today is his feeding day because its Thursday and you said he eats his food on Thursday." and Thor looks on in horror at Steve producing the adequate Snake Food, because hes fresh out of excuses.

Nat pops up from the ether in which she ninja-travels like "Oh boy, I have to watch this." and Loki as a snake is like "Well fuck I guess I have to eat it or the jig is up” and that’s how Loki ends up eating a whole ass rat.

#thor #loki #my au #kinda #crack #mr scales #its not super explicity but uh....#gammafrost #cause im here for it #long post #mine

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littlemxtchgirl · 3 years

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@intentosolenne:

🖋!! 👀 [ auuuuu 350$ penalty ; ACCEPTING ]

[ HEHEHE HOHOHO I'M GENTLY GRASPING @shadowedmagic‘s REVERSE AU FOR THIS because I want you to think about Willow, a scientist far too interested into experimenting with fire and blowing up stuff on purpose, for a change, who one night hears the voice of a old woman from a radio who offers her the possibility to make all the fires she wants... for a price.

Much like canon Willow, she can be brash, aggressive and rude, but generally manages to keep her anger issues under control far more, since she still grew up in a somewhat civilized area. She had occasional encounters with Them in her life before jumping in the Constant too, but nothing more than the occasional “hey i could swear i saw a shadow move” kind of meeting. She's also the one who frees Charlie from the Throne, gets captured by it and eventually freed by William, but it's more of a matter of “if i free her i can punch her in the face properly' rather than 'oh i have pity for this woman who tricked us all to get in this fucked up island'. The respect for Charlie comes much sooner than the one she has for Maxwell in (blog) canon, but it still take them a few days together to bury the axe fndsmgfg

AS FOR STATS:

Willow, “the arsonist scientist”, starts the game knowing how to make any kind of fire-related items (campfires/fire pit, endothermic fires, fire staff and fire darts, for example) without prototyping them first in any kind of machine and her precious lighter (that, just like in DST eventually dies out rather than lasting forever), just like her normal self she can resist high temperatures more and lower temperatures less, and doesn't have her fire immunity. She can make Bernie, but she must prototype it with the Alchemy Machine and actually add Nightmare Fuel in him to make him beat up Shadow Creatures rather than being used for a big Sanity boost.

She has 150 Health, Hunger and Sanity. ]

#• |[ 🔥 ooc 🔥 ]| •#intentosolenne

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arynchris · 7 years

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Humans are space orcs, eh?

I’m new to this, but I love what I’m reading in the feed lately, so, trying my hand!

Some ideas:

What if the greatest diplomacy problem in dealing with humans is that they seem to lie about past events constantly, even to someone who witnessed the same events? Then it’s discovered that humans have recording devices of all kinds-- security cameras, diaries, mp3-- and the problem becomes clear. Humans lie, but not that badly. The poor, fretful creatures just have a species-wide brain defect. Kindly aliens take to recording every event and encounter they can, then preface every diplomatic meeting with a record swap so the humans can brush up on what actually happened and the aliens can get some insight into what the humans have been falsely thinking happened. Ambassadors to Earth get supplementary training in how to handle people with memory impairments, and human ambassadors to other worlds start hiring aliens-- ANY aliens-- to be their assistants. Everything smooths out after that.

Religion. Aliens intellectually understand how religion works and that there are different kinds, but they don’t really “get” it. The biggest confusion regards whether the humans, who do seem to have some sort of empathic abilities at least, are actually communing with incorporeal beings/forces... and if so, why some humans seem able to commune with more than one, while other humans not at all. Notable scholars have decided that the rituals and paraphernalia have nothing to do with the beings or forces being communed with, but muddied the matter by suggesting that the rituals may be important for a human’s ability to commune. Alien non-scholars, eager to accommodate this new species and prove that space is nothing to be afraid of-- nobody wants a repeat of the H’j’g’rcxin Xenophobia disaster-- simply treat any and all religious requests as vital necessities for their human guests and crewmen. Accommodation becomes so ordinary that when the first religious argument erupts between an engineer and a navigator, the biggest shock is that one of them objects to the other wearing a turban, something which does not affect work performance in any way.

Styling. Alien species each have their own primary sense that they rely on, and when they find out that humans primarily rely on sight, well. Reliant on sight means that surface patterns and colorings are particularly important to them, right? They will have evolved to be individually distinctive in appearance? New human crew are automatically assigned a mentor from another vision-reliant species, so someone will be able to tell them apart until the auditory and pheromone labels are attached to their uniforms. Then Abby comes to mess with a new haircut and sparkly chapstick one day, and the mentor has no idea who she is or how she got aboard.

Word of Stabby the Space Roomba spreads, and soon every ship with a human captain or sufficiently high number of human crew has a Stabby. Names vary, but most of them are Stabby. One ship becomes low-key known for sending out broadcasts of Stabby McStabberson, son of Stabberson, son of Stabber, and its adventures stabbing juice boxes in zero-G.

Aesthetics. Humans have a bewildering tendency to open starmaps or sneak into the scientific observation module at odd times, including with a mate or offspring, and just stare at open space. Not even particular stars, although they like to study and talk about particular stars and clusters at times, but just, the whole of space. Why do they do it? Nobody knows. Humans behave as though intoxicated during these times, but productivity lowers dramatically if they are barred access-- if barring access even works in the first place, given humans’ seemingly endless ability to get into places where they aren’t supposed to be.

Fire. Due to different atmospheric content, inability to heal from burns, or just plain never needing to cook their food, no alien species has ever utilized fire as a tool. When humans say that learning to use fire may have been the start of their civilization, everybody believes that the humans are just talking a tough game to make up for their lower technology level, or-- once they learn about human hierarchies-- to compensate for a perceived lack of political status. Then a human sees a catastrophic explosion on a hostile planet and laughs. Then another shushes panicking engineers and smothers an accidental fire with some garments. Then another builds a bonfire out of dead plantlife and a shredded religious document to warm an injured alien crewman after xir endothermic suit is punctured and the planet rotates away from its sun. Humans-- soft, cuddly, pack-bonds-even-with-inanimate-objects humans-- are comfortably in control of the most terrifying force of disaster the galaxy has ever known. Aliens stop being surprised that we nearly made ourselves extinct so many times in history.

“Why does your larval stage look so similar to your mature stage? How do you know when a human is old enough to leave the Pit of Offspring? Or to mate?”

#humans are weird #humans are space orcs #humans are space australians #stabby the space roomba #i love these tags

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funkymeihem-fiction · 7 years

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Request 2- Protective Meihem

“N-no! No, it’s fine! It’s…kind of nice?”

Junkrat stared at her, yellow eyes gleaming brighter than ever, his hands clasped and wiggling impatiently. “Do you like it really? You don’t gotta like it! Aw, are you just saying that to make me feel better? I know it’s a trash heap, I hate it, it’s the worst, don’t even know why I ever wanted to head back to this pit, eh? Heh! What a dump!…Do you like it though?”

Mei stood there for a few long moments, trying to find something nice to say about Junkertown. And eventually she settled on a rather meekly stated, “Well! W-well, it’s…a lot cleaner than I thought it would be?” Which was not a lie. It was literally a town made of junk, trash, and spare parts, but at least she wasn’t wading knee-deep in grease and blood like she was afraid she would be. She looked around again, deciding not to comment on an animal that she wasn’t really sure was a rat, a cat, or a dog, (or some mutant creature she didn’t even recognize) that was staring menacingly at her from the shadows of a nearby alleyway, hunched atop an overturned garbage can. “It’s, erm…nice?”

“We can leave, darl. We can leave at any time and I won’t say a thing about it…Roadie, we’re turning around, we’re leavin’!” He did an abrupt about-face, spinning about on his peg, but found his path blocked by the enormous gut of his bodyguard. Roadhog merely uttered a tired sigh, and Mei grabbed onto his mechanical hand to help jostle him back into place, walking ahead. The lanky junker groaned a little, stumbling back into step as Hog placed one enormous hand against his bony spine and brusquely pushed him forward. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Jamison, it’s fine. I never got to see Junkertown proper before, and it’ll be interesting to see where you came from.” Mei squinted at the furry monstrosity in the alleyway and she could have sworn it squinted back at her before slinking into the dark. Shaking her head, she held Rat’s hand and shepherded him along. For the past few hours he had ping-ponged rapidly back and forth between being overly excited to ‘show her the sights’,and bemoaning Junkertown’s very existence as beneath her and how they never should have come here. Several times now he had tried to convince her to leave, only to become distracted by some familiar landmark or favorite hiding spot and drag her towards it a moment later.

The sight was almost comical, the tiny woman barely reaching up to the ribcages of her two giant companions but leading them placidly along the sandy dirt trods that served as their roads. The Queen herself couldn’t have asked for a more imposing set of bodyguards, and so she was surprised to find that the other junkers did not seem afraid of them in the least. They kept clear enough of Roadhog- even the largest and bravest of them didn’t seem keen to tangle with the pig-masked man- but Junkrat was not so lucky. A handful of other junkers had started following them at a distance, and she could hear snippets of their conversations.

“Ballsy of them to show their fuckin’ faces around here again. Especially Rat.”

“Dunno why Roadhog bothers with that one. After everything that happened. Gave up being a Queen’s Enforcer for what?”

“Heh, bet the pig fucks the rat, bet you anything. Why else?”

“Bringing outsiders in here?”

“Hey Rat! Heard you’d died years ago! DogLeg said he found your body lashed to a ‘lectric wire! We held a celebration and pissed on your corpse! Turned out to be an old scarecrow, but nobody could tell the difference, hawhaw!”

At the last man’s words, Junkrat readily whipped around, eye twitching. “Fuck DogLeg! And I bet you did! Bet you all got rotten on your own literal piss while I was off pulling heists and getting seen on the telly all over the world! ‘Cause instead of being dead I’m RICH N’ FAMOUS!?”

Mei winced and held out an arm, whispering quickly. “Jamie, don’t. They’re not worth it.”

“They ain’t worth anything!” he spat hatefully into the dirt, his own venom getting the better of him and overflowing his jaws, the taste of bile still rising. “Drongos…Drongos who’d better stop fucking following us if they know what’s good for ‘em!”

Roadhog moved a little closer to them, as if feeling the beginnings of a brawl close at hand. Junkrat had always picked fights he couldn’t win, and the older junker could see his hackles rising despite Mei’s usual attempts to soothe him. A beer can, still half full, went spinning through the air and he moved to block it. The can plonked uselessly off his thick hide, spattering sun-warmed liquid everywhere. Roadhog didn’t particularly care and didn’t react, and Mei merely winced a little as a few droplets landed on her. But his employer had already seen it, and the fuses of Junkrat’s temper lit up all the brighter as he whirled once more to face the group.

“Who threw that!? Who fucking threw that!” He lifted his fists, nearly foaming at the jaws. “Was it you, you dipstick!? You!? Next one of you to throw shit at my mates gets blown sky-high!”

“Jamie, please?” Mei whispered again, as the hyena-like laughter of the junkers got all that much louder. “This isn’t helping. Let’s just go.”

“Did they hit you, love?” He fussed at her with his gloved hand, trying to wipe away the offending droplets from her jacket. “Here, I got ya.”

A female voice hooted from the group of jeering junkers. “He called her ‘love’! What’s wrong, couldn’t get a proper junker woman so you had to settle for that fat little girl?”

A harsh, shrieking snarl ripped itself from Junkrat’s jaws. Mei’s eyes widened and Roadhog was already reaching to stop him, cuffing Junkrat by the harness as the younger junker lunged. He quickly became a whirling ball of fury, teeth gnashing and limbs swinging blindly as he tried to reach the offensive woman, spitting expletives that Mei couldn’t even understand. Roadhog kept a firm grip on him, dragging him back. But the other junkers were already starting to advance, smelling the proverbial blood in the water and ready for the fight that Junkrat was all too willing to take part in.

“Why don’t you let him go, Hog?”

“Yeah, maybe he needs a reminder how things work around here?”

Roadhog reached for his hook with a low growl.

But the entire debacle was interrupted when there was a sharp hissing noise. Mei appeared from behind Hog’s wide gut, having pulled her endothermic gun from its straps on her pack, the tank of cryo-freeze liquid hidden within her rucksack. A blue cloud misted over the group of junkers, bringing with it a wave of biting cold as it settled onto the junkers, freezing and crystallizing as it went. Several of them managed to break free to a safe distance, though not without a struggle and a storm of surprised cursing and exclamations, scattering and retreating back several steps.

But Mei stood where she was, both feet planted as her gun continued steadily freezing one of their number…The junker who had joked about Junkrat being dead. He stood rooted to the spot, his skin an unhealthy gray pallor, blue crystals twinkling cheerfully all over him as his eyes darted wildly, unable to move or even scream. The little climatologist stared at him with something dangerously close to malice, her finger white-knuckled on the trigger.

Before his fellows could move to help him, she jerked the gun upward, a shimmer forming within it before a large and dangerously sharp icicle jutted from the barrel, and she aimed it at the man’s forehead. There was a loud SSSSSSSSSTHNNK— and several of the junkers screamed aloud. A puff of steam drifted away from her blaster, but the man seemed whole enough, though his eyes had rolled back and he seemed to have passed out where he stood. The icicle had sailed mere inches away from his skull, sinking halfway into the wall behind him, the cement blocks forming cracks where it had impacted.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” Mei said a little too softly, “-It’s bullies like you.”

Everyone stood frozen (some quite literally) as she reloaded her gun, the endothermic liquid bubbling menacingly as she continued. “It’s not my first time in Australia. Last time I was here, I learned that junkers really don’t like the cold. And I’d appreciate it if you stopped trying to fight my friends. Why don’t you all just go away, before someone thinks there’s any trouble here?” She lifted her gun away, jaw still tight and eyes narrowed as her glasses glinted ominously in the light. “Or before there is any trouble here?”

The ice shattered around the frozen junker, and he flopped unconscious to the ground. The others did not bother gathering him up, withdrawing quickly and scuttling off in various directions, abandoning their cohort in the dirt as Mei watched them go. When she was sure they were not going to come back, or at least not yet, she tucked her gun away, brows lifting and features going soft and worried once more. “Oh, that was a little scary!”

“I th-think I just came in my pants a lil’,” Junkrat whispered hoarsely, staring at her.

Roadhog nodded in agreement.

“Well I wasn’t going to just let them be so rude to you! So mean, honestly! Can we leave before they come back, please? You said you were going to show me that Chinese take-away place with the big koala on it anyway.” She dusted herself off and offered a hand out to Junkrat as Roadhog lowered him safely back to the ground.

He darted past her hand and latched onto her like an overly large, gangly-limbed leech, wrapping his arms about her and assaulting her face and hair with kisses as she squeaked and batted at him with both hands. He merely gave her another over-affectionate squeeze, grinning madly down at her. “After that? Darl, we’re gonna get all the bao and beers we can eat. But then we gotta head back out so I can show you my loveshack!”

“…Your loveshack? Really?” She groaned.

“Can even show you my couch where the magic happens. Oh, and I still gotta show you Roadie’s place! And my work bench! And the boom station! And then my couch again! And the secret hidden doors I installed in Roadie’s garage where you have to stand on both of them at the same time to reveal a cunningly hidden secret compartment where we hide our most valuable treasures!”

Roadhog slowly placed a giant hand over his masked face in exasperation.

Junkrat didn’t seem to notice, grabbing Mei by the hand and pulling her forward yet again with, crowing jubilantly. “It’s great to be home!”

#meihem #junkmei #meirat #mei #mei-ling zhou #junkrat #jamison fawkes #roadhog #mako rutledge #overwatch #blizzard #junkertown #fanfiction #funkymeihem

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speculative-evolution · 7 years

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As you may know by now I'm a pretty big fan of Dougal Dixon's The Future is Wild, a 14-episode TV series which speculated about what might happen to the earth's animals and ecosystems in the far future should the human race see fit to randomly not exist.It had three segments, each corresponding to an era in the future; a 5 million years hence segment, a 100 million years hence segment, and a 200 million years hence segment. The 5 myh segment mostly dealt with organisms that looked and acted rather normal and unexotic by todays' standards. I say mostly, because there were a few outliers that could not possibly have developed within 5m years of humanity's extinction and invariably seemed better suited to a documentary about alien life. Among these was an adorable yet perplexing creature: The Spink. Google it. Let's be perfectly clear here; the Spink is an impossibility. There is no way a bird like a quail (for that is what the show claims is its ancestor) could develop into a eusocial, burrowing, sausage-shaped creature with a head as big as the rest of its body within the timespan allotted. And if somehow it DID, it probably wouldn't look much like a Spink. However. What if it did exist? What then? We have a perfectly weird creature- Let's see if we can turn the weirdness up to an eleven, shall we? Let 95 million years pass- now we enter the time when Toraton rule the Bengal swamps, terrifying wasps fly like fighter jets through the Antarctic Rainforest, and Silver Spiders harvest the hormone-rich blood of the last remaining mammals on earth, high in what was once the Himalayas. But while all this is going on, a new creature has emerged in the forests of what was once North and South America. The Mantisfinches are creatures of my own invention. They are a diverse clade of predacious birds with a bizarre lifestyle and biology. Ranging in size from just a few centimeters to over half a meter and equipped with a set of vicious, heavily spiked forearms, they hunt among trees, reeds, and other three-dimensional environments for their prey. Mantisfinches are the world's only fully Ectothermic birds. Descended from burrowing creatures, they now rely on the warmth of the sun to heat their fluffy bodies- and, given the hothouse climate of the world, have spread far and wide, from Patagonia north to Alaska. Incapable of flight, Mantisfinches have repurposed their feathers for a completely different purpose. The short, hair-like body feathers are patterned in such a way as to provide camouflage, while around the mouth wispy whiskers help detect vibrations. In most species the broad remiges and retrices of their tail have narrowed, stiffened, and garnered hook-like projections. Attached to the pygostyle and highly mobile, the Mantisfinch can clamp them shut around branches, reeds, spiderwebs, or any other such subtrate. In doing so, it provides a firm anchor with which to hold the bird. But the most impressive feathers reside on the forelimbs- once wings, then shovels, and now tools for killing. The primary and secondary remiges have become vicious spikes, often brutally crooked, used for impaling and imprisoning prey. The wings are cocked back in a posture reminiscent of a mantis- hence the name- and then let fly with a sudden release. The eyes are large, bulbous, and can see in any direction independent of each other, much like a chameleon. The feet are zygodactl, perfect for gripping branches- although it does make it difficult to walk on flat ground. The beak is short, abbreviated, and serrated with huge keratinous denticles. Mantisfinches are solitary, but when a male and female meet high above the ground and an egg is produced, something must be done. Returning to the forest floor to bury it in the leaf-litter is out of the question; though they have lost the eusocial tendencies of their ancestors, the desire to care for their young is still strong. Thus, the female tucks the proportionally huge egg away in a pouch, or marsupium. It is at this point in the female's life that things get weird. Broody female Mantisfinches suddenly become endothermic as a response to hormones released during laying. The rise in body temperature warms the egg; but it also means that the mother must greatly increase her food intake, and thus even the most patient ambush predators have to chase their prey around the canopy. As well, the high body temperature makes them a target for snakes, which are both abundant and very fond of fresh poultry; as such, during the mating season female Mantisfinches become extremely aggressive and should be avoided if one wishes to remain attached to one's fingers. Some Mantisfinches have perfected the art of camouflage, with specialized whiskers that perfectly mimic the petals of orchids and other flowers. Others have feathers that imitate the colour and texture of lichen, moss, and bark. As well, their slow, ponderous motion is calculated to resemble a leaf or twig shaking in the wind; in such a way they can creep up on their prey.

#speculative evolution #speculative biology #biology #science #flora #fauna #art #concept #evolution #nature #zoology #botany #mycology #ecology #conservation

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kaaramel · 7 years

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#karma writes things #dont starve #famine's friends

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hella-free-space · 7 years

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How did you start your fish tank? I'd ;like to start one up myself but I have no idea where to start... Any tips or pointers?

Hello there anon! Thank you for the ask :DD

I’ve got tons of tips and pointers for ya :3 Below I’ll explain the basics of fishkeeping, the stuff that generally applies to all freshwater fish tanks like the basic supplies you’ll need to gather and explain the nitrogen cycle! (I’m not sure about saltwater stuff, though, as I haven’t gotten into that part of the hobby…yet ;p) The species you want to keep will dictate the specifics of your tank, beyond the basics, though, so keep that in mind going forward! :)

The Basic Supplies:- Tank- Filter- Heater/Chiller (if required)- Thermometer- Substrate (optional)- Décor/Hides- Water Test Kit

Tanks:Choose a tank that is sufficient in size for the species you plan on keeping! Long tanks are almost always better than tall tanks, as fish swim side-to-side and not up-and-down :) If this is your first ever fish tank, I’d start out with a fish tank no smaller than 5 or 10 gallons, if not larger! Larger volumes of water hold a stable cycle more easily! :)Filtration:There are three main types of filtration: mechanical/physical, biological, and chemical. Mechanical filtration is what filters out particles from the water, large or small. Biological filtration refers to the nitrifying bacteria that perform the nitrogen cycle! Chemical filtration is filtration that helps to take certain chemicals out of the water.Types of Filters:- Hang-On-Back (HOB) filters hang on the lip of the tank. They have a ‘media basket’ where the filter media goes (usually cartridges). If you buy a filter that requires filter cartridges, I recommend replacing those with a ceramic media, sponge media, or both since you’ll have to replace the cartridge eventually and that can disrupt your cycle. Fluval AquaClear filters are a great HOB filter for larger tanks, and come with sponge (physical, biological filtration), ceramic (biological filtration), and carbon media (chemical filtration)!- Sponge filters are great for fish and other aquatic animals that prefer (or require) low-flow! These filters are basically blocks of sponge hooked up to an air pump. The air pump forces air up through the sponge, creating a vacuum that sucks up particles (mechanical filtration) and water (biological filtration). The air is forced out the top of the sponge, creating bubbles that agitate the surface, aiding in gas exchange!-Canister filters are like HOB filters on steroids. Instead of a ‘media basket’ you get a literal ‘media bucket’ (biological, chemical, mechanical filtration). A canister filter (also called an external filter) is placed somewhere outside the tank, and doesn’t hang on the lip like a HOB does. Its great if you don’t want to see your filter or if you need a ton of filtration for a larger tank :p Mini canister filters also exist, if you’d like one for a smaller tank :)- Undergravel Filters are something I’ve heard pretty mixed reviews about, and I’ve never personally used one. They’re usually grated, plastic, thin hollow block filters that you put under the substrate of your aquarium (I believe gravel works best with these filters, as I assume using sand or another small-particle substrate would fall into the filter? someone please correct me if I’m wrong .-.). They may provide enough surface area for nitrifying bacteria (biological filtration) if you have a very small bioload, or if you could fill them with some type of media…these are probably the most painful to clean, though, since you’d have to take apart your entire tank…Heaters & Chillers:Your fish may require a heater or chiller! If they do, its for good reason. Fish are ectothermic (like reptiles), meaning that they rely on their environment to help them regulate body temperature. (Humans like you and me are endothermic, meaning that we can produce our own body heat/regulate our body’s temperature.)A fish that is too cold will become lethargic, stressed, and may refuse to eat. Temperature affects bodily processes as well, such as digestion, circulation, and metabolism regulation. Temperatures that are colder will slow down these bodily processes and warmer temperatures will usually do the opposite. Because improper temperature is stressful for any fish, they will experience a suppressed immune system as well, and will be more susceptible to illnesses as a result :/Some fish require heaters/higher temperatures to function properly (Bettas, tetras, other tropical fish). Some fish require no heater, or the addition of chiller, to function properly (goldfish, minnows, danios). As a general rule of thumb, heaters should be 5-10 watts per gallon. Adjustable heaters are always more reliable than non-adjustable heaters. Adjustable heaters also usually have thermostats, so they turn on and off automatically to ensure that the aquarium’s temperature stays constant(ish). Usually you don’t need a chiller unless you’re keeping a temperate- or cold-water species and where you live it doesn’t get below the high 70s all year.

Thermometer:Yes it’s necessary! You need to be able to monitor what temperature your tank is, whether you have a heater, chiller, or neither :) Even if you have an adjustable heater with a thermostat, it may not be accurate to +/-1 degree. Avoid those strip-sticker thermometers. They’re not very accurate :/ You can buy glass ones at Walmart for about 1.50$ though! :p

Substrate:There are lots of different substrates to choose from! Gravel, sand, plant substrate (like fluorite), or no substrate at all! Some substrates are ‘inert’ (don’t affect pH or other parameters) some substrates are ‘active’ (affect pH or other parameters). Some aquatic species have a very specific range of pH/KH/GH, like shrimp, and may require substrates that help you achieve that range of values. Some species require certain substrates for their health and safety, like corydoras, which require sand (or barebottom) as gravel and other rough substrates can cut up their tummies or injure their barbels. If the species you keep doesn’t require any special substrate, then choose whatever substrate you like best! It’s your tank! Have fun with it! :)

Décor:One of the funnest (idc if funnest isn’t a word *3*) part of setting up an aquarium is decorating it!! Some fish have delicate fins (like bettas) that require either live or silk (material, non-plastic) plants and décor devoid of sharp edges. Hides are also important. Providing adequate caves and cover for your fish to hide in/feel safe in/explore is the functional aspect of décor. Make sure you’re meeting your animal’s needs :) Other than making sure that your décor is safe and functional for the creatures you plan to keep, go full ham!! Crazy color gravel with wacky colors and glow in the dark caves or an aquascaped, planted tank with driftwood and rocks! :D

Water Test Kit:In order for you to maintain the health of your fish, you’ll need to know what your water parameters are :) You should at least test for Ammonia, Nitrites, Nitrates, and pH. You may need to test for other things like copper, KH, or GH depending on the species you’re keeping. A liquid test kit (like the API Freshwater Master Kit) is easy to read and very accurate :) (plus you get to use test tubes n stuff…like the lil fish scientist you are *3*)

The Nitrogen Cycle!*ALL* fish (yes that includes bettas…and all animals for that matter) produce waste. Because all aquatic animals produce waste, they require (biological) filtration of some sort to process that waste.Fish produce waste in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is toxic above 0ppm (parts per million). So you’ve got all this ammonia floating around in the water, right? and you’ve got water running through your filter…so these bacteria start growing all over your fish tank, wherever there’s water flow, but we want to concentrate on the bacteria that are growing in your filter media. This bacteria will be processing the waste that your fish or aquatic animal produces :)So your fish produced some waste, and it’s floating around in the water as ammonia. The first bacteria (#1) that grows will ‘eat’ the ammonia and then ‘poop’ out nitrites.Nitrites are also toxic to aquatic animals above 0ppm though :/ so then another bactiera (#2) grows and it ‘eats’ these nitrites that are floating around in the water and ‘poops’ out nitrates.Nitrates are safe for fish (up to 20ppm)! :D Since there’s no bacteria that’s going to grow to eat these nitrates that are in the water, we have to physically remove them by doing a water change. A helpful post about water changes, how they work, and why they’re important:https://hella-free-space.tumblr.com/post/160931725969/whats-the-rule-for-water-changes-like-ive-seenIf you have live plants, they will use some of the ammonia, nitrite, and/or nitrates in the water as nutrients :) Some plants will use more than others, as some plants are heavy root feeders, some are floaters, and some prefer to be somewhere in the water column. (note: live plants SHOULD NOT totally replace water changes! water changes are still necessary even for planted tanks :3)To recap:Fish waste (ammonia) -> bacteria #1 -> nitrite -> bacteria #2 -> nitrate -> water change

If you have any other questions, Anon, please send me a message or another ask!! :)If anyone would like to add onto this, or if corrections need to be made, please reblog/comment/let me know! :)

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