#pure blood culture

[darkcrowprincess]

Black family thoughts:

The Black Family dressing more French like and royalty like than any other families because they are really really old. Like wizards robes like I talked before in my other post but also marie antoinettie type clothes but darker and Gothic.

[thewholesircus]

ok no bc the last reblog kinda inspired me for a prongsfoot fic, I want jealousy, yearning, Sirius battling with the prejudice of being attracted to another boy/man and his resentment towards Lily.

He knows James best, she doesn't, she never liked him like he did, she doesn't know his secrets, they don't share a story and secrets like they (and the rest of their friends) do. She was not there for James whenever she turned him down.

Hell, she didn't even like him at all. But he can't say that to his friend now, can he? Or at least not the whole truth.

I want an oblivious James that realises something maybe too late, that wonders what could have been, that is jealous of Sirius spending time with his random dates. His friend shouldn't ignore him, that's all it is really. Except when he realises that Sirius doesn't go out just with witches but wizards too.

I want an homoerotically charged fight, or maybe they're flying together, playing Quidditch till they are a bit too rough and all the pent up feelings stumble out in angry touches.

I want them living under the same roof, thinking about sneaking to the other's room but pride and fear of rejection stops them.

I want James looking Sirius in the eye as he walks the aisle, eyes locking for a moment before he marries the girl he has chased all his life. Because he could chase her, but whatever fucked up thing popped up with Sirius can never be. Because loving him would be so easy, but living with that love wouldn't be.

Because loving Lily is easier in a way and he truly loves her and can't believe she's marrying him but he's haunted by what ifs.

Some brave lions they are, indeed.

[paidinbrains]

these crazy bastards are using magnets to isolate bacteria from whole blood samples

[vounoura]

I’ve been thinking abt this for a bit

If you can get past all the very explicit and shameless anti-indigenous racism and narrative (like it’s. actually extremely offensive and has otherwise ruined my ability to replay it which is a shame), Pillars of Eternity is good. I don’t think it’s absolutely amazing (it is VERY clunky, and the writing is…well, it was written by people who like to describe things in the longest ways possible) or anything, but if you go in with the context that Pillars 1 was made for people who are REALLY nostalgic abt the OG Baldur’s Gate’s then it’s a fairly enjoyable experience.

Deadfire’s writing isn’t as good as the first’s (and tbh, I wasn’t inclined to trust Obsidian’s take on a narrative abt the horrors of colonialism after the unmitigated disaster that was the Glanfathans) imo but if the gameplay of the first is an issue for it try skipping to Deadfire, it’s massively improved and way less clunky.

[psalmsofpsychosis]

i like to play a game in which i ask myself "are you actually insane or have you been talking to white people too much"

[mishkakagehishka]

Opening the comment section on an intercultural wedding and thinking what fucking year did i stumble into

[fellhellion]

post coming from a guy who doesn't know what they're talking about (has only ever seen evil dead trilogy), but the Thing in horror films and especially older ones where sex is seen as a kind of. marker for death later in the story is kind of facinating to me. like there's just the tonal dissonance of physical/emotional vulnerability against obliviousness to whatever predatory Thing is coming for you and that betrayal of security just being scary. but idk. interesting as well that this kind of trope was so often apparently utilised to denote stupidity to the characters.

[thebadchoicemachine]

I feel the need to throw a gauntlet /lh

[userautumn]

Yesterday my mom said I was pretentious "hard to please" when it came to literature and I had to laff. she is right though

[iguanodont]

Are there albino birgies?

A complete lack of pigmentation does sometimes occur in Birgs, yes!

Sentiments on complete albinism vary by culture; in kakroum clans, a pure white Birg is thought to occur when a cold draft allows a winter spirit to infect a larva. With a snow-ghost in their blood, they attract other spirits and may be agents of misfortune. Southern clans view them in a more positive light, embracing them as born interpreters of weather omens carried on the wind.

Heartland Twowi find them somewhat less uncanny, as large white patches are already a common phenotype in the region. Folk wisdom based on a centuries old practice of fate reading in spots would suggest that they are blank slates, their futures uncertain because the gods didn’t bother to mark them at all.

[darkcrowprincess]

Controversial Harry Potter opinion:

I actually really hate the concept of turning/comparing death eaters and just the messed up tangled mess that is pure blood families/culture into nazis for several reasons. One because I feel like that is a cop out. But two and this is really really big, wizards and witches (especially when you add in half bloods and muggleborns and magical creatures) are really really complicated and their reasons for doing things are complicated. Especially when you take in muggles, and what muggles did to witches and wizards in the medieval times and salem witches trials. Add that with hogwarts and houses. That is why I see it less as that, and more so that this a culture that not only screams very old traditional community but also screams really old toxic religious community. This is why I see it as a cult. This is a dangours cult. A half blood(Tom) saw these old families with lots of money and connections and saw power. So yes it is a cult. A very religious, very traditional obessed and very complicated cult. With kids growing up with this stuff as propaganda and religion. Which why I feel bad for kids that find it very hard to escape this cult. Especially slytherin kids! This is just how I personally saw it growing up when reading the books. This just my opinion. Especially when I got to reading Books 5-7. Tom Riddle during book 6 gave me so many Manson/cult leaders vibes. Because to me I do not think Tom gives a shit about blood puirty. Yeah he hates muggles. But I think Tom only cares about Tom and getting as much power for himself as possible.

Main reasons why I see it as a cult:

Tom Riddle and mainly all of his backstory in book 6.

The concept of all the pure blood families/ the sacred 28 that relates to incest and arranged marriages. How everyone is related to each other in some way because of this. It's screams toxic religious cults.

How isolated pure blood families are and how they dont allow and outside knowledge of the muggle world into the very traditional world. It screams very lds/Mormons. Especially in school and in the ministry. Even the Weasleys who are bloody traitors do not have very much accurate knowledge on what muggles are really like.

Sirius leaving his family and staying with the Potters.

Regulus Black.

Draco Malfoy.

Just the whole concept of Wizardy world and Muggle world and the separation. And the using of the word muggle and no mage. It gives me very how Mormons see other people vibes.

Magical Creatures.

(Don't like don't read. Post hate and I'll block you!)

[reasonsforhope]

"When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers report July 24 [2024] in Nature.

“They are pushing the limits of rapid diagnostics for bloodstream infections,” says Pak Kin Wong, a biomedical engineer at Penn State who was not involved in the research. “They are driving toward a direction that will dramatically improve the clinical management of bloodstream infections and sepsis.”

Sepsis — an immune system overreaction to an infection — is a life-threatening condition that strikes nearly 2 million people per year in the United States, killing more than 250,000 (SN: 5/18/08). The condition can also progress to septic shock, a steep drop in blood pressure that damages the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. It can be caused by a broad range of different bacteria, making species identification key for personalized treatment of each patient.

In conventional sepsis testing, the blood collected from the patient must first go through a daylong blood culturing step to grow more bacteria for detection. The sample then goes through a second culture for purification before undergoing testing to find the best treatment. During the two to three days required for testing, patients are placed on broad-spectrum antibiotics — a blunt tool designed to stave off a mystery infection that’s better treated by targeted antibiotics after figuring out the specific bacteria causing the infection.

Nanoengineer Tae Hyun Kim and colleagues found a way around the initial 24-hour blood culture.

The workaround starts by injecting a blood sample with nanoparticles decorated with a peptide designed to bind to a wide range of blood-borne pathogens. Magnets then pull out the nanoparticles, and the bound pathogens come with them. Those bacteria are sent directly to the pure culture. Thanks to this binding and sorting process, the bacteria can grow faster without extraneous components in the sample, like blood cells and the previously given broad-spectrum antibiotics, says Kim, of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Cutting out the initial blood culturing step also relies on a new imaging algorithm, Kim says. To test bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics, both are placed in the same environment, and scientists observe if and how the antibiotics stunt the bacteria’s growth or kill them. The team’s image detection algorithm can detect subtler changes than the human eye can. So it can identify the species and antibiotic susceptibility with far fewer bacteria cells than the conventional method, thereby reducing the need for long culture times to produce larger colonies.

Though the new method shows promise, Wong says, any new test carries a risk of false negatives, missing bacteria that are actually present in the bloodstream. That in turn can lead to not treating an active infection, and “undertreatment of bloodstream infection can be fatal,” he says. “While the classical blood culture technique is extremely slow, it is very effective in avoiding false negatives.”

Following their laboratory-based experiments, Kim and colleagues tested their new method clinically, running it in parallel with conventional sepsis testing on 190 hospital patients with suspected infections. The testing obtained a 100 percent match on correct bacterial species identification, the team reports. Though more clinical tests are needed, these accuracy results are encouraging so far, Kim says.

The team is continuing to refine their design in hopes of developing a fully automated sepsis blood test that can quickly produce results, even when hospital laboratories are closed overnight. “We really wanted to commercialize this and really make it happen so that we could make impacts to the patients,” Kim says."

-via Science News, July 24, 2024

[red-the-dragon-writes]

every day i [conlang]

Zero Point shook out their sleeves and reconfigured from the palm up. Oil-slicked flesh flipped up to metal and smooth curves turned over into brick-square panels. Hmph. This would be one for the memoirs. The kkyribi at home would be begging him to explain how it even happened. For all Zero Point knew, though, it was just that they were like that. Cybertronians. What an odd set of creatures. But no odder than the va-kkyreittyr, really. And certainly no odder than Zero Point.

[evilwickedme]

I really really REALLY don't want to be the antisemitism mutual again bc y'all do not know how much damage that did to my mental health. But the fact that goyim only ever mention the antisemitism in what is literally blood libel: the game as an afterthought, sometimes not even expressing it by name, and instead focusing on the trans issue - I'm saying this as a trans Jew: fucking stop it. Even if not one single penny ended up in jkr's hands bc of this game it would still be extremely harmful. Stop saying "even ignoring the game's moral problems" or "not even mentioning the antisemitism". MENTION THE ANTISEMITISM. This is a game teaching fascist ideals to PRETEENS. It is teaching them that Jewish caricatures deserve to DIE for the crime of wanting their cultural artifacts back, it is teaching them that Jewish caricatures wanting to no longer be oppressed is equal to murdering "wizards" (aka white goyim) (while the main character literally discovers they're pure bloods...) and kidnapping children - THE OLDEST FORM OF BLOOD LIBEL. Jewish lives MATTER. I'm saying this as a trans Jew, but cishet, able bodied, white, neurotypical Jews also deserve to be safe. We all deserve to be able to exist as Jews without being targeted. Antisemitic hate crimes has been on the rise by hundreds of percentages worldwide, especially in the US and Europe. Stop treating us as afterthoughts.

[shadowvalkyrie]

There are a lot of things about Taskmaster that feel very... culturally British. That mixture of extreme silliness with occasionally very dark humour for example.

Or the particular tone of affectionate bullying and the way it's (mostly) taken in good humour. (And expected to be taken in good humour, even when it hits a nerve. Something that caused quite a bit of bad blood between the Brits and the Germans in my former workplace, because we generally don't shrug off insults that easily.)

But I think one difference is sort of... simmering under the surface in ways that aren't immediately obvious to international audiences (and makes me wish I was still writing uni papers, because it would be a GOLDMINE), is how much of the humour is based on the British class system.

I mean, the basic premise of "tyrannical taskmaster makes people jump through arbitrary hoops for his favour and then belittles them for doing so" is already something only an audience with a slightly monarchical bend would accept unquestioningly. Add to that the way the Taskmaster/Assistant relationship is set up... Let's just say it fetishises a social dynamic that doesn't exist in quite the same way elsewhere.

Which I think may partially explain why so many people seem to be oblivious to the D/s undertones. -- Of course it's often kink-blindness on the part of non-kinky people, but I strongly suspect it's helped along by the cultural perception of what constitutes an acceptable power differential acting as a buffer to seeing anything off about it. The threshold for when it becomes weird is different.

Now, I think (and since I'm not British, do correct me if I have it wrong!) a key part of what makes the basic premise funny to British audiences (and differently from how it's funny to international ones) is the way cultural expectations of power vs submission are subverted.

Purely based on accent? Alex is the posh one. By miles. And Greg -- very pointedly! -- doesn't do the matching Fauxbridge that most viewers would probably expect from someone presented in a position of authority (or even just a "neutral" BBC accent). It seems bizarre from a foreign point of view, but I've found that this kind of discrepancy immediately and viscerally registers with Brits. (It's uncanny how little it takes, too -- ask your favourite non-TM-aware English person to just listen to the different ways they say "taskmaster" and they will extrapolate things you cannot even imagine.) Instead of just the regional connotation, there are always implications of class and social status to an accent that are absolutely baffling to the unaware.

Add the fact that Greg Davies is from Wales, and a lot of English people have a weird colonial superiority complex towards Welsh people to this day... It's enough to make all these obvious gestures of devoted subservience from Alex very unexpected and therefore funny.

(Also notice how it adds interesting layers to Katherine Ryan buying Greg a fake lordship title? And makes it funnier in a way she may not even have fully been aware of herself, being Canadian? It's delightfully irreverent and pokes fun at the whole system.)

My guess is that this is also why the studio audience's reaction to linguistics-based jokes is always so strong. Lets take the recurring bit about Alex correcting Greg's grammar. To an international audience, the main joke is that Alex is a nerd and cares too much about grammar, with maybe a side of him being a smartarse towards his boss in a potentially ill-advised way. But to a British audience, the level of audacious insubordination implied there? Much stronger. Wildly offensive thing to do. (And a level of arrogance that is extra hilarious coming from someone shown to be sleeping in a dog bed.)

The same mechanism also puts Alex's snide little asides towards contestants with regional or "urban" accents into perspective. Offensive dick move on his part? Oh yes, extremely. But the audience is very much not supposed to be on his side in this. He's being a bigoted little bully, and either the contestants get to humiliate him in retaliation (it's certainly not a coincidence that the Welsh and Irish contestants are generally the ones having the most fun putting him in his place) or Greg calls him out on it in the studio. In a society in which Alex's brand of micro-aggression is still incredibly commonplace and accent discrimination a widely accepted default, it's actually very cathartic to see it openly acknowledged and condemned.

I mean Tumblr obviously loves Alex, because he's cute and funny and we love the Greg/Alex D/s thing (I'm definitely guilty of this as well), but we have to remember that -- in the context of the show's premise -- his character is supposed to be pathetic and ridiculous, so when Greg does the "next to me a man who once told me while drunk that he thinks regional accents are inversely correlated to intelligence" intro thing, we're meant to see it as an asshole opinion that is actually unacceptable to hold and no one in their right mind would openly admit to. So Greg is humiliating Alex by (supposedly) exposing him as someone who would spout that kind of opinion. (Same as the jokes about Alex's misogyny. I see people criticise these jokes all the time, but I think that's because they refuse to understand how the underlying mechanism actually works and take them at face value as the real Alex's actual opinion, rather than something deliberately assigned to his in-show character to make a point about them being terrible.)

[translunaryanimus]

A Nhâchchech [Naak'kek] hunter shows off typical daywear. The Nhâchchech (weaver) culture is the most prominent culture of the northern polar regions. The Nhâchchech are also sometimes called the Eshtchchonh [Eshtk'kon], or 'pattern folk/pattern people' due to their brightly patterned outfits. Ssereâch [Sareaat], a hunter, displays typical daywear for teens and adults. Garb is conveniently labeled for our sake. More in depth description under the cut.

Ssereâch is wearing a Ghelâmach, a Nhêdchchonh, a pair of Mhshêchchonh, Dhlesfa and Dhlepach, and a Ssamhnhâl. She also wears Ffâpecha and a few Bhearpaf as accessories. A Ghelâmach [Gelaamat] is the skinned, tanned pelt of one or several polar Ghelâ turned into a warm, insulating cloak. Perfect for colder environemnts. Traditionally Ghelâmach are handmade and use real fur, but faux fur dupes can be found in tourist heavy polar cities. Ssereâch's Ghelâmach is split into two parts, with a more typical overcape 'mach' and a separate waist wrapped section sometimes referred to as a Shochghelâ [Shotgelaa], Ghelâ skirt, when worn apart from the mach. Together though, the two piece ensemble is collectively called a Ghelâmach. A Nhêdchchonh [needk'kon], literally 'pattern shirt', is common upper wear following the same vein as Mhshêchchonh. The patterns of a Nhêdchchonh are typically reserved for the collar, sleeves, and bottom border as opposed to trailing up the entire side of the fabric as is common for Mhshêchchonh. The bright blue color of the body fabric is due to the dye of an aquatic plant rather morbidly called Fôlachemhêsh [Fulatemeesh], "Blood Root". This name comes from the plant's tendency to 'bleed' a vibrant blue sap that heavily resembles Chenesht blood when wet, and when dry, can be boiled down to make a liquid pigment.

Mhshêchchonh [msheek'kon], literally 'pattern pants', are common legwear for polar cultures. Their patterned bands traditionally contain information about the individual wearing them such as name, job, and family but can also contain folk stories, poems, or legends, though purely decorative patterns have come into style among younger generations. Ssereâch's Mhshêchchonha have purely decorative patterns.

The patterned borders of Nhêdchchonha and Mhshêchchonha are woven either through the loom weaving method or the more typical card weaving method and made of dyed sinews, braided plant fibers, or spun fur. They can take months to years to complete depending on the complexity of the pattern. Dhle [Dle] is the common word for any sort of hand or foot covering, typically translated as either 'boot' or 'glove' depending on the context for its use. The Dle being worn here are Dhlesfa [Open Dle] on the forelimbs and Dhlepach [Closed Dle] on the hindlimbs. Dhle were near exclusively worn by the Nhâchchech culture prior to the Three Beasts War and the subsequent cultural merger that led to global leaps in technological advancement. Their once niche use as protective coverings from harsh elements became common use as comfortable footwear for walking along the artificial sidewalk pavements and streets of most modern cities.

Ssamhnhâl [Samnal] literally translates to 'bone glasses' [ssamh - glass, nhâl - bone]. Ssamhnhâl are carved from bone and serve as eye protectant from winter storms or harsh light gleaming off of the snow. The primary eyes look through horizontal slits in the bone, while the secondary eyes are shielded by a carved in 'flap' that they can look under or over. Ssereâch's Ssamhnhâl is carved with decorative patterns as well.

Ffâpecha [Faapeta], or 'twin rings', are a common decorative accessory among teens used to show their devotion to one another. Each ring is made of carved bone and sealed together by animal sinews mashed into glue once they've been linked, and typically have the first name or family name of their beloved carved into one, and their own name into the other. Ffâpecha have long been a source of drama and contention among especially young teens, and broken or cracked sets can often be found littered around the grounds of majority teen camps. Bhearpaf [bearpaf/bearpaw] is the general term for any good luck charm taken from an animal and worn on the hunter's person. Bhearpaf literally translates to 'blessing' or 'lucky charm', but is quite often misinterpreted as the english term 'bear paw' when speaking to humans. Shortening the word to Bhear (gift) has not helped the jokes, and has instead spawned a new tradition of gifting carvings, drawings, or anything with images or patterns of earth bears to your chenesht friends during birthdays or other gift-giving holidays.