#someone did their research

[livingsurreal]

Fiber Arts and Textiles in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Today I want to show some appreciation for the amazing people who created the armor ins DAtV. There is some really neat stuff if you look at it in detail. I have a tousand pictures of the companion armor, so here are a few outstanding details! LOTS of pictures below <3

I love the knitted pullover on Lucanis. So cozy and warm! Taash also has a really interesting pullover here.

You can see, that Emmrichs coat is made of woolen fabric, adorned with a lot of amazingly embossed leather. His west is a denim like textile and his shirt a fine weave with a starched cotton collar.

His silk sash has some amazing pattern. And the little elbow patches, stitched on to his coat? <3

Now Davrin clothes are made of rougher linen, wool and leather.

Neve wears a lot of leather (again, finely embossed), denim like textiles and her famous silk scarf!

Bellara likes leather, heavier cotton fabrics, her favorite silk scarf and she too has a nice knit pullover.

Harding prefers leather and sturdy, heavy fabrics, of course.

Lucanis is our leather boy, of course. Gosh the details!

And now to my favorite part!

The embroidery!

You can see the goddamn stitches!

The patterns on Bels scarf and puches are completely stiched. The fine stitching make of silk on one or Ems robes. A rougher wave pattern on Taashs sash!

And then there is Lace.

Look at Hardings sash, she things she stitched on it! Solas, Orlais Lion, Big Els helmet/horns, BEES!, Coles hat, the Inquisition eye, Varrics book (writing), a Tevinter snake, Iron Bulls Head with a little eyepatch, a griffon/dragon, one of Lelianas ravens, and Inkys hand!

So damn beautiful.

[sunflowermp4]

watched missing (2023) for the first time tonight and it was such a good time however the initial argument scene between her mom and dad felt WAY too real as a biracial child of a non-white mom and a shitty white dad

[justaz]

country bumpkin merlin not knowing anything about city life and accidentally courting arthur without knowing

merlin, watching gwen give lancelot her favor: why do you do that

gwen, heart eyes at lance and not paying that much attention to the conversation: so he knows i’m rooting for him

merlin, with an Idea: ah.

gwaine, lover of chaos, pisser offer of nobles and royals alike, ultimate wingman: merlin…you have such lonely lips. shall i introduce them to mine?

merlin, unaware of the game gwaine is playing: so you can steal my breath away? i think not, scoundrel

arthur, crushing his goblet in his hand:

merlin: arthur’s been in a bad mood recently :( i should cheer him up

merlin, remembering when arthur was put out when merlin brought morgana flowers and not him: i know just the thing

merlin, bringing a bouquet of carnations, roses, and tulips and setting them on arthur’s table while he’s eating breakfast: good morning, sire

arthur, trained on flower language in hopes that one day when he was to take a queen he could woo her easily, trying not to audibly choke on his sausage as he reads merlin’s declaration of love sitting in front of him:

arthur, who recently found out about merlin’s magic and was trying to find a way to bring it up, catching him in the act and watching merlin panic to explain himself:

merlin, Freaking: and i swear to you arthur, i have only ever used it for you. my magic is yours. my life is yours. i am yours. i would never do anything to harm you. i have protected you for years and will continue to do so at your side if you’ll have me

arthur, already believing them to be courting, desperately trying to figure out if that was a proposal for marriage or not but tired of being confused and deciding fuck it: here.

merlin, taking it: i…uh…huh?

arthur, watching merlin with hawk eyes and trying to figure out what he’s thinking and feeling: it’s my mothers sigil

merlin, confused as FUCK but is focusing on the fact that arthur is handing him something of his mother rather than a death sentence: my…my lord?

arthur, realizing how scared merlin’s must be about him finding out about his magic and trying to comfort him while also proposing, killing two birds with one stone: i will always keep you at my side, merlin, so long as we both shall live. if you’ll allow me.

merlin, almost collapsing with relief and tearing up, smiling at arthur as if he had parted the storm clouds to allow sun to shine down on them in that moment: of course…of course, arthur. always and forever.

merlin, watching the castle staff rush this way and that: wow. this banquet must be incredibly important

sir leon the long suffering, day one ride or die, one of the original merthur shippers: banquet? merlin, this is for your wedding

merlin, overworked and exhausted: my WHAT? to WHO??

leon, regretting everything he’s ever done in his life that led him to this moment: to…arthur?

merlin, over joyed but also absolutely befuddled: i’m getting married to ARTHUR?????

leon: you two have been courting for the past year or so, have you not?

merlin: i’ve been COURTING ARTHUR?????? FOR A YEAR?????????

[kindnessoverperfection]

Please, if you can, take a moment to read and share this because I feel like I'm screaming underwater.

NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) stigma is rampant right now, and seems to be getting progressively worse. Everyone is using it as a buzzword in the worst ways possible, spreading misinformation and hatred against a real disorder.

I could go on a long time about how this happened, why it's factually incorrect (and what the disorder actually IS), why it's harmful, and the changes I'd like to see. But to keep this concise, I'll simply link to a few posts under the cut for further reading.

The point of this post is a plea. Please help stop the spread of stigma. Even in mental health communities, even around others with personality disorders, in neurodivergent "safe" spaces, other communities I thought people would be supportive in (e.g. trans support groups, progressive spaces in general), it keeps coming up. So I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on this site need to see this.

Because it's so hard to exist in this world.

My disorder already makes me feel as if I'm worthless and unlovable, like there's something inherently wrong and damaged about me. And it's so much harder to fight that and heal when my daily life consists of:

Laughing and spending time with my friends, doing my utmost best to connect and stay present and focused on them, trying to let my guards down and be real and believe I'm lovable- when suddenly they throw out the word "narcissist" to describe horrible people or someone they hate, or the conversation turns to how evil "people with narcissistic personality disorder" are. (Seriously, you don't know which of your friends might have NPD and feels like shit when you say those things & now knows that you'd hate them if you knew.)

Trying to look up "mental health positivity for people with npd", "mental health positivity cluster bs", only to find a) none of that, and b) more of the same old vile shit that makes me feel terrible about myself.

Having a hard time (which is constant at this point) and trying to look up resources for myself, only to again, find the same stigma. And no resources.

Not having any clue how to help myself, because even the mental health field is spitting so much vitriol at people with DISORDERS (who they're supposed to be helping!) that there's no solid research or therapy programs for people like me.

Losing close friends when they find out, despite us having had a good relationship before, and them KNOWING me and knowing that I'm not like the trending image of pwNPD. Because now they only see me through the lens of stigma and misinformation.

Hearing the same stigma come up literally wherever I go. Clubs. Meetings. Any online space. At the bus stop. At the mall. At a restaurant. At work. Buzzword of the year that everyone loooves loudly throwing around with their friends or over the phone. Feels awesome for me, makes my day so much better/s

I could go on for a long time, but I'm scared no one will read/rb this if it gets too much longer.

So please. Stop using the word "narcissist" as a synonym for "abusive".

Stop bringing up people you hate who you believe to have NPD because of a stigmatizing article full of misinformation whenever someone with actual NPD opens their mouth. (Imagine if people did that with any other disorder! "Hey, I'm autistic." "Oh... my old roommate screamed at me whenever I made noise around him, and didn't understand my needs, which seems like sensory overload and difficulty with social cues. He was definitely autistic. But as long as you're self-aware and always restraining your innate desire to be an abusive asshole, you're okay I guess, maybe." ...See how offensive and ignorant that is?)

Stop preventing healthcare for people with a disorder just because it's trendy to use us as a scapegoat.

If you got this far, thank you for reading, and please share this if you can. Further reading is under the cut.

NPD Criteria, re-written by someone who actually has NPD

Stigma in the DSM

Common perception of the DSM criteria vs how someone may actually experience them (Keep in mind that this is the way I personally experience these symptoms, and that presentation can vary a lot between individuals)

"Idk, the stigma is right though, because I've known a lot of people with NPD who are jerks, so I'm going to continue to support the blockage of treatment for this condition."

(All of these were written by me, because I didn't want to link to other folks' posts without permission, but if you want to add your own links in reblogs or replies please feel free <3)

[heyhanibee]

courting dance♡

[your-local-granny]

"Our job is to find truth, no matter how painful it may be."

[theartofmadeline]

okay but did you celebrate pride by researching & making a zine about abraham lincoln being gay??? don’t worry becuase I did! :)

[afterthelambs]

I'm not sure if I believe the "Wakaba Isshiki did unethical experiments" theory in the fandom, but I do think this is the biggest proof of it in-game:

Because how the hell would she know that?

The first explanation is that she did experiments by sending people into palaces and then testing what happens to them if the palace collapses. Which is messed up for obvious reasons.

The second explanation is that she did NOT test it, meaning she was just making shit up. Which is funny but also would make her a terrible scientist. This explanation is less believable because everything else about her research is too accurate.

There's also a theory that Wakaba did unethical experiments on Akechi specifically. I'm not sure I believe that, since the evidence for it is pretty shallow (like the featherman game scientist experimenting on grey pigeon). But this scene is once again the biggest argument you could make for that theory. The researcher in the image above refers to palaces by their correct term 'palaces', which they say was based on Wakaba's research. But that's only something you would know with firsthand experience of the metaverse. And the only person they know who could access the metaverse was Akechi (that we know of, but i dont think Shido would rely only on Akechi if there were other options).

So yeah this scene is very sus. It's most likely the writers didn't think too deep about the implications. There's no way they wanted Futaba's mom to be sketchy, right? But even if it's not intentional, the scenes and their implications still exist. So in conclusion those theories make sense, I get it, and I don't blame anyone for headcanoning them and having fun. And tbh anyone involved with cognitive psience was portrayed as some degree of unethical (maruki for example), maybe this is just on-brand

[zoe-oneesama]

In the Angelic Layer AU what are the glitches that the angels use? (I have never heard of angelic layer until you started posting about it so I don’t know things about it unless you’ve posted about it)

In the original story, some of the angels had strange "abilities", almost like powers - the ability to lift up a shield, the ability to go "hyper-mode", the ability to grow angel wings and fly, etc - and these were explained in the original manga as "glitches".

Angels that had a slight malfunction, they weren't built with these abilities, but the Deus (the one controlling the angel) discovered them and incorporated them into their fighting styles. The creator of Angelic Layer decided that he liked the creative way Deus' took advantage of these glitches and opted out of patching them out.

So in that spirit, I think it'd only be natural that by the point in the timeline that my AU would take place (20 years after the game was created), people would be going crazy thinking of different ways to break the game in unique ways. Thus why basically all the ML kids Angels have glitches.

[otaku553]

2 am thoughts about roommates

[puppyeared]

Why are ppl scared to call it what it is and say we’re still going thru covid on top of seasonal illness. Like. That’s pretty important right. I was watching the news and they were like oh yeah we have an unprecedented number of flu cases “as well as other sicknesses” without actually saying Covid. No announcement abt vaccinations or masking or anything. Also if I hear someone joking abt “war flashbacks” for mentioning covid I fucking hate u

[ali3nboyfriend]

whyyyy do so few people actually put consideration into their dog's breed when assessing unwanted behaviors

[hopeless-eccentric]

i dont do a lot of book recs on here (i think ive done one before?) but the Henry Rios books by Michael Nava are so criminally underrated!

They're these mystery novels from the 1980s-1990s about a gay, Latino lawyer (Henry Rios, our protagonist/narrator) solving mysteries--usually while trying to prove his client's innocence. He's a long-suffering idealist written as this kind of hard-boiled detective.

This is actually something the whole series tackles, subverts, and deconstructs in a really interesting way! Instead of being this stoic detective, the archetype gets broken down in a lot of really fascinating and human ways earnestly discussing love, grief, intergenerational trauma, racism, homophobia, illness/disability, toxic masculinity, and substance abuse.

What I love is that these books realize that the hard-boiled detective is stuck in a point of hurt and trauma, and so the Henry Rios series makes a big deal out of fighting tooth and nail to GET BETTER--whatever it takes to improve yourself and your surroundings. While the books maintain a lot of the dark and morose vibe of the original genre (especially given the looming, perpetual grief of AIDS-era queer lit), they always come back to a death match against apathy. It's really moving stuff, especially as the books take this approach to Henry's recovery from alcoholism.

if you're interested in queer history, the books are in touch with queer legal/political history during the HIV/AIDS crisis. The first few books have been rewritten/published as well since Michael Nava's retirement, so I think a comparative reading could be really interesting. For the record, Nava was a civil rights lawyer, so this is all done REALLY well (not to mention the legal drama is engaging, theatrical, petty, gutting, and sometimes hilarious).

if you're interested in detective fiction, they're brilliant deconstructions of the genre. instead of taking the depressed alcoholic white guy with repressed desire for male companionship at face value, the series considers a gay Latino man struggling with machismo, racism and homophobia, intersectional identity, and processing/recovering from grief, childhood trauma, alcoholism, and Catholicism.

Stylistically, the books are smart, poetic, introspective, dark, and witty. There's a lot of suffering, but there are also a lot of intense moments of joy and catharsis that feel really earned.

Also, if you read the rewrites. uh. there's a lot of smut! Happy retirement, Mr. Nava!

[sysmedsaresexist]

What's the dead salmon study, and what does it tell us about fMRIs?

fMRIs generate roughly 130,000 voxels in every set of scans.

A voxel is a very small cube. Remember the ones you played with in school?

Like that.

Put together, they form a 3-D picture.

In the background of fMRIs is static and interference.

Through completely random chance, with over 160,000 voxels of data to comb through, the area around a dead fish's brain showed "activity".

The activity was natural interference, which coincidentally "lit up" in a way that set off sensors. It's not actual activity, but what does this tell us? What can we learn from this?

What was the point?

According to the lead researcher, "In fMRI, you have 160,000 darts, and so just by random chance, by the noise that's inherent in the fMRI data, you're going to have some of those darts hit a bull's-eye by accident."

Like adjusting the contrast on a photo, researchers can filter data to see through the noise, but in doing so, you have to ADD additional checks to maintain data integrity.

You can set the filter too high and eliminate false positives, but you'll miss things under the threshold. Set the filter too low, and you get active voxels in a dead fish's brain.

The point of the study isn't to prove that fMRI shouldn't be used or are worthless. It's to show that there's a fine line in that filter level, and that additional verifications MUST be made.

The answer is multiple comparison corrections.

Data collection and interpretation can seem very simple at first glance. Orange around a fish's brain? Clearly it's examining the photos and trying to determine the emotion of the people in the photos, as requested.

No, seriously, they put a fish in a machine and asked it to do the same tests as any other person in the scanner. They talked to it.

I think that's neat :)

But the point of the study was that it's not that simple. That orange could be nothing or it could be something. You HAVE to take the additional steps.

According to Oxford academic,

'The dead salmon study was not bashing functional MRI, it was about people who refuse to use multiple comparisons correction in functional MRI analysis … the salmon is important because it drew attention to the problem, but it’s not a problem with functional MRI as such’.

Yes, the problem is with the researchers.

So what about current fMRI research into DID?

Well, any paper that's been published has had its methods scrutinized. Considering:

1) the number of papers from THE MANY different organizations all showing the same things

2) the repeatability of the findings, over all these studies

3) the decades upon decades of repeated findings, and the additional scans and research in other areas of interest connected to it

4) the mentioned and approved comparisons within the studies

6) the rigorous data sorting involved in ALL of the studies combined, and the noted methods of sorting and interpretation, and the acceptance of sorting methods by MANY various journals

5) and what we are actually seeing on scans, AFTER multiple comparisons...

I think the DID studies are just fine when we're talking about the dead fish study and fMRIs.

[sharonisthebettercarter]

"how do you know so much about the spice girls?"

billy:

[brekitten]

The Therapist

There's a new therapist at school.

Normally this wouldn't really bother Peter at all, since he's never gone to see a shrink in his life and doesn't ever plan on it, but there's something... off about this woman.

She seems unassuming enough at first glance. Red hair, green eyes, bright red lipstick. But there is something in her eyes, something that Peter can only describe as a predator looking at its next prey, when she looks around the school at all of the teenagers milling about. Heck, even the way she walks makes her seem as if she is a predator stalking her prey.

It could always be some kind of power move, Peter reasons. He's met people like that before, who try to intimidate everyone around them into thinking that they are superior, that they are the apex predator and anyone who dares to cross them would pay for it dearly.

But his Spidey Sense went crazy around her.

He tries to brush it off as paranoia. He'd pulled an all-nighter last night in the lab with Tony because neither of them had been able to sleep, and he hadn't been sleeping well even before that. (Funny, how it had all started the night after he first bumped into the new therapist in the halls.) So his Spidey Sense is probably out of wack because he's tired. Simple as that.

But it seems like everyone in the school is depressed. Even Ned, who can't even muster up the energy and enthusiasm to talk about Legos or Star Wars or even the weather. It worries Peter.

Because it all started when that therapist came to the school.

He can't ignore it forever, he knows that. There is only so long his Spidey Sense can tell him that she is danger danger danger before he finally listens. He has to do something to help everyone.

So he researches.

And he falls into the rabbit hole of ghosts and ectoplasm and secret government organizations and the little, unassuming town of Amity Park, Illinois.

He doesn't sleep that night.

When he comes to school the next morning, Dr. Penelope Spectra looks him dead in the eyes, and smiles.