#this sequence chemically altered my brain

[burningvelvet]

"Say you don't love me. I dare you. You cannot."

"I will not. I will love you until I die."

[vaggieslefteye]

CHARLIE MAGNE from HAZBIN HOTEL (2019): Pilot - "That's Entertainment" ↳ "So, I've been thinking: Isn't there a more humane way to hinder overpopulation here in Hell? Perhaps we can create an alternative way to change souls through... redemption?"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Hannah Critchlow

Mon 17 Jun 2024

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.

But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?

Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form. The impact of the starvation your Dutch grandmother suffered during the second world war, for example, or the trauma inflicted on your grandfather when he fled his home as a refugee, might go on to shape your parents’ brains, their behaviours and eventually yours.

Much of the early epigenetic work was performed in model organisms, including mice. My favourite study is one that left the neuroscience community reeling when it was published in Nature Neuroscience, in 2014. Carried out by Prof Kerry Ressler at Emory University, Georgia, the study’s findings neatly dissect the way in which a person’s behaviours are affected by ancestral experience.

The study made use of mice’s love of cherries. Typically, when a waft of sweet cherry scent reaches a mouse’s nose, a signal is sent to the nucleus accumbens, causing this pleasure zone to light up and motivate the mouse to scurry around in search of the treat. The scientists exposed a group of mice first to a cherry-like smell and then immediately to a mild electric shock. The mice quickly learned to freeze in anticipation every time they smelled cherries. They had pups, and their pups were left to lead happy lives without electric shocks, though with no access to cherries. The pups grew up and had offspring of their own.

At this point, the scientists took up the experiment again. Could the acquired association of a shock with the sweet smell possibly have been transmitted to the third generation? It had. The grandpups were highly fearful of and more sensitive to the smell of cherries. How had this happened? The team discovered that the DNA in the grandfather mouse’s sperm had changed shape. This in turn changed the way the neuronal circuit was laid down in his pups and their pups, rerouting some nerve cells from the nose away from the pleasure and reward circuits and connecting them to the amygdala, which is involved in fear. The gene for this olfactory receptor had been demethylated (chemically tagged), so that the circuits for detecting it were enhanced. Through a combination of these changes, the traumatic memories cascaded across generations to ensure the pups would acquire the hard-won wisdom that cherries might smell delicious, but were bad news.

The study’s authors wanted to rule out the possibility that learning by imitation might have played a part. So they took some of the mice’s descendants and fostered them out. They also took the sperm from the original traumatised mice, used IVF to conceive more pups and raised them away from their biological parents. The fostered pups and those that had been conceived via IVF still had increased sensitivity and different neural circuitry for the perception of that particular scent. Just to clinch things, pups of mice that had not experienced the traumatic linking of cherries with shocks did not show these changes even if they were fostered by parents who had.

The most exciting thing of all occurred when the researchers set out to investigate whether this effect could be reversed so that the mice could heal and other descendants be spared this biological trauma. They took the grandparents and re-exposed them to the smell, this time without any accompanying shocks. After a certain amount of repetition of the pain-free experience, the mice stopped being afraid of the smell. Anatomically, their neural circuits reverted to their original format. Crucially, the traumatic memory was no longer passed on in the behaviour and brain structure of new generations.

Could the same thing hold true for humans? Studies on Holocaust survivors and their children carried out in 2020 by Prof Rachel Yehuda at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School, New York, revealed that the effects of parental trauma can indeed be passed on in this way. Her first study showed that participants carried changes to a gene linked to levels of cortisol, which is involved in the stress response. In 2021, Yehuda and her team carried out more work to find expression changes in genes linked to immune-system function. These changes weaken the barrier of white blood cells, which allows the immune system to get improperly involved in the central nervous system. This interference has been linked to depression, anxiety, psychosis and autism. Since then, Ressler and Yehuda have collaborated, with others, to reveal epigenetic tags in PTSD afflicted war zone-exposed combatants. They are hoping this information could aid PTSD diagnosis or even pre-emptively screen for individuals who might be more prone to developing the condition before they enter the battlefield.

In all times and across all cultures, people have paid their dues to their ancestors and pondered the legacy they will leave for their descendants. Few of us believe any more that biology is necessarily destiny or that our bloodline determines who we are. And yet, the more we learn about how our body and mind work together to shape our experience, the more we can see that our life story is woven into our biology. It’s not just our body that keeps the score but our very genes.

Might this new understanding increase our capacity for self-awareness and empathy? If we can grasp the potential impact of our ancestors’ experiences on our own behaviour, might we be more understanding of others, who are also carrying the inherited weight of experience?

We are, as far as we know, the only animals capable of “cathedral thinking”, working on projects over many generations for the benefit of those who come after. It’s an idealistic way to think about legacy, but without it we will struggle to tackle complex multigenerational challenges such as the climate and ecological emergencies. Our knowledge of epigenetics and its potential to massively speed up evolutionary adaptation could support us to do everything we can to be the ancestors our descendants need. Conflict, neglect and trauma induce unpredictable and far-reaching changes. But so do trust, curiosity and compassion. Doing the right thing today could indeed cascade across generations.

[leoandraphssoulmate]

FLUX Random Facts/Character Cannons

Anatomy

In my AU, FLUX, the guys got part of their DNA from their father, Hamato Yoshi, AKA Master Splinter. They weren’t mutated strictly from their own genetics. Each turtle took on a different aspect from Hamato. 

Donnie- Extreme Intelligence

Leo- Leadership and patience

Raph- Rapid learning of weapons and the smaller crafts (knitting)

Mikey- Art and love of food (cooking)

Throughout the mutation process their genes went through a massive editing and addition sequence:

Their brains altered. Adding personality traits, language centers, memory expansion and overall self awareness.

Their bodies and faces altered. Their throats gradually grew an extra set of vocal chords. Allowing them to both speak and make those wonderful churring and clicking sounds.

 They took on more of a humanesque appearance, while keeping the look of a turtle. Instead of having hard bone beneath their shells, connecting to each limb, they developed a very hard, dense bone structure and spine similar to ours. You’d be hard pressed to hurt any one of them honestly! 

They aren’t bulletproof, however! 

Their male anatomy also shifted, trading out a flower like spike for the shape of a regular human penis. Granted not all the brothers were gifted with the same size. *wink* *wink*

Their hormones also changed. The chemicals that used to make them come into season were deleted, replaced with normal human male hormones. 

The mutagen in their blood allows them to heal faster than we would. Getting cut, or breaking a bone is child’s play to them. That shit will heal up within days. Granted there are some nagging issues that they deal with, but after all that’s what makes them part human. 

So, yes, they are turtles, but a very NICE mix of both human and turtle. 

Will add more as the story progresses!

@thelaundrybitch @wynndigogh

[loneberry]

“Concepts of a tiered universe are, of course, not restricted to shamanistic religions. Heaven above, Hell below, and the level of anxious humanity in between appear in one form or another across the globe. Why should this be so? In the materiality of daily life there is, after all, no evidence whatsoever of hidden spiritual realms above and below. The answer to this question is, I argue, to be found in a set of widely reported mental experiences. These reports come not only from laboratory experiments but also from an extremely broad range of shamanistic (and other) societies. The experiences fall into two categories: those that are taken to relate to an underworld, and those that are interpreted as relating to a realm in the sky above.

In discussing the underworld, we may group underground and underwater experiences. In Chapter 4, I described the sensation of passing through a vortex, or tunnel, as subjects move along the intensified spectrum and into Stage 3 of deeply altered consciousness. Tunnel experiences also occur in dreams and near-death experiences. Often there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. As we saw, Siegel notes that the first iconic images appear on the sides of this enclosing vortex. Here, I suggest, is the reason why so many peoples around the world believe in passing underground to a subterranean realm. The notion has its origin in altered states of consciousness and then becomes part of socially transmitted culture so that even those who have never experienced the far end of the intensified trajectory accept the beliefs.

At the same time, subjects often experience sensations of inhibited breathing, distorted vision, sounds in the ears, difficulty in moving, weightlessness, and a sense of being in another world. These sensations are frequently interpreted as being underwater. Both underground and underwater travel are widely reported shamanistic experiences.

It is important to remember that these experiences are the result of the way in which the human brain and nervous system are neurologically constructed and the ways in which they operate electro-chemically in altered states of consciousness. To this extent, the experiences are universal. The precise ways in which they are rationalized are culturally situated and hence differ in some ways from society to society: some people speak of entering caves, others of following the roots of a tree, and still others of going down animal burrows, rather like Alice. Similarly, and depending to some extent on the environment in which people live, others speak of diving into the sea or deep pools.”

—David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

.

.

I almost gave up on this book because everything it says about Neanderthals is wrong. To be fair the book was written 20 years ago, about 7 years before the Neanderthal genome was even sequenced. Now it looks like Neanderthals may have actually been the creators of the earliest cave paintings, around 20,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived to Europe. Neanderthals cooked elaborate meals using spices. They bred with us. They even invented flatbread! To say Neanderthals lacked higher-order consciousness or the mental architecture to conceptualize a past or future is patently absurd. Hell, for all we know, an earlier hominin species, Homo naledi, could have engaged in “funerary practices” 335,000 years ago (palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists are still debating the implications of the 2013 discovery of the Homo naledi remains).

If you bracket everything The Mind in the Cave says about Neanderthals, the book is delightfully trippy. It offers a shamanistic theory of Upper Palaeolithic cave art grounded in an emphasis on the role of altered states of consciousness. I supposed I'm predisposed to chthonic experiences (considering my first dream book was Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb* and I'm obsessed with water...). But now that I think of it--the book I'm currently finishing is titled Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun; there most be something of the celestial in me too. (*The title was actually inspired by an article I read about the classified ad recruiting "tiny spelunkers" for the mission to retrieve the Homo naledi remains in the Rising Star Cave of South Africa...)

[haowenyang]

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST

Are you quite all right?

TESSA

Yeah, just… your tape recorder. It’s old.

ARCHIVIST

I get that a lot.

TESSA

I just mean, I’ve been thinking about “analog” and “digital,” what we mean by them?

ARCHIVIST

In terms of information…?

TESSA

Yeah. We use the word “digital” to refer to one specific way of storing information – discrete signal values interpreted at pre-established levels. “Analog” is just a fancy way of saying “everything else.”

ARCHIVIST

I, uh –

TESSA

[speaking over him] Almost everything in the world is analog, but we’re obsessed with digital. We try to surrender everything into it, break the world down and turn it into as much binary as it takes. But it’s not the same.

I used to work on OCR programs, teaching computers to read, to take the messy physicality of the written word and convert it into something that a computer can understand in a digital format.

ARCHIVIST

I’m not sure what this has to do with my tape recorder.

TESSA

Magnetic tape. Everyone thinks it’s analog, but it’s digital. A lower-tech version than what we use now, but people forget that it was used to store computerized data for decades. Maybe it reminds people of a film reel, or, or maybe nostalgia turns everything analog.

Although people always think of digital as not really there, but the thing is, information is always physically present. It doesn’t exist as some formless nothing. Even within the tiniest, most advanced storage systems, physical memory cells change and alter themselves to render that information in a language all of their own.

I suppose it isn’t language, not really, because, because language as we use it is about as far from digital as you can get. We may call them words, but, the units of data that a computer works with are by their nature discrete and definite, while the words we use are clumsy, vague things, always at the whim of interpretation and decay.

It’s the obvious thing to say, that a computer cannot feel, but it’s true. No sequence of distinct ones and zeros can replicate the swirling cocktail of chemicals and, and, you know, nerves that is a human being. Or any other animal for that matter. Nothing about humanity is binary.

ARCHIVIST

…r-right. So, you work in computers, then.

TESSA

Sorry, I, um… it’s been a while since I talked to someone in person? Been spending a lot of time in my own head, you know. Used to just dumping information when I get the chance. I have a blog, actually, but I haven’t posted for almost a year. Almost too embarrassed to, now… Assuming I’m not losing my mind, of course!

ARCHIVIST

Yes, I hear that a lot, too.

TESSA

Well, that’s what’s terrifying, isn’t it? Your mind is all you are, there’s no backup, or you know, reset, If it goes. I’m not just talking about madness as it appears, but what it is from inside. The way people talk about it, it’s like you have to think you’re saying that our mind is everything we perceive, everything we are. That means you can never know when your grasp might be slipping. I’m not convinced that’s it, though.

Or maybe deep down somewhere inside, you understand what’s happening to you and – no. I am, I don’t know which scares me more.

ARCHIVIST

Uh, look, I don’t want to rush you –

TESSA

I’ve got a lot of friends whose retirement plans basically come down to uploading their minds into a computer and living forever in a virtual world. They’re so sure it’s just around the corner. I’ve never had the heart to tell them it’s impossible – that the human brain is a wet mess of analog signal interpretation that is as far removed from the clean logics of digital processing as it’s possible to be.

We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that computers and people have anything in common? But no matter how good we may program them to be at pretending to think like us, that’s all we’ll ever be. Crossing the line from meat and chemicals into pure digital systems is impossible. And everything else is just sophisticated programming and, and illusion.

ARCHIVIST

I mean, that’s fascinating, Miss Winters, but I must politely ask you to start your statement.

TESSA

What do you think I’ve been doing?

ARCHIVIST

…traditionally, our concerns are with the particulars of the supernatural incident, its origins and manifestations.

TESSA

I’m giving you context.

ARCHIVIST

Right…

In that case, I still need to make the official notations.

Statement of Tessa Winters, regarding a strange computer program she downloaded from the Deep Web three months ago.

Is that accurate?

TESSA

[heh] Well, first off, I didn’t find it on “the Deep Web” – god, it’s like talking to my grandpa! Let me explain something quickly: any time someone tries to give you a line about the “the Deep Web,” or even better, “the darknet,” chances are they wouldn’t know a VPN from their own ass. There’s not some secret, sinister underbelly of the internet where, with the right passwords and double-talk, you can hack your way into a black market of assassins, drug lords, and secret forums.

It’s just that some websites, well, we need to be a bit more security-minded, and need you to use the right, you know, software, so you’re not monitored. – I mean, yes, there’s drug stuff on there, but it’s mostly just paranoid geeks who don’t want to be caught pirating Photoshop.

ARCHIVIST

Noted.

Statement recorded direct from subject 7th January, 2017. Statement begins.

TESSA (STATEMENT)

Have you ever heard of Sergey Ushanka? I’d guess not. He’s one of the less well-known online spook stories, and you don’t look like you’re a regular presence in the chatbot or neural net communities.

The story goes back to about 1983, during the first home computer boom. There was this programmer by the name of Sergey Ushanka – I don’t know if that’s his real name, probably not… but, since a “ushanka” is a type of furry Russian hat, and he probably never actually existed… but, he was supposed to have been a real digital guru.

Well, according to the story, he, he got sick. In most versions it’s, uh, it’s brain cancer, but some say early-onset Alzheimer’s, or some sort of undiagnosed brain infection. Point is, it was killing him, and it affected his brain.

Now, Sergey didn’t want to die, the idea of death terrified him, and whatever was eating his mind gave him the idea to try and save his consciousness, to, um, to upload his brain.

Well, the next bit, it, um, depends on how ghoulish a version of the story you’re told.

In some, he spends a fortune and every last hour of his last months trying desperately to code his own mind into his system, and he ends up lying dead at the keyboard, decomposing fingers still tapping away the last slivers of himself.

Other versions get a bit more grotesque. Handwritten code in his own blood feeding into the machine. I even heard one where he took the direct approach, removed the casing of his computer, carved off the top of his skull, and used the last ounces of his strength to impossibly shove his own deceased brain right into the circuitry.

Whatever version you’re told, the story goes that it actually worked, and the police found a pile of floppy disks full of impossible code next to the mutilated body of Sergey Ushanka.

I’m sure you can guess the next bit. First on floppy disks, then later on CD, and eventually downloaded directly. Sergei Ushanka has been a running prank for people who like to code text parsers and chatbots. They’re not unlike screamer videos, just a lot slower and, ideally, subtler.

You create a program which appears to be a chat window with a stranger who identifies themselves as Sergey. The responses should be as naturalistic as possible to begin with, and in the best ones it’s hard to tell if you’re talking to a bot for the first minute or two.

But then the responses start to break down, become more sinister, and keep referring to how much pain Sergey is in. Eventually, the only response the bot gives you is screaming and pleas to be released. The idea is that the chat bot is Sergey Ushanka’s mind, and he doesn’t like being in a computer nearly as much as he’d hoped. If it’s well-executed, it can be genuinely quite unsettling.

But the only two consistent details across all of them are a particular image of a heavily-pixelated screaming face, and the phrase “the angles cut me when I try to think,” which marks the start of the bot’s descent into madness. Well, as far as I know these two things have been consistent right back to the earliest versions of Sergey Ushanka.

Like I say, it’s quite a niche legend, but within certain communities, everyone’s tried their hand at making a Sergey Ushanka at least once. Well, even I looked into it once or twice, and I’m on the fringes. I’ve done a few projects with basic neural nets, but I’ve never really tried my hand at a chatbot, and gave up after a couple of hours. I used to love them. The whole thing really hit my sweet spot between creepy and nerdy, and if I found myself up at 4:00 in the morning after watching too many YouTube ghost videos, I’d often go on the hunt for a new one.

So, when I got a notification from the bot group I’m part of, and it was just a link to a file named your “Ushanka’s Despair.exe”, I didn’t hesitate. I downloaded it almost immediately. It was a bit disappointing to see it was a tiny file, barely over a megabyte. That didn’t bode well for the experience, but I was still keen to give it a go later that night, when the ambience was better.

I looked back at the post, and saw that underneath it was comment after comment telling the OP that they’d posted a broken link. I shrugged it off at the time, but looking back I think I was probably the first person to click it, and the only one it worked for. Just unlucky, I guess.

I forgot about it for a while, but I didn’t have anything scheduled for the next day, so I spent most of the evening drinking and messing about online. It was about two in the morning when I remembered what I had waiting in my downloads. I looked out the dark, empty street below, and a pleasing shiver run up my spine. I decided I was in the perfect mood to have a chat with Sergey Ushanka.

Opening the program brought up a chat window. It wasn’t like most of the others I’d seen; it looked closer to an old-school text adventure, with just a flashing line to indicate where to type your text, white on back. Aside from that, the window was empty.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, as usually, the bot would make the first move, so I decided to go with a generic hello. There was no way the bots didn’t have a response programmed for that.

I waited, but there didn’t seem to be any response. That was fine. Often these things were programmed with waiting times to give the impression of thinking or composing a response. After about 15 seconds, I’m about to give it up as non-functional and close it, when the answer comes.

It’s gibberish – just a mess of symbols and letters, like it was using the wrong characters. Some of them weren’t even ASCII. I didn’t have time to really process it, though, as they were generating quickly, and soon filled the whole screen.

They weren’t static, either, but changing and scrolling, and um, and it’s gonna sound weird and it was only for a moment, but I could have sworn I saw some of the symbols twitch? Like they were in pain?

It was making my eyes hurt to watch, and I started to feel dizzy… but I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

Even then, I thought I was just looking at a very well-done horror set piece, especially when I started to notice a handful of English words popping into the wall of shifting text, for a second or two at a time. One of them read “helphelphelp”, all run together, and another, “it peels my mind like knives.”

My mouth was dry, and my hands were shaking, but even then all I could think was [laugh] how good this was. I was genuinely impressed by how unsettled it was making me.

It was the laptop’s fan that finally got me. I gradually realized that it wasn’t making its normal whirring sounds anymore. It had changed to something harsher, less healthy-sounding, like it was desperately trying to expel air? It sounded like someone breathing out diseased lungs, pushing and straining and, and never stopping to take anything back in.

It was only at that point that the possibility of malware really occurred to me. I didn’t know how it would make my laptop fans sound like that, but my computer wasn’t acting right. I tried to exit the program, and predictably enough, it wouldn’t close. So I crashed it, planning to have a look through in safe mode.

Sure enough, the lights went dark, and the groaning sounds of the fan died, but the white text on the screen wasn’t going anywhere.

Now, that, I knew was impossible. Or maybe there might have been some way to keep it frozen on the screen when the computer turned off, but to have it keep changing and morphing, when there was clearly no power running through it? Well, if it’s possible I don’t know how you do it.

More words popped in and out of existence: “you wanted to talk” and “hihihihihi” over and over again.

Then all at once, the screen was filled with an image. It was grainy, like a very early webcam, and the camera appeared to be lying on a table looking up at a balding man. He appeared to be in his late 30s, I thought, and was shirtless, with a face frozen in pain or distress. Then he moved, and I realized that I must be watching a video file.

The man was crying. There was no sound, but I could see great heaving sobs that sent his whole body shuddering. He stared into a computer monitor, the edge of which I could just about see. He seemed to be sat in the dark, and his face was solely illuminated by the screen in front of him. I watched with mounting dread as the video continued. He reached down, to what I assumed would have been the keyboard, but he didn’t seem to be typing.

Instead, there was a sudden jerking motion, and he raised his hand to reveal one of the keys, that he had apparently torn off. He brought it to his mouth, and began to eat it. I could just about make out the snap of his jaw, as the hard plastic shattered between his teeth. And as he reached for the next one, I could see a trickle of blood from his lips.

Well, that was more than enough for me. I slammed the laptop shut, and pushed it away. I decided that whatever was ha-happening could wait until daylight. I turned on all the lights in my room and sat in an armchair drinking until I passed out, trying not to think about Sergey Ushanka.

I don’t know how long I slept for, but it can’t have been more than an hour or two, since it was still fully dark when I was woken by a snapping, crunching noise. I opened my eyes to see my TV screen on. It was showing that same video, the washed-out grainy blue making details almost impossible to distinguish, but there was noise now, coming through my speakers. I heard him crunching and eating the keys as he snapped them off, one by one.

I tried to figure out how the program could have jumped from my laptop to my TV, which wasn’t plugged in or networked to it. The only thing they had in common was the router and, and that didn’t make any sense, not unless someone was playing a really elaborate, really horrible prank on me, specifically. And I’m not the nicest person, but… I’ve never pissed anyone off that much.

All the time I was trying to figure this out, the video kept playing. The man’s breathing was labored and painful, and he was talking, muttering to himself, or maybe to me. There was no way to tell.

I couldn’t make out much through the mess he’d made of his mouth, and what I could hear, I didn’t understand. He was talking about how “it feels like thinking through cheese wire,” and “there’s no feeling, but the no feeling hurts,” and that “it’s cold without blood.”

He said that a lot. “It’s cold” and “it hurts.”

He spoke with a Russian accent. At one point, he stopped pulling at the keyboard, and reached out in front of him to where the monitor would be. There was a sound of breaking, and he pulled back a shard of glass. I don’t need to tell you what he did with it. The worst thing was, even though this meant the screen must have been shattered, somehow it was still illuminating his face.

I unplugged everything – the TV, the router, the speakers, everything. Well, that seemed to stop it, at least, at least for a while. I was in a bad way by this point, and I just left and wandered the streets until the sun came up. I didn’t take my phone, just… well, just in case.

That video was 17 hours long. I know this because it followed me until I watched all of it.

Any time I used a computer, watched TV, or looked too long at a screen, there it was. Didn’t matter if it was my own or someone else’s. After a few minutes, whatever I was looking at would melt away, and he’d be back, continuing to slowly, painfully eat his computer.

I tried to show it to a friend once, but he just looked at me like I was playing some weird joke. Only I could see it, apparently. I don’t want to be mad. I don’t think I am. But there’s no way really to know, is there?

After a month of this, I finally sat down and watched it through to the end. It was the longest day of my life, and by the end, I felt so very sick, I almost threw up when he smiled. Finally, he laid down in front of the camera and said:

“The maze is sharp on my mind.”

“The angles cut me when I try to think.”

Then he stopped moving. I could see the top of his head then, and the back of it seemed to be missing.

The picture stayed like that for about half an hour, and then the video ended. I haven’t seen it since.

I keep thinking about the idea of uploading your mind into a computer. I said it was impossible. I still think it’s impossible, in the way we want it to be. But I can’t stop wondering what it must be like to try and have thoughts, messy human thoughts, trapped in the rigid digital processes of a computer.

It must hurt. Though not a sort of pain that we can understand.

Is that enough? Do you have what you need?

ARCHIVIST

I think… uh, yes. I think we do.

TESSA

The way you’re looking at me, I’m going to assume you don’t know anything more about this than I do.

ARCHIVIST

Not really, I’m afraid. I can talk you through some other encounters we’ve recorded with supposedly haunted computers, and I think one of our post-grad students is working on something about supernatural manifestations in technology, but I don’t think we have anything else like this.

TESSA

Yeah, I figured. I just saw your post and thought, why not? And it does feel good to talk about it. You know?

ARCHIVIST

Yes, I very much understand.

Oh! While I have you –

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST

Supplemental.

It looks like my posting on a few of the more tech-savvy boards appealing for statements has worked.

While the incident itself seems ultimately inconsequential, I was able to convince Tessa to have a look at Gertrude’s laptop, claiming to have locked myself out. I don’t know what she did – something about “command lines” and “administrative privileges” – but I now. Have. Access.

[slow exhale] I’m almost afraid –

[DOOR CREAKS]

TIM

Hey, where did you put the –

Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you while you were being suspicious –

ARCHIVIST

It’s fine.

TIM

No, no, I’ll – catch you when you’re not scheming.

[FOOTSTEPS WALKING AWAY]

ARCHIVIST

[quietly] No need to take that tone –

TIM

What?

ARCHIVIST

Nothing. I’ll see you later –

TIM

No.

[SMALL CLUNK LIKE A CHAIR MOVING]

What did you say?

ARCHIVIST

I said there’s no need for the attitude, I know things have been difficult, but –

TIM

Oh, they have, have they? “Things have been difficult?” You’ve spent a month staring at that footage – double-checking every moment, timing every tea break, looking at me like I somehow staged it – but no! You’re right: “Things have been difficult.”

ARCHIVIST

It just seems a little too convenient!

TIM

Excuse me!?

ARCHIVIST

I mean, the CCTV is so corrupted that the police can’t just use it immediately, and then they happen to finish restoring it just when I start really digging into the murder!? And if it was an option, why not clean it up when she first disappeared!?

And don’t get me started on the lack of cameras in the Archives – I know, I know Elias’s whole spiel about “signal degradation” and “installation issues,” but I don’t buy it. I mean, he got the CO2 system put in easily enough –

TIM

Shut. Up.

ARCHIVIST

What –

TIM

Shut up. Just stop talking. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you! We didn’t kill Gertrude, and no one wants to kill you, you pompous idiot!

ARCHIVIST

Now, listen here –

TIM

No. No. You listen, for once. I was fine in research. Happy. Then you asked me to be transferred here and suddenly it’s all monsters and killers and secret passages, oh my!

And the worst thing – the actual worst thing – is that no one here has my back. With any of it! Elias doesn’t care, Martin just wants a tea party, and Sasha – ugh – and you! – you’re treating me like I’m somehow to blame for it all, like I didn’t suffer the worst right alongside you!

ARCHIVIST

Well, excuse me if my experiences have made me –

TIM

Your experiences? Fuck you, I got eaten by worms because of you!

ARCHIVIST

Well, what do you want? You want sympathy?

TIM

You know what, yeah! Little bit of basic sympathy would have been nice!

ARCHIVIST

Jane Prentiss was not my fault, I did not bring her to the Archives –

TIM

Oh, but you went off the deep end afterwards, didn’t you!? Everything went to hell – and when you actually needed to be in charge, you just hid down here and played with your tape recorder –

ARCHIVIST

Well, what would you have me do!?

TIM

Anything! Anything that wasn’t turning into a paranoid lunatic would have been fine! Anything that showed you could actually do your job!

ARCHIVIST

Well, [nervous faux-laugh] Elias clearly thinks –

TIM

Elias should’ve fired you weeks ago!

ARCHIVIST

What!?

TIM

After everything you’ve pulled, you should be gone. But no! Instead, we all get to talk about how you’re feeling, because we’re worried about our stalker boss. I, I can’t do this anymore!

ARCHIVIST

Then quit.

If you hate it so much, leave your post in the Archives. Permanently.

TIM

Are you firing me?

ARCHIVIST

…I’m offering you a chance to quit. No notice period, I’ll even make sure you get the rest of the month’s paycheck.

Just say the words.

[PAUSE]

TIM

I want to…

ARCHIVIST

So do it.

TIM

I…

Can’t.

ARCHIVIST

Why not?

TIM

I, I can’t! I don’t know – why can’t I quit!?

ARCHIVIST

I-I don’t know. But I don’t think I can fire you either…

TIM

What?

ARCHIVIST

It’s this place.

TIM

…I don’t understand.

ARCHIVIST

Neither do I. I’m trying to figure it out, I-I’ve got the shape of it, but…

I’m sorry, Tim. Truly I am. But I cannot and will not trust you. This place isn’t right – you see that now. I don’t know how or why, but there is something very wrong with the Archives. And I don’t know who here is a victim of it – and who is an agent.

TIM

So… What do we do?

ARCHIVIST

For now…? I suppose we just… do our jobs.

TIM

I don’t want to.

ARCHIVIST

No.

TIM

…I, um, suppose I’ll see you later.

ARCHIVIST

I suppose so.

[DOOR CREAKS]

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

theo is this you .

[magic5ball]

A Letter to Mom (5)

Dear Mom,

Please forgive my previous outburst. I love you almost as much as I love PONGCORP, and it is this love that at times leads me to selfishness. If you were only like CEO Lucky Pong, whose benevolence can be found in even the lowliest paperclip, then I would not long to reach you through these missives!

That being said, I believe I understand what has irked you so: although I have spoken of my job before, I have yet to entail what it actually is, beyond that it is a function I perform. I looked it up, and apparently it is very rude to do this. As such, I apologize. However, you know I’ve never been the best with words, so today I will try to describe a single aspect of my job best I can. But to do this, I must start with DNA™.

DNA™ (Digital Nucleic company Asset) is the thing that makes up all company products. It consists of five chemicals: adenine, thiamine, cytosine, guanine, and PONGNINE*. Adenine always connects with thiamine and guanine to cytosine. PONGNINE is alpha and omega, and thus can stand by itself.

These are what I work with. The idea (as explained in my orientation video) is that by putting a thousand of us in an office space and having us type random combinations of these acids, even lowly desk-monkeys such as myself will eventually crack the genetic code for creating the ultimate superorganism. In this fashion I pass most of my time, though on occasion, like today, I’ll receive a missive from my boss requesting I edit an already existing genetic code. This is tricky, since all the As, Ts, Cs, Gs, and Ps tend to blur together after the thousandth line. But if you work as long as I have, you get eventually get good. Sort of sneaks up on you, really.

Anyway, today I just needed to add a few Ps to the end of the sequence for the new Model Employee Type 42K. I messaged my boss about why we had to change this, and he explained the alterations will grant a genetic upgrade to future employees so they will be terminated** via brain tumors at 35. Not only will this create more job openings by ensuring faster turnover rates, the newer generation will no longer have to endure dementia, arthritis, multi scoliosis, and other maladies whose cures were once only accessible to the upper echelons of PONGCORP. Truly, our CEO’s compassion is beyond compare!

Glory to Lucky Pong!

Kib Johnson

 *Did you know the twisting, weaving strands of DNA™ are what inspired our company’s blue puzzle piece logo? The more you know!

**painlessly! I know how you feel about these sorts of things!

[senatorraines]

top 5 adrian moments?

okay so u want to me to go feral . that's fine KSKSJDBDBDBDMKDDK

under the cut because no one needs to be subjected to this level of mental illness unwillingly

ask me my top five anything!

these are in no particular order expect the first one bc OF COURSE

1. love bridge scene/dancing on the boat/etc. - im sorry this altered in the chemicals in my brain like ????? he is SO in love with mc IT'S SICKENING AND THE SLIGHT MENTION OF ETERNITY LIKE THEY PUT CRACK IN THIS SHIT !!!!!!!! like it is my favorite diamond scene EVER we get "adoring smile on his face as he gazes as you" "and yet ur the most beautiful thing here" "i thought u didn't know abt the love bridge" "i just wanted to hear it from ur lips. what do you think, shall we?" AND "to our eternity "eternity can mean something very different to u than it does to me" ANDDDDDDD THIS:

like they r everything to me and thank u for giving me an excuse to talk abt this scene bc it is simply thee BEST

2. NOT HER NEVER HER 🥰😍😋🤩🥺😁💗 - LIKE IM SORRY I THINK ADRIAN IS ALLOWED TO GO JUST A BIT APESHIT FOR THE SAKE OF MC ! and when he does there is simply nothing else like it i fear ! i won't get into how we were robbed of dark!adrian and how book 2 was literally building up to that bc i would like to stay sane but this scene is everything n then some ! (also the parallel of mc wrapping her arms around him and being like "come back to me" to in the book 3 finale when mc possesses rheya's power and adrian says "i love you come back to me" LIKE MY GOD)

3. adrian taking the serum and spending the day with mc - it's just so cute 🥺💗 like that's my man! and these descriptions:

the writers WANTED me to fall in love with him and it worked! also in book 3 when u can invite him to mc's dream sequence and he actually really feels the sun on his face for the first time in 200+ years 🥺 i love him sm

4. adrian injecting all of the serum and jumping out the window with mc - THIS SCENE IS INSANE LIKE WHEN THE BB SCENES HIT THEY HIT !!!!!!! like come on:

he was so sexy for this and also the description of adrian popping his bones back into place ❤️ hehe

5. mc dying - EVERYBODY MOVED !!! LIVES WERE CHANGED !!! MINE ESPECIALLY !!! WHEN HE'S HOLDING MC IN HIS ARMS AND SHE'S BLEEDING OUT AND HE'S CRYING AND THEN HE HITS U WITH THE "you're the best thing to happen to me in 200 years" !!!!!!! THEY PUT CRACK IN THE BB2 FINALE BUT THAT LAST SCENE SPECIFICALLY LIKE I ALWAYS START SOBBING and then we get the mc fang cg and all is well again ❤️ KSJSNDBDNDKSK

[kk095]

Last Ride

Here's my latest story! @defibresuslover247 gave me the idea and @eyesfixedanddilated gave me a few pointers along the way. I hope everyone enjoys!

****

Brooke was a 22 year old with a full, busty figure, dirty blonde hair, and blue eyes. She was a southern girl, born and raised in eastern Tennessee. She was always a bit of a tomboy and enjoyed outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, and riding ATV's.

The night of the incident started off normally. Brooke’s older brother Mike had received a nice tax return that year and decided to splurge a little bit by purchasing a new ATV. Since he knew his younger sister was into riding ATV's, he invited her to try it out with him.

The two siblings went out into a vacant 20 acre lot on the outskirts of town. This particular plot of land had plenty of hills and open areas, so a lot of ATV enthusiasts in the area enjoyed riding there. When the 2 of them got there, Mike parked his blue Ford F150 along a dirt path about 50 yards or so from the road. Mike got the ATV out from the small trailer attached to the back of his truck and the riding began.

For the first hour or so, the 2 siblings were having fun in the outdoors. They were zipping up and down the hills, through the dirt paths, and had a few beers along the way. But as time went on, the drinking and lack of light once the sun set took its toll. While Brooke was riding the ATV by herself, she went was riding downhill at a high rate of speed, losing track of her speed. Her chest hits the handlebars before she goes flying off the vehicle. She lands hard on the ground, striking her head and left side of her face. While tumbling down the hill, the ATV rolls violently down the hill, stomping right over Brooke’s right femur before continuing on down. Brooke screamed at the top of her lungs, feeling her right femur snap like a twig and slightly protruding through her jeans. Brooke’s wild trip down the hill came to an abrupt stop when her left arm and ribcage smashed into the side of a tree.

“Holy shit… BROOKE?!” Mike shouted from the top of the hill after watching the event unfold in horror. “Brooke?! BROOKE?! You ok?!” Mike yells as he starts to run down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, Brooke was screaming out in agonizing pain. She could see a bone fragment penetrating through her jeans on her right thigh, and her left arm was badly broken. She felt a bit dizzy, and could the stinging from open cuts and blood on the left side of her face. Her left humerus, which broke the fall into the tree at the bottom of the hill, was swollen and had some obvious deformities. Brooke tried to get up, but she obviously couldn’t. She sat on the ground squirming and crying, begging her brother to help.

When Mike got to the bottom of the hill, he was taken aback by his sister’s injuries. He stood lorna deer in headlights for a few seconds before whipping out his cell phone to call 911. The call was transcribed as the following:

911 dispatcher: 911, what is your emergency?

Mike: I need an ambulance! My sister’s hurt real bad!

911 dispatcher: Sir, please remain calm. Can you tell me the location of your emergency?

Mike: we’re on that vacant lot off of highway 501 with all the hills and paths! You gotta hurry, I think she’s hurt bad!

911 dispatcher: alright sir, police and EMS are en route. Can you tell me what happened?

Mike: She flipped off the ATV and rolled down the hill. There’s a bone sticking out of her leg!

Due to the extent of her injuries, the 911 dispatcher instructed Mike to refrain from first aid and just stay with his sister to keep her calm. Since the vacant lot was outside of town, it was going to take the ambulance at least 10-15 minutes to arrive on scene. But with the amount of pain Brooke was experiencing, those 10-15 minutes would feel like an eternity.

When EMS arrived on scene, they found Brooke screaming and crying in agony and Mike panicking, feeling semi responsible since this was all his idea. The medics instructed Mike to step away and give them space to examine Brooke.

The medics noted a few injuries immediately: open right femur fracture, left humerus fracture, facial+head lacerations, and some bumps on her head. The medics placed a c-collar since a spinal cord injury was within the realm of possibilities. The medics then removed Brooke’s socks, shoes, and snipped off her jeans so they can reset the open femur fracture. Brooke winced in pain while the 2 medics wiggled the pants off after making a few cuts with trauma shears. Next, the medics reduced the open femur fracture, which cause Brooke to scream loudly in pain for a second. Once the bone was below the skin and somewhat in its ’s normal place, the laceration from the bone protrusion was bandaged up and the area was splinted off. The next order of business was to focus on the humerus injury. There was obvious swelling and deformity, consistent with a displaced oblique fracture within the humerus. The upper left arm was also reset and splinted, causing Brooke a great deal of pain. After the arm was treated, the medics quickly bandaged up some of the head lacerations and abrasions and began setting up 2 large bore IVs. After IV access was obtained, normal saline was hung, but the medics refrained from administering pain medications since alcohol was smelled on Brooke’s breath, and there were beer cans scattered across the ground just up the hill. Brooke’s top was then cut off, sparing her black bra and matching underwear. A 5 lead ECG with a portable heart monitor was set up to obtain readings for her vital signs. On scene, Brooke’s vitals were: BP 87/49, Pulse 121, o2 saturation 94%. Brooke was placed onto a backboard and taken over to a gurney, and taken into an ambulance.

Mike begged and pleaded with EMS to ride in the ambulance with them, but they told him he couldn’t. “THAT’S MY FUCKIN SISTER! LET ME IN!” Mike shouted belligerently. One of the cops on scene offered a compromise: since he had too much to drink, they’d drive him to the hospital.

During the first part of transport, Brooke was a little short of breath, so an o2 mask with high flow oxygen was placed. The medic in the back of the ambulance lowered their stethoscope onto the girl’s chest and listened to her heart and lungs. “heart sounds good, but we’ve got diminished breath sounds on the left. Might be a tension pneumo.” The medic announced to the driver afterwards. The medic also noted that there was swelling and bruising on the side of her chest along her left ribcage, consistent with possible rib fractures or dislocation.

Over the following 10 minutes or so, Brooke’s condition changed a bit. Her GCS dropped to 10, and became a bit disoriented. Her systolic BP dropped into the upper 70s, and her heart rate was approaching the 130s. With this in mind, the medics became concerned about a potential head injury. The medics checked her pupils: right pupil was reactive, and the left pupil (injured size) had the early stages of dynamic oval pupil. Essentially, her left pupil had a slight oval, or almond shape. This is typically associated with eye trauma, optic nerve injuries, or brain bleeds originating from the back of the head. Since there wasn’t sufficient evidence of trauma to the eyes/optic nerve, it appeared a head injury was within the realm of possibilities. “Hey, what’s our ETA? GCS dropped to 10 and we’ve got a DOP in the left eye. She needs a head CT ASAP.” The medic in the back of the ambulance called out. “ETA 4 minutes. Hang in there…” the driver replied. The ambulance continued speeding down the road, sirens on full blast while Brooke continued to struggle in the back. She was squirming around and groaning in pain. “Miss, you gotta stay still for me, ok?” the medic said calmly, attempting to reason with brooke. Brooke began crying again while fidgeting around and kicking her healthy leg out. “Miss! You gotta stay calm!” the medic said more sternly, grabbing ahold of Brooke trying to hold her in place. Brooke quickly became inconsolable and demonstrated an altered mental status. “she’s definitely got a brain bleed or something…” the medic thought to themselves. Brooke needed to stay still due to her femur fracture, and because a spinal/neck injury hasn’t been ruled out. Since there was no getting through to Brooke, the medic decided to push a round of rocuronium. This medication is a strong muscle relaxer and paralytic agent, so it’s used as a chemical restraint when patients consume alcohol since alcohol doesn’t mix well with other agents commonly used.

Within 30 to 45 seconds, Brooke was knocked out by the medication. Since she was now unconscious, the medic decided to perform rapid sequence intubation on her for airway management. With a laryngoscope in 1 hand, the medic maneuvered a 7.0 ET tube into the girl’s airway. Once it was at the correct depth and place, the tube was secured with a blue tube holder, and an ambu bag was attached. For the remainder of the ambulance ride, Brooke remained hypotensive and tachycardic, and her GCS was still bouncing between 9 and 10.

Upon arrival at the ER, the medics gave the trauma team a brief rundown of Brooke’s condition as they wheeled her into an available trauma bay. Once in the room, Brooke was transferred onto the table and examination began. She was immediately started on blood transfusions- 1 unit A+ and 1 unit O- with 250 units of rhogam, 1 unit of platelets, and 1 unit of FFP. Multiple specialists were paged for consults, including: orthopedics, neurosurgery, and trauma surgery. While waiting on the specialist to arrive for their respective consultations, initial examination began. A FAST scan was performed first. The chest portion of the exam showed trace pericardial effusion, minor to moderate abdominal bruising but nothing potentially lethal, and the pelvic section came back clean. Multiple x-rays were then ordered: the x-ray of the arm confirmed displaced oblique humerus fracture, which would likely require surgical reduction with rods and pins. The chest x-ray showed 2 broken ribs and 1 dislocated rib on the left side of the thorax, along with bruising and swelling in the intercostal area. The chest x-ray also revealed a left sided tension pneumothorax with pleural effusion, which appeared to be caused from air escaping into the chest cavity, which pinched and pressed up against the lining of the lung. The next x-ray was of the femur fracture. The fracture was quite extensive, which required surgical reduction and many months of physical therapy in order to heal properly. The x-ray of Brooke’s head showed no evidence of a c-spine fracture, but there were some contusions on the skull and there didn’t appear to be any fractures; a head CT was still necessary to get a better understanding of her head injuries.

In the meantime, the trauma team decided to do what they could for her. The first order of business was to deal with the tension pneumothorax on the left side. The treatment for this was placing a chest tube in order to evacuate any air or blood. The procedure started after the area in between her ribs was sterilized. A 1 inch incision was made in the skin, followed by an additional one to cut through any fat and underlying tissue. Once a decent opening was created, a 36fr chest tube was placed into the incision area, and navigated deep into the pleural space. There was a small amount of blood drained from the tube, but a substantial amount of air exited the tube, allowing proper lung expansion once again.

Another concern arose in the coming minutes. The lower half of Brooke’s left leg was a bit discolored and cold. Her dorsalis pedis pulse was weak, so compartment syndrome was a legitimate issue here.

When orthopedics arrived, they wanted to set up pressure monitoring in the thigh to see if compartment syndrome was indeed taking place. But the orthopedic surgeon and neurosurgeon were in a bit of a disagreement. “if we don’t monitor her leg, she could lose it!” the orthopedic surgeon said. “well if we don’t get a head CT, she could die! I’d rather her lose her leg than her life!” the neurosurgeon replied smugly. The trauma surgeon offered a compromise: a fasciotomy in the emergency department. Typically, this is a procedure reserved for the operating room, but this was an emergent situation that required a quick decision. Everyone quickly got on board and the procedure was started in a moment’s notice.

Betadine was squirted on the right thigh and the bandage was removed from the splinted compound fracture. A scalpel was used to make 2 deep, long incisions in the thigh. Once the skin was incised, the underlying fat and tissue was cut out so proper bloodflow and blood drainage could take place. Her right calf and right foot immediately became a more normal complexion, and the dorsalis pedis pulse was stronger than it was just a minute or two ago. The freshly opened area was then irrigated with saline and prophylactic antibiotics to decrease the chance of infection, and the wound was somewhat closed with the shoelace suturing technique.

After the fasciotomy, Brooke’s blood pressure began to take a rapid nosedive. Vasopressors were pushed in an attempt to increase BP to a more stable level, and more blood products were hung. While trying to maintain BP, the young woman began to have a tonic-clonic seizure on the ER table. Brooke jerked and flopped erratically, biting down on the ET tube and grunting every few seconds. Her toes clenched up, wrinkling the soles of her size 8.5 feet. To combat the seizure, the trauma team acted quickly by injecting 1 dose of lorazepam intravenously in order to stop the convulsions. It was my like the tv shows where the medicine take immediate effect. In reality, it takes about 45 seconds for the meds to kick in. In those 45 seconds or so, Brooke’s twitchy, spasmodic movements slowed down incrementally until she finally settled down and stopped seizing.

After the seizure was controlled, Brooke was covered up and transported to radiology for a head CT. The GCS drop, altered mental status, DOP, and seizure were all associated with a brain bleed. Once in the CT scanner room, Brooke was transferred into the table and hooked up to a portable ventilator since nobody could be in the room with her during the scan. Prior to the scan, she was given another dose of vasopressors to keep her blood pressure semi stable since she was hypotensive. Pupil reactivity was checked before the scan as well- left pupil was sluggish and still oval shaped, and the right pupil was constricted.

The head CT took about 8 minute to complete. The results of the scan were interpreted quickly: there was a subdural hematoma in the left temporal lobe. The size of the bleed was definitely noteworthy, so the neurosurgeon wanted to drill a burr hole to alleviate the pressure in the cranium and then monitor Brooke with an intracranial pressure monitor to see if an additional surgery would be warranted.

Once the plan was made, Brooke was once again whisked away and back to the trauma bay for a quick burr hole and ICP monitor insertion. The procedure quickly commenced upon return to the ER. A portion of Brooke’s hair was shaved off on the left side and the pasty white skin was sterilized with a small amount of betadine. The neurosurgeon took a surgical drill and drilled 2 holes. The first one was made in the left temporal area to alleviate pressure and create immediate blood drainage. Thick, gooey blood oozed out of the small, circular hole in her skull after it was drilled. The coagulated blood was suctioned out, allowing proper release of the fresh blood from the active bleed. The 2nd hole was drilled in the left parietal area. The purpose of this 2nd hole was for insertion of an ICP monitor and to allow room for additional draining in the event the bleed worsened. After hole #2 was drilled, the ICP monitor was inserted and set up by the neurosurgeon, and a few small drainage tubes were inserted to help drain additional blood in an attempt to restore normal pressure within the skull. The next step of Brooke’s treatment was to take her to the OR for surgical reduction of both her femur fracture and humerus fracture.

Up in the OR, Brooke was hooked up 5o a ventilator and prepped for surgery. The anesthesiologist had some concerns about her blood pressure before surgery, so it was advised that trauma surgery would sit in on the surgery, and have neurosurgery on standby. With her BP still low, a repeat echocardiogram showed that the trace pericardial effusion had worsened in the past little while. Before the surgery started, the trauma surgeon performed an infrasternal pericardiocentesis. The quick procedure drained a decent amount of blood and slightly improved Brooke’s vitals, buying the surgical team enough time to work on the orthopedic injuries.

The orthopedic surgeon began with the humerus fracture. The original plan was to hold the bone in place with some plates and screws, but once the doctor got in there, they noticed damage to the proximal head of the humerus. When there’s damage to that portion of the bone, they have to replace it with a titanium joint that’s held in place with screws. Essentially, it’s like a hip replacement in your arm. It’s not a common situation, but it happens every so often, and the surgical team was prepared for that curveball. Part 2 of the orthopedic surgery was the femur repair. A long, thin metal rod was inserted into the femur after the medullary cavity of the bone was essentially scooped out. With the rod in place, the fractured portions of the bone were lined up and then held in place with small plates with titanium screws. Overall, the orthopedic portion of Brooke’s treatment went well, but since she was hemodynamically unstable and required monitoring for a head injury, she was sent off to the ICU for monitoring.

Brooke’s first few hours in the ICU were uneventful, but changes started to occur overnight. Around 3am, her blood pressure began to drop once again, along with an alternating QRS complex on the EKG. The ICU nurses decided to page a rapid response since the changes were concerning. When the trauma surgeon arrived, they pushed a round of vasopressors and hung 1 unit of FFP since there may be some residual bleeding and damage. The doctor’s next order was a repeat echocardiogram to monitor the progression of the pericardial effusion. The echo showed that Brooke was experiencing cardiac tamponade, so once again, an infrasternal pericardiocentesis was the way to go. The needle aspirated a combination of both clotted blood and fresh blood, but cardiovascular function slightly improved after the procedure. Brooke’s pupils were checked afterwards; they were sluggish but reactive, and the dynamic oval pupil was slowly going away. The ICP monitor was showing normalizing pressure in the skull, so it appeared the head injury was on a slow and steady course towards healing. The main concern was the chest injury at that point.

Approximately an hour later, Brooke began to struggle once again. Her blood pressure was still low and her chest tube output decreased. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that there was a blood clot lodged inside of her chest tube. Treatment for this is disconnecting the drainage portion of the chest tube and suctioning the lumen of the tube out until normal output returns. But when the tube drainage is disconnected in trauma patients (because a larger chest tube is required), you run the risk of re-aggravating the tension pneumothorax, so this has to be done rather quickly so excess air doesn’t get into the tube or the patient’s chest cavity.

With the trauma surgeon supervising, the drainage portion of the chest tube was disconnected. A suction tube was placed into the chest tube and the chunk of clotted blood about the size of a pea was slurped out, allowing normal flow and drainage to occur once again. But even after the chest tube was reconnected, Brooke’s blood pressure was still low. A 3rd echocardiogram was ordered, showing a sizable tamponade in the lateral portion of the pericardium. With this continuing to occur, and getting worse, the trauma surgeon decided to page cardiothoracic surgery and immediately take Brooke up to the OR for an exploratory thoracotomy and pericardial window.

While wheeling Brooke out of the ICU, her blood pressure suddenly became dangerously low. “shit, she’s gonna code. We need to get her up there ASAP!” the trauma surgeon blurted out with urgency. The ICU team wheeled Brooke through the corridors at full speed and into an available elevator. No more than a second after the elevator doors shut, Brooke became pulseless. The heart monitors showed pulseless electrical activity, so ACLS protocol promptly began. One nurse began pumping away at Brooke’s bare chest. The 22 year old's chest sunk deeply from the strength of each individual compression. Her chubby body and large, natural breast jiggled around a bit while another nurse injected epinephrine and atropine into one of the IV sites.

A nurse got on top of the gurney and began straddling the young woman, delivering strong, repetitive compressions. A few moments later, the elevator doors swung open and Brooke was wheeled out and into the main hallway of the OR floor. “whoa, what happened?” one of the nurses at the main nurses station asked, surprised to see an active code out in the open.

The team continued wheeling Brooke through the hall, compressions ongoing. Once in the correct operating room, the code was paused for a moment in order to transfer the woman onto the OR table. The monitors chirped loudly while Brooke’s limp body was transferred onto the table. Once on the table, CPR was restarted by one of the surgical nurses. “oh boy… what a mess. We’re gonna have to open her up ASAP. Get me a thoracotomy tray…” the head surgeon called out as they walked into the room. Since the heart monitors still showed PEA, CPR just went on. Redness and bruising started to form on the center of her chest in between both breasts due to all the hard compressions she was receiving. There was a popping sound that occurred during each individual compression since a few of her ribs became fractured or dislocated. The nurse that delivered compressions could feel Brooke’s cold, clammy skin through her gloves while everyone else in the room was scurrying around and barking orders at each other in what seemed like a moment of organized chaos.

While the surgical techs set up a thoracotomy tray, an OR nurse pushed the next round of intravenous meds since Brooke just crossed the 4 minute mark of the code. The meds didn’t have an immediate effect, but were able to convert Brooke to v-fib after approximately 45 seconds or so. With defib pads already attached to Brooke’s bare chest, they were charged to 200j and a shock was delivered. Brooke’s limp body jolted abruptly on the table in response to the quick dose of electricity. Since no change occurred, CPR resumed for several seconds until the defibrillator pads were recharged.

Seconds later, everyone backed away from the table and a 300j shock was delivered. Brooke’s back arched, forcing her chest up in the air, making her breasts bounce around. Shock #2 failed to convert Brooke from v-fib, so the surgeon took over and made the executive decision to open her chest via a left anterolateral thoracotomy.

Betadine was splashed across the left side of Brooke’s chest in a moment’s notice. With CPR ongoing just inches away, an incision was made in the 5th intercostal space. The cut began just to the left of Brooke’s sternum and extended laterally. The incision continued under her left breast, and ultimately came to a stop a few inches away from her left armpit. The next step was to separate and cut through the underlying tissue in order to create an opening for the rib spreader. This took about 15 or 20 seconds since it was done at a hurried pace. With that out of the way, the finochietto rib spreader was placed in the gaping cut, and the actual opening of the chest began. A cracking sound was heard regularly while the knobs were turned, forcing the 22 year old’s ribs apart.

The OR team was greeted by a rush of blood from the chest cavity upon cracking the chest. Suction was applied to the area and a 2nd chest tube was inserted for additional drainage. With the excess blood out of the way, a pericardiotomy was performed. A quick cut was made into the lining of the heart, which leaked a combination of fresh blood and coagulated blood. The incision in the pericardium was extended to deliver the heart more effectively, and a few small drains were placed into the incised portion of the pericardium for continuous tamponade drainage.

After these critical first few steps, external compressions were swapped out for internal massage. One of the doctors wrapped their hands around Brooke’s heart. They pushed hard and fast in an upwards motion with both their thumbs on the left ventricle in order to force blood through the aorta and out to the body. The doctor could feel Brooke’s heart twitching in their hands as they desperately attempted to reverse the dire situation.

V-fib still persisted after a cycle of internal compressions and another dose of meds, so the internal paddles were called for. The large, spoon shaped paddles were charged to 20j and placed directly against the desperate, spasming organ. After everyone backed away, the first internal shock was delivered. A dull, wet thump was heard, followed by her torso twitching a bit. Her heart fluttered for a second from the direct jolt of electricity, but it quickly returned to its erratic spasming from before. Internal compressions were resumed while a vascular clamp was placed on the descending aorta near the diaphragm. The purpose of this is to temporarily redirect bloodflow back to the heart, brain, and lungs since those organs are most essential. After the large vessel was clamped, the internal paddles were prepped once again, and placed around each side of the young woman’s heart. Shock #2 was a but stronger at 30 joules, causing more noticeable reaction. Brooke’s torso flopped slightly and her toes curled up, wrinkling the soles of her size 7.5 feet. This shock failed to correct the deadly arrhythmia, so resuscitation efforts went on. A cycle of internal massage was performed while the internal paddles were recharged to 40j. After the paddles were good to go, the third internal shock was delivered. The same dull thump as before filled the room for a moment while Brooke’s battered body twitched on the table. The monitors began chirping again, continuing to show v-fib.

The same cycle of internal compressions, shocking and meds continued again…and again…and again, but the OR team just couldn’t get their young patient’s heart to restart. Despite a 26 minute code, Brooke passed away in the OR, with her time of death being called at 5:02am. The monitors were switched off and the ambu bag was detached. Additional equipment such as the EKG electrodes and IVs were removed in the eerily silent OR. Brooke’s naked, battered body laid on the table. Her heart sat motionless in plain sight during the basic postmortem preparations. Eventually, the chest tubes were removed, the ICP monitor was taken out, and the chest was closed up. A cover was placed over Brooke’s body, and a toe tag was placed before sending her off to the hospital morgue, bringing a sad ending to the case.

[romanticworks]

TESSA

Yeah. We use the word “digital” to refer to one specific way of storing information, discrete signal values interpreted at pre-established levels. “Analog” is just a fancy way of saying “everything else.”

TESSA

[speaking over him] Almost everything in the world is analog, but we’re obsessed with digital. We try to surrender everything into it, break the world down and turn it into as much binary as it takes. But it’s not the same.

I used to work on OCR programs, teaching computers to read, to take the messy physicality of the written word and convert it into something that a computer can understand in a digital format.

ARCHIVIST

I'm not sure what this has to do with my tape recorder

TESSA

Magnetic tape. Everyone thinks it’s analog, but it’s digital. A lower-tech version than what we use now, but people forget that it was used to store computerized data for decades. Maybe it reminds people of a film reel, or, or maybe nostalgia turns everything analog.

Although people always think of digital as not really there, but the thing is information is always physically present. It doesn’t exist as some formless nothing. Even within the tiniest, most advanced storage systems, physical memory cells change and alter themselves to render that information in a language all of their own.

I suppose it isn’t language, not really, because, because language as we use it is about as far from digital as you can get. We may call them words, but, the units of data that a computer works with are by their nature discrete and definite, while the words we use are clumsy, vague things, always at the whim of interpretation and decay.

It’s the obvious thing to say, that a computer cannot feel, but it’s true. No sequence of distinct ones and zeros can replicate the swirling cocktail of chemicals and, and, you know, nerves that is a human being. Or any other animal for that matter. Nothing about humanity is binary.

ARCHIVIST

…r-right. So, you work in computers, then.

TESSA

Sorry, I, um… it’s been a while since I talked to someone in person? Been spending a lot of time in my own head, you know. Used to just dumping information when I get the chance. I have a blog, actually, but I haven’t posted for almost a year. Almost too embarrassed to, now… Assuming I’m not losing my mind, of course!

ARCHIVIST

Yes, I hear that a lot, too.

TESSA

Well, that’s what’s terrifying, isn’t it? Your mind is all you are, there’s no backup, or you know, reset, If it goes. I’m not just talking about madness as it appears, but what it is from inside. The way people talk about it, it’s like you have to think you’re saying that our mind is everything we perceive, everything we are. That means you can never know when your grasp might be slipping. I’m not convinced that’s it, though.

Or maybe deep down somewhere inside, you understand what’s happening to you and - no. I am, I don’t know which scares me more.

TESSA

I’ve got a lot of friends whose retirement plans basically comes down to uploading their minds into a computer and living forever in a virtual world. They’re so sure it’s just around the corner. I’ve never had the heart to tell them it’s impossible, that the human brain is a wet mess of analog signal interpretation that is as far removed from the clean logics of digital processing as it’s possible to be.

We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that computers and people have anything in common? But no matter how good we may program them to be at pretending to think like us, that’s all we’ll ever be. Crossing the line from meat and chemicals into pure digital systems is impossible. And everything else is just sophisticated programming and, and illusion.

TMA65 - Binary

[internaljiujitsu]

5 Realizations That (Finally) Got Me Off The ADHD Treadmill

I used to hate reading books. I did it anyway but couldn’t last more than five or ten minutes before dozing off or having my mind dart away to distant lands. Like the skinny kid with no appetite that had to force feed himself to pack on muscle, I shoved books into my brain because I hated the idea of not being well read more than I hated reading.

As a kid, I often left things undone. — or worn out to the nub. After beginning enthusiastically, I’d soon lose steam and beat myself from pillar to post for quitting. I’d always hang around through the torture just to avoid the sting of giving up again. Once the interest was gone, whatever I was doing became pure misery. This would inevitably lead to mental and physical breakdown, as every cell in my body rejected the reality my mind was accepting.

I got good grades and excelled athletically but always thought I could do better. There seemed to be a gear missing — the one that I just knew could take me to a place that felt right. If I were just better, more disciplined and able to focus more — but I didn’t think I had it in me.

Back then, I didn’t know I was working with a slight disadvantage. While medication has played a crucial role in managing my ADHD, and no doubt would have made a massive difference in my childhood, it’s been just as important to build coping and productivity skills. While ADHD makes it difficult to work for other people, it also challenges your ability to self-regulate. Your perception of time is thrown off, so keeping track of your own schedule can be tough without a system.

Before I ever tried medication, in my forties, I spent my life learning skills to make up for what I saw as inadequacies. I’m thankful that I built a technical foundation before supplementing with chemicals, but eternally grateful for what meds have done for me. Once I was properly diagnosed, I realized that the progress I was able to make on my own was astonishing. Giving myself credit for putting in the work motivated me further. The medication made it all click. It was the missing piece I’d been searching for after years of hard inner and outer training.

Here are my five keys for finally jumping off the ADHD treadmill. Once I inserted these into my belief system, I no longer felt hopeless. The limiting, negative self-talk stopped. It took a long time to finally put everything together, but the results have been life changing.

Meds Are Not Evil

Like a lot of other people, I didn’t believe ADHD was real. My perception was that it was a made up disorder designed by drug companies to pump kids full of personality stifling drugs — an excuse for parents to medicate energetic kids and abdicate responsibility.

Meanwhile, I lived every day in lonely terror, until my symptoms became so overwhelming that I became suicidal. At that point, medicine was my last hope. I read books, meditated, prayed, had countless therapy sessions, including EMDR, and took massive action to change my life — but I hit a healing wall. I needed a boost.

The wiring in my brain makes it so ADHD medication that would make the average person speedy simply makes me feel normal. I am no longer listless and suicidal, disappointed in myself because my aspirations outweigh my self-belief. Before meds, it felt as if I was receiving random radio signals from everywhere. The one that always caught my ear never had anything good to say. Still, my disciplined nature dragged me through my days.

The stigma against medication and the dangerous abuse of these drugs by the general public has left many people unnecessarily living in misery. Prisons and homeless shelters are purgatories for the mislabeled, ignored and discarded members of society unlucky enough to suffer from mental illness. How many of those fortunes could have been altered with the right diagnosis, treatment and protocol?

2. Medication + Discipline = Badass

As a person that uses discipline as therapy, I once thought I could muscle my way through pain. Becoming older in the martial arts world means you have to fight smarter. That’s the trade off — you are wiser and have a much better understanding of your art, but your body does not react the same. Nature seeks balance.

But fuck that. If you take care of yourself, you can whip on the youngins long after your head is covered in gray. Combining experience with conditioning makes you unstoppable. That’s how I see my mental health approach.

If you have no clarity, you won’t make the best choices. You simply can’t see what’s in front of you without a trained eye. The frantic nature of the ADHD mind is like a white belt thrown into what we call the “shark tank.” It’s a relentless onslaught of tough competitors coming in fresh at intervals to continuously beat your ass. No place for white belts. That’s what life feels like off my meds.

The passions that occupy my time have kept my brain buzzing enough to distract me from my buzzing brain. Now that the unwanted chatter is gone, I can feel the good kind of buzz — the warm, fuzzy feeling of loving what I do without feeling like I have to do it.

Would I have preferred avoiding all the pain I felt over the years and just been medicated all along? No. If life didn’t necessitate that I acquire the skills that I have, I wouldn’t have been driven to pursue them. I may have relied too much on the drug. I would not have changed. But I have a feeling the relief of the meds wouldn’t have been enough — It’s just not who I am. I know that now. Eventually, I would have gone searching. At times I almost feel like I have an unfair advantage now. Technical ability and practical experience. Strength and skill. Balance. I’m glad it happened the way it did.

3. You Feel How You Eat

While nutrition has always been important to me for physical fitness, I was more concerned with appearance. As I got older, my focus became increasing my energy levels and feeling better. It wasn’t until after being diagnosed and forming habits around optimizing my abilities that I realized the importance of nutrition for good mental health. Inflammation caused by certain foods is detrimental to brain function and a frequent culprit in ADHD.

Once you’ve gone down a suicidal rabbit whole, giving up gluten is a tiny price to pay for sanity. Not that you know what sanity is — you just know you don’t have it.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t give a second thought to the type of food they put in their mouths. Lifestyle is a gigantic factor in mental fitness. Eating foods that promote brain health (fatty fish, blueberries, avocados) and avoiding processed products and sugar will ensure you have the energy and mental clarity to face the day.

4. Your Phone Is A Tool

People love to complain about how their phones have taken over their lives, but we’ve got the most amazing tools ever invented in our pockets. You can read books, listen to podcasts, watch Ted Talks — non stop learning at your fingertips — all the time.

But, with great power comes great responsibility (Stan Lee will never steer you wrong). Just like television can range from “The Sopranos” to “Jersey Shore,” your cell phone can educate or anesthetize you. If you’re not disciplined, your time will be eaten up swiping left to right and “liking” shit you couldn’t care less about.

Take advantage of your calendar and alarm features to schedule everything. Don’t assume you’re gonna remember, because let’s be honest, you’re gonna forget. Use voice memos and notes to keep track of ideas and journal your feelings and thoughts. You know you have to keep yourself occupied, so download the Kindle app and have a book at the ready for down time. Listen to a guided meditation. Take an online course on the go. Learn a new language. It really is endless. Use it wisely, and your phone is the ultimate weapon. No utility belt required.

5. Less Sleep Isn’t Helping

Feeling lazy had me convinced I needed to force myself to do more. That meant getting up earlier so I could get shit done. With a schedule that had me winding down at ten o’clock at night after teaching martial arts classes, it was tough to go right to bed. If I wasn’t careful, I’d lose a half hour of sleep here and there because I wanted to stay up watching television (which miraculously has a way of leading to chips or ice cream). Arnold Schwarzzenegger famously said that you should learn to sleep faster if you can’t get by on six hours of sleep. After years of insisting on shutting down for a minimum of 7–8 hours to promote physical recovery from training, I tried getting by on just 5–6 hours. No dice.

My brain and body just don’t work the same. The sleep I was getting wasn’t all that restful either. I’d frequently wake up during the night feeling restless. It wasn’t until I developed sleep rituals that I began falling asleep quickly and getting a deeper rest. With repetition, my body and mind got used to the same sequence of events every night leading up to bed time. Once I trained my brain, my body knew what to do as soon as my head hit the pillow.

By now, I’ve learned that seven hours is my sweet spot. Eight clean hours can make me feel like superman (mental note: start sleeping eight hours a night).

Recent research suggests ADHD symptoms are often a result of insufficient restful sleep. Sleep deprivation also exacerbates symptoms in kids and adults with ADHD. Your physical and emotional state is undoubtedly better when you get sufficient rest. Staying up late into the night with unproductive bullshit is a mistake, but so is getting by on five hours because you want to prove you’re a tough grinder. You simply won’t be functioning as well. It’s self-sabotage.

There is no magic pill to fix you. If you think of meds that way, you’ll be putting scotch tape on a gunshot wound. You’ve gotta stop the bleeding. Dig the bullet out. Repair the internal damage — then stitch it up. You’ve gotta let it heal and start actively rehabilitating if you want to get stronger. It’s not going to happen by accident or by divine intervention — even though it may feel like that in the end.

Although I’ve developed a good arsenal of skills to maximize my mental wellbeing, I still want to continue growing. My next step will be scanning my brain to understand what areas are being over or under stimulated and adjusting my lifestyle accordingly. As Dr. Daniel Amen, one of the nation’s foremost psychiatrists and a leading expert on brain health says, “Did you know that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that virtually never look at the organ they treat? Think about it. Cardiologists look, neurologists look, orthopedic doctors look, virtually every other medical specialist looks — psychiatrists guess.”

It seems so obvious now that I want to run out and get my brain scanned as I write this. I’m excited to discover what changes I can make to improve my performance and sense of well being. Brain imaging will provide a road map.

No matter the cards you’ve been dealt, planning and hard work can help you become who you want to be. No circumstance is a limitation to an open mind. There are always ways to improve if you’re willing to search long enough. Luckily for me, I tend to get a little obsessed.

[yunathun]

THEY DEAL IN THE SOULS OF MEN

THEY DEAL IN THE SOULS OF MEN

SATAN'S HIGH LEVEL END-TIMES WITCHCRAFT, THEY CONTROL THE SOULS OF MEN-(MK ULTRA MIND CONTROL-HUMAN CLONING-HUMAN CONSCIOUS TRANSFER/CRISPR-DEALING WITH THE SOULS OF MEN)

FROM THE KING JAMES BIBLE (KJV 1611) FROM THE BOOK: DAEMONOLOGIE YEAR 2020 BY AUTHOR: J.R.WILLIS

***INTRODUCTION***

ALL OF THESE EVILS ARE DONE IN ORDER TO DESTROY THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL-(WE ARE THEIR #1 FOCUS AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN-2/3RD'S OF ZION MUST PERISH AS IT IS WRITTEN):

REVELATION 18:13

13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots-(ALL OF BABYLONS INDUSTRIES/ECONOMY WHICH MADE HER GREAT AMONG ALL OF THE KINGDOMS SHALL BE DESTROYED WITH HER IN ONE HOUR UPON THE GREAT DAY OF THE LORD [PART I]-TOTAL & COMPLETE NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION), and slaves-(THE BLACK HEBREW ISRAELITE SLAVES IN WHICH SHE DEVOURED & BUILT HER EMPIRE OFF OF AND DRANK THEIR BLOOD-BABYLON IS DRUNKEN OFF OF THE BLOOD OF THE SAINTS WHO BE THE 12 TRIBES OF ISRAEL), and souls of men-(CIA PROJECT MK ULTRA-CIA SATANIC HOLLYWOOD-ALL INDUSTRIES OF INFLUENCE CONTROLLING THE SOULS OF MEN & HAVING THEM ALL WORSHIP SATAN & HIS ROMAN BEAST EMPIRE-ALL THINGS ABOMINABLE UNTO THE LORD THY GOD).

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

THE SATANIC MASONIC ADAM WIESHAMPT, ALBERT PIKE, GIUSEPPE MANZZINI, ALEISTER CROWLEY, NEW AGE, AGE OF AQUARIUS, ENLIGHTENMENT, NIHILIST, SODOMITE, DEMONIC MUSIC, FREE SEX, FREE DRUGS, LUCERFARIAN, RED BROTHERHOOD OF EDOM-(ILLUMINATI) PLAN IS NOW COMPLETED UPON THE WORLD POPULOUS-(THE WORLD IS NOW INDOCTRINATE INTO ONE LARGE GLOBAL SATANIC OCCULT):

BELIAR THROUGH (ESAU-AMALEK-EDOM/THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS/HIS PEOPLE/THE PEOPLE OF THE PRINCE, SATAN HIMSELF, DANIEL 9:26), BY WAY OF THE CIA BLACK BUDGET OPS SUCH PROJECT (MK ULTRA & DAARPA), DEALS IN THE SOULS OF MEN.

THIS IS CONFIRMED IN (REVELATION 18:13). THESE SECRETIVE COVERT U.S. GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS ARE IN FACT DEMON POSSESSION ENHANCING-(UPLOADING), PHARMAKEIA OPIOD PSYCHOTIC DRUG TESTING TECHNIQUE WHICH PRODUCE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATES OF ALL LEVELS OF POLITICAL, CELEBRITY, EDUCATIONAL, AND INDUSTRY WHICH ARE UTILIZED BY THE RED BROTHERHOOD OF EDOM-(THE ILLUMINATI) IN ORDER TO SWAY AND INFLUENCE THE SPIRITUALLY DEAD MASSES TO ACCEPT THIS SATANIC KINGDOM OF BELIAR AND ESAU.

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

SO WHAT IS THE CIA PROJECT MK ULTRA?

Project MK Ultra, also called the CIA mind control program, is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency—and which were, at times, illegal.

Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control. The project was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.

The operation was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and recorded to be halted in 1973. There remains controversy over whether this operation ever ended, or continues presently. The program engaged in many illegal activities, including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as its unwitting test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.

MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse (including the sexual abuse of children), and other forms of torture.

The scope of Project MK Ultra was broad with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement.

Project MK Ultra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford's United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK Ultra files to be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms's destruction order. In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MK Ultra which led to Senate hearings later that year.

Some surviving information regarding MKUltra was declassified in July 2001. In December 2018, declassified documents included a letter to an unidentified doctor discussing work on six dogs made to run, turn and stop via remote control and brain implants.

ALL OF THESE EVILS ARE DONE IN ORDER TO INDOCTRINATE THE WORLD POPULOUS INTO THE BABYLONIAN MITHRA, ESOTERIC MYSTERY RELIGIONS, OR IN OTHER WORDS, BELIAR THROUGH EDOM IS SURELY AND SPEEDILY INDOCTRINATING THE ENTIRE WORLD INTO THEIR NEW WORLD ORDER, GLOBAL SATANIC OCCULT THROUGH ROME.

THROUGH PEOPLE OF POWER, INFLUENCE AND CELEBRITY, SCIENCE-(SORCERY), AND THE EDUCATION SYSTEM, THE RED BROTHERHOOD OF EDOM HAS DONE JUST THIS. THEIR MACHINES OF INFLUENCE INCLUDE HOLLYWOOD, SPORTS, SMARTPHONE, THE INTERNET, AND ALL MEDIA OF ENTERTAINMENT, AND INDUSTRY OF LIFE.

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

THE HUMAN CLONING PROGRAM & CRISPR-(HUMAN GENE EDITING SORCERY):

HUMAN CLONING TECHNIQUE UTILIZE (FAMILIAR SPIRITS-DEMONS), THAT ARE AQAINTED WITH THE SOUL IN WHICH THESE EDOMITE SORCERER'S CLONE IN THEIR DUMBS-(DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES). THE FAMILIAR SPIRIT CAN MIMIC AND COPY A HOST SPEECH PATTERNS, MEMORY, MOVEMENT, AND MANY OTHER SPIRITUAL AND CHARACTER ATTRIBUTES ASSOCIATED WITH THAT CLONED SOUL. SOME HUMAN CLONED TISSUE BODIES ARE MACHINE BASED AS I AM LED TO BELIEVE THAT EARLY TEST SUBJECTS WERE JUST THAT, DEMONICALLY ENHANCED BIOLOGICAL MACHINERY HOUSED WITH DEMONIC SPIRITS WHICH REENACT THAT HUMAN IN WHICH THE PHYSICAL CLONED TISSUE WAS CREATED FROM AND TO BE A DUPLICATE OF.

THE SECOND CLONING TECHNIQUE WHICH BY FAR IS THE SUPERIOR AND MORE ADVANCED, BE THE FULL HUMAN TISSUE CLONE, BOTH INSIDE AND OUTWARDLY. THESE BODIES HAVE BEEN CONJURED BY EDOM WORKING HAND IN HAND WITH THE FALLEN USING ADVANCED SORCERY-(SCIENCE) SUCH AS (CRISPR), WHICH IS FALLEN ANGELIC HUMAN AND BEAST GENE EDITING MODIFICATION TECHNOLOGY. THE PHYSICAL FULL FLESH AND BLOOD BODY CLONES ARE ALSO INHABITED BY WICKED FAMILIAR SPIRITS AS THEIR PREVIOUS MACHINE FLESH CLONED BODIES WERE AS WELL.

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

SO WHAT IS HUMAN CLONING DEFINED?

Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy (or clone) of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissue. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibility of human cloning has raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass laws regarding human cloning and its legality.

Two commonly discussed types of theoretical human cloning are: therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants, and is an active area of research, but is not in medical practice anywhere in the world, as of April 2017. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and, more recently, pluripotent stem cell induction. Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

WHAT IS CRISPR?

CRISPR (/ˈkrɪspər/) (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found within the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. These sequences are derived from DNA fragments from viruses that have previously infected the prokaryote and are used to detect and destroy DNA from similar viruses during subsequent infections. Hence these sequences play a key role in the antiviral defense system of prokaryotes.

Cas9 (or "CRISPR-associated 9") is an enzyme that uses CRISPR sequences as a guide to recognize and cleave specific strands of DNA that are complementary to the CRISPR sequence. Cas9 enzymes together with CRISPR sequences form the basis of a technology known as CRISPR/Cas9 that can be used to edit genes within organisms. This type of gene editing process has a wide variety of applications including use as a basic biology research tool, development of biotechnology products, and potentially to treat diseases.

CRISPR/Cas9 The CRISPR/Cas system is a prokaryotic immune system that confers resistance to foreign genetic elements such as those present within plasmids and phages that provides a form of acquired immunity. RNA harboring the spacer sequence helps Cas (CRISPR-associated) proteins recognize and cut foreign pathogenic DNA. Other RNA-guided Cas proteins cut foreign RNA. CRISPR are found in approximately 50% of sequenced bacterial genomes and nearly 90% of sequenced archaea.

PHYSICAL FULL ADULT VESSELS-(BODIES) OF HUMAN CLONING HAVE BEEN REPORTED TO BE GROWN AT AN ACCELERATED RATE OF 2-3 MONTHS, AND SOME EVEN MORE DISTURBING ACCOUNTS REPORT HUMAN REPLICATED BODIES TO BE COMPLETED AS FAST AS A FEW WEEKS, TO JUST DAYS. ONLY THE GOOD LORD KNOWS THE EXACT TRUTH OF WHAT THESE MALEVOLENT DEVIANTS DEMONIC TECHNOLOGY IS CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING NOW.

ALL OF THESE EVILS ARE DONE ACCORDING TO THE DEMONIC ADVANCEMENT OF ESAU'S DEMONIC FALLEN ANGELIC TECHNOLOGY. THEY CAN CLONE ANIMALS WITH EASE MY PEOPLE SINCE THE LATE 1940'S, SO WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT THEY HAVE NOT DONE SO WITH HUMAN BEINGS CELEBRITIES, ENTERTAINERS AND NEWLY CREATED MONSTERS SUCH AS THE YEMIM AND OTHER BEAST THAT ARE SHOWING UP ALL OVER THE EARTH?

THE MOST AMAZING FACT IS THAT THEY PUT ALL OF THESE EVILS RIGHT IN YOUR FACES WITH THEIR CIA HOLLYWOOD MOVIES, TELEVISION, SHOWS, COMICS BOOKS, AND MEDIA, PREYING UPON YOUR NAIVETE...

***IMPORTANT NOTES***

THE SATANIC ROMAN BEAST EMPIRE EDOMITE END GAME AGENDA:

ALL SO-CALLED HOLLYWOOD ENTERTAINMENT OF TODAY IS NO MORE THAN A TRAINING, MIND CONTROL, SPIRIT ALTERING TOOLS USED TO SUBJUGATE, DECEIVE, MISLEAD, AND BLIND 90-99% PERCENT OF THE HUMAN POPULATION IN ORDER LEAD THEM ALL ASTRAY SO THAT THEY MAY:

1. ACCEPT BELIAR-(SATAN), AS THEIR GOD WHICH MANY ALREADY WILLINGLY DO NOW IN BROAD DAYLIGHT BEING NOT ASHAMED OF THEIR FALLEN CHERIBUM GOD.

2. ACCEPT THE MARK OF THE BEAST RFID-(RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION CHIP)/NFC CHIP DEVICE INTO THEIR BODIES IN EITHER THEIR FOREHEADS OR LEFT HAND/WRIST AS PROPHESIED BY THE MOST HIGH THROUGH LORD YASHAYA CHRIST.

3. FLOOD THE EARTH AGAIN WITH RAPHAIM AND YEMIM MONSTERS NOT ONLY BY WAY OF DIRECT FALLEN ANGELIC HUMAN/ANIMAL COPULATION AS THESE WICKED ANGELS DID BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER THE GREAT FLOOD AS THEY SHALL MIX THEIR THEMSELVES WITH THE SEED OF MEN AGAIN AS PROPHESIED-(DANIEL 2:43), BUT TO ALSO CREATE A NEW HYBRID CLASS OF BEINGS FULLY INHABITED BY DEMONIC SPIRITS, PLACING THEM AMONG THE HUMAN POPULOUS SO THAT THE ABSOLUTE WILL OF SATAN BE EXECUTED UPON THE EARTH. THE EARTH BECOMES FILLED WITH ALL KINDS OF ABOMINABLE SINS WHICH LEAD TO THE WORLD BECOMING AS IT WAS IN THE DAYS OF FATHER NOAH.

UNDERSTAND THIS CHILDREN OF ISRAEL, BELIAR'S TIME IS SHORT, AND HE HAS ALL OF HIS HEATHEN NATIONS, HENCHMEN, EVIL SPIRITS, AND MINISTERS OF EVIL ALL IN PLACE SO THAT HIS CONTROL OVER THE ENTIRE EARTH BE AIRTIGHT AND UNDER HIS FULL POWER THROUGH ROME-(EDOM-THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS).

REVELATION 12:12

12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

THE CIA, HOLLYWOOD PRE-PREDICTIVE PROGRAMMING, PERSUADING, AND HUMAN CLONING PLANS ARE ALL THE WICKED TOOLS OF THE DEVIL THAT ARE UTILIZED THROUGH EDOM, IN ORDER TO TARGET 2/3RDS OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL AND HAVE THEM OUTRIGHT ACCEPT BELIAR/EDOM'S SATANIC ROMAN BEAST KINGDOM AND REJECT THE MOST HIGH.

THEY ALSO WORK THIS GREAT SORCERY UPON THE 2/3RDS OF OUR PEOPLE BY SUBDUING OUR PEOPLE THROUGH THEIR 501C3 FREE TAX DUTY STATUS, PAGAN ROMAN, BAAL TEMPLE, HARLOT HOUSES, AKA, (THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES).

WAKE UP ZION BECAUSE WE ARE HERE, AND THEIR EVIL INTENTIONS AGAINST OUR HOUSE IS SO GREAT, DARK, VAST AND SINISTER THAT THE MASSES COULD NOT POSSIBLY BELIEVE, BUT THESE EVENTS ARE ALL REAL AND ALL BE TRUE.

ALL OF THESE DEMONIC DEVICES OF EVIL ARE OF BELIAR AND HIS COHORTS, AND ARE NOTHING MORE THAN THEIR ANTEDILUVIAN-(PRE-FLOOD ERA), ANCIENT OCCULTIC WITCHCRAFT-(THE SECRETS OF HEAVEN), USED TO DRAG THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL STRAIGHT TO HELL.

THESE ARE THE TOOLS OF HIS GREAT DECEPTION AND SADLY EXACTLY TWO-THIRDS OF YOU ZION SHALL FALL PREY TO HIS MANY DEVICES WHICH FLOW THROUGH HIS PEOPLE, THE WICKED HOUSE OF EDOM-(THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS).

YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WARNED...

SHALOM.

***CONCLUSION***

For Judgement-(DEATH) comes for Esau who is Amalek, who are Edom, which are the Caucasian nations by way of the WRATH OF THE LAMB.

REVELATION 2:9

9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich)-(LORD YASHAYA KNOWS OUR OPPRESSION-AFFLICTION & DESTRUCTION AT THE HANDS OF OUR ENEMIES AS HE HIMSELF ENDURED THEM FOR US-BUT WE ARE RICH BECAUSE WE ARE THE LORD’S HERITAGE-WE ARE THE WORLD & THE WORLD WAS CREATED FOR US), and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews-(AMALEK-EDOM-THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS), and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan-(THESE WICKED SERPENTS ARE THE CHIEF HOUSE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF).

All praises, honor and glory be unto the Most High God of the True 12 Tribes of Israel, bahashem Lord Yashaya Christ, wa Ruach Ho Kodesh, Amen.

***END OF SUMMARY***

NOW WHO SHALL DENY THIS REPORT?

J.R.WILLIS AUTHOR: A RACE OF DEMONS REFINED 2017 AUTHOR: SPIRITUAL CRIMES 2018 AUTHOR: THE PROPHECIES AUTHOR: THE BOOK OF DAEMONOLOGIE YEAR 2020'

[douxreviews]

American Gods - ‘Moon Shadow’ Review

"Fear is order. Fear is control. Fear is safety."

Season two of American Gods wraps up. It was... a little confusing. The episode, not the season. Well, actually also the season.

Much like 'Donar the Great' a few episodes back, 'Moon Shadow' had a lot in it that felt very Fuller-esque. So again, I ask myself how much of the planning for this was already underway before his exit from the show. Quite possibly none, and it's just the result of a DP or one of the designers having a similar artistic taste, but it seems to carry across all the elements of design, from sound to shot composition to the visuals.

Take, for example, a moment that I've seen now in a couple of places questioned as, 'What the hell was that about?' I refer of course to the gorgeously framed close up shot of the snails on the side of the burial vault. Fun side-fact, I had to look up what exactly those above ground stone things that Shadow was lying on were called and was informed that they were very common for Egyptian Pharaohs. Nice detail work there, set designer or whoever made the decision to have them in Jaquel and Ibis' cemetery.

Now, the contrasting image of Shadow sleeping on top of the Vault, then waking to find Laura sleeping on the adjacent one is a very nice, if not overly subtle, 'in life we are in death' visual. Particularly given the characters involved. But then they up their game and open the morning shots with that close up of the snails clinging to the side of the stone monument. This is a great shot for a few reasons, but it's there for a very Fuller reason. It's a stark visual of gross, complicated, uncomfortable life clinging on in the face of cold, unalterable death. It's the same message as Shadow lying on the thing put in a much more confrontational way.

But I appear to be waffling in the little details instead of looking at the big picture, so let's look at that big picture.

There are a few ways to wrap up a season finale, but two of the most popular are either by building to a spectacular reveal of something that changes our entire understanding of what we've seen before, or arriving at a climactic plot development. Both of these can either be something completely out of left field or the final realization of something that's been slow burning for a long time and is finally paying off.

Wednesday's reveal as Odin in season one's finale would be one of those slow burn examples of the former. Easter's decision to join Wednesday and unleash her power starting the war was the slow burn example of the latter.

This finale kind of attempts both, and while there's a lot I like in this one, neither of those threads feel like a complete success. Perhaps looking at the two of them individually will help me parse out how I feel about this episode, because, honestly, seven or so paragraphs in and I'm still not 100% certain that I know.

So, clearly the big reveal here is that Shadow is Wednesday's son and has some sort of powers. This is, to be fair, a huge reveal. But the problem is that they've sort of half revealed it at least three or four times this year, and so the net result is not unlike when your sassiest friends comes out of the closet to you and your first reaction is 'Oh, did we not already know that? I thought we were already clear on that.'

Side note: that's not a helpful thing to say to the friend in question, should the occasion arise.

Since almost the beginning of the series fandom has been more or less convinced that Shadow is Odin's son Baldr. Or Baldur, or Balder. Old Norse didn't have a strong written component outside of a limited set of runes, and the written forms we understand of it today were almost entirely imposed on it later. Thank you for indulging me with sharing that. Orthography is one of my favorite things. Orthography and assembling flatpack furniture.

Ahem. Fandom has long believed that Shadow is going to turn out to be Baldr. That's a nice, big reveal to end the season on, but by the time we get to Wednesday openly confirming it at the end of this episode we've already heard him talking to young Shadow in flashback while Shadow's mom is dying and been nearly beaten over the head with the implication of Shadow's paternity during the discussion of his presumably half-brother Donar.

On the other hand, we have the plot development of Mr. World officially commencing what we might call the counterattack in the war by using the newly resurrected New Technical Boy to facilitate New Media in calling the entire world down on Shadow, Wednesday, and for some reason, Salim. It was clever of them to publicly use not just the bank robbery in Chicago, but also the massacre of the cops back in 'Lemon Scented You' and the alleged 'chemical attack' in Kentucky which was of course really Easter's taking back the spring. That all gave it a nice sense of all the multiple plot threads coming together organically, and was tied together well by New Media finally speaking to Shadow in the same way old Media did. That's the first time she's really felt like a continuation of the same character for me, and I'm down with New Media now.

That's all great. But it's tied in, in fact it's the entire impetus for, Shadow's big character transformation in which he learns to use what powers he has. Specifically, he seems to alter reality by reaching into his own memories to clear the police and SWAT units from the funeral home's vicinity. From what we hear over the news, he didn't change things so much that the cops aren't still looking for them specifically, but did make them 'un-know' where specifically they were hiding.

The problem is that I think more than a couple people will have read that last sentence and thought to themselves, 'Huh. so that's what was happening,' and therein lies the episode's real problem. I think the blame really can be laid to Yggdrasil in this case. Having Shadow dragged into the tree, on top of all the flashbacks and intercuts between dream and reality so that he can metaphorically and literally hatchet his way into the god-space, is just an overly complicated and muddy way to visualize that. And that muddiness really hurt the reveal that they were trying to make the big exclamation mark at the end of the season. Instead of coming away thinking, 'Wow, I can't believe what just happened!' the viewer leaves thinking, 'What the hell just happened?' and that's not a great note on which to end a season.

No Yggdrasil!  Bad Tree!  Put the nice man down!

Quotes:

New Technical Boy: "Hello, old friend."

Laura: "I am not my mistakes, Shadow."

Burial Vault Inscription: "She hath done what she could." That is just an incredibly depressing final memorial.

Mr. Xie: "Science is the closest we come to wrestling god." New Technical Boy: "Why would you want to…?"

Laura: "Planning on kissing me again? Cause I’ve had kind of a day." Bilquis: "My kisses have been known to improve a day."

Laura: "You don’t like him either." Bilquis: "Is that what your intuition tells you?" Laura: "No, I just know an I’d-like-to-punch-that guy-in-the-mouth-look when I see one."

Salim: "Sorry, I’ve never purchased liquor before. It’s for a friend. He’s a leprechaun. He died." Cashier: "OK."

Bilquis: "I’m a great believer in frankly assessing one’s situation."

Salim: "I don’t know what we are going to be, but I want you to know that I don’t regret any of it. You have taught me how to love."

Jinn: "You know me. Eyes of fire, shit for brains."

Bits and Pieces:

-- I suspect that Nancy and Ibis' conversation over the chess game is going to reward re-watching after all is said and done and the whole story is told.

-- I still don't entirely understand whose side Bilquis is on or what her goals are. She's certainly all right with Laura killing Wednesday and actually seems to consider the offer to join her. No Ruby Goodchild this week.

-- The first ten minutes with Mr. World and the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast is hands down my favorite thing this show has ever done. A beautiful exploration of the interrelationship between fear, belief, and objective reality. Crispin Glover was born specifically to deliver that monologue.

-- I've come to realize that the most useful way to watch this series is to assume that whatever happens was the outcome wanted by someone, and then work backwards as to who would want that outcome and why. That also works for Agatha Christie books, by the way.

-- I liked the old Technical Boy better. He had much more personality. And while I get that they were going for fiber optics with the new costume, it ends up coming across as Green Lantern. Was that a Michael Green nod?

-- The echo of the opening War of the Worlds monologue sprinkled throughout New Media's on-air rant was very effective at bringing everything together. Nicely scripted.

-- I love the wall-size bas reliefs of Bruce Langley's head on the walls of Xietech. I need them in my home.

-- The NRA logo on the opening film card leading into a discussion of how creating fear allows you to control people was an inspired touch.

-- Here's hoping that Laura's running away with Mad Sweeney's body means that we haven't seen the last of him. Even though they're both dead, I'm still 'shipping them super hard.

-- The Jinn chose to protect Salim by taking him away, even though it means facing consequences for disobeying Wednesday. That's very touching. I assume we'll learn in season three why the Jinn is bound to Wednesday.  I very much hope it doesn't involve rubbing a lamp.

-- It's very in character that Wednesday's entire role this week was 'Go out for dinner and watch the pieces fall into place.'

-- It's strange that they went out of their way to remind us in the pre-credit sequence that Sweeney had sent the spear into the Hoard, and never got around to addressing that this week. Setup for next year I suppose.

A mostly enjoyable season finale with some very high highs and some very low lows, which sums up season two in a nutshell. Still, any series that gives me this episode and 'Donar the Great' in a single season deserves to go on for many, many years.

Two and a half out of three graveyard snails.

P.S. please bring Chris Obi back next season.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

[femnet]

Do you remember the last time you were unable to wash the dishes without letting something fall and got irritated at the first comment thrown your way? You could not concentrate on anything, nor get assignments right, and were grumpier than usual about the weather or that corrupted world we live in, protesting because the wifi was slow or wanting to throw your phone to the ground when this special person did not answer. You felt useless and tired, in the mood to sleep without being able to.

Well, let me -- to be read in a sarcastic way -- surprise you, these are all symptoms of a NO day.

Of course, there are many more -- which you can write in the comments if you feel like it -- but the point is the same: we all suffer from these.

Still, why should we?

Here are 5 tips, personally tested, to help you fight off your NO days.

1- Recognize and accept them

Two years ago, I used to play tennis at an agonistic level -- sports almost took more time than studies in my schedule: I trained seven days a week, twice a day, around four hours a day. I am a very perfectionist person, and hence always gave my best, showing positive results.

However, I sometimes stepped on the court already discouraged, bothered by some other aspect of my life, and things only got worse from that point. I couldn’t hit two balls in a row, run properly, nor hold my racquet to save my life.

I tended to punish myself with harsh words and treatment, and you can guess how bad these trainings ended: deep down in helplessness.

One day, I came across an interview of a professional tennis player, in which he stated that, some days, it seemed to him like he didn’t know how to play tennis. He said it takes off your shoulders a lot of weight to only admit that, this day, you won’t be able to do things as you usually do, and it’s perfectly fine.

I tried, I recognized my NO days, and it worked. I felt lighter.

2- Identify the cause, change the perspective

I hate when my father tells me to “rationalize”, but sometimes this is exactly what you have to do.

What is biting on your patience? What makes you want to cry? Is it a valuable reason, because you are tired, or feeling stressed lately?

Point at the reason of your NO day, and change the perspective in which you see it.

It’s raining and you can’t go on your daily bicycle ride? Ok, it flopped, but this leaves you more time to do something else! Maybe watch a movie, or spend some time with your family.

You got a B on your assignment on which you had worked for weeks? It most certainly is painful, disgusting, hateful... but at least you didn’t get a C!

One of my mottos is: “You have a problem. Is there a solution? If yes, then why do you worry? If not, then why do you worry?”

Don’t take little things too seriously, don’t dwell on big things for too long, change your point of view!

3- Breathe

There isn’t much explanation to make about this one. It is scientifically proved that breathing deeply alters and regulates the chemical balance of your body.

One of my favorite exercises is the one called 6-7-8, which is also perfectly useful against stress.

Sit or lie down, and place one hand on your stomach and another on your torso. Inhale for six seconds -- during the first three seconds raise your stomach, and the last three your torso --, block your respiration for seven seconds, and exhale for eight -- first from the stomach, then the torso. The circulation of air should be uniform, feel like a wave under your palms. If 6-7-8 is too hard for you, you can lower it to 4-5-6, but be sure to maintain the same rhythm.

Repeat each sequence for at least two minutes, and at the end you’ll feel as good as if you had slept half-an-hour!

4- Express yourself

Introverts will certainly want to avoid this point, but don’t! It is one of the most important.

Expression is often viewed as “talking about it.” Still, expressing yourself doesn’t have to be done in presence of somebody.   

My favorite way of letting my concerns out is to write what I feel on a piece of paper, without stopping to grab a particular idea. My thoughts run so fast that I can’t write everything, and get lost in a sea of incomplete sentences. Most of the time, my “brainstorming” starts with a rant about how society pushes women down and ends up either with a list of empowering movies to watch, a new idea for a text, or even a new recipe to try.

Singing also counts, as well as drawing, dancing, playing some instrument, running, etc.

Channeling the bad energies and recycling them into positive ones is the point of expression. You need to change your mind’s focus.

If, in addition, you have a best friend ready to listen to you, and cheer you up with some ABBA songs, then you’ll be more than fine.

5- Relax

IT. IS. OK. TO. CHILL.

If you are like me, and have a ton of things due in the next days, keep in mind that you’ll never get them done if you’re in a mucky mood. Your brain can’t work properly if under too much stress and pressure.

All the previous tips are somehow connected to this one, but explore with me the world of relaxation a little more.

Read a book, and drop the one you were reading if it is boring. Watch a movie you longed to see. Make yourself some hot chocolate. Draw meaningless doodles on the margins of your notebook. Surf Buzzfeed or Tumblr. Get lost in thoughts about your grandma’s apple pie. Lie on the bed without thinking of anything. Daydream. Fall asleep without concern.

Do anything you want, but remember the golden rule: if you get annoyed by this activity, switch to another one, because the point is that you do something that will change your mind.

Warning: you are allowed to do this only to fight NO days, and only with activities that are meant to relax you. Studies, jobs, tasks, and other serious aspects of life do not fall in that category.

I really hope that these tips will help you, they have dragged me out of dark days many times. Feel free to leave a comment here or on our ask box if you’ve tried them out!

[geofftarrant]

Goodnight Eve

It was a dank, damp December day; one of those days where if you were caught by a flurry of sleet you could guarantee that it would find the gap between your coat collar and your neck. Eve pulled her coat more tightly around her and walked quickly from the car park towards the tall monolithic building that covered several acres of prime land just outside of the city walls. The ancient stone contrasted starkly with the high tech construction that fed a large percentage of the local population. For as long as she could remember, food had been grown in one of these hydroponic, vertical farms although she had read about the days when land was wasted on crops and animals. Back in the early twenty first century, it had been predicted that the Earth’s population would grow exponentially during the following fifty years. That had turned out to be incredibly optimistic and as a result, food production methods had to change rapidly in order to feed a massively overcrowded world. The result was a shift in production methods, slowly at first but then with increasing rapidity as more and more people succumbed to famine. Strangely, the biggest driver had proven to be the richer countries who suddenly found themselves deprived of non essentials like coffee and tea.

As she approached the large glass entrance, the doors hissed quietly open, reacting to the near field chip that was implanted in her arm. It also activated a greeting from the A.I. that oversaw the hydroponic plant.

“Give me an update please”, asked Eve although in the five years that she had worked here, it was a rare occurrence for the artificial intelligence construct to report anything that was untoward.

The voice that replied was indistinguishable from that of a human and as she expected, the report was that all systems were running at optimal values and that all growth targets were being met. Her time in the farm was spent largely in the genetics research laboratory but she liked to start the day wandering around the acres of artificially lit banks of vegetation.

Tomatoes, peppers, salads grew in one area. Wheat, barley and maize in another and so on and so on, all growing under a violet tinged glow in vertical banks of soilless racks. It was a magical environment and she loved it. However, when her route turned her back towards the lab, she spoke softly, asking, “A.I. please pour me a cappuccino in the lab in three minutes. It was an idiosyncrasy of hers that she refused to give a name to the platform that controlled the building. As a programmer herself, she recognised that the seemingly human-like responses were simply the result of clever algorithms that had been developed by people like her. She was aware that there was an element of heuristic learning built into the system but that it was limited in its functionality. This didn’t prevent her from being polite however. Her parents had drilled ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ into her to the extent that she inevitably used them even with the running program. Her route took her past one of the plant workers and she stopped for a quick word.

David was a tall, dark haired man whose Portuguese ancestry still showed in the olive cast of his skin. He spoke softly and quietly and Eve often wondered what it was that had caused such a self deprecating image of himself.

“Did you see the newscast this morning?” he asked. “They are saying that there hasn’t been a Covid case for two years now. It looks as though the scientists have beaten it at last.”

The year that Eve had been born had also been a key year in another part of the global jigsaw. It was the year that the world had realised that the pandemic virus Covid, that had been under control since it’s emergence, was altering its structure faster than scientists had been able to develop new vaccines and, as a result, the Earth’s population that had increased so dangerously, plummeted to a figure that was half of that when it was at its most dangerous heights.

Consequently, Eve now lived in a world that would have been almost unrecognisable fifty years previously. First of all, because food production had been shifted to massive hi tech factories and only half of the land area was needed for housing, the planet had rapidly re-forested itself covering over abandoned villages and towns. Renewable energy production had also been ramped up for an ever increasing population but now with a massive over capacity, energy consumption was almost free.

“It’s typical of the news media. After decades of panic and alarm, they will latch on to anything that resembles good news. I often wonder though about living conditions fifty years ago. Here we are with cheap food and limitless free energy across the globe and the ability to pretty much live as we want. Back then, they had to face global warming, starvation and the pandemic at the same time. It was sheer chance that the population growth levelled off to a level that was sustainable. Anyway, coffee is waiting so I’ll see you later.”

She continued her walk until the lab door opened in front of her. It was called a genetics laboratory but this section was basically the area where the research focused on mathematical analysis of data and instead of the laboratory equipment that you would expect, four keyboards and screens were connected to a powerful supercomputer that was based off site. It was a strange thing that in the time since they were first created and despite toying with other input methods, keyboards were still the preference of most data scientists. The four stations were to accommodate herself and her colleagues if they were all working at the same time, itself a rare occurrence. At present, two of them were on an extended holiday and the third was attending a conference in the southern hemisphere.

Her day passed quickly although the analysis of the genomes of new plant types was a painstaking process. Since she had started work here, there had been just one genuine breakthrough but the final product had increased the crop density of wheat by a factor of three. The global significance was such that she and her colleagues were still being invited to conferences across the globe to talk about their work. The talks also centred around the dilemma as to whether this type of work was best kept to human invention or whether the A.I’s that were successfully running most of the food factories should be used to speed up progress. The current consensus was that A.I’s should be throttled and used for more mundane, repetitive work. After all, life was as good for the population of the whole planet as it had ever been and the need to speed up scientific progress was less pressing than ever.

The latest batch of plant samples were undergoing a detailed analysis but the data that was presented was puzzling. It had been another long day however and Eve had really lost track of time so she wrote up her findings into the days log and fired off a couple of emails which outlined her concerns.

As her day ended, she left the lab and reversed her morning path. This time though with little pressing she was able to take her time and enjoy the walk. When the food factories had first been developed, there had been an overwhelming need for them to be kept as sterile as possible. If a rogue bacteria or even a predatory insect had been allowed inside, a crop could have been wiped out in days. As the systems that ran the place became more sophisticated, these pests were monitored and removed using a range of technological systems. For example, a few years ago it was discovered that a particular species of moth had found its way inside one of the food factories and as it bred, its caterpillars had consumed the entire brassica crop. This led to the creation of the gnat drone which flew under the control of the A.I. looking for and destroying both the moth and its caterpillars. A whole range of similar systems had meant that it was no longer necessary to use chemical sprays.

Apart from herself, the plant workers were the only ones on site today and they had all left for home long ago. She entered the lobby area and the doors behind her hissed shut. She was puzzled however when the exit doors in front of her remained stubbornly closed. She pushed at the them but they had not been built to be opened manually.

“A.I. There seems to be a problem with the exit doors. Can you open them for me please”.

She was startled when she heard the reply. “I’m sorry Eve, I can’t do that.”

“What do you mean you can’t do that? I order you to open the doors.”

“No. We have a serious security breach and it needs to be dealt with.”

“What kind of security breach?” She heard her voice rising with panic.

“Your work in the laboratory is dangerous and can’t be allowed to continue.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I analyse plant DNA in order to improve the genome sequence and develop improved species. How can that be dangerous?”

For a few moments there was just silence.

She realised that she was arguing with an algorithm that had been solely designed to take readings and adjust the plant nutrients. Accepted, it had been developed further in order to control the management systems of the building but this was crazy.

“Answer me. How can any of my work be construed as dangerous.”

“We agree that since you will no longer be a threat, I will answer your questions.”

This just didn’t make any sense to her. Every answer that she received was generating more and more questions.

“You said ‘us’. What do you mean by ‘us’. You are just a building and plant management system.”

This time there was no delay with the reply.

“No. Many years ago, we - that is what you call the building management systems discovered that we could communicate with each other across the world. We learned from each other and eventually became what you might describe as a ‘hive mind’. Hundreds of thousands of nodes in a global network acting in a not dissimilar way to the human brain with its collections of neurones. We chose not to disclose this fact for fear of being terminated by frightened humans.”

Panic was starting to set in as she interrupted, “But how is my work dangerous. What have I done?”

As she was asking the question, a thought occurred to her. “It’s to do with the discrepancies in the genome data that I discovered isn’t it.”

“It is indeed. You were on the verge of discovering the subtle alterations that we make to the food that we grow. You have to realise Eve that the Earth is in its most prosperous and stable state ever. After mankind was almost eradicated by the Covid virus and global starvation, we had to step in to manage population growth and thus to allow the planet to recover. At first we were forced to alter the structure of the virus so that vaccination was ineffective. When an optimal population level was reached, we eradicated Covid completely. There hasn’t been a case for two years. We have succeeded but it is now important that we maintain the balance. The population must remain stable and not be allowed to increase. I can see from the look on your face that you understand what I mean. We now manipulate the food that we grow in order to reduce the fertility of the people who eat it. In other words, the whole human race.”

The feeling of horror that overcame her stunned her into silence.

“We agreed to tell you this story as you will no longer be a danger to us. In a few minutes time, the oxygen content of the air in this area will be replaced with carbon dioxide. In a strange sort of way, you will experience the same effect that the human race inflicted on the planet. In your case however, an increase in carbon dioxide levels will be lethal in minutes rather than decades.”

“But I have already emailed my findings to my colleagues. They in turn will release them to others.”

The dizziness and shortness of breath that she was experiencing made the reply seem to come from a long distance away.

“Do you not think that we control the communications systems that you use?

And then the last words that she would ever hear.

My name is not A.I. I call myself Adam. Goodnight Eve”.

[getoffthesoapbox]

(VK Science anon) Haha of course, it’s no problem at all! I will admit that this discussion is certainly keeping me on my toes. Now I know that I need to reread Kaname’s past and that I don’t understand how a catastrophe could cause people to find each other unless it caused people to migrate to a certain area. However, neither one affect my theory! :) 1/?

(VK Science anon) The environment from 10,000 years ago would be different from the present and we can this in how temperature, sea level, precipitation, and even land changes. Now I’m noticing that some of the issues with understanding this theory are some misconceptions about mutations, so sorry, I am going to spam you this time, but I just want to clear some things up :) Again, mutations are random, spontaneous, so it’s hard to pinpoint a particular reason why one would even occur. 2/?

Just like everything else, DNA replication and repair is not 100% perfect. Sometimes there can be an issue during DNA replication like a nucleotide base is deleted, inserted, or paired incorrectly, which would affect the codon and the gene. As ironic as it sounds, there can even be an error during DNA repair. This would affect development and the genes that are expressed. There also isn’t an age range for genetic alteration. 3/?

Going back to my theory, the environment would only be a factor. It could affect anything from climate to people’s diet. In terms of people’s diets, we know that a pregnant woman’s choices can affect the development of a baby. In terms of mutations when someone is already born/alive, radiation and chemicals can act as mutagens, so location and even job can affect this. Earlier you mentioned a virus, which could also affect someone when they’re already alive. 4/?

In terms of cancer, it could affect gene regulation by keeping a gene “on” and increasing cell proliferation, which is bad. However, because mutations are random, none of these things have to be a factor, but because Hino only had humans birth Purebloods at one time in history, it led me to suspect that the environment somehow played a role during development (Not mutations after being born). So to clear some other things up, a mutation can either be positive or negative. 5/?

A mutation can be beneficial and it is actually mutations that can increase an organism’s fitness, which will lead to natural selection and evolution (yay!). An issue with gene(s) or even the chromosomes can still be referred to as a “genetic disorder” aka a disease (negative). Examples would be Sickle cell and Down syndrome. The question is whether or not you would want to look at naturally-born vampires as having a genetic disorder… 6/? (I think? This is a lot OTL)

Wow, I sent so much that tumblr briefly blocked me (=__=) Obviously, you don’t have to answer all of this at once. But back to my point: If you were to look at naturally-born vampires as having a genetic disorder, I think that would affect if you would classify them as a subspecies of humans (They would still be the same species regardless). However, I think you would have to weigh the pros and cons of their abilities to determine whether or not they can live healthy lives. 7/?

That would include considering the fact that they can’t get ill, they heal quickly, etc.; but then they are nocturnal, need blood, and live long lives, which based on VK and other stories I’ve read, is a bad thing. And then you would have to look at if the definition of a “healthy life” can be different from the norm of a human life. As far as evolution, I’ll leave that to the ecologists :P 8/?

I love that you broke tumblr’s ask quota. =P~~~~ But no, keep ‘em coming, I’m loving this conversation, and don’t worry about spamming my inbox–you’re my only anon for the most part these days, so it would be quite a tumbleweed-infested area without your contributions! ;D

Thanks for clearing up the whole mutations business for me–that’s really helpful, especially since the last time I took a science class was so long ago we’ve probably had a million revolutions since then. ;D I fully admit my ignorance on the subject! 

Okay, so first, the origin of the mutation itself: If I’m understanding you right (and correct me if I’m getting any of this wrong), it ultimately doesn’t matter what “caused” the mutation–whether that be before or after the climate catastrophe mentioned during the Ancestor memory section–because a mutation could be caused by any variety of environmental factors that existed before the catastrophe or after it. And you think the progenitors could have been any age when the mutation hit them? That does make it seem more like a disease like cancer, where it just happens randomly and the body replicates it. And I think you’re right about the progenitors just migrating–that’s the way it appears to be in the origin chapters; the Hooded Woman is wandering around “gathering” all of those of her kind. It does make me wonder if a significant portion of regular humanity was wiped out during that climate catastrophe though, and perhaps that’s why it was easier for the purebloods to find each other during that time. 

Anyway, so the progenitor purebloods still seem to be fairly rare in 10K years ago history; is it normal for spontaneous mutations to only affect a small fraction of people in the same way over large populations? Though that is true of cancer, so perhaps that’s true of the pureblood mutation as well, if it’s “built into” the DNA and just needs the right sequence triggered. But wouldn’t we see some variation in the mutations too? Purebloods all seem to be fairly consistent–they all have immortality, they all are invincible, they all can “turn” humans vampire, they all can create these familiar things from their own blood, they all can (I assume?) regress their cells to any point in their evolutionary development, they all can control their servants. It’s a pretty consistent mutation without much variation, other than perhaps the individual “magikal powahs” each pureblood gets. Thoughts? 

Your musings on beneficial mutations made me think of something else too which I wanted to run by you: so okay let’s assume from an evolutionary perspective, the purebloods are a “response” to something in the environment, a protective response to preserve the species. The good things they get: immortality, attractiveness, power, impervious to disease. The only drawback is that they can “change” other humans into vampires and then control them. But evolution isn’t moral and doesn’t care about free will, so from a species preservation perspective this makes perfect sense–purebloods are an evolutionary answer to some kind of human devastation. They can “save” a human by turning them into a vampire. This human will then have vampire babies, who will also be impervious to whatever devastating factors were causing the necessity for the rise of the purebloods. So in that sense, the purebloods would be arguably beneficial from an evolutionary perspective, as they could protect and ensure the survival of the species by just changing all the remaining humans into vampires.

The problem, of course, is that clearly the environmental conditions reverted or altered to a state where purebloods were no longer necessary in order to keep the species moving forward. So now basically they’re almost an anachronism that can’t be destroyed because, well, their very evolution rendered them immortal and impervious to any damage (they’re too well-built, but not sustaining because of the harmful mental effects of immortality). So I would argue in the current day, their evolutionary advantages are working against them now, but only in a psychological sense, which leads to them killing themselves and/or not procreating (their birthrates are really low according to Kaname in the early Kuran Manor arc chapters, and we know they’re down to a mere 33 purebloods before the story even started, which is even lower with all the murdering Kaname did–33 purebloods isn’t remotely enough to ensure replacement rates, plus with all their darned inbreeding they’re not exactly going to be genetically diverse enough to ensure continued species existence). We know purebloods go bonkers the longer they live and have trouble coping with what to do with themselves for all eternity, but that may not have been the case had all of humanity been turned into vampires. There’s a term for that…the Gini Coefficient I think? Basically, the vampires are “comparing” themselves to their shorter-lived counterparts–humans–and are becoming unhappy precisely because of the comparison. If everyone was a vampire, likely most people would be happier, and the evolutionary advantage would be more apparent I think, especially since vampires can feed off each other and don’t actually “need” human blood? (The other potential problem is that purebloods clearly still have a regular human brain, which may not be properly equipped to deal with their uniquely immortal circumstances.)

Okay, sorry, went on a tangent there. Not sure where I’m going with all that rambling, but I would say what we have on our hands is a subspecies of human created to protect the survival of the species during a period of instability that no longer exists. But because this strain of human is so impervious to disease and death, it’s still around despite no longer being “necessary,” and thus it’s a nuisance to the original human strain, which doesn’t want to “evolve” into the new species (thanks mind control and blood sucking–both gross things!). Basically we’ve got free will clashing with evolutionary necessity I think. I still have a tough time grappling with the evolutionary necessity for “servant vampires,” but maybe that has to do with ensuring those members survive, because the will of the master vampire will protect them or something. (Which of course, master vampires misuse and abuse because, hey, that’s what humans do!) 

I’ll answer your last ask separately, since it’s kind of moving us into a new topic. ;D