#underthehedge

[lady-harrowhark]

Hey, so I was browsing your tlt meta tag (because I remembered your post about Ianthe being waxen, still love that btw) and I saw a post about you writing a thing called The Megatheorem. Is that still a thing in the works? Was it already posted somewhere? Am I causing you physical pain by asking about it and should not do that?

(I've also got ADHD and fully respect if it's Option Three there and you'd rather I never asked about it again. Sorry if that's the case.)

Ahahahaha yes, it's still in the works and no, you are not causing physical pain by asking about it, although I did actually laugh out loud when I saw this 😂 Anyone is free to continue prompting my about it as encouragement to work on it! (Also I'm still surprised at how that Ianthe post took off - I very genuinely almost didn't post it because it was just sort of a passing thought at first lol)

The Mega-Theorem hasn't been posted anywhere because it's not finished yet lol. I also have ADHD and I was massively hyperfixated on working on it for several months and The Hyperfixation Shine has worn off BUT it's definitely not abandoned by any means. I did post the current table of contents a while back as a sneak peek, which I can share again here!

Several sections are pulled pretty directly from posts that I've previously made, which are all in my tlt meta tag. As an aside, I'm glad someone else is finding my tagging system useful lmao. I love being able to go back and browse specific tags for art or meta or whatever and I get a kick out of knowing other people do too lol.

I do plan to post it once I feel like I've tied up the loose ends! It's definitely going to have to be split into multiple posts/sections, though, given that it currently sits at 12,849 words and 25 pages 💀 When will said loose ends be tied up? Excellent question! I would also love to know the answer to that one!

[marzipanandminutiae]

#also would that mean that the entire western world from like 1836 to 1920 had ADD?

I mean, I get the point you're making but it would explain their relationship with cocaine and amphetamines as normal everyday medication.

Perhaps not so much. As I understand it, amphetamines were first synthesized in 1887 and didn't come into widespread western pharmaceutical use for another 40 years, and cocaine was first used pharmaceutically in something like its current form in 1880, as a surgical anesthetic (although medicine with coca leaves involved has a far longer history, of course).

In conclusion: they were all more or less unmedicated. And apparently can be diagnosed with ADD via their interior design, according to that anon. Might explain even more, to be honest.

[felassan]

DA Absolution: ohohoho the moment she said "The Red Knight" I thought "oh fuck it's that stupid red bullshit again"

asdjkhknl. I actually had nooo idea who "The Crimson Knight" could be when Hira said that so my little mind was set racing trying to work it out (...) and then in the final scene of the show I just

[liesmyth]

Congrats

THANK YOU SO MUCH!! HAPPY PRIDE MONTH TO US!!

[maraeffect]

Sending this to everyone who reblogged that post from jackamazinglynn: it is a scam.

Paypal account linked (Jacklyn Webb) does this regularly, creating new blogs soliciting donations for a new sick cat each time.

That tumour, as one of my followers pointed out, is on a dog.

The veterinary invoice is for an animal called Chanel, not Zoe, though that's not as suspicious as the list of medication doses for an animal in the 40-60lb (18-27kg) range, i.e. a medium sized dog.

List also includes canine medications generally not considered suitable for cats (Carprofen).

aw shit, thanks for letting me know. i wish trusting people on here was easy to do, but people like this ruin it for everyone else. i appreciate u 💖

[c0smic-coral]

Idk whether this is an ADHD or autism thing but I can say the alphabet backwards at the drop of a hat. It’s because, similar to @cyberphuck, I’ve associated letters with their numbers in the alphabet for most of my life, so when I verbally say “Z Y X” I’m mentally saying “26 25 24”

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Sorry I had this open in another tab and thought you might get a chuckle out of it r.e. your last post.

Actually had this screenshot saved too which seems...relevant?

what a MOOD

[thebibliosphere]

"You don't have ADHD you're just sensitive"...what? I've mercifully been spared that one and I can't work out what that's even meant to mean. Sensitive to what? Sensitive to stimuli/lack thereof/emotional dysregulation due to my ADHD? Sensitive to bullshit "ADHD don't real" takes? (Admittedly, aye, I am). Sensitive to magical waves coming through the aether that are kicking my prefrontal cortex in the dick?

There’s this new-ish thing going around at the moment that where people are identifying as HSP, or “highly sensitive person”, and most of the things they are describing are neurodivergent issues. But they don’t want the stigma of being associated with Autism or ADHD, so they label themselves as “HSP” so they can say “oh no, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m normal. I’m just a highly sensitive person”. I reblogged a couple of posts about it I think it was last week? and how a lot of the “girl-boss” professionals are being targeted with it by life coaches.

And you know what, neurodivergency is a spectrum, so chances are they can’t relate to some of the things we talk about. But the way they’re choosing to define it whilst also distancing themselves from ADHD and Autism—and also now telling people “oh don’t be silly, you’re too X to be one of those people. You’re just Highly Sensitive” is ooft, yikes. Big old ableist red flags right there.

Obviously not everyone who identifies this way is like that, but there’s a lot of red flags in their community that keep popping up. And it seems to becoming more prevalent on places like YouTube which of course means the info people are getting is often skewed.

[systlin]

"I am going to need you to read [...] and then actually use your goddamn brain." Systlin please, this is tumblr, where reading comprehension comes to die. We are all Jared, 19, and our skulls are hollow and bare.

An excellent point, but better to light a single candle than to curse the dark

[zenosanalytic]

Absolutely predictable from something that only provides STATISTICALLY LIKELY language to "answer" prompts. Again: these DONT KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL, they lack entirely the capacity for knowledge, they're just stringing words which are likely to be close to each other based on the prompt they get together.

“I once had ChatGPT insist that a particular composer wrote music for a game, even going so far as to list particular songs from the soundtrack that they were supposedly responsible for, and it helpfully provided hallucinatory citations when I asked for them (a broken link on the game publisher’s website and a link to Wikipedia, which did not in fact support its assertion either now or at any point in the article’s history). Nor could I find anywhere else on the internet where someone even mistakenly believed that that composer had worked on the game. ChatGPT lies not because it’s regurgitating falsehoods that it found on the internet - it lies because it invents new falsehoods on its own. It’s not just trained on stuff on the internet that’s wrong; it’s trained to be confidently wrong in general. It doesn’t know what facts are, it just knows how to produce things that are shaped like facts and shove them in fact-shaped holes. I personally wasted 30 minutes of my life fact-checking/“not believing everything it says”, when it confidently told me something surprising. My horizons were not broadened by exposing me to “different worldviews”. This was unequivocally a negative experience for me.”

— comment on a MetaFilter post about AI: “My goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest.”

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Ok I am loving the headcanon that no one can quite decide if Madly Sadly is wearing an incredibly pimped out bath robe or proper Magic User Robes that're for some reason made of terrycloth. I am now however decreeing that, to me at least, it is in fact a noir detective style style trenchcoat that's either been slowly warped by prolonged contact with Gaud or your helpful addition to a transmutation spell

i like this Very Much

[bunjywunjy]

Bunjy, how could you do a post about Barn Owls without including pictures of their Cursed, or should I say Curséd, offspring because baby barn owls are terrifying. Also if you hate the idea of ever sleeping again I heartily suggest you google "Barn owl yawning" because hoo boy that beak goes back a lot further than you think.

yeah there’s a very famous gif that’s been cycling for years that illustrates the whole thing perfectly:

WONDERFUL!

[bogleech]

Hey do you have any more info about the blind, terrestrial, Amazonian catfish you mentioned in a recent post? I can't find anything on regular google or scholar.

Not a whole lot more seems to be known about Phraetobius. The photo I shared of them supposedly in water wasn’t even right! It was just a closely related, more aquatic species!

This is a real image of one in water, showing it has much more atrophied fins and whiskers than other catfish, but apparently when put in water they try to jump back out!

[underthehedge]

People all over Britain are still saying "Shut up, UnderTheHedge" because I've been recommending them the book The Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow for about a decade now, but I will not stop.

It's a legitimately great dive into the topic, looking at many examples and hypothesising about various dispersal partners, and identifying patterns in what is termed "ecological anachronisms". The writing is accessible to non-scientists and entertaining to trained ecologists alike and it's just...it'll really change the way you view certain plants.

Seriously worth reading.

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[biologyweeps]

A friend just sent me this and if I had to read this with my own two eyes, then so do you.

I am suffering. 

For my followers: Iron in food comes in ‘heme iron’ and ‘non-heme iron’. Heme is iron that’s bound to a porphyrin ring, non-heme is everything else, essentially. 

Heme iron is much easier for your body is absorb, which is good because you need iron. Non-heme iron is much less bioavailable, which is the important term here.

Bioavailablity is essentially ‘how much of X that you ingest/come into contact with can your body actually absorb’. There are for example vitamins that have better bioavailability if you eat them with something fatty because they’re fat soluble. 

An additional factor is the iron absorption is further impacted by stuff like ‘what else is in the food’ with things like oxalic acid further reducing iron absorption. If you just said ‘hey that acid sounds familiar’ than that’s because it’s contained in plenty of plants. Rhubarb is kinda famous for it, but spinach also contains it, making uncooked spinach less-than-ideal for iron absorption. 

So no, ‘your body can excrete it! :)’ is actually not a good thing because what actually happens is that your body never absorbs it to begin with. Vegetarians and vegans have to potentially compensate for this by eating more non-heme iron things to meet their quota.

Another factor is that it actually takes work to ‘overload’ your body with iron? Why? Well, due to how it’s absorbed to begin with. You see it’s absorbed in the gut, and how much of it is absorbed is regulated by hepcidin. That’s produced in the liver and suppresses iron uptake. If your body has full iron stores, more of that is produced and iron uptake is lessened. If your body is running low, production of hepcidin is suppressed and your body takes up more.

Additional, the intestinal mucosa itself can nope out on you. If your dietary iron uptake is high, they can produce a sort of block and just flat out refuse to take any iron for a few days, even if your system is low on iron (most of the stuff mentioned above you can read about in more detail here).

Indeed if your hepcidin production or something downstream from the signaling is faulty, you get an iron accumulation disease of some kind. They’re bundled under the term ‘hemochromatosis’ 

While it’s also possible to get that through excess dietry iron, that takes some work. Let’s math some. 

Taken from above paper:

‘ In the U.S., a tolerable upper intake level (UL—the Tolerable Upper Intake Level represents the highest level of daily nutrient intake that is likely to pose no risk of adverse health effects for almost all individuals in the general population) for total iron intake (from all sources) of 45 mg/day was set for adults, which was also based on gastrointestinal effects. ‘

So, 45mg/day. According to the USDA, steak contains 2.4mg iron on 100g streak. That means to exceed your daily allowance on iron on steak alone you’d need to eat 1875g steak a day. That’s nearly a solid 2kg of meat, assuming that ALL iron is absorbed (which for reasons mentioned above, might not be true.) But still, that’s not ‘steak several times a week’ that’s ‘about two solid kg of meat A DAY’ for extended periods of time to actually do yourself a lasting damage. There are plenty of foods that have a higher iron content. Pork liver clocks in with 18mg/100g, meaning you can reach the 45mg/day with a more reasonable 250g piece. But again, this assumes complete absorption of all available iron and a daily habit, not a once a month event.

Generally, the easiest way to overload your healthy self on iron is supplements when you don’t need them. 

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Befuckening-opinion: Avians are no longer birds and that term is now reserved for Sauropods, aka, Beefy Birds.

Everyone is grounded. The internet is over. Time to go home