science side of tumblr why do all of us mentally ill ppl like storms so much
@revelationed said:
Rain/moving water has negative ions which cause a biochemical reaction that reduces stress. It’s the same reason people feel more at peace on beaches or by waterfalls. We spend most of our lives surrounded by positive ions created by electronics and recirculated air. A study by Columbia University showed that negative ions can have the same affect as antidepressants.
one of the most important things ive learned from upper level biology education so far is that dna isnt the god-like all-powerful beacon of similarity between all living beings on the face of the earth as high school science textbooks will lead u to believe but actually is, in fact, the molecular equivalent of a smoldering dumpster fire that’s in a constant state of chaos and cellular scandal like some highlights:
-the parts of dna that just casually detach on a physical level from the main strand, do some sick skateboard tricks in the cytoplasm, and land somewhere else with 43552342 copies
-the parts that would do A Thing if they wern’t physically spooled up so tightly that the Make Thing Happen machinery couldnt get to them
-the dna thats in ur mitochondria bc the mitochondria used to be a bacteria that our bigger, buffer cellular ancestors just vored in the primordial ooze
-the dna that’s in chloroplasts in plants for the same reason
-rna….bitches be crazy like what is she gonna do next?? o she gonna act like a protein now and do shit?? im on the edge of my seat
-sometimes u just gotta make more chromosomes man like sometimes u just be hanging out and u gotta make ur genome 64 sizes larger and then change ur mind only 100,000 years later and delete half of it and thats just how it is on this bitch of an earth
-random shit from like 5 BCE is just casually left over everywhere like no susan i told u to leave that gene alone we might need it to fight dinosaurs again u just never know!!!!!
dna is earth’s biggest and brightest train wreck and honestly i wouldnt trust a dna molecule to water my plants let alone run my body but here we fucking are
I am feeling physically very unstable after reading this.
I’m a genetics professor and everything here is true.
There’s a fern that has 1,260 chromosomes. That’s 630 pairs of chromosomes. No, we don’t know why.
Oh, and everyone should know that the person who first presented evidence for endosymbiosis (the official name for cells eating each other and then turning into mitochondria or chloroplasts instead of being digested) was this woman, Lynn Margulis, in 1967:
Her paper where she presented the theory was rejected 15 times before it got published. Over the next decade, her work was mocked and ignored. Now every biologist knows that she was right.
The bits of DNA that move around (“jumping genes”) were discovered by this woman, Barbara McClintock, in the 1940′s:
Her work on them was ignored and derided for about two decades before some people started to take it seriously. In 1983 she won a Nobel Prize for it.
Something of a derail, but I feel strongly about talking about the contributions of these two women.
it’s never not the time to learn about cool women in science
You are Death, but in a post-apocaliptic world. Only a few survivors remain, and you’re doing everything you can to help them because if the last human dies, you die as well. The survivors can’t see you, but they feel your presence and noticed your effort. They started to call you Life.
Hi friends. This is our new comics TEST. This one means a lot to us and we really hope you like it.
We put out a digital comic book today containing our stories TEST, ARK, and MIDNIGHT RADIO. It’s hi res, DRM free and pay what you want. You can download it at: Gum.co/theworld
If you would like to support us creating more stories like these, please consider buying a copy. If you can’t, no worries. Please download and enjoy the book!
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!
authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture – “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
I have no plans to ever ever delete any of my stuff but reminder that I do offer trade paperback editions of a bunch of my fics that you can have if you cover the cost of printing.
As a writer, I’ll never delete my stuff (and if I ever were to delete anything, I’d give a lot of warning and upload at least one new chapter simply declaring the planned removal date and all current works would contain notes of warning for a fic’s removal). As a reader… I’m currently cleaning out my AO3 history as I try to hunt down a fic I read within the last six months. And it’s so disappointing to see those mystery fics that were deleted. No clue as to what they were aside from the surrounding fics I read about the same time. = It’s what got me downloading every completed fic I enjoy.
So, yes! Download! Print! Save! Anything so you don’t lose out on something you love!
Also, as someone with bookbinding experience, I fully support printing and binding fics into handmade books.
I vowed to myself a long time ago to never delete a thing, no matter how much I hated it. So, no matter how awful and cringey, everything I’ve ever posted is still around
Ok so heres this story where Derek moved to Salem when he was a young boy with his family. They were well off as they could have been at the time and an affluent part of the community. They were all know for being devout but welcoming and compassionate, a trait not shared amongst the entire town. Even as children they would consider anyone a friend which is how Derek met Stiles.
The boy had trouble in school and lived on the far reaches of town in the woods.
Unlike the rest of the children, Derek never learned to keep away from those who were different and this hyper son of the sheriff fascinated him, a trait he never lost even as they reached maturity.
When he was old enough, his hand was arranged to be promised to a young womans whose family was the most respected in the colony. The tying of the two households would have brought prosperity to both, but knowing that despite all his efforts never warmed Dereks heart to it.
He would meet up with Stiles in the woods, despite their school days being long over and try to convince his friend that this was a good match, that it was what was best, though he knew he was only trying to convince himself.
In the end he never had to worry.
His familys home burned to the ground in a freak accident leaving only his two sisters and himself behind.
The Argents bought their land, for a pittance when they had nothing to live on and were forced to accept, scraping enough to build a small cabin with whatever they could salvage and the help of a few loyal townsfolk.
Stiles father died that year. While digging throught the remains of the Hale house. John had always had doubts that it was an accident, just as Derek doubted his blow to the head had been a pillar giving way.
Stiles changed after that, always a little bit of an outcast; he was rarely seen or remembered especially after the whispers began.
Derek in his grief had turned to god, trying despretely to make sense of all that had happened to them and to provide for his family. He wasn’t terrible at it, he had always had a good sense of people and wanted to help the good in this town get back to themselves and remember why they had come all this way for a fresh start.
But there was so much he could not reconcile. The loss of his family and the untimely death of the sheriff ate away at him. Each day the town seemed to become more and more on edge. They lost the harvest two years in a row. Their were more unexplained fires, sickness became rampant.
Instead of this tying them to their faith, eachday they seemed to be inching closer to losing it. Neighbour turned against neighbour. Accusations flying out left and right for all manor of indiscretions. With no sensible replacement for law enforcement, the few who stepped in were in it for themselves and the town unravelled that much further.
Derek was quick to try and put an end to the rumours when they started. Each new utterance becoming more and more damaging. Everyone was looking for someone to blame and their were few too voices going against the injustices.
The Hales distanced themselves from the town as much as they could, staying inside or relying on their meagre plot of land to carry them through another winter without help.
But they were not alone. Just as they were putting the last of their stores on the table for the evening meal, despite their careful rationing a figure appeared at their door, shutting it quickly against the late winter snow.
Derek rose from his chair but before he could protest, the intruders hood was thrown back and a brace of rabbits were thrown over the hearth. Dereks breath choked in his lungs and he held the gaze of the man who had turned the tide of their fortune, his amber eyes glowing in the firelight. A man he hadnt seen in months but felt the ache of loss from in this seemingly hollow spot beneath his ribs.
Stiles brought them to life, quite literally that day. With his skill in hunting and uncanny ability to forage enough food from the woods that his family forgot what it felt like to be hungry for the first time in years.
The man was still hyper, figitting in his chair with an abundance of energy but a more subdued quality about him. He rarely spoke of the town, but seemed interested enough when Derek told him stories of the day to day life of becoming a minister, this wry sort of half smile always on the edge of the other mans lips when he spoke of it.
It was a distraction.
Amber so golden it was hypnotizing.
Stiles breathed new life into him, challeged him. Made him stronger in his faith but also tested it more intensely than Derek thought possible.
Its shamefully why he was so slow to notice when it started.
The whispers, turned to rumours.
Rumours turned to trials.
Which turned to death.
And no one saw what was at the heart of it. No one saw straight through to the truth like Stiles did. Derek begged him to stay out of it. He couldnt explain himself. Couldnt quiet his conscience with the idea that if enough people heard the truth this madness would be put to an end…as long as Stiles wasnt the one who put an end to it.
He should have tried harder. He was selfishly protecting the ones he loved by keeping them away. Out of sight. He tried. Every day but his voice wasnt enough.
He should have tried harder.
He should have pushed more. He felt at a loss and no one would listen to reason and he was questioning every foundation he had built his life on. These people had abandoned them, god had abandoned them.
And all it took was one more whisper for his worldview to shatter so competely its like it never exsisted in the first place.
The day they took him….
Stiles smiled at him while awaiting trial, the black lurid ink on his skin hidden beneath the white of his shirt did nothing to give Derek pause. He pressed the palm of his hand to the swirling image on the centre of the mans chest like being pulled there by a magnet the skin beneath his hand hot the heart below banging out a rhythm too calm for what was about to happen. And Derek knew.
Three years into this madness and they had finially got it right.
And that night every last one of them paid for it.
shealwaysreads 