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cephalotodd:

werewolves stink like wet dog and shed all over your furniture and are probably really really needy around a full moon and wake u up all the time with questions about morality but on the other hand vampires are like “øh hëllö thêrę vøuld yoü lïke to help me örganise mai evening vear closët for the third time this veëk :)” so really you cant win





"I went back but I didn’t stay
(…)
I had to see if the fields were still shining,
the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is"

— Louise Glück, from Sunrise in “A Village Life”
(via adrasteiax)

















feynites:

prokopetz:

I just got one of those door-to-door evangelists, and I’ve gotta admit I kind of feel sorry for them - their pitch is, like, hilariously ineffective because they just don’t seem to realise that most folks have no point of reference on what they’re selling. It’s like watching someone try to convince people that they should play Pokémon, except they’re operating under the unexamined assumption that everyone everywhere is already familiar with the basics and just can’t decide which generation is best, so they’re standing there banging on about the finer points of the type matchup grid to an audience whose knowledge of and interest in the franchise begins and ends with “the monster goes in the ball”.

I once completely stumped an evangelist when I was a kid because he asked me if I knew who Jesus was, and I said ‘no’.

“No?” the poor dude repeated, looking dubiously at his companion.

Me being myself, I immediately doubled-down.

“No,” I repeated. “Who’s Jesus?”

This summoned up a long silence, followed by the evangelists asking to speak to my mother or father.

“They’re not here,” I said. Technically also a lie, but my father was sleeping from working nights, and I wasn’t going to wake him up for this.

“Well… um… so Jesus… Jesus Christ? Our Lord and Saviour, Who is the Son of God?” the chatty evangelist tried, looking at me like I was some kind of alien puzzle.

“You mean Hercules?” I responded, for some reason. I still don’t know why.

Another long silence. We were clearly off-script. The chatty evangelist started trying to go through the ‘died for your sins’ spiel, and for some reason, all I could think to do was roll with the angle that I was legitimately unfamiliar with even the concept of Jesus, and had somehow reached the age of nine or ten with only a thorough education on Greek Mythology to serve me in a religious context.

I think the second guy was well aware that I was full of shit, because he kept covering his mouth like he was going to laugh, but the first guy was just caught somewhere between horror and a weird kind of excitement. Like he’d been waiting to finally meet someone who didn’t know ANYTHING about Jesus, just so he could be the first to explain the whole Christianity deal.

Anyways long story short I ended up just trying to tell them all about the Trials of Hercules, like we were just exchanging fun facts we knew about demigods, while the first guy was just adamantly trying to be like ‘no that stuff is made up, but the Jesus stuff is true’, until his friend finally was just like ‘thank you have a good day’ and closed the door and made him leave.





giwatafiya:

bombtraq:

the only reason weed is attributed to Bob Marley is because it was a huge part of the Rastafari religion. Rastafarians promoted black empowerment, self-love, and self-reliance and smoking pot was used as a way of enhancing meditation. although he was rumored to smoke one pound of weed a day, police found no pot in any of his belongings while on tour and none in the belongings of everyone on tour with him.

now Bob Marley is depicted as a happy dude smoking on a beach when he was actually a huge activist against African countries with dictatorships and even did a huge concert in Zimbabwe when they declared independence. thousands of fans broke in to the concert to see him and police shot tear gas into the mob. Bob didn’t stop performing even when tear gas reached the stage, making most of his bandmates rush off. he also did a huge peace concert in Jamaica to unite two warring political parties. his songs often spotlighted racism and inequality and he was an important voice for black people not only in the US, but the entire world.

and now he’s a snapchat filter

This is the man that wrote revolutionary songs like “Africa Unite”, “Black Man Redemption”, “War” (where he spoke out against apartheid and the conflict in Angola).

Songs like “Buffalo Soldier”, “Redemption Song”, “Crazy Baldhead”, “Stiff Necked Fools”, “War”, and many other songs that made it clear where he stood in the movement.

But folks have reduced him to “Jammin’” and “One Love”, ignoring his entire library of music in which he clearly sent the message that he was an activist who worked and strived for global Black liberation.









nightinngales:

somebody: i changed urls–

me, who hasn’t been able to recognize anyone on my dash for years:

image




xiaolapcheong:

scientia-rex:

xiaolapcheong:

scientia-rex:

frenchfrysplash:

fanfic: this character has had several bottles of hard liquor and they’re just slurring their speech slightly and for some reason are not in the hospital with alcohol poisoning

me: ….you’ve literally never had a drink in your life have you

very good point.

Alcohol For the Non-Drinking Fanfic Writer, a primer by me

There’s a shit ton of variability in response to alcohol depending on body mass, history of drinking (your liver can upregulate the CYP450 enzyme responsible for metabolizing alcohol but only to a certain point; chronic alcoholics hit a point where their livers are so trashed they lose this and go back to getting drunk off small amounts of alcohol), and ethnicity (people of East Asian descent are more likely to lack a critical enzyme for breaking down one of the metabolic steps in the degradation of ethanol and are stuck in the shittiest part of it, with flushing and nausea), and other factors.

But if I had to guesstimate for writing:

1 drink (a tall glass of beer, a can of beer, or a shot of hard alcohol in a cocktail or alone): are you a burly dude? you may or may not feel it. are you a tiny lady? you will probably notice it.

2 drinks: burly dude may or may not be noticing it. tiny lady like me: this is a sweet spot where you’re talkative but not drunk. (Note: people don’t go from zero to “so drunk you remember nothing/are profoundly disinhibited.” There’s a lot of ground to cover in between.)

3 drinks: burly dude probably feeling it, tiny lady getting drunk.

4 drinks: burly dude still feeling it, tiny lady ready to FUCKING FIGHT YOU

5 drinks: burly dude, slow down, buddy, you gonna polish off that six-pack by yourself? That’s going to hurt in the morning. Tiny lady: oh my GOD stop. Go to bed.

This is where we draw the cut-off for a “binge,” if you were wondering. More than this and you’re officially binge-drinking, where your odds of serious harm go up sharply. From alcohol, but also from the bad decision dinosaur that plagues you when you binge-drink.

a fifth of anything by yourself: Sir. Sir, can you hear me? Sir, I need you to open your eyes. Squeeze my fingers. Sir, you’re in the emergency room.

Splitting a bottle of wine between two adults: generally like three drinks each, you’ll feel it but you’ll survive. (A bottle of wine between three adults: usually not quiiiiiite enough.)

An entire bottle of wine by yourself: oh, so you enjoy suffering?

Other Fun Medical Alcohol Facts: high-proof alcohol like vodka will temporarily paralyze your pyloric sphincter, so the alcohol can’t get into your gut for about twenty minutes. Then, when it DOES get into your small intestine, enjoy getting uncomfortably drunk too fast.

Alcohol is a zero-order metabolizer: that means that nothing on Earth can sober you up except time*, and the time it takes is linear, directly related to how much you drank. Most of us can clear about a drink an hour, so if you’re drinking slowly you can stay roughly sober all day. Most of us don’t drink that slowly. Hangovers are made awful by a metabolic intermediate (literal acid in your blood!!!! it’s so shitty!!!!!!!) that makes you nauseated and feel super gross, and not every drinking episode will lead to a hangover, and severity of hangover varies greatly by person and amount drunk.

So please never write someone having coffee to “sober up.“ Now they’re drunk AND they can’t sleep. Bad combo. Sucks for driving. Splashing cold water on your face? No. Amphetamines? Good Lord what’s wrong with you. Look, the room’s gonna spin, you fucked up your endolymph in your semicircular canals, deal with it. You can partially override that with proprioceptive feedback–keeping one foot on the floor to get tactile input–but it’s just gonna suck for a while.

The variability in capacity is real; my aunt-in-law, who is roughly my size, can drink me under the table easily. She’s a high-powered business executive who has martinis with lunch. I tried to keep up with her once and had to call in sick. So you don’t HAVE to write a character having a “normal” alcohol tolerance, but don’t get into “yep, definitely alcohol poisoning” territory, please.

This has been Please Don’t Show Up In My Emergency Room, I Hate Getting Barfed On by your local friendly medical trainee.


*this is technically not true, but no substance you can get your hands on will do it. hmu if you want to hear the story of the EtOH receptor antagonist and why it never went to market, what with all the dying.

what’s the EtOH receptor antagonist???

okay whew. here we go. there has been a LOT more interest in this than I was expecting (I was expecting none, to be clear), and it has been approx. 8 billion years since I was in undergrad, which is the last time I can reasonably claim to have been CURRENT on Neuro research. (I did my master’s at an institution that does not have what one might call a robust Neuro department and mainly did Stats.) So if a real live Neuro person comes on here and contradicts me, you should probably believe them.

BUT. Here is the story, as I recall it:

Alcohol, or, as we fancy-schmancy-pantsy medical types like to call it to distinguish it from the bajillion other alcohols out there (”alcohol” describes a general type of molecule in chemistry, not the good ol’-fashioned Get You Drunk molecule) ethanol, abbreviated EtOH, is what’s generally called a “sedative-hypnotic.” What that means is that it doesn’t work on opioid receptors, it doesn’t work on cannabinoid receptors. It does stuff to your GABA receptors–GABA being the major inhibitory neurotransmitter–and it also binds to other stuff. We still don’t have its actions in the brain fully mapped. But we know, and we’ve known for a while, that it does stuff to GABA receptors.

A major pharmaceutical company developed an honest-to-God antagonist. If you’re not a pharm person, you may be going, “a what now?” First point: damn near everything your brain does is determined by neurotransmitters and the receptors that love them. Neurotransmitters interact with their receptors in a variety of ways, with a HUGE variety of end results. Humans love jamming other chemicals that are not neurotransmitters into their receptors. Why do opioids work? Because they mimic NTs we make ourselves. Why does cannabis get us high? Because it mimics endogenous (”originating inside”, self-made) NTs. Manmade molecules that alter us are hijacking built-in systems. Don’t even get me started on how fucking bananas cool it is that neurons can adapt to neurotransmitter levels, and in a super awesome sci-fi-like variety of ways. Take a Neuro class! Take five! Take seventeen! Most fun I ever had was in a Neuro lab.

So what’s an antagonist? It’s something that, one way or another, makes it so the NT can’t do its thing at the receptor.

The line of thinking went, if we can keep ethanol from doing its thing at the GABA receptor, we can make people sober again. They can drink and then take a pill and be sober. Wouldn’t that be AMAZING? Wouldn’t that be lucrative? These are questions that drug companies think about a LOT.

So they made the chemical! Its name is Ro15-4513. You can Google it and get a WAY less interesting description of what went down. But how my professor explained it to us is like this:

It works. It’s an ethanol antagonist at the GABA receptor. You take it and it blows the ethanol off the receptor and you’re sober. And… because humans are awful, you get drunk again. You take another pill. You’re sober again. The time that pill is active is less than the time it takes your body to metabolize ethanol, so you’ve still got all that ethanol swishing around in your system waiting to murder you via aspirating your own vomit the hot second it wears off, but by God, you’re sober.

Except, as mentioned, the GABA receptor is not the only place where ethanol does stuff. One of the effects it has, since it’s such a teeny tiny molecule, is fucking with the lipid bilayer that forms the bulk of your cell membrane. If you’re a Neuro person, you’re getting cold chills right about now, because the only reason neurotransmission works is the properties of the lipid bilayer. You have to be able to transmit electricity down the axon of the neuron to generate an action potential. The lipid bilayer is what allows you to do that.

The pill does nothing for that. So if you take enough of the pill, and keep drinking, there comes a point where you’ve fucked the lipid bilayer beyond repair. You can’t transmit messages. Your brain doesn’t remember how to tell your body to do things like breathe, or not have seizures. And you die!

So, in summary, we have a pill that could make you a responsible designated driver, but actually fucking kills you because people have no self-control.

Moral of the story: Neuroscience Is Super Fun!!!!! It was my gateway drug into medicine. I would never have gone to medical school if it weren’t for my Behavioral Neuroscience professors.

today on: humanity’s hubris has led to so many things being bad when they were designed to be good







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