#lab advice

[mythmagicetc]

crazy that eddie brought home chris and tía pepa to remind buck he has a family who loves him, and then pepa encouraged buck to embrace change so he tried to leave the 118. i need this to come up when buck is distancing himself next season like

buck: i’m just trying to embrace change! like pepa told me to!

eddie: so my aunt, who calls you evancito and treats you like my wife, told you to embrace change, and you interpreted that to mean you should move out of our house and into a separate apartment, which is the same way we were living for years?

buck: um. well it’s—it’s not—

eddie: there are SO many actual changes that you could embrace. like getting a new tattoo or getting rid of your awful couch or actually verbally responding when i say beautiful earnest things to you or kissing me on the mouth—i’m just spitballing here, feel free to interrupt me if—mmph

[exitwound]

does anyone even care about the algae that live in southern ocean sea ice or is it just me and my milf antarctic oceanography professor. because if it’s just us that’s fine it definitely increases my chances

[spindle-and-nima]

I've had a good lot of people reach out and ask for rabbit care advice, especially with regards to stasis scares and other situations where a vet is not immediately available but first aide to rabbits needs to be done. I've had it in mind for a while now but I'm going to compile a mini guide on how to do first aide for rabbits as well as warning signs in their body language because those suckers are subtle, even to the trained eye

I've wanted to make a guide for proper nutrition and what to look for in labels, rabbit first aide, bonding guides, and beginner rabbit owner guides.

It's obv a lot of info to put in a post so I'm kinda wondering what I should use instead to give proper info. Would people generally be interested in a Google doc that I could share the link to?? One big document or several broken up or something maybe?

[parowanormal]

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ computer specs explained - processors ˖ ݁݁ 𖥔.

shopping for a laptop (or determining what your laptop can do) can be confusing. even as a computer science major, it took me a long time to get familiar with all of it! in this series, i'm breaking down each term, number, and specification, so you can determine what's best for you.

if you have more specific questions, my askbox is open, or feel free to send me a DM. let's talk processors!

what does the processor do?

the processor (also called the CPU) is the brain of a computer. it executes all the instructions needed to run applications. your internet browser, video editing software, games, and messaging apps are all managed by your processor. the code that makes them run is sent to your processor piece by piece, and the processor executes all of them simultaneously. it's the most important part of your computer!

what do the numbers mean?

two things determine how well your processor will perform: number of cores and clock speed. these numbers are often thrown all together when talking about the processor: e.g., "AMD Ryzen 7 7730U 2.0GHz Processor". AMD is the brand, Ryzen 7 7730U is the specific model, and 2.0GHz is the clock speed.

the number of cores determines how many of those individual instructions the computer can run at once. in other words, it's how much "brain space" your processor has. more cores means your computer can run more complicated programs.

each core may have 1 or 2 threads, which divide the core into pieces to run smaller programs more efficiently. a complicated program may need multiple threads or multiple cores, but simple programs can fit onto a single thread of a single core.

the clock speed is measured in gigahertz (GHz), which you may recognize as a frequency measurement. without getting too much into how processors work, the clock speed indicates how quickly your computer can execute instructions. it has to do with how quickly electrical pulses are sent through the CPU.

most CPUs have at least 4 cores and a clock speed of around 2.0GHz. modern Intel brand processors have two types of core: higher clock speed "P-cores" (for performance), and lower clock speed "E-cores" (for efficiency). in this case, the important number of cores to look at are the P-cores; more E-cores will just mean your machine is better at multi-tasking.

rowan recommends...

...as much processor as you'll realistically use. don't spend a lot on a powerful processor if you only surf the web, and don't try to cut corners if you like to play games or use video editing software.

there are two major CPU manufacturers: Intel and AMD. i've only personally used Intel CPUs, but most people won't notice the difference between an Intel and an AMD. if you're choosing between two similarly priced processors, choose the one with a higher clock speed.

for surfing the web, word processors, and small apps like Discord or Spotify: an Intel i3/AMD Ryzen 3 is perfectly fine.

for simple programming, music production, or games like Minecraft or Stardew Valley: choose an Intel i5/AMD Ryzen 5 with a clock speed of at least 2.0GHz.

for video editing, rendering, 3D modeling, complex programming, or high-performance games: an Intel i7 or i9, or an AMD Ryzen 7, with as high of a clock speed as you can afford.

thanks for reading and good luck! again, if you have specific questions, feel free to ask a question or DM. :3

next in series: memory

[abyssalzones]

What's your comic writing process like? I'm starting to get into making my own comics and I really admire your work!!! Any advice?

Ah, intrepid traveler, you've done well to journey to this secluded mountaintop spire, in search of the answers you seek. I indeed can provide such forbidden comicmancy knowledge... at the cost of your mortal soul...

coughs. anyway, I'm going to warn you immediately that what works for me does not work for everyone else, and in my experience the way I do things can prove very slow and discouraging for anyone who is more interested in the actual "drawing the damn comic" part of the process. I only do it this way because I enjoy weaving a narrative web that feels not only fully contained but re-readable, but my projects are often so long and my memory so shitty that I can't just keep all of it in my head! It would spill all over the place and make a really embarrassing mess of brain-juice. Not ideal.

but as for my own process, uhh... I suppose a comic would be fitting, right?

a little choppy but you get the idea.

as for turning words into art, I've been experimenting with figuring out the best way to do that for a little while now. Originally what I was doing for something like Ad Astra Per Aspera was to take my "script" and sketch it out on paper very loosely, before transposing that onto my canvas and working from there:

...but, I've found that can make it kind of difficult to space everything around on your standard page-size, and the thing I'm having the most problems with currently seems to be finding the sweet spot of panel-size proportions. So, I've taken to printing out standard thumbnail templates (you can just find these on google) and sketching very tiny panels in those, which seems to give me a slightly better sense of scale... (mild chapter 5 spoilers, sorry ad astra fans)

but I have yet to totally pull through on this, so who knows, maybe I'll try something else in the future!

As for advice, this is probably most applicable to me, but as a disabled artist I have a very hard time managing my workload without literally working myself into injury. I don't think I talked about this publicly but when I was working on that ten year anniversary comic I was literally drawing every single day for 3 solid months. Sometimes, in my case, I really can't bring myself to stop once I've latched onto an idea, and sometimes I find the most rewarding thing I can do with my time is to draw- but I seriously cannot overstate: Do not fucking do this.

You will fuck up your wrist, your back, your neck, your eyes, and probably your mental health. It's a well-known fact that mangaka have a lower life expectancy than the average japanese person due to the intense workload imposed on them by deadlines and personal expectations. Comics are a very demanding artform, and even though I'm not on any sort of mandated schedule there are times where I've toiled away at something when I likely should have been exercising or taking vision-breaks. Therefore the best advice I can give you is to chill the hell out.

Namely, find parts of the process you can be lazy about, and embrace the laziness! You don't like digitally sketching? Don't do it! Skip it, or maybe find a way to traditionally sketch things out in advance like I do. Hate lineart? Don't fucking do it. You really don't feel like wasting your time writing 72k words of comic scripts? ...then, don't be like me. skip that part. I'm a flawed human being and what works for me might not work for you.

The second most important piece of advice I could give is to read comics. Of all kinds. The reason for this is pretty self explanatory: In order to figure out your own comic-making style, you should first pick out bits and pieces from the artist's buffet to add to your plate. Manga, graphic novels, american comics, european comics, weird niche little webcomics, funny papers, anything and everything. This advice rings true of pretty much any art form, but I find it to be essential to honing comic-making skills because so many things you feel will just come intuitively often don't. and that's okay! nobody is born knowing how to leave space for speech bubbles or shape their panels in a way that imitates stretches of time. The best way to figure out stuff like this, in my experience, is to study the "masters", and then after becoming well accustomed to the basics, figure out what rules you want to bend or break to create your own style.

I consider myself to be in equal parts a writer and an artist, which lends itself well to making narrative comics, but maybe you're a bit more of an artist and want to focus on panel-by-panel visual storytelling. Or, conversely, maybe your talents lean closer towards writing, and the art itself is more of a secondary skill. Regardless of your unique blend of talents you can and should make a comic, you should just also be aware of your strengths and try to hone in on those- there will always be opportunities to build up skills you lack, but focusing on what you do best will always lead you in the right direction.

Anyway, that being said, here are some recommendations in no particular order:

Monster, Naoki Urasawa (!!)

Bone, Jeff Smith

Witch Hat Atelier, Kamome Shirahama

The first IDW run of Transformers comics (namely More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light)

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (!!)

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (really any Emily Carroll comics)

Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic) (!!)

Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo

The Third Person, Emma Grove

Tintin, Hergé (can be super racist please be wary)

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Cucumber Quest (webcomic)

Jellyfish Princess, Akiko Higashimura

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda (!!)

Note that I did not grow up with manga so I am seriously behind on a lot of extremely influential japanese comics such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, basically any of the original Shonen Jump comics, but they're widely considered building blocks of the genre so if you love the artform I think you should give them a try! Same goes for classic non-shonen manga genres like various Shoujo, Josei, Yuri, Gekiga, ETC.

same as above applies to a lot of classic DC and Marvel works, I unfortunately am just not a big fan of superhero comics... but I'm sure there's good stuff in there. a couple of my mutuals talk about booster gold and the blue beetle all the time so I'm assuming there has to be something worthwhile.

...and many, many, many more that I'm forgetting! I noticed as I made this list that, to my knowledge, hardly any of these are made by black or just non-japanese-mangaka BIPOC artists, which makes me sad about the gaps in my own comic collection. Therefore, anyone is welcome to add their own recommendations in the replies!

now go forth, and combine images with text!!!!!!!!!!!

[buggbuzz]

Hey, I hope this doesn't bother you but I'd like to make an enasone but I'm not sure how, would you mind giving me some tips?

Like, how do I choose the emotions on each side?

(If you see this same ask on other blogs it's because I like to have a variety of opinions to see which one I like the most/makes the most sense/helps me the most)

not sure how much help i'll be, but sure, why not!

honestly abstract/interpretive/absurdist art (or whatever you'd call it) like this is really outside of my comfort zone, so i'm surprised i got anywhere with it. the only reason i made an attempt at all was because i made a joke about how i should use markiplier's voice (since im a die-hard mark fan of like 10 years or something) as the male voice for my enasona

and then i thought about it more and i was like "shit, that'd be pretty fun though." and i ended up just toying with a design for fun with no plans of committing to an actual project.

as for the design itself, i just kind of went with my intuition? i really liked dbbq ena's design, so i took a lot of inspiration from it, as you can tell. then i just tacked on more colors that felt like me and messed with the limbs and hair until they felt right.

since the design was meant to be a persona, i started thinking about what traits best represented me in this context. well, one of my most overt traits is my confidence, and what is markiplier if not confident? so that was one half down already. so then i thought, what significant trait do i have that compliments confidence? and i ended up landing on "neuroticism." they're very different, but not necessarily contradictory, and together can summarize a lot of my outward personality pretty succinctly (not completely, of course. despite what conclusions people might draw about me, i'm not actually just crazy and arrogant💀)

only problem was, i wasn't sure what voice would do my own brand of neuroticism justice! mark worked for my confident side, since a lot of my style of confidence was directly inspired by him anyways (again, i've been watching him constantly since i was ten.) but my neuroticism? kind of unique. i was considering entrapta, but her coocoo dialogue is a lot closer to "fanatic" than "i'm going to crush. everything. into a tiny tin foil ball and then eat it." and eventually i realized that, hey, i have a very expressive voice that i'm pretty proud of, and look at that, i have dozens of voice messages i sent my friends of me tweaking over my research project being riddled with mistakes by other people! so i figured what better voice to use for the neurotic side than my own voice crashing out? and that was what gave birth to the final project!

i guess this was more of just me giving you my behind the scenes story instead of tips, but hey, that's what my process was! i hope this helps you with your design :)

[antiquepearlss]

Together Kiera, Catalina, and Varian have a body count.

[lepusrufus]

While Moira ever admitting to not being able to do anything is a little ooc, I think it's infinitely funnier for her to get hella annoyed at people taking one look at the Doctor title that came with her PhD and assume she can do anything medicine or science related like

"Oh yeah sure I brainwashed Widowmaker right after finishing my course in The mind of depressed housewives with murder tendencies sure do I look like a fucking psychologist to you?" "No I can't perform open heart surgery on you unfortunately you'll just have to deal with it." "The fuck do you expect me to do about those symptoms I don't know sounds like either flu or terminal cancer here would you like to flip a coin?" "Well no I can't tell why your blood pressure has been fatally high for two days, I can however tell you the likelihood of your child being born with green eyes though." "What do you mean your cells are dying agai- actually Gabe yeah that's something I may be able to solve sure take a seat."

[cookiefate]

Cookiefate for September 20th:

"You will soon emerge victorious from the maze you've been traveling in."

The lab rat that completes the task is still a lab rat.

[lex-artis-studios]

"I asked ChatGPT about my cat's last exam and labs..." Just stop. Jesus Christ on a cracker.

[wanderingmind867]

Well, I'm doing personality tests again. Why am I doing these quizzes when I barely know these pieces of media? Well, it's simple. Boredom. I need something to do. And these give me something to do, while also offering some very basic insights into my personal self.

Speaking of, I think I saw Care Bears stuff as a kid. I had some stuffed animals from that franchise. I haven't thought about them in years, but they were cute enough. It's nice to know they aren't dead, I suppose. And my results on that quiz feel really accurate.

PS: No quiz on this one, but does anyone remember those mister men books for kids? I saw that tv show as a kid, and I fell madly in love with it. I have nearly all those stupid children's books. Those tiny little things were great.

[emryeezys]

10 things I do to become a whole human by the time I hit age 20:

1. always ask for and complete side quests. that’s how you build a skill tree

(ex. i went on a week long trip to yosemite state park for no reason other than my friend asked. I climbed a volcano in guatemala because a buddy said hey let’s hike the volcano)

2. get really good at things you have no business being good at

(ex. an asthmatic being really good with a lighter even though they don’t smoke, being good at climbing balconies, cooking really good adobo and being white)

3. Go on a cleanse of something, anything. it’s a conversation starter

Example: the color orange, hot dogs, people who say melk instead of milk

4. learn a foreign language. learn another.

example: i learn spanish so now i do really easy french duolingo

5. learn how to manipulate people. It’s a preventative measure so you know when people are trying it on you and helps you manipulate people to get what you want

6. Touch grass and not hypothetically

7. Go out and do something extremely impulsive like use a coupon at aldi or drive around at night for no purpose

explanation: don’t be the manic pixie dream girls boy that only learns he can go enjoy life for the sake of living while he drains a lovely woman of all her joy

8. refuse to use social media as your main communication center. You have a phone number for a reason

9. have something on the back burner or something to look forward to

example: you get to grocery shop this weekend, you’re going to see a friend because they make good sandwiches, your load of laundry is almost done

10. most average people are weird. get weird. be weird. find something to be bizarre about even or you’ll genuinely piss me off.

[musiclovingmoth]

the lab i'm joining is just me (phd student) and two master's students. it feels like i have to be the academic oldest sibling without having done a master's 0_0;; i'm very excited to get to know them tho

[ikareur]

Hi Fishblr people, I need help

So I wanted to ask for advice. I have two goldfish(?) that I may or may not have rescued from my uni because they were used for an experiment. Every other fish used in the experiment died, with only the two survivors. They are Brobbles and Yoimiya. I knew my neighbour had fish, I tried to ask if they wanted these two but they already had six full-grown fancy goldfish (I don't know what kind) and could not take them. So the responsibility kinda fell to me. I bought a tank. I know 20 gallons is the minimum, but I was forced to take this 30x25x30cm tank (it's a 5-gallon, I think?), and I know it's been stressing both of them. It's way too small, I know. Brobbles is really aggressive and territorial and nips and chases Yoimiya and I feel bad for Yoimiya because her(?) tail is cut short. I really was hoping to get that 20-gallon tank because I knew this would happen, but unfortunately, I couldn't. Is there any way I can lessen the stress? Make Brobbles less aggressive or anything? Yoimiya is struggling with Ich I believe and I've already bought a heater (it's shipping for a few days) and added in a teaspoon of no-additive rock salt (could've been aquarium salts but from what I saw, rock salt was fine as long as there aren't any additives), changed the water and added a few drops of methylene blue to it too. I know I probably shouldn't have taken them in being so underprepared, but I thought them being stuck in a water bottle left to die and seeping into chemicals was probably not the life they deserved. I just felt bad for them, and now I really truly do want them to feel better. Please be nice to me, I'm really a beginner. I just want these little fish to know life better than being stuck in a lab and suffocating in chemicals.

[racerback-parallels]

HE WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAAATTTTTTTTT

[midnight-rice]

I think I confused my coworker who came in at 11:30 AM on a Sunday to find me alone crying my eyes out over my ninth onion and quietly singing a spontaneous parody of Hey There Delilah about snow in Alabama and cooking fried rice in a wok