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sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really. 

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As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

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i am legit crying here

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they posted a full version lol it’s mr Stacy’s dad for me

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So, something I learnt the other day. So, you know how dinosaurs supposedly can't see you if you stand still? Well that myth is based on real-life lizards/etc and how eyes in general work. So, once my dad starts infodumping, here comes some other cool information. We, humans, can in fact, also not see something unless it's moving. We fixed this by having our eyes constantly shake. And then our brain compensates for us, so we don't have to have shaky vision.

What if aliens don't have this? Like. What if they find out when one of us was looking at something in the distance, and they walk around this thing that's in front of them, and the alien is confused so they bob their head and oh, there's a thing there, but how did the human know that, and then we explain and they're like, horrified.

Humans are apex predators. They can hunt in packs. They can hunt in pairs. They can hunt on their own. They're persistance predators, which is unheard of. They get stronger when they're mad or scared. They have this thing called 'body language' which acts like a type of hivemind, even if they'll claim it isn't. And. They can see you. When you're not moving. They can still see you. If you ever find yourself in a fight against a human, for whatever reason? Run. Run as fast as you can. And hope, pray if you have a religion, that they won't follow.

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The Original Broadway Cast celebrate 10 years of Hamilton at the 2025 Tony Awards (full performance)

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this is the full video of patti lupone breaking the sound barrier at the 1988 tony awards btw

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English has a bunch of words where O is pronounced /ʌ/, like come, love, some, and honey. I never really thought about it because I'm resigned to legacy vowels being appallingly arbitrary, but it turns out that all these words did originally use U, and the O was added not for reasons of pronunciation but because in the middle ages everyone was writing in calligraphy that made it impossible to tell m, n, u, and i apart, as in the unum shown here, which you must imagine reading by candlelight:

fuck you! this is a problem you created for yourselves! god damn it.

Anyway. This was a factor in the emergence of the v and j forms for u and i, and it's the reason i has a dot, but in English specifically, it also led to a convention of using O for U in some places, which then fixed the spelling for those words, and that's why O only has this pronunciation before m, n, or v.

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OP: Old Chinese TV dramas were so wild lol

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i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

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honestly i never thought the phrase “i want that twink obliterated” was like a sexual thing. like when i read the phrase i imagine “a meteor like the one that killed the dinosaurs is summoned from the heavens and hits the twink in question” type situation

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Not taking any of Crayola’s shit today.

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Lise, may we please have the "most horrifying nonfiction books i’ve read (and liked)" list?

so "liked" is probably the wrong word for some of these; what I mean is mostly "horrifying nonfiction I've read that in some way felt like it tweaked something vital in my brain" (though a couple of these are just. straight up horrifying)

let's see I had to go back into my reading records for this, and the list I came up with was:

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Ever wanted to feel worse about the insidious way that "smart" technology has come to be a seemingly inevitable part of life? Have I got the book for you!

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It's my privilege certainly to have not already known a lot of this when I first read this book, and I feel like it's almost a cliche by now, but I remember how it felt to read the first time and yeah, it was very oh god as an experience.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Though honestly I could've put Black Earth on here too/instead.

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. Ever wanted to feel worse about the ways that social media is changing our behavior and social landscape? Have I got the book for you! (aka the one that had a friend telling me "congrats, you've figured out how to doomscroll with a book!")

The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett. I read this I believe actually pre-Covid and honestly the horrifying part was not even about the diseases under discussion themselves but the inequities in design that, even if they weren't just an appalling injustice in themselves, set the world up for failure in the face of a pandemic. Which. We saw how that went.

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Less of a "the modern world is built on fundamental failures of justice and compassion" and more "hey here's another piece of history that's horrible that you weren't previously aware of, Lise, have fun." I've read some critiques of this one since, but none that contest the basic facts of the case.

Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. I don't read a lot of books about the Holocaust but I've read a few and this is one of the standouts very specifically for the way that it gets into the psychology of how you convince a bunch of people to personally commit mass murder - and it's not via bureaucratic distance, in this case.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer. I've also read some critiques of this one since I read it, but reading it for the first time and going "wow this is fucked" was sure an experience for me to have. I remember the particular flavor of despair I came out of it with. Big ouch.

Spillover by David Quammen. This is probably the one on this list that was the most just "straight up horrifying" - it's about zoonotic diseases and it was gnarly and scary to read at the time. Part of me wants to reread it. The rest of me really doesn't want to do that.

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Another one I remember reading and coming out of with a deep sense of dread and despair. But it was, like, good. Worth reading, if you want to suffer and/or know more about the mass extinction event we're in the middle of.

this is not, to be clear, including books that just got me fired up about something (I waffled on including How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr but decided that was more of a 'this just made me angry' book than 'horrifying' in quite the same way of the other books here) or books that were upsetting in retrospect (Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg). this is more books that made me go "shit that's fucked up" in a sort of appalled, terrified kind of way. and I'm almost certainly forgetting a bunch.

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look at her

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cell bio professor closed out today's lecture on free-radical oxidation in mitochondria and programmed cell death by saying "you've probably all seen those commercials for fruit juice that says it's got antioxidants, which are said to prevent this sort of thing from happening, or at least slow it down. well, they don't work. this is an inevitable fact of life— this process that lets us live is also the thing that kills us, and it's why all of us will die someday. there's no escaping that. it's been with us since the dawn of eukaryotic cells; our pact with mitochondria is to the death. anyway, enjoy the rest of your friday, and remember, exam four is next week!"