#Journal of Consumer Research

[reasonsforhope]

"A surprise discovery from the University of Birmingham shows that we may be significantly underestimating the potential of trees to regulate the variables of climate change.

That’s because they found microbes living inside trees’ bark absorb the greenhouse gas methane about as significantly as microbes living in the soil.

It’s long been thought that soil is the only effective terrestrial methane sink, as certain microorganisms use methane as a food source, but similar creatures live under a tree’s layer of bark, meaning that not only do our woody cousins withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, but also remove methane as well, about as effectively or perhaps more so than soil.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas for the few short years it exists in the atmosphere before degrading.

Professor Vincent Gauci of U. Birmingham led the study, published in the journal Nature.

In the study, the researchers investigated upland tropical, temperate, and boreal forest trees. Specifically, they took measurements spanning tropical forests in the Amazon and Panama; temperate broadleaf trees in the UK; and boreal coniferous forests in Sweden.

The methane absorption was strongest in the tropical forests, probably because microbes thrive in the warm wet conditions found there. On average the newly discovered methane absorption adds around 10% to the climate benefit that temperate and tropical trees provide.

By studying methane exchange between the atmosphere and the tree bark at multiple heights, the researchers were able to show that while at soil level the trees were likely to emit a small amount of methane, from a couple of meters up the direction of exchange switches and methane from the atmosphere is consumed.

In addition, the team used laser scanning methods to quantify the overall global forest tree bark surface area, with preliminary calculations indicating that the total global contribution of trees is between 24.6-49.9 Tg (millions of tonnes) of methane. This fills a big gap in understanding the global sources and sinks of methane.

“Tree woody surfaces add a third dimension to the way life on Earth interacts with the atmosphere, and this third dimension is teeming with life, and with surprises,” said co-author Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford."

-via Good News Network, July 31, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:

https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/

Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1

The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals

Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.

If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.

Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.

Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/

Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:

https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra

Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979

The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:

https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:

https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/

Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:

https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight

It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/

How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!

https://unsub.org/

The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.

Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

[4theitgirls]

ways to start taking care of yourself

─────────♡──────────

physically

💕 30 minutes of movement per day

💕 research your hair type and start a hair care routine

💕 build a skincare routine - start with a basic cleanser twice a day and a moisturizer

💕 have a home spa day once a week

💕 take a multivitamin daily

💕 try to get 8 hours of sleep per night

💕 implement a nutritious, balanced diet

💕 aim to drink at least 5 cups of water daily

💕 never skip meals!

💕 keep your body moisturized

💕 start a nail care routine - start by implementing cuticle oil and a nail strengthener

mentally

💕 practice gratitude daily

💕 meditation and/or prayer daily

💕 read 10 pages of a book daily

💕 start a reflection journal - what went well today? what didn’t? how can tomorrow be better?

💕 consume healthy and productive content in your free time

💕 avoid social media early in the morning and late at night

💕 practice positive self-talk

💕 keep your space clean and organized

[adviceformefromme]

You can read all the books, consume all the content but until you unplug from the outer world, and plug into to the unseen, to the divine, to the inner world of your being, you will simply be an information consuming junkie.

No progress, no growth, just 'wow, that makes so much sense' without any application. Today is for applying what you've learnt. For expanding yourself. For actually doing the mediations you've heard are transformative. For doing the mobility stretches for your bad back instead of researching them on Pinterest, for opening your journal and actually scripting on your dream life instead of watching a video about this. You already know what it is you need to do to strengthen from within, and its not found outside yourself.

[simply-ivanka]

How the Biden-Harris Economy Left Most Americans Behind

A government spending boom fueled inflation that has crushed real average incomes.

By The Editorial Board -- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris plans to roll out her economic priorities in a speech on Friday, though leaks to the press say not to expect much different than the last four years. That’s bad news because the Biden-Harris economic record has left most Americans worse off than they were four years ago. The evidence is indisputable.

President Biden claims that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but this isn’t close to true. The economy in January 2021 was fast recovering from the pandemic as vaccines rolled out and state lockdowns eased. GDP grew 34.8% in the third quarter of 2020, 4.2% in the fourth, and 5.2% in the first quarter of 2021. By the end of that first quarter, real GDP had returned to its pre-pandemic high. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.

Instead, Democrats in March 2021 used Covid relief as a pretext to pass $1.9 trillion in new spending. This was more than double Barack Obama’s 2009 spending bonanza. State and local governments were the biggest beneficiaries, receiving $350 billion in direct aid, $122 billion for K-12 schools and $30 billion for mass transit. Insolvent union pension funds received a $86 billion rescue.

The rest was mostly transfer payments to individuals, including a five-month extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, a $3,600 fully refundable child tax credit, $1,400 stimulus payments per person, sweetened Affordable Care Act subsidies, an increased earned income tax credit including for folks who didn’t work, housing subsidies and so much more.

The handouts discouraged the unemployed from returning to work and fueled consumer spending, which was already primed to surge owing to pent-up savings from the Covid lockdowns and spending under Donald Trump. By mid-2021, Americans had $2.3 trillion in “excess savings” relative to pre-pandemic levels—equivalent to roughly 12.5% of disposable income.

So much money chasing too few goods fueled inflation, which was supercharged by the Federal Reserve’s accommodative policy. Historically low mortgage rates drove up housing prices. The White House blamed “corporate greed” for inflation that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, even as the spending party in Washington continued.

In November 2021, Congress passed a $1 trillion bill full of green pork and more money for states. Then came the $280 billion Chips Act and Mr. Biden’s Green New Deal—aka the Inflation Reduction Act—which Goldman Sachs estimates will cost $1.2 trillion over a decade. Such heaps of government spending have distorted private investment.

While investment in new factories has grown, spending on research and development and new equipment has slowed. Overall private fixed investment has grown at roughly half the rate under Mr. Biden as it did under Mr. Trump. Manufacturing output remains lower than before the pandemic.

Magnifying market misallocations, the Administration conditioned subsidies on businesses advancing its priorities such as paying union-level wages and providing child care to workers. It also boosted food stamps, expanded eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies and waved away hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. The result: $5.8 trillion in deficits during Mr. Biden’s first three years—about twice as much as during Donald Trump’s—and the highest inflation in four decades.

Prices have increased by nearly 20% since January 2021, compared to 7.8% during the Trump Presidency. Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings are down 3.9% since Mr. Biden entered office, compared to an increase of 2.6% during Mr. Trump’s first three years. (Real wages increased much more in 2020, but partly owing to statistical artifacts.)

Higher interest rates are finally bringing inflation under control, which is allowing real wages to rise again. But the Federal Reserve had to raise rates higher than it otherwise would have to offset the monetary and fiscal gusher. The higher rates have pushed up mortgage costs for new home buyers.

Three years of inflation and higher interest rates are stretching American pocketbooks, especially for lower income workers. Seriously delinquent auto loans and credit cards are higher than any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2008-09 recession.

Ms. Harris boasts that the economy has added nearly 16 million jobs during the Biden Presidency—compared to about 6.4 million during Mr. Trump’s first three years. But most of these “new” jobs are backfilling losses from the pandemic lockdowns. The U.S. has fewer jobs than it was on track to add before the pandemic.

What’s more, all the Biden-Harris spending has yielded little economic bang for the taxpayer buck. Washington has borrowed more than $400,000 for every additional job added under Mr. Biden compared to Mr. Trump’s first three years. Most new jobs are concentrated in government, healthcare and social assistance—60% of new jobs in the last year.

Administrative agencies are also creating uncertainty by blitzing businesses with costly regulations—for instance, expanding overtime pay, restricting independent contractors, setting stricter emissions limits on power plants and factories, micro-managing broadband buildout and requiring CO2 emissions calculations in environmental reviews.

The economy is still expanding, but business investment has slowed. And although the affluent are doing relatively well because of buoyant asset prices, surveys show that most Americans feel financially insecure. Thus another political paradox of the Biden-Harris years: Socioeconomic disparities have increased.

Ms. Harris is promising the same economic policies with a shinier countenance. Don’t expect better results.

[drdemonprince]

Can you offer any (academic) writing advice for Autistics and ADHDers? You clearly write a lot and write very well and very clearly, so some insight into your process would be great. Personally, I tend to struggle with over explaining or over citing (cause I am always getting misunderstood) and that I get very fixated on not misrepresenting what my sources are saying to avoid feeling like I'm lying. All this is time consuming and makes it hard to say what I really want to say. Thanks!

Hi there! I've written an essay about a lot of this, here is the free link to read it on Medium:

Much of my writing process is inspired by the book How to Write a Lot by Paul Silvia, and it is specifically tailored to academics. The advice applies to people who write popular nonfiction or fiction just as easily, however. And he does have advice relevant to the self-editing and self-doubt you describe feeling.

The full piece gets into this more, but here are some of the stand-out tips:

Schedule a regular time to write every week and show up no matter whether you are feeling it or not.

Throw out all your magical thinking about what you "need" to be able to write. You don't need the perfect workspace, divine inspiration, the right pen, the right playlist. You just need to show up to write regularly, and do it

Editing, outlining, working with research notes, and drafting all count as "writing." Don't expect your initial drafts to be perfect or to equate writing only with getting new words on the page.

Try writing in public spaces to help get yourself in the mindset of explaining a concept to someone with a different frame of reference and type of expertise than you. Writing in a cafe or a public library can force you think and write in a more accessible way. (alternatively, you can pretend you are explaining the concept to a specific person in your life who you respect but who doesnt have all the same reference points as you -- sometimes this is called the "Grandma Test". Explain something like you are talking to your grandma.)

In addition to all this, I would add that you should read a lot of writing, both good and bad, especially work that isn't dry and academic. If all you read is journal articles, you'll write a journal article -- and most of those are hell to read, even for academics. read fiction. read bad wattsapp shipping. read substacks. read newspapers. read indulgent personal nonfiction in the cut or whatever. read reddit posts. notice what works and what doesn't. develop an ear.

and then write a lot! it took me 15 years to get good enough for anything i wrote to get noticed. you can expect to take many years to get comfortable developing your own voice, too. i dont know how far along you are, but even when you've made tremendous progress you'll only notice your flaws and feel the most turgid brain foggy moments. that doesn't mean you're failing.

also, to some extent you can embrace your citation-dense, precise manner of self-expression. we are living in a moment of maximalism and indulgent, long creative works. it's the decade of the 5 hour youtube essay and the 2 hour album. my 5,000 word essays do better than my 2,000 word ones. you should strip down unnecessary tangents and trust yourself and your reader a little more probably, but ive found that the more blatantly autistic and indulgent my writing gets the more the right people like it. a writer's flaws and their distinctive voice are kinda hard to separate. you're not for everyone!

good luck!

[nightbunnysong]

Strategies for enhancing collagen synthesis

A biochemical perspective

Collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body, is essential for maintaining the structural integrity of skin, bones, cartilage, and connective tissues. Its production naturally declines with age, leading to wrinkles, joint pain, and other signs of aging. This article explores specific, scientifically-backed methods to boost collagen production, with a particular focus on the biochemical processes involved.

1. Bone broth

A DIRECT SOURCE OF COLLAGEN PRECURSORS

Bone broth is a direct dietary source of collagen. This nutrient-dense liquid, derived from simmering animal bones and connective tissues, is rich in collagen, gelatin, amino acids (such as glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline), and minerals. When ingested, collagen from bone broth is broken down into its constituent amino acids, which serve as building blocks for collagen synthesis in the body.

Biochemical mechanism

The collagen in bone broth is primarily composed of type I, II, and III collagen. Upon ingestion, it undergoes enzymatic hydrolysis in the stomach and intestines, producing peptides that are absorbed into the bloodstream. These peptides, especially glycine and proline, are crucial for collagen synthesis. Glycine provides the basic structural unit, while proline and hydroxyproline confer stability to the collagen triple helix by facilitating hydrogen bonding.

Scientific support

Research suggests that consuming bone broth can increase the levels of collagen-derived peptides in the bloodstream, which may be utilized by fibroblasts in the skin and other tissues to enhance collagen synthesis. A study published in Nutrients found that participants who consumed collagen peptides from bone broth showed improvements in skin elasticity and hydration, indicative of enhanced collagen production.

2. Vitamin C

THE COFACTOR FOR COLLAGEN SYNTHESIS

Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) plays a critical role in collagen synthesis as a cofactor for the enzymes prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase. These enzymes are responsible for stabilizing the collagen molecule by hydroxylating proline and lysine residues, which are essential for the formation of stable collagen fibrils.

Biochemical mechanism

Vitamin C donates electrons to the iron-containing active sites of prolyl and lysyl hydroxylase enzymes, converting Fe3+ back to Fe2+ and thereby maintaining enzyme activity. This hydroxylation process enhances the thermal stability of the collagen triple helix and is essential for the secretion of mature collagen from fibroblasts.

Scientific support

Studies have demonstrated that vitamin C supplementation can significantly increase collagen production. For example, a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that daily supplementation with vitamin C led to higher levels of procollagen mRNA in the skin, indicative of upregulated collagen synthesis.

3. Jumping rope

STIMULATING COLLAGEN VIA MECHANICAL STRESS

Exercise, particularly high-impact activities like jumping rope, has been shown to stimulate collagen synthesis in connective tissues. The mechanical loading experienced during jumping rope promotes the production of type I collagen in tendons and type II collagen in cartilage.

Biochemical mechanism

The mechanical stress from jumping rope induces microtrauma in collagen fibers, which stimulates fibroblasts and chondrocytes to upregulate collagen synthesis. This process is mediated by the mechanotransduction pathway, where mechanical forces are converted into biochemical signals, leading to the activation of signaling molecules such as integrins and focal adhesion kinase (FAK). These signals enhance the transcription of collagen genes (COL1A1, COL2A1) and increase the production of growth factors like TGF-β (transforming growth factor-beta), which further stimulates collagen synthesis.

Scientific support

Research in sports medicine indicates that regular mechanical loading, such as through jumping rope, leads to adaptive remodeling of collagenous tissues. A study published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that athletes who engaged in high-impact exercise had significantly higher collagen content in their tendons compared to those who did not.

4. Nettle (Urtica dioica)

AN HERB RICH IN ESSENTIAL COLLAGEN-BUILDING MINERALS

Nettle is an herb rich in silicon, sulfur, and other minerals essential for collagen synthesis. This plant is traditionally used in infusions and teas to improve the health of skin, nails, and hair, indirectly contributing to collagen production.

Biochemical mechanism

The silicon present in nettle plays a key role in cross-linking collagen, enhancing the strength and stability of collagen fibers. Sulfur is involved in protein synthesis, including key enzymes in collagen production. Nettle is also rich in antioxidants that protect collagen from oxidative damage.

Scientific support

Studies suggest that supplementation with nettle can improve collagen quality. A study published in The Journal of Herbal Medicine found that using nettle-based supplements led to increased collagen synthesis and improved skin elasticity.

5. Green tea

A POWERFUL ANTIOXIDANT FOR COLLAGEN PROTECTION

Green tea is rich in catechins, particularly epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), which has potent antioxidant properties. These compounds not only protect existing collagen from oxidative damage but may also stimulate the production of new collagen.

Biochemical mechanism

EGCG in green tea inhibits the activity of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that degrade collagen in the skin. Additionally, EGCG has been shown to upregulate the expression of collagen genes and enhance the proliferation of fibroblasts.

Scientific support

A study published in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry demonstrated that green tea catechins can prevent collagen degradation and stimulate new collagen production in the skin, particularly in response to UV exposure. This makes green tea an excellent natural choice for promoting collagen health.

[curlyhairedsimp]

I think about this show a lot. I think about Ford a lot and his thoughts. Why he chose to do things the way he did. Now I’m not trying to place blame but it will sound like it. Ford factually without a doubt fucked up cause he thought that he was supposed to be the man to turn to for these things. He is supposed to tell you if it’s dangerous. He just didn’t account for this other being actually being able to outsmart him.

Bill in the beginning was trying to figure Ford out. I’m sure that he wasn’t quite sure where he stood but Bill doesn’t get attached for no reason. He saw what Ford could become with his selfishness and thought with how far Ford was willing to take it this would be okay too.

Ford isn’t an idiot and he knew what he was building. This part is more of a head canon than anything but in his journals the progression of the books doesn’t really show that Ford slowly feels suspicious of Bill. It’s like one page to the next and that’s why I think bill just laid it out for him. He tried to get ahead of Ford figuring out he was actually lying to him and so he told him. He could bring the weird here and Ford was mortified probably. He was given access to things most people can’t even dream of. It’s why I know it’s his hubris considering more that more than anything that the most important thing to him was preserving his research from being destroyed even when he’s trying to fix everything.

So when Stan calls him selfish in the basement and he gets mad at Stan. It’s because of all people he didn’t want to hear it from one person and it was Stan. Cause to him the most selfish person in the world is right in front of him. Not even realizing that Stan wasn’t wrong to call him that. He almost damned the world for trusting an anomaly and instead of just letting Stan destroy the book. He fights him for it cause he respects his own work too much to destroy it. When it could kill so many people and it was just the best course of action at the time. Regardless of why it was being done.

Ford never unlearned those selfish tendencies cause that’s just how consuming his work is. I think in this sense Ford is a lot like Mabel except Ford doesn’t get hate like Mabel does. Even though Mabel actually goes out of her way to acknowledge her selfishness. Also Mabel is 12 and Ford is like 60. And was like practically 30 making all the mistakes he did.

In terms of emotions/values Ford and Mabel are very similar even if they don’t enjoy the same things. Like the unicorn hair incident. That wouldn’t have bothered Stan or Dipper nearly as much as Mabel or Stanford. Cause they strive to be those things and more so it hurts when someone says otherwise.

In conclusion Ford needed fucking therapy yesterday and Stan deserves hugs.

[themimicbird]

15 Productive Hobbies to Introduce Yourself with

September 13, 2024

Sewing, Hemming, Up-cycling

Tend to houseplants, Landscaping, Or a fruit or vegetable garden

Learn another language, Expand your first language's vocabulary

Biking, Hiking, Yoga, A style of dance

Volunteer and help in local events or affairs

Knit, Crochet, Quilt, Leather work

Play an Instrument, Make sheet music, Or learn instrument respiration

Paint, Sculpt, Make jewelry, Learn art respiration

Analyze films, Novels, Poetry, Historical records, Specific historical events, Open cases, Or family history

Baking, Cooking, Sweets, or Drink Making

Write poetry, Journal, Lyrical Writing, Script Writing, Book Writing

Meditate, Do spiritual work, Religious duties

Research lost folklore, Original fairy tales, Local legends

Consuming film or novels from a different country than your own

Blog, Make videos, Or content

[librafair]

how to be smarter

● be curious

research topics you always wanted to know. Anotate what interest you when you listen to someone else ( in a youtube video, a podcast or irl). Ask more questions

● have a knowledge journal

this one is connected with the previous one. The brain is not made to store information, it is made to create more questions, so you have to keep all the knowledge you adquire in one place. It does not have to be pretty, it has to be useful.

● read more non fiction books

reading is a great habit, one of the best ones because it keeps you from social media. If your are starting your journey with reading, my advice is not to force you to read an specific genre but if you are looking for new books to read it is always recommendable to read non fiction. Start with a topic that you are curious about or one that helps you to become better at one skill

● learn a language

speaking various languages allows you to have an open mind, while helping you to have a better CV. Choose a language acording to your personality, what you enjoy doing, don't worry too much about how many people actually speaks the language. Dowload apps to start, pick a workbook to guide you with your grammar and listen to media in your target language

● consume content that is useful

be aware of what you watch, what you listen. Look for new youtube channels, tiktok and instagram accounts that give you information that makes you want to learn more. Make sure you are mindful about what you consume and choose content that is not only informative but entretaining

[astroboots]

Can we just think about somno/cock warming with Steven for a quick sec? Like imagine getting sweet doe eyed Steven semi hard to sink down onto him just to sleep. Waking up to the poor man whimpering and begging for you. Lord take my soul now.

Summary: Steven is preoccupied by a research task for Marc that keeps him away from bed with you. You decide to keep him warm until he's done in the most distracting way possible.

Word Count: 2,850

Content: somnophilia, cockwarming, overstimulation.

ASTROBOOT’S MASTERLIST | MOON KNIGHT MASTERLIST

It's dark in his flat, the only light is coming from the small desk lamp in the corner and the blue aquarium lighting from the fish tank that bathes everything in a shade of pale neon blue.

The rain is pitter-pattering against the large windows. There is a faint scraping sound of pages being turned every so often.

You're lying in bed, head propped up against your pillow, as you try to keep your eyes open and observe Steven where he's hunched over his desk that's filled with piles and piles of books that he's completely consumed by. He's drowning in the books. Face practically pressing up against the ink that you're convinced will leave smudges on his soft cheeks. His outdated librarian glasses are slipping down the arch of his nose.

"Steven," you murmur sleepily, asking him for the third (or is it the fourth time tonight?) to come join you in bed.

But you get the same reply you got last time. A gentle hum, followed by, "in just a minute, almost finished love."

You give it another minute, then two-- until a good half hour must have passed before you call out for him again.

"Steven."

The only response you get from his is a distracted hum. He doesn't look up.

"Come to bed," you try again, but it's a lost cause.

Ordinarily, you barely have to finish the second syllable of his name before Steven's head pops up like a meerkat, with his alert and undivided attention focused all on you.

In the rare times he didn't, you'd certainly get his attention by the time you finished the first repetition of his name.

Tonight though?

This is probably the fourth or fifth time for the evening you've asked for him.

You're… annoyed to say the least.

With a heavy sigh, you raise yourself into a sitting position in the bed.

"What is so important it can't wait until morning?"

It comes out just a tad sharper than you had meant it to.

That seems to finally snap Steven out of his trance.

He looks up from his book, turning in your direction as his eyes flicker over to you with a wide-eyed expression of surprise. Like someone's just stirred him from a spell.

"Oh! Sorry sorry," he closes the book in front of him and holds it up to you.

"Marc needed me to decode the location of some ancient map, and it's a bit more complicated than we thought. It's a bit like a treasure hunt, quite fun actually. We're trying to retrace the steps of Hargrave Marks, he's an archaeologist from the 60s, who had this detailed journal of his treks. But I also have to cross-reference it with several history books cause the accounts aren't exactly contemporaneous or accurate even for the time it was written. Hargrave had a tendency to opt for good storytelling instead of accuracy and--"

His excited ramble pewters out as you cross your arms across your chest. It's rather hostile, you realise when you see him bite his lip in worry at the sight and follow up with a much quieter: "Sorry, love.. am I being too loud? Am I keeping you up?"

There's an apologetic smile on his lip, and normally that would be enough to make any traces of irritation thaw and melt into dew. You're soft for Steven that way.

But this time, his cluelessness at the source of your irritation only serves to make you more irritated.

"No, that's hardly the issue. I want you to come to bed with me."

You can admit that you're acting spoiled.

Because you are spoiled. Used to being spoiled rotten by Steven's profuse adoration. The way he constantly showers you with his affection and full attention at all times. It's probably why it feels like something that is rightfully yours (him) has now been unfairly ripped from you by someone else (Marc), and you're not happy about it, childish and unreasonable as it may be.

And poor Steven, he looks genuinely torn, eyes flittering between you and the book pages. Hesitation etched over the line between his brows, his eyes lingering at the reflection of the TV screen for a few conspicuous seconds too long (Marc).

Whatever Marc is saying to Steven, has him sheepishly ducking his head back down towards the books.

"It might take a while longer," he murmurs, eyes not meeting yours. "Maybe half an hour? Or an hour? If you're sleepy you shouldn't stay awake for me. I'll make it up to you tomorrow. I promise."

You lie back down on the mattress with a huff as you turn away from him. Trying to shut out the white noise of his pen scribbling away as the pages continue to turn.

Mad as you may be. It's cosy and warm underneath the sheets. And you had a long day at work. It doesn't take you long to fall asleep. The odds were against you. You don't know how long you are out for, but you wake to the weight of the bed shifting.

Blinking your bleary eyes open, you see Steven with one knee clambering into bed, books strewn all across the mattress, and another half dozen huddled up in his arms, and a pen tucked behind each ear.

"I'm sorry, love. This was taking longer than I thought, and I hate being away from you. I didn't mean to wake you up."

God, this sweet adorable man. All at once, guilt washes over you for having been so harsh to him earlier.

Stretching out your arms, you wrap them around his back and curl one hand around the back of his neck as you pull him down to you, relishing the small "oof" sound he makes as he plops down on top of you with a soft thud against the mattress, books landing somewhere besides you both.

"You finished?" you ask.

He shakes his head, apologetically. "Not quite yet, sorry. But I thought I could maybe do the rest in bed? That way I can at least be close to you. If you don't mind? I'll try to be very quiet."

You hum, pressing your face into the warm crook of his neck. He's so soft and warm. Comforting and steady. You draw in your breath and you're not sure if you're imagining it, but he has that familiarly pleasant smell that reminds you of a bookshop. Notes of coffee and a freshly turned page. Drawing up your lips, you mouth a small path along the line of his neck, and relish the keen little sound that he makes. A quiet little whine as his hips hitch up and press up against your legs.

"Lo-love that's-- oh god that feels--wait, I still--" he's babbling, the way he always does when your lips are on him.

You nip at the soft skin with your teeth, not enough to hurt, just with enough strength that you know will have his toes tingling as he tries to curl them against the sheets for reprieve.

"Wait," he murmurs, even though he's the one who's bearing down his weight down against you, the outline of his cock pressed up against the softness of your stomach, separated only by the comforter. "I--I need," he licks his lips, trying to find his words. Eyes glazed in a way that tells you the blood in his head has travelled south, and his capacity for speech is quickly going with it.

You hum softly, one hand travelling between your torsos as he hisses sharply at the touch of your hand when it brushes up against his clothes then underneath, your knuckles dragging against the bare skin of his soft belly. "Hmm? Need what Steven?"

Reaching for his waistband, you slip your hand into his boxers. He's already half-hard, and still rising as if to meet your fingers as you wrap them around the girth of his cock, and he gasps brokenly with a half-strangled noise.

"Tell me what you need," you remind him.

His pupils are blown wide as he swallows, Adam's apple constricting against that graceful throat. He's trying to find his words again.

"I need to finish my reading. I promised Marc."

"So finish, I'm not going to stop you."

Steven's gaze darts downwards between your body, to where your hand is still wrapped around him under his sleeping pants, with a pointed look in an unspoken accusation that you are in fact: stopping him.

His cock twitches in your grip. You can feel the slick wetness of precum leaking down from the blunt tip, trickling down your knuckles even as Steven is trying very hard not to react.

You can't help the smile that spreads on your lips as you tilt your head up, until they're brushing against his sensitive ear, letting your breath fan against the shell of it as you speak.

"Don't let me distract you, keep going, keep reading. Finish your work." You're still holding him in one hand, as the other moves to the waistband clinging to his backside and drag it down.

You let your nails gently graze along his spine, round hips and thick thighs as you do, enjoying the way he shivers defenselessly under your touch.

"Uhm, love-- you're--"

It doesn't take much encouragement or strength on your part. You grab hold of his hips as you roll him onto his back, and he lets you. No resistance on his part, as you straddle his hips, palms braced on his chest to steady yourself.

"I'm what Steven?"

The tip of his tongue, pink and glistening darts out in a nervous habit against his lower lip.

"No-nothing, nothing..." he manages. Words slurred and clumsy in his mouth as his hands grip onto your thigh as if he never wants to let you go.

It's all you can do, not to laugh. Whatever promises he had made Marc, it seems to have flown out of the cuckoo's nest.

You really should let him finish his work for Marc though, it won't do to make Mr. Grouchy even grouchier. Problem is you're not quite ready to let go of Steven or to relinquish his attention that you've finally earned from him this evening.

Dragging your hand, you let it caress the soft cotton of his shirt from his chest to his stomach then further down as you grip his cock again.

"Don't worry, let's make a compromise" you say as you stroke his cock up and down the fully hardened length as it twitches and jumps in your grip.

Steven is already nodding forcefully before he's even heard what he's agreeing to. You grip his cock angling it between your thighs and you can hear the soft gasp erupting from his mouth as the tip catches against your slick entrance.

"Keep reading, and when you finish--" you tilt your hips, sliding down in a slow and steady pace. The pleasure is sweet and heady as it skitters through your spine.

Steven's fingers grip the flesh of your thighs, trying to drag you down deeper onto his cock. But you refuse to let yourself be rushed, taking your time to prolong the sweet stretch of the thickness of his cock splitting you open as you sink down on him inch by slow, gorgeous inch, until he's buried to the hilt of you.

His eyes are on you, wild and frenzied, like you're the only thing he can see, his whole world: sky, ocean, and every atom in between are composed of you.

Leaning down, you lie flush down on his firm torso, until your breast are pressed up against his chest, you tilt your head up just enough to press a much too chaste kiss on his lips.

"Keep reading" you tell him again and he whines.

"Love, I can't--"

"Finish the work" you interrupt. "You've promised Marc and I'm not going to move an inch until you finish."

His eyes widen impossibly large at your words, as he starts to realize what he's signed himself up for. Then his bottom lip pushes forward. He's actually sulking, and god, he has no right to make pouty look so gorgeous.

Without any words, his right arm reaches out along the mattress, patting it down until he finds one of the books and brings it to his chest. He lets out a slight testy murmur, in a grouchy tone that is much more characteristic of Marc than it ever would be for Steven.

Once the book is settled in his hand and he starts to read, you nestle your face into his chest. It's the best solution to prevent yourself from bursting out into laughter when you hear Steven mumble discontentedly about how: he's never going to do Marc any more favours again.

He still smells of books and coffee, of warmth and happiness that makes you feel weightless against him. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest as he reads, hypnotic, like being rocked to sleep, and before you know it you drift to sleep.

You wake to pitch blackness. A sweet syrupy pleasure that flutters somewhere deep in you, but you can't tell where it comes from, and you can't grasp it in your hold. It skitters to your stomach and down to your thighs, warm and soft that makes you clench down to chase the sensation.

A keen gasp fills the room. Too low to be your own voice.

You blink your eyes against the darkness, mind still fussy and drunk with sleep, as you shift your body and are rewarded with that sweet-honeyed pleasure swirling through your stomach, except brighter this time, sharper, and you can't help but clench down again, hoping you can catch it this time and make it stay.

The sound comes again, a sweet gorgeous gasp, except this time, it breaks off in the middle with a quiet whimper.

"Love, please..." the voice pleads with you.

It's such a pretty voice, soft-spoken and gentle, but it sounds almost pained.

Steven...

You dart up, elbow anchored against his firm and solid chest as you look down on him, the small patch of drool on his white shirt, shit...

Trying to raise yourself further, the warm pleasure drags against your insides, and you can't help the moan slipping past your lips. Thick and heavy, his cock is still inside of you jerking from the movement in protest.

You fell asleep on him.

"I finished all my work now." He says it like an announcement.

You look down until your eyes meet. They're sharp. Mouth in a firm line of concentration. Then his hands grip down on the outside of your thighs, hard enough that you think he might leave permanent dents.

Patient, sweet, polite Steven is at the end of his ropes it seems. He pushes you down flush against him until you're pressed down as far as you can take him. It's white and electric, no longer the slow and lazied pleasure you've dreamt of in your half-awake state.

"Been having a nice restful nap, you have," he says, and you don't miss the sarcastic tone in his voice even as he groans, low in his throat, while he continues to reprimand you.

"Did you know that you've been shifting and squeezing down on my cock the whole time? No, I don't imagine you did, love."

The firm weight underneath you shifts, and you barely have a second to breathe and regain your composure before Steven raises his hips, thrusting up and into you as far as he goes.

"Felt like I was going mad."

He lifts you up, hands beneath the underside of your thighs, as he drags his cock alongside you, slowly. Maddening.

It feels like payback. The sweetest lesson you've ever earned.

"Said you weren't going to move until I've finished," Steven reminds you, as he holds you still. "But I've been done for quite a while, and you've been moving quite a lot before then actually. Writhing, hot and wet around me. I can actually feel it dripping out of you."

He pulls out of you until only the fat tip is resting inside you, his hips flush back down against the mattress. One hand draws down between your legs, his thumb sliding wetly against your folds, infuriatingly slow, until he's reached your clit but doesn't press down. He holds it there, without any pressure as if he's waiting for something.

"You ready love?" he asks, holding you poised against him, his hips canting up in preparation

Steven searches for your eyes, and the look in his eyes, focused and honed, has your heart beat fast and excitedly with no logical rhythm against your ribs.

"Yes, Steven."

It's all he needs, he thrusts up as his hands pull you down on him in a devastating stroke that incinerates the air in your lungs.

You're in for a long night, and whatever shortlived sleep you managed to catch earlier won't be enough for what Steven has in mind for you two. Not when you've gotten him riled up like this.

But that's alright.

You look down at Steven, eyes glassy with a feverish sheen. All of his attention pinned on you.

It's not so bad is it? To get to have all of Steven's devoted attention for yourself like this.

Dedication: To @thirstworldproblemss who was indispensable as always, for the brainstorming, the coming up with the hottest Steven dialogue (jesus fucking christ her lines are fucking fire) and for the beta-ing and putting up with my atrocious run-on sentence, tenuous grasp of grammar and wilful typos. I love you.

Also to the secret nonny. You don't know what your ask did to me (and TWP) we went into a horny frenzy and I couldn't sleep haunted by the horny images that were flashing behind my eyes because of your ask. I adore you! thank you for sending this in.

a/n: to be notified of new writing updates follow @astroboots-writes and turn on notifs 🤡💖🤡

[reasonsforhope]

"A global shift to a mostly plant-based “flexitarian” diet could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help restrict global heating to 1.5C, a new study shows.

Previous research has warned how emissions from food alone at current rates will propel the world past this key international target.

But the new research, published in the Science Advances journal, shows how that could be prevented by widespread adoption of a flexitarian diet based around reducing meat consumption and adding more plant-based food.

“A shift toward healthy diets would not only benefit the people, the land and food systems,” said Florian Humpenöder, a study author and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “but also would have an impact on the total economy in terms of how fast emissions need to be reduced.” ...

The researchers found that adopting a flexitarian diet could lower methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture and lower the impacts of food production on water, nitrogen and biodiversity. This in turn could reduce the economic costs related to human health and ecosystem degradation and cut GHG emissions pricing, or what it costs to mitigate carbon, by 43% in 2050.

The dietary shift models also show limiting peak warming to about 1.5C can be achieved by 2045 with less carbon dioxide removal, compared with if we maintain our current diets.

“It’s important to stress that flexitarian is not vegetarian and not vegan,” Humpenöder says. “It’s less livestock products, especially in high-income regions, and the diet is based on what would be the best diet for human health.”

In the US, agriculture accounts for more than 10% of total GHG emissions. Most of it comes from livestock. Reducing meat consumption can free up agricultural land used for livestock production, which in turn can lower methane emissions. A potent greenhouse gas, methane is mainly expelled from cows and other animals raised for livestock. Animal production is the primary contributor to air quality-related health impacts from US food systems.

“This paper further confirms what other studies have shown, which is that if we change our diets to a more flexitarian type, we can greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jason Hill, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s department of bioproducts and biosystems engineering.

According to the study authors, one way to achieve a shift toward healthier diets is through price-based incentives, such as putting taxes on the highest-emitting animal products, including beef and lamb. Another option is informing consumers about environmental consequences of high meat consumption."

-via The Guardian, March 27, 2024

[fredwkong]

Alphaworld File 1: Oral History

The universe is multifarious, constantly diverging as new choices are made. Spinning away through time, these alternate realities become locked away from our own, so we can never know exactly what would have happened if a single choice was made differently.

Except, sometimes, two of those worlds, careening through the upper dimensions, happen to converge. As they slide past each other, they may line up just so, each leaving behind fragments as they continue their journey into their divergent futures. You’ve never heard of this, because the remnants, mostly data, are swiftly collected by various government agencies and collected into reports on the intercepted reality.

This report collects various scientific articles, personal journals, news reels, and even a documentary series from one such reality, codenamed Alphaworld. In this world, gay men have not only become the norm, but have seemingly replaced all other people. In this world, society is stratified into an apparently biological hierarchy of homosexual castes, based on men’s physical characteristics and psychologies. Upon finishing the following fragment from a peer-reviewed article that was a trace recovered from Alphaworld, please select the next fragment you would like to consume.

X

An Oral History of the Creation and Initial Spread of the Alpha Phenomenon, by Alpha Dr. Jose Martinez

Until recently, it was not known what sparked the spread of the Alpha Phenomenon which has wholly remade the world in recent years. This was until Alpha Joshua Dearfoot, who resides with his Betas in rural ex-Ontario, stated during a livestream on OnlyFans that he is the original Alpha.

Alpha Dearfoot does not interact with Betas from outside his harem unless they renounce their current Alpha. As this research team contains no unbonded Betas—Alpha Dr. Martinez says we can’t spend too much time with non-harem Betas—we investigated among those close to Alpha Dearfoot, conducting interviews and surveying in the local area to discover as much as we could.

Joshua, as he was known before the emergence of the Alpha Phenomenon, was a PhD candidate in nanotechnology, with a secondary focus in physiology. Photographs kept by his father (Beta to Alpha Sean Barehill) reveal that through his youth and young adulthood Joshua was physically unimpressive, with a physique not even reaching the base level expected of a Beta.

According to a classmate of Joshua’s from university (Beta to Alpha Liam Oliver), Joshua was studious but insecure: “I mean, I used to push him around all the time for being a fa— gay kid. Gay and a nerd? In the Old World, that was, like, the worst thing.” When asked about whether he has properly apologised, the Beta said, in a rapturous voice, “Oh, yeah, Alpha Dearfoot was my first. He disciplined me so well I could barely walk, I came like four times. Then he told me to come join Alpha Liam’s harem. I mean, he wasn’t Alpha Liam then, I was one of the first guys to go full Beta on campus.”

It appears that Alpha Dearfoot had a difficult youth, growing up unable to meet certain Old World expectations of manhood. The masculine stereotypes of Native Americans also seem to have weighed on him, as he was entirely unable to meet them. As his father told us, “Joshua was a sweet kid, but he got bullied for being too short and scrawny, not matching the image of an “Indian” in all these bigoted kids’ heads. He was obsessed with growing bigger, which is why he went into physio.” Remember, in some communities it is normal for a Beta father to continue to refer to his Alpha son by his first name.

According to Sigma Harrison White, a former lab partner of Dearfoot’s who fucked us on his lawn in exchange for this interview, Joshua was obsessed with creating some way to become more manly. “He spent some really long evenings in the lab,” said Harrison while one of us squealed in the grass beneath him. “One morning he came out with this manic grin on his face, said that he’d finally done it, and ran off. Two weeks later, he came back a full Alpha.” At this point, Harrison’s pace slowed down as he became contemplative. “It was only after he started hooking up with all the queer guys on campus that we started becoming Alphas and Sigmas and stuff, too.”

Did Alpha Dearfoot intend for the Alpha Phenomenon to be infectious? A Beta from his harem claims not. “He got home from school one morning all excited about some project he’d finished,” the Beta told us—it seems that he and Alpha Dearfoot were childhood friends. “The next day, he seemed a little different, a little more muscular, more assertive. He seemed really satisfied for about a week, then he got scared. He just kept getting bigger. The day he got taller than me and nearly broke a bar at the gym doing deadlifts, I started feeling the Beta change.

“I went to him and started telling him about my muscle gains and all the weird thoughts and sensations I was experiencing, and he got really scared,” the Beta continued, his eyes distant. “I started to comfort him, and that was when we felt the bond form. It felt so right for him to be my first, to finger me open and fill me with his still-growing dick.”

While we pressed for more details about what may have been the first Alpha/Beta bond in history, the Beta refused to disclose more information, claiming that it was private to him and his Alpha. For the reader’s imagination, see Figure A to find a picture of Alpha Dearfoot from his Instagram profile.

Alpha Dearfoot appears to have intended to create a nanomachine-based masculinity booster, and the transmissibility of the Alpha Phenomenon, as well as the behavioural and sexual changes it induces, were unintended side effects, perhaps introduced in the particles’ replication process. The effects of the Alpha Phenomenon on aging and physical fitness may also be unexpected consequences of Alpha Dearfoot's programming efforts.

According to Alpha Young Baek Hyeon, who lives in the former New York area with a mixed harem, he and Alpha Dearfoot attempted to “date,” an outmoded practice common in the Old World, during the early weeks of the Alpha Phenomenon’s spread. “Alpha DeWayne and I work well together,” Alpha Young told us by video call, “but we’re both pretty chill even since we changed. Alpha Dearfoot and I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room once I had transformed. He’s one of the most territorial Alphas I’ve ever met, he can barely stand to have another Alpha within a mile of him.” As Alpha Young spoke, we watched a well-trained Beta enter the room with a plate of apple slices and present them to his Alpha.

“He was really torn up about it, too. Even though we couldn’t stop yelling at each other in person or over the phone, he left me a ton of really sweet voice messages about how much he’d liked me before we became Alphas.” Alpha Young took a bite of apple and ruffled his Beta’s hair, causing all of us to shudder with phantom pleasure at the affection. With a contemplative expression, Alpha Young said, “No, I don’t think he meant for any of this to happen.”

While this study has yielded plenty of useful biographical information about the man apparently responsible for the Alpha Phenomenon that changed the world, we appear no closer to understanding the precise mechanism of that change. With better access to the programming of the nanomachines, perhaps it would be possible to reduce the natural aggressiveness of the Alphas, allowing Alphas like Dearfoot to return to their studies or jobs if they so wish. In the following section, we will propose potential opportunities for further research in the effort to isolate the Alpha Phenomenon.

Or vote on Strawpoll here: https://strawpoll.com/wby5A0vw8yA

This series is my way of celebrating reaching 2000 followers! I hope you enjoy this glimpse into Alphaworld and vote on what file you would like to see next. There is no strict update schedule, so you good boys better be on the lookout for a new chapter you can vote on ;)

[4theitgirls]

how to be confident

how to be confident

─────────♡──────────

get to know yourself

it’s easy to be insecure when you don’t understand who you are, why you do what you do, or why you feel the way you feel. take time to understand those things. explore your likes and dislikes, your passions, your feelings, and your thought patterns. research shadow work and journal prompts and try to see into the deeper parts of yourself and your personality. getting to know yourself will give you a more stable image of yourself and help build up your self esteem and improve the way you see yourself and those around you.

consume content that makes you feel good

unfollow everyone that makes you feel insecure or insignificant. get rid of people you constantly compare yourself to. focus on pages, blogs, and channels that help you and make you happy. i have two posts about productive and healthy youtube channels you can follow, but for building confidence, i recommend leo skepi, simonesimmo, tam kaur, and thewizardliz.

take care of your body

skincare, hair care, exercise, and eating a balanced diet are not just about the aesthetics or how they make you look. taking care of yourself helps you appreciate your body and makes you feel good about yourself mentally. exercise also releases endorphins, a happy hormone, and gives you a sense of accomplishment knowing you’ve done something good for your body. that being said, do not force yourself to do workouts you hate. there are so many different types of exercise out there. experiment with different ones until you find one that you enjoy and works best for you.

practice positive self-talk

it sounds cheesy, but it’s so important. we talk to ourselves so much more than we realize, and since we rarely say these things out loud, our thoughts are usually uncensored negative things. “that was so stupid, i’m so stupid” or “i can’t do this” or “why can’t i look like her?”

would you talk to someone else like that? would you talk to a child like that? would you want someone to say that about themselves? if the answer is no, you shouldn’t say it to yourself either. we all have things we don’t like or things we would change about ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we should beat ourselves up over them. be mindful of the way you talk to yourself. turn “i don’t understand this, i’m so stupid” into “i may not understand this now, but i know that if i keep trying, i will get it.” turn “i’m so ugly, why don’t i look like her?” into “she may be beautiful, but so am i. her beauty does not take away mine.”

understand that not everyone will like or understand you, and that’s okay

no matter what you do or who you are, there will always be people who don’t understand what you’re doing or don’t like you for one reason or another, and that is perfectly fine. unfortunately, it’s just how life and people work. but that doesn’t mean we should change ourselves to try to please everyone. you can never please everyone. you are the only person that has to live your life and deal with the decisions you make. do what makes you happy and what is best for you and leave everyone else alone. it may take time, but it is always worth it.

[museofthepyre]

CAMP HERE & THERE SWAP! AU!!!

EVERYONE GATHER ROUND I NEED TO INFODUMP. This is going to be a long post, bear with me.

In this AU (constructed alongside the lovely @cecilsrandomeverything) is a protag/ antag swap AU, wherein Sydney and Elijah swap narrative roles, and so do Jedidiah and Adam. The rest of the cast are just swapped with their obvious counterparts (Joshua/ Yvonne, Rowan/ Juniper, Fennell/ Soren, etc)… though, there is also the less obvious swapping of Warren/ Matthew, and Lucille/ the Gravediggeress.

Titles:

Elijah, "The Angel"

Sydney, "The Miracle"/ "the Black Cat Man"

Adam, "The Vivisector"

Jedidiah, "The Horologist"

Ms. Graves, "The Sentinel"

And Lucille, "The Puppeteeress"

General Plot:

Everything pre-limn is almost exactly the same. Jedidiah and Sydney live their messy little lives, until Sydney starts wilting— Jedidiah delves into dangerous unknowable ‘magic’ in attempts to save him, but it’s not working. It’s only making him worse, and his time is running out. In a desperate Hail Mary effort, Jedidiah kills and resurrects Sydney… successfully*.

Sydney wakes up in hospital, having emerged from a long coma. The first thing he sees is a figure standing over him, haloed by the bright white lights of a hospital ceiling. Sydney saw an angel… tending to him with caring and dutiful hands, guiding him back to the realm of the living. He could feel a bruise-like ache throughout his body from where death itself had gripped him. He… had died. He knew he died, and that’s all he was certain of in that moment. He’d kissed heavens gates, and still retracted his lips from the cold metal… It left the taste of copper in his mouth. But now, somehow… he was alive again. He was alive enough to look up, all milky-eyed and dreary, at the angel who awoke him. He who preformed a miracle… divinity caged within a human vessel. Sydney felt he owed this angel a debt… he knew it would only be a matter of time before his body began to fail again. A good long life was just never in the cards for him. As he stayed in hospital, barely conscious or coherent, he came to believe that his saviour would only suffer the same fate. The body is a prison, its betrayal is inevitable and indiscriminate… even the most beautiful and holy creatures are not exempt. The body is a curse, and so, Sydney knew what he had to do with his new fleeting life.

Jedidiah must have messed up the ritual. Sydney came back, yes, but he came back wrong. So, so terribly wrong… he still… looked… dead. He was clueless to his situation, all spacey and confused… his memories were scrambled and blurry, and Jedidiah saw no spark of recognition when their eyes met. Seemingly, like a newborn fawn, Sydney had imprinted onto the first thing he saw (Elijah, who in this AU is a normal nurse). Jedidiah couldn’t accept this ending. He left Sydney there in the hospital, entrusting his care to the nurses while he isolated himself to research. He threw himself deeper and deeper down the rabbithole of forbidden magic, until he was in so deep that he could no longer see the sky above. He became lost within the unknowable… he let it consume him. He’d let it transform him. Whatever the Conductor was: some spector of the astral plane, visiting dreams to share unknowable knowledge with those who sometimes recognize his form… that’s what Jedidiah became. Jedidiah A A Martin is missing, with no body to be found. His childhood room (which he had been staying in during all this) was found in-tact, showing no sign that Jedidiah had packed up to leave. On his desk were journals filled with unintelligible writing, which slowly devolved into frantic scribbles with each passing page. Soon after… Sydney went missing too! What odd timing… he seems to have up and vanished from his hospital bed at the same time that two nurses left the job.

Elijah and Adam, who’d been college roommates a few years prior— with Elijah studying nursing, and Adam studying psychiatry. They were friends in all respects… which Elijah found himself feeling lucky for. He’d always struggled to keep friends, so when someone as sociable and charming as Adam took an interest in him… he felt indebted to the kindness. Elijah (as he does in normal CHNT) struggles with mental health… he really clung to Adam, and Adam was just as eager to be there! There to listen to him vent, help him stay grounded to reality, offer up advice, and to ask questions… lots of questions. So so many questions. After a few years, Elijah found himself feeling like Adam’s personal case study rather than a friend. As if the most interesting thing he could offer was a mind so profoundly broken that it was a spectacle to observe- something to be poked and prodded at, to see how it’ll react… but that’s impossible, Adam was his friend! He’d confided so much in this person, how could he not be? Adam told him not to seek therapy elsewhere, since Adam would help him for free! And, yknow, you can trust him, he has a psych degree. When the stress of working in hospital got to be too much for Elijah, and he began to think about staying with family for a bit… Adam was quick to provide an alternative. Adam was a social guy with many strange and unusual connections, and he just so happened to have the perfect suggestion! A much less stressful nursing position, at a summer camp run by a “Ms. Graves”, whom he raved about with high regards. They could go together! Take a little break, get away from it all… and so they did.

At Time of Series:

Adam and Elijah are co-nurses at Camp Here & There, or well… Adam is more of an assistant nurse at this point. He seems utterly distracted by Elijah’s condition, poking and prodding his way into the man’s head with words like cold, sterile medical tools. Pinning him down to an inescapable sort of “friendship”, even though their relationship feels like nothing more than an artificially preserved husk. Adam is still always nice, but Elijah can never tell if it’s genuine or not. He misses when their conversations felt warm, he misses when he felt like a friend rather than a case study… or a paranoid asshole for doubting Adam’s sincerity. He puts on a cheerful face for the kids, and while some find him to be a bit *too* cheerful, they can tell he really does care. He’s well-spoken and delivers the morning announcements with a theatrical flare! Sometimes he’s a little too eager to share his feelings, but he does mean well. The kids really like him overall, they think he’s nice!

Adam is like an illusive celebrity around the camp, he’ll show up and be very energetic and engaged for a short period of time, winning the favour of all the kids with his fun fun chaos-enabling… and then he’ll disappear! Back to his office, leaving Elijah to clean up the mess he made. Nobody knows what he’s up to in that office. Last time Elijah got a peek, he saw the walls COVERED in framed pinned insects and taxidermy… and stacks of notebooks, the ones he’s always scribbling into after speaking with Elijah. Adam seems to know a lot more than he’s letting on.

Jedidiah is missing. It’s actually his college that made report of this, after he ghosted all his classes and no professors could reach him. Nobody could track down his mother either, and his father… his father had already passed. Elijah sees someone in his dreams sometimes, a dishevelled man wearing a lab coat and too many watches. His presence is accompanied by cacophonous rhythmic ticking, like multiple clocks all overlapping at different paces. He tells Elijah things he can’t know… he speaks like a frantic and incoherent madman, it’s all so bizarre. And yet, Elijah can’t help but think he looks oddly familiar.

Then there’s Sydney, who… just up and vanished from his hospital bed. Who knows where that guy is. Although there has been a mysterious figure spotted lurking around the campgrounds… draped in layers of tattered black fabric, covered in moss and mushrooms, and wearing a strange black cat mask. They’ve been caught leaving random things outside of Elijah’s bedroom in the nurses cabin… little shiny rocks, bones, pinecones… one time an entire fairy ring grew around the cabin overnight. Nobody knows what he wants, but it’s been reported that those who see him are overcome with an overwhelming existential awe… dread and wonder in equal amounts, makes you want to sob your eyes out for the universality of pain, and dance for the love of the sunlight. The only exception to this is Elijah, who upon seeing the ‘Black Cat Man’, feels a strange sense of obligation— of care and concern, for a reason he can’t pinpoint. His guard lowers and all sense of danger melts away… he feels compelled to care for this stranger, like he would a patient. A patient who can do him no harm, still and quiet in their hospital bed. Of course, the questions and red flags all come back once the Black Cat Man is out of sight... but which reality is he to trust?

Running the camp is Ms. Graves, a mysterious lady who is rarely seen or heard from. She only seems to communicate through written letters or using Adam as a proxy. She’s just a busy lady… she really is lovely to her staff!

There are also rumours floating around regarding the crawling fields beyond camp. A desolate span of colourless grasslands infested by bugs of all sorts, wherein the fabled “puppeteeress” dwells. Nobody has ever seen her, but they have seen those handsome wooden mannequins she enchants to do her bidding! They show up on the outskirts of camp quite often… their eyes may look inanimate, but you can still feel them watching!

Ok ramble over for now. I may be back with character doodles later. Also if you’ve read a suspiciously similar fic on AO3 with this exact setup, but it’s the au’s version of “the ceremony”… yes that is me :3 hello :3

[olderthannetfic]

As a writer, how do you balance butt-in-seat writing time commitment with reading enough of other people's work not to stagnate as a writer? I'm fortunate enough to (humblebrag) not have any trouble simply sitting down and making myself write, but among my other time commitments, I'm a bit worried I'm not doing the latter - especially because snatching bits of writing here and there is easier for me than finding the time to sit down with a novel, i.e. the form I'm trying to write in.

--

Eh... I think this becomes more of a problem if you're writing novels full time for 20 years or something. If you're only just starting (as I frankly am still), you have your entire reading history behind you. I guess if you're getting started at 15, maybe that's more of an issue, but most people are well into adulthood when they make their first serious attempt at a novel.

Plenty of novel writers read more well-written nonfiction while they're actually writing than they do other people's novels.

If you're actively studying how some aspect of novel-writing works, absolutely, go read novels for research. But if you just want to keep the sound of good language in your ear or think about plot, all the other stuff you consume and all the stuff you've consumed in the past will also inform you.

And, tbh, reading only novels in some narrow niche will also potentially have issues. Read some good journalism. Read popular nonfiction. Read dry academic articles. Watch all kinds of things. Take a walk and observe the world.

If you're finding that you are stagnating, that's one thing, but I wouldn't just assume it's going to happen.