#You want a copy of my DNA breakdown next?

[positively--speculative]

Did you come from the womb of a black woman?

Lol, only a nasty TERF would start quizzing Black women like this. You all are so gross. Next anon is getting blocked.

[cellarspider]

13/?? Science interlude!

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We return to Prometheus, where I am taking a break to ramble about my job. A thing that I love. It will be a nice change. Also: weird blood!

I have been informed that some methods of accessing tumblr do not play well with long alt text rambles. To keep the flow between the main text and alt text separate, I’ll be copying the longest ones below the main text and citations. Captions that I think are going to be long enough to need this treatment will be marked with “Overflow Ramble [number]”, so they’ll be slightly easier to find. It’s not a perfect system, but Tumblr is not a perfect website.

And I am going to need the overflow space this time, because we’re getting into genetics!

After electrocuting a decapitated alien head until it exploded into a shower of green gore, the creatures that claim to be scientists stuck a bit of the goop in some sort of very science-y DNA machine, leading to this:

“Let's have a look at its DNA. Isolate the strand. Okay. Compare it to the gene sample?”

“[Overlay… Processing… Processing… DNA MATCH.]”

“Oh, my God. It's us.”

I want this preserved for posterity, because this made me absolutely hoot. They avoided fake science technobabble by going so far in the other direction that it becomes equally meaningless.

What the scene is trying to say is “this alien shares the vast majority of its genetic material with humans, indicating that they are in fact related.” 

I will get to how one would actually determine that, but first: The head turned into green goop. Green goop. Humans are notably not prone to turning into green goop. Otherwise Nickelodeon would’ve probably been shut down within a week.

(Image credit: Rich Fury/KCA2021/Getty Images for Nickelodeon)

This annoyed me so much that years later, I dug up a possible explanation that backfills this with cool biology.

Humans, and almost all vertebrates have hemoglobin-filled blood. And on a tangent that I must follow: The only vertebrate that doesn’t is the icefish Channichthyidae family, commonly known as the white-blooded fish. 

You’ll never guess what’s special about them. 

Yes, somehow these fish manage to live without hemoglobin, their blood only having 10% of the oxygen carrying capacity of their red-blooded cousins. Hell, most of them also lack myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle. The loss of myoglobin isn’t just a one-off event either, genetic studies have shown that these icefish have seen four distinct branches of their family tree lose myoglobin independently of each other. They have a wild series of adaptations to permit this, but basically they were already in such cold-oxygen rich water and moving so slow that they didn’t need all that extra oxygen-having stuff. They lost it, kept going, got bigger hearts, weirder muscles, and just kept going. They’ve actually expanded their range in the past 30 million years or so!

I love them! Evolution is wild. You know what’s also wild? There’s green-blooded vertebrates. Yes. You read that right. Yes, they still have hemoglobin. What they also have are staggering levels of biliverdin, which human bodies only produce when breaking down hemoglobin–when a bruise takes on a greenish hue, it’s because the dismantling of the blood under your skin has created biliverdin. While it’s generally been thought of as just a breakdown product, some research suggests that it also has protective effects against a number of diseases. In moderation, though. If you have enough of it to actually turn a bit green, you’ve got jaundice, which is not a thing you want to have. 

But for a number of fish species, bush frogs, and skinks, they have way more biliverdin. 

(Austin, C. C., & Jessing, K. W. (1994). Green-blood pigmentation in lizards. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology, 109(3), 619-626.)

Humans usually don’t have much circulating biliverdin at all, so the table above compares someone with untreated jaundice to a number of other species–fish with two to fourteen times that amount, and the green-blooded skinks have twenty-two times as much! These creatures have green blood and turquoise-colored bones, and we still don’t know why. Maybe it’s protection against diseases, maybe it’s protection against parasites like malaria, maybe it’s to make them really blend in with foliage. Could be all of those at once, could be none of them, we don’t know! What we do know is that, as with the icefish, the green-blooded skinks in particular have independently evolved this feature four different times. (Rodriguez, Z. B., Perkins, S. L., & Austin, C. C. (2018). Multiple origins of green blood in New Guinea lizards. Science Advances, 4(5), eaao5017.)

(https://australian.museum/blog-archive/amri-news/amri-three-tiny-green-blooded-frogs-sing-like-birds/) 

(https://web.archive.org/web/20180619143048/https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/09/30/why-do-mysterious-lizards-have-green-blood/) 

We have no mammals identified with biliverdin-filled green blood, you would need a lot of tweaks to how our bodies function to make this work. But it’s not literally impossible, like I thought in the theater! I’m quite sure the prop department didn’t do this level of research on the subject, but think about it! 

I love biology! It’s! So! Weird!

And because I love biology, you’re not getting rid of me yet. My chosen field is genetics. This movie has presented me with a laughable sci-fi depiction of what we do. 

So! What do we actually do, when we want to find out how related we are to another species?

I’m going to get into excruciating detail, so here’s the top-line summary: We extract the DNA, mash it up into readable little chunks, use some wicked cool machines to do the actual reading, and then we compare the target DNA with our DNA, and do some cooler stuff the movie isn’t aware of. A competent analysis would not only be able to tell you how much overlap two genomes have, but also be able to estimate how long the two species have been genetically distinct. 

Is this way more than the movie needed for this plot point? Yes. But they didn’t actually have to do this at all, they could’ve just said the truth that science fiction usually ignores for budgetary reasons: “there’s no way these beings independently evolved to look so much like us, we have to be related.” 

(Although even Star Trek, despite being the classic example of “putting a rubber thing on an actor’s forehead to make them an alien”, actually does acknowledge this. Precisely once. TNG s6e20, “The Chase”. It has never been mentioned again in the main line series, possibly because Rick Berman didn’t like it.)

Now. Time for me to take you all on a grand tour of DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. You are all getting into the Willy Wonka boat with me. You have no choice.

So! You have a sample you’ve taken from a non-human mammal, one that’s never been genetically analyzed before. You are very lucky. You get to do fun stuff.

But before you get to sequencing, you have to purify any DNA in the sample. Your sample is full of all sorts of other biochemical gunk, and when cells are happy, DNA is packed away in the nucleus–you need to crack those open to get at the DNA. 

Next, you need to break the DNA into chunks, that’s #1 on the diagram above. For most of the past twenty years, this has meant chunking DNA down into pieces 25-50 letters long–just enough to probably get something unique over most of the genome, though you will have some areas that look identical at that tiny scale. In recent times, we’ve been getting better and better at what’s called “long read sequencing”, which at this point means fragments of several thousand DNA letters in length–though that’s still pretty short, compared to human chromosomes though: the average length of a human chromosome is 134 million letters long.

Depending on the sequencing technology and its needs, the sample may also need “amplification”: getting copied over and over using a protein originally harvested from hotspring-loving bacteria (#2). I always love that bit just as a concept: it’s one of many places where the modern study of genetics uses the microscopic, biological machinery of proteins for our own use! 

After everything’s prepared, Then the sequencing itself can occur. That too is wild–the most common versions these days use tiny little fluorescent proteins to tag each letter of the DNA and read the sequence of lights (#3!). Some use infinitesimally tiny electrical modulations as DNA passes by a microscopic reader. There’s loads of different ways, anything works, so long as it can be read by a computer.

All this takes place in machines that are either small enough to fit on a countertop, or big enough to look like a fridge, and come in Apple White or Cheap Plastic Appliance.

Because you have a new species, you’re building what we call a reference genome. This tries to capture as much of the entire genome sequence as possible. Here’s an interesting wrinkle, though–A lot of samples won’t be just DNA from your target species! You might be picking up microbial DNA along the way as well. That can be really interesting and worth knowing about, though! Some people spend their whole careers studying the genomes of microbes found on people’s skin, or in their bodies. You’ll be computationally sorting out which sequences are in contiguous, mammalian chromosomes, which are from mitochondrial DNA (those cute little powerhouses have their own genomes!), and which come from microbes.

At the end of it, you have sequenced an entire genome. Because you want to find out how related it is to humans, you compare it to our reference genome–The human reference genomes we use is an assembly made from multiple individuals.* We use the reference genome as a common point of comparison that we refer to when studying genetic variation.

*Though if you’re working with data form the Genome Reference Consortium as is usually standard, one anonymous African-European donor, RP11, is still the backbone of the reference, accounting for 70% of the latest assembly.

(https://mk.bcgsc.ca/telomere-to-telomere-human-genome-assembly/posters.mhtml)

So, we’d compare this new mammalian genome to our own–how much overlap would we find? A lot. How you define our similarities and differences from other species can change the answer, but you’ll expect a lot of overlap. Some areas of the genome diverge faster than others, others are highly conserved–generally the more stable it is, the more important it is for our function. 

Through many, many, many studies and corroboration with the archaeological record, we’ve worked out how to estimate how long ago two species diverged from each other. Actually, you’d rarely be comparing between just two species at this stage–get out all the other relevant reference genomes you’ve got! Compare them all! Build a phylogenetic tree–the modern version of that “tree of life” idea that Darwin popularized. Then you’ll have a more accurate sense of how your mystery species relates to everything.

(https://www.embl.org/news/science/a-new-tree-of-life-allows-a-closer-look-at-the-origin-of-species/) 

I’m going to go off on a tangent to end this post, because that’s just the start, taking the entire genome of a single individual. This is what most people think is what we always do. But no! That’s expensive overkill for most experiments. Once you’re familiar with a species, and you’ve sequenced DNA from many individuals, you can identify areas where lots of them have sequence variants. These can be completely benign, differences that make us all unique, or make an individual more susceptible to disease. This allows us to target what we want out of DNA sequencing: Are we trying to diagnose an illness? Identify a person from a tissue sample? Or are we doing something more exploratory?

Depending on what you want, you select anywhere from a handful of locations, up to tens of thousands. The closest many people have gotten to this stuff is through ancestry services like 23andMe, which uses this kind of sequencing.

But that’s not all! There’s so many different targets to choose from, depending on what you want to do! So many techniques to get DNA in different ways! And we still haven’t gotten to the part that I actually work on.

I’m a computational geneticist. I get all the gigabytes of data that comes out of these experiments and I get to dig into the details, the patterns that emerge between genetic code and the details of the organisms we study, the connections between genome sequence and other, wilder things we can collect data on, the dizzying complexities of what goes on every microsecond of every day in every cell in your body.

I love my job. 

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_YuTMDkWfI 2. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.116129 note: this source lists the image as credit to “J.M.B.”, which is not how I’m used to seeing images credited. Those are the initials of one of the authors, but I thought it meant “Journal of Molecular Biology”, so I went on a half hour wander around the internet trying to find where the hell this fish blood came from. 3. https://www.thebhs.org/publications/the-herpetological-journal/volume-13-number-4-october-2003/1729-01-hyperbiliverdinemia-in-the-shingleback-lizard-tiliqua-rugosa 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0264.2009.00952.x 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill#Characteristics 6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dune-part-two-costumes-jacqueline-west-interview 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29564.08327 8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357946568_New_approaches_and_concepts_to_study_complex_microbial_communities 9. https://karobben.github.io/2023/10/30/Bioinfor/PacBio/ 

Overflow Ramble 1

 the fuckin “DNA MATCH” machine. I already wrote a 380-word alt-text about this thing last time. I’m not doing it again. I’m going to talk about things I like instead. Such as Dune: Part Two! Yes! I mentioned it last week and then didn’t ramble about it after seeing it. Well, NOW I WILL. tl;dr it’s good, go see it. I only vaguely remember the book, but I liked the changes they made to center the fact that no, Paul becoming Lisan al-Gaib is not actually a good thing.

Man, it’s nice to see a movie where the costumers and set designers got good time to work on their craft. (cite 6) Even the generic Harkonnen soldiers looked great–reminded me a lot of my beloved Warframe, probably because the costume designer was using H.R. Giger for inspiration there. Everything felt real. Even the stuff that definitely wasn’t–the gigantic spice harvesters and ships felt like living, physically present beings. The sand worms looked great. The movie did a fantastic job visually communicating the massive size of so many things. Especially because the camera remains restrained: no weightless zipping around, the camera itself follows paths and finds locations that make sense. 

Chakobsa continues to be a fantastic conlang, now the work of both David and Jesse Peterson. It’s heard a lot more in this movie, and there are some great flourishes with it. While there isn’t as much Arabic vocabulary in it as in the original books, I remember from DJP’s work streams that he definitely was using the grammar of Arabic as one of his touchstones. Most key words remain Arabic though–jihad was removed, but it made me double-take in the theater when Stilgar referred to Paul as the Mahdi.

I’m of two minds about lowering the Arab influences on the Fremen–on the one hand, missing representation, which included some explicit ties to real world anti-imperial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. On the other, these first two movies are about how the Fremen are manipulated by a colonial power, using their adherence to a faith that was manipulated by a different colonial power. They become both hapless victims and also perpetrators of colonial violence, with only Chani seeing through it.

I think the general decisionmaking process on cultural changes was motivated by a desire to remove some of Frank Herbert’s bad ideas–particularly around the Harkonnens, thank fuck. That seems to have been the thinking around altering the Fremen a bit as well. Did it succeed? Not my place to say. On all other notes, I have no reservations recommending the movie. It’s a very earnest attempt to bring that world to life, and I think it succeeds.

Overflow Ramble 2

A figure showing the basic steps of the standard Illumina sequencing method (cite 7). It is broken into four sub-figures:

Library Preparation. The genome is snipped into small fragments, then adapters are attached (“ligated”) to stabilize the molecule and make it behave. This creates a “library” of DNA that will be read from.

DNA library bridge amplification. The adapters on DNA fragments stick to a prepared plate, which is covered in little clusters of molecules that specially attach to those adapters. Biochemical processes are then carried out in repeated cycles to duplicate (or “amplify”) those fragments in such a way that the clusters on the plate are all filled with copies of just one DNA fragment.

DNA library sequencing. The DNA is modified so that the four letters it’s made out of all glow a specific color, with each DNA letter shining in sequence. This is pure awesome and I love it.

Alignment and data analysis. Because of some details on how step 1 is done, you have lots of fragments that create an overlapping patchwork of sequences. This allows (most of) the genome to be pasted back together by looking for overlaps (“contiguous sequences”, or “contigs” for short).

Congratulations! You have just attended an abridged graduate-level introductory lecture on Illumina sequencing.

Overflow Ramble 3

A diagram of PacBio Systems’ sequencing technology, Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing, or SMRT Sequencing, because scientists love acronyms. Pretty much every step is different from how Illumina does it. I cannot find a diagram that’s both brief and also good at explaining what it’s showing, so this is the best I could find. It’s split into four parts with attendant text, which I’ll try and explain as well.

“SMRTbell template. Two hairpin adapters allow continuous circular sequencing.”

Library preparation basically involves taking a longer chunk of DNA and splitting it in half lengthwise, in such a way that the two strands of DNA will form a single-stranded loop. This is called a SMRTbell library. Why? I have no idea! 

“ZMW wells. Sites where sequencing takes place.”

Then, these are fed into SMRT Cells, which contain zero-mode waveguides (ZMWs). I was once told what this means, and I have completely forgotten, but it sounds like something from Gundam.

“Modified polymerase. As a nucleotide is incorporated by the polymerase, a camera records the emitted light.”

What I do understand is that at the bottom of each of these little holes, they stick a molecule which the DNA sticks to. This molecule, a polymerase, has precisely one job: make more DNA, an exact copy of what it’s latched onto. So you give it this loop of DNA, feed it a soup of free DNA letters, and it starts cranking out a new strand. 

“PacBio output. A camera records the changing colours from all ZMWs; each colour change corresponds to one base.”

Each one of the DNA letters given to the polymerase has a special modifier, on it which flashes a color when the polymerase slots it into the new strand it’s making. A camera picks up this flash. And, because the DNA is a circle, the polymerase doesn’t know where to stop–it just keeps going and going until something breaks or it runs out of letters to work with. This means that even if the camera misses a flash the first time, it will have more chances to see it, and confirm what it already saw.

Wait what in the fuck this figure was from somebody’s thesis (cite 8), but that wasn’t what actually got this into search results. What got it there was a github page with a vtuber avatar sitting in the corner?? What??? (cite 9)

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[uwuwriting]

Shirakumo x daughter!reader

Request: Maybe Shirakumos daughter being brought into Tartarus in order to see if she's actually his daughter *she doesn't know who her dad is so Aizawa and Mic only see the resemblance between her and their friend *. And she is in the room with her teachers while they try to reach out to him and he calls out her moms name. She has a mental breakdown maybe ???? - anonymous.

                                                        +

Request: I have this personal hc that Shirakumo’s s/o would name her daughter something sky related and what better name than Sky? Its connected with clouds and its so bright and happy. I think that it suits Oboro’s daughter perfectly. Sorry if this changes your plans you can totally ignore it!!!! - anonymous 

I’m so happy that you guys want a part 2 of my Shirakumo content, it really means a lot because I love him and poor baby has suffered. The name Sky fits perfectly with his daughter and I’ll roll with that. So the child is Sky L/N. I have one more part of this hc *for which I’ve gotten two requests* so I’ll write that as well. Love ya and thank you again for 200!!!  💖💖💖

warnings: mental breakdown, panic attack, mention of death.

-Sky L/N has been part of class 1-A since the very beginning of the year when she flew to Japan for the entrance exam.

-After passing with flying colors she was placed under Aizawa’s care, constantly reminding the man of the childhood friend he lost so mane years ago. 

-Bringing back memories with her mannerisms and personality that both him and Hizashi wished to keep locked up.

-Those memories just hurt to much, wounds that Sky unbeknownst to her was reopening. 

-They really couldn’t blame the child for that, it wasn’t her fault after all. 

-She had been asked by her classmates about her family life where she jokingly said that it was just her and her mom, that she had never met her dad and that it didn’t really bother her.

-Aizawa could see through lies and he saw the pain those words hid, but decided to let her be. 

-She was doing just fine in the hero course going as far as to taking work studies at an agency, boosting her hero training.

-Hizashi had spoken to Aizawa about the resemblances between the girl and their friend but they couldn’t know anything for sure. 

-Sure she might have physical similarities like her hair color and eyes, or how her personality was almost a carbon copy to Oboro’s and just because her quirk was could related, doesn’t mean she was his daughter. 

-That’s what they kept telling themselves. 

-Not wanting to pressure the girl for personal information and result into her freaking out when they reveal their association with her late father. 

-Those attempts to keep this knowledge hidden from her were unraveled when they captured Kurogiri. 

-Gran Torino had called them telling them to come to the high security prison and to bring their student with the cloud quirk with them. 

-This took them by surprise to say the least and they were about to question this when Gran Torino said that he would explain everything once they arrive. 

-After waking Sky up and telling her to get dressed, all three of them got in the car and drove to Tartarus.

-Aizawa kept looking at the back seat where Sky was seated, looking out the window trying shake the sleep off of her with her music blasting through her earbuds. 

-Once at Tartarus, the trio made their way inside where they came face to face with Gran Torino and detective Tsukauchi.

-Sky was taken to another room for some test which was concerning to her teacher but they were all reassured with answers after things had been cleared out. 

-When Sky was out of the room, Aizawa and Hizashi were informed about the investigators’ suspicions. 

-Kurogiri being a Nomu.

-Kurogiri being a fragment of their friend or even worse being his corpse, but they couldn’t know for sure if they didn’t test Sky’s DNA with his. 

- “We don’t know if she’s actually related to him....how can you be so sure that Sky is Oboro’s kid?” 

-It was Tsukauchi’s turn to talk and he said that they analyzed her characteristics both physical and quirk related before requesting for her presence here. 

-He said that they were 90% sure that she had some relation to him.

-Plus her age matched. 

-If Shirakumo left someone pregnant before his death, the child would be around 15 by now and by their sources they knew that at that time so many years ago, he had a girlfriend who left the country shortly after his death. 

-Aizawa thought of you at that moment. 

-He had met you a handful of times, your schedules colliding with one another and preventing you from seeing them more often. 

-But he remembered how in love Oboro was, how he talked about you with that stupid smile on his face. 

-It’s true that neither him or Hizashi could remember you enough to be able to find similar traits between you and Sky. 

-They waited for the results of the test, Sky having gone silent after her questions weren’t answered. 

-She was patient, Aizawa would give her that. If it were Oboro he would talk their ear off with questions no matter how many times they didn’t answer him. 

-When the tests came out positive, their DNA matching perfectly with one another, everyone fell silent. 

-They knew that they had to tell her what was going on but.... they couldn’t muster up the courage to do so. 

-All three of them are led into a room separated in the middle by a glass wall and on the other side sat none other than Kurogiri himself, strapped onto the chair and head hanging low. 

-They sat in the chairs and let Gran Torino explain everything, from Oboro’s death to the capture of Kurogiri and the compatibility of their DNA. 

-Sky was silent, taking everything in with a blank expression and once Gran Torino was finished she waited for the next phase, hands folded in her lap not a single sign of agitation. 

-Aizawa knew that this wasn’t normal but at the moment, standing in front of his old friend, he couldn’t push her to let whatever she was thinking out. 

-After the confrontation with Kurogiri and the glimpse they got of Shirakumo, the ride to the dorms was silent.

-No music coming from the backseat, no radio and no talking. 

-The following days were relatively normal.

-Sky would come to class and laugh with her friends, pretending that what took place some nights ago never happened.

-That is until she didn’t come to class one morning.

-Aizawa asked Mina about her whereabouts, learning that she didn’t feel so well that morning and that she stayed in her room. 

-He had planned to talk to her at some point but this ‘incident’ gave him the opportunity to pay her a visit.

-During his free period he made his way to the dorms and turned towards the girls section. 

-As he came closer and closer to her room he could see faint clouds coming form under her door and as he knocked he could hear sniffles coming from inside.

- “Sky open the door. Let me in please.”

-He waited for an answer but was met with more clouds emerging from the crack.

- “You can’t go through this alone so please open the door. I know it hurts, I know you don’t want to believe it but you can’t bury it Sky. So please open the door.”

-After a few moments he heard a faint ‘It’s open’ and he pushed the door, steeping inside finding her curled up in a corner of her room, knees to her chest and her head buried in the space in between.

-He slid down the wall next to her, pushing her head back and taking a good look at her face.

-Tears rolled down her cheeks as her eyes held nothing but pure pain behind them, her lower lip trembled as her whole body followed suit.

-He could hardly begin to imagine the pain she must be going through.

-All those years growing up without a father and suddenly it was shoved in her face. 

- “It’s not true, please just tell me it’s not true.”

-It was barely a whisper but he heard it, he heard the anguish and the desperation in her voice. 

-Tears of his own slid down his cheeks as he brought her into a hug, holding her tightly as if she too would disappear just like her father. 

- “It hurts. Please make it stop I can’t-”

-He just hugged her tighter, trying to drown both of their desperation as if the empty space Oboro had left in both of their lives could be filled. 

-The two of them sat there for about an hour silent sobs leaving their lips as they exited the room. 

-Two broken hearts.

-A heart of a friend and that of a fatherless child, both holding on to the hope that one day they’ll get to see him again. 

TAG TEAM AY:

@brattyquirks​ , @the-arcana-fan-fic​

[emybain]

Makeup

the other day I read over some supernova scenes that made me upset and want to write some younger nova with the anarchists for whatever reason. so, I wrote a little fic with honey and nova when nova’s 12 (and too nice for her own good like cmon the anarchists shouldve see her “weaknesses” before she went undercover as a renegade)

Masterpost of all my Renegades fics

    After nearly six years of living with the Anarchists, Nova had learned that Honey Harper was best left alone when she went into a crying meltdown. The first time she had heard the painful sobs coming from the older woman’s train car, Nova had been eight and concerned. Ingrid and Leroy advised against Nova going to comfort the distressed Anarchist, as it was normal for her. At least, normal since the Age of Anarchy came to an abrupt end and Ace was forced into hiding. 

    Tonight, however, Nova was recovering from a high fever that almost had Leroy taking her to the hospital out of desperation, as none of his concoctions or drug store medicine was helping. It was a last resort, as no one knew of Nova’s existence among the Anarchists, and a simple DNA testing could have her removed from her only family and placed in a foster home. Thankfully, as if by some miracle, she pulled through and was now resting and regaining her strength, something that would be easier if not for the pitiful wails coming from the other side of the subway tunnels. 

    Everyone else was asleep, so not even Ingrid could go and shut Honey up. Nova had a piercing headache and a sore throat that made talking like poking knives into her neck and chest, and was not really in the mood to hear the sound all night. That, mixed with her own body racking coughs, were enough to send Nova over the edge. 

    Sighing heavily, the movement ending in a pathetic wheeze she could feel squeezing her lungs, Nova snapped her copy of one of Ace’s books shut and set it beside her cot. She would have to return to her pre-Age of Anarchy literature later. For a moment, she debated making some tea to take with her just in case Honey ended up sending her away and she would need a legitimate reason for being there. But she decided against it, not in the mood for the cheap, bitter tea Leroy got from the nearest convenience store. 

    It was cold in the tunnels, being early November, the prime season for illness, so Nova grabbed the blanket off of her cot and wrapped it around her shoulders. After a second thought, she also grabbed Dolly Bear, who was sitting beside her bed. The bear was as old as Nova, and after almost twelve years of wear and tear, it’s age was beginning to show. Nova made an effort to take care of it, since it was one of her only remaining physical memories of her family, but she couldn’t always stitch up age. 

    Upon reaching Honey Harper’s door, the crying now obnoxiously loud, Nova raised a hand and knocked. Briefly, the sobs paused so Honey could allow Nova entrance into her train car. As always, Honey was at her mirror surrounded by wasps and bees of all kinds. Before her sat a collection of beauty products, some looking older than others as if they meant more than what could be seen by the eye. 

    Honey sniffled. “Oh! Nova, darling, I wasn’t expecting you. Usually it’s Ingrid who comes to my door this late at night.” She touched her curls softly with her hands, attempting to fix her messed up hairdo. 

    Nova almost retorted that she was only there to deliver the same message Ingrid would’ve eventually given, to shut up, but the words died before she could even open her mouth at the tear and mascara streaks running down Honey’s face. The empty, haunting, glassy eyes. 

    She lifted the corners of her lips up slightly and shrugged. “I just thought you might want some company?”

    Honey’s face relaxed at that, and while she didn’t smile, she pointed to a small ottaman beside her cot. “Pull that over here next to me.” Nova did as she was told, sitting and curling her knobby knees up underneath of her on the cushion. A bumble bee landed lazily on Nova’s finger, and she gently shooed it away. 

    “How’s that fever of yours been? Staying down, I hope.” Honey grabbed a tissue on her vanity and dabbed at her eyes, not doing the best job at removing her runny makeup. 

    Nova nodded, hugging her bear closer to her chest. “I’m not sick anymore, just coughing and a headache. But they’re not a big deal,” she tacked on quickly, not wanting Honey thinking that she was weak. “The fever wasn’t even that bad.”

    Honey raised an eyebrow. “Really? Last I checked, a fever of one hundred and four is not something many would classify as nothing. You’re lucky to be getting better without needing medical attention, Nova.”

    “I guess.” Nova’s fingers became distracted with a hole near Dolly Bear’s eye. “At least now I can resume my training with Ingrid.” 

    Honey turned from her to face her mirror again, checking her appearance carefully. “Is that all you care about, darling? There is more to life than fighting and weapons and blood.” A shudder ran through her body. “Not that I’m saying it’s not important. I’ve had my fair share of violence.” Her manicured hand drifted over to a mean looking wasp sitting upon a makeup compact, stroking it’s back gently with one finger. Nova averted her gaze; she had never been victim to one of Honey’s bees or wasps, but she had heard stories of how terrible they were, more painful and dangerous than a normal bee sting. She could only imagine how many had fallen to Honey’s pets. 

    “I will not rest until the Renegades pay for what happened to my family. Whatever the cost.” Nova wondered how convincing her words sounded, considering she was sitting cross legged on top of a cushion with a torn up stuffed bear clutched between her fingers, looking bony and sickly from her fever. Probably not very.

    Honey studied Nova, and Nova’s cheeks reddened at her intense stare. It wasn’t often Queen Bee paid so much attention to anyone other than herself. “How old are you again, child? Nine? Ten?”

    Her fingers tightened around the bear. “I’ll be thirteen in May.” 

    Honey hummed in her throat, then reached forward and grabbed a bottle from a pile of other bottles on her vanity. “I was eleven when my mother first let me put makeup on. Not much, just some eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick. Have you ever worn makeup before?” Nova shook her head. Her personal belongings consisted of what little she had from her life before the Anarchists and what she needed for her inventions and for survival. She would never waste money on something as self centered as makeup. Besides, she had never understood the point of makeup, or why people even liked it. 

    “Well, a girl’s go-to best friend is eyeliner.” Honey rolled the bottle in her palm. “Face me. I’ll put a little on you.” Nova watched as she unscrewed the top and pulled out a wand. Honey leaned toward Nova with the device poised between her clawed fingers; Nova shrank back on instinct. Honey rolled her eyes. “Sweetheart, it doesn’t hurt, I promise.” 

    Nova would rather not have Honey’s hands so close to her eyes, but if it kept the woman distracted and from crying, well. Nova held back a sigh and turned toward Honey, tilting her head up. 

    “Close your eyes.” She did as she was told, and nearly flinched when the cool, wet end of the wand pressed against her inner eyelid. Honey placed her other hand on Nova’s chin to hold her still. Makeup felt weird. Nova was surprised how heavy the eyeliner felt on her eyelids when she opened her eyes up after Honey was finished, blinking rapidly. 

    She turned her head to look in the mirror, squinting to get a better look. It wasn’t often she saw her reflection, much less saw it willingly. It was nothing fancy, just a simple wing on either lid, standing out against Nova’s plain complexion. 

    “What do you think?” Honey clasped her hands together, waiting for Nova to show any reaction. Truthfully, she wasn’t sure she liked it. Maybe one day she would, but that day was not today. However, due to Honey’s fragile mental state, she couldn’t just say that. 

    Nova plastered a smile on her face. “It’s different.”

    A sigh escaped the older woman’s honey-coated lips, appeased. “You’re turning into quite the pretty young lady, Nova. Almost as pretty as I was. It doesn’t surprise me, you’re parents were very attractive people, especially that handsome father of yours. I suppose it’s the Artino blood, huh? In just a few years, all the boys will be chasing after you. The ladies, too,” she added, laughing lightly. “Do you want to try now? I can teach you all the secrets to the perfect wing.” 

The mention of Nova’s parents flipped her stomach. Honey’s compliments on her looks turned her mouth sour, as she had never found herself attractive or anywhere near looking like her parents. Her face was plain, her long hair limp, and she didn’t have curves like Honey did; her body resembled a stick figure. She would rather not be in Honey’s car anymore, but glancing at the now dried tears and runny makeup left behind from Honey’s breakdown on her cheeks and her still red eyes, Nova forced herself to nod. 

She only somewhat paid attention to Honey as she dove into a lecture about the importance of a sharp wing.

[ziracona]

I am both kind of glad she didn't like. Spiral into thoughts or more realization of what exactly she's done to these people. But also not, because I love angst. So. Questions. Will she ever meet the other survivors? What will their interactions be like? Who do you think she gets along with most? Will she meet any other killers? (probs introduced by other survivors??) And also. A painful one but. Does the entity realize she's lying? Do you think you'll continue this story in anyway?

Haha, I feel that. Adiris certainly will hit that horror realization more completely than she did during her breakdown in the archives room. I think because of her realizations of both what she’s done and just how much danger she and they and everybody upstairs depending on her is in suddenly because of the truth, happening at the same, she had a whole lot of fear and anger in play (I was used and hurt and manipulated and lied to and made to suffer, whatever you[Not Nergal/Entity] are, you have been doing horrible stuff to innocent people for no good reason, my people have also been manipulated and lied to and forced to suffer, oh Gods what happens to us if he knows I know? What can I do to save my people and myself and these foreigners? Can I do anything?) and I think the immediacy of the parts of that she had to act on hit so hard it was her core focus, but next time she either is in a trial and has to method act through hunting down people she now knows are not murderers and infidels, or the first time she’s in a safer and more calm setting with the survivors and one of them mentions something, that will all uhhh, it’ll hit home. I’m sure. God, this poor woman.

Okay! For the questions.

“Will she ever meet the other survivors?”

Yes. Definitely, and all of them.

“What will those interactions be like?”

It’s hard to say since I haven’t written that yet, but probably exceedingly awkward. I think there’s a lot of inherent fear from them towards her, and like, how would you feel talking with someone you used to murder a lot because you thought they were the enemy? Nnnmnnnnn probably not great! TuT which is how she gon be feeling. I think she is very aware she’s coming from a place of power, and is also still super used to thinking of herself as a priestess/holy/kind of removed, so she’ll try to approach it like that. Reassuring, and thoughtful/careful to not be scary or threatening, but also in control and a little aloof. And probably after a little time with the survivors, who will all go from “Scary. D:” to “A curiosity but in a good way. Weird. Neat. Still kinda spooky.” to “I like her : )” and thinking of her the way they would any normal human (the normal version of the fkn speedrun Quentin & Dwight went through), she’ll have to adjust to being treated like a normal person, and the way 21st century humans act when they’re being casual and friendly—which honestly, not too different from being friendly throughout history, but sadly either way not something this girl is used to. I think it’ll be weird and she’ll be nervous to try shifting identities from one of the only two things she’s ever known how to be, and into normal human and friend, but that it’ll also be really welcome. Because she has literally never gotten to have a family or a normal life or a friend or any single goddamn healthy or even decent relationship with another living human being. And like, god, humans need that. On a DNA level—We die in isolation. And she hasn’t been “isolated,” but she’s been mostly isolated her whole life, and she sure as hell has never ever gotten to belong or have any kind of certainty or permanence in her relationship, even her spiritual ones. She needs that. She just needs someone to look at her, go: “There’s a human being right there, and I see who she is, and I think she’s very worthwhile. I would like to keep her in my life.” God, she needs that so, so badly. I don’t think she knows it, but she really, really, desperately does.

And she deserves it, too. None of the abandonments or alienations or failures in her life are things she did wrong. But when that kind of thing keeps happening to a person, it sure as hell makes them feel like it. So, haha, sorry, got carried away (the name of my memoir probably >.>). But I think she’d be awkward, and confused, and then nervous, because she’d be invited into something she has literally never had, doesn’t know how to do right, but also desperately wants without fully understanding, which is a terrifying combination to work with socially. But then deeply impacted and happy and moved. Also afraid—I mean, girl smiled without doing it on purpose one time and flipped out emotionally with no idea why, because every time she has felt attachment or sought belonging or thought she had it her whole life, she’s been routinely betrayed and abandoned. She’s a lot more than once burned. But after the initial fear, she would be a mixture of happy and very awkward, and then eventually hopefully just exceedingly happy and also proud of herself and confident. I listened to I’m Still Here from Treasure Planet a lot while writing Adiris. Like, a lot.

“Who do you think she gets along with most?”

Hmmm, well, Dwight and Quentin I think will always be special to her after the day in the temple. Claudette is a sweetie who will definitely try to help alleviate sickness symptoms and be maybe the single least afraid to touch her of all the survivors, and that can’t help but be meaningful. Meg & she have a lot of complimentary similar personality traits, Jeff is super kind & also a great artist so he’ll probably be group interpreter & she’ll be around him a lot, and since Tapp is 2 and 0 so far on drawing bullet barrel in friend luck Russian roulette and keeps befriending women with absentee fathers, I can only assume that means she will end up close with Tapp as well. It’s too funny for him not to be 3 & 0. The world itself demands it. Beyond that, I’d have to write interactions and see how they fall. 👈👈😎 (Also a large part of how she feels about Meg & maybe also Ace, possibly Nea too, maybe even Feng, will come down to how she feels about being flirted with shamelessly. F in the chat for my poor confused ancient Mesopotamian. 😔)

“Will she meet any other killers?”

Yes, definitely. And it will be very interesting to me to see that.

“Does the Entity’s realize she’s lying?”

No. It absolutely does not. Queen method acted hard enough to give herself trauma—the first person experience thoughts and narrative are what she lived, and luckily the Entity is an emotion sponge, not a mind reader. It may or may not have been aware Quentin & Dwight were in the room (legit just depends on if it decided to/thought to look, which I don’t know, because I didn��t need to to write the scene & it be like that sometimes, but regardless of if it did, the outcome is basically unchanged. Either it didn’t look because Adiris clearly wasn’t lying, from its POV, as she felt nothing but what she exhibited outwardly as well. Or it did look for them, saw they were under there, and thought nothing of it because it lined up with her story. She said they ran off. Wouldn’t be weird for them to go to the Archives to try to steal information, or hide, or even just get lost. And it had no reason to expose them if it did see, because if it had dragged them out, it would have had to do something Adiris would understand to them, and it’s really just easier to give itself time to figure out in what way to do its “Nergal the God” aftermath, than to do it right in the room on the spot. TLDR: No, it has no clue. She method acted the fuck out of that situation, and there was nothing weird to sense, so it didn’t. Queen out-bullshitted the Entity.

“Will you continue the story in any way?”

Harder question. Probably? Likely? Maybe? Hard to say. I would love to, but I also have four, five other stories right now? Ever since I made a dumb Fate joke about having four multipath AUs, my brain has been trying to convince me to adapt New Dawn Fades, From the Earth of No Return, and some fourth, as yet unchosen story, into full length monsters. But I might die. Like, y’all, ILM is a hunk of book. If I recall correctly from back when I saw my word count, got nervous, and looked stuff up, if I published a physical single volume copy of ILM, it would become the longest single volume book ever published in a physical single book form. Which I both kinda want to do now just for the knowledge of it, but also!!! That’s SO much, like, I don’t even know how that happened. Like I am immensely proud, but also kinda like wtf? Did I drug me?? And also mostly just because rip @ me that the longest work I have written is a fic I /can’t/ ever publish or include in a resume or reel or anything. :’-](Also, @ the speed readers who did ILM in under two weeks, HOW? And please teach me your absolutely terrifying powers). I don’t plan, even if I do full length stuff again, to make another ILM length one or something. But even then, full length is big! (Also I live in fear of saying this to myself, trying to write, and becoming:

Like u have no idea rip lol.) It takes a whole bunch of time to do books, and like, I do fic books because I love it! Like SO much. It has and does bring me great joy. But, it can get a liiiittle daunting too. It eats up most of my free time to all my free time, if I get super into it.

So yes, I would really like to adapt it further. I have the barest of bones for an outline, I even have two possible endings already envisioned and several major events more fleshed out! : D But if I do write more long-form full novels for DbD, even in more manageable sizes than their forebearer, I’d try to do them in the order I began. Which means Signifying Nothing—the prequel to ILM about Philip’s time with Vigo, Alex, & Benedict (which is a will do, not if), then New Dawn Fades (the ongoing fic I have on AO3 centered around Joey & Quentin’s relationship), then From the Earth of No Return. Which for the record, my soul very much wants to adapt. Every time I hear Brave Shine now, I see cool TV show opens for it in my head. TuT But I guess the best I can say is, “We’ll see”? Since fics aren’t like my paying job or smth, it depends largely on my personal & work life & how much time I have to devote to for-passion writing. So, I guess the short answer is I’d love to, and I hope to, I’d even say I think I intend to sometime, but I’m not completely certain I’ll be able.

[contrivedcoincidences6]

The Invisible Cord- Vol. 2

Ok so I’ve decided to basically rewrite this story. I’m in love with it but looking I was not really happy about how it went so with that here is a revamped version of the prologue! 

***

February 1995 Washington D.C.

Looking over the DNA results Scully knows there can be no question. Mulder is Emily’s biological father.

A sob starts to build deep inside of her and she wants to grab the pillow next to her and scream into it.

Before her abduction, they had slept together three times. Just three times. She tries to remember if she’d forgotten to take her pill at some point but normally she’s consistent with it, and as a scientist, she can’t argue that the proof is staring her in the face. She’d been at least one month along when she was abducted and somehow during that time they’d stolen her little girl. Stolen her and turned her into something not human.

It wasn’t just her little girl though. It was their little girl.

The sob works its way out and she puts the results on the table, hides her face in her hands and cries.

She had looked into it all on a hunch. A tech at the hospital during Emily’s stay mentioned she had paternal DNA, rightfully assumed that the girl had a donor father.

Scully considered the fact the DNA could have come from anyone, until a few nights before when Mulder had been in bed holding her. The same way he had before her abduction.

After she returned he had stayed at arm's length. He was there for her during the cancer, he was tender and loving but he never made any advances. Scully couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he viewed her as damaged. Later she learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A week ago he’d come clean about the case he worked in California while she was still missing. The one with the vampire club. He told her about Kristen Kilar, about having sex with her, and the immediate shame and guilt he felt after the fact. Her grisly end just increased his remorse. He also told her what he’d been most afraid of facing since the case; the results of the HIV tests he’d had since.

He’d been tested more times than recommended and finally, his doctor told him that unless he was continually worried about contracting the virus he was fine. Mulder still felt dirty though, when he wasn’t saying it to her he showed it in the way he carried himself. It broke her heart and when he finally broke down and told her truth, she had cried. He assumed she was angry, that she wanted him to leave but she reached for his hand, made it clear she felt the opposite.

They held each other for what felt like hours before she kissed him, granted the forgiveness he was clamoring for. They weren’t involved, they’d made no promises to each other before her abduction. To her there was nothing to forgive but knowing he needed it, she absolved him, told him she held nothing against him. He melted into her arms, finally made the promises and declarations of love that he hadn’t had the chance to before.

Later that night she laid her head on his bare chest, listened to his steady heartbeat before the tech’s words rang clear in her mind.

“The genetic material could be the result of interference, but it could also be the result of intercourse. Emily was created like a normal child. But afterward they changed her biology.”

They changed her biology.

A sudden chill ran up Scully’s spine and she shivered. Feeling it in his sleep Mulder pulled her closer and covered them both. She still didn’t sleep at all that night.

They hadn’t discussed what the change in their relationship meant, but every other night one of them would show up at the others apartment. One night when she was at home knowing that he was occupied she took the time to go over the results with a fine-tooth comb. She takes all her files and documents she has pertaining to Emily, lays them out on her coffee table and began to review the data in front of her, point by point. Naturally, her assumption is wrong.

She hears him knock at the door and is forced out of her forced objectivity, her compartmentalization, her detachment. Knowing it has to be him she’s overwhelmed with dread, tastes bile. Gathering the documents she hastily stuffs them into file folders, too on edge to care her organizational system’s all gone to hell.

“One second, Mulder!” she calls, standing to put the stack of folders on the desk before taking a breath, crossing the room to open the door.

He’s standing there with a bashful look on his face, looking like a teenager picking up his prom date. Despite everything, she’d just looked at, and the churning in her stomach, his handsome face makes her smile as much as she can manage. A fuzzy warmth fills her in his presence.

“So, I know we’ve been doing an every other night type thing but I didn’t think that arrangement was set in stone and I…I just wanted to see you,” he trails off as Scully lets out a ragged breath and pulls him into her apartment.

After she closes the door he gets a good look at her and his face fills with concern.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

Putting one hand on her shoulder he tilts her chin up with the other and takes in her red nose and puffy, tearful eyes.

“Please talk to me, Scully.” He whispers.

She shakes her head and he lets out a sigh before she even says the words.

“Nothing, Mulder. I’m just not feeling well.”

Dropping his head he groans. “Really, Scully? We’re still doing this?”

He expects her anger, expects her to glare and push back but instead, she shakes her head miserably, falls into him as her face crumples.

In total shock, all he can do is hold her as she cries.

“God Mulder… I don’t even know…. I…I’m so sorry…” she chokes out between sobs and hiccups, hiding her face in his chest.

Rubbing her back he feels a shiver down his spine as she stammers in half sentences that don’t even fit together.

“Shhh, Scully. Just breathe. It’s alright, it’s alright…,” Mulder murmurs, pressing kisses into her hair. When her tears don’t let up he lifts her up, carries her into the living room. Moving to the couch he takes a seat and she stays put in his lap, tucked under his chin. Rubbing her back he holds her close. Her sobbing starts to subside but she still refuses to meet his eyes.

Mulder holds back his panic at seeing Scully fall apart and waits for a few minutes in silence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he finally asks softly, pushing some hair behind her ear. Her head still bowed, cheek pressed to his chest she looks down at their hands that are twined in her lap. Sniffling she lets out a slow breath.

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“Take your time. I’m here.”

After a beat and another slow breath, she shifts off his lap, still staring at her lap.

“There are some papers over on my desk. Could you grab them? They’re in that stack of folders there on the left. In the messy heap.”

“I didn’t know you had messy heaps, Scully,” Mulder chuckles nervously, bringing her hand to his lips before following her instructions. Picking up the manila folder, the papers above it he glances at the top sheet. Seeing medical terminology, a series of charts and figures he doesn’t understand he frowns.

“Are these in some kind of code? If I go get a copy of Catcher in the Rye will I find something hidden?” His lopsided grin cuts her heart.

“Mulder…”

She doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even manage a smile and he feels a knot form at the base of his stomach. He looks down at the sheet again, tries to scan and decipher for anything recognizable, anything familiar until he thinks of one devastating thing that he might be familiar with. Reading again though, not seeing anything he can pick up on associated with cancer he lets out a ragged breath. Hands them to her before he can scare himself more.

“What’s in these documents, Scully?”

He sits down, waits as she worries her lip between her teeth, and speaks after a beat.

“When I was with Emily in the hospital, even before she was admitted, there was so much happening all at once, it was almost impossible for me to take any of it in.”

“That makes sense. It was such a whirlwind, Scully. Why…”

“When I learned what was wrong, I was so focused on finding a way to save her… I couldn’t think about anything else. But, since that night, I remembered something. Something I discovered in the tests that were being run.”

Rifling through the papers she pulls out some transparent sheets that he recognizes as gene markers.

Taking one she holds it up to the light. “This is the breakdown for my DNA,” she says as he nods in understanding, prompting her to raise the other sheet.

“This is Emily’s. It’s clear that we’re a genetic match.”

Mulder had seen the same demonstration from her but he says nothing and waits for her to continue.

Letting out a long sigh, Scully sets down the sheets with her markers and Emily’s holds up the other sheet in her hand.

“This is the DNA from Emily’s biological father,” she says as Mulder’s brow knits. Frowning he nods, runs his hand over his face as she bows her head.

“Back at the hospital, I was told that Emily was created with normal genetic material. The tech said it this could have been the result of some kind of intervention during my abduction or…”

“Or what, Scully?”

“Or…it could have happened naturally, Mulder,” she says softly, meeting his eyes. He’s still wearing a frown, staring at the sheet in her hand. He wants to tell her to just spit it out, fill him in and stop keeping him in suspense until he squints, sees the printing etched in the top right corner of the breakdown for Emily’s paternal DNA.

Taking the sheet from Scully’s hand he slowly brings it closer to his face. Reads the series of numbers in small print, then the printed name. His name.

His whole body goes numb and his ears fill with white noise. The sheet falls from his bloodless fingers and he holds onto the arm of the couch for support.

“Mulder…” she appeals, but he can’t respond. He can’t think. All he sees is Emily’s tiny angelic face. Her little smile that matches his, the shape of her face, and the little expressions on her face that matched a young Samantha. In his mind, he sees all of these things mixed with Scully’s eyes and the light hair and small dimples. Their little girl.

The day he met he fell for her. She laughed at his jokes, that stupid potato face he made. The fact that she was a part of his partner meant he loved her from the get-go but now-this was different. An instinctual rage rose up in him. He and Scully had created a child. A child that had been taken from them. Stolen away by evil, malevolent sons of bitches who turned her into something different, made her sick, conducted experiments on her until her little body finally gave up. Molten anger rolled through him.

Concerned, Scully moves her hand to his cheek but his gaze is still far off.

“Mulder. Mulder look at me, please look at me.” She begs and takes his face fully between her hands.

The wrath she sees in his eyes scares her. The only time she’d seen anything similar had been during her cancer.

She takes the DNA sheets from his hands and moves close so she can wrap her arms around his neck.

After a few seconds, he stiffly puts his arms around her. “I’m so sorry Mulder. I should have tried to look into it at the hospital. You should have had a say in what happened. I’m so sorry.” She cries into his neck.

His hand tangles in her hair and he pulls her close. He doesn’t have the words to tell her that she shouldn’t be sorry.

Instead, he speaks in a low voice, “It’s going to be okay. I’ll find them. I’ll find who did it, Scully.”

“No, please. Please Mulder, just stay with me right now. Just be with me.”

He nods and curls himself around her as if he could protect them both from the evil around them.

[punkscowardschampions]

Chloé & Buster

Chloé: McKenna Buster: What do you want? Chloé: I have some bad news Chloé: well not news, but a reminder, unwelcome, I'm sure Buster: I don't wanna hear anything you've got to say Chloé: Naturally Chloé: Did you not have any qualms about letting your sister 'date' James? Buster: The fact that my little sister was able to take your man from you is nobody's problem but yours, babe Chloé: Good to see you're as dense as ever Chloé: Cast your thick skull back and remember the last conversation we had, yeah Buster: No thank you Chloé: The reason you should've given more of a shit Chloé: because you see, that really brought back some old pain for me, made me remember some things I tried desperately to forget Chloé: like the fact we slept together, almost exactly to the day by the way, exactly nine months before Jay was born Buster: I ain't taking responsibility for your kid 'cause you fucked up your marriage Buster: Your husband finally growing a set of balls was a surprise to all of us, like Chloé: Hmm, his lack of really highlights his inability to be the father, no Chloé: not to mention he was a good three weeks too late but that can be glossed over easily enough at the time Buster: Fuck off, Chlo Buster: The entrapment didn't work all those years ago and it ain't gonna now Chloé: What entrapment? Chloé: I'm already engaged, divorce pending Chloé: and I've given up the kids Chloé: that ones yours, you should know Chloé: James does, I've already told him Buster: You already told me she was and wasn't Chloé: When I had to raise her, I was not going to do that with you Buster: When I had to know you, I never believed a single word that came out of your mouth Buster: Guess what ain't changed Chloé: Don't do the right thing then Chloé: I have Chloé: he should be getting a DNA right about now Buster: You've done the right thing for yourself, yeah Buster: That ain't news to me either, babe Chloé: I've told you the truth Chloé: if you don't want to fight for your daughter, you don't have to Chloé: he wants to keep her regardless Buster: She ain't mine, regardless of how many times you say it now Chloé: Whatever, McKenna, I can't be bothered with this back and forth Chloé: I know she is, James will have proof she's not his Chloé: could even use his girlfriend's DNA to prove she's yours if he fancies Chloé: you've been given the information, do or don't Buster: Shut up and leave my sister out of your sick games Chloé: She involved herself in this, it has nothing to do with me Buster: She ain't involved herself with you, I mean it, leave her alone Chloé: I've got better things to do with my time Chloé: though you've apparently not grown up in the last six years, the rest of us have Buster: Like planning wedding number 2, yeah? Buster: You actually gonna bother to raise any kids you have that time around or what? Buster: Give it a few years and you can come back around to convince James they're his Chloé: That's truly not your business Chloé: worry about your own Chloé: there's an idea Buster: I can't wait to take you to court for wasting my time with this bullshit Buster: Hopefully whoever her actual father is will be more receptive once you've copied and pasted this convo to him Chloé: N'awh Chloé: here's hoping you don't get dumped this time Chloé: must make family meals so awkward Buster: I forgot how hilarious you were Chloé: I can assure you your wife/cousin won't have forgotten Chloé: good luck, truly, you're going to need it Chloé: James is a good dad, despite his other faults Chloé: and just fucking your sister, not his own Buster: Get over the fact that Nance didn't wanna fuck you please, it's been years Chloé: Not exactly how I remember it Chloé: though I see why you two would want to rewrite your history Chloé: didn't exactly go how you planned, did it McKenna? Chloé: Poor boy Buster: Well, nobody knows better than me how selective your memory can be Chloé: It was convenient for you to believe me the 2nd time, not the 1st Chloé: you have no one to blame but yourself, likewise, should Jay ever meet you, she'll have no one to blame but you, for abandoning her Buster: It was convenient for you to fucking assault me, except it wasn't really, was it? Buster: None of that went how you planned, did it, Chlo Chloé: Assault you? Now who's funny Chloé: you couldn't wait to fuck your sister by fucking me Buster: You, still so gutted we ain't celebrating our wedding anniversary, hilarious that is Buster: And the fact you reckon I couldn't wait to do anything with you other than fuck off far away from you, ain't even that, it's just tragic Chloé: I'm afraid I don't have time for your delusions Chloé: though the fact you still fantasize about me after all these years- oh wait, no, that turns my stomach Chloé: you should know a thing or two about restraining orders by now, yeah? Chloé: Get me one against you and have a nice life Buster: So little time, so many lives to try and ruin Buster: And yeah, 'course, but so do you after that one Nance got against you, which you're bound to have had framed, like Buster: It didn't really work too well, and neither would any you tried against me if you also try and fuck with my life again Chloé: I didn't even hear about it Chloé: What extraordinarily sad, close little lives you do all lead Chloé: Your life, and how fucked it is, has nothing to do with me Chloé: you best hope James never decides he doesn't want her Chloé: that child is a nightmare Buster: She's yours, what else could she ever have a hope in hell of being? Chloé: Mutual Buster: Don't Chloé: I've said it, no amount of denial fronted as bravado changes the fact I have and you know it's true Chloé: and now you have to deal with everything you did and didn't do Buster: Nothing's true until the DNA proves it Chloé: I'm under no illusion he's going to report his findings back to me, McKenna Chloé: and I'm certainly not acting as your go-between Chloé: no doubt your sister is already well aware and all over that situation like a rash Buster: Cry about the breakdown in communication between you and your whipping boy on your own time Chloé: Yes, I'm heartbroken Buster: The only person that's surprised a 17 year old kid has more to offer him than you, is you Buster: You never really got past the mental age you were when I first moved to Chelsea, did you, babe? Chloé: We're all aware what she's offering him, I'm not surprised, I was left when he HAD to go to rehab before his daddy cut him off for how expensive the coke habit got Chloé: you were all much of a muchness to me Buster: Poor you Buster: It won't be long before your 2nd husband is driven to drink and drugs either, I'm sure, so it's a good thing you're used to that particular martyrdom, like Chloé: It's a good thing he's got more about him than any of you ever did Chloé: he can handle and take responsibility Buster: You better hope and pray he ain't or he won't stick around for the vows Buster: He'll definitely wanna hold his hands up to what a mistake it was regardless though, yeah Chloé: As I said, your jealousy and obsession is truly disturbing Buster: Says you & it's so rich that I could afford another house Chloé: Mhmm Chloé: you can go now Buster: It's richer still that you reckon you can tell me what I can and can't do Buster: You'll be hearing from my lawyer one way or another, even if all I can fuck over your new life with is maintenance payments for a kid you don't want Chloé: Of course I will Chloé: Goodbye Buster: Always a pleasure, Chlo Chloé: Not mutual Buster: Let's leave it longer than the 6 years next time, yeah? Chloé: Try never again Buster: Suits me

[kristablogs]

Last year, we finally photographed a black hole. Now what?

Future black hole images could look sharper, although probably not as sharp as this rendering. ( NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman/)

It took Sheperd Doeleman nearly a decade to pull off the impossible. As the director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project involving an international collaboration of hundreds of researchers, he spent years flying suitcases full of hard drives around the globe to coordinate observations between radio telescopes on four continents, including Antarctica. On April 9, 2019, the collaboration at last released the fruits of their labors and the world gazed upon the first image of a black hole.

The feat—which pioneering black hole theorist James Bardeen called hopeless in 1973—represented a towering achievement of astronomical technology. But once the data processing was done and the champagne popped, the EHT collaboration in some sense resembled the dog who caught the car. “It took everyone a little by surprise that they got such a good image so fast,” says Andrew Strominger, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. “Sheperd and Michael [Johnson, a Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist and EHT coordinator,] were asking me about it. ‘What do we do with this? We took the picture, now what?’”

Now Strominger and an interdisciplinary group of researchers including theorists, experimentalists, and one philosopher are back with a wild answer, which appeared last week in Science Advances. With access to a distant enough telescope, the EHT collaboration could discern multiple reflections of light streaming from around the black hole. By sorting through the precise pattern in these jumbled rays, astronomers could directly measure the basic properties of black holes and stress test Einstein’s theory of gravity like never before. Basically, they hope black holes will become more like stars and planets: not just objects to ponder, but to directly observe.

“These are objects that for me have just been equations that I try to visualize mathematically in my mind,” says Alex Lupsasca, a Harvard theorist who worked on the research. “But now we’re getting real pictures of them.”

The team did pencil-and-paper calculations using Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and simulations of unprecedented resolution to analyze what black holes do to light. Spoiler alert: it gets weird. “Black holes, they're just kind of the best at everything they do,” Lupsasca says. And that includes bending light rays into loops.

As the densest objects permitted by the laws of physics, black holes have a lot of cosmic pull, and physicists have long known that the abysses cloak themselves in shells of light. Where Earth might attract a passing space rock—drawing it into a few orbits before it escapes into space—black holes can capture actual light particles. Anything crashing into the black hole gets stuck inside forever, but photons that closely skim the boundary can make a few turns around the black hole. “This is the warped nature of spacetime in your face,” Lupsasca says.

Exactly what Strominger, Lupsasca and their colleagues calculated was the light shell’s specific structure, and what it would look like from Earth.

Here’s how it works. As light rays approach the black hole, its fearsome gravity drags them into orbit. Rays passing at one particular distance make half a turn around the black hole before escaping into space. Rays passing a bit closer might make a complete circle before returning from whence they came. Rays passing closer still might make a turn and half, others two turns, and so on. Each of these infinite groups of light rays can form an image (if they hit a camera or an eyeball), so the black hole could produce an infinite number of such images. Strominger likens the trippy effect to standing between two department store mirrors and seeing images of yourself stretch off into the distance.

“In a perfect world with a perfect telescope, you’d look at the black hole and see not only an infinite number of nested images of yourself, but of the whole universe,” he says.

But the EHT is, like all telescopes, not perfect. It’s also not exactly a telescope, but technically an interferometer. Interferometers work by comparing observations of a distant point from two different locations. The farther apart the locations sit, the finer the features on the object they can resolve. Because the successive black hole reflections (which would appear as rings to an observer) get thinner and thinner, astronomers need to harness more far flung observatories to see them. Unfortunately, with facilities in Hawaii, Chile, Spain, and on the south pole, the EHT is running out of space. “They’ve already used up the whole earth just to see the first image,” Strominger says.

To spot the reflection rings, the EHT will have to go further still. Eventually, the research authors conclude, the collaboration should add a space-based observatory to their network. Just one would do it. A satellite orbiting the Earth could clearly spot the first ring, or hardware orbiting the moon could see the second. If they could get a spacecraft out to a location between the Earth and the Sun known as the second Lagrangian point (the destination of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope) they could resolve the first three rings. Such a mission might cost a few hundred million dollars—pricey but not as nearly as expensive as the largest science projects. “It’s something that someday someone will do,” Lupsasca says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

With that pile of cash, astrophysicists would be buying a wealth of black hole knowledge. An observation of the rings would immediately serve as the first test of general relativity in an environment with gravity intense enough to bend light rays into full-on loops. The way the rings narrow is very precise, so any deviation would signal that something weird was going on. “There’s no wiggle room,” Lupsasca says. “You go out there and do the measurement and it either matches the theory or it doesn’t.”

Few theorists expect a breakdown of Einstein’s most successful theory. Rather, they’re more excited about what the rings can reveal about the two black holes close enough to image in this way. Astronomers have a few ways of measuring the basic properties of a black hole, such as its mass and spin, but they have to make a lot of assumptions to do so. The ring pattern depends only on the black hole—having nothing to do with the glowing plasma and debris nearby—so such observations could provide a cleaner way for physicists to answer their most basic questions about these enigmatic objects.

And this analysis is just the beginning. After the work was released last summer (ahead of peer review), it sparked a flurry of follow-up research as physicists raced to flesh out the theory. “It’s emphasized that there are a lot of cool details we haven’t explored yet, and gotten us excited about possible new signatures,” says Elizabeth Himwich, a Harvard graduate student who analyzed how the type of light alternates from one ring to the next.

Lupsasca likens the effort ahead to the early days of biology. “Before you want to understand how to sequence DNA and use CRISPR to copy and edit DNA, first you go out into the woods and say, ‘that’s a tree, that’s a flower,’” he says. “This is where we’re at with black hole physics as an experimental science.”

[scootoaster]

Last year, we finally photographed a black hole. Now what?

Future black hole images could look sharper, although probably not as sharp as this rendering. ( NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman/)

It took Sheperd Doeleman nearly a decade to pull off the impossible. As the director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project involving an international collaboration of hundreds of researchers, he spent years flying suitcases full of hard drives around the globe to coordinate observations between radio telescopes on four continents, including Antarctica. On April 9, 2019, the collaboration at last released the fruits of their labors and the world gazed upon the first image of a black hole.

The feat—which pioneering black hole theorist James Bardeen called hopeless in 1973—represented a towering achievement of astronomical technology. But once the data processing was done and the champagne popped, the EHT collaboration in some sense resembled the dog who caught the car. “It took everyone a little by surprise that they got such a good image so fast,” says Andrew Strominger, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. “Sheperd and Michael [Johnson, a Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist and EHT coordinator,] were asking me about it. ‘What do we do with this? We took the picture, now what?’”

Now Strominger and an interdisciplinary group of researchers including theorists, experimentalists, and one philosopher are back with a wild answer, which appeared last week in Science Advances. With access to a distant enough telescope, the EHT collaboration could discern multiple reflections of light streaming from around the black hole. By sorting through the precise pattern in these jumbled rays, astronomers could directly measure the basic properties of black holes and stress test Einstein’s theory of gravity like never before. Basically, they hope black holes will become more like stars and planets: not just objects to ponder, but to directly observe.

“These are objects that for me have just been equations that I try to visualize mathematically in my mind,” says Alex Lupsasca, a Harvard theorist who worked on the research. “But now we’re getting real pictures of them.”

The team did pencil-and-paper calculations using Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and simulations of unprecedented resolution to analyze what black holes do to light. Spoiler alert: it gets weird. “Black holes, they're just kind of the best at everything they do,” Lupsasca says. And that includes bending light rays into loops.

As the densest objects permitted by the laws of physics, black holes have a lot of cosmic pull, and physicists have long known that the abysses cloak themselves in shells of light. Where Earth might attract a passing space rock—drawing it into a few orbits before it escapes into space—black holes can capture actual light particles. Anything crashing into the black hole gets stuck inside forever, but photons that closely skim the boundary can make a few turns around the black hole. “This is the warped nature of spacetime in your face,” Lupsasca says.

Exactly what Strominger, Lupsasca and their colleagues calculated was the light shell’s specific structure, and what it would look like from Earth.

Here’s how it works. As light rays approach the black hole, its fearsome gravity drags them into orbit. Rays passing at one particular distance make half a turn around the black hole before escaping into space. Rays passing a bit closer might make a complete circle before returning from whence they came. Rays passing closer still might make a turn and half, others two turns, and so on. Each of these infinite groups of light rays can form an image (if they hit a camera or an eyeball), so the black hole could produce an infinite number of such images. Strominger likens the trippy effect to standing between two department store mirrors and seeing images of yourself stretch off into the distance.

“In a perfect world with a perfect telescope, you’d look at the black hole and see not only an infinite number of nested images of yourself, but of the whole universe,” he says.

But the EHT is, like all telescopes, not perfect. It’s also not exactly a telescope, but technically an interferometer. Interferometers work by comparing observations of a distant point from two different locations. The farther apart the locations sit, the finer the features on the object they can resolve. Because the successive black hole reflections (which would appear as rings to an observer) get thinner and thinner, astronomers need to harness more far flung observatories to see them. Unfortunately, with facilities in Hawaii, Chile, Spain, and on the south pole, the EHT is running out of space. “They’ve already used up the whole earth just to see the first image,” Strominger says.

To spot the reflection rings, the EHT will have to go further still. Eventually, the research authors conclude, the collaboration should add a space-based observatory to their network. Just one would do it. A satellite orbiting the Earth could clearly spot the first ring, or hardware orbiting the moon could see the second. If they could get a spacecraft out to a location between the Earth and the Sun known as the second Lagrangian point (the destination of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope) they could resolve the first three rings. Such a mission might cost a few hundred million dollars—pricey but not as nearly as expensive as the largest science projects. “It’s something that someday someone will do,” Lupsasca says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

With that pile of cash, astrophysicists would be buying a wealth of black hole knowledge. An observation of the rings would immediately serve as the first test of general relativity in an environment with gravity intense enough to bend light rays into full-on loops. The way the rings narrow is very precise, so any deviation would signal that something weird was going on. “There’s no wiggle room,” Lupsasca says. “You go out there and do the measurement and it either matches the theory or it doesn’t.”

Few theorists expect a breakdown of Einstein’s most successful theory. Rather, they’re more excited about what the rings can reveal about the two black holes close enough to image in this way. Astronomers have a few ways of measuring the basic properties of a black hole, such as its mass and spin, but they have to make a lot of assumptions to do so. The ring pattern depends only on the black hole—having nothing to do with the glowing plasma and debris nearby—so such observations could provide a cleaner way for physicists to answer their most basic questions about these enigmatic objects.

And this analysis is just the beginning. After the work was released last summer (ahead of peer review), it sparked a flurry of follow-up research as physicists raced to flesh out the theory. “It’s emphasized that there are a lot of cool details we haven’t explored yet, and gotten us excited about possible new signatures,” says Elizabeth Himwich, a Harvard graduate student who analyzed how the type of light alternates from one ring to the next.

Lupsasca likens the effort ahead to the early days of biology. “Before you want to understand how to sequence DNA and use CRISPR to copy and edit DNA, first you go out into the woods and say, ‘that’s a tree, that’s a flower,’” he says. “This is where we’re at with black hole physics as an experimental science.”

[helloelizabethsmithposts]

THE GLORY OF GODHEAD-YAHWEH&YESHUA[MIRACULOUS POWER FREED THE UNIQUE ONE[ELIZABETH L.SMITH CONSECRATED TO GOD'S LIGHT]

Annyeong, OR, Hello Everyone, To Explain Everything To You All. It's Sad, But Very True This All Has Been My Life Story Through The Years! GOD KNOWS THAT I DON'T NEED PITY, FROM NO ONE, I JUST WANTED THE PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD TO UNDERSTAND HOW, DEVILISH THE BONDAGE MINDSET IS!!!! JESUS CHRIST KING OF GLORY( TOLD US IN MATTHEW 5. THE LAST VERSE, BE YOU PERFECT LIKE GOD. PERFECT IS MATURE IN GOD. THAT'S WHAT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST WAS TEACHING US. I GREW UP , WATCHING THOSE I LOVED VERY DEARLY, THEY WORKED, TITHE, AND OBEYED GOD'S WORD. THEY HUSTLED IN ANYTHING, AND ANYWAY, JUST BECAUSE THEY WHERE REAL GODLY MEN,WHO VALUED WHAT GOD MADE THEM TO DO, WITHOUT ANYONE REPEATING THESE THINGS TO THEM. I ALSO MATURED VERY EARLY, SO IT WAS EASY TO HAVE FAITH IN GOD LIKE JESUS CHRIST SAID! EARLY, I JUST LACKED REALLY LOVING MYSELF, BECAUSE WHEN YOU ARE TOLD SO MUCH DIFFERENT THINGS, AND IT REALLY GETS INTO YOUR SPIRIT. IT REALLY TAKES GOD, TO STEP INTO YOUR LIFE, AND RESCUE YOU, FROM DANGER!!!! WHEN MY HAPPINESS SHATTERED RIGHT BEFORE MY FACE, I WAS SO TORN APART, I WAS BARELY HANGING IN THEIR, TILL GOD CALLED ME THAT SAME VERY, DREADFUL NIGHT, AND I HEED TO HIM. CAUSE I WAS UPSET, MY PARTNER LEFT ME SO FAST, I COULDN'T EVEN GRASP, ANYTHING! BUT I WANTED TO STILL WORK IN THE BABY NURSERY TO MAINTAIN, MY SMILE, EVEN THOUGH I WAS BEING TORMENTED, I DIDN'T CARE! BUT NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY 4 DAYS BEFORE HE RETURNED BACK TO FATHER GOD, HE[RICO] SAID, I NEVER SAW SOMEONE STILL SMILE, AND LAUGH EVEN THOUGH YOUR HEART WAS BROKEN! I LEARNED IN PROVERBS TO SMILE, THROUGH THE PAIN, SO THAT MY FAITH IN GOD WOULD GIVE ME THE COURAGE, I NEEDED TO OVERCOME ANY CHALLENGE IN THIS LIFE. TAKE IT FROM A YOUNG LADY, WHO REALLY VALUE TRUE LOVE[GODHEAD- EL ELYON ,YAHWEH, JEHOVAH-ROHI, &YESHUA THE TRUE TRINITY]. GOD LOVE IS NOT FAKE, IT IS VERY REAL THAT, HE SUSTAINS YOU THROUGH THE MOST HARDEST TIMES YOU EVER HAD. I WORKED IN ALABAMA, ATLANTA, AND TENNESSEE, AND I'VE COME TO UNDERSTAND PEOPLE LOVE MONEY SO MUCH THAT THEY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT NOBODY, BUT THEIRSELVES! I FOUND OUT EASILY I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL 3 TIMES IN ATLANTA, TRYING TO REASON WITH THE PEOPLE I WORKED WITH, SAYING CORRECT THE PERSON YOU HIRED, THAT DON'T WANT TO WORK, BUT THEY ONLY DENIED, EVERYTHING, SO I WAS SO ANGRY, I HAD A MENTAL BREAKDOWN I WASN'T CRAZY, I WAS JUST A LITTLE YOUNG WOMAN HURT, WHO MISSED THE PEOPLE WHO PROTECTED ME, FROM THESE KIND OF PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD. AND THE LAST TIME WAS ACTUALLY IN 2016, I HAD A MENTAL BREAKDOWN, BECAUSE THE MANGER CHANGED MY SHIFT AFTER MY VACATION, AND HAD ME WORKING 8 DAYS STRAIGHT, SO YES AGAIN I ENDED UP IN THE HOSPITAL, BUT THIS TIME, I WAS DANCING, PREACHING, AND QUOTING THE VERY SCRIPTURES I WAS TAUGHT TO USE. SO I PROMISED GOD THAT SINCE, HE TOLD ME I NEVER REQUIRED YOU TO DO THIS, I ASKED FATHER TO HELP ME, TO GET BACK UP THROUGH FAITH IN GOD TO HELP OTHER'S TO AVOID THE MISTAKE I'VE MADE IN HELPING EVERYONE ELSE AND NEGLECTING TAKING CARE OF MYSELF. I WAS ON 4 DIFFERENT MEDICINES TO NEGATE EACH AFFECT, BUT HELL NO, I'M A TRUE WALKER, AND TALKER, WHO BELIEVE IN THE HOLY BIBLE, AND THE RESURRECTION POWER OF JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, I TOLD GOD, I WASN'T GETTING ADDICTED TO MEDICINE NO MORE, EVEN THOUGH THEY LET ME USE THE RESTROOM ON MYSELF, DOPPED ME UP WITH SO MUCH MEDICINE THAT EVEN AFTER THAT IT REALLY TOOK SOME MONTHS FOR MY BODY TO RECOVER, CAUSE I WOULD CRY TO GOD AT NIGHT, PRAYING THAT MY BODY, GOT OVER THE PAIN, I COULDN'T SLEEP A CERTAIN WAY FOR AWHILE. BUT PRAISE THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND THE EARTH, ALL OF HIS GRACE,MERCY,TRUTH,AND LOVE HAS GUIDED ME TO BE THIS WOMAN THAT I AM, I JUST RECENTLY ON MY 32 BIRTHDAY, GOD PROMPT IT ON MY HEART TO START TAKING BETTER CARE OF MYSELF, AND I'M STILL NEW TO THIS BUT, AT LEAST I CAN TELL YOU ALL, NO JOB IS WORTH KEEPING JUST FOR MONEY, IF IT ENDANGERS YOUR, LEAVE AND MOVE ON, DON'T HOLD ON TO NO PLACE THAT'S NOT WILLING TO VALUE YOUR TRUE WORTH!!!! IT TOOK ME THIS LONG, TO REALIZE, RACE IS NOT THE PROBLEM, IT'S THE GREED THAT'S IN MOST PEOPLE HEARTS, LOVE DOESN'T EVNY OR COVET, 1 CORINTHIANS 13. GALATIANS 5 IS MORE REAL EVERYONE, I SUGGEST YOU ALL GET BACK TO SEEKING GOD WHOLEHEARTEDLY, THAT'S THE WAY FOR TRUE ULTIMATE HAPPINESS THROUGH THE HOLY SPIRIT, JESUS CHRIST, AND GOD! JESUS CHRIST TOLD US LET NO MAN DECEIVE YOU! I WASN'T FOOLED BY NO ONE, I JUST WANTED TO MASTER MY GIFTS AND TALENTS, AND ULTIMATELY LEARN HOW TO ACT, I SOUGHT FATHER GOD IN 1998, TO BE AN ACTOR. WELL SEE, WE PLAYED Y'ALL WICKED ASS, WE PLAYED THE GAME TO WIN ONLY, I KNEW THAT DAMN OLD UNEMPLOYED BASTARD WAS UP TO NO GOOD, SO I ASKED FATHER, THIS REQUEST, BECAUSE I WAS MAD WHEN IN 1997 I WANTED MY CRAFT SHOP AT SCHOOL, TO MAKE MONEY THE NEXT YEAR SO I DIDN'T NEED NO ALLOWANCE, I HAD MY PLAN TO HUSTLE IN SCHOOL BY SOMETHING GOD HELPED ME TO DESIGN, BUT DAMN NEAR, IT FELL THROUGH. I SAID PAY BACK IS A MUG!!!! AND I ALSO WAS HIT IN THE EYE FOR A CERTAIN WORD I USED IN SPANISH, AND SOME TOUCH UP STUFF FELL, INTO MY EYE, AND I STILL HAVE THAT SAME MARK SLIGHTY SHOWS UP ON MY EYE FROM TIME TO TIME.... SO YOU ALL REALLY DON'T WANT TO LIE, OR MENTION OUR NAMES EVER OUT OF YOUR MOUTHS AGAIN, OR I WILL PETITION HEAVEN TO SEND AN ANGEL TO DEAL WITH YOU SUDDENLY, WITH THESE OLD FAKE,COPYING BASTARDS PROCRASTINATING, EVERYTHING KNOWING THEY ASS NEVER LIKED, OR LOVED NO ONE BUT THEIR DAMN SELF. WE HEAL OUR FAMILY, THESE ARE KIDS WHO WALK IN LIGHT, BUT WE HURT OUR ENEMIES (THIS IS HOW WE DO FOR REAL.) I SAY DAMN SELF, CAUSE YOU ALL WILL REALIZE VERY, VERY SOON YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SENT STRAIGHT HELL!!!! AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT, YOUR ARROGANCE KICKED YOU IN THE ASS😁😁😁😁😁💞💝🎎🛫⛴🎆🌍.... LOL,LOL,LOL, SHOO YEAH I TOLD YOU ALL I HAVE MY FATHER GOD DNA- FROM MY HEAD TO MY TOES,AND MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY, I HAVE VERY CLOSE, AND TIGHT CONNECTIONS WITH HEAVEN!!!! THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN SUFFERS VIOLENCE AND THE VIOLENT TAKE IT BY FORCE!!!! I'M NO FAKE FIGHTER, LIKE YOU ALL CLAIM YOU ALL ARE FIGHTERS. I'M A RIGHTEOUS QUEEN OF LIGHT WHO IS GOD'S HOLY FIGHTER, I STAND UP FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS IN ANY GIVEN DAY,TIME,AND SEASON, BECAUSE I'M GODHEAD TRUE DIRECTOR OF MUSIC, WORSHIP IS MY SPECIALITY, ESPECIALLY WHEN, ABEOJI,OPPA,HEONG,YOONA,AND CHINGU[FATHER, HUSBAND, BROTHER,SISTER,AND FRIEND] WANTS FATHER TO BE GLORIFIED IN EVERYTHING, I'M THE GIRL/WOMAN FOR HIS JOB!!! TRUE WORSHIPPERS, CAN ONLY RESPECT WHAT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST SAID GOD IS A SPIRIT, AND THEY THAT WORSHIP HIM[GOD] MUST WORSHIP HIM IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH!!!! I JUST LOVE, AND LIVE TO GLORY FATHER GOD, THAT'S HOW HE MADE ME TO BE, AND I HONESTLY THANK GOD WHOLEHEARTEDLY FOR ALLOWING TO ME FOLLOW HIM DAILY AND ALWAYS!!! HOPEFULLY YOU ALL WILL LEARN TO LOVE EACH OTHER, AND ACCEPT THE DIFFERENCE IN EACH OTHER, TO HELP BUILD EACH OTHER UP THROUGH,HOPE,FAITH, AND LOVE= GODLY KNOWLEDGE, GODLY WISDOM, AND GODLY UNDERSTANDING DAILY. SEEKING GOD DAILY, IT'S A JOY FOR ME, CAUSE I NEED THE SHEKINA GLORY, EVERYTIME, EACH SECOND, MINUTE, AND HOUR OF THE DAY, I HAVE TO STAY NEAR GOD, HE KNOWS MY LITTLE ASS GET INTO EVERYTHING... I'M NOT VERY TALL BUT JUST 5/4, LOL, I KNOW GOD JUST CRACK UP LAUGHING, TELLING THE ANGELS SHE WOKE UP WATCH HER AND PROTECT HER ALWAYS, I JUST SINCERELY, AM GRATEFUL TO ALL OF THOSE WHO TAUGHT ME SOMETHING IN THIS LIFETIME, AND I NEVER I HAD THE TIME, TO MEET THEM NATURALLY IN PERSON TO TELL THEM THANK GOD FOR YOU BEING YOU,AND PRAISE OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST KING OF GLORY, FOR YOUR TALENT THAT TAUGHT ME NOT TO BE ASHAMED OF BEING DIFFERENT NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, BUT EMBRACE THE FACT OF BEING THE UNIQUE ONE. RICO THAT'S WHAT I WANTED TO TELL YOU, WHEN YOU ASKED ME WHAT ONE I WANTED TO BE, IT WAS THE UNIQUE ONE. [DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE REST, BUT DETERMINED TO OBEY IN EVERYTHING,KEEPING GODHEAD[ADONAI FIRST IN EVERYTHING, AND EVERYWHERE, I GO, JUST BECAUSE HE CONSIDERED MANKIND AND EVERYTHING ELSE!!!! SOMEONE LIKE [YAHWEH&YESHUA]DOESN'T OWE US NOTHING REALLY, AND THE THINGS GOD BLESS US WITH SHOULD MAKE US WILLING TO LEARN, AND KNOW HIM[GOD]ON A VERY PERSONAL LEVEL, HE'S MIGHTY, BEAUTIFUL, AND VERY POWERFUL I COULD NEVER DO NOTHING HE HATES, CAUSE ULTIMATELY HE WAS THE ONLY WHO REALLY CARED SO MUCH ABOUT ME TO DRY UP MY TEARS, AND HOPEFULLY BOAZ, THIS WILL FREE YOU TOO, NO JOB IS WORTH, LOOSING PEOPLE SOUL, AND GOD RESCUED THEM SWIFTLY, CAUSE I SAW THE EVIDENCE IN THE BACK TREE AND FRONT TREE. STOP PLAYING AND TELLING LIES ON GOD'S CHILDREN DUMMIES, CAUSE WHEN HE STRIKE YOU DOWN AND OUT IT'S OVER FOR YOUR WICKED DUMBASS. I DON'T FEEL BAD FOR PEOPLE WHO TRY TO SLAVE, PEOPLE CAUSE THEY DON'T WANT TO WORK, YOU SHOULDN'T EVEN GET A JOB IF YOUR ASS DON'T WANT TO WORK, BUT GET PAID OFF OF OTHER PEOPLE PROFESSIONAL SKILLS, I TELL YOU NOW, I'M NOT GETTING PAID NO DAMN PENNIES NO MORE, TALKING ABOUT 10.20 CENT AN HOUR AND YOU WANT TO HAVE YOUR PLACE KEPT UP FOR YOU, DAMN IT YOUR ASS DON'T DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO, IT JUST WON'T GET DONE, YOU CAN WAIT TO THE RAPTURE IF YOU LIKE TOO, LORD GOD ALMIGHTY KNOWS, Y'ALL SOME TRIFLING ASS STEP-CHILDREN, I TELL YOU THIS BRING YOUR MISFIT BUTT, OVER SOMEWHERE AND TRY ME, IF YOU LIKE TOO I WILL SAY LORD JESUS CHRIST OF NAZARETH I HAD TO DEFEND MYSELF ON THAT DUMMIE, SO I KNOCKED THE HELL OUT OF THEIR ASS.... WARNING COMES BEFORE DESTRUCTION, I FOUND OUT GOD HAS DENOUNCED A LOT OF YOU ALL ON EARTH SO LOOKS LIKE YOU ALL ARE REALLY ON BORROWED TIME!!!! WELL AT LEAST WE GET TO PARTY HARD IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN STYLE, SO WE BE CLUBBIN IN THE BUILDING, OR OUTSIDE, WE WILL PRAISE GOD FREELY, BECAUSE IT'S ALL OF THE PRAISE,GLORY,AND HONOR THAT'S DUE UNTO HIS NAME FOREVER AND EVERMORE, AMEN, AND AMEN!!!!💞💝😍💙🎎⛴🛫🎉....

[benegap]

Is Caffeine The One Thing Standing Between You And Optimal Health?

Why can some people throw back coffee all day long and not get jittery while others get completely wired with a racing heart from only a few sips? Well, let me introduce you to your caffeine gene, which controls how we break it down and how our bodies respond. It’s called CYP1A2, and this gene is super important because it controls the enzyme CYP1A2 (yes, they have the same name). And it’s this special enzyme that determines how, exactly, we metabolize caffeine.

Caffeine and your DNA.

We inherit a copy of the caffeine gene from our mom and another from our dad. And one variant of this gene causes the liver to break down caffeine very quickly, so those of us who receive two of the fast caffeine genes handle coffee and tea like a boss. These fast metabolizers break down caffeine up to four times more quickly than those people who inherited one or two of the slow-variant version of CYP1A2. So how many of us have the fast, caffeine-tolerance gene? Well, I am glad you asked. Here’s the breakdown:

40 percent of people are fast metabolizers.

45 percent have one slow and one fast copy, so they are middle-of-the-road caffeine metabolizers.

15 percent carry two copies of the slow variant.

If you’re a slow caffeine metabolizer:

Consuming too much caffeine, especially if you have a slow caffeine gene can make you feel anxious, jittery with heart palpitations, and worsen panic attacks. Caffeine withdrawal also commonly causes headaches. But feeling shaky and on edge isn’t the only health problems associated with caffeine:

1. Increased risk of hypertension.

Some fascinating research published in the Journal of Hypertension found that people who drank a heavy amount of coffee were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure if they were slow metabolizers. What about fast metabolizers? Amazingly, they saw their high blood pressure decline the more they drank coffee!

2. Increased risk of heart attack.

A similar study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that drinking four or more cups of coffee a day was associated with a 36 percent increased risk of a heart attack.

3. Negative effects on digestion.

It’s not only coffee that’s linked to some digestive issues. Even my beloved green tea, which has about one-third the amount of caffeine as coffee, can trigger diarrhea, gas, and heartburn in some people with sensitive stomachs.

4. Cortisol spikes.

People who are sensitive to caffeine can see a spike in their stress hormone cortisol. This can be an issue especially with adrenal fatigue and other hormone problems. Some people have an initial spike in cortisol from caffeine but gain tolerance over time, while others don’t adapt to caffeine.

If you’re a fast metabolizer:

Remarkably, if you tolerate caffeine, organic coffee and green tea are associated with a bunch of cool health benefits:

1. Increased longevity.

A New England Journal of Medicine study found that people who drank coffee had a much lower risk of dying! Another large Japanese study published in JAMA found that people who drank five or more cups of green tea a day were significantly less likely to die during the study period. And finally, a Harvard study showed coffee and tea drinkers’ overall risk of premature death is 25 percent lower than those who don’t drink these caffeinated drinks.

2. Speedier metabolism.

Caffeine can be a great metabolism booster, increasing lipolysis (fat burning) and improving exercise performance.

3. Healthier brain and better memory.

Caffeine has been shown to improve cognitive function, decreasing brain fog and increasing mental sharpness. It can also improve your mood by increasing neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. A study out of Harvard found that people who drank coffee were 20 percent less likely to be depressed. Green tea also contains L-theanine, which ramps up the activity of your calm-down neurotransmitter GABA, which has an anti-anxiety effect on your mood. Caffeine and L-theanine can have a synergistic effect, creating a potent combo for improving brain function. In one study coffee drinkers were even found to have a 65 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and up to 60 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

4. Decreased risk for cancer.

Both coffee and green tea have been associated with a significant decrease in cancer rates.

5. More stable insulin levels.

With 50 percent of the United States being prediabetic or diabetic, there’s no denying the fact that we have a serious blood sugar problem. Both coffee and green tea have been shown to decrease diabetes in separate studies.

Figure out what’s right for you.

The way we react to coffee is the perfect example of bioindividuality: One health plan isn’t right for everyone. Your DNA, microbiome, hormones, and everything in between are unique. What works for one person when it comes to nutrition or exercise might not work for the person next to them. Another thing to consider is that unless you are popping caffeine pills (which I don’t suggest) or an energy drink with an ungodly amount of concentrated caffeine (which I also wouldn’t suggest), you are having a whole food, actually a whole food steeped in water, but you get the point. Coffee and tea are more than just pure caffeine. Both of these caffeinated drinks have lots of other factors like antioxidants, amino acids, and minerals—all with added health benefits.

As a functional medicine practitioner, I look at the complex genes that play a role in detoxing caffeine (there are more than just CYP1A2) as well as other factors that play a part, such as a person’s gut health, liver function, and mental health status. If caffeine isn’t a problem for you, and you want to get in on the sweet health benefits I mentioned above, the sweet spot for most of the research is about four to five cups of coffee a day or about eight cups of green tea a day. But remember: This is just general advice, so be sure to find out what’s best for your body.

from Health Insure Guides http://ift.tt/2xsIk6n via health insurance cover

[benegap]

Is Caffeine The One Thing Standing Between You And Optimal Health?

Why can some people throw back coffee all day long and not get jittery while others get completely wired with a racing heart from only a few sips? Well, let me introduce you to your caffeine gene, which controls how we break it down and how our bodies respond. It’s called CYP1A2, and this gene is super important because it controls the enzyme CYP1A2 (yes, they have the same name). And it’s this special enzyme that determines how, exactly, we metabolize caffeine.

Caffeine and your DNA.

We inherit a copy of the caffeine gene from our mom and another from our dad. And one variant of this gene causes the liver to break down caffeine very quickly, so those of us who receive two of the fast caffeine genes handle coffee and tea like a boss. These fast metabolizers break down caffeine up to four times more quickly than those people who inherited one or two of the slow-variant version of CYP1A2. So how many of us have the fast, caffeine-tolerance gene? Well, I am glad you asked. Here’s the breakdown:

40 percent of people are fast metabolizers.

45 percent have one slow and one fast copy, so they are middle-of-the-road caffeine metabolizers.

15 percent carry two copies of the slow variant.

If you’re a slow caffeine metabolizer:

Consuming too much caffeine, especially if you have a slow caffeine gene can make you feel anxious, jittery with heart palpitations, and worsen panic attacks. Caffeine withdrawal also commonly causes headaches. But feeling shaky and on edge isn’t the only health problems associated with caffeine:

1. Increased risk of hypertension.

Some fascinating research published in the Journal of Hypertension found that people who drank a heavy amount of coffee were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure if they were slow metabolizers. What about fast metabolizers? Amazingly, they saw their high blood pressure decline the more they drank coffee!

2. Increased risk of heart attack.

A similar study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that drinking four or more cups of coffee a day was associated with a 36 percent increased risk of a heart attack.

3. Negative effects on digestion.

It’s not only coffee that’s linked to some digestive issues. Even my beloved green tea, which has about one-third the amount of caffeine as coffee, can trigger diarrhea, gas, and heartburn in some people with sensitive stomachs.

4. Cortisol spikes.

People who are sensitive to caffeine can see a spike in their stress hormone cortisol. This can be an issue especially with adrenal fatigue and other hormone problems. Some people have an initial spike in cortisol from caffeine but gain tolerance over time, while others don’t adapt to caffeine.

If you’re a fast metabolizer:

Remarkably, if you tolerate caffeine, organic coffee and green tea are associated with a bunch of cool health benefits:

1. Increased longevity.

A New England Journal of Medicine study found that people who drank coffee had a much lower risk of dying! Another large Japanese study published in JAMA found that people who drank five or more cups of green tea a day were significantly less likely to die during the study period. And finally, a Harvard study showed coffee and tea drinkers’ overall risk of premature death is 25 percent lower than those who don’t drink these caffeinated drinks.

2. Speedier metabolism.

Caffeine can be a great metabolism booster, increasing lipolysis (fat burning) and improving exercise performance.

3. Healthier brain and better memory.

Caffeine has been shown to improve cognitive function, decreasing brain fog and increasing mental sharpness. It can also improve your mood by increasing neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. A study out of Harvard found that people who drank coffee were 20 percent less likely to be depressed. Green tea also contains L-theanine, which ramps up the activity of your calm-down neurotransmitter GABA, which has an anti-anxiety effect on your mood. Caffeine and L-theanine can have a synergistic effect, creating a potent combo for improving brain function. In one study coffee drinkers were even found to have a 65 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and up to 60 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

4. Decreased risk for cancer.

Both coffee and green tea have been associated with a significant decrease in cancer rates.

5. More stable insulin levels.

With 50 percent of the United States being prediabetic or diabetic, there’s no denying the fact that we have a serious blood sugar problem. Both coffee and green tea have been shown to decrease diabetes in separate studies.

Figure out what’s right for you.

The way we react to coffee is the perfect example of bioindividuality: One health plan isn’t right for everyone. Your DNA, microbiome, hormones, and everything in between are unique. What works for one person when it comes to nutrition or exercise might not work for the person next to them. Another thing to consider is that unless you are popping caffeine pills (which I don’t suggest) or an energy drink with an ungodly amount of concentrated caffeine (which I also wouldn’t suggest), you are having a whole food, actually a whole food steeped in water, but you get the point. Coffee and tea are more than just pure caffeine. Both of these caffeinated drinks have lots of other factors like antioxidants, amino acids, and minerals—all with added health benefits.

As a functional medicine practitioner, I look at the complex genes that play a role in detoxing caffeine (there are more than just CYP1A2) as well as other factors that play a part, such as a person’s gut health, liver function, and mental health status. If caffeine isn’t a problem for you, and you want to get in on the sweet health benefits I mentioned above, the sweet spot for most of the research is about four to five cups of coffee a day or about eight cups of green tea a day. But remember: This is just general advice, so be sure to find out what’s best for your body.

from Health Insure Guides http://ift.tt/2xsIk6n via health insurance cover