#at first i wasnt gonna write anything. i dont really do propaganda as i just like to sit and watch

[monstercumhrt]

🚨 PSEUDOMONAS AERUGINOSA PROPAGANDA🚨

Listen. I can't speak outside of my profession — people in human medicine, please feel free to chime in — but what I can say is this: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the bane of my existence in veterinary medicine.

You can smell a P. aeruginosa infection from across the room. It's the most distinctive scent. I am the only one in our hospital who volunteers to clean the ears of a patient infected with it, because my sense of smell is so poor... But this bacterium doesn't care — despite it all, it's scent still reaches me, and clings to my scrubs for the entire day. In particularly bad cases, I am barred from taking rooms for the rest of the day, lest I scare the clients away. I can only imagine the Hell that my coworkers must go through.

This is the only time I'll ever say this, but you don't even have to run a cytology to know what it is. But you know what we do run? Cultures. Because this son of a bitch is resistant to EVERYTHING. And it NEVER wants to go away. We have a patient who has had P. aeruginosa otitis externa for years, because it just keeps coming back. This bacterium strikes fear into the heart of every technician and veterinarian in the whole wide world.

And the worst part is? The owners never believe us on the first go. And so they don't come back for continued treatment... Until it returns in full force with a newfound resistance to the one antibiotic that actually worked well. And this infection is painful, beyond belief. There have been times where we've had to use lidocaine, while the patient is sedated -- to even clean the visible portion of the ear canal... Nevermind the inner canal.

I nominate Pseudomonas aeruginosa not because I love the bacterium, but because it's the only bacterium that has Demanded my respect and commanded my fear in such a way.

@bacteriashowdown

[aprito]

hello <3 since i got these asks at the same time i decided to combine my thoughts on them in this post. yet another annoying sjw essay from yours truly on this blog 

before i get into these i think i need to preface why im like. i guess overly hyperfocused on a certain unproblematic base (same age au / platonic canon) for them and avoid the ped0philic content like the plague lol

tw for pedophilia ment, rape ment if that makes you squicky. ALSO THIS IS LONG AND RAMBLY

as i’ve mentioned a couple times already, ive been into the ship since i was 12, back when it was very very common to not only post untagged (nsfw) canonverse content of the two in writing and in drawing but also non con and the like, so you can imagine how bad my first impression online was. thinking back on it ...as a child i found it disturbing but didnt really register how problematic it really was?? (i know, but i also lived in the middle of nowhere and had no one explain this to me) 

skip to 2014 aka me coming back to naruto at 17ish and i had kinda become hyper aware of the fact that there was an increasing amount of people online who had come forward with explaining how fictional problematic content, mostly pedophilia, had been used to groom them into starting relationships with adullts. it was also a time where a lot of people didnt believe these victims, not registering how common it was for minors to be online friends with adults who had no boundaries and no qualms exposing them such content. not gonna get into my personal life here but i was lucky to not having gone through this myself. like... it kinda was my first time truly realising how fiction can EASILY be used to manipulate others irl (and yes i will not argue this, if you dont think fictional media can form and manipulate people’s opinions on attitudes, countries, cultures and virtues, pick up a book about the effects of propaganda media at least once please) 

i, being young, still liking the dynamic but not really the romance, would point this out here and there in the fandom and get into fights with grown adults in their mid 20s who assumed i automatically hated the ship(s) and tried to restrict their freedom of speech or whatever, heard everything from the “age of consent doesnt exist in naruto” to the “sasori looks like a child what does it matter” despite people clearly playing on him being older and experienced. it made me so upset that people were just consuming all this content uncritically and exposing children to it tbh?? not really just sos but a lot of minor/adult ships in naruto in general. and thats where i sat down and thought, i do not want to be a grown adult talking down to children that point out how unsafe the fandom is. theyre absolutely right in drawing these boundaries and calling out adults who defend the uncritical consumption and creation of this content. i do not want to consume or create content that predators could use to groom minors, and i absolutely do want to let younger people in fandom know that i am respecting their comfort zones and want them to have a safe and fun experience. after all, naruto is not an adult show and i think a lot of people forget that!!!! i am not perfect in that regard but its something that i, at the age of 23, am very passionate about and strive towards to.

and i guess thats where same age au was born for me and i have been sticking to it ever since. 

so finally we can move to the first question 

aside from the fact that we both dont like canon sos, i dont think it would work out even if i wasnt prejudiced to it anyways. in all honesty, 35 year old canon sasori is not a redeemable character to me, given the fact that he’s easily amongst the cruelest villains in naruto (torturing and killing and taxiderming people for his own fun personal gain, never for a goal that served anyone but himself. how do you redeem having over 300 corpses in your backpack that you felt absolutely no remorse for killing). sasori was legit one of the only cruel villains that didnt had someone else pull the strings, which sends a clear message on kishi’s part, who absolutely loves to redeem villains LOL.

being that old, he obviously had already been very manifested in what he believed in, even if it was shakey, to the point where the first crack in that world view (sakura and chiyo protecting each other) immediately had him give up on his life all together. that, in my opinion, is not a man who’s going to know what healthy relationships would look like, regardless of it being romantic or not. 35 year old sasori to me has the same appeal as an expired can of tuna and he’s probably very happy 6 feet under. he’s supposed to be a failed gaara in that sense that he had no one to look out for him and therefore was never going to experience anything but a bad ending in life. its fine that hes dead honestly, it wraps up his short character development the best IMO.

adding to that, seriously, sakura was obviously interested in knowing why he was that way, and called him out for being seriously fucked in the head, but it’s weird to me that people assume she had any interest in actively rehabilitating him, let alone starting a serious romantic relationship with him. sakura who’s not only very, uhm, immature and straight forward when it comes to her romantic viewpoints also, as a big bootlicker, wouldnt soil her standing in the village by starting anything with a disgraced and far too gone criminal like sasori. shipping that version of sasori with sakura intimately is still going to set her up for a huge power imbalance that would be difficult to handle imo, even if she was the one in the fight ultimately exerting her power over him. i would still look at it and think damn she deserves better than having to play therapist for man like that lol.

additionally, even if you ignored all of this, you cant really ignore that sasori had already known her as a child, and that had been his first and most impactful impression of her. i dont think that sasori would look at 35 year old sakura and see her as a grown woman and not the little green girl she was in the fight. plus, you easily fall into predatory comparison territory between the “childish” and “womanly” and i have seen way too often in fic just being boiled down to her now being fuckable. a lot of of ships do this and i would just like to remind yall thats it not normal for adults to want to start relationships with children they have seen grown up or known as a child when they themselves were fully grown adults. therefore, maybe if sakura hadnt met sasori before it would be less of a problem? but that also obviously defeats the point of the dynamic and the reason he died in the first place. so yeah, it sounds kind of doomed especially if you were to make it romantic. 

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE SECOND QUESTION

let me preface this that im not fundamentally against age gaps, even if im not super interested in it. after all, colorblind had a 5 yr age gap (with sakura being 21), even if, say, i wrote similar fics today i probably would make it smaller lol. i think it can be handled well if both parties have enough life experience to deal with it, and the author is cautious of where the age gap starts, i think a 10+ year age gap would be fine in a scenario where the younger party (i guess sakura) was at least 25-27ish, meaning she has completed most of her most formative life stages and probably had been in relationships before, meaning she would be able to handle it without having to fear a huge power imbalance. the older the younger party is the less the age gap is going to matter tbh .TsukiHoshino and AngelOfDeath10 both handle age gaps in their fics really well imo, so i do not mind reading about them.

unfortunately, a lot of people in this fandom think making sakura barely "”””legal””””” (18, not even 20 which is hilarious to me because the source material is obviously japanese) because they both cannot stand her being past her “prime years” of being young fertile and fuckable to much older men as well as thinking a 20 year old is automatically old enough to handle that type of relationship. ive seen a lot of unironic takes that believe it will absolve them of callout posts if they throw around age of consent and “shes 18 now suckers!!!” enough lmfao. absolutely hilarious. aging a minor up without aging the adult down seriously reeks of predatory “cant wait until youre 18″ narratives and thats why i find it similarly disturbing as straight up pedo shipping.

ultimately, sasosaku is and will always be a inherently problematic ship in canon, which is why i think it should always be handled a little more responsibly in fandom spaces, ignoring or outright excusing the main problem factor, which is sasori, isnt going to convince anyone that the dynamic in itself is well written and interesting enough to explore in aus, like giving sasori the redemption most of us wanted him to have by aging him down to a point in time where he was still realistically going to allow being positively influenced, similar to gaara. 

so really, what i think is well handled age gap and how most people handle age gap in the naruto fandom are two different worlds at times lol 

tl;dr

canon shippers have never been anything but gross when i was younger and i didnt wanna be like that, even if youre “smart”enough to differenate, actual creeps dont really care and might use your content to blur the lines, sasori isnt rly redeemable so romantic canonverse realistically wouldnt make much sense and is still iffy, age gaps are fine if they are handled well, but given that the dynamic doesnt really need the age gap to still work im not that invested on making that an essential part of my shipping experience.  

thank you for reading and hope this makes sense!

[survivor-kuwait]

Episode 10 - “I wanna merge” - Thomas

alright just a recap of the round since i was at work all day! i was suuuuper excited that despite being in the warzone i was there with owen and matt my main boiz. also now people don't need to go bitching that i haven't been there yet anymore xoxo bite me cullan u bitch. apparently right when we got to the warzone tommy threw out adrian's name to trace bc he's still pressed about him calling him inactive during the round that nehe left which i mean eyeroll but ok. so as soon as i heard this i told matt, which probably was a mistake on my part but oh well. at that point i still was wanting to go through with what matt had wanted which was an alliance with us, adrian, and maynor. matt tells me last night though that adrian apparently initially brought up wanting to vote myself or owen due to challenge prowess, and i'm assuming the fact that we're winners as well. again, eyeroll. i brush it off and am like well let's sleep on it and see where we're at in the morning. so i tell owen all of this as well and make him promise me not to leak bc this could've potentially been a big round for us depending on what we wanted to do. he agreed with me that adrian even suggesting our names in passing wasn't a cute look and i didn't really wanna stand for that. we talked about it in pms and then again in the paradise hotel chat and it was odd bc then traces' information and actions were always seemingly right behind us. i'm fairly certain matt was leaking all of it to him but ok. i mean i hope he wasn't, but we'll see. trace and adrian got close real fast if they weren't already so that was kind of another point that i was trying to drive home with matt. good ol' matt kept mentioning yk that me and owen are his main people and that he doesn't care if adrian goes and at that point it just felt like ok well put your money where your mouth is. so we push for that and come to the conclusion that we really just need us, tommy and chloe obvs bc she's not gonna vote herself. the group decides to leave trace out of it after i bring up how trace apparently has all of the tea so maybe it wasn't getting leaked to him afterall??? idk shrug. i did let stephen know what was going on a little before tribal, i probably should've confirmed with him earlier but i wasn't sure how much he was willing to trust me with kind of right away like that. everything goes right as planned and adrian leaves 6-2??? happy to be back and out of the warzone, but i miss matt and owen already, but corey is back with me now!!! oh that reminds me apparently matt is wary of both ian and corey so i gotta keep an eye on that moving forwards and plan accordingly. ummmm also trace messaged me and was like hey so what happened?? i decided to tell him that i legit must've misunderstood messages from someone and that he was back to voting adrian. idk i just played dumb so i hope he bought it. he was like yeah as long as it was miscommunication and not me getting fucked over it's cool sdjgksdlg like what am i supposed to say to that.... yes i was trying to fuck u over u right.... got me!! 

Genuinely surprised Chloe survived after being a target for so long, makes me suspicious there might be another alliance out there, because most people told me Adrian, they might not trust me yet, hopefully voting with them helped me there.

If I’m being truly honest. This challenge is so weird that i dont think imma be able to like do iy. Might be a warzone trip for me this round and it sucks because I dont want to go. Like Adrian was someone i could have worked with but he left 6-2 and I hope it wasnt Matt who voted Cloe.

---

I got the first one in 6 clicks. I hope im able to get the rest pretty quickly but i dont know if i move from kuwait or i start from survivor again.

Part 1. I have emotional motion sickness. Somebody pls roll the windows down. I'm scared to lose Matt or Owen at this tribal. I don't see it happening but it still worries me. Ideally, Thomas leaves. Kait or Stephen leaving aren't the worst case scenarios either. Realistically, I predict Trace or Stephen. Trace.... pls survive. I'll send this confessional in two parts. Will be writing the second part later tonight. Part 2. Well. Adrian left. this is bad for my game. Is it worst case scenario? no. But Trace didn't vote him out; Matt did. Matt betrayed Adrian and Kait basically told me so. I cannot trust Matt as much as I thought I could; but maybe his allegiance is to Owen primarily as Matt sold Adrian out bc Adrian wanted to target Kait/Owen. It's hectic but Adrian was a number for my game, personally. I'll do my espionnage and try to keep tabs on what everyone is thinking. Oh, and attempt to win immunity again!

Well, last night's war zone did NOT go as I expected. I really thought that everyone was on board to vote Chloe, but I was clearly mistaken. The tribal left me a little confused, and genuinely nervous about what my fate would be if I were to return to the war zone in the near future. There are a few things that I did learn from this war zone, however. I really think that matt is kind of calling the shots over there. He seemed to be the sneakiest one, and was the one lie that kind of hurt the most. Kait claims that she thought I knew the vote was Adrian, and that is was a mistake on her part. I don't fucking buy it. Kait is clearly close with Thomas (she literally calls him Tommy), but decided that they couldn't trust me enough to tell me in the end the vote wasn't chloe. I did not appreciate that. I hate being in war zones where people who are inactive get to stay because somehow, someone figured out how to goat them to the end. I am going to do my best to stay out of the war zone this round, but this challenge is confusing so I have no idea if I even have a chance.

Im really nervous for this immunity. I hope i had a quick clicks. If not I hope im with people i can work with and not be voted out. Im anticipating a merge soon but how it works idk.

http://prntscr.com/nu7q5f what kind of false scorpio antics.......... 

Me? Safe again? Hskshdjd who woulda THOUGHT!!! I’m glad madison is finally safe I feel like the more she goes the more time she has to make connections lmao. I know she rlly wanted to be safe this time for some reason but part of me thought she had been throwing tbh so she could actually play the game which isn’t a bad strategy. I feel really bad for matt going again :( but I think he will be okay. Here’s hoping they send Stephen out please and ty!!!! In other news I still think I’ve never talked to Ian or corey which is funny af because corey could be my number one in this game. I feel like he will be loyal to me once we make it together.... I rlly just hope him and Kait don’t clash, but I’m scared af because Matt was sus about corey getting renee out and I haven’t gotten to tell corey that yet. Hopefully when the time comes I can get corey and Kait to work together and the three of us can go to the end somehow. I’m not gonna turn on Kait. I can’t turn on corey. It’s gonna be messed up if they ever start to target each other bc Kait doesn’t know I’m close with him but he knows I’m close with her nnnn

Kait thinks I'm targeting pairs, huh? Well, yes but actually no. I'm targeting pairs in the since that members of those pairs are people I don't think would work with me, I'm not targeting them for being pairs. I've got a pair in Leo I want to work with, also MY SIGN PARTNER IS STILL IN THE GAME, albeit barely. It has become abuntly clear to me that Matt does not have over lapping interests with me in this game. The man is out there spreading propaganda against me to Kait and Owen, who has never met me might I add so he sees me exactly as I see him. A threat. Kait, I thought you were warming up to me, but please keep thinking Corey is who you should confide in, he's totally not closer to me or anything.

This Warzone is really stressing me out. I don’t think I have the same allies I’m usually confident with. There’s Devon and Trace and Maynor and Chloe but I only can trust them so much because none of them are working together. I’m hoping to get out timmy or Stephen who I don’t know and don’t trust but I also know that my name certainly could be coming up soon enough because with each tribal I survive I become a bigger and bigger threat. I’m ready for some idol shenanigans if need be but I’d love to save that shit for down the road.

The names being thrown out right now are Cloe, Timmy, and Stephen. I much rather have Timmy stay because we are actually working together in this game rather than against. Stephen even tho we dont talk much there is still that connection through his game he hosted and one we played together. Getting majority on Cloe will be great because she wont get dragged to the f3 and take a spot that could be mine.

This warzone feels different. It’s an odd group and a lot of people who haven’t been together. So it’s somewhat quiet but also contentious since anything could happen at this point. Not sure how tonight will play our, should be fun....

So the vote seems to be Chloe, yet she always gets votes and it’s never her so naturally I’m weary. I think this will be the time though, especially with who is at this tribal. Trace was saying Devon had said Stephen, which I don’t want him going because he would be a good number for me. Trace also said that Matt said my name but I think he’s now on the Chloe train...I’m hoping. Either way I doubt he would have majority. I’m hoping I stay because it’s about to be merge and I think I’ve been doing well so far. I’m proud of how social I have been with people, it’s not the best, but it’s a lot better than I usually am.

It looks like the vote is locked on Cloe but still very awkwardly quiet. I hope nothing crazy goes down. *knocks on wood*

Don’t mind me just dying and having no idea what’s going on at all hahaha probs gonna be voted out next xoxox 

This better be the last Warzone, I wanna merge.

So, with little debate, I think we settled on voting Chloe. Originally, Devon and Matt wanted to vote Stephen, but I had to convince them onto Chloe because I want to make sure we have more people on our tribe than theirs so that I have a chance of winning immunity. Matt told me he heard Timmy's name which is weird. I think he was just trying to scare me. I told Timmy about it, and Timmy was upset, but I really don't think it went anywhere. Chloe came to me and told me that she would vote anyone as long as it wasn't her. I really don't trust Matt even though he keeps telling me that I can trust him, so idk. Maybe I'll flip the script at the last minute and try to get everyone Matt at the last minute, but we shall have to see if that's smart for me... idk