#how to kill a geologist

[badnewlifesmpideas]

The baseball bat on the head relates to "how to kill a geologist"

"-and then I'd hit him with the wooden baseball bat in my other hand, which they would not have noticed because geologists can only see rocks and minerals."

-✨️anon

Oh!! Wait I have seen this!!! Oh that's funny. I'm kinda sad I didn't realize that earlier lol

-Raven

(this ask references this post!)

[howlingday]

How to Kill a Dust Scientist

---------------------------------------------------

Nora: Full disclaimer; my hatred for dust scientists is purely theatrical.

Nora: But if I did have to kill a dust scientist, it would be very easy, regardless of the reason. I would simply brandish my knife which I had carved from from dust, and they would be compelled to approach.

Weiss: "That's very cool!"

Nora: They would say, confident in their superior strength and endurance from carrying all the dust rocks around that they carry around with them at all times of all days.

Nora: They would shower me with interesting dust facts, hovering just out of range of my dust knife's cutting edge. They would then bide their time, waiting for me to lower my guard from exhaustion.

Weiss: "It is simply a dust shard, and is irradiated and will do more harm to your hands than to the other-"

TONK!

Nora: AND THEN I WOULD HIT THEM IN THE FACE WITH MY HAMMER, which they are blind to as my hammer does not contain the dust and is therefore invisible to every dust scientists.

[mistresscitrusslice]

How to Kill a Geologist but with Hazel and Coach Hedge

[flingza98]

Disclaimer: my hated of conservativivs is purely theatrical but if i were to kill one it would be very easy.

I would show them my collection of trump supporter itemsand they would be compelled to approach confident in the facts and logic from all the Ben Shapiro videos they watch

Thats very cool

They'd say

And they would shower me in diffrent insults to liberal

"But as they are weak and inferior to us the have no chance winning the elect- AND THEN I HIT THEM WITH MY LIBERTARIAN as conservatives can only see libreals and barn owls.

Parody of how to kill a geologist

[jimthemoth]

How to Kill a Baseball Player: A Short Scientific Writing

By a baseball player who took earth sciences in high school and understands the properties of a large amount (for a baseball player) of rock and minerals.

The idea of killing a geologist by leading them on with an obsidian knife and hitting them on the head with a wooden baseball bat is an interesting scientific scenario, as it has been proven that some geologists would fall for this. The question that remains is, "How would i go about killing a baseball player?" The idea of how I would go about killing a fellow baseball player is purely hypothetical and scientific. To kill a baseball player is to kill a geologist, but you would use slightly different tools. To begin, you would present to them a baseball bat made up of pure sodium metal. "That's very cool," they'd say, confident in their superior agility from running around in a square pattern. The baseball player would approach cautiously while spouting nonsense about the resource that was used to create the baseball bat. "Sodium metal is part of the alkalai metal group, and it has the atomic number of 11. However, it's use for the creation of a baseball bat is a terrible idea, as sodium is a very soft metal and is highly reactive when exposed to water, as it is known to combust when even a tiny amount of water comes into contact wi--" and then you stab them with your obsidian knife as the difference between baseball players and geologists is that geologists can only see rocks and minerals, but baseball players can only see different types of wood and hollow metal pipes.

[ytcomments-archive]

[tarjapearce]

Like Me Pt. 2

Tarzan! Miguel O'Hara x Scientist ! Reader

Art by Rendraws21 on X

WARNINGS: Mildly suggestive, power dynamics, emotional distress, endangering situations, Kraven being an asshole.

Summary: Your savior proves himself to be very much real.

A|N: Hope you like! I know you're waiting smut. Just bare with it! ;w; Reblogs and feedback are always welcome ❤️

Previous Miguelverse Main Masterlist

Kraven didn't dally and ordered the camp to be settled. The spot was rather good. A prime source of water and food next to you all, soil sturdy and perfect for withstanding the hard hammering of the tools that nailed the bases for the tents.

And after hours of bickering, russian cursing, more work and the crew doctor patching your arm up, the camp was settled and food served.

Each bite not only felt heavenly, but was scarfed down. You couldn't care less if Peter looked your way, mildly disgusted and surprised of your manners, or rather the lack of them while eating.

It was the least you deserved after surviving a ship sinking, getting lost in the jungle, being chased by a giant Jaguar and a man that left more questions than answers.

Who was he? More important, How had he survived all these years on his own?

After a second plate and extra slices of bread, one of the men approached and announced the readiness of your tent. One of the things you asked in your contract. To have your own, cause as much as you trusted Peter, there was nothing better than to have your own space and privacy in the midst of an unhealthy amount of testosterone surrounding you.

"We've eaten, replenished, and blah blah. What happened?" Peter mumbled while picking his and your plate together.

You shook your head softly as another crew member passed by. You didn't trust them, and Kraven had proved to be unpredictable.

One minute he cared for his crew and the other he was leaving you to fend for yourselves. But as long as you did your job, you wouldn't be part of the russian's guessing dangerous games.

"Kraven said we'd have to make do with the little tools we have. He spent a good time of the day trying to get some signal for the radio."

"Any luck?"

"None so far." Peter mumbled as he took your things inside your tent.

A hammock was the bed, a few boxes and other storage things were placed in a corner. A chalkboard and your investigation books in another corner and against all odds, a little broken mirror that acted as a poor attempt of a vanity ontop of another wooden box. Your hairbrush rested next to it. Whoever arranged it, at least had the consideration to make it as comfortable looking as possible.

In total, you had a couple of shirts and skirts left to use. The rest remained on the sea, floating and drifting away with unknown course.

Peter excused to go change himself and you seized the chance to do the same. Catching a cold in the jungle wasn't in your priorities list. Not with reduced medicine and victuals.

You put on a dry set and combed your hair out as much as you could. Peter joined you a couple of minutes later.

The fire cracked and sparked alive as the crew surrounded it. The day had been chaotic at best and everyone tried to soothe the nerves in their own way. Some drank, others sang, others talked and soon Kraven joined.

Others simply went to sleep. Too tired to keep up after a well deserved meal.

"So..." Peter started while sitting before you, a rag and some tubs on his hands. He was cleaning the remaining pieces of your equipment.

"Promise me you won't talk to anyone about this. And I mean it, Parker."

"I'm a geologist, not a snitch."

"I'm... kinda scared of what might happen if Kraven finds out"

"Now you're scaring me.  What happened back there?"

"I know... who killed the beast Kraven is skinning." A gulp rolled down your throat upon remembering the lurid scene displaying before your eyes

"Wait... you said, who?"

A nod from you and Peter paled.

"We're not alone, that's for sure."

Peter rubbed his hands against his face, an exasperated groan escaped him.

"He's taller than Kraven."

"Bullshit." Peter mumbled almost immediate, surprised at your words.

"I'm not bullshittin' you Parker!" You had to hush your voice and soon grabbed a sketch notebook and begun tracing and drawing.

"He's freaking tall, long hair and he's naked. Well, not naked but a loincloth is everything but clothes if you think about it."

Peter frowned suspiciously as his hand pressed on your skin, to see if your body temperature had increased. Jungle fever was one of the worst things a human could suffer when away from their homeland. Cause he refused to believe anything of the nonsense that came out of your mouth was true.

A man taller than Sergei? Impossible. He was tall, but Sergei had been one of the tallest and well built men he had ever came across with.

"What are you doing?" You pushed his hands away and frowned.

"I'm sorry, I do want to believe you but.."

"I'm telling you the truth, Pete! He had... This... red hue on his eyes and fangs!"

"Fangs?" The incredulity in Peter couldn't be hidden the more he listened to your apparent rave.

"He's fucking strong, Pete. He was holding that beast by his tail! and then fought body to body against it! and He's so damn touchy. No respect for personal space!."

"And what? He smashed the jaguar to death and then kissed you?"

"Yes!" You nodded but quickly frowned when Peter tittered on his seat, unable to keep the mirth away.

"Why are you laughing?!"

"I'm sorry. You know we've been friends since college, but you seriously can't expect me to believe that, Dally."

A short for Dalhberg. The surname that put your name out in the researcher's map in London, upon discovering and naming another type of daisy and named it after you. The Dalhberg Daisy.

"You believe in the freaking Queen but refuse to believe in this?"

"I believe in the Queen's acquisitive power, nothing else. Cause I've seen it!" He explained, skeptical.

You showed him the sketch and shoved it to his hands.

"Look at that! That's exactly how he looks like!"

Peter sighed and raked over his eyes on the semi-crumpled paper sheet. Sharp features, a strong jaw and deep eyes.

"Yeah, a haircut would make him look better though." he chuckled, "Look, I know it's been a long day for us... let's rest, ok? We've got another tomorrow."

With a frown you removed the sketchbook away and tossed it on the makeshift vanity.

"He's real." you pointed at the sketchbook

"Okay, okay. He's real. We can discuss it all tomorrow when we're less tired, alright?"  He held your shoulders, trying to ease your rising anger.

But you quickly removed his hands from you, hurt that your best friend didn't believe you. "Whatever. Goodnight."

Peter left with a defeated sigh and soon you cuddled in your hammock.

"I know he's real." With a huff, you pushed the pillow closer to your face, letting the day's weight to finally crash on you.

-----

The loud bangs of a gunshot echoed through the bright blue skies, frightening any local fauna that rested comfortably, like you, that nearly fell out the hammock from the initial jumpscare.

With a heavy exhale, and rub of your eyes you geared up for the day.

This time Kraven was thoughtful enough to give you a weapon. A small knife with enough sharp to slice and dice through anything weak enough to perish under the blade.

And soon everyone gathered to the morning structions. Kraven split up the crew in three parts. The first group of men would go to the beach to recover as much equipment as they could. The second group would be in charge to set up traps and hunt down for food. And the third one, meaning Peter, you, two more men and himself would go explore and study the jungle in order to gain any sort of information of new potential species.

You carried a small backpack, filled with your sketchbook, pencils, some essay and sample tubes and some snacks in case Kraven decided to return until dinner time.

And after a quick breakfast of oatmeal and fruits, everyone left.

Peter walked behind Sergei, guiding the group whenever the mercenary asked him to. You were in the middle as the other two men trailed with their guns behind.

Morning slowly poured into hours. Tortuous, running at the speed of a snail. Each breathing felt like adding more to the waiting, bringing your nerves to a much annoyed stance.

But it quickly melted away upon finding your first discovery.

The grass laid pressed in a circular pattern on the ground. The leaves were placed strategically, as if used as cushions in great amounts. A couple of fruit carcasses laid next to them. Discarded and forgotten.

"Look at that" The excitement in your voice beyond evident. You crouched to see if there was any other clues to your growing suspicion.

Kraven and Peter stopped upon you crouching to the floor.

"What is it?" Kraven pulled his gun from it's holster and walked over you.

"These are nests!"

"Nests?" His brow quirked and you nodded vigorously, to then count the spots. Around six in total.

"You know what that means? They live in packs! Gorillas live in packs!"

"About damn time we found something." Kraven nodded, pleased as he helped you up to then mark a spot in his map.

"Good job, Dalhberg."

Praised the mercenary before moving.

--

When the sun got high enough and Peter discovered some other findings like rare minerals, the group decided to take a break nearby a lake.

The five of you sat down and ate whatever thing you got left from breakfast.

Once you were done, you took your backpack, pencil and sketchbook with you.

"Where are you going?" Kraven grumbled after gulping down the water from his canteen.

"Saw some specimens of plants Id like to register. Won't take long."

"You better return as soon as possible, understood?"

The mercenary warned and you nodded while walking away from the tree. Excited to partake in the things you were brought and paid to do.

Your first specimen was a moss plant, then a new type of orchid. A fish, some birds and more plants. Even though you studied everything alive, the plants were your speciality.

You put the little backpack in a a nearby trunk as you sat down to draw yet another orchid. The place seemed flooding with them.

Engrossed beyond wits to notice you had drifted off a bit too far from the group and a little too late a baboon sniffing and ransacking your backpack.

"H-Hey! Hey! -The baboon took the backpack away, excited and driven by the tinkling within "Get back here!"

The animal hopped on the trees before you could catch it, with graceful and effortless agility, to finally stop to a sturdy looking and serpent-like shaped trunk above the middle of a swamp.

As much as you wanted to let the monkey get away with it all, you didn't want to face Kraven's anger for losing the last bit of equipment and delay the investigation. You didn't know when the next ship would arrive. None did actually.

It's hoots and chirping only increased the more things he pulled out of your backpack. The tubs shattered as they fell off.

"Stop it!" you shrieked while hopping onto the trunk with wobbly and uneven steps.

The monkey hooted louder until it started shrieking, as if mocking you whenever your balance failed and you were forced to crawl over the top.

"God, I swear... if I catch you, I'm so making an article on how annoying you are!"

The baboon just screeched at your silly threat once more before leaving your backpack pending from a twig as he jumped way through the stretched branches that favored him like open arms, with your bag of seeds.

Your breath hitched when the trunk creaked and some cracking around the base perked up your ears.

Shit.

You couldn't stop and return crawling from where you came from, not when the backpack was oh so close to be reached and your nightmare to be over.

With a deep breath, you crawled closer and closer. Paused breaths turned controlled, but quickly grunted when the hem of your skirt stuck in a jagged branch.

"No, no" You whined and pulled away, the trunk creaked harder and you immediately hugged the trunk.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck-" with a firm yet calculated yank, you ripped the fabric away, freeing yourself although losing a good chunk of front coverage.

A thunderous crack made your breath hitch and you moved forward as the trunk stuttered midair. It was then your eyes actually considered the generous and dangerous distance from your position to the murky water. But the backpack dangling before you, edged you to take a risky decision.

Or you took the backpack and threw it on land, hoping to take the least damage as possible or jumping to that other branch to avoid falling to the water.

None of them happened as the tree dipped forward, and with a dying groan, the cracks widened, tearing the feeble base of the trunk, unable to support your weight any longer.

As in slow motion, you saw the murky water closer and closer and closer, until nothing but darkness swallowed you whole. Cold and muddy water hit you, suffocating your body with enraged water that fought hard to drown you.

Your hands were the only thing that made it out as they failed. The sub aquatic flora begun their tangling in your boots and legs, pulling you down.

Your lungs burned as some water seeped through, the backpack sunk deeper and deeper. Like a sacrifice in exchange of your life. Because a strong pair of tanned hands pulled you with a powerful yank by the forearm, out of the water before death and crocodiles owned it.

Your head too dizzy to actually understand what was happening. Your eyes could only see the landscape sliding smoothy underneath your feet, like if you were flying.

Am I dead? Dead people don't fly, do they?

You shrieked as soon as your eyes looked upwards. Powerful and solid thighs held tightly on the growing vines, that spurted from underneath the gigantic trees, as one of his hand took your arm gently to suddenly pull you up in the air and catch you in his arms.

Your instincts told you to hold onto him as the other survival mode blared with danger alarms. The massive wall of solid muscles he had for a body was warm, full of scars and plush hair that did nothing but welcome your dizzy head on his chest.

The man quirked a brow at your sudden state. He frowned and quickly got over the foliage of a tree, before the pouring rain trapped you both.

You were put with ease against the solid and definitely not rotting trunk, and your body lurched to the side to expell away the swallowed water, clearing your airways.

A firm slap from his hand made your lungs to finally get some air as you gasped and coughed, all the while he watched you curiously.

You were drenched, against a tree, clothes sticking way too intimately against your shivering body, breathing like you were a first born, raged and fast. Lungs burned less.

Eyes finally widened when recognizing the man before you. Some fresh scars littered his Greek-god type physique.

"T-Thank you." You mumbled through clattering teeth and forced yourself to take a deep inhale to control the rising anxiety.

He grunted and approached. One of his hands slid gently under your chin to take a hold of your cheek. Your head instinctively melted into his heavenly body heat, and your eyes dared to shut for a minute. Relishing in the irradiating warmth his calloused hands provided.

He's so warm.

As if sensing the good deed, the man rubbed his hands on your cold arms, mindful of the patches around your arm, a couple of times before going back up to your cheeks and neck.

You gasped as soon as his hands were placed on your chest. His hands gently palming your breast but quickly let them go upon feeling your hardened nipples. You quickly covered your chest

He watched his hands, as if inspecting them for any damage when he felt the hardened nub, to then return to your arms, prying them away from your chest.

"Wait!"

You shrieked and he took both of your wrists with one hand and hovered them above your head, squishing them against the tree, softly. His eyes raked and took in every feature of you, before stopping at your chest again.

Your breath hitched as he slid the other hand inside your shirt. Cheeks turned impossibly warmer when he took one of your breasts and pulled it out of their confinements.

He examinated the perky mound with puppy wonder-like curiosity and then looked down his own chest. He frowned. His didn't swell like yours did.

"Wh-What are you doi-" you bit your lip as he poked your nipple, sniffed it and licked it. Earning a short mewl from you.

The sound startled him and he let you go.

"T- That's not a polite thing to do!" 

You quickly put the breast back and swung your hand to slap him. You had to admit his reflexes were something else cause it caught it before it collided against his face.

"How dare you?!" You struggled to let your hand go, but stopped your outburst when his eyes watched your hands and brought them before his ever curious face.

His own hand reached up, and placed itself before yours, comparing the stretched and long digits against your smaller ones. They weren't the same size, that was much true, but the texture and lines he had were the same on yours.

His eyes shone brighter than any  bewilderment. His mind had finally clicked together at the sudden epiphany that flooded his brain.

You were like him.

He pursed his lips before letting out an excited grunt. He backed away to create enough space for his arms to move freely.

He pointed to himself and spoke with the deepest yet excited voice he could manage.

"Miguel."

Your eyes went wide and you approached. He tried again while pointing at his chest.

"Mi guel."

"Miguel." His nose flared proudly and his throat grunted happily.

"Oh! I see!"

His ears perked up upon hearing your name.

"OhIsee!" He repeated.

But you quickly corrected him, with your name as you pointed to yourself and then called his name as you pointed at him.

A buttery crawl rolled down your spine as he mumbled your name.

"Exactly." you smiled.

He cupped your face again and mumbled your name once more. However, the sound of a gunshot tearing through the skies disrupted his attention from you and stood at the edge of the branch.

"Kraven" You gasped. Completely forgetting about him and the group.

Oh no...

Trouble was a tiny word of the deep neck shit you were into. Another shot rippled through, frightening the birds in the ratio.

"Kraven!" He repeated, excited.

Extraordinary. There wasn't any word to describe him better. He took you back, trapping you in between his muscular thighs and swinging through vines.

The more you approached the camp, the clearer you saw this massive black and brown spots moving away from the settlement.

Your hearth thumped with violence upon finally standing before a small group of gorillas, sniffing and hooting softly upon seeing Miguel.

Your savior wasted no time in pulling you closer to them. You shook your head, rightfully frightened.

"No, no, no wait!"

The gorillas huffed to then sniff your head, your clothes. Some even pulled at your hair softly, others examinated the clothes you were in.

Another gunshot echoed closely this time and it was loud enough to spook out the beasts out that pulled Miguel with them. You could only watch him, wide eyed, expectant. But he left.

"Miguel..."

----

Kraven wasn't one for losing his temper with women. But you, had the annoying ability to make his patiece turn to dust in the least opportunes of moments.

"I asked you, where the fuck have you been?!"

He dragged you to the center of the crew and threw you on the floor.

"I told you, I almost drowned! Why do you think I'm like this?!"

Kraven spat a few words in his native language under his breath and grunted

"You lost your equipment, didn't you?"

"I... I tried to get it back but I almost drown in the swamp, Sergei!" you explained with nothing but the truth

"You can't swim, don't you bullshit me.!"

"I'm telling you the truth!"

"Then how you survived!?"

Peter frowned as he looked at you.

"I was saved. Ok? A man saved me!"

"A man?"

"He's... Not like us. He's taller than you and he saved me!" you kept pressing, hoping the angered mercenary understood that you didn't do anything in purpose to upset him.

"He knows how to swing through the vines! And dropped me here! His name is Miguel. "

Everyone stared with derision at you and Peter seemed concerned you stuck with your story so bad to the point of risking your own neck and reputation.

Kraven' brows furrowed into a scowl and soon he pulled his revolver out and pointed at you.

Your face turned to panic, as your hands rose shakily.

"A savage named Miguel helped you?"

"He did! Otherwise you'd still be looking for me."

Kraven snorted without removing the gun's aim from your body.

"Funny you think I'd waste my resources to look up for a stupid woman like you."

"Please, you have to believe me! I saw gorillas around the camp!"

Kraven removed the safety pin from the revolver, as if peeved you'd waste his time and resources into being an idiot and not doing your work as he required.

Time was ticking and he still had no news, and for you to be fantasizing about savages and doing stupid things such as endangering yourself had proved you weren't reliable.

"You're not reliable, anymore, Dahlberg."

"No! Sergei listen to me-"

He pointed the gun once more to you "I can't keep unreliable people within my crew."

"I'm not lying!" You pleaded with all your might and tears in your eyes, "Miguel is-"

Before Sergei could push the tip of his revolver on your head and shoot, the earth underneath rumbled, as Miguel fell in between you.

Real.

Kraven stepped back as the imaginary savage was now fully standing before him. His head had to crane up to meet his burning ember eyes.

Miguel's lips snarled at him, showing his fangs and beating his chest. A clear challenge for him to fight him.

A collective round of gasps echoed through the men, but when Miguel bared his teeth, they all pulled their guns and pointed at him

"Stop!" You yelled and quickly scrambled to your feet to take Miguel's hand and shake your head with determination.

"Don't hurt him!"

Peter immediately got himself before you and rose his arms, showing he was no armed.

"I'm sure we can reach an agreement here without filling eachother with bullets, gentlemen"

"Shut up, Parker!" Sergei seethed and with a deep flare of his nose, pointed the gun at Miguel again, but Peter grabbed the weapon and the shot tore through the air again.

"Kraven" Miguel grumbled at the gun shot sound.

Said mercenary could only watch him, nonplussed for a moment. While you, again, stood your ground before the behemoth of a man. Attempting your best at protecting him.

"Have... we met before?" Kravinoff spoke confused.

"I told you he could speak! And he is real!"

Miguel remained glued at your side. Everyone slowly put their weapons down as Kraven approached to take a proper look at Miguel, fascinated by his sheer size and build.

Peter had to admit, that it was the last time he'd ever doubt your words.

"You said you had seen gorillas?"

Again, you nodded and Miguel repeated the word.

"Miguel knows them. He could help us."

"Help us? The man barely understand us, but... It's better than nothing I suppose."

Sergei scrunched his face in confusion as Miguel took strands of your hair and sniffed them, his senses awakening in pure adrenaline. Throat grunted approvingly.

"Yeah... kind of understand the personal space thing now." Peter cleared his throat behind you. The rest kept looking to see but quickly were dismissed by their leader.

"Oh, shut up." You grumbled nervously as Miguel pulled your head to his chest once more, to listen to his powerful heartbeats.

"Yeah, it's very very nice." You chuckled nervously with a soft flush creeping your cheek.

"Nice." He repeated.

Kraven could only watch but if he was the link towards the gorillas, he'd seize the chance in every way he could.

"He's way smarter than you think."

"We're running against time, how would he understand us, Dhalberg?"

Miguel moved to inspect Kraven, mimicking his gestures effortlessly. Earning a giggle from you.

"Leave that to me."

-------

Taglist:

@yhrlocalcyprus @nommingonfood @literatiastray @call-me-nyxx @gennirose @loonalockley @danubliat @marit332 @beabfleab @l3lazeit @lililapuce @prollyanvycchi @huehuehuehuehehe @nanamiscunt @ncj2837ndjcj @leviswifey-act62 @migueloharacumslut @migshusben @freehentai @animequeen4

@del-ightfulling @angel-of-the-moons

[ravings-of-a-mad-scientist]

Psychologist: How come evil scientists in movies are always biologists, physicists, chemists, and engineers?

Military Scientist: Yeah! Where’s all the evil mad military scientists!? Do you have any idea how many people I’ve killed using science? How many people that other people have killed thanks to my military theories and formulas?

Astronomer: Uh… yeah. Well, a mad astronomer could make first contact with aliens and convince them to take over the world? That would be a pretty cool villain idea. Of course it is pretty unlikely we'll ever get to meet aliens but y'know...

Meteorologist: Or a mad meteorologist could… like… predict the weather incorrectly. And minorly inconvenience a bunch of people!

Psychologist: Oh, so like you!

Meteorologist: shut up

Geologist: An evil geologist could discover some evil rocks! And add them to his private rock collection so no one else gets to see them! That's just so EVIL!

Anthropologist: Oh, or a mad anthropologist could make real life have regionally and historically inaccurate language, clothing, and architecture, just like in a movie! It’d be completely immersion breaking!

Ornithologist: *gasps* THEY COULD RELEASE LOONS EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND ANNOY PEOPLE WITH REGIONALLY INACCURATE BIRD CALLS!

Psychologist: You know what? I was actually an evil mad psychologist this whole time and was trying to manipulate you guys into turning evil, but you all just kinda suck. I don't know if I even want you on my side anymore. 

Military Scientist: *whispers into radio* She said I suck, start the bombardment

[ladykissingfish]

Very Random Akatsuki Headcanons

Sasori would 100% have a garden, and most of the stuff he grows would be illegal or highly toxic. He would ask Zetsu for tips a lot and force Deidara to help him weed it even though Deidara will LOUDLY complain about it the whole time. Sasori will gently sing to/ talk to his plants when he thinks no one is looking.

Kisame the type to nag others about how important it is to drink water and stay hydrated but. He has never fully finished one single bottle of water. Any place they are, you can immediately tell that Kisame’s been there because every surface area will have plastic water bottles sitting on it with various levels of water in them.

Hidan has many, many bad teeth, mostly in the back of his mouth. Missing, chipped, cavities or straight rotting. Always in some level of pain but never seeks out help because you know, Lord Jashin encourages personal suffering. Was finally tentacle-held to a chair by Kakuzu and forced to let Sasori do what repair work he could after the others got tired of hearing him curse and grumble all night over his mouth pain. Absolutely loves his new smile afterwards but never admits it.

Every single member of the Akatsuki has at some point had a crush on Konan. Including Zetsu. But it went away once each member started seeing her as a sister or mother figure. The only one it didn’t go away for is Nagato, but he’d never admit his true feelings because he values their friendship and working relationship too much.

Itachi likes to collect rocks. He’s an amateur geologist and enjoys finding different types of stones when he’s out on missions. The others learn this about him and will sometimes take the time after missions or when traveling to pick up “pretty” rocks to bring back to him.

Deidara has a lot of anxiety and restlessness, and keeping himself busy alleviates that. He prefers doing things with his hands which is why he’s always making little sculptures with his clay. If no clay is available he’ll tap or drum his fingers on things or fiddle with his hair. The faster his fingers move it means the more anxious he feels. Sasori would get annoyed by this behavior so he created for Dei what would essentially be a ninja world version of a fidget-spinner. Deidara loved it and he makes sure to pack it with him whenever he leaves on missions.

Nagato’s fingers are often bloody because he’s a nail-biter to the extreme. He’ll chomp those things down right to the quick of the finger. The others will “gift” him gloves to try and prevent this from happening, and it’ll work for while, but sooner or later he’s right back at it again.

Deidara once gained ten pounds in two months because Tobi kept convincing him to stop at sweets cafes while they were out traveling, and then to have seconds and thirds of whatever they were eating.

Kakuzu figured out that Hidan didn’t know how to read when Hidan would avoid looking at the map on missions and kept giving Kakuzu wrong information about sign posts along roads. After a lot of convincing that he wasn’t “making fun of him”, Kakuzu finally got Hidan to let him teach him basic reading and math skills over the course of a year.

When Orochimaru was a part of the Akatsuki, one day he managed to get Konan alone and was hitting on her in a very creepy Jiraiya-esque way. Turns out that he was merely trying to get her to trust him so that, when he ultimately left the Akatsuki, he would be able to convince her to follow so he could study her body and paper-jutsu. Having had no close experiences with women other than Tsunade, who always responded favorably to flirtatious behavior, he’d assumed that this was how ALL women would react. If Itachi hadn’t driven Oro away, Konan would have blindsided and killed him first.

Nagato (in a Pein body) gave the sex talk to Deidara, Hidan and Itachi. All three of them hadn’t the slightest clue about how anything worked in that regard. Sasori gave him diagrams out of his medical books to aid in his talk. Nagato kept having to add on to his talk because of the questions. “What if you’re a guy who likes guys? How does that work?” “What if you don’t like anyone like that, or you don’t want to ever do those kind of things; is that okay?”

In strong sunlight:

Konan burns bright red.

Itachi and Hidan brown.

Zetsu withers.

Nagato dehydrates within two minutes. As does Kisame.

Deidara sprouts freckles.

Sasori smells like a fire.

Obito and his Hashirama cell DNA photosynthesize like a damn tree.

Kakuzu also turns into a freckle-factory but because his skin is already so dark, it’s unnoticeable.

Sasori has fairly moderate misophonia and especially can’t stand the sound of people chewing. It was one of his primary reasons for turning his body into a puppet; so he no longer had to endure the sound of himself eating. He thought he’d died and gone to hell when he found out that Deidara chews food with all three mouths.

Deidara likes Tobi to read to him at night. It gives him a very comfortable sleepy feeling. The more Deidara nods off the more Tobi lets his voice become more natural/Obito. This is pleasant to Obito because doing the “Tobi voice” all day puts a huge strain on his throat, so it’s nice to be able to break character once in a while and speak normally.

Hidan is extremely sensitive to the cold and will do anything to avoid having to travel or do missions in the winter.

Konan has kept a diary of her life ever since she was a child. She picked up the habit of writing during the period when Jiraiya was staying with/watching over her, Nagato and Yahiko.

Deidara developed a hell of a crush on Kakashi after “meeting” and getting his arms blown off by him and the Konoha nin. He’d gush about Kakashi for days afterward … to Tobi. Tobi who had to grit his teeth and not start screaming over how Kakashi unintentionally attracted everyone that Obito was ever interested in.

Best Smelling to Worst Smelling:

Konan

Tobi/Obito

Deidara

Kakuzu

Kisame

Zetsu

Itachi (would be higher but often smells like strong, bitter medicine and night-sweats)

Nagato (his actual body, not a Pein body)

Hidan and Sasori tie for worst because both smell like blood and corpses

Obito never killed his grandmother during the Uchiha massacre. He used a very powerful jutsu to erase her memory and then relocate her to a place in a village far away that took care of the elderly. He pays the facility with the money he earns/steals during missions, and every so often he’ll go and visit her at night, when she’s alone in her room. She doesn’t know who he is and just thinks that he’s a nice young man that’s there because he’s visiting somebody else.

Kisame loves to bake. It started because he was worried over Itachi being so thin and never seeming to want to eat anything other than desserts. So Kisame taught himself how to make cakes and pies and cookies, etc. Over time it became a zen-like activity to him that helps him relax and clear his head when he’s stressed out.

Kakuzu is as vain over his hair as Deidara is over his own. At least once a week they’ll get together and give each other trims and deep conditioning treatments. Sometimes Itachi will join if he feels up to it. Hidan mocks them for this but is secretly trying to grow his hair longer so that he can join them.

[cellarspider]

Spider's Big Prometheus Thing: Index Post

Being a list of all the posts produced in the course of this inexplicable project of mine. This post will be updated as more entries are added, on days when I remember I made an index for these.

All entries will have at least a minimum level of citations for where to start looking for more facts on a subject. Be aware that there's also hidden rambling and bonus facts in the image alt text.

0. Introduction

Setting the scene, including my background, my intent, and where this movie is going.

1. Opening

Expectations, landscapes, and aliens.

Rambles: DNA, whether aliens would have it, and why it doesn't look like a pale bacon ladder.

Alt-text rambles: nano-bubbles.

2. Discovery

The Isle of Skye is gorgeous, the movie attempts to establish its themes, and why it had already got my hackles up. Rambles: how cool ancient and pre-modern peoples were, the implications of humanoid figures in European cave paintings, and misplaced lions. Alt-text rambles: seriously, Skye is just so cool. Erich von Däniken and modern publishing royalties are not.

3. David

We meet the loneliest android, and his fandom of choice. Rambles: I go nuts for a paragraph over Proto-Indo-European. Alt-text rambles: Help me remember a dude's name, that time Ron Perlman saw Sigourney Weaver do something so cool he forgot to act, and a Coronation Street conspiracy theory.

4. Humans (Derogatory)

We meet the human crew, and analyze why they're a mismatch to the movie's established expectations, and what subgenre they fit in most. It isn't the one the movie seems to be aiming for. Rambles: 50s B-movies and their Men Of Science, modern movies and their quietly suffering scientists. Alt-text rambles: inconsistently moist characters, Idris Elba's christmas tree decorations.

5. Pseudoarchaeology (Extremely Derogatory)

We meet Old Man Capitalism, poor logistics, and how the movie began to really lose me through dropping in some racist pseudoscience tropes. Rambles: more logistics (of alien bioengineering), historical art styles, what the world was getting up to in the 600s CE Alt-text rambles: Linguistics, more ranting, the life and extraordinarily ornate death of Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal. Rants: the existence of writing, people who don't look like you can still think, stargazing and how conspiracy theorists don't understand it.

6. Roads

Poor firearm safety with Chekhov's Gun, when movies move too fast, atmospheric chemistry, and the moment I began to yearn for blood. Rambles: First contact protocols, why 3% CO₂ won't kill you but it will make you weird, my personal experience digging up a Roman road. Alt-text rambles: the logistics of securing items in moving craft, linguistics, atmospheric science, colorblind-friendly diagram design, swearing about orology, and cursing the crew for their fictional crimes against archaeology. Rants: Why they should've stayed in orbit, and my impassioned defense of historically significant transportation infrastructure.

7. Masking

The bit that made most people realize these characters were idiots. Featuring an attempt at themes. Rambles: NASA's policies on biological contaminants Alt-text rambles: Benedict Wong having nothing to do, helmet design, driving on dusty track, the tiny overlap between archaeological horrors and Minecraft, the CDC's excellent captions on men sneezing. Rants: Nominating a man for the Heinrich Schliemann Archaeology Award, all these people are catching space covid

8. Ghosts

Comparing the Engineers to their series antecedents, and I develop a slight soft spot for the geologist. Rambles: Set design in Alien, how carbon dating works. Alt-text rambles: Adventure games, GET DOWN MISTER PRESIDENT, I get very excited for Dune: Part Two, the archival devotion of people with rare blorbos.

9. Dignity

Personal, professional, social, and media context for the treatment of people's remains. Rambles: Personal experiences around the archaeological discovery of human skeletons, professional codes of ethics, movies that handle dead bodies better by being more crass about it. Alt-text rambles: None, the main text gets full focus this time.

10. Atmosphere

How intertextual imagery is overused, how the one major character arc is developing, and a whole grab bag of miscellaneous shambolic events. Rambles: How tourist-breath can destroy artifacts, and a deleted scene Alt-text rambles: Whether explaining mysteries is always the wrong decision in fantasy, the usefulness of helmets, Mass Effect's loading screens, please someone give me more recommendations for things where Giger creatures aren't all bad, and how cultural variation in gestures can make you look like an asshole. Rants: they aren't done desecrating the dead oh boy it's just gonna get worse

11. Decontamination

How to present an audience with events that make no sense, how to do it eerily, and how Prometheus does this by accident. Rambles: NASA's Apollo 11 quarantine policies Alt-text rambles: How 2001: A Space Odyssey put on a cosmic lightshow, how traditions are faked for political and social power in Midsommar, confusing lab equipment, robot arm safety, the use of camper vans in space exploration, umarell behavior, and robot horror movies. Bonus text rambles: pressurized gas cylinder safety, and how the cargo of one truck apparently tried to join Roscosmos. Rants: Laboratory safety

12. Shocking

Mary Shelly would not be proud of them. Rambles: Which home electrical appliances their tomfoolery is equivalent to. Alt-text rambles: Semiotics and Alien, reuse of props and art department equipment, the cast's inability to look at things, how the first chestburster scene intelligently incorporated spontaneity, and I completely lose my mind over a single computer readout, finding out in the process that the Engineers are close cousins to the common house mouse. Rants: I didn't think that "don't stick electrical plugs in people's ears" would be something that needed to be said, but here we are.

13. Family Tree

A soothing ramble about some of the cool bits of my job. Rambles: How evolution has made some vertebrate blood white or green, how genomes are sequenced, and how to determine the relatedness of species. And more. A lot more. I love my job. It's so cool. Alt-text rambles: How Nickelodeon slime was made, how hecking tiny molecules are, why blue-tongued skinks have blue tongues, my review of Dune: Part Two, how hard I worked to not turn Gene Wilder into a jumpscare, lots of enthusiastic explanations of DNA sequencing techniques, the aesthetics of the machines wot do that for you, how "snip" no longer sounds like a verb to me, and how I started out as a computational scientist.

14. Cheers

David poisons a man, and how his character arc ties into christian-influenced existential dread. Rambles: series continuity, gnostic theology, Ridley Scott's beliefs. Alt-text rambles: How to ruin petri dishes, Vickers' questionably carbon-based existence, the game of Operation, hand doubles in filming, how the funniest possible misidentification of an early church figure is wandering around the internet, the cool genders of suit actors, gnostic Archons, and the Engineers as Sophia. Rants: Holloway seems unaware that archaeologists study dead people, Ridley Scott is his own biggest problem.

15. Unworthy

The movie does something I'm not going to joke about. Don't read this if you're having a bad day. Big content warning for Holocaust imagery.

16. Intimacy

Your asexual commentator grapples with Hollywood's terrible track record on romantic and sexual chemistry. Rambles: Why we don't say an archaic-looking species is "older" than another, how religious scientists do what they do Alt-text rambles: the human family tree, Abbott and Costello, pitcher plant cultivars, the creative possibilities of a Buddhist version of this movie, and Stephen Still's lack of accordions. Rants: I've never been a boyfriend but I'm pretty sure that's not how you do it

17. Threat

Prometheus takes a hard turn into old slasher movie tropes. Rambles: A movie trailer that gave Wee Spider the screaming heebies Alt-text rambles: The age rating of Prometheus, a spontaneous X-Files crossover AU, Pitch Black, how likely it may or may not be that the images in the post will get flagged, critter behavior, insufficient EVA suit design, and the content balancing I take into account when selecting screenshots. Rants: This movie does not seem to know what it is. Alt-text rants: Ditto, focusing on characterization.

18. Flames

"Mac wants the flamethrower!" Rambles: I wandered off in the middle to watch a 40k comedy video, does that count? Alt-text rambles: More content-balancing, what kind of very English critter David appears to be, dune buggy design, Star Wars: The Old Republic is worth your time, Dune: Part Two is worth your time, an extremely long ramble about integration of CG background elements, and Oblivion memes. Alt-text rants: Movie color grading and lighting, undercutting scares.

19. Stars

The movie shows how good it can be when no dialog is involved. Rambles: The movie Contact and how Prometheus could've learned from it. Alt-text rambles: How I estimate large numbers from a still image, a brief Baldur's Gate 3 appearance, the set design and staging of a room made for giants with squishy computers, the use of color to make a cohesive scene, facts about Uranus, visual intimation of threat, VFX wizardry, practical FX wizardry, Michael Fassbender's wordless acting.

20. Expectant

The movie shows how good it can be when character choice is removed from the horror. Rambles: the inspiration and place of chestbursting in Alien movies, the continuing religious symbolism in the movie, the clunky dialog, how to build or undermine tension, and the good blending of practical and CG effects, and how tiny creatures of the ocean manage to be more uncanny than horror critters. Alt-text rambles: reading details the prop department never meant for you to see. Alt-text Rants: the return of the head-exploder and the first sight of actual PPE, slowly mangling a plot point's name until it has been thoroughly folded, spindled, and mutilated.

21. Underdelivered

The movie shows how terrible it can be when horror doesn't build tension. Rambles: Contortionists in horror, hillbilly horror/hixploitation movies. Alt-text rambles: Resident Evil 7, Dead Space and "strategic dismemberment"

22. Hubris

The movie tries to do some themes again Rambles: my ineffable desire to genetically sequence ditch weeds, Left Behind Alt-text rambles: Brad Dourif's commitment to the bit in The Two Towers, nigh-invisible wheelchair product placement, the Fallout series in general and the upcoming show in particular, praise for an epic-length critique of Left Behind, Robert Zemeckis' bizarre quest to mocap everything Rants: This movie does a terrible job representing both religiosity and atheism

23. Informed

Exposition is delivered, and plot points try to knit together. Rambles: The Silent Hill movie, Pacific Rim Alt-text rambles: Pyramid Head's secret unclothed backside, demanding environmental enrichment for scientists, greebling, Tumblr's favorite shitty copper merchant Rants: What could've been done instead of an exposition dump and daddy issues Alt-text rants: these people and their interior design are tempting fate and testing my patience

24. Inscribed

I go rogue and ramble about constructed languages and cuneiform for an entire post. Guest appearances from Klingon pop music and a delightfully eccentric Assyriologist. Rambles: All of it. Alt-text rambles: the self-awareness of conlangers, fingernail length, Schleischer's Fable as a warm-up for the next section, my primary conlang derangement, speculation about whether cuneiform was legible for the blind, my beef with the cowards at Lucasfilm for refusing to use Star Wars' coolest letters, my love for Warframe's Grineer, going into far too much detail about redesigning Prometheus' Engineer script, and finally, the many crocodiles of ancient egyptian hieroglyphs. Rants: None/all of it

25. Judgement

We discuss some of what the movie doesn't. Rambles: Fiction and morality, Blade Runner, biblical allusions the story could've made and doesn't Alt-text rambles: Lance Henriksen's insane career, the paintings of John Martin and a surprise George Washington, Rutger Hauer's effect on Blade Runner, my tentative plans for the next essay series. Rants: Germs, old man makeup. Alt-text Rants: The characters are reading ahead in the script again, the half-assed Engineer writing system continues to hurt me

26. Awoken

I go bananas over PIE. Rambles: fix-it fic for this damned movie, PIE, how to avoid PIE, how to analyze PIE, and my personal alternative to PIE. Alt-text rambles: calculating how long the Engineer's overslept, their potential spiritual kinship to Moominpapa, behind the scenes photos of the suit actors, Prometheus rants in the days of LiveJournal, the game Hades, how hard it personally is to get PIE right, the linguistics nerdery of the Hittite empire, and watermarks. Rants: how the movie fails its premise and hurts my soul with linguistics

27. Shortcomings

The characters, and movie, fail to get their message across to someone bent on their destruction. Rambles: David's confused religious symbolism, Star Trek Alt-text rambles: My desire for fanfic, behind the scenes photos, what other critters the Engineer's suit actor has played, the naming of Australopithecines, crash-proofing a movie set, alien gender, Gandahar and how French animated SF in the 80s was awesome, Scorn and its expert consultation from a cenobite, and Doctor Strangelove. Rants: the assumptions of the human characters, I go from trying to be measured to actively spiting the writer for his take on thoughtful SF Alt-text Rants: Del Toro is the only one who gets me, the movie has forgotten its main character just had a major surgery, one last rant about how terribly unsafe the Prometheus was as a ship, before it becomes definitively not a ship.

28. Momentum

It's the bit where she doesn't turn. Rambles: How to fix the dumbest thing we've seen in a hot minute, Edge of Tomorrow and feeling Tom Cruise's fear, how the dead thing is never really dead in horror. Alt-text rambles: How hard it is to find the most catchy song in We Love Katamari, more behind the scenes pictures of my blorbos, Friday the 13th Part IV, bad braille, and trilobites. Rants: I mean how can you not when the movie forgets how space works? Like, the idea of 3D space as a concept? Also, a particular rock earns my ire, and my ranting about interior designs on ships finally pays off.

29. Dissonance

The ending of the movie, and its tonal incoherency. Rambles: Protagonist-centric morality and lack thereof Alt-text rambles: Star Trek TNG, green blood, caecilian teeth. Rants: shallow christian themes, sequels that could have been, Shaw's confusingly deployed robo-racism Alt-text rants: sequel disappointments, inadvisable post-caesarian activities, how the hell do you fit that much 'burster into one chest, biological plausibility in alien extend-o-mouths

30. Justification

A breakdown of a post-release interview with Ridley Scott, explaining some missing details. Rambles: Gnosticism again, Mesoamerican and European human sacrifice and the exoticization of shared cultural practices, and a hearty book recommendation. Alt-text rambles: Icelandic volcanoes, The Collector (2009), Stephen Speilberg's War of the Worlds and how scaring the shit out of someone isn't necessarily the job of a horror film, the Tollund Man, unique cultural practices, Hello Future Me, and my opinions on what we've seen of Alien: Romulus. Rants: Ancient peoples weren't stupid, an unexamined christian-centric worldview, an unexamined christian-centric worldview, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGh

[wolven91]

Magma Flows

The burning human silhouette continued to amazingly pull away from it’s pursuer. Her footprints, left in the deep snow, gave her an impressive stride.

The mango coloured ssypno, in any other environment would have had no issue in not only outpacing the shorter alien, but would have also been able to drag her back to safety without any kind of notable resistance from her. The ssypno inherent speed and strength would surely outstrip the smaller creature, just if she could get her claws on the damn creature.

As it was, the surrounding snowy environment was hampering not only the ssypno’s movement but her speed too. Her usually powerful tail, instead of launching her forwards, the survival suit that covered her slipped and left deep gouges in the snow banks. She was only on this stupid frozen hell of a planet because of the apparently single most insane human she had ever had the displeasure of meeting and knowing. 

She’d begun to like the geologist that had ‘needed’ an escort, she was kind and soft and warm before now. But while visiting the tundra world that was experiencing several volcanic eruptions Ya’tfeea had zero desire to be anywhere near an entire mountain exploding. Apparently the human’s job had meant that she decided that she was to record if there were any differences between ‘Earth’ flows and ‘alien’ flows. The ssypno didn’t understand the difference; they were all alien!

She focused her eyes against the back of her head as she ran in frustration. It was impossible without eye contact, but the ssypno hoped her Stare would burn a hole in the back of the human’s head so she would turn to face her and be forced to stop. 

Why couldn’t these damned apes just look from orbit? Why’d they have to land on a planet that was specifically designed to kill her kind?

The whole planet was freezing; dangerous to her cold-blood. 

Come to think of it, the human started getting excited when she moaned about being cold. 

The smaller creature breached the tree line and turned her head towards where Ya’tfeea expected the lava to be. She picked up her pace, carving her path through the snow; it would do no good if the human went and got buried under a million tons of molten rock! How would she explain that to her government?! 

As she breached the treeline moments later, her four arms grasped the human’s shoulders and arms in a vice-like grip, while her face was a vision of fury, she turned her to face the ssypno in one smooth move.

“Why were you running?! You need to be careful! If the lava flow is too fast you could get hurt!” She blurted out, while one side of her body rapidly had the cold that had leached through her survival suit and was replaced with a wonderful heat. 

“Because we already knew that this one is not that fast… and I thought you wanted to get warm?” She replied with that insufferable smirk that Ya’tfeea had gotten used to over the past few weeks. Against her grip, the human’s left arm, diminutive in her far larger hands, lifted to ‘present’ something to her. 

She slowly turned her head to see what she seemed so confident that she’d want to see. 

It was beautiful. 

Lava flows have always been described to be mesmerising by those who have seen them, But to the sspyno’s heat vision; it was a blinding white light that reminded her of seeing through a crack in the very mountain into the blinding light of heaven. She was stunned at this near religious awakening. The cold of the world was always nearby, the perfect contrast against the blinding heat of the centre of the flows and the various shades of it cooling over time. 

She released her, gently setting her down while she; a lowly guard, got to bask in so much heat that she knew there were even Nobles who had never had this much to play with. Within the ssypno ships and stations, heat was always controlled. Only the rich and powerful could bask in it.

A small hand slipped into her where it hung limply by her side. 

“It’s mostly looking at rocks, but every now and then; we find a really cool rock.” Murmured the human.

Ya’tfeea smiled to herself, already feeling the effects of becoming heat-drunk as it saturated every cell in her body. 

“...I think you’re confused; those rocks are really hot…” 

A snort from the human set off both as the two bursted into laughter, confused laughter for the ssypno, knowing for the human.

Alone on a tundra world, in front of the remnants of a world’s might, the pair took their time.

[headspace-hotel]

Howdy! I've been following your discussions of ecology and spirituality and indigenous ways of knowing with interest! If it's alright I'd like to share some thoughts. A commonality I've noticed in a lot of the people who object to a lot of the things you're saying, and I think you've noticed as well, is that they seem to see science as a way of accessing reality without filtering by bias and belief. I think that idea comes from how we teach science in the US, and probably more broadly. We tend to teach science as a set of objective unchanging facts and truths without much detail or thought on how we came to know these things. My personal belief is that it would be far better to teach science as a process. Maybe have a class tracing the history of scientific ideas and understanding previous scientific or even pre-scientific thoughts and theories.

I've commented on your posts a few times and you may know I'm a geologist. As I've gotten further into my studies, I've had to change my idea of what science is. I now see it as a living process of making ever more useful simplifications about the world. The world itself is far too complex to understand even one aspect of it in its totality, so we observe patterns and try to simplify them to make models and rules out of them to understand behaviors of the world around us. Scientific models aren't always true in a simple direct way, but what they are is useful. If it isn't useful get rid of it and make a new hypothesis or conjecture or theory. I think one culture difference between different scientific disciplines is in how the subject matter confronts you with complexity. Much of the rigour that gives physics and chemistry their prestige for being able to explain so much stems from the fact that they remove as much complexity and impurity as possible. I think that baked into that sort of hierarchy of sciences is how close they are to pulling all of the different theories within the discipline under a universalizing theory (ie., quantum mechanics/relativity for physics being the best example) but I'm now off topic so I'll stop.

That turned into a bit of a stream of conscious mess, but I think I put down what I wanted to. I've been really enjoying your thoughts, and it's been (as you may be able to tell from the length of this) food for thought for myself in a similar way as reading Braiding Sweetgrass was for me. Keep it up!

basically, yes, correct. and also that, in times and places where "spirituality" and "science" are not culturally considered separate, you can't bring your "science is about the real world of real things, spirituality is about things that can't be measured or proven" framework because it Doesn't Work

The oldest mathematicians viewed mathematics as what we would today call "spiritual;" that doesn't make mathematics not real. Just because shamans with a framework that deals in the world of spirits use X plant for medicinal purposes, doesn't mean the plant doesn't have medicinal properties or that the shaman's usage isn't rooted in observations of what that plant does.

And if you went back in time to a Neolithic shaman with nothing in common with you and tried to explain the germ theory of disease to them, through a universal translator so both of you could understand, you could explain that mammoth pox isn't caused by a slight to the mammoth god by accidentally knocking over the mammoth god idol.

But you couldn't explain that mammoth pox isn't caused by evil spirits that leave the body of a mammoth when it is killed. It would be literally impossible to explain this. Because the Neolithic shaman's conceptual framework for "evil spirits" doesn't have a stipulation that it excludes microorganisms. It has no reason to.

And instead of trying to explain to the shaman THAT "demon=things that don't exist in physical reality" and THEN explain that demons (by this definition) aren't real, you would have to realize that you and the shaman are using different models for the same thing, and the shaman isn't fundamentally misattributing the cause of illness in any meaningful way, they just don't know exactly how it works.

[strawberrywindow]

I'm in the process of replaying all the Amnesia games and taking notes on them, finished Dark Descent last night. I may post my notes themselves eventually but for now some things I found interesting, especially looking back on things post-Rebirth or Bunker.

Daniel is very obviously special somehow and I think everyone is aware of that but the point or extent of this specialness is never explained in full lol.

Daniel is the only protagonist who feels directly called to or beckoned by the Orbs. He is uninitiated in their workings and as Agrippa states this can lead to them breaking which Daniel's does in Algeria, but not before showing him visions of the Other World. For what reason and how? Daniel has no idea what the Orbs are at this point but for some reason is able to briefly wield its power.

Daniel is NOT the one actively being pursued by the Shadow. It didn't take long after Herbert found the second Orb for his camp to be destroyed by the Shadow. But Daniel makes it back to London perfectly fine, outside of his hallucination on the SS Hortensia, where he dreamed of falling in the sea and feeling something, likely the Shadow, brushing against him. So obviously the Shadow is following him but not attacking him. It continues this by killing the men Daniel visits in London - the geologist, the professor, and his doctor - but not himself. Why is the Shadow sparing him?

Even once we awaken in Castle Brennenburg and are told the Shadow is a threat to us - it never REALLY harms us. It is present in the Castle as it was present in London but it does nothing to us other than give us light slaps or block our path backwards, despite the fact it can obviously do much more as it dismembers and bisects two of the Gatherers. It is urging Daniel on his way. For what purpose? Likely to regain the Orb that Alexander is misusing. The only deaths we suffer where the Shadow actually harms us are:

Waiting idle in certain areas for too long.

Being caught in a chase sequence.

Or if we fail to stop Alexander from going through the portal.

And even then the only one we PERMANENTLY die in is the one where we fail to stop Alexander lol. Where we have failed to protect the Orb.

Daniel somehow gains the knowledge of how to repair two separately shattered Orbs. This is something no one, not even Weyer, have ever done sucessfully. Agrippa is doubtful if Daniel is even telling the truth. Why would the Shadow grant him this knowledge?

Alexander repeatedly tells us that Daniel is 'tainted' by the Shadow and eventyally reveals that it is do to this that Daniel will not be able to breach the Gate. What is different here? Tasi was also being pursued by the Shadow for a time but had no issue passing through Gates. So what about Daniel's relationship with the Shadow is so different that he would be made unable to pass through? If we can believe Alexander, of course.

In short the things interesting about Daniel and the Orbs: he is uninitiated in them and yet can wield them to some extent, he hears memories that are not his own, he is granted knowledge on how to repair them, he is spared by the Shadow numerous times, is beckoned by the Orbs and Shadow, is plagued by dreams of the Shadows call. What does all this mean?

I think Agrippa's dialogue provides perhaps some explanation. It is through him we learn about Mithraeism. He describes it as an ancient faith where "people built temples out of caverns, humans watching the sky turn." He also tells us this faith is gone now and there are no mithraeists left. This and what little else we know of Mithraeism from the other games makes me think it was more some kind if universal order as well as a faith, people charged with watching over and protecting the Orbs, instruments of the Shadow/the Guardian.

The Shadow seems very temperamental with who it allows to handle Orbs. Weyer handles multiple at a time. Agrippa had his life spared when he tried to take the one in Altstadt but the Shadow ultimately still took the Orb from him. Alexander later retrieves this Orb amd breaks it when he tries to perform the ritual but he does not attract the Shadow at this time. And Daniel is haunted by but not punished by the Shadow.

I don't knpw what my conclusion is here lol. I always leave this game with more questions than answers. My thought is MAYBE the Shadow is slowly attempting to choose new mithraeists to be new protectors of the Orbs. And perhaps Daniel was unwittingly chosen as one. Maybe the Shadow saw him as a viable option because since Daniel is practically clueless about the Orbs he can't possibly misuse them lol. I REALLY don't know, this is all word vomit lmfao

Anyways, stay tuned for next time where I word vomit about how it's Alexander and not Daniel who is the 'Orpheus' in the 'it's like Orpheus descending into the Underworld!' line

And also eventually make a complete chronological timeline of the games 🫡🫡

[bonesandthebees]

new file added to au’s I will probably never write but are fun to rotate in the brain microwave:

qsmp pacific rim au

instead of kaiju, you have alien creatures that shift and warp their giant forms and sometimes look like literal binary code to people although no one can agree quite on what one looks like. they just know it when they see it. and you also have the federation running the jaeger program with our good ol friend cucurucho overseeing it all

ft. pilot pairings like

Jaiden and Roier who have always been a great duo until the son they've been coparenting was critically injured in a recent attack

Forever struggling to find someone he’s drift compatible with until a French pilot named Baghera gets transferred to the base

Charlie and Mariana who were a great pilot team until their daughter Juanaflippa was killed in a binary entity attack on the base itself, and the two both went off the rails the next time they tried piloting. long story short they both freaked out and accidentally took out a support beam, killing Tilin and a few other workers. it was deemed to be partly a glitch through the drift system and not entirely their fault, but they were both banned from piloting for the forseeable future

Quackity and Luzu were supposed to be a pilot duo, but Luzu went missing before they could ever get in the jaeger and hasn't been seen in months. Then Quackity's child Tílin was killed unintentionally by Charlie and Mariana's breakdown, and since then he's been deemed too unstable to pilot. Somehow Wilbur, a random computer tech who isn't trained to be a pilot, is the only person they've found that's also drift compatible with Quackity. But again, Quackity isn't allowed to pilot atm, and Wilbur has no interest in getting in the giant robot death machine. He has a daughter to take care of after all.

Phil has been a pilot longer than most and at the moment is piloting with Missa, who is much newer to piloting

Tazercraft are a very well-renowned pilot duo worldwide largely because of how high their drift compatibility is

but there's not just pilots! (also this is getting long so gonna put this under the cut)

cellbit is a biologist that studies the entities, but after he gets transferred to the base he starts getting suspicious of what's going on 'upstairs' with the federation itself

baghera is the only pilot in the french group. the rest of the guys are the engineers for her jaeger

felps, who was a biologist alongside cellbit, also went missing shortly after arriving on the base. people think both he and luzu are deserters but cellbit keeps insisting felps wouldn't just leave like that

maxo is a software engineer who is supposed to focus on the jaeger drift system but he also keeps dabbling with an AI he built himself in secret

bad is kind of like HR/social services for the base, and therefore it's kind of his job to babysit everyone's kids if they're busy with other stuff and will also usher them to a safe room during any attacks

foolish and vegetta are both jaeger engineers who met on the base and very quickly fell for each other. they're like the romcom portion of the whole thing

fit is a geologist trying to figure out where the fuck the entities are coming from

and of course there's the kids

there were a lot of kids made orphans by the initial attacks on major cities. there's an 'educational' program the federation has set up to allow a few kids orphaned through these attacks to live at the shatterdome and learn the ins and outs of jaegers when they're young as unofficial prep for the jaeger academy

because of this many people on the base did not intend to adopt kids they just kind of. bonded and eventually took them in.

for bobby, jaiden and roier were already copilots so when jaiden started bonding with this kid she met in the shatterdome roier soon followed thanks to the drift sharing

juanaflippa thought charlie and mariana were the coolest pilot team around and she just kept following them until charlie was like "is it unethical to teach a child how to shoot a gun? Idc I'm gonna do it anyway" and that sealed the bond

juanaflippa and trump both died in the same entity attack on the shatterdome

phil had wilbur long before the first entity attacks ever started, but during his time at the shatterdome phil quickly took a liking to chayanne and put in a request to adopt him. once he and missa start piloting together, missa gets parental feelings for chayanne seeing him through phil's memories and the two just unintentionally become coparents

part of why wilbur refuses to be a pilot is because he grew up with his dad as a pilot and knows how terrifying it is as a kid. he also never intended on having a kid at least until the entities were defeated because who would want to bring a kid into a world like that, but then he met a shy orphan girl at the shatterdome named tallulah and he was a goner.

people are very surprised when they learn bad and dapper are not biologically related. the two act exactly alike but no, dapper was an orphan bad ended up getting really really close to

when the shatterdome was still trying to find luzu quackity felt very listless since he didn't have a copilot and couldn't do anything. he ended up spending time with tilin, although he was always hesitant to label himself as a father. when tilin died though he was heartbroken

baghera is a more recent transfer to the shatterdome and stumbles across pomme on her first day. the little girl says one thing in french and baghera is like "oh my god she's mine" while the rest of her engineering crew are like "who is this random child why are you carrying her" (but they all end up warming up to her pretty quickly)

okay this ended up being way longer than I meant it to be god why is pacific rim so fun to rotate in the brain microwave

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Frederick R. Prete

Published: Feb 11, 2024

About the Author

Frederick Prete is a biopsychologist in the Dept. of Biology at Northeastern Illinois University. He teaches courses in neurobiology, and human and animal physiology. He has also served as an associate editor for the International Journal of Comparative Psychology. Prete writes about how people use and misuse biology to support their social and political points of view. 

Other essays by Prete can be found on his Substack Everything Is Biology.

--

The contemporary “debate” (if one can call it that) surrounding the biology of sex suffers from a lack of intellectual seriousness on one side. The arguments forwarded by those insisting on the non-binary nature of sex often demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of basic biology, or are so comically nonsensical that one wonders whether they’re even worth responding to. Academic biologists engaging with gender activists’ arguments for the so-called “sex spectrum” are like mathematicians engaging with numerologists (individuals who believe in a mystical relationship between numbers and coinciding events) or geologists debating Flat Earthers. However, given that sex pseudoscience has somehow taken over academia, serious scholars now find themselves compelled to engage with the absurd.

One such example is the bizarre suggestion that because some fish can literally change sex during their lifetime, then perhaps humans can too. This idea, while absurd on its face, is far from fringe. It has been given credence by popular science outlets like Scientific American, which highlighted the sex-changing abilities of clown fish “to emphasize the diversity of ways in which sexual beings move through the world.” Even the United Kingdom’s national library posted (and later deleted) a thread on X during Pride Month last year about the sex-changing abilities of the Māori wrasse, and Greenpeace made a similar move in 2021.

What relevance does LGBTQ+ Pride Month have to sex-changing fish unless there’s an intention to suggest that these examples illuminate the potential for sex changes in humans? But if activists insist on making such far-fetched comparisons, they should be challenged to follow their logic to its ultimate conclusion.

Let’s be honest, animals do a lot of weird things. They enslave other animals, eat their offspring, cannibalize their lovers, kill their newborn twin sisters, and devour their siblings in the womb. Do any of these activists want to justify slavery or embryonic cannibalism because animals do it? Probably not. But it’s equally silly to claim that we can derive grand lessons about human biology and sexual behavior from animals. Male octopuses, for instance, grab a packet of their own sperm with one of their tentacles, shove inside a female’s mantle cavity, and drop it next to her oviduct. This hardly seems like a behavior humans should try to emulate. Are there any objections? Why, then, would we think that fish sexual biology is a better model for us humans than that of octopuses?

What’s more, it frustrates me that those who continuously discuss sex changes in fish don’t get the fish-sex story straight in the first place. In reality, sex changes among the roughly 20 families and seven orders of teleost fish are driven by physiological and hormonal events that are triggered—depending on the species—by factors such as body size, perceived social status, or (in the monogamous clown fish Amphiprioninae) the disappearance of the large, breeding female. It’s also the case that those big, newly minted, dominant female clown fish are viciously aggressive to any fish they do not recognize as part of their group. So, if we’re taking our cues from clown fish, let’s not be hypocritical—let’s go all the way and demand that only extremely large, dominant, hyper-monogamous people who are particularly xenophobic should consider a sex change, and only after all the other females in the neighborhood have vanished. Does that sound reasonable? (I trust you realize I am being facetious here)

It should go without saying, but it appears that some still need a reminder: people are not fish. Fish live in the water. People live on land. When it comes to sex and reproduction, this makes all the difference in the world. In aquatic environments, you can simply release your gametes (eggs and sperm) into the water and let them drift around until they hook up. That’s because, in water, they won’t dry out and die. And neither will your embryos because they’ll be in the water, too. This is why so many fish can produce eggs or sperm at different times in their lives. It doesn’t take any specialized external organs to squirt gametes into the water, just a gonad for gamete production and an orifice for release.

However, the whole situation changes if you live on dry land. As mammals evolved for terrestrial life, they had to acquire adaptations—both structural and behavioral—to prevent their gametes and embryos from drying out. You can’t simply drop your sperms and eggs on the ground and hope for the best. So, male terrestrial animals evolved specialized external body parts for transferring sperm directly into females, who, in turn, have evolved body parts designed for receiving sperm and a chamber for nurturing the developing embryo until it is ready for life on dry land. Additionally—and equally important—both males and females evolved complementary neuromuscular behavioral patterns that allow them to court and mate successfully.

That’s why terrestrial mammals can’t change sex like some fish do. Such a transformation would require females to spontaneously sprout some kind of tube for internal sperm delivery, and males would need to somehow develop a complementary orifice. Moreover—and more importantly—both males and females would need to develop all the necessary internal parts and “plumbing” to make these external structures functional. It’s insufficient to merely alter the appearance of external structures, which can be done surgically (even on pets). A terrestrial animal transitioning from a female to a male would also require developing a complex duct system linking the gonads to the external tube, along with glands to secrete a carrying fluid and nutrients for the sperm (i.e., the Wolffian duct system, prostate, and bulbourethral glands). Going from male to female would involve developing some kind of organ to catch the eggs when they get released into the abdominal cavity, retain them until they encounter sperm, and then house the resulting embryo while it develops (these are derivatives of the Müllerian duct system).

Obviously, none of this could happen. When it comes to mammals, the die is cast prenatally. So, whatever fish do is their business and has absolutely nothing to do with terrestrial mammals. So, let’s drop the clown fish and Asian sheepshead wrasse analogies. Anybody who brings them up simply doesn’t understand evolutionary biology. It is futile to engage in discussions based on such analogies unless, of course, you’re one of those people who think that because some animals reproduce parthenogenically, humans should simply stop having sex altogether and hope for the best.

I want to make it clear that I have a deep understanding and empathy for those of us, including myself, who do not fit the popular stereotypes of any category or group. Throughout my life, I have received what seems to be an unrelenting stream of criticism for the fact that I was never (and still am not) perceived as representative of the norm (whatever that is). Consequently, I grew up defending those who were similarly targeted, and I believe that each of us should be continually mindful and accepting of the rich diversity of the human condition. Each of us should actively and consciously strive to be as compassionate, accepting, supportive, and inclusive as possible.

However, doing so does not require us to abandon reason, turn our backs on biology, or unhinge ourselves from reality.

[eaglefairy]

Hello liveblog viewers, it's been a while! We were both busy last weekend, but now we're back for more xenoblade. The roommate decided to postpone sidequests for now and return to the main plot, much to my delight!

The cutscene as you enter Valak Mountain spawned some rapid theorizing (and I have some thoughts about it too that I'll share later), most of which I expected (trying to figure out what the Face Mechon's relationship to memory is, picking up on that Meyneth is very old and has met Zanza before, etc)

I am most definitely testing my roommate's patience by continually calling the geyser a "geezer". And I will not stop.

Oh ok fun fact: my roommate is a geologist. She has some Complaints about the idea of taking a quick stroll through lava to grab some item orbs

Ah and we're back to the ramifications of my accidental spoilers. After the scene in Ose Tower with Alvis, roommate is now theorizing that Shulk's death will be not just a plain heroic sacrifice but somehow tied into the main plot with the Monado. She's still certain that it'll be a heroic sacrifice though :,)

Roommate: Do you remember that time we almost lost 4 hours of progress? Me: Do you want to go manually save right now? Roommate: ...you know what, yeah I'll go do that.

"Motherfucker, are you going to kill her again?" -my roommate, upon seeing Metal Face swoop in and hit Silver Face

Oh shit uh. Huh. We...did not put Shulk in the party to fight Mumkhar. Whoops. Rip Reyn, Riki, and Dunban

OH MY GOD SHE DID IT. SHE BEAT HIM WITH THE BOYS???

Egil: "Find us, Monado. Sword of the Bionis." Roommate: "Rude, I'm a person too." Me, with foreknowledge:

Roommate: "Oh, it's interesting that Egil claims he's an agent of Meyneth but Meyneth didn't want him to know she was there." Me, with foreknowledge:

Roommate: "The tyranny of the Bionis...? Weird, it'd be kind of hard for the Bionis to do tyranny while it's asleep." "I bet it's a really stupid reason. I bet we're going to find out what it is and I'm going to be like 'Egil, really? This is why you chose war and slavery? Grow up.'" "Either that or it'll be a really good reason and I'll scream. It'll be one of those two for sure, though."

Me, with foreknowledge:

eeeee we're blasting ahead to get Fiora! No sidequests no distractions the roommate misses Fiora and wants to get the babe back!!!

Oh she's so on the side of the Bionis. I'm listening to this wonderful rant about how terrible the Mechonis is for leeching ether out of the Bionis and oh, the poor Bionis just trying to support the life living on it with that terrible Mechonis siphoning away the ether!

Ah and now she's theorizing that the Mechonis used to produce its own ether but ran out during the ancient battle, so now she drains ether from the Bionis to sustain herself

The shriek she let out when she saw Dickson again. Now she's just flipping off the screen and singing "you liar" in different ways

Roommate: "If I had a little less self-respect I would have a crush on that man[Dickson]. Maybe I already do and I just don't want to admit it to myself." Me: WHEEZE

Roommate: "Dickson? You gonna be honest with us?" Me: "It's Dickson, what do you think?" Roommate: "He'll probably be honest with me when I'm dead."

Ah, we blazed through Sword Valley but our level advantage ran out against Mumkhar. It's also past midnight so we're going to do some sidequests tomorrow and head back in to save Fiora!