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periminkle · 4 years

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Orphic | 03

After moving into your own place, it seems life is finally going your way; the path to independence leading you to a quaint suburban town where even the grass seems to grow a little greener. Although a shocking encounter leads you to believe that perhaps appearances can be quite deceiving.

pairing: hybrid!jk x reader (first person)

genre: hybrid au, angst, fluff

word count: 8.0k

rating: pg-15

warnings: swearing, people throwing up, death, mentions of harming test subjects, ANIMAL ABUSE

author’s note: hahaha no it hasn’t been almost a month since i uploaded the last chapter, what are you talking about ?? this was also supposed to be the second half of chapter two before i got carried away and added an extra 8k to it,,, anyway eNJOY

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A few days had passed since word broke of Taemin’s death. With his absence, there was a substantial lack of cells to study, thus granting loads of free time to brood over said jaguar cub.

Knowing he would eventually leave prepared me for a mild episode of dejection, but nothing could compare to the aching gap left from his passing. Despite having known the little guy for only a short month or so, he was my stress reliever, coaxing a tender smiles after a day’s worth of drudgery with his endearing behaviour. He was the spark that fuelled my growing bond with the only decent people I could find here.

Moreover, he spent the last couple months of his life caged, muzzled and treated atrociously, as if he was the beast. I pushed back tears for the umpteenth time.

My head jerked backwards as a tissue was abruptly shoved in my face. “Do you want me to get another box?” Yoongi’s rough voice permeated the sniffles I tried to hold back and I buried my face deep into my arms, closing my eyes and trying to even out my staggered breath.

In my grief I pushed everyone away, disgusted with even my own lack of ability to protect the one faultless being that was ripped out of my grasp much too soon. Bereavement blinded me, leaving me unable to distinguish friend from foe and as a result, I cast them all out.

Unknowingly, I reverted to the mindset that I had hoped to leave behind in the city, where there was no one to turn to when everything spiralled out of control. Blaming others for my own shortcomings opened my eyes to just how cowardly I was, losing myself in a labyrinth of my own self-loathing.

It was lonesome, to say the least.

But they’d never left my side, much to my initial displeasure. Either Namjoon or Yoongi constantly shadowed my inhospitable self, from the office to the lab tables, going as far as waiting outside the bathrooms for me. I angrily confronted each one about the evident stalking on numerous occasions, yet Namjoon would insist that he was worried about my well-being and Yoongi claimed he was simply headed the same way.

By the second day, I caught on to their schedule of routinely swapping babysitting duties at around the second and third hour mark. I attempted to find some respite and solace by escaping to the break room once, when I knew both assistants had already taken their respective time off for the day. Foolishly, I believed that I’d finally evaded the duo’s clingy tactics.

However, before I could bask in my newfound solitude, Jin’s lethargic form made an appearance. True to his overbearing, fatherly instincts, he placed a homemade sandwich on the coffee table in front of me and lectured me on skipping meals.

Even without acknowledging my mistreatment towards them lately, I knew the three of them were empathetic enough to chalk it up to my process of mourning. Nonetheless, the immeasurable guilt I felt had accumulated over the abundance of time I had to reflect on my actions. Enough hours had been allotted to sulking and after a full day’s worth of encouraging, internal pep talks, I mustered up the courage to put effort towards amending my wrongdoings.

The screech of wheels rolling against the smooth tiles of the floor elicited the roll of his name off my lips. “Yoongs.” Intrigued by the lack of a hostile tone present in my voice, I felt his gaze flit to my hunched frame. The fact that I didn’t even have to lift my head to feel his eyes softening at the vexing nickname stuck a fresh layer of shame to my skin. “’M sorry.”

With my face practically burrowed into the sleeve of my lab coat, the apology came out muffled and barely audible, though I was met with the thoughtful, low timbre of Yoongi’s hum. “And, I know it’s no excuse, but everything has just been a lot lately.”

Regardless of my verbal atonement, the blonde man continued on his path out of the office, evident by the creak of his weight shifting off the chair and the following footsteps that drifted farther away.

I belatedly lifted the heavy weight of my head off of my arms, vacantly staring at the doorway that Yoongi had just passed through. Before I knew it, his unusually lively form lumbered back inside, two brightly patterned tissue boxes in hand. “What a crybaby.”

The corners of my lips tugged upwards for the first time in the past few days. It was a welcome development.

One down, two more to go.

With a single reconciliation under my belt, repeating the same process with Namjoon went a lot smoother than expected. I sought him out after my healthy banter with Yoongi ceased, eager to successively rectify all the relationships I’d bruised. “Don’t stress about it; honestly we deserve a cold shoulder for the trouble we’ve caused you. Yoongi probably depleted over half your stash of beer all on his own.”

The drinking tolerance of those boys was well beyond my comprehension. Although my house was completely out of the way home for all of them, I could only assume that it was sheer obstinacy impelling them to commonly stop by my house to wind down after a typically harsh day.

Lifting my head from the microscope that held samples of Doshik’s DNA, the resident blue tang speedily running laps in the tank, I peeked over at Namjoon’s dark hair, ruffled from the strap of his goggles. “I don’t mind. All I’m saying is that if I ever run out of stock, you guys are going to have to bring your own drinks.”

“C’mon Y/N, don’t be like that. Restocking your liquor every once in a while is nothing compared to our company right?” The appearance of his endearing dimples brought me back to the times I magically woke up in my bed after drinking my problems away with them the night before, the days they sent me home early because I yawned one too many times or all the snacks I strangely picked out of my bag ever so often.

I raised one teasing brow, crossing my arms and leaning back in the incommodious, metal chair. “Once in a while? With the rate that you guys are going, I would have to go to the store every other day.”

“Like I said, mainly Yoongi’s fault.” His deft fingers switched to a higher lens before continuing, “But really, you’ve got to confide in us, alright? I think we’re past the stage of ‘I want nothing to do with you when my shift is over.’”

It seemed like another weight had been lifted off my shoulders from the unexpected, forgiving nature of both men despite having every reason to be peeved at my churlish attitude as of late. Before I could formulate a response, Namjoon added, “Are you feeling better?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to his question when I was just as clueless about my own welfare. But, I disregarded the notion of lying or concealing anything from them, as they’d relentlessly proven their loyalty and concern for me on more than one occasion.

“I’m not sure yet, Joon. I think I need some more time.” I covertly swapped out my microscope slide for the one sitting next to the unsuspecting man, intent on decreasing his workload, even if only by the slightest bit. “I’m glad that I have you guys, though. Thanks for dealing with my grumpy ass.”

I couldn’t help the curve in my lips when his impish gaze finally met mine, evidently content with my candour. “To be honest with you, Yoongi told me about your apology, so I was kind of expecting it.”

My jaw dropped in betrayal. “He told you?”

“Mhm, said that you could practically refill Doshik’s tank with the amount of tears you shed.”

“Wha—how could he, this guy!” Contrary to the clear exasperation in my tone, a wide grin revealed my true feelings. “Then he says that Jin exaggerates all his stories.”

A hearty chuckle escaped him. “Well, at least we know where Yeri got it from. Do you remember the last time she came to the lab?” I couldn’t repress my own chortle at the memory, the onslaught of laughter provoking a sudden cramp in my stomach that I uselessly pressed my palm against, attempting to quell the overactive muscles. “She swindled me out of twenty bucks by crying about Jin throwing out all of her toys!”

With a flaming red flush to my cheeks, I struggled to get a sentence past my quivering lips. “You can’t even blame the kid,” I temporarily regained my breath and continued, “you’re just too gullible.”

“Hey!” He pouted at the remark, jabbing a gloved digit into my side as a form of retaliation. The blow to my ribs induced a high-pitched squeak out of me and my hand darted to the sore spot in an attempt to block any further attacks. “Have you ever been on the end of those puppy dog eyes? You can’t just do nothing, it’s basically witchcraft.”

“Yes, yes, Jin taught her too well.” I attempted to placate the threatening fingers that hung in the air, poised for another stab if need be.

Namjoon bobbed his head in agreement, seemingly pleased with my answer as brought his attention back to the chromosomes in front of him. “Have you had time to go see him?”

“Ah, no, not yet. He’s the last one I have to pour my soul out to.”

In the comfortable silence that ensued, I found myself recalling the vile confrontation from a few days back. Truth be told, my mind regularly drifted to Hyunho’s harsh words whenever an empty lull emerged within my headspace, which was the exact reason I enjoyed keeping myself occupied as of late. The echo of the wretched man declaring Taemin’s passing was the predominant focus of my flashbacks, but a particular fragment of the rest of his spiel stuck out to me as well—the mention of a tiger cub. “Hey, Joon?”

No doubt noticing the change in my tone, Namjoon fixed his stare on my fragile countenance once more, holding my gaze. Only then did I realize that I was unconsciously craving the sincere reassurance locked away beneath those brown specks, similar to a wailing newborn falling silent at being held in its mother’s embrace.

“Did you know?” The question spilled from my lips before I could process it.

Even with the lack of context, the adept assistant instantly shook his head. “No. No, I didn’t.” My gut twisted as he redirected his stare, trapping his lower lip between his unforgiving teeth in thought. “I still don’t really know. I’ve heard bits and pieces from some gossiping researchers that talk too loud, but I haven’t gotten enough to piece everything together. Hoseok said that they recently found the test subject they’d lost a while ago.”

Sincerity undoubtedly rang within each syllable of Namjoon’s voice. After a speedy internal debate, I unloaded all the horrendous secrets that I’d uncovered, from the initial suspicion I harboured to the folder in Jin’s office, and finally to the mutated PDE6C gene. The hardly intelligible speech all raged past my lips much like word vomit and my knee began to briskly bounce up and down from the massive influx of emotions.

“Hey, hey, calm down,” Namjoon said softly, stretching one lengthy limb out to rub soothing circles onto my back. “Let’s go slow, hm?”

I concentrated on the gentle touch that now rested on my shoulder, schooling my breath before continuing, “I need to help them. I can’t stand around, watching Hyunho and Minzi do whatever they want with no repercussions. These are lives they’re ruining.” Feeling myself getting heated again, I twiddled the tips of my fingers to keep my head level and busy. “It’s not just about Taemin anymore, think about it. This can’t be the first time a lab animal has been ‘tested on’ and died of ‘natural causes’ or whatever excuses they’ve been using.”

I didn’t catch the recognition flashing in Namjoon’s eyes, but his silence drove me to release the thoughts that had been stewing around my conscience for a while now. “Hyunho said that they’re bringing in a new cub right? We can’t let the same thing happen to him. We have to protect the animals in this lab, Joon.”

“I know how you feel, but there isn’t much we can do when they take the animals away to perform their tests.” As he saw me open my mouth to butt in, he interjected, “Trust me, we’ve tried. I’m pretty sure that the only reason we’re still around is because Jin keeps vying for us despite all the ruckus we’ve made.”

“We can’t just sit around and do nothing though! Have you been in the break room lately? Have you heard their screams? Joon, there’s something in there. Even now, they’re probably torturing some poor, undeserving animal.” In my determination, I grabbed the lapels of Namjoon’s pristine, white lab coat. “We have to save it.”

“We don’t even have a key card, Y/N,” Namjoon protested, his tone of voice still low and gentle, imploring me to understand the more rational side of the nonsense I was spewing. “And even if we did, the second we barge in there the cameras will spot us and we’ll be fired immediately. No matter how persuasive Jin can be, he won’t be able to save us from that. Then there’s really going to be nothing we can do to help them.” He hung his head in resignation. “At least we can make their last days somewhat enjoyable. At least from here we can wait for an opening, a chance for us to catch them in the act when they inevitably slip up one day.”

My brows pulled upwards in my distress, bringing my head closer in an attempt for Namjoon to see my desperation. “And how long is that going to take? Weeks? Months? Years? When do we put our foot down?”

His features softened and I already knew that I wouldn’t like whatever he was going to say next. “If we don’t act logically, we won’t be able to save anything.”

My jaw clenched, but I knew he had a point.

A sigh escaped his distraught form. “Go eat something and cool your head. We’ll talk more when you get back.”

In my defence, I had made my way to the break room like Namjoon suggested, nearly settling down with one of the many homemade sandwiches Jin left in the fridge—but not even five minutes passed before torturous whimpers of pain filled my ears. The pile of carbohydrates in front of me suddenly didn’t seem quite as appetizing.

In order to restrain my impulsive self from further digging my own grave, I mercilessly gnawed away at my lip, repeating Namjoon’s warnings like a sacred mantra in my head. When the dull taste of metal hit my tongue, I quickly placed the meal back where I found it and scurried out of the agonizing space as fast as my legs would carry me.

Rather than providing relief though, I found that every step weighed heavier than the next. I felt the toll both physically and emotionally. No matter how much distance I put between myself and the tormented creature, I wasn’t able to escape the distressed cries that echoed throughout my skull, perpetually bounding from one end to another.

My plan was to drown out any nonsensical thoughts with the lengthy sequence to Doshik’s yellow tail.

However, it was foolish to believe that I would be able to concentrate on the chromosomes in the petri dish. I couldn’t focus on properly setting up the gel electrophoresis, forgetting to dig out small wells in the agarose gel and even incorrectly attaching each end of the power source, mixing up the spots for the cathode and anode. At this point, I had to restart the whole project.

My annoyance was made vocal by the groan of frustration slipping past my mouth, though there wasn’t anyone around to witness my theoretical fall into insanity. After a few beats, attributable to the pads of my gloved fingers drumming against the lab bench, I gave in to my curiosity and concern.

I wish I hadn’t.

A quick search on the computer in Namjoon and Yoongi’s office brought up the history of the animals that had been kept at this laboratory at one point in time or another. I was revolted at the sheer number of predators who had spent their last breath here.

Dread filled my gut at the upcoming arrival of the tiger cub. I knew I could no longer heed Namjoon’s words, no matter how sensible and pragmatic they were in comparison to my own faulty logic. But to tune it all out, live in ignorance and deal with countless other innocent mammals meeting the same tragic fate as Taemin—no, I would protect anything within my reach, no matter the cost.

Although I could never fight off all the monsters of this world, I hoped to have enough power to at least change one innocent being’s life.

And that would start with whatever they’d hidden away upstairs.

With this new mission in mind, my once empty days became filled to the brim with organizing a brilliant plot, often sacrificing hours of my sleep to continue planning and ensuring every aspect was foolproof. It took self-restraint that I wasn’t aware I was capable of in order to not burst in behind Minzi whenever she threw that smug smile at me before entering with her keycard; though I knew that plan wasn’t beneficial to the animal inside. Hence, I clenched my fists and dug the soles of my runners deeper into the ground whenever I thought of it’s tortured wails.

Just a little longer.

Despite familiarizing myself with the tone of the screeches that constantly resonated in my mind, I still couldn’t place the species the groans belonged to. It didn’t necessarily matter, but I was starting to run on the blind hope that they would be similar in size to Taemin, who I could easily carry in my grasp. In case, I also hid one of the carts used around the lab to transport loads of spot plates and test tubes, emptying it of all equipment and sanitizing the sides in case of any lingering, harmful chemicals.

After many long, strenuous hours of devising strategies and avoiding suspicious eyes, the day of the crime was finally upon me. Throughout the day, I used my precise notes to shift the angle of each camera slightly when I found myself alone, just so I could sneak past without showing up in frame.

I even headed upstairs to finally visit Jin, not having found the chance to properly apologize to him yet. The opportunity wasn’t wasted though, as I scoped out the cameras in the dim hall and nudged them over to the side as well. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to deal with those inside the torture chamber itself, but I would cross that hurdle when it came down to it.

Hopefully, the all-black guise I prepared would cover any distinguishable features amidst the shadows of the night.

I was nearing the end of my extensive plan, the only step remaining being the act of acquiring a key card, grimacing as I thought about resorting to the horrible decision of swiping that which belonged to Jin. Ironic, really, considering that the whole reason I was going to see him was to atone for my previous behaviour, yet I was planning to nab his keycard within the same breath.

That aspect of my plot was at a standstill, as I’d never gotten a glimpse of said object in Jin’s office or on his person. I was stumped, beginning to believe that he didn’t have access to the lab upstairs. But his position as assistant director must surely give him such privileges, right?

As I was about to enter Jin’s office, prepared to snoop around a bit with the excuse of looking for Doshik’s file for concerns about his unusual allergy to something within the tank’s water, I spotted Eunmi, the snotty receptionist, striding past my frozen form.

She plucked the notorious keycard out from an inside pocket near her chest, holding it against the reader as my eyes practically bulged out of their sockets. Unperturbed by my blatant shock, she adjusted the pile of folders squeezed within her hold and strolled in.

A huge grin split across my face as I formulated my next steps. Instead of carrying on to my original destination, I changed my route to head off to the front entrance, patiently waiting for Eunmi’s return. I could push off Jin’s apology for a little later.

After about half an hour had passed, I spotted Eunmi gracefully slide back behind the towering desk, which concealed everything but the crown of her head. The loud clicking of the keyboard filled the silence.

Typical.

“Ah, Eunmi!” I briskly walked towards her, meeting those sharp eyes for a fraction of a second before they flickered back to the monitor in front of her. “I don’t see you around very often, how have you been lately?”

“Cut the small talk newbie, I’ve got work to do,” she sneered.

I clenched my jaw, refusing to allow her words to affect my deceptive, cheery disposition as I asked, “I was wondering if you’d like to get a drink with me tonight? Y’know, since I’ve been here a couple weeks and we haven’t gotten a chance to know each other yet!”

“Sorry, too busy,” Eunmi asserted, flicking a strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her shoulder. It seemed to be one of her many annoying habits that ticked me off.

Slapping my flattened palm against the shiny surface of the desk, I leaned back slightly and threw out my bait. “Ah, that’s too bad. I wanted to treat you out tonight, but I guess you’ve got too much work, huh...”

Hook.

She hummed in thought. “Time and place?”

Line.

“Bar two blocks away, eight-thirty?”

Eunmi raised a single, defined brow. “Nine. Your treat?”

I confirmed with a nod as her lips curled, displaying a pink lipstick mark on her front tooth.

Sinker.

Precisely a quarter before nine, the gentle creak of wood followed the twist of the doorknob to the assistant researchers’ lab. Jin’s drooping countenance peeked through the crack he created, fixating a mock glare on my busy hands. “That’s enough, Y/N. You can pick it up tomorrow.”

Despite the multitude of gel electrophoresis equipment scattered around me from the past few hours spent slaving away, most of that time was allocated to finalizing the nitty-gritty details for tonight. Honestly, analyzing DNA became second nature to me by now, creating space within my mind to freely cogitate due to the lack of deliberation the task required.

I swivelled around in Yoongi’s chair, facing the evidently fatigued man. “I’m almost done with this sequence though, give me ten?”

He let loose an excessive groan of frustration at being unable to retire for the day, tousling his unkempt locks before collapsing on the worn down bench in front of Namjoon’s desk. I hummed a catchy melody as I continued to scribble down the results from each experiment.

“Now that I have you all to myself,” I gingerly began, stealing a glance at Jin’s unmoving form, “I wanted to properly apologize for everything.”

He raised his arms to cushion his skull against the tough surface, which I took as a sign to continue. “Yoongi might have already told you about my poor attempts to make amends with everyone and I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down with you yet so,” I paused, taking a second to inhale and gather my thoughts, “better late than never, right?

“I shouldn’t have turned my back on you guys when all you do is look out for me,” I sincerely confessed. “I guess I took advantage of how comfortable I felt around you, but I realize that it was unacceptable to treat you as my friend when we’re at work and you’re acting as my boss. I crossed a line and I’m sorry. I’ll make sure to conduct myself accordingly at work.”

A few minutes of devastating silence trickled by. My mind was whirring with all the possibilities of Jin’s next actions; whether he would flip out and rage, simply march back out the door or if he’d fallen asleep and hadn’t heard a word I said. Unsurprisingly, when I turned around I was met with the tranquil sight of Jin’s relaxed frame, soft snores circulating in the office.

I swerved over to him, the squeak of the old chair screeching horribly against the tiles of the floor. “Hey, Jin. How about you go home and I’ll make sure to lock up, hm?”

His eyes fluttered open into slits and I could see the gears whirring in his half-conscious state. To seal the deal, I threw out a cheeky smile; one that I knew he couldn’t resist. “Alright, fine. You just,” he was interrupted by a hefty yawn overtaking his speech, “you just need to lock this door and the main entrance. Everything else is already taken care of.”

My eyes lit up at the sight of his keys and I let out a hum in acknowledgement at his instructions, attempting to curb any suspicion.

Jin’s tall stature towered over me when he pushed off on the balls of his feet, standing up to his full height. “And you didn’t need to apologize, Y/N.” My jaw went slack at his confession of having heard my whole spiel and I had to strain my ears in order to pick up the quiet mumble of, “I should be the one begging for forgiveness anyway.”

Before I had the chance to process his words, much less time to compose a well-thought-out response, he brushed past me and discarded the shiny metal on top of my pad of paper. The revving of a car engine came to life, headlights beaming through the window to the left as he sped away.

Although I could have spent much too long trying to decipher the hidden meaning behind Jin’s bewildering statement, the clock was ticking. Ten minutes remained to clean everything up, change outfits, lock both the office and the front door, then book it to the bar.

Prancing through the flashy entrance with mere seconds to spare, I registered the reality that I might have missed a minute detail in my intricate scheme. Whereas the individuals loitering around appeared as though they’d just come from a fashion show, I felt severely underdressed in the tight jeans and oversized sweater I’d worn to work that morning.

The place was relatively empty, seeing as the night had yet to begin. Nevertheless, I made my way over to the bar stools where I saw Eunmi with a glass in her hand.

“Eunmi!” After a closer look, I took in the wine coloured body-con she slipped on, complimenting her dyed hair well. But from the forced smile she plastered on, I could tell she hadn’t discovered that lipstick mark from earlier.

“You didn’t go home and change?” She pointed out once I was within earshot, her awkward grin morphing into her mundane scowl. Oddly, I felt more at ease with her evident displeasure than her amiable facade.

I glanced down at my attire with a slight shrug and pretended to dust off non-existent wrinkles.

“Tonight’s on you, so let’s start off strong, hm?” If the stench wafting off from her breath was anything to go by, I presumed that she commenced her own pregame at home before arriving. She waved the bartender over, “Two shots.”

He flashed a greasy smile and a nod our way before beginning on our drinks.

“So,” I tried to initiate conversation that hopefully didn’t come off as awkward as I felt, “how’s the pro—”

“Nope, we’re not talking about work here.” Eunmi turned her chin up, rolling her eyes at my apparent nonsense. “I don’t wanna think about that shit hole more than I already have to.”

It was difficult to remain civil in the face of the obvious contempt she harboured in her voice, although I bobbed my head to convey my consent anyway. While racking my brain for any other topics to touch on, I came to the realization that I’d never properly interacted with the surly woman seated beside me; other than asking for directions on the first week and extending a greeting that was rarely reciprocated, I only knew her name and that she enjoyed clicking away on her noisy keyboard for the majority of her days.

Swooping in to the save the definite lull in the discourse, the round-eyed bartender slid over the shots. Eunmi, shockingly, downed the drink as soon as it came into her grasp. In an effort to appear as amiable as possible for the sake of the overarching strategy, I rushed to follow. The abrupt grip on my forearm halted any movement though.

“But, I will say,” Eunmi confidently boomed, puffing her chest and slapping one outstretched palm on the table. If the irked stares the other patrons were giving us right now were enough to kill, I was certain that we’d be ash by now with her outrageous volume overpowering the dull beat of the music. “I am way overworked considering what my job description actually entails. The place wouldn’t even be able to run without me!”

My brow creased as I toned down my own voice in the hopes that she would get the hint. “Oh, uh, of course! And, uh... just as a refresher, how have you been helping out lately again?” Honestly, with the lack of visitors to the lab, assistants having to prepare samples and write reports, Eunmi’s role within the lab puzzled me greatly.

“What haven’t I been doing is probably the better question to ask!” She haughtily spat out, swiping my glass and chugging the liquid down her—most likely burning—throat. Even the narrow glare courtesy of the bartender himself couldn’t stop her from slamming the empty glass on the counter. I smiled apologetically. “I mean, from delivering J3’s documents to manning all the receptionist duties, I wonder what miss Minzi is doing exactly!”

Naturally, my head tilted in curiosity at the unfamiliar name. “J3?”

“I keep telling them; ‘he’s too dangerous’, ‘if he gets out again we’re really in for it’, but who’s about to listen to the too-brilliant-for-her-own-good receptionist? This is exactly how those stupid characters in the horror movies die; they don’t listen to the smart one!” With each argument, her unstable torso swayed back and forth, threatening to completely topple off the barstool a number of times. I placed a hand at her waist in an attempt to keep her upright, although she, very dramatically, slapped it away.

Undeterred by the aggression, I leaned in closer with widened eyes. “Mhm, but I would listen to you, Eunmi. What exactly is J3 though?” I prayed to any higher power that she was too intoxicated to pick up on how desperate I came off in prodding her for information.

She scoffed, “You don’t actually think I’m that dumb, do you?” Her face reared closer to my own, merely centimetres apart at this point, eyes burning holes into my soul and the stench of tequila thick on her breath. “I know what you’re trying to do here, inviting me out to get wasted, even going as far as to pay for it all.”

Panic rose as I nervously chuckled, eyes darting. “I don’t know what you’re getting at?” To relieve some of the perspiration building in my palms, I nabbed the freezing water that remained untouched in front of Eunmi—not so subtly placed there by the bartender.

Licking her lips, she arrogantly leaned back with a cocky smirk plastered across her countenance, “You want to get in my pants.”

Any remaining liquid in my mouth grotesquely flew into the air.

“It’s okay, no need to be embarrassed that I connected the dots. I mean, a lot of people have been in your shoes.” Eunmi expressed, flicking a stray strand away from her forehead. “But I just don’t see you that way.” The look of sympathy she attempted to exude didn’t sit well with me, although I didn’t know whether it was because I could trace where her eyes were drifting to—another drunk guy who’d ripped his shirt off and began spinning the fabric around as if he was some kind of helicopter—or that anything less than hostile was strange look on her.

I was still pondering on whether it was a blessing or a curse that she misinterpreted my intentions so horridly because after downing a couple more shots and a cocktail to top it all off, Eunmi was thoroughly convinced that I was harbouring some intense feelings.

The second time she swiped her pink tongue across her lips, she gracelessly clambered off the barstool. “Don’t worry about it too much; it’s not you, it’s me,” Eunmi drawled out, pointing a well manicured finger to her chest. “It just wouldn’t be fair to you, having to stand next to me all the time when everyone knows there’s absolutely no competition.”

I didn’t realize how many people had entered the club since we’d arrived and I reached out to grab Eunmi’s wrist again, worried at the way she was stumbling away from me. Even though she was a bit of a lousy woman, I wasn’t heartless enough to have Eunmi fend for herself in a pool of sharks, especially when she was heavily intoxicated.

My attempts to restrain her were futile though, as she squirmed away while eyeing the man from before, who had scrambled onto the top of a table and sensually moved his hips to the beat.

“Ooh, I do see something worth banging toni—”

And down she fell.

As I reached over to aid the inebriated receptionist, lifting by her exposed upper arms while wondering just how much alcohol she consumed prior to her arrival. Coming in contact with the unexpectedly damp, sweaty skin impelled me to cringe away from the unpleasant sensation, but I resisted temptation to turn tail and duck out of there for the sake of my goal.

Eunmi’s whines complaining that she was fine and endeavours to wriggle out of my loose hold only served to further thin my nearly non-existent patience. At this point, I had to conserve as much energy as I could for later on, not expend it all to take care of a toddler that couldn’t seem to stand on her on two feet.

When Eunmi’s visage faded into sickly green shade, I hurriedly yanked her limp body over to the unusually vacant washrooms. Out of seemingly nowhere, another sobbing, disheveled girl wriggled out from beneath the sink, evidently having thrown up there as well. As my nose scrunched up at the fishy odor, the stranger crawled over to Eunmi’s side by the toilet, gently patting her back and cooing at the similar, dreadful state the two were in.

While her focus was on aiming her regurgitation into the toilet, all her efforts in vain with the sheer amount of vomit surrounding her, I took the opportunity to file through her shimmering purse that I held in my clutch. I rummaged around to quickly find the key card, slipping it into the back pocket of my jeans, thankful that despite the change in outfit, she brought along the same bag that she had left work with.

“Eunmi, I think we should head home now,” I suggested, mildly concerned about her ability to breathe due to her continuous retching. Without waiting for a response, I began dialling the number for a cab.

After she finished emptying all the contents of her stomach and my wallet felt noticeably lighter than when I came in, I detached the weeping girls from one another and took hold of Eunmi’s underarms, dragging her past the dancing masses and plopping her down at the entrance.

“I get that you had a rough day,” I huffed out, taking a seat on a misplaced block of cement, “but did you really have to get so wasted?”

Streaks of her dark mascara decorated her cheeks from her bawling session, swollen eyes staring off into the distance. “Might as well enjoy myself before J3 finally rips my throat out.”

My brows knitted together at the repeated mention of the name, although I wasn’t able to dwell on it for long because I was soon blinded by a pair of bright headlights beaming from a vehicle painted in a distasteful mustard shade. The cab pulled up to the curb and I somehow managed to shove Eunmi into the backseat, forking over another wad of cash as I encouraged her to mumble out an address.

The car sped away and the lingering breeze grounded me, steeling my resolve despite the wet drops spattering onto the sidewalk. It seemed as though even the weather was attempting to foil my immaculate plans and I silently cursed my past self for failing to check the forecast ahead of time.

Deep down, even the possibility of having to endure another day acting clueless to the torment transpiring within my own workplace terrified me. Not even hard-headed Namjoon could deter my unwavering will at this point.

I jogged back to the lab as quickly as my fatigued legs allowed, predictably drained from hauling another person. The adrenaline pumping through my veins was the only tangible factor keeping me going and luckily, powering through the skittish apprehension gripping my mind.

Once the spotless exterior of the lab came into view, I began scouring through the bulky tote bag I lugged around everywhere. My hand ran across a smooth length that I failed to recognize, pulling it out to identify the unknown object. A miniature fishing rod decorated in vibrant red accents emerged.

The toy I bought for Taemin.

Clenching my fist around the rod, determined to save them this time.

Driven now more than ever, I located the keys that Jin entrusted me with earlier, twisting the lock open and slinking inside. The door creaked eerily behind me as I scanned the tenebrous entrance.

Refraining from switching on the lights, I relied on my muscle memory to sneak off to the changing room and donned the black guise in my locker. I secured a cap on top of my head before creeping up the stairs.

With the staircase enshrouded in darkness, I was forced onto my hands and knees to carefully navigate myself; I tried not to think about how pathetic I looked at the moment.

My hands trembled in the face of the obstacle I had envisioned barging through countless times—and now, I was presented with that very opportunity on a golden platter. Well, with more lying, drunken antics and conniving than intended, but none of that was important in the grand scheme of things.

Taking hold of the key card and pressing it firmly against the reader, the ruby glow blinked green. Success.

I took a tenuous inhale and an even shakier exhale before heading in. Considering the lack of windows, the complete darkness that enveloped the room was expected; hence the downwards tilt of my head and slight adjustment of my cap as I begrudgingly flicked the light switch beside the doorway. Immediately, I covertly surveyed the ceiling for any cameras that could be covered or nudged out of sight.

Oddly enough, none were fixed up there nor were they scattered along the walls. I wearily stepped deeper inside, elated yet distrustful all the same. The number of cameras I passed on the way here was more than I could count on both hands, so I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t want a single, watchful eye in here.

Just what kind of experiment were they performing here?

Relenting in my inspection, my attention wandered to the middle of the rectangular room. There, on what looked to be a decrepit operating table, laid a human body.

Well, sort of human.

The lack of movement on the other end prompted me to draw in closer, examining the man. I was bewildered at the jet black ears that stood atop the crown of his head, poking out through his dark locks. Hesitantly, I stretched a hand out and tugged on one, watching his face for any sign of cognizance. My heart rate sped up at the confirmation that they were indeed attached to his skull and were undeniably soft to boot.

Examining the rest of his body, which was clad in simply a pair of boxers, I spotted a similar pitch black coloured tail resting beside his left leg. Although I resisted the urge to check if that was real as well, since I was sure that if he was anything like his animal counterpart he wouldn’t take well to the idea of a sudden jerk on his tail.

I couldn’t help but run my digits along the length of the fur, pleased to find that it was just as fluffy as his ear. The longer I stared, the more confusion swarmed my head. The pads of my index and middle finger came up to rub at my temple, unsure of what I was observing.

Were they trying to fuse the DNA of a human and—

A sudden, horrifying connection fired off in my head, making my heart drop to my gut as I examined the rest of the room. I pleaded for my assumption to be incorrect, just a figment of my bereaved brain.

Resting on the floor in one corner of the room was a sheet, draped upon an indistinguishable object. With bated breath, I staggered over to the lump and pinched the fabric, lifting the sheet off and uncovering what lay beneath.

Taemin.

My chest tightened and I felt claustrophobic in the spacious room, as if the walls were closing in and I could no longer afford the luxury of a breath. Salty tears welled up, slipping down my cheeks as I quietly wailed, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Through the blurry haze, my gaze travelled along his tiny body that was missing patches of fur, making parts of his pale, bruised skin visible. Another sob wracked through my body as I looked to his face and met a pair of dull, emerald green eyes; they were devoid of life, staring aimlessly at the wall. They didn’t even have the decency to lower his eyelids.

Instead of shock, a sort of numbness filled me—which was a thousand times more terrifying. I longed for the rich emotion that blazed through every orifice of my body, anything other than the apathetic desolation that halted my waterworks.

With one last glance, I shut his eyes and allowed the muscles to remain in their relaxed position. My heart yearned to give him some semblance of a proper burial, although I reminded myself that his young, playful spirit no longer occupied this empty carcass. After smoothing my palm over the side of his head and giving my final goodbyes, I covered his unmoving form once again.

I used the corner of my sleeve to wipe away any evidence of my anguish and turned my attention back to the man on the table. At the very least, I would save one life tonight.

Upon further inspection, I noted the chains cuffing his limbs to the table, which made me wonder about the threat he might pose if released—something I hadn’t taken into account. A quick scan of the room gave no clues as to anything that could free him, prompting me to forage through the few lab benches scattered around.

The mess of papers, test tubes and syringes made it difficult to locate anything, I doubted if even the head researchers could rifle through this mess to uncover something of use. A common theme among all the stacks I came across was the name, J3, scrawled across each of them; the familiar name that Eunmi brought up earlier that night piqued my interest. But, I stuck to the mission at hand, stressed from being on borrowed time.

Irritation settled into my features with each tick of the clock, coming up empty at the bottom of each bench I scoured. Through pure coincidence, I made out the gentle skitter of metal bouncing across the floor after making contact with the front of my sneaker. I grinned and scooped up a key

After stumbling back over to the table, I scrutinized his distinct features, defined brows resting above his closed eyes, enhanced by thick lashes. Travelling over his high cheekbones and down the slope of his nose, I inspected his thin lips complimented by the tiny mole underneath and framed by a strong jawline. I found his countenance oddly familiar, as though I’d seen him somewhere befo—

A hollow chuckle escaped my lips.

It was the burglar.

Of course, perks of moving into a small town right? You’d get to know everyone, even the criminals!

My eyes roamed over to his side where an atrocious attempt at first aid was located, the torn skin peeking through slivers of the bandages. Bright pops of colour laid in a few different spots, courtesy of the Hello Kitty band-aids he’d stolen from my drawer back home. The sight of the white cat on the well-built man almost made me burst into a round of giggles, but the dried, crusted blood reminded me of the gravity of the situation.

Any remaining resentment I harboured fled with my next exhale, leaving pity in its exchange.

In reality, I didn’t sustain any injuries from the scuffle and all I’d lost were a couple of first aid supplies. While in this rare compassionate state, I also reluctantly forgave him for the hassle brought about from my broken lock.

Even if he probably snipped a few years off my life with the stress from the encounter—resulting in the growth of a couple white hairs, no one deserved to be screeching out their lungs in pain every day.

I deftly unlocked each lock confining his wrists and ankles and stepped back to admire my handiwork when I processed just how ripped the guy was, strength bulging out every crevice of his body. All I could think about was how the hell I was going to transport this hulking mass of pure muscle out of here.

The idea of plunking him onto the cart I prepared earlier and wheeling him all the way home was tempting, but other than all the little kinks in that plan, most of all, I didn’t think it would be too comfortable with his current state adorning his body.

Then came the crippling realization that I couldn’t handle this on my own.

Thus, I retrieved some clean bandages from one of the benches, deciding that it would be best to snatch a few tranquilizers for my own safety as well and returned to his side.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my short list of contacts before locating his name. As the device began to ring, I reached across the stranger’s lithe body to unravel the old dressing, nearly consumed in reddish-brown dye at this point, to replace them with new ones.

The chime ended, indicating that the receiver had been picked up, before he asked, “Y/N? Why’re you calling so late?”

I began to place the gauze on some of his superficial wounds. “Hey, so, um... long story?”

#jungkook fanfic #jungkook scenarios #jungkook imagine #jungkook x reader #jungkook au #jungkook hybrid au #bts fanfic #bts scenarios #bts imagine

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irkenheretic · 4 years

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Does Red have that one genetic disorder? What does it do to Irkens who do have it?

OOOHHH OKAY SO this is all gonna be headcanon stuff for ANX (watch me forget to tag the post as such lmao) so itll be canon divergent at points

so The Red Eye Thing, which has no formal name because why would irkens name it, is a linked gene between the gene that causes red eyes, and a genetic disorder that leaves an irken with a little extra chunk of chromosome in a sex cell that made them. (a sex cell is like, either the sperm or the egg, one of those) not an entire extra chromosome, that doesn’t happen among irkens, but a chunk.

you can’t have red eyes without having The Red Eye Thing, so yes red does have it! ^^

i just have to go on record and say that in ANX, irkens still reproduce naturally. they dont mate for fun or keep the young, but its still not artificial. smeets are also VERY IMPORTANT in irken society as they are seen as the future of the empire (like, assaulting a smeet is so universally hated that if someone is jailed for it they will 100% be killed before they ever stand trial. smeet assaulters are so hated that the control brains know this happens and they just let it happen)

so given how societally important smeets are, it tends to be Very Bad for Red Eyes that the main problem their genetic disorder gives them is infertility. theyre basically looked down upon societally because they’re unable to do a basic biological function that even smallers and defectives can do.

i mentioned they also have hyperpigmented skin in my other ask, but im putting it here again anyway. skin colors from that hyperpigmentation can range from “dark, but still normal irken dark” to “i have never seen a skin color as dark as yours before holy fuck” these edits i did of red are what he looks like in ANX, and hes on the way far end of the spectrum- out of 100+ characters in ANX, some other Red Eyes, he’s the darkest one. the hyperpigmentation is a result of the extra chunk of chromosome lmao

also, Red Eyes have trouble detecting pheromones other irkens give off. this can be just dulled senses, or it can be a total lack of detection, like what Red has. (ur seeing a pattern arent u, red has a more “severe” case of his genetic disorder.)

the gene also causes developmental disorders which... aren’t exactly on a sliding scale per se? it’s kind of like autism where every Red Eye acts differently from each other that there’s no real “universal experience” for how this specific thing presents itself.

the red eye gene is passed on from parent to child, it won’t mutate and it can’t be carried- you either have it or you don’t.

“but how can that be if they’re infertile!” i said infertile, not sterile. the reason Red Eyes are infertile is because, since the extra chromosome chunk was in a sex cell, at least 50% of their sex cells will be affected with the extra chunk, too. irkens have a biomechanism that purges cells with missing or extra chromosome parts (extra-chromosome irkens are relatively fine, missing-chromosome irkens are like, hatched with no brain or are stillhatches so good that thats... there)

but since those cells are purged, that’s at least half of the fertile cells. of course if they have a more severe case, like red, it would be more than half. so it is moderatley hard to nigh impossible for Red Eyes to conceive or fertilize, depending on who it is. so since only Red Eyes can pass down The Red Eye Gene, and these bitches rarely have smeets, there’s only like.... one Red Eye per generation, maybe two.

(fun facts: there used to be more Red Eye family lines, but some idiot got it in his head that Red Eyes caused defectiveness and that most defect trials were a false positive so in order to save everyone he needed to kill all Red Eyes, so now there.... aren’t..... any more......) (yes the control brains crazy murdered that idiot. they hate him so much sometimes they go “hey remember the red eye genocide guy? what the fuck, right?”)

so tl;dnr: it’s a genetic disorder caused by an extra chunk of chromosome in either a sperm or egg that made the irken. it causes infertility, hyperpigmentation, low or no ability to detect irken pheromones, and a developmental disorder that presents differently in everyone that has it.

tl;dnr 2: irken down’s syndrome.

under the cut im gonna go on about how society sees irkens with this condition (under the cut because.... sexual assault tw. also ableism tw)

Red Eyes are seen as... well... broken pieces of shit. before red was tallest, there WAS another Red Eye Tallest in recent history- tallest Zim. (NO RELATION to invader zim haha) zim becoming tallest made Red Eyes not be.... as hated, but there’s still this societal idea of “you are a broken piece of shit and your cells should have been purged.... buuuut if you do something above and beyond whatever it is your job is, we Might think you’re cool. also we probably won’t say this to your face but we’re thinking it really hard at you, and you KNOW we’re thinking it, so there’s no point in not saying it, but we still won’t so you cant claim we hate you. but make no mistake, we do.” so red just had, the BEST time growing up.

remember in my last ask, i said Red Eyes are liked a little too well sometimes? well... due to their infertility, they’re frequent targets for rape, especially in the military, since military irkens aren’t allowed to mate. nab a Red Eye and you can have all the fuck you want without any, er, evidence. red honestly was lucky he was constantly stickied to purple as an elite, otherwise Horrible Things could’ve happened.

was the general populace worried about a Red Eye tallest? yes. yes they were, back when it was tallest zim. they thought he’d be shit at it due to how “broken” he was. there was a LOT of public outcry, especially since zim was on the shorter side of tallests. they were ready to be all “see, Red Eyes are NOTHING,” until zim was actually an amazing tallest. he was so good the control brains liked him, and the only other modern tallest they actually liked was miyuki. he did great things for the empire, everyone loved him. when tallest red became tallest, everyone was much less worried. but they were still thinkin it, ya dig.

is red related to tallest zim? yes, zim is red’s grandfather.

is red’s tendency to forget words a part of his developmental disorder? it could be, could not be. there’s not much of a sample size due to yknow, the genocide, so there’s no-one to compare his symptoms against. the disorder presents differently in everyone so even if red is the only living Red Eye with that symptom, doesnt mean its NOT a symptom ya dig? but im gonna word of god it and say yes it is

can you have the same chromosome thing without being a Red Eye? yes! in this ask i talk about spork having a learning disability- he has the same chromosome thing, it just gives him different symptoms because he doesnt have the specific instance that red eyes have.

can you have red eyes without the chromosome thing? no, the gene for red-colored eyes is stickied to the Extra Chunk gene, and unlike chromosome issues, which can happen to any irken, an irken will not randomly mutate a gene for red-colored eyes.

is the term “red eye” derogatory? it was EXTREMELY derogatory before tallest zim took power. now it’s just a general term for a red eyed irken, but... irkens will still use it in an insulting way. like... “queer” is the best parallel i can draw. used to be a slur, now is a general term, but some people still clearly use it as a slur against others.

are red eyes called slurs? YES. they are targets for The Word. The Worst Word In The Irken Language, So Bad You Can’t Even Call It “The __ Word” Because It’s Too Close To Saying The Word. It Is Just, “The Word.” it used to be WAY worse before the genocide, simply because there were more of them. it decreased even more after tallest zim took power, but make no mistake, it’s still out there. also The Word translates out to “condemned obsolete bastard” with a side order of “the beginning of The Word sounds like im spitting on you and thats also exactly what it means.” its an awful slur its like if every human slur had an orgy

(was red called slurs growing up- YES.)

are Red Eyes defective? they can be! defectiveness is in the PAK, not in an irken’s biology. that’s why they’re called genetic disorders and not genetic defects, to separate them from the “we are going to execute you” defectiveness. they’re still scorned as if they are defective, though. sometimes theyre called “worse than defectives” as a jab at their infertility- like, even the empire’s worst can do that, ya dig?

back in The Old Days, there was probably a mix of defective and non-defective Red Eyes. now they’re all defective by coincidence.

#anarchisma au #I REMEMBERED FUCK YEAH #rape m #ableism tw #live from conventia #i hope u like it!!

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pointless-yearning · 4 years

Text

Sorry for the vent. Ignore this. But if you ARE going to read this, then here:

T W / / mentions of s*xual ass*ult, miscarriages, vile language, talk of effects of pregnancy, and more on that subject.

Also, I didn’t proofread this, and I most definitely do NOT wish to go back to this later on. I probably should’ve just posted this on private or left it in my drafts but f*ck, I might as well express my opinion. I’m pro-choice.

I hate it when people say that women just “carry” the baby like- no bitch. She full on fucking MAKES that child. It’ll affect her in so, so many ways. Physical, emotional. Her skin, muscles, skeleton, brain, hormones will all be affected. It isn’t a “bun in the oven” because you place the bun in there AFTER you placed ALL the main ingredients. So it’s a horrible comparison. A woman’s egg cell has 23 chromosomes. So does a man’s sperm cell. But not only does she hold half the “ingredients” if we’re gonna stay on the subject of cooking, but she ALSO has to “bake the bun” which is full of pain and misery. And taking the bun out is full of pain, misery and blood. Giving birth could even result in DEATH. And if she doesn’t get a man’s “ingredients” then she STILL. HAS. TO. FUCKING. BLEED. EVERY. MONTH. So, no. When men take pride in the fact that their dicks ejaculate sperm and when they belittle pregnancy and period pain because of some dumb misogynistic shit (“oKaY bUt hAvE yOu eVer bEeN kiCKeD iN tHe bALLs”), I will NOT just sit there with a forced smile on my lips and listen to all the bullshit they’re slipping. I’m so so SO fucking pissed at whoever says that fertilizing an egg is just as hard as your insides creating a whole ass fucking human being, or that getting a hit in the nuts after you were an asshole is just as unfair and hurts just as much as having your vagina bleeding for a week once a month and getting cramps, which feel like someone is turning your insides out while repeatedly stabbing them with a knife btw. Ooh or when people say to a woman that wants to get an abortion that she should’ve been more responsible or she shouldn’t have had sex if she didn’t want a child or that she should live with her mistakes. FIRST OF ALL, there’s r*pe that can be brought in the conversation, SECOND OF ALL, medication, and sometimes even condoms, fail to do the job, THIRD OF ALL, if men are going to go and feel so entitled because they have sperm, then they might as well get the blame for the pregnancy, FOURTH OF ALL, a child shouldn’t be labeled as a mistake, and FIFTH OF ALL, a small “mistake” shouldn’t have such cruel consequences. Some people act like they have a say over another person’s body when really, they don’t. And they shouldn’t fucking guilt trip that person into feeling bad for getting an abortion. Some people just aren’t ready, mentally, physically, or financially, for that shit, or they just don’t want the mf child- WHO ISNT EVEN A FUCKING CHILD YET SMH- and being forced to go through the pregnancy, which, I repeat, has life-long effects on them, is so so SO fucking unfair. And when the pregnant person in question is UNDERAGE after getting pregnant because of, for example, some dumb makeout session that turned into drunken, unprotected sex, that’s when I’ll get extra fucking pissed. If an underage person can’t adopt a child- if a CHILD cant adopt another child- then why THE FUCK should they be forced to give birth to one?? Istg there are so many wrong things with humanity and some of y’all act like people searching for ways to get a miscarriage because abortion is illegal in their country is okay. I’m sO fucking disappointed. Also When people call themselves “pro-life” because they’re anti abortion but don’t gaf abt the baby after it’s out if the vagina makes me want to actually go lunatic and beat the shit out of them. Like, no Karen, you’re not “pro life” you’re just “pro birth”. I don’t see u being vegan, I don’t see you fighting against police brutality because NO ONE SHOULD BE FUCKING MURDERED OR EVEN HURT BY THE POLICE WHAT THE FUCK, and I most definitely do NOT see you donating or even taking a minute to even THINK and sympathize to children in hospitals. I don’t see you actively tring to talk about how wrong deforestation is, or how we should stop eating so much meat and how we should stop going hunting because it has a negative impact on different, multiple species. These fake ass “pro-life”rs are, ironically, going to be the death of me.

#pro choice

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mcatmemoranda · 4 years

Text

Going through questions:

The genetic code is degenerate because more than one codon can code for 1 amino acid. Every tRNA goes with a specific amino acid; due to the degeneracy of the genetic code, the tRNA will respond to whichever codons go with its specific amino acid. The wobble hypothesis is that the third nucleotide doesn't have to do traditional base pairing.

Bloom syndrome is an autosomal recessive mutation in the BLM gene. It causes defect of helicase and presents with growth retardation, photosensitivity, immunodeficiency, and microcephaly.

Lyonization = X inactivation; in females, one of the X chromosomes is methylated and becomes a Barr body. This inactivated X chromosome becomes tightly would heterochromatin that isn't expressed. Heterochromatin = methylated DNA +deacetylated histones. I recall from listening to OnlineMedEd that acetylation makes DNA accessible. So deacetylation makes DNA less accessible. DNA is wrapped around histones. Methylation of DNA and deacetylation of histones makes the DNA less accessible for transcription. Euchromatin is not methylated and is easily accessible.

Precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA, aka heterogeneous nuclear RNA, hnRNA) is processed before leaving the nucleus--it gets the 5' cap and poly A tail added and introns are spliced out. Once all that happens, it's mature mRNA, which can leave the nucleus. There are also these things called P bodies that regulate mRNA in the cytoplasm. P bodies are involved in mRNA decay.

Uniparental disomy = the offspring receives 2 copies of a chromosome from 1 parent, and no copy from the other parent; leads to issues with imprinting. Uniparental disomy-> improper imprinting-> Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes.

Down syndrome is often due to nondisjunction in meoisis, but can also be due to unbalanced Robertsonian translocations (you get too much of one copy of a gene and not enough of the other--this one I took detailed notes about from OnlineMedEd videos in my red notebook; if Robertsonian translocation causes Down syndrome, the pt will actually have a normal number of chromosomes [46], but the amount of genetic information from chromosome 21 will be more than it should be on the chromosomes the pt has, so it presents like there is an extra chromosome 21) or mosaicism (nondisjunction in mitosis causes some cells to have an extra chromosome 21, but not all cells).

Gowers’ sign is when pts with Duchenne muscular dystophy use their arms to get up; looks like they use their arms to “walk up” their own bodies. From Wikipedia:

Gowers' sign is a medical sign that indicates weakness of the proximal muscles, namely those of the lower limb. The sign describes a patient that has to use their hands and arms to "walk" up their own body from a squatting position due to lack of hip and thigh muscle strength.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is an X-linked recessive mutation in the dystrophin gene. Frameshift and nonsense mutations cause shortened dystrophin gene. In unaffected people, dystrophin links with actin for support of glycoproteins in the plasma membrane of skeletal muscle cells. Defective dystrophin-> breakdown of sarcolemma, degeneration of muscle fibers, calf enlargement (it's really not the calf muscles that are enlarged--it's fat resulting from breakdown of the muscles), increased serum creatine.

Huntington disease is due to CAG trinucleotide repeats in the HTT gene. The more of these there are, the earlier the disease comes on and the more severe it is, which is called anticipation. Huntington's presents with chorea, depression/aggression/apathy, and dementia. Friedreich ataxia, fragile X syndrome, and myotonic dystrophy are also trinucleotide repeat diseases.

From Wikipedia:

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA or FA) is an autosomal recessive genetic disease that causes difficulty walking, a loss of sensation in the arms and legs and impaired speech that worsens over time. Symptoms generally start between 5 and 20 years of age. Many develop hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and will require a mobility aid such as a cane, walker or wheelchair in their teens. As the disease progresses, people lose their sight and hearing. Other complications include scoliosis and diabetes mellitus.

FRDA is an autosomal recessive disorder that affects a gene (FXN) on chromosome 9 which produces an important protein called frataxin.[5]

In 96% of cases the mutant FXN gene has 90–1,300 GAA trinucleotide repeat expansions in intron 1 of both alleles.[6] This expansion causes epigenetic changes and formation of heterochromatin near the repeat.[5] The length of the shorter GAA repeat is correlated with the age of onset and disease severity.[7] The formation of heterochromatin results in reduced transcription of the gene and low levels of frataxin.[8] People with FDRA might have 5-35% of the frataxin protein compared to healthy individuals. Heterozygous carriers of the mutant FXN gene have 50% lower frataxin levels but this decrease is not enough to cause symptoms.

The condition is caused by mutations in the "FXN" gene on chromosome 9. The FXN gene makes a protein called frataxin. In FRDA, the patient produces less frataxin. Degeneration of nerve tissue in the spinal cord causes the ataxia; particularly affected are the sensory neurons essential for directing muscle movement of the arms and legs through connections with the cerebellum. The spinal cord becomes thinner, and nerve cells lose some myelin sheath.

No effective treatment exists, but there are several therapies in trials. FRDA shortens life expectancy due to heart disease, and some people can live into their sixties or older.

FRDA affects 1 in 50,000 people in the United States and is the most common inherited ataxia. Rates are highest in people of Western European descent. The condition is named after the German physician Nikolaus Friedreich, who first described it in the 1860s.

Homeobox (HOX) genes code for transcription regulators. A homeobox is highly conserved DNA of 180+ nucleotides. Mutations in homeobox genes lead to limbs in the wrong place and skeletal abnormalities. Homeobox genes make sure your leg isn't where your head should be!

From Wikipedia:

A homeobox is a DNA sequence, around 180 base pairs long, found within genes that are involved in the regulation of patterns of anatomical development (morphogenesis) in animals, fungi, plants, and numerous single cell eukaryotes.[2] Homeobox genes encode homeodomain protein products that are transcription factors sharing a characteristic protein fold structure that binds DNA to regulate expression of target genes.[3][4][2] Homeodomain proteins regulate gene expression and cell differentiation during early embryonic development, thus mutations in homeobox genes can cause developmental disorders.[5]

Homeosis is a term coined by William Bateson to describe the outright replacement of a discrete body part with another body part, e.g. antennapedia—replacement of the antenna on the head of a fruit fly with legs.[6] The "homeo-" prefix in the words "homeobox" and "homeodomain" stems from this mutational phenotype, which is frequently observed when these genes are mutated in animals. The homeobox domain was first identified in a number of Drosophila homeotic and segmentation proteins, but is now known to be well-conserved in many other animals, including vertebrates.[3][7][8]

CAAT and TATA are promoters necessary to start transcription. CAAT is 75 bases upstreat from the start codon and the TATA (Hogness) box is 25 bases upstream from the start codon. The promoters are where RNA pol II and transcription factors bind.

Heteroplasmy is mixture of two types of genetic material; it's the fact that some cells have normal mitochondria and others have mutated mitochondria because during mitosis, the mutation may distribute more to some cells than others. This affects the severity of the disease. Due to random chance, one offspring may be more severely affected than the other because that's just how the mutation distributed amongst cells during mitosis. This is what happens in syndromes such as MELAS syndrome (Mitochondrial Encephalopyopathy with Lactic Acidosis and Stroke-like episodes), which is due to mutation of mtDNA. All the offspring of an affected mother will be affected because you only get mtDNA from your mom, whose eggs have a lot of it. MELAS syndrome causes seizures, stroke-like episodes, muscle weakness, lactic acidosis.

G6PD deficiency is X-linked recessive; this means that affected males will make unaffected sons (because they can't give their sons the bad X) and carrier daughters (who don't have the disease themselves because they have one good X to counteract the bad X). Females who carry X-linked recessive chromosomes have a 50% change of having affected sons and a 50% chance of having carrier daughters.

An enhancer sequence is found in the introns, upstream, or downstream of a gene. In eukaryotes, RNA pol II makes mRNA from DNA template; enhancer sequences bind to activator proteins that help DNA to bend, which lets the activator proteins interact with the transcription factors and RNA pol II, which causes faster transcription. Silencers bind to repressor proteins and decrease rate of transcription.

Hemophilia A is X-linked recessive = factor VIII deficiency.

Nucleosomes = DNA wrapped around a core of 8 histone proteins. Histone H1 is outside of the histone core of nucleosomes and promotes compaction of heterochromatin.

Ok, I think it's prokaryotes that have DNA pol I, II, and III and eukaryotes that have RNA pol I, II, and III. Eukaryotes have 5 DNA polymerases (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon). DNA pol I, II, and III have 3'-> 5' exonuclease (proofreading) capability; but only DNA pol I has 5'-> 3' exonuclease activity, which allows it to remove RNA primers and repair damaged DNA. I got more than one question on this. So remember that DNA pol 1 has 5’-> 3’ exonuclease activity. Eukaryotes have multiple origins of replication whereas prokaryotes have 1.

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perplexinglyparadoxialperson · 4 years

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Aging in Super Soldiers

Another theory here! This is part of a story I’m writing, so the formatting might be weird, but I hope you like it! Find me on Archive of our own at PerplexinglyParadoxialPerson

When I first began to think of this possibility, I thought of using Thor and Asgardians in general as examples, but that doesn’t make much sense. While Asgardians have longer lifespans than ordinary humans, (eg, they have been to earth in the time of the Vikings and are still alive) and have enhanced healing and durability, (eg, Loki got Hulk smashed during the battle of Manhattan, and walked away from it) as well as many other similar traits to super soldiers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are connected. We only know of one alien species that has enhanced healing and/or a longer lifespan. Correlation does not equal causation, and it is entirely possible that it is a coincidence, despite how much sense it makes.

To start with, we have to define aging, and know what causes it. (Kind of. We don’t have all the information yet, but this is what’s suspected.) Basically, aging is when the rate of cell death exceeds the rate of cell replication, even by a tiny bit. Cells die in only one of two ways, external stresses, like cuts, burns, etc, or apoptosis. Apoptosis is when a cell destroys itself because it’s DNA is damaged or mutated, and shouldn’t keep on replicating. One of the reasons that a cell could have damaged DNA is because it doesn’t have telomeres anymore. Telomeres are basically junk DNA on the ends of our chromosomes, so that if there is a copying error, then there is a much smaller chance that useful DNA will be destroyed. Telomeres gradually deplete over time, and that is one of the speculated causes of aging. The older you get, the shorter telomeres you have, which causes more cell death, which means that you deteriorate, because you have a higher rate of cell death than cell replication.

A related fact is that super soldiers have enhanced healing, which logically means that their cells replicate faster, to close wounds faster, replace blood volume quickly, and probably leave minimal scarring. The thing is, if super soldier cells replicate twice as fast as normal human cells, and did that constantly, then the effects would probably be very visible, with the extra cells that aren’t dying probably causing massive growths, and possibly growing into the hollow spaces inside him, like his lungs. Steve has been a super soldier for quite a few years now, so it’s likely that if that were to happen, we would know already. It is most likely that Steve’s (and other super soldiers) cells stop replicating if there isn’t a need to replace dead cells, and probably act like most brain and spine nerve cells, which do not replicate after you stop growing, which is why brain and spinal cord injuries are often permanent. Of course, they would begin to replicate again once he got injured, but unless that happened, they would stay in a limbo of sorts.

Aging is partially genetic, and partially based on environmental factors, but I will be basing my theory mostly on the genetic side. Some people have longer telomeres than others, which makes the individual cells last longer, and make it so they can live to one hundred years old and beyond. Since the whole point of the serum was to make people become the best a human could be and beyond, it is very likely that super soldiers have longer telomeres than anybody, and it’s also very likely that their cells make less mistakes in copying DNA, and/or can fix it more effectively than any normal human. Not to mention that they are more durable than any human, so their cells would also not die as often. The thing is, the more a cell is replicated, the more damage there is to the telomeres, and (it’s assumed) the faster someone will age. Since I’m assuming that a super soldier’s cells only divide when needed, and their cells are more durable, and die less, needing less division to fix, that already significantly increases the chance of them aging slower, and means less cells dying of apoptosis. But if you add in the high chance of them having longer telomeres, DNA being less likely to mutate, and the possibility of their cells being able to fix damaged DNA much better than an ordinary human, and it seems that they will have a drastically increased lifespan. There’s also the fact that a few animals (and cancer cells as well) can produce telomerase, which increases the length of telomeres, and increase a lifespan well past it’s normal length. It’s just a guess, but it’s definitely possible in theory that super soldiers could produce telomerase, increasing their lifespan even more.

One interesting fact that I found while researching this is that chemotherapy, or drugs that kill cancer, do that by destroying the cells that replicate faster. Cancer is just cells replicating very fast and out of control, so it works well on cancer, but it also works well on other quickly replicating cells, like hair follicles, bone marrow, and digestive tract cells. This would make it much easier to kill a super soldier with chemotherapy drugs than probably any other drugs. Once one cell was killed by it, other cells would replicate in order to fill the gap, exposing them to the effects, making the cells around them replicate in order the fill the spot, and on and on, until the super soldier was dead. Of course, this would require a lot of chemotherapy drugs, and probably a significant amount of time, but it’s an interesting thought.

One thing that would happen if they did age much slower than the rest of us, and my speculations about how that would happen are true, is that once they did start aging properly, it would be fast. The thing is, when their chromosomes run out of telomeres, cells will start to die of apoptosis. Then those cells will be replaced by other cells that are close to apoptosis, which start to die quickly, then more cells need to be replaced, all with cells that are also close to dying of apoptosis, and on and on. I have no clue how quickly that would be, it might be at a normal human rate, but I do know that it would be much faster than their previous aging rate.

#science #theory #super soldier serum #marvel cinematic universe

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schepperhaus · 4 years

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How To Handle Color Blindness The Right Way

Little children are adapting such a great amount in their soonest years. They're figuring out how to walk and talk and distinguish a wide range of things—individuals, creatures, numbers, letters and hues. Furthermore, for reasons unknown, the manner in which we use hues in English—commonly prenominally, or before things—doesn't help. We will in general say, "There's a blue vehicle," as opposed to, "a vehicle is blue," which makes it harder for a kid to perceive shouldn't something be said about the vehicle makes it "blue."

Yet, imagine a scenario where it appears as though your kid is continually stirring up red with dark colored, despite the fact that your impulses reveal to you that they ought to have the option to recognize the two at this point. You might be thinking about whether they have a type of visual weakness.

Utilize This Trick for Teaching Your Kid Colors

At the point when my little girl was youthful, we would peruse the baby exemplary Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do

What is visual weakness?

To begin with, the expression "visual impairment" is somewhat of a misnomer. It infers that an individual with the condition can't perceive any shading. Yet, frequently, visual weakness is an inadequacy in specific hues, generally reds and greens yet at times blues, as indicated by the American Academy of Ophthalmology. For instance, an individual who is red-green partially blind may consider red to be green as a similar shading, and they may battle to recognize hues that have hints of red or green in them, for example, purple and dark colored.

In the event that you, similar to me, are interested how this really occurs inside the eye, the AAO is here for us:

In the retina, there are two sorts of cells that identify light. They are called bars and cones. Poles distinguish just light and dull and are exceptionally delicate to low light levels. Cone cells recognize shading and are thought close to the focal point of your vision. There are three kinds of cones that see shading: red, green and blue. The cerebrum utilizes contribution from these cone cells to decide our shading observation.

Partial blindness can happen when at least one of the shading cone cells are missing, not working, or recognize an unexpected shading in comparison to ordinary. Extreme visual weakness happens when every one of the three cone cells are missing. Gentle visual impairment happens when every one of the three cone cells are available yet one cone cell doesn't work right. It identifies an unexpected shading in comparison to ordinary.

Who is in danger?

Young men have an a lot higher pace of visual weakness than young ladies, with gauges that around 1 of every 10 guys have some level of the condition. Ransack Darzynkiewicz, boss clinical official of Hazel Health, reveals to Romper that the likelihood develops if a kid's maternal granddad is visually challenged:

"[Color visual deficiency is] dependent on hereditary qualities. It's passed down from your folks, normally your mom. The quality for red-green and blue vision can be found on the sex chromosome X. Ladies have XX and men XY. So on the off chance that one X has the quality that isn't functioning admirably, yet the other X works you will most likely be fine. That is the reason young ladies are once in a while partially blind. For young men, they just get one X quality from their mother, and if it's the defective one, they're in danger of being shading insufficient."

How would you test for it?

Since partial blindness doesn't really influence visual sharpness, it might get missed in schedule regular checkups or vision screenings. There's presumably no motivation to test for partial blindness at all except if you have a family ancestry of it or you have different motivations to speculate it, for example, routinely attempting to distinguish certain hues. Be that as it may, on the off chance that you do, there are visual tests you can lead at home with your kid as an underlying check; they simply should be mature enough to recognize numbers—or if nothing else have the option to follow a line with their finger—normally around ages 4-6.

These tests, known as the Ishihara tests, are named for Japanese ophthalmologist Ishihara Shinobu, an educator at the University of Tokyo who built up the screening for the military in 1918, as indicated by the AAO. They're broadly available on the web and comprise of hued dabbed designs that uncover a number or whirling line in the inside, which an individual who doesn't have partial blindness will have the option to see.

On the off chance that your kid can't see the number or example, an ophthalmologist may likewise lead extra tests for partial blindness to help analyze the condition.

You Should Take Your Kid to the Eye Doctor Sooner Than You Think

My better half and I have both been eyeglass/contact-wearers since youth, so I've constantly expected…

On the off chance that your youngster is partially blind, presently what?

There is no treatment for intrinsic visual impairment—instead of partial blindness that is gained further down the road, which may have treatment choices. It shouldn't cause any noteworthy incapacity or medical problems, however it can cause humiliation or dissatisfaction. Darzynkiewicz reveals to Romper that it's significant for guardians to begin by thinking about how their kid sees the world:

"You can generally modify your reasoning each day: 'we are left by the road light' rather than 'we are left by the red vehicle' or 'how about we attempt that striped shirt' rather than 'how about we attempt that green shirt'. On the off chance that they're disappointed it might be about shading observation, so don't be reluctant to inquire. Tell them you are there, you give it a second thought and need to gain from their encounters."

Furthermore, here are a few different ways guardians can advocate for their partially blind youngsters, especially in grade school:

Make the educator mindful of what your youngster can see so they can stay away from games or exercises that depend on recognizing certain hues.

Request that educators name hues on conspicuous or significant announcement sheets and different shows in the study hall.

Name any markers, hued pencils or other craftsmanship supplies that might be mistaking for them so they can all the more effectively pick the shading they're being advised to utilize.

Request that the instructor write in dark on the white board (or in white chalk on the blackboard), as opposed to in shading.

Furthermore, in particular, converse with your youngster about their condition so they comprehend that the manner in which they see hues is not the same as most others, and that it's alright to request help

#health

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sweatpantsscienceguy · 3 years

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Chromosomes-Part 2

The following is a transcript from my video Chromosomes-Part 2:

Welcome, or welcome back to the channel. This is the second in my series of videos on chromosomes. Last time we had a brief primer on what chromosomes are and then we discussed sex determination in ants, birds and mammals, chromosomal conditions in humans and spooky clone bananas. This time we’re going to talk about conditions like Down Syndrome and what causes them, how different cells in your body become specialised to do different things and we’ll have a look at epigenetics which means heritable changes which don’t involve a change to an organism’s genetic code; which is way cooler than it sounds, honest. As with last time, timestamps and sources are down below in the description and I’ll put important definitions on the screen here.

We left off in the last video after talking a bit about Klinefelter’s syndrome. To recap, Klinefelter’s syndrome is characterised by a male phenotype but with two X chromosomes. XXY. This can cause symptoms like breast growth or decreased fertility. We also talked about X inactivation which is why individuals can survive with only one X chromosome- because they only need the products of one X chromosome. On a related note, Turner syndrome occurs when only a single X chromosome, and no Y chromosome is present. Symptoms include short stature, fertility issues and webbed neck, among others.

Now when I started talking about symptoms of Klinefelter’s and Turner syndrome I might have raised a few eyebrows. If so, well spotted. How can there be any symptoms associated with these conditions at all? Don’t all but one of the X chromosomes in a cell get inactivated? Surely an individual with Klinefelter’s would just have the extra X chromosome inactivated and an individual with Turner syndrome would just develop as if they had a chromosome inactivated in each cell? Well it turns out that X inactivation is a bit of a misnomer, most of the genes on the “inactive” X chromosome are silenced yes but around 15% of the X chromosome’s genes escape silencing to some extent. This would account for the symptoms seen in these two conditions due to this idea of a gene dosage imbalance we discussed in the last video. A person with Turner syndrome would have a lower gene dosage of the X chromosome genes than is expected for an XX individual and conversely a person with Klinefelter’s syndrome would have a higher gene dosage of the X chromosome genes than is expected for an XY individual.

With this all in mind and with everything about human sex determination we discussed in part one, I’ll come back to my opening statement on the subject: We tend to think that when it comes to sex and gender, sex is the less complicated one of the two. Well I don’t know about less complicated but as we can clearly see it’s not as simple as XX and XY being the final word on sex determination.

Turner syndrome and Klinefelter’s syndrome are aneuploidies, a word which refers to conditions that come about due to an abnormal number of chromosomes being present. Down syndrome is a specific type of aneuploidy called a trisomy which means that three copies of a chromosome are present instead of the usual two. In the case of Down syndrome there are three copies of chromosome 21. A trisomy can occur with any of the chromosomes but apart from the X and Y chromosomes the only trisomy conditions that regularly occur involve chromosome 13- Patau syndrome, chromosome 18- Edwards syndrome and chromosome 21- Down syndrome. When other trisomies occur they tend to be more deadly.

Looking at the chromosomes might give us a clue as to why this is. As you can see the survivable trisomies seem to occur with the chromosomes on the smaller side. This does have something to do with it, however chromosome 22 rarely has a survivable trisomy condition. The answer isn’t directly to do with the size of the chromosomes; larger chromosomes tend to contain more genes. We talked about gene dosage earlier, for some genes the gene dosage has to be pretty precise, much more or less of that gene being expressed is pretty bad news for the organism. Others however, it doesn’t matter so much. Chromosome 22 has at least one of those genes that require a more exact dosage and due to the higher number of genes it’s more likely that a larger chromosome will have one or more of these genes.

Trisomies occur due to an event that happens before conception known as nondisjunction. Nondisjunction happens during meiosis which is a type of cell division which creates gametes- sex cells. Unlike mitosis, which is ordinary cell division and results in two identical diploid cells, meiosis results in 4 haploid cells which are statistically likely to be different from each other. During meiosis the chromosomes are randomly reassorted, so with 23 pairs of chromosomes the total number of combinations is two to the power of 23 or eight million three hundred and eighty eight thousand six hundred and eight for a single sperm or egg cell. So you know, quite a few… And that’s not even considering recombination, which is a topic for a bit later.

Nondisjunction occurs in the first stage of meiosis when a chromosome pair fails to segregate leaving one of the new cells lacking that chromosome and the other with an extra copy of that chromosome. Using our earlier aneuploidy examples with X chromosomes: the cell lacking the chromosome could lead to a gamete that could become an individual with Turner’s syndrome and the cell with the extra chromosome could lead to a gamete that could become an individual with Klinefelter’s syndrome.

During the first stage of meiosis homologous chromosomes line up next to each other on the centre of the cell. Homologous in this sense means the chromosome ones are next to each other, the chromosome twos are next to each other, chromosome X is next to either another chromosome X or a chromosome Y and so on and so forth. What allows this to happen is a physical connection between the "arms" of each of the chromosomes, sites where they cross over. This connection is maintained by something called the cohesin complex. A complex in this sense refers to multiple protein subunits working together as a single unit. The cohesin complex forms a ring around the two chromosome arms to maintain this connection. This connection allows the chromosomes to attach to the spindle fibre, a structure that physically pulls the chromosomes to opposite ends of the cell. The connection gives some resistance against the pull of the fibre so that no chromosomes are separated too early and everyone can get all lined up properly. When it's time for the homologous chromosomes to be pulled to opposite ends of the cell one of the cohesin subunits is cleaved by an enzyme, conveniently named separase. The ring breaks and the chromosomes separate.

Nondisjunction that occurs at this stage of meiosis is caused by this separation happening too soon. This can happen due to a variety of reasons but interestingly one of those reasons is the physical placement of the crossing over site on the chromosome. When the site is closer to the end of the chromosome arm the tendency for loss of cohesion increases. This seems to be because the cohesin ring can “slide off” the end of the chromosome arms and the further up the cohesion site is, the more likely it is to happen.

Before we move on I should mention recombination. At this stage of meiosis there is a small chance that the little bits of chromosome that are past this crossing over point can swap over. This uses the same mechanisms as those used to fix double strand breaks in DNA. This means that the number of combinations of different chromosomes in a gamete I mentioned before: eight million three hundred and eighty eight thousand six hundred and eight, can just be thrown out of the window entirely. The real number is way bigger when you account for the fact that chromosomes can just swap bits and pieces of themselves as they please.

You might have heard that the chance of conditions like Down syndrome occurring increases the older the mother is at conception, a phenomenon known as the maternal age effect. Most aneuploidies in eggs from older mothers arise in phase 1 of meiosis, the phase we've just been discussing. Oocytes, or eggs develop up to this phase and then stop there until ovulation, so all eggs are at this stage at birth. This has led to the theory that the maternal age effect is caused by an increased chance that the crossing over process will fail and the paired chromosomes will separate prematurely the longer it goes on.

This theory is supported by a 2005 study that used a mutant line of mice deficient in a gene for a cohesin subunit specific to meiosis. The chromosomes of the mices' eggs were observed at different ages, from one to twelve months old. The occurrence of nondisjunction increased massively as the mice got older suggesting that loss of cohesion is directly related to nondisjunction and therefore aneuploidy.

We've talked a fair bit about genes and gene dosage so I think it's time to have a quick and rough overview of what genes actually do. Genes are sequences of DNA nucleotides that encode proteins. Nucleotide is just the name of the molecules involved. The nucleotides are called cytosine, guanine, thymine and adenine. The names aren't that important for this, just think of them as the letters C,G,T and A. You might know that DNA is double stranded, the nucleotides on one strand bind to those on the other strand, C to G and A to T. We call these complementary pairs. On the way from DNA to protein we have another step- RNA, which is another kind of nucleic acid similar to DNA in ways we don’t need to go into too much detail in, we’re not doing full on biochemistry here, thankfully. RNA nucleotides have the same names as the DNA counterparts except we have a molecule called uracil instead of thymine. The gene sequence of the DNA undergoes a process called transcription to create a molecule of messenger RNA, essentially a copy of the gene's complementary pairs but as RNA instead. The last step is translation which is when the messenger RNA is used essentially as a bit of code to assemble a protein from amino acids. I'd love to go off on a tangent on how that works but I'm gonna try and stay on track for now and leave you with vague assurances that I'll cover that in another video.

I've mentioned differentiation a couple of times in this video and the last one and now it's finally time to talk about it. Differentiation is the process by which cells in a multicellular organism, like you, presumably, become specialised for their role. For example, erythrocytes- red blood cells, being able to carry oxygen. The different types of cells all have the same genetic material but produce different proteins in different quantities to perform these different tasks, this is why your red blood cells aren't hairy and your skin isn't red with haemoglobin. The way this happens ties into what we were discussing before about Klinefelter syndrome, epigenetic gene silencing.

Epigenetics: as I said near the start of the video is a term that refers to heritable factors determined by things outside the genome, so not changes to the actual “code” if you will but rather changes to things around the code that alter how the code is read. As an example, the Professor Conrad Waddington who coined the term epigenetics was working with Drosophila- Fruit flies, because of course he was. You can hardly do anything in genetics without involving the fucking fruit flies. Anyway, all Waddington did was incubate the Drosophila eggs at a slightly higher temperature than usual and when they fully developed into adults they had a pair of legs where the eyes should have been. Nothing about the flies’ genome had been changed but rather a previously silenced gene had become unsilenced. He called this gene aristopedia. Aristopedia is what is known as a homeotic gene, which is a gene that regulates the development of body parts, like legs. Homeotic genes usually encode transcription factors which lead to more genes being expressed in a sort of cascade and lots of different things happening as a result of that which wouldn’t have happened without that first step. We saw something similar in the last video when we talked about testosterone leading to a cascade of developmental events further down the line, same principle. What Waddington saw was essentially a gene for a leg being expressed in a part of the body where it ordinarily wouldn’t be.

I’ve mentioned before that small chemical groups can be added to DNA and be passed down that cell’s lineage. So if I added a methyl group to a particular bit of DNA then the two cells that cell divides into will also have a methyl group on that same bit of DNA. This is because of and enzyme called DNMT1 which is a DNA methyltransferase. Belting name for an enzyme that, the name tells you exactly what it does, it puts a methyl group, transfers it, onto DNA. When it happens upon a piece of DNA where only one side is methylated it’ll add a methyl group to the other side. Then when the cell is going to divide the DNA will be replicated, each strand will so off to form a new double strand of DNA, the new strand will get methylated by our mate DNMT1 and there you go, heritable changes to your DNA that don’t involve changing the code. Epigenetics.

I mention DNA methylation because it’s one of the ways epigenetics are used during differentiation to down-regulate or silence genes in different cell lineages. Transcription factors can find it harder to bind to areas of high DNA methylation so any gene in that region of DNA is either much less active or might as well not be there. There are other modifications that can be made to DNA such as acetylation and hydroxymethylation too that lead to a whole landscape of potential differences between cells containing the same genetic information with wildly different patterns of gene expression.

So that this process can begin again for an organism’s offspring these epigenetic markers are pretty much all reset when new gametes are generated or when a new embryo is formed. This is also quite helpful for the health of the offspring too as we can actually pick up some of these epigenetic modifications. You were probably already aware that smoking could cause DNA damage in lung tissues but it has been found to cause DNA methylation, histone acetylation and other epigenetic modifications with the broad effect that the expression of genes for inflammatory proteins is altered.

There is evidence that some epigenetic changes manage to avoid the reprogramming however. For example, children of fathers with prediabetes have been found to be more susceptible to diabetes themselves. This alone isn't grounds to suspect epigenetic inheritance but it's made more likely by the presence of similar DNA methylation patterns in both the fathers and the children, with these particular patterns being associated with insulin resistance which is a key factor of diabetes and prediabetes. So it seems that despite two rounds of removal of epigenetic markers, some manage to escape and get passed on to the next generation.

Remember Charles Darwin? Probably, right? His theory of natural selection is our basis for how we think about evolution. Organisms are born with a set of characteristics and there is variation of these characteristics in the population. Parents pass on their traits to their offspring and individuals with traits that suit their environment survive long enough to pass on these traits. The next generation is more likely to have the favourable traits and survive and so on and so forth.

You may also remember being told about this other guy, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who put forward another theory: organisms develop traits over their lifetime and similarly pass those on to their offspring. The famous example given is the giraffe, which supposedly started out as something resembling a big fuck off deer with crap camouflage wearing deely boppers which would stretch its neck to reach high leaves on trees. Over time its anatomy would slightly change, its neck would stretch and it's offspring would have longer necks too and then they'd stretch too and you get the picture. Clearly Lamarck was barking up the wrong tree, and even if he barked up the right tree it still wouldn't stretch his neck and allow him to pass that trait on to future generations.

I think you see where I'm going with this though. These epigenetic changes are acquired during a person's life and then passed onto their offspring, just like Lamarck's giraffes. That's obviously not a reason to ditch Darwin and go full Lamarckian but we can see that in certain situations where these modifications have escaped the epigenetic reset that there is an element of Lamarckian inheritance. Pretty wild. Also, I know I've been making a few jokes at Lamarck's expense but to be fair to him; he was mostly a botanist and plant epigenetics work a little bit differently to our own, with many more epigenetic markers passed down to offspring to allow for adaptation to environmental pressures.

Anyway, that's about all for today. Thank you so much for watching, please consider subscribing to the channel and drop a like on the video if you fancy. Hope to see you next time.

Citations:

Carrel, L., Willard, H. X-inactivation profile reveals extensive variability in X-linked gene expression in females. Nature 434, 400–404 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03479

Radermacher, A. (2007). Extra or Missing Chromosomes. Available: https://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask209. Last accessed 8th Jul 2021.

Lamb, N. (2005). Cytogenetics. In: Jorde, L, Little, P, Dunn, M and Subramaniam, S Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics. : John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gruber, S, Haering, C & Nasmyth, K, (2003) Chromosomal Cohesin Forms a Ring, Cell, Volume 112, Issue 6, 765 - 777

Makrantoni, V & Marston, A. (2018). Cohesin and chromosome segregation. Current Biology. 28 (12), p688-p693.

Gilliland, W & Hawley, R. (2005). Cohesin and the Maternal Age Effect. Cell. 123 (3), p371-p373.

Hodges, C, Revenkova, E, Jessberger, R, Hassold, T & Hunt, P. (2005). SMC1β-deficient female mice provide evidence that cohesins are a missing link in age-related nondisjunction. Nature Genetics. 37 ( ), p1351–p1355.

#sexdetermination chromosomes science biology genetics

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bi-asstronaut · 6 years

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hi! a good friend of mine doesn't understand nb genders (especially the fluid ones & agender). she thinks nb ppl have a mental problem, bc as she sees it- gender is about deciding (between female/male), while nb is not deciding. in general she's very understanding and open, but I couldn't explain her (plus I'm cis and don't want to say something harmful). how would u answer the question of "why are nb genders are actual genders? why are they not a problem of making decisions?"

Hi Anon! Thanks for sending me this ask. I’m not an All-Knowing Expert on nb genders because I’m nb myself, since everyone experiences their gender differently, but I’ll do my best to answer your question.

It can be very difficult for non-nb people to understand what being nonbinary means or “feels like”, simply because they’ve never experienced gender outside the binary themselves, so I understand why your friend has a hard time seeing where we’re coming from. Nonbinary isn’t a disease or a mental illness, just like being binary trans (a trans man/woman) isn’t, and it’s also not about not making a decision. If anything, I think being a cis person has more to do with not making a decision than being nb does - Cis people are comfortable with the gender they were born as and don’t have to go through any of the processes nb people (and binary trans people as well in some cases) may have to; processes, which, to me, are filled with decisions. Am I really nb? Do I want to change my name? Do I want to alter my body in any way? How should I dress to best express who I am? Does dressing how I want to/expressing my gender have any consequences for me? etc. I hope that answers your question of why I think nb genders aren’t about not making decisions.

To understand why nb genders are actual genders, I think it’s important to understand that gender is largely a social construct. What many perceive as being something inherently “girly”, feminine, “boyish” or masculine is actually just… stuff. It’s just objects and concepts. A dress or a skirt is just a piece of fabric cut and sown in a certain way, but lots of people think it’s inappropriate for a man or a boy to wear because it’s “girly”. And to think that the notion that gender is determined by chromosomes can shut down any argument because it’s biology is actually wrongful and completely ignores… actual biology. For example, a quick google search gave me Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic mutation where a person is born with an extra X chromosome, so that their sex chromosomes are XXY. In rare cases, they can even have two or three extra Xs (XXXY or XXXXY). Physically, this shows as low levels of testosterone, which means less-developed “male” characteristics and more-developed “female” characteristics. An example that may seem even more out of this world are people who have a genetic mosaic, where they possess XX chromosomes in some cells and XY in others. How are we supposed to determine whether this person is male or female if we go by chromosomes alone? I think it’s much easier to just ask what the person feels like.

(Not to mention the fact that the biology argument completely erases the existence of intersex people, but I don’t know enough about this subject to speak about it.)

With that said, I think one of the keys to “unlocking” how someone can be nb is being able to differentiate between sex and gender. Typically, sex is defined as what’s going on with your body, while gender defines what goes on inside your head. That means that your body and your gender don’t have to match up whatsoever. Trans women are still women and trans men are still men if they identify as such, regardless of how their body looks. This also goes for nb people - We’re still nb, no matter what our physical characteristics may be and how we choose to dress.

I’d also like to point out that a large number of non-Western cultures recognise more than two genders and otherwise gender non-conforming people, but these genders are often intrinsically linked to that culture’s traditions and beliefs and should therefore not be used by people outside that culture. A relatively well-known example of such a gender is “two-spirit”, which is used by some indigenous North Americans to describe “certain people in their communities who fulfill a traditional third-gender ceremonial role in their cultures.” (Wikipedia) The fact that many non-Western cultures recognise and have recognised more than two genders for centuries should be a good indication that identifying as nonbinary isn’t a new thing made up by hipsters and teens who just want to be cool and different.

tl;dr:- gender is a social construct built on concepts and things that have come to be seen as “girly” (feminine) or “boyish” (masculine), but which have no inherent gender, such as clothing- sex/physical characteristics and gender are two different, separate things and they don’t have to match up- using chromosomes/biology as an argument against trans and nonbinary genders is wrongful and erases intersex people- more than two genders are recognised in many non-Western cultures

This got really lengthy, but I hope it answers your questions and questions your friend may have! If you want me to elaborate or answer another question, feel free to shoot me another ask.

And if there’s anything in my reply that’s offensive, wrong or could be worded better, please let me know.

Further reading and watching (I’m on mobile so I apologise for the ugly links):- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlc8H4WUqEs (“Proof that there are more than two genders”, uploaded by Riley J. Dennis, a nonbinary person)

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjIGlYSe6iDxaIAsFhQ7eLoYlo35JNAKy (“The ABC’s of LGBT+”, uploaded by Ash Hardell)

- For your friend about being genderfluid and agender specifically: http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Gender_Fluid (the definition of being genderfluid)

- https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-agender/amp (a rather lengthy article that includes an agender person talking about what being agender means to them, a doctor who works with gender, pronoun usage, and other things) (I only skimmed it, but it seems respectful and good)

#woo boy this got long i’m.... sorry #when i get asked about gender there’s no knowing where it’ll go #it’s a subject i like talking about and which i think is important #anyway uhhh thanks for the ask have a good day #nonbinary #nb #gender #long post

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rage-against-the-meyer · 4 years

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Breaking Dawn (2008)

So, I've reviewed the other Twilight Saga books already, but I promiss you, this is gonna be the worst one yet. I must admit, as a 13-year-old girl this was my favorite book (don't kill me yet). I was growing up in a Dutch small Christian town that had had a big infuence on my views. In my mind, it was perfectly logical that the story ends with a child against all odd. As a grown-up Biomedical scientist, this does not go anymore. As such, I now view Breaking Dawm as the absolute worst one yet and here, I will tell you exactly why.

Breaking Dawn is a big fat book that consists of three different books. I will discuss the books seperately in fear that it might be too much otherwise.

Part I from Bella's point of view

It's no surprise that I actually do like this book. We get 6 chapters of sheer happiness and joy. Very much Edward/Bella intimacy and they finally have sex (woohoo). So what can I bitch about?

Well, actually not too much. I loved the wedding, the secret goodbyes (yes, I cried). I just believe that after the first 6 chapters Bella should have struggled with the decission to change instead of the pregnancy. Yes, Chapter 7 is the cursed chapter for me. It's the onset of all pending misery. Also, it is the first time that menstruations are mentioned and the weak excuse SM gave to explain the never-having-killed-her-due-to-smelling-period-blood on Edwards part is just that, weak. So, all-in-all, I hated this chapter but what comes after is exceedingly worse.

Part II from Jacob's point of view

I hate Jacob. That much hasn't changed. I hated the cold Jacob that is so prominent here very very much. Personal sun my ass. I have always loathed this POV but it offers us some interesting views on the wolves and the Quileute people. It was good to see the communication between the wolves, but it was also nonsense. The big difference between you can't hide what you think and thinking in directed full sentences became a blurry line that never really made sense to me. What was good about it, is that we saw how pure Seth's mind is and how deeply hurt and actually good Leah is. Seth, a mere teenager, is objectively one of the purest characters I have ever read and that's on that. The faint influence of the coming Gen Z was shimmering through in his defiance of made boundaries in communication: Seth saw the good in the Cullens and defied his tribes prejudice. Good for him. Leah, of course, is one of the most denied characters in the series. Such a fierce young woman that has suffered so much is the only character that does not get redemption. It is absolutely outrageous and I agree with many that it shows SMs prejudice against women of colour. She gets literally nothing. She stands on her own in a group of men that mock her for her guard as she has to suffer through knowing her ex's love for his new love. Then, of course, she cannot have children and she gets no love interests. To through all these (in SMs mind) limitations only at one of the few POC is not great. I do like the fact that Leah and Jacob become closer and that Leah cares most for Seth. It's not enough, though. Leah should have gotten the trip to go to college somewhere far away, paid for by the Cullens out of sheer gratitude. She should have everything and all but through Bella's (read: SMs) mind she is still depicted as sad, lonely and bitter. To show a woman's anger like that is straight up misogynistic. Great start.

Jacob's story skips so many valuable parts of Bella's story, which we have been focussing on until now, and it makes so little sense that Jacob would be there for all the important interactions.

In Jacob's part, some shocking facts become clear. As a biomedical scientist, I have been holding back the outrageousness of this one: the chromosomes.

Vampires are frozen in time; after the change, their bodies don't change anymore. They also don't grow new or longer hairs, new teeth, anything. They are frozen in time. Curiously, they still have a need to feed (blood) and their consumption influences four things: their thirst, the colour of their eyes, their strength and their behaviour. I will tell you why this makes absolutely no sense. In humans, we feed for much the same reasons: we don't get hungry, we stay alive, become stronger and we are nicer when we aren'r hungry. This influence is exerted by the distribution of food molecules throughout the body; to the brain, to the muscles, the organs, you name it. Vampires don't have blood, their distribution of food molecules would be so slow that it would take days if not weeks for the molecules to get to the eyes or the brain. We know vampires aren't mushy inside to increase the distribution so how does it work? It eludes me, I'll tell you. Also, every part of the vampire body is supposed to be solid. Where does the liqud from the blood go? A human averagely holds 5 litres of blood. That is a lot. And since the body doesn't change, where does the liquid go? Aside from the distribution, it makes even less sense that any of these factors should be influenced by anything at all. It is likely that vampires still have cells, their bodies still need to create impulses, movements, talk etc. But their bodies don't changes anymore, so after the change the cells stop producing hair molecules? Why don't the hairs drop anymore? It is so dumb that SM suggested a certain balance between the actiond that continue and actions that don't. We still move the muscles but they can't grow anymore but the cells in the muscle stay active?? This brings me to the chromosomes.

So, Carlisle has tested human, vampire and werewolf (without consent) blood. He found that vampires have 25 chromosome pairs, werewolves 24 and humans 23 chromosome pairs. His findings and his tone suggest that he attributes all the vampire qualities to the 2 extra chromosomes. Now, with everything that I have just explained, I see no possiblity behind that. The venom of a vampire just adds two pairs of chromosomes to your cells? One from your mother and one from your dad? And then, these chromosomes are able to pinpoint exactly with genes to silence and which to activate and that is enough to make your skin hard as granite? No way. The body makes strong pieces, but still the strongest is the teeth. Strong but not as strong as SM thinks.

All-in-all this science is straight up the biggest fucking bullshit I have ever seen. There is just no logic behind the logic SM gave. It doesn't stop here, though. No. I am 100% convinced that SM has not had any sex talk ever in her life. She started with Edward's 100-year-old sperm being vital enough to produce a baby. This sperm is saved at approxomately the temperature of a rock/as cold as ice. This is far far far too high a temperature to preserve sperm cells for long, let alone a 100 years. So, No. No, again. Then, Edward's dick is magically able to get hard without any liquids in the body? No. And THEN, his human sperm cells (human but also vampire?) are able to make a zygote with Bella's egg cell??? A zygote with 24 (!!!) chromosome pairs???? So, it's one of each of Bella's, one of each of Edward's and then just one of the two vampire pairs?????? No. Nah-ah.

I haven't been this vocal about any of my other issues, including racism and other forms of discrimination. Somehow, I have accepted that these concepts come from very well-preserved ideas and I can plainly discuss this matter. However, the pain Stephenie Meyer has put me through as a scientist is still very unknown to me and it annoys me to the core.

I suppose, while I'm on the matter, I should address the elephant in the room. Resumé. Renesue is the embodiment of everything Bella didn't need. The book should have ended before the pregnancy. A story of a woman that found a love in a vampire and she needed nothing else in her life but him. This was the story we were promissed. And then, SM takes her turn to make the last non-conservative woman in the book a mother (her being a mother will come later).

In conclusion, this part stretched every nerve in my body and made me cringe so hard I felt sick.

Part III from Bella's point of view

I'm not gonna lie, I have been pretty dark about the last part. But I LOVE Bella as a vampire. The tranquil chapters where she learns everything about being a vampire made me confident I wanted to be one. I loved Bella more confident and comfortable. I loved the new ease between Bella and Edward. Tranquil, as I said.

Of course, these chapters are overshadowed in part by Rususme. I don't mind the child. It seems nice enough - SM made it pure. But Bella is not a very caring mother. She meets her daugther and then, both Edward and her really don't mind her. They have no urge to be with her and have no trouble letting her go. They go have sex the whole night instead of looking at Relsume's dreams. Then, there is the fact that all tense and loaden discussions are held in the presence of the exceptionally perceiving child. Edward can SEE that she understands tensions. It's so fucking dumb. It really bothered me the last time I read it, maybe because I've matured or maybe because I didn't really care the first time.

When it comes to the final battle approaching, I enjoyed that. I loved Alice's plan. I like the Volturi and their grand dramatic scheming and such. I loved the new characters very much. I think they added a whole new demension to the story. I would have been there for Edward and Bella traveling around the world meeting these people with the oncoming thread of genocide for a child as well though. Of course, the racism is back. The Amazonian and Egyptian vampires are so blatantly racistly described. In that aspect, the movie deserves way more credit for giving us the straight up prettiest actors ever to cover this.

Wrongness continues as Jacob imprints (as the second wolf) in an infant. I know some people see no issue with this. SM tried to make it clear that it was just about her happiness by letting Edward see that Jacob wasn't thinking sexually about his equivalent-of-a-three-year-old child. I mean. Looking at this logically, it's disgusting and there is no changing my mind. Personally, I feel Jacob could have imprinted on any other female character (with the exception of Leah). For all I care it was a 35-year-old woman. But, reversed pedophilia (Jacob was still underage) isn't fun for SM so she sticks with what she knows.

I think I have adressed my most important issues. Please inform me if I've missed any. As usual, I urge you to inform yourself on the Quileut Tribe as it is and donate to them for SM has wronged and exploited them.

The Quileute Tribe

Information:

Donation:

TLDR: I curse Stephenie Meyer for creating that incredibly stupid child as a way to project Jacob's love to something of Bella. Please inform yourself on the Quileute Tribe and donate to them via the links above; SM has wronged them.

As a final note, I am a biomedical scientist at heart. I am always interested in a challenging topic, so fire away.

#breaking dawn #bella swan #bella #edward and bella #edward cullen #edward #the cullens #rosalie cullen #esme cullen #alice cullen #emmett cullen #jasper cullen #bella cullen #renesmee and jacob #renesmee cullen #resume

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years

Text

Minutes

I’ve seen the musical Rent at least three times. One of the songs, probably Seasons of Love, has a line that asks how years are measured. The answer they came up with is 525,600 minutes. The time constraint got me thinking this Pride month about how many of those I spend on my phone. I remember having so many minutes as part of my cell phone plan, but the unlimited ones didn’t start after 9 P.M. Imagine that. Measuring how you use your phone based on how many minutes you spent talking to someone else rather than how many gigabytes of data you used all by yourself.

As I write, I’m attempting a digital detox by giving myself only so many minutes to look at my phone each day. I didn’t even take it with me to work yesterday, but I couldn’t shake an anxious feeling I did bring along. It was as if a part of me was missing. You’d have thought I was in mourning. I feel something similar if I’m unlucky enough to forget my watch. I’ll stare down expectantly at the obvious tan lines on my wrist seeking validation that time is indeed passing, but not counting how many of the 525,600 minutes I had left in 2019 and beyond. If I’ve worn my watch but forgotten my phone, the left front pocket of my jeans feels as empty as my wrist without its timepiece. Maybe my soul already was empty. The two questions that consistently emerge are how did I get to this point, and how can I reclaim my minutes instead of just watching them pass?

There are unexpected moments that pique my attention. The first times I heard the phrase: the modern Stone Age family, and the piano outro on In The Meantime by 90s alternative rock outfit Spacehog come to mind. Neither of them made much sense.

In an ode to another of my vices, I recently watched a video in which the author stated that by living for the weekend, your average 22-year-old in the United States has a life expectancy of approximately eleven years if you consider hours spent working a 9-5 job, sleeping, and medical conditions brought on by age that cause one’s quality of life to deteriorate. I’m sure there were even more factors, but if I tell you everything, I’d pretty much rip away the joy of self-discovery.

I wish that my journey toward self-discovery could fill me with the childlike enthusiasm of the athletes of the Special Olympics I saw in action this morning. Not that I wish I had Down’s Syndrome like many of them, but I couldn’t help noticing how those athletes who live with it always seemed to be in IDGAF (I Don’t Give a Fuck) mode. I was envious.

Learning to live with envy isn’t easy without another emotion or activity to balance it out. I won’t go as far as saying I want an extra chromosome or advocating for a specifically-targeted line of 24 and Me DNA tests. Still, I could learn something from the athletes of the Special Olympics. They have every reason to be pissed about the shitty hand life and dealt them on the surface, and the minutes stolen from them due to circumstances beyond their control. If nothing else, watching the athletes compete made me think twice about giving away my minutes so easily to activities designed to take my minutes away.

A few days ago, I watched part of a video presentation in which the speaker said something simple, yet potentially very powerful depending on how I chose to react to it. He admitted to having heard the phrase somewhere else, but I’ll give him credit for it because I don’t know the source. The simple phrase was: “Create more than you consume.” I started ruminating on those words the moment I heard them, and have yet to continue watching the presentation. Why? It speaks to the struggle I’ve had when it comes to seeking validation. It flies in the face of the notion that the things you own end up owning you. It was the rarest of phrases that I could fundamentally relate to rather than just powering through to the next page, segment, or some other demarcation only to feel an ever-fleeting sense of accomplishment. After I heard this, something clicked. I understood that if I wanted to achieve anything worthwhile, I should stop giving myself away so easily when various opportunities present themselves.

I don’t want to break the rest of my life down into fifteen-minute increments, but I would like to relearn how to stay focused beyond the commercial breaks between major events.

When it comes to creative endeavors in which I engage to repurpose my time, I often think of two things I’ve attributed to Charles Bukowski. I’ll give him credit for saying that he tried to write two hundred shitty words a day and that he’d get letters from strangers who told him that Notes from a Dirty Old Man turned them on. Would I like an occasional letter from a stranger confessing that my writing made a bit more blood flow to their private parts? Sure, why not?

My lost minutes are like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan’s Neverland. Lost Boys had fallen out of their prams, and if they weren’t claimed within seven days, they’d be sent to Neverland, where their captain was the boy who wouldn’t grow up. My lost minutes can’t figure out who their captain is. The top contenders are anger, regret, pornography, irrelevant video clips, swirling thoughts, and superficial conversations. Oh, and the newly discovered (by me at least) assertion by Peter Pan that there were no lost girls. Girls were far too clever to fall out of their prams. Who knows why the author was already putting women on a pedestal before they were strong enough to stand on it. Maybe their baby legs couldn’t support the weight of the expectations they were already feeling.

If I believed that there were no lost girls, I might as well go all the way and start shouting from the hills that a certain shampoo really can bring a woman to orgasm, or that an electric toothbrush does remove 47% more plaque than manuals. Below the gum line even. Won’t somebody think of the goddamn gum line? All I had to do was watch thirty-second ads for each product at least one hundred times (thereby throwing more of my nonrenewable minutes in the trash) before I truly believed the messages they were pushing. After all, what're thirty seconds? Whatever stupid show I was watching or game I was playing would be right back, so why should I care?

If I shouldn’t care, why would I be angry? Because the doctor messed up either during or immediately after my birth? Should I be pissed that he was allowed to go on practicing medicine unimpeded, yet his mistake condemned me to a life of not exactly wanting to identify as a person with a disability, but also not wanting to milk my disability for unreasonable accommodation or financial gain? I have to laugh when I see those ads from lawyers trying to drum up clients on TV:

Was your child born with Cerebral Palsy?

Did you or a loved one serve in the Navy or work in a shipyard thereby risking exposure to asbestos?

Are you sick of no one letting you and your wheelbarrow ride the elevator in privacy due to your severe Orchitis?

What’s the point of surrendering my minutes to an emotion rooted deeply in my past when I have to live in the present? My clock has never stopped running from the moment I was born?

Long summer days remind me of the brief period that I felt close to my dad. I was fourteen going on fifteen in the summer of 1996. That’s when I began working on the service project requirement to attain the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America (fuck yeah). My project was to repaint the bleaches at Spartan Municipal Stadium, which almost every Scioto County schoolkid knows was the site of the first night game in the history of the National Football League.

Dad would wake my ass up at 6:30 A.M., and we’d go to the New Boston Wal-Mart to buy paint, trays, and rollers. In small glory-days-are-gone areas like Scioto County, Ohio, Wal-Mart(’s) had become the place to see and be seen. You could find almost everything American consumerist culture said you needed, and catch up with friends from school, church, or around the corner all under one roof.

If you were having a bad day, pushing your cart past the checkout aisles only pretending to look for the shortest line could make you feel better about yourself almost immediately. You were bound to see people of all shapes and sizes in various states of undress. It was an honest-to-God spectator sport, worthy of competing against the very Spartans whose stadium we were painting. The only real difference (other than the circumference of their waists) between those Spartans and the modern incarnation being that those modern warriors were people who’d largely given up on life, but still needed to sustain themselves before thinking of a way, creative or otherwise, to check out permanently. The fact that even this microcosm of modern life in my hometown was deserted when dad and I came in search of supplies should say something. The prevailing sentiment was that trips to cookie-cutter chain stores like Wally World were all small towns like mine had to look forward to.

As if attaining the rank of Eagle Scout would be my ticket out of that hilly hell hole. When’s the last time you heard someplace described by three straight words beginning with h? Supposedly, only two percent of the boys who join the scouts ever make it to the rank of Eagle. As if I too would grow up to be a United States senator, like John Glenn, or have a generation of kids grow up believing that the answers to life’s biggest questions could be found in my movies, like Steven Spielberg.

I may have believed some of the stories I heard about what other Eagle Scouts had done with their lives since reaching the top of the scouting mountain, but I wanted to get in and out of Wal-Mart on those summer mornings before people who were easy subjects for my dry, often callous sense of humor showed up. The biggest reason I loved pointing out the differences between us was that deep down, I knew there weren’t any.

If dad and I were lucky, we’d make it to the stadium before the heat of the season sucked up the breeze so typical of its early mornings, and left behind temperatures that only seemed to move in one direction. We hardly even talked. We just painted. A father and son who had both suffered loss at an early age, yet not dwelling on anything for once in their lives, just focusing on the task at hand. Not even a traveling band from Cleveland could interrupt us. We’d been instructed not to let anyone who wasn’t helping with the project inside the stadium gates. I’ll remember that summer painting with my dad for the rest of my life. Why should I still be angry at him for not being like the dads I saw on TV? Why should I regret that not a word has passed between us in almost five years? That summer was better than nothing. It gave me more time than a lot of boys got to spend with their dads, however unavailable they may have been. How many minutes have passed between now and then? How many have those have I already lost to useless anger and regret?

Porn’s been a hell of a time thief too. But is it guilty of stealing my time if I was a willing participant? In Q, I wrote at greater length about my addiction and struggling to overcome it than I will here. For now, I’m mainly concerned about the theft of time. I began my meteoric descent into the pornscape at about the same time as my rise through the ranks of scouting. If John and Steven could have only seen what was just the beginning of my life out of uniform. What started as a curiosity ballooned into a serious problem because, for years for the average 22-year-old living for the weekend, I didn’t ownership of the why behind it. I thought watching short spurts (which reflected more on me than them) of acrobatics executed by male and female performers with both surgical enhancements and natural gifts could permanently take the place of genuine intimacy forged with a real partner.

What started as a weekend thing with the sound off and the blinds closed became more and more of a wide-open, sound-no-higher-than-twelve (I had to show some restraint for Christ’s sake), IDGAF, who-would-notice-me-anyway thing. I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted on porn rather than creating or consuming something of real value to the person I could become. Porn was a nasty reminder of what they always say about potential: It just means you haven’t done it yet. I knew that those who acted in and sent it out into the world didn’t give a damn about me, but the real tragedy was that I didn’t give a damn about myself. I often wonder who I’d be, and what I would have accomplished by now if I’d stopped my recidivistic porn use a long time ago, but that’s in the past, and time waits for no man as it marches on. I have a much better idea now of who I was and who I want to be.

At least that’s what I tell myself until a clip of a video I watched one Monday morning, or Wednesday night (what’s the difference) flashes through my dreams. I don’t care as much about the actresses’ measurements or what she was doing in the clip as much as I do being able to see her face, but having no idea what her name is. You’re nobody if nobody’s watching.

The intellectual part of me takes over. I become obsessed with finding her name, or at least what she calls herself in front of the camera. Intellectual curiosity, or so I say, leads me back down a rabbit hole I’d fought for so long to climb out of. Urges win the minutes. My streak ends quickly and has to start all over again, way back at zero.

At least I found out her name’s Britney. With one t and an e.

If I ever woke up feeling less hardcore, or less like dwelling on some perceived slight from my past, no matter how recent or distant, I’d tap the thumbnail of a popular site for posting video clips that came pre-installed on my phone. If it was already there before I even bought the damn thing, that means it was supposed to be, and I was supposed to use it. Besides, its a library of largely short clips that only take five, seven or ten minutes to watch. I need this information if I’m going to be able to seamlessly work references from an episode of an animated show that originally aired twenty-five years ago into current conversation. I need to be able to quickly recall the hardest college football hits of all time if I’m going to have a shot at being accepted during Monday morning water cooler talk with no one in particular during the season. I need to know why women reject men or the benefits of making a schedule and sticking to it. It’s okay. Britney doesn’t even have to know.

They’re just minutes. I’m still young. My hair hasn’t even started to go gray. There’s still time. There will always be. Time’s my friend. Blah Blah Blah.

At the end of the day, all of my excuses were lies. Whether they stemmed from negative emotions like anger or regret, or destructive behaviors like watching porn or too many other, non-explicit videos. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. I spent too long avoiding resistance. I’d talk about putting in the work, but at the core of my being, I wasn’t into it. I’d have much rather had someone tell me what to do with my minutes instead of holding myself accountable for how I chose to use them. I was the greatest thief of my own creative space, not a video clip, or a performer with fake tits or a nine-inch cock.

Me.

I can’t get the lost minutes back, but I can turn my back on Neverland, and ask myself “What if I could,” instead of saying, “This is why I can’t.”

525,600 minutes? How about the rest of a lifetime? Not given away, but carefully measured. One second at a time. I’ll take that any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

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angelthefirst1 · 7 years

Photo

Down the Rabbit hole level 1 part 2

We continue,

The last blond zombie girl and Sherriff we will see will be in Season 4 (Beth who was referenced as a cotton tail in season 4 (bunny slippers on the zombie girl and gas pump 4), and if you go back and watch claimed from S4E15 you will see that the Claimers are just a smaller version of the Saviours you will see Daryl punch the leader in the face (like he did with Negan which led to them taking him prisoner)

Before going with them this time (claimers) voluntarily, next time (Saviours) not

You will also see Glenn enter his own dark tunnel (death) during the same period Daryl is with the claimers/saviours.

During this episode Daryl sneaks off at one point and is hunting a cotton tail he shoots it the same time Len does, Len says: “My arrow hit first” to which Daryl replies “I’ve been out here from before the sun came up”.

(If you haven’t read my post “the patterns all zig zaggy” You should because it details that Beth is represented by the Sun/Son although if you do read it keep in mind I hadn’t figured out exactly how this pattern went and how deep it goes too.)

Daryl was looking for her from before the sun came up; he had been searching for Beth from the moment she went missing in S4E13.

When did it come up the first time?

In season 5E10 (same time the get well soon clock in her hospital room pointed to 10 10… or translated in to the pattern 101 = Season 1E1 when Rick first wakes) And when Maggie and Sasha watched the sun come up together and the music box started playing on its own as Aaron stated “I have good news” (another Good news story you may have heard before? Well the Bible literally means good news) but that we will get more into in level 2 and 3 of the rabbit hole.

Also Claimed has many amazing clues as to when Daryl will get the Cotton tail (Beth) Back I encourage you to go watch it. A few main points of interest are: As Len (who is a representation of Daryl but evil) and the real Daryl are fighting over the cotton tail the leader Jo cuts the cotton tail in half, so we now have two representations of the cottontail and two of Daryl, which is exactly what we received in the story with the Saviors. We got Dwight and Sherry and Daryl with Beth being his cottontail even though she is still gone, but they did for a time add Tina, Sherry's sister who was another loop of Beth (Keep in mind Beth’s connection as the cottontail for level 2 of the rabbit hole)

There comes a scene where the claimers and Daryl are staying the night in a mechanic factory and the others are claiming comfortable places to sleep but Daryl refuses to participate in their game and has to sleep on the concrete floor just like he does in the cell the saviors lock him in when he refuses to say “I’m Negan” in season 7.

Revelation 3:11

I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown.

Revelation 22:7

“And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”

Revelation 22:12

"Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.

Revelation 22:20

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Also Claimed has many amazing clues as to when Daryl will get the Cotton tail (Beth) Back I encourage you to go watch it. A few main points of interest are: As Len (who is a representation of Daryl but evil) and the real Daryl are fighting over the cotton tail the leader Jo cuts the cotton tail in half, so we now have two representations of the cottontail and two of Daryl, which is exactly what we received in the story with the Saviours. We got Dwight and Sherry and Daryl with Beth being his cottontail even though she is still gone. Though they did loop in Tina Sherry's sister for a little bit who was another loop of Beth (Keep in mind Beth’s connection as the cottontail for level 2 of the rabbit hole)

There comes a scene where the claimers and Daryl are staying the night in a mechanic factory and the others are claiming comfortable places to sleep but Daryl refuses to participate in their game and has to sleep on the concrete floor just like he does in the cell the saviours lock him in when he refuses to say “I’m Negan” in season 7.

Not long after this Len tries to set Daryl up and plants his half of the cottontail in Daryl’s bag and accuses Daryl of lying, steeling and cheating and asks permission of the leader Joe to teach Daryl a lesson. The leader Joe is very perceptive and knows Daryl didn’t steal it so he says to Len “you didn’t plant it on him like some pussy punk ass cheating coward did you”?

Len denies planting it; But Joe knows he is lying so he orders his men to teach Len a fatal lesson.

Joe then says to Daryl “you told the truth, he didn’t. You understand the rules and he doesn’t. Looks like you get the other half of the cotton tail too”. He then throws the other half of the cotton tail at Daryl who catches it and places it in his bag.

If we really look at this scene and what happens in season 7, we can figure out what has to happen before Daryl gets his full cotton tail back.

First Len plants something on someone else (just like in s7 when Dwight plants a note that says “Goodbye Sherry” on the sanctuary doctor. Dwight plants the note on the doctor to protect Sherry and himself, and to place the blame for Daryl’s escape on the Doctor also, but it leads to Negan killing the doctor.

In Claimed it’s only once Joe the leader is aware that Len planted the half cottontail on Daryl that he is then given the whole cottontail back, so it will be similar with the sanctuary, only when Negan is aware that Dwight is the traitor that planted the note, those events will lead Daryl to getting his cotton tail (Beth) back.

Further on in Claimed just before the claimers find Rick, Michonne and Carl. Rick Michonne and Carl had eaten a cottontail of their own for dinner (don’t panic they are not going to eat Beth lol) but they say some very interesting things about the cottontail, Rick says “the cotton tail is small” and Michonne says “it travelled well though” interesting as we believe Beth will have to track and travel a long way to get back to her family.

Once the claimers find Rick, Michonne and Carl, Joe makes an interesting comment of his own “it’s Christmas eve, the balls about to drop” all tied together and knowing how the loops work it defiantly makes me think back to Daryl saying I never got nothing from Santa clause in Still, because Christmas day is just around the season 8 corner for Daryl. And Beth’s going to be wrapped to see him… get it? Beth is the gift… get it??? Ok no more jokes, promise. (But keep in mind that Christmas symbolism is related to Daryl and Beth being reunited for level 2 of the rabbit hole)

But wow did I go off on a tangent back to Beth and the 3 representations of the blond zombie girl, Beth went missing in S4E13 (burial) woke in the hospital (Life S5E04) and was almost rescued but then shot S5E08 (Death) however the gas pump 4 was the only one with the yellow life symbol on it and that added to the fact she was the only one to wear the sheriffs hat, means she still has more pattern to play out.

Gas pump number one and two (completely red) only lead to the death coda for Amy and Sofia as Zombie girls because they will not bring the cure. Also Rick and Carl as Sherriff's will not bring redemption in the form of the cure but the number 4 representation of Both the Zombie Girl and the Sherriff may seem dead but will in fact have gas/life (Beth). Note she is the only one that crosses over into both realms of the zombie girl and the Sherriff that's what makes her different. That's what makes her allegeable to bring the cure.

So as there are 3 main representation of the little zombie girl, it will be the same with the sheriffs. We know there are 3 characters that got shot and put on the sheriff’s hat, they will all survive being shot and that’s part of what makes them the sheriffs but only one of them will bring the cure. Number one and two sheriffs will only lead to the death coda (no cure) same as the gas pumps but the number 4 will have the cure. So it will be with the 3 zombie girl representations they will all be bit but only one will survive it. The common link between the 3 blond zombie girls and the 3 Sherriff's well its Beth!

Added extra here the little girl has a wound in the shape of a cross on the exact same spot just on the opposite side that Beth gets shot. (Opposite side = life coda for Beth) also this clue loops back around with Daryl getting shot on the same side of the head as Beth (opposite side to the little zombie girl) in season 2 and also the picture on the wall behind Beth in the funeral home as she plays piano season 4 ep13 is another loop.

This particular little zombie girl Rick comes across is a walker so the wound itself didn’t kill her something else did (the virus)

She starts moving towards Rick (life for her) while he moves backwards (death) he hesitates (burial) but finally shoots her right in the middle of the eyes (life for him death for her). Her teddy goes flying and she moves no longer.

Her final destination is the red coda: lasting death.

End of cycle for this section.

Next scene in S1E01 is breaking the forth wall to tell you a few hidden secrets I’m typing the whole section out and will explain it at the end.

Rick and Shane are in their sheriff’s car eating lunch and talking.

Rick asks Shane: “what the difference between men and woman?”

Shane: “is this a joke?”

Rick: “No serious”

Shane “I never met a woman who knew how to turn off a light, they born thinking the switch only goes one way… on. Stripped blind the second they leave the room, I mean every woman I ever let have a key, I swear to God I come home, house all lit up, and my job apparently… because my chromosomes happen to be different, I then gotta walk through that house and turn off every single light this chicks left on”

Rick: “is that right?”

Shane “Yeah baby, Reverend Shane be preaching to ya now boy” “This same chick mind you will bitch about global warming, that’s when reverend Shane wants to quote from the guy gospel and say darling, maybe if you and every other chick on this planet could just figure out that the light switch goes both ways maybe we wouldn’t have so much global warming” Rick “you say that?”

Shane “the polite version, but still man that earns me this look of loathing like you would not believe and that’s when the exorcist voice pops out, “you sound just like my Fatherrrrr, always yelling at me about the power bill telling me to turn off the damn liiightsss”

Rick “what do ya say to that? ”Shane” what I want to say is Bitch, you been hearing this your entire life and you are still too stupid to learn to turn off a switch”

I typed this section out because here we have a break in the standard pattern they are instead breaking the forth wall to tell you that there are two sides (Shane may be referencing men and woman but he is really describing forces of good and evil one brings light and the other darkness) which is what the two different codas represent also (light = Life, Dark = Death).

He is also alluding to the fact that we are going to see the same thing (pattern) over and over and most will be too stupid/blind to figure it out even though it’s right in front of our noses.

Reverend Shane has literally just preached to you that one sides job is to hide the truth the other sides job expose it and that while this pattern will be playing it will be obscured to most by the story itself because they will not look deeply enough into the show (or life, rabbit hole level 3) to recognise this pattern.

A version of this conversation is repeated in every season too, in S2 it’s With Rick and Lori as they are with carl, at the farm house while Carl is unconscious after being shot, Rick starts Telling Lori a story and says to her, “I know you’ve heard this a thousand times this story” but he goes on to tell it anyway and at the end he says “you know the story right? Of course you do you’ve heard it before”

This is where Team D gets a massive round of applause because for years we felt and recognized something was up (not as it seems) and have all been drawn to figuring out what is really going on and so we have been delving in deeper and figured out so much along the way, but there is still more to uncover so let’s keep going.

Next scene:

Note the life, death, burial pattern continues always but I’m not going to keep pointing it out in small scale unless it’s really important as it will take forever to get to the main points but remember it is still there as we go on, every character and scene continuously cycles through the pattern. But as I said earlier we have only had one representation the life coda so far every other time up till now it has just been a life cycle and we are due for another life coda very soon.

After finishing up the talking and lunch a call comes over the radio for a high speed pursuit on highway 18 (season one to eight, with massive coda’s being season one and season 8 they will be equal opposites, season 8 we are starting over again) the crime: grand theft and assault with a deadly weapon (sound like Grady and Beth to anyone else?)

Well it should because this and the rest of season one and up to S2E01will lay out Ricks story, but Beth’s in season 8 also.

They start driving and get to the hwy they then set up a spike strip trap (just like they set up a perimeter with snipers at Grady) for the car.

The car hits the strip and rolls comes to a stop upside down a bad guy shoots at Rick but it hits him in the bullet proof vest, the other cops shoot this bad guy dead but yet another bad guy starts shooting and we then see the number plate of the stolen car and wow it just happens to say 508 upside down with an x3, (3 Sherriff's 3 shooters)

The cops kill this guy too and a third bad guy climes out the car (he also has the same black bandana on that Daryl gives to Beth when she is collecting berries while looking for the lost children, Eugene also wears it while making the poison pills in s7, this bandana is on the life death burial loop of its own, everything is)

He shoots Rick in the side; this is the injury that will land him in hospital to wake up to a cursed world and being separated from his family. It also just happens that the first bad guy we see shoot at Rick was not the one to really injure him which gives a lot of weight to TD theories that who the audience thinks shot Beth is not really the shooter (Dawn is not actually the shooter she may have been about to try and shoot as a reflex, but there was another person that caused Beth’s injury, we will look at this more further on.)

Still… we all know even though Rick is badly injured here he does not die, so… neither does Beth.

Next Scene: Hospital Rick

It’s worth noting again here that as Ricks pattern plays forwards Beth’s will play backwards and because we have now reached the end of the 7th Season and just as the blueprint of Ricks story is 7 episodes from the time he wakes up to the time he leaves the CDC in S1E06 and S2E01from the failed cure hope, We are now jumping to the start again. The first 6 episodes of S1 represent 2 loops of the pattern. E1 Rick wakes to a cursed world which is life for him but death for the world, E2 Rick is Looking for family- (burial), E3 finds family (life), episode 4 Amy Gets bit (Death), E5 they leave the camp looking for hope in the form of a cure and protection at the CDC (burial), E6 CDC destroyed no cure (death)

In S2E01 they have a small life coda prediction in the from of Rick standing in front of Grady hospital in Atlanta talking to Morgan on the radio telling him that the CDC didn't work out. So this small section of S2E01 is predicting a life coda in the form of Beth and what happened to her at Grady and that's why the blueprint is 6 episodes plus a small part of next episode. 7 in total. 6 episodes bringing only death at the end but if you add the seventh it's predicting a life coda.

To help make it a little clearer for you in S1 we find out what happens to Rick in chronological order (he wakes e1, is separated from family e2 but looking for them and then gets a reunion e3) but with Beth we will see her reunion first S8E01, her search for her family S8E02 and e3 and then how she survived the gun shot and got separated from them again in S8E04 (I have a feeling this is why Gimple is saying the first 4 episodes of season 8 will melt peoples brains because they won’t understand how she is still alive straight away, the audience will have to wait until the end of e4 to find out).

This picture of the season 7 final depicts her song will commence backwards; we are going back to Rick’s Story with Beth as the lead part but it will play backwards to his. I will go through what the symbols mean a bit later on.

Close up of the symbols

But back to Rick for now because his story will tell us Beth’s story but in reverse

Rick wakes up in a hospital (he starts his life pattern, ep 1 to coincide with the 1 on the sheriffs car) knowing this we can figure out that some kind of death cycle had to have come before Rick waking up, that’s just how the pattern works and we know that for Rick it is the car chase and being shot. Prior to him being shot was a representation of a “life Coda” where the world was not “cursed”.

Beth’s story is in reverse to Rick’s and so the 4 on the cop car coincides with the season and episode they (Grady people first took her and she wakes up in the hospital S4E13 & S5E04 and it will loop around again to represent the second time she gets separated from her family when they leave her “body” behind most likely seen in S8E04) 4:13 (same numbers as the cop car just a different order 134) due to the pattern moving. Pi circles

In the hospital Shane Visits with a blue and white vase with flowers, Rick is unconscious but seems to hear what Shane says. Shane tells him the flowers are from everyone and they hope he comes back real SOON

He leaves and the next thing we see Rick awake looking at the ceiling he starts talking to Shane he says “that vase that’s something special fess up did you steal it from your grandma Jeans house? Giggles, I hope you left her that spoon collection!”

Added extra here: the vase loops back around in S4E13 another version of it anyway is on the piano Beth plays in the funeral home just before she gets taken and wakes up in her own hospital and Grandma Jean’s spoon collection? Well we all know Beth collects the Spoon in S4E12 at the golf course with “The Capital Washington DC” written on it. (A note to remember for level 2, reaching the capital of any city but especially, capital cities like DC and Rome are symbolic of reaching a life coda)

Also in S4E01 When Daryl visits Beth in her cell to tell her about Zack's Death there is a blue and white patterned sheet hanging near the door, it's another loop of this vase just in a different form.

Its then Rick realizes Shane is not there and sees the flowers are dead and dried out (that’s why looking at the flowers = Death). Guess what Rick has off to the left of his bed? A table with Get well Soon cards! Just a prediction of Beth’s get well soon clock in the hospital!

I mean come on this stuff is insane it’s just looped over and over.

He looks at the clock and realizes time has stopped. He falls out of bed and pulls out the IV, calls for the nurse but no one comes.

He is really thirsty gets some water from the tap in the Bathroom (life cycle, also looking for water is a looping theme that comes up in so many episodes like 508 Maggie’s group is looking for water and 509 they are all looking for it the ep Tyrese dies, looking for water in this show is during a Death Coda or Death cycle because Water = Life and whenever water is found it will be during a life cycle or coda) (note to remember that water = life for future level's)

He then leaves his room to find a deserted hospital and clues that something really messed up happened (A cursed world- Death).

(We find out later that Shane came to get him out but thought he was dead so pushed the hospital bed in front of Ricks door to make sure nothing could get to him) in comparison we know that they came to save Beth at Grady and when she gets shot they think she is dead so it’s not really not too hard to connect the dots here (and from so many other episodes that depict the same thing) as to the same situation going down with Beth just slightly different circumstances.

They will lock her somewhere and have to get out like Shane did (Army was there shooting at everything that moved)

(Matt 16:2 Very early on the first day of the week (S8 represents the first day as we are going back to the start again now), just after sunrise (Beth’s music box started playing) they (the two Mary’s and Salome) were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed, “don’t be alarmed” he said “you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He is risen! He is not here. See the place where you laid him”.)

Team defiance I will continue this in Down the rabbit hole level 1 part 3.

#team defiance #team delusional #beth greene #team beth lives #td #beth is alive

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sarahhenrez018-blog · 6 years

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How to reduce wrinkles naturally?

What do you consider more attractive – a healthy, fit-looking person or someone who looks cosmetically enhanced? The statistics say we all prefer the more natural look. And according to market research company Zogby International, only 6% of men would like a woman to use Botox rather than have wrinkles.

So if you want to try a few natural ways to eradicate your frown lines, saggy skin and deep wrinkles, here's how.

How to reduce wrinkles naturally - in a nutshell

• Maintain good circulation through regular exercise • Buy some flaxseed oil. "It's the richest vegetable source of omega-3 fatty acids, essential for lubricated, supple skin," says registered nutritionist Carina Norris. • Cut down on alcohol. "Alcohol dehydrates and adds toxins to a system that's already having to deal with pollution, chemicals in food and so on," says Norris. "If you must, drink red wine which contains antioxidants." • Look after your teeth - they, along with your jaw bone, form the scaffolding that holds your face skin in place. • Eat blueberries. "These are packed with antioxidants to fight skin-damaging free radicals," says Norris. • Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of liquids. • Avoid the evil trio: sun, smoke and stress. "These three factors will dramatically increase the number and severity of wrinkles," says Dr David Orentreich.

Smoothies For Younger Looking Skin

Reduce wrinkles naturally with exercise

"People want instant results," says Marja Putkisto, of Method Putkisto, a company with branches in the UK, US and Finland, where the 'face school' method originated.

"As with exercising any part of your body, however, it takes a few weeks before you'll see the effects. But you will see an amazing difference - our exercises eliminate double chins, reduce puffiness and wrinkles, and improving skin texture. It also helps realign the upper body, key to reducing shoulder and neck tension."

Even cosmetic surgeons agree facial exercise is beneficial: "When you exercise, you tone and tighten the muscles in your body," says Dr Mark Berman, former president of the California Academy of Cosmetic Surgeons. "So why not apply the same principles to your face? I've seen the results, and it works."

How does exercising my face reduce wrinkles?

"Skin needs a good supply of oxygen to stay looking healthy," says Dr David Orentreich, dermatologist for Clinique. "That means good circulation and muscle tone."

how to increase energy after 50

"Very few people utilise their full range of muscles," says Marja. "Just think, for example, how little you move your eyes when you sit at a computer all day. These exercises increase circulation and oxygen - clearing away toxins, smoothing lines and giving a healthier skin tone." Knowing which areas to target is key to getting good results. "Our method focuses on relaxing the tight, short muscles in your face, such as your biting muscles," says Marja. "Strengthening other, smaller muscles. This method also realigns the jaw, improving posture."

Can I use massage to reduce my facial wrinkles?

Massage is very good for the skin, but it won't improve muscle tone. "Using different muscles and parts of your face also encourages you to use different muscles when you perform 'standard' facial expressions such as smiling or frowning, for example," says Marja. "The frown lines you already will appear reduced because you're spreading the effort across more facial muscles."

Exercise for Flabby Arms for Seniors

So how can I get rid of my saggy cheeks?

"The Centre Triangle Lift stretches, mobilises and strengthens the important cheek muscles, lifting your cheeks," says Marja. • Place your fingertips on your cheekbones, a couple of centimetres in from your temples and tilt your chin towards your chest. • Use your fingers to lift the muscles up and over the cheekbones, and breathe out. • Create a stretch by opening your mouth slowly, continue opening and closing your mouth - repeat between five and 10 times. "You may be surprised at how tight these muscles are and may even feel the stretch in your neck," says Marja. And how can I get rid of a wrinkly neck? "Loose skin on the neck indicates that you are not holding your head and jaw in a relaxed position," says Marja. • Lift your chin and place both your hands at the top of your throat. • Lift your jaw without flinging your head back. • Push your jaw forward to feel the stretch. "To see how tight your neck muscles are, try swallowing in this position," says Marja. "This tightness hinders support of the upper part of the neck, allowing skin to sag."

Can face exercises get rid of extra chins?

The first step to losing an extra chin is to lose weight – like the spare tyre around your waist, a spare chin is often down to excess body fat. Loss of definition around your cheeks and jawline is often caused by lost teeth that haven't been replaced – your gnashers and jawbone are the scaffolding to your skin. Get well-fitting dentures to ensure this isn't the case for you.

And to target the chin through exercise try this:

• Sitting upright, tilt your head back to stare at the ceiling. • Bring your lower lip up and over your upper lip as far as possible - count slowly to five. • Relax and let your head come back to its normal position. Repeat five times. Do this exercise twice daily. What can I do about the excess baggage under my eyes? A main cause of eye bags is collected toxins and water under your eyes - that's why you look slightly puffy eyed if you've been drinking the night before. • Put your fingertips under your eyebrows and gently lift your eyelids • Press your upper lids down, holding your fingertips in place, and count to five. Then relax. Repeat this twice. • Now put your fingertips to the outer corners of your eyes, moving your fingers upwards as you move your eyelids down - repeat three times. Can I make my frown lines disappear? Exercise different forehead muscles to increase blood flow to the area. • Press both your index fingers on your forehead above your eyes. • Push up against them with your eyebrows. Resist with your fingertips. • Repeat this 8-10 times, rest, then repeat five times.

Are facial exercises as good as a non-surgical facelift at beating wrinkles?

Cosmetic surgery expert Wendy Lewis isn't convinced, and sounds a cautionary note.

"Facial ageing involves more than just lax muscle tone," she says. "It has to do with the ravages of sun exposure, sagging skin, descending fat pads, breakdown of soft tissues and the supporting structures. "Facial muscles are like fine elastic sheets that are stretched in layers over the facial bones. Exercising these muscles can't repair or restore the ligaments that hold the muscles in place and weaken with age. If you repeatedly manipulate your skin, it is likely to cause more elasticity. "Facial exercises should not be considered a non-surgical facelift or better than Botox."

Meditate to slow wrinkles

Meditation appears to slow some of the cell loss which causes wrinkling of the skin. If you’ve ever read the label on an anti-wrinkle cream, you’ve probably heard of telomerase. It’s an enzyme that looks after the long-term health of your cells and is found in many expensive lotions. A study from the University of California has found that meditation increases telomerase activity too.

How To Release Toxins From Fat Cells

Telomeres are structures at the end of chromosomes, sometimes envisaged as the equivalent of the cap on the end of a shoelace. They get shorter each time a cell divides and when they drop below a specific length, that cell can no longer divide and dies. By maintaining telomere levels or promoting their activity, it’s possible to slow down cell loss. It’s this cell loss that causes wrinkling and other signs of ageing.

The researchers believe that this beneficial side effect of meditation is down to the reduced stress that practitioners feel. They base this theory on the fact that those study participants who showed the highest levels of telomerase activity were also those who showed the greatest improvement in terms of positive psychological changes.

So while it’s tempting to think meditation could help keep you younger, in fact it’s psychological wellbeing that helps keep you younger. If meditation makes you feel good, de-stressing you and giving you a general sense of wellbeing, then it may also increase your telomerase activity. But if gardening or painting gives you a similar sense of wellbeing, it may well be just as effective.

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ishadyfartcollector-blog · 6 years

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The Transhumanist movement is made up of people of various political leanings. There are those who skew left-of-center, those with a more libertarian mindset, and there are even some who are archly conservative. But they all share a belief that science and technology can be wielded to cheat death. And they’re all completely tone deaf.

I first came to Transhumanism in my work as a journalist. In my career, which has spanned a decade of reporting and editorial writing on the intersection of human rights, policy, and science, nothing has raised my hackles as much as this movement’s quest for immortality and the ignorance of the inherent inequality of the discussion around that idea.

It was actually this ignorance, or perhaps willful callousness, that made me pivot my career to focus on bioethics, in which my main areas of research are biohacking, DIY science, and fringe technologies. I overlap with Transhumanist interests more often than not in my career. And it’s not all negative. In fact, I very much agree with the other maxims of the movement, including self-experimentation and morphological freedom, and I enjoy investigating the ethical challenges associated with using scientific knowledge to enhance the limits of the human body.

My disagreement with transhumanists isn’t that they want to be immortal. That goal has been a popular pastime of the wealthy, fearful, and bored for at least a millennia. It’s not the quest for immortality that seems unreasonable to me.

It’s the timing.

We live in an age where civil liberties are constantly under threat. People are in fear of being assaulted, detained, or even killed by state-sponsored actors from municipal police forces to ICE. It seems that our freedoms are eroded daily in favor of catering to the fleeting temper tantrums of one man. Trying to unleash radical life-extension strategies in this political climate is at best vain and misguided, and at worst offensive to anyone who doesn’t possess freedom over their bodies, or doesn’t possess the privilege to even think about living forever.

Some of us are just trying to make sure we’re alive at the end of the week.

Memento mori? Nah, bro.

There are several so-called “life-extension” technologies, some of them absolute bunk, others questionable-but-possible, and some theoretical-but-perhaps-legitimate. None of them are currently able to keep us alive for longer than a normal human lifespan, which currently hovers around 80 years old in most developed countries.

There is simply no logical reason to invest money in being frozen.

It’s true, we have already used modern medicine to extend our lives significantly over the past couple decades, and by some estimates, the first person to live to 150 has already been born. But radical longevity enthusiasts aren’t just hoping for an extra century or two. The moonshot is true immortality, and the investments by Randian billionaires into tremendously questionable efforts by private companies seeking secret ways to avoid dying are staggering — perhaps even reaching into the trillions of dollars.

Cryonics, or the idea that a dead body can be frozen at extremely low temperatures and resurrected at some point in the future when technology has evolved to bring frozen people back from the dead, is a big-ticket theory with Transhumanists. There are global conferences dedicated to the study of cryonics, a technology that is said to preserve tissue so well that this tissue is essentially still alive. Or so the story goes.

Max More, one of the original founders of the modern transhumanist movement, and the author of a 1990s Transhumanist manifesto, owns and operates Alcor, one of the country’s largest cryonics facilities. There, those hoping to simply press pause on their deaths and join humanity as a reanimated corpse can buy a tank for themselves, their loved ones, or their pets, for a pretty price. Alcor charges a minimum of $200,000 for whole-body preservation. (The running price of preserving a loved one at the Cryonics Institute, another major operation, starts at $35,000.)

Unfortunately, cryonics is bullshit.

Scientists agree that the freezing process damages cells irreparably, by creating what are essentially cellular icicles. Not to mention that reheating a human body — cells, membranes, and so on — also mangles the many proteins and pieces that comprise us. One BBC investigation into cryo-preservation pointed out that organs often need different temperatures and environments to maintain functionality, something we know from preserving them for donation.

There is simply no logical reason to invest money into being frozen. It doesn’t work now, it likely won’t ever work, and by the time it ever does work, no one who was frozen now will be able to be successfully resurrected.

A similarly dubious technological attempt at dodging death is brain uploading. This concept is basically just the plot of Transcendence. A major proponent of brain uploading is Transhumanist luminary Martine Rothblatt,the founder of SiriusXM satellite radio and the highest-paid female CEO in the country. When the time comes, Rothblatt would like to upload her wife, Bina, to the cloud — a project that is already underway with Bina48, a social robot that has Bina’s personality — and her own Twitter account.

The concept behind brain uploading is that someday, everyone will be able to upload their entire consciousness and personality to a server and preserve themselves digitally, only to be transferred at some point into some other vessel, if they so desire. (Popular options are humanoid robots or similar household objects.)

This is a fun pastime for people who can afford it, no doubt. Talking to robots is awesome. (My kid’s first word will likely be “Alexa.”) And AI and robotics technologies are progressing at an incredible pace. However, true mind uploading is incredibly far off, because there is no evidence that personality traits reside within brain tissue, and there is no proven way to harness memories or creativity, or any of the other things that make you “you.”

Still, one provocative start-up is currently enrolling patients who want to try out this tech. (You just have to die first).

The most realistic-seeming life extension technique lie somewhere in the realm of regenerative medicine, a fringe of largely theoretical ideas based in real science that is progressing rapidly. Aubrey de Grey, the famed Cambridge gerontologist, who is also a figure in the Transhumanist movement, leads this charge. He is followed by a number of stem cell experts, geneticists, and otherwise legitimate characters who have taken up the mantle of the study of genetics and telomeres.

Telomeres are the timekeepers of human genes. They are small capsule-like pieces that make up the bottom of chromosomes and are often described as the little plastic nubs at the end of a shoelace. Their length appears to be indicative of lifespan because they seem to shrink as humans age. The longer the telomere, the longer you’ve got on the terrestrial plane, or so the theory goes.

This is real science, and there are plenty of legitimate aging studies underway that involve measuring telomeres and to see how they correspond to aging and disease. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad science surrounding the theory as well.

Liz Parrish, the CEO of a company called BioViva, claims to be the first person to have elongated her telomeres through gene therapy that she perhaps performed on herself, possibly in Colombia. The details are foggy, but what’s clear is that BioViva’s science is happening without any regulatory oversight, peer review, or pre-clinical trials.

After she allegedly used gene therapy to reverse her body’s aging process, Parrish plastered the internet with blog posts claiming she was “Patient Zero”for this unproven and untested idea. Genome editing pioneer George Church, who despite being listed as a scientific advisor for Parrish’s company, referred to her gene therapy project as “a one-person show” in an article in MIT Technology Review.

I understand natural curiosity, the thrill of science, and the quest for innovation. But Transhumanist leaders have made science into a circus.

It is irresponsible, if not actively harmful, to pursue radical life extension as a serious goal, while so many Americans fear that they won’t be able to make through the next few years.

Zoltan Istvan, formerly the head of the Transhumanist Party and self-described “science candidate,” traversed the country campaigning during the 2016 presidential election in a vintage RV decorated like a coffin. Because becoming immortal and alleviating existential risk was his actual campaign platform. Most recently, Istvan also ran for governor of California, and once again suggested that governments should divert more resources into scientific and technological research to “cure death.”

Istvan, like so many other life extension advocates and Transhumanists, is a supporter of the concept of “morphological freedom,” or the idea that anyone has the right to do what they will with their own body. I also believe in morphological freedom, and I feel privileged to have it. But until every American also gets the chance to enjoy freedom over their bodies and choices, I remain exceedingly skeptical about investing outrageous sums into longevity research or prioritizing it above the needs of living people.

Until every American can say that they enjoy morphological freedom, including every woman who wants access to safe, affordable reproductive care, I don’t want to hear about Peter Thiel or Larry Page spending billions on flimsy science for life extension. Only 28 states require insurers to cover contraception, and 6 states moved to ban all abortions in 2017, while a further 28 states introduced legislation that would “ban abortions under some circumstances.”

Instead of funding life extension, let’s fund pro-choice candidates, build health clinics, and train midwives. Let’s fight for all women to have control over their own bodies.

Until every American has the freedom to live without fear of the state impeding their natural lifespans, I don’t want to hear about funding brain uploading initiatives. Nearly 1,000 people were shot by police in 2017. People of color actively fear for their lives every day in this country, from militant police forces and unwieldy federal immigration officials.

Instead of talking about the rights of the wealthy and educated to dabble in dubious science, let’s focus first on making sure that everyone, regardless of class or color, can feel safe on our streets.

Transhumanists list “curing death” as the number one item on their political platforms. To the people researching life extension, death is a “disease.” But I have never heard any of the people advocating that they have a human right to live forever also demanding universal healthcare. In fact, there is an ongoing debate within Transhumanism about whether universal healthcare is a human right at all.

In the U.S. in 2016, 3.2 million children did not have access to health insurance. In Zoltan Istvan’s home state, California, that number was 268,000.

I don’t see longevity supporters rallying for these causes. I don’t see them en masse wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts, telling GOP senators to leave the ACA alone, carrying signs for Planned Parenthood, or building a float for Pride. But they will rally across the US to “oppose death.” And raise $28,000 for Istvan to build a mobile coffin.

Without also advocating for civil liberties for others, longevity proponents can be seen as a truly unethical example of what happens when the uber-privileged from Silicon Valley lose touch with how bad things really are. It is irresponsible, if not actively harmful, to pursue radical life extension as a serious goal, while so many Americans fear that they won’t be able to make through the next few years.

Forever isn’t even a consideration.

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