#mistaken assumptions

[this-acuteneurosis]

Awakening

Leia takes zero responsibility for the madness that surrounds her and Padmé 100% encourages more madness in her own sphere.

Like mother, like daughter.

[princesssarisa]

Characters who are dying of tuberculosis seem to be constantly mistaken by audiences as being older than they really are, and cast older too.

@midnightcowboy1969 just posted the fact that in the original book of Midnight Cowboy, the title character Joe Buck is 28 and several years older than his TB-ridden friend and Muppet namesake Rico Rizzo, who is only in his early 20s. But in the movie version their actors were both in their early 30s, and I've read two or three reviews of the movie which all assumed that Rizzo was much older than Joe: calling him a "father figure" to him, describing him as "aging," etc.

That reminds me of how some people responded to Anne Hathaway's casting as Fantine in Les Misérables back in 2012. Fans of the stage version kept calling her "too young" for the role, and in an interview, she revealed that she was labeled "too young" when she first auditioned too. She was 30, and in Victor Hugo's novel, Fantine is about 25 when she dies.

And then there's possibly the most famous "death by TB" story of all time: Camille and its opera adaptation La Traviata. So often I've seen people describe Marguerite/Violetta as being older than her naïve lover Armand/Alfredo, as if it were a stated fact. It seems typical both on the opera stage and in straight Camille adaptations to cast women in their 30s or even early 40s as Marguerite/Violetta, alongside a 20-something Armand/Alfredo. I'm counting the Camille/Traviata knockoff Moulin Rouge! in this too: Nicole Kidman is four years Ewan McGregor's senior, while the stage version's Karen Olivo is seven years older than Aaron Tveit. But Marie Duplessis, the real courtesan who inspired the heroine? Died three weeks after her 23rd birthday. And Alexandre Dumas fils, who modeled Armand after himself? Exactly the same age as she was.

It's a strange trend. Apparently Victor Hugo was right when, after describing Fantine's haggard looks in Les Misérables, he wrote that illness "mimics old age."

[notachair]

Since atla is again having an extra surge of popularity, I'm shooting my shot:

[ID: (Rest of image description in alt). At the bottom of the image sits the text: "Zuko: Okay. Well, I can't remember how it starts, but the punchline is "leaf me alone, I'm bushed."" ID end].

Did we ever find out what the setup for this joke was? I feel kinda haunted by it. If not- anyone wanna make their best or worst guesses?

edit: I now know what "I'm bushed" mean, but go ahead anyway 👍

haunted thoughts in tags ↓

[anneapocalypse]

One of the downsides of a fandom with so much Deep Lore (which overall I do love) is that it is just not possible for anyone to know all of it, full stop. And that makes it really easy for fanon to slip in and become accepted as canon, not in the way of people just liking the fanon, but in the way of a post gets circulated either saying outright or strongly implying that it's canon, and people go, "Oh!" and don't ask for a source and from there it's a stone rolling downhill.

And if you say, "But that isn't confirmed canon," half the time people just say "No you're wrong it is canon actually" even though the only sources for it are a fan-made post or an out-of-context tweet.

[alesyira]

Izuku: This guy might be a villain, but I could be mistaken. Hitoshi: This guy can't possibly be a villain, but I might be mistaken.

the cute guy next door

[softshuji]

*rocking back and forth* begone with cheater hanma and cheater ran or suffer the wrath of a million swords

[electricea]

honestly i get that atlus probably made the year 20XX just to make things simpler but damn if it doesn't make tying p5/p3/p4 together hard lmao.

[lessthanimpressedlesbian]

What if Laudna goes into Imogen's next dream and they meet her mother there? What if Imogen subconsciously added a ring to her own finger in the dreamscape? What if Liliana sees them and starts crying because she's missed so much of Imogen's life?

"Oh Imogen, you're married?"

[scoopsgf]

hopefully what comes of this isn’t empty stadiums but taylor finding a way to sell tickets directly from her site or something. like they have to be investigating this and trying to find a solution right?

[bahrlee]

"Tumblr is the queerest website on--" I got harassed by TERFs last year for simply making a post in support of trans women. I'm not a trans woman myself yet my support of trans women alone filled my inbox and reblogs with transphobic weirdos. Tumblr is not safe for the LGBTQ+ community until trans women are safe here. Fuck you

[naturallybecca]

STILL MAD that wayward girls spinoff was not picked up, all those episodes setting it up, all those fantastic characters, such potential but noooooo not enough men sorry can't do it

[queenlucythevaliant]

👩🏼‍🔬

It's me! Hi! I'm the problem (too many science facts).

Since I know you like weird fish (lol), let's talk horizontal gene transfer between different fish species!

So for the uninitiated, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the process by which genetic information moves between members of different species by methods other than descent. It's typically associated with microbes, like the ones we study in my lab, which swap DNA back and forth via a form of conjugation (I study Archaea, they're weird). HGT makes prokaryotic evolution tricky to study; the simple definition of evolution is just "descent with modification," so what do you do in cases where there's modification without descent? (Lots of math is the answer.)

But! HGT has actually been demonstrated in other areas of the tree/web/coral of life too! Specifically, we've documented cases of different fish species swapping antifreeze genes back and forth horizontally.

So there are, broadly, five types of antifreeze proteins, each of which is very diverse. There are loads of these guys, because protein sequence space is enormous and there are usually unfathomably many molecular mechanisms by which to achieve something. Broadly, they've also evolved really fast (within the last 20 million years) in response to glaciation events, so sometimes you even get radically different antifreeze proteins in closely related fish species.

However! There are three very different, distantly related fish species (herring, rainbow smelt, and sea raven) that all encode extremely similar antifreeze proteins. They're so similar that convergent evolution just can't account for it: work the same way, unique disulfide bridge patterns, 85% amino acid identity across the board and higher in coding regions. For reference, they did a big survey of other antifreeze proteins when this was discovered (2008, I believe) and they couldn't find any homologous (related) proteins with greater than 40% amino acid identity. This was a highly conserved protein in both intron and exon regions.

like

Source

These three random, unrelated fish have darn similar homologous proteins. I said in a previous post that there are more possible proteins 100 amino acids long than there are atoms in the whole universe. So what the heck?

Horizontal gene transfer, baby! Between vertebrates!

Proooooobably this happened via viral infection? But we're not totally sure yet! It's an ongoing area of research and I, for one, absolutely cannot wait to read the textbooks in another thirty or fifty years.

When I first encountered this in a class several years ago, my response was genuinely just like. It's a miracle.

See, I get why YE Creationists talk about the odds of evolution occurring via random chance so much, all those piles of silver dollars covering Texas in which you just happen to pick the right one. It's compelling, in a way: these are crazy long odds we're dealing with.

Except no! When glaciation happens and one fish has a useful antifreeze protein, and then that fish gets some weird virus and it ends up infecting other fish and altering its eggs, who now have access to that same useful antifreeze protein which keeps them alive long enough to procreate... That's providence, baby! That's God looking out for our silly little fish buddies!

AND it's the power of natural selection! Because the fish that ended up with the useful protein DOES have a reproductive advantage now! And so of course these proteins spread like crazy, of course they do! It makes a world of sense.

It's just. It's so cool dude. HGT is awesome, and I mean that in the classical sense of the word. HGT is sublime.

[queenofthegalaxxy]

[[ 'Tis the season with @symbioteburnout !]]

Did seriously all the clubs to this? Ugh. All Blackfire had wanted was a little bit of dancing, but all the clubs she tried to enter told her that it was 'the season', and that no one was allowed to go in without the right outfit. How ridiculous. By now, she was pretty fed up with looking for clubs and always getting the same answer, so Blackfire turned a corner or two from the shop and put her focus on some girls leaving the place.

Minutes later, she had on a different outfit above her uniform, the typical short red dress and hat you'd expect for a female christmas outfit, and even though her armor was still eyed for being so visibly below the outfit, this time she was let in - and threw off the hat instantly once she was inside. Before she could tear off the dress too, she walked right into someone, and shifted her focus to the other girl instead. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you look about as excited about the whole 'festive season for clubs' as I am."

[spinelessandtimeless]

So I’m studying abroad to improve my Spanish right? But people keep on asking me if I’m from France and no offense to french people but IM NOT FRENCH IVE NEVER LEARNED FRENCH IVE NEVER BEEN TO FRANCE I DONT THINK I EVEN KNOW ANYONE FROM FRANCE HOWISTHISHAPPENING. AM I GIVJNG FRENCH VIBES??? WHEN DID THIS START???AM I SECRETLY FRENCH??? DID MY OBSESSION WITH JOAN OF ARC (I am queer) FILL ME WITH THE FRENCH SPIRIT SO MUCH THAT I NOW HAVE SUBCONSCIOUSLY TAKEN A FRENCH ACCENT???

[lesser-vissir]

Reverse racism isn't real but its kinda insane how some poc react to being told "taking out your anger about racism on white people you oppress on the basis of sexuality or gender, by being homophobic/transphobic to them is bad"

[grrlofswirls]

So, I’ve been wondering about this for a while and figured I might as well just ask:

Did Cloud actually have a poster of Sephiroth growing up?  Or is this just an example of a fanon idea becoming so ingrained into the fandom’s collective consciousness that we all assume its true, like Sephiroth being called a General in fanfics when in reality he never had that title?

If he did, then providing some solid evidence to confirm it would be greatly appreciated.