#so in order to not have to go in there

[theonetrueyeet]

spider ramble... particularly about false widows

in a Mood™ abt spiders currently, ESPECIALLY false widows. been going back over my arachnid section of the invertebrate module bc i have exams soon and its late and im frustrated abt how false widows get portrayed by the media and percieved by the british public... this is gonna be long and rambly and probably not make much sense and go off in a million and one diff directions sorry i just feel like talking abt spiders. this also came about bc of the big fuckoff house spider that was in my room last night on the top of my door frame but since it was late (like. midnight) and also out of my reach i went eh. ill deal with it in the morning. and then i woke up in the morning and no more spider to deal with! which i should be more stressed about i feel but im so exhausted from the run up to exams and other life stuff that im just like ok cool thats Around somewhere now ig. im guessing it was a female from the size but i cant be sure... anyway without further ado onto the main show.

so here in the uk we arent exactly known for our venomous animals. we have some but they're nothing really that dangerous (to us as humans at least. im not going into venom-prey specificity rn ive had ENOUGH of that recently). we have the european adder (which is also percieved as terrifying bc its a venomous snake but it poses very little risk to us as humans bc they are very shy and i have a lot to say abt adders but thats for another day), wasps, bees, some venomous fish (didnt know this until i found one rockpooling they r pretty neat), even some stinging jellyfish and siphonophores like the portuguese man o war. and then we have the spiders. all species of spider are venomous (minus the uloboridae family, aka the cribellate orb weavers which im not too sure off the top of my head if we have those in the uk... we might have one or two species?? idk but they arent venomous and i think theres another family that has some non venomous spiders BUT THE POINT IM MAKING IS PRETTY MUCH ALL SPIDERS ARE VENOMOUS). there are 650ish spp of spider in the uk and of those VERY FEW are at all medically significant. of these few are the rabbit hutch spider, the cupboard spider, and... the noble false widow. these 3 spiders are all known as false widow spiders. we also occasionally get the meditterreanean false widow, but to my knowledge these only arrive on imports and dont have a population within the uk.

belonging to the genus steatoda, false widows are usually seen as these terrifying death spiders that will kill you just for looking at them when really... they arent actually that dangerous. most cases of bites being severe are either a) a result of an allergy or b) it was actually caused by something other than the bite itself (such as a bacterial infection in the bite, or the "bite" not actually being a bite) or even c) greatly exaggerated by the tabloids (shocker)... like ok we dont have many scary animals in the uk but. we dont need to overexaggerate the ones that really arent as bad as people think! badgers probably pose more of a threat to you than a false widow does. have you seen a badger?! they look so cute but they are VICIOUS those things will FUCK YOU UP and give you TB on top of getting absolutely mauled. a false widow will, at most, just make you feel a bit ill for a couple of days. me personally i would take a falsie over the badger. false widows also only bite in defense! most of the time they bite because you didn't see them and happened to be a very big thing up in their personal space! tbh i would bite too

false widow bites are, to most people, no more harmful than a wasp sting. so its not exactly a fun time but its not exactly the limb destroying death bite that the british media loves to make it out to be. most bites are probably dry bites or have near neglible amounts of venom, so won't cause anything more than a bit of pain. when venom does get involved it gets a bit more complicated bc it depends on how ur body reacts to it. as i said before, most ppl its not much worse than a wasp sting but it can cause things like muscle spasms, sweating, and a raised temperature. it rarely gets worse than that. of course you can be allergic to it which will cause anaphylaxis which is a medical emergency, but this is an exceptional circumstance. most ppl bitten by a false widow will not experience that. the panic over false widows in the uk is a mixture of media-driven mass hysteria and arachnophobia.

anyway in conclusion shoutout brandon collier who did an amazing talk abt false widows during the bhs venom day both at the 2022 and 2023 events both of which i was lucky enough to attend. if i cant go to venom day this year you will see me on the news.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[egophiliac]

in honor of Azul's time to shine 🐙

[obsob]

hmm anyway. holds u in my arms

[toorumlk]

ginger n spice 🫚🌰

[heybaetae]

maknae line + gestures of love 🫰🏼💋🫶🏼🌹🤟🏼 happy birthday @jkvjimin! ♡

[thatone-highlighter]

I love you albums. I love you songs connected by similar themes. I love you listening to songs in a specific order picked by the artist. I love you reoccurring motifs throughout the same album. I love you album covers. I love you albums with extended editions. I love you songs that reference each other.

[excali8ur]

Weird dream.

[vampireposter]

meeting wyll at the grove, as someone who the tieflings trust enough to train their children, says so much about him. it's so sad that he doesn't get explored in acts 2-3 as deeply as the other companions, when his problems are equally intense. the average player probably long rests once before coming across the grove, but even if not, in that time wyll has already proven to the tieflings that they can rely on the Blade of Frontiers.

this is the immediate first thing he chooses to do after being condemned to slow death via ceremorphosis. his priority list in the first conversations with tav is: 1) hunt down a dangerous devil, 2) help zevlor with the goblins, 3) once nothing threatens the tieflings he will gladly search for a tadpole cure. wyll is perpetually his own last priority, and i wonder if it has to do with the lore about souls.

if he believes mind flayers' souls have been destroyed, and fiend warlocks will all have their souls sent to the hells after death, then becoming a mind flayer isn't the worst possible way for him to die. he would never become a mindless monster to save his own soul, but he's not gripped by horror the way that some of the other origin characters are. lae'zel has been made revoltingly impure to her people, astarion is terrified of losing the scrap of bodily autonomy he just regained, gale is guilt-ridden over the orb detonation if he dies, shadowheart has to survive to prove herself to her cult leader, and karlach has also just regained bodily autonomy and is desparate to live.

this is just another quest for the Blade, whose persona guards wyll ravengard against the vice of self-concern when he ought to be concerned for those in need.

[ryllen]

do u know that even the size of the different size of vegetables at another country amazed me because from where i came from they are all smaller and scrawnier

[homielander]

i'm sorry but hotd positing that all women are innately cautious and peaceful and compassionate while men are rash warmongers is not a feminist win! i could see the value in everyone being hesitant to go to war at the onset of the story because it intensifies the tragedy of this house tearing itself apart, but at this stage, rhaenyra has as much reason for bloodlust (if not more) as the men on the show. it's pretty heavily implied that the shock of her usurpation killed her daughter, aemond killed lucerys, and one of aegon's kingsguard snuck into her quarters with the intent to assassinate her. most importantly, she has felt entitled to the throne since she was named heir as a child. she should be incensed! rhaenyra's inaction in the season 1 finale due to a sudden aversion to violence was already stretching believability -- this is the same woman who expressed nothing beyond mild shock at vaemond's beheading, who plotted with daemon to have an innocent man killed to facilitate laenor's escape while declaring that the realm should fear her. to have rhaenyra insist on peace at this point in the story, when war is already well underway, is incredibly irrational.

this problem is not limited to rhaenyra. alicent ordered larys to kill mysaria's network of spies and any suspected traitors in the red keep, presumably without any due process, and neither of these decisions was depicted with the gravity they deserved for a character who was once horrified by any bloodshed. meanwhile, aegon had a few extra ratcatchers executed, and not only was the direction sufficiently ominous, but we also got a lengthy monologue from otto about how it would spell his doom. it is probably pointless to bring up rhaenys because she is written less like a believable human being and more like a mouthpiece for the writers to assert whatever political opinion they believe is correct in a given episode -- but she did very much kill dozens if not hundreds of smallfolk last season. she did do that and very clearly did not care. why is she an advocate against war? for both alicent and rhaenys, there is a strange dissonance where their actions are at odds with their attitudes about opposing large-scale war for the good of the realm. i'm not saying this dissonance cannot exist, but it should at least be acknowledged.

helaena raising concerns about the losses suffered by the smallfolk might have worked in isolation, but for it to accompany everything above is exhausting. can none of these women be allowed to feel for themselves?

[claraoswalds]

#mrs flood who are you: time lord edition

[jazzyjesse]

working at a grocery store has only made me even angrier about inflation and how food, water, and shelter isnt free

like just looking at groceries (not water or shelter) i see just a few bags (maybe around 5 or so) of food costing over $125 USD regularly. I've seen orders upwards of $600. and sure those have been bigger orders but no food should cost that much.

my coworkers and i shouldn't be complaining about the price of food when we get employee discounts.

a single bag of food for myself (usually containing some small pizzas, crackers, milk, and cereal) regularly costs between $50-60. minimum wage in my state is 15/HR. thats about four hours of work for one bag of food

a coworker who works on the front end of our store prides herself on being able to catch theives. everyone says how good she is at it. and sometimes it makes sense, sometimes people are just stealing to steal. but how do you ever know?

when the card reader we take outside is broken we are supposed to have the customers come inside to pay for their groceries if they're paying with EBT. there's a woman who's a regular who has a few small children and when she comes to pick up groceries they're usually asleep in the car.

am i supposed to make her choose between leaving her children alone in the car or waking them up and taking them inside?

four hours of work for one bag of groceries. is this not also theft?

four hours of work. let that sink in. four hours for one small bag of groceries.

we aren't supposed to accept tips but if we don't accept tips then how else are we supposed to afford our groceries?

i haven't seen a single person stealing food. you cannot steal whats already stolen.

although im no longer a christian, the teachings of my childhood have stuck with me, and in the bible it says "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you."

society has reaped right up the the very edge and beyond of its fields, so it's up to us to reap what we can

four hours of work for one bag of food

[gloriousmonsters]

love when you can ask the Narrator why the Princess is a Princess and he's like 'well i uhhhh YOU did that. maybe it's because uh... something something about her being above you... but still approachable... look i don't want to analyze or anthropomorphize your--' my guy. i am a primal being of Order and Eternity and Shaping. You're the one who convinced me I was some dude and were quite willing to take credit for shaping my view on the world through narration five seconds ago. Are you gonna look me in the eye and tell me the desire to interpret something worthy of adoration and more powerful than me as a dommy princess is written in the very nature of the universe or are you going to show me your browser history like a man

[babykittenteach]

Watched Deadloch.

[elodieunderglass]