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A Colorful Lumberjack...?

@benevolentwanderer / benevolentwanderer.tumblr.com

Writer, artist, and former undergrad developmental biology researcher. Somewhere in the process of getting into or being in grad school. Purveyor of the canonical Bad Post about Axolotl, which was based on standard lab technique. As your house is not a lab, please don't actually follow its advice.
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faeriekit

FMA is fascinating because there aren't many works about what it means to be an atheist and a heretic to a god that you can not only see, but who has personally snatched body parts off of your living body and made fun of you for it.

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unpretty

a fact about me is that i was an early bloomer who hit puberty in elementary school and was immediately, obnoxiously horny in ways that were uncomfortable for everyone because no one is prepared for an elementary schooler with b cups and a deep fascination with movies where people get tied up. another fact is that because i was considered smart for my age in the ways that mattered, i just accepted all this as a single package, the many ways that i was not really a child the way other children were children but was instead a miniature adult. i was technically a child, but not really, as far as i was concerned. it also did not occur to me until around high school that i was fat, because i instead considered myself to be sturdy, to be buff, to be built like a tank.

so somewhere around middle school i am noticing the ways in which i am Not Like Other Girls, the ways in which i am not what society says a girl is and the ways that things marketed to girls do not appeal to me. i don't know how other girls dealt with this, but i very rationally decided that i was only technically a girl, in the way that i was only technically a child. so i looked at the things that did appeal to me, and that i did enjoy, and reverse engineered my demographic to decide that on a practical and functional level i was a middle-aged man. i had also gotten really hornily into wolverine because of the first x-men movie, and ended up reading a lot of comics, so as you can imagine the comic book version of wolverine who is short and built like a tank and older than he looks despite being for all intents and purposes a middle aged man really had some appeal to me.

there are idiots who say shit about how tomboys would be considered trans these days or whatever, but i can assure you that was not what was happening here. by middle school i already had to special order bras and i was fine with that because of the many weird fetishes i was developing, none of which can be blamed on the internet because i hadn't found that shit yet and also to this day you would have a hard time finding anything similar to the things i wrote in my secret notebook and immediately destroyed. the fact that i was technically a girl was vital to all this. media where there was a big reveal that some cool dude had been a hot chick the whole time was my shit. weird feral beast people who turned out to be hot women once they took a bath? fuck yes. i would never have cut my hair because that would have ruined my chances to take off a helmet and reveal that i had girl hair. at no point did i think i was anything but a girl, it was just that i was functionally a middle-aged man, who was a girl.

what this means is that i still liked all the things i already liked, such as leather jackets and comic books and anime and old stand-up comedy, but i also did extensive research on the other things i felt i should like according to the demographic i had assigned myself. i watched vh1's 'i love the 70s' with the air of someone trying to hide their amnesia, even though my parents were children in the 70s. i got into the beatles. i tried to get into cars for a while before accepting that i only liked the vintage car aesthetic and couldn't be fucked to know actual car facts. i wore nothing but cargo shorts and aloha shirts for a while, which didn't really stand out that much because it was middle school. i bought a fedora and became a libertarian atheist. i made plans to buy a motorcycle (i could not ride a bike).

i gave up on it after a while because quite frankly my titty situation meant there was never really going to be a big reveal that i'd been a girl the whole time. it was pretty obvious even with the cargo shorts. also the older of a teen i was, the more likely it felt that i could maybe get laid, except i could tell that was never going to happen as long as i kept wearing cargo shorts. it took longer to give up the fedora because it was leather and i wore it with my leather jacket and fingerless gloves, which i convinced myself worked a lot better after i'd gone full high school goth. i lived in the desert so you can imagine how well that worked out for me, smell-wise.

anyway that's how my female socialization went, i don't think it was particularly successful tbqh

cis, but for fetish reasons

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mossworm

dude ADHD sucks so bad, it's like one of those audience input twitch streams where people can add new parameters to the game to screw you over for fun. "puddingtruck49 just paid 8 dollars to make you forget your debit card pin in the checkout line"

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attackfish

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

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squeakitties

i make a lot of posts to the tune of "you're allowed to be horny btw" because it's becoming increasingly clear that adults being sexual in (clearly marked and blockable!) spaces is being stamped out and made out to be evil both legislatively and in the moral zeitgeist, especially among younger folks. not even in the "wait to be a horny adult online when you're An Adult" way, just an ingrained puritanical outrage response to *anything* that isn't chaste wholesome perfect all-ages allowed. it's unnerving and scary.

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When creating speculative biology art, how well do you research the subject it’s based upon?

  • Common knowledge: things everyone might know
  • Minimal research: basic why’s and how’s your subject works, surface depth things
  • Extensive research: specific anatomical terminology, similar real-life species, information digestible to other spec bio artists (but might be confusing to those who are not)
  • Complete research: evolutionary lineages, intricate anatomical similarities to real-life species, extensive environmental/individual behavior, information may be confusing to those lacking knowledge in biology

Galaxy brain answer: my day job is biology research, creating spec bio works is a side effect.

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prole-log
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crazy-pages

This article is actually about a very serious problem. If you overgenerate electricity it increases the phase frequency of the power grid, and if that goes out of sync with your generators (including solar panels) it can destroy them. In the kind of way where your power grid is fucked for months. It is very very very very bad.

California started a program to make solar panels more affordable by offering very low interest rates for solar panels, to allow people to benefit from their lifetime $/energy cost that's below fossil fuels, without having to worry about the high frontloaded cost. However they did not do this for batteries. And power grid quality batteries with massive energy storage and serious charge-discharge lifetimes, are expensive.

And they did this because while solar panels are cheaper than fossil fuels per kilowatt hour of electricity over their lifetime, solar panels plus batteries are not. And California wanted a supplemented free market solution and didn't really want to think about the part that direct government intervention in the form of taxation and paying for this change would be necessary.

So everyone in California just kept adding solar panels to the grid with no disconnect mechanisms, until eventually it hit a point where at noon, solar panels generated more power than the entire grid needed. With no batteries to store the excess. This is a motherfucking power grid killer. It is a scenario where people get left in the fucking dark for months because of how badly it destroys the powergrid.

So the power grid authorities did the only thing they could do. They called up every industrial plant with heavy duty equipment and ovens they could and paid them to turn it on full blast (because using that equipment costs money in wear and tear even without the electricity cost). And in doing so, avoided disaster.

That's what this article is talking about. They are solar panel researchers criticizing a capitalist adoption strategy and promoting direct government intervention to create renewable energy. However as with most newspapers they don't get to choose the title, the editor picks the most provocative title that will get clicks.

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biggest fantasy in bg3 is the concept of a long rest. you just go to sleep on the ground & wake up feeling refreshed. can’t even do that in my own bed. i’d get 16 hours of sleep and be like damn guys yeah sorry. i still can’t do my spells. it’s a melee day. then again i slept on my arm weird too…….