I cannot implore the people who say “Crosshair never smiles Crosshair doesn’t joke around Crosshair is a stick in the mud” to watch the batch’s TCW arc enough. You are missing the snarkiest, smirkiest, quietly affectionate version of this character that we were supposed to see first like please I beg of you because you’re missing the entire gravity of his arc without it

If we don't get that crosshair back on some level in tbb s3 then what is even the point

He'll probably never get quite to that point again after all they've been through but a progression of that side coming out more while he works with omega to get out of tantiss and subsequently back with the batch,,, that's all I need

Bonus points if it's wrecker who brings it out in him by starting up their game and crosshair falls into it without even realising until Hunter just smiles at him, claps him on the back, and says good to have you back Crosshair

So help me, if while they’re getting out of Tantiss and it’s a scenario where Wrecker and the others are there with them, and Wrecker says “watch this Crosshair! Not gonna top me this time!” and Crosshair doesn’t miss a beat, shoves a toothpick in his mouth (because I can’t imagine a scenario where they got him a helmet), smirks at Wrecker and goes “give it your best shot” and they pick up where they left off and the Hunter back clap - I will be a wreck on the floor half cheering half sobbing

Extra bonus points: it's Tech who hands crosshair a toothpick yes he's definitely alive and in on this mission and brought toothpicks with him for this reason

Phenomenal addition because where’s he gonna get the toothpick from? Certainly not Hemlock!

Also now crying over Hunter being the one to hand it to him because he’s always had them on hand since they separated ready for the day Crosshair came back to them

Also hugs all around. I need that Hunter/Crosshair hug of reunion like I need to breathe.

@lightwise I’m in the same boat as you if they give us a Hunter/Crosshair hug I won’t be able to recover from the feels. Especially one when Hunter doesn’t let go so Crosshair takes the cue and hugs tighter 😭😭

”I want to put in a good word for just leaving me alone. I want to clean my gun and be alone with my thoughts. And I don’t need to talk about anything else. And so that is my soapbox for the week.” (x)

Crosshair really bringing this energy to the telethon

Zeb is such a great character. On one hand, he's a genocide survivor and feels immense guilt over apparently failing in his role as Captain of the Honor Guard , but on the other, he regularly throws hands with a teenager and thinks that calling Chopper "Shopper" is the pinnacle of comedy.

Silver haired with a wild temperament? Yeah, of course I named them Crosshair

I’ve now projected so much of Crosshair’s personality onto this horse that it and Link are now a buddy-cop duo in my mind and yes I narrate their dialogue out loud

I caught a new horse (this one is now Tech) and by accidentally boarded Crosshair when registering Tech, and now Crosshair won’t stop side eyeing me every time I approach him

This is 100% how the horse looks at me now it’s actually eerie

One of the things I think about a lot with regards to Hunter is actually a Tech line.

Because yeah he's talking specifically about his tracking abilities but this statement can also be taken in a much more general way. And the pressure of that must be absolutely crushing. Every mistake he makes hurts his team, could get them killed, and that 100% success rate turns into a massive weight on his shoulders thinking that even one major fuck up could destroy them.

And then Crosshair's chip activates. Hunter can't fix it. They have to leave him behind and Hunter is angry at himself because he can never, ever fully forgive himself for Being Wrong, even though logically there was nothing he could do. That mistake turns paralyzing over time and I think that's a big reason that he's so hesitant to make any moves at all by season 2. If he holds completely still maybe he won't make another mistake.

Absolutely gobbled up this analysis. I feel like the creators and animators did a really good job of showing the weight of this taking it’s toll on hunter in TBB. In TCW, even with that expectation, he has the air of a cocky frat boy. His squad has a 100% success rate and he’s so dam proud of it and of his brothers, and I see him with an air at the start of every mission like he’s almost amused with each one.

But then Crosshair happens, and everything that followed, and you are the cocky frat boy turn into worried older brother that turns into protective dad. Each episode his shoulders slump a little more, he’s not holding himself up as straight, his body language is giving “so dam tired”, and I see the weight of the expectation of never being wrong quite literally weighing him down

The way it only takes one (1) "mistake" that wasn't even his fault to start breaking him too because he's never encountered something with no win condition before. The cockiness is still there when we first see them on Kaller (the SHEER AUDACITY of immediately sassing a Jedi ten seconds after wandering in) and then it just gets smacked out of him in one blow and everything after that is just the universe beating him like a sad pinata.

Sergeant Sad Piñata is now canon I heard it from Jennifer herself

changing elves from being assholes with a superiority complex and recharacterising them as just sort of weird guys that have an entirely different set of social behaviours to harken back to the days when people thought autistic people were a kind of fae for having odd behaviours. the entire reason why they dont particularly enjoy gatherings of men or dwarves or whatever is because they tend to be loud and the average elven social gathering is just a bunch of them sitting in a room in silence ignoring each other

like theyre still kind of mean but its more of them being blunt and lacking empathy rather than being condescending or purposefully malicious

my elven ass after spending 45 minutes in the pub with my dwarf friends:

I GROW WEARY OF MIMICKING YOUR OBNOXIOUS MANNERISMS TO ACCOMMODATE FOR THIS ENVIRONMENT. I WISH TO RETURN TO MY CHAMBERS TO REST AND SO I MAY PLAY SPLATOON 3 ON THE NINTENDO SWITCH. WE SHALL GATHER AGAIN NEXT HALF MOON AND I SHALL TELL YOU OF MY VICTORIES.

them:

okay man take care

you understand my vision

I have never felt so validated in never having given up on Tumblr.

IT GETS WORSE!

So he artificially limited the number of tweets you can see per day with a "free" account.

Once you hit your limit, it stops you from loading the page. But it also doesn't know WHY it isn't loading, so it keeps TRYING.

Twitter is literally hitting itself in the face ten times per second per user.

This is so completely amateurish it's unbelievable. It's like putting your car in neutral and slamming your foot on the gas until your engine redlines and then wondering why it's making a horrible noise and a terrible smell but not going anywhere.

Pabu Hunter Bad Batch

Suction cup boi

(via)

he flatten

“Scully, you’re not gonna believe this”

Every time the bad Hunter takes roll in front of me I am actively sitting on my hands to avoid getting into a pointless fight. They just keep coming back. The way that I'm putting this man in a blanket nest to protect him.

Yerp. On the one hand, no one has to like the character—people can interpret things however they want whether anyone else thinks their interpretation scans. On the other hand, I’m going to keep disagreeing with the interpretations I’m thinking are in bad faith.

Also, take this with a grain of salt, because this is just based on my observations, but I think part the reason a lot of the Hunter takes keep happening is because we’re seeing this weird intersection between a bunch of different things that sometime happen when it comes to fandom. Or subsections of fandoms—I never mean the entire fandom. Fandoms are always made up of tons of smaller pockets that all kind of do their own things and then occasionally interact with each other.

First off, fandoms can sometimes flatten characters out to the point that they’re almost unrecognizable, and the flattened version ends up being the one people think about. Like Fives, for example. Canon Fives and Fanon Fives aren’t the same character. And to be totally clear, I love fanon Fives—he’s fun and goofy and just a silly little guy, and that’s great! But he’s not Canon Fives (who I also love). Canon Fives could be a little silly and sarcastic, so it’s not coming out of nowhere, but he was also fiercely loyal, ready to break the rules to do the right thing, brave, and determined to be recognized as a person, and goofy wasn’t even close to his overriding personality trait. And with some characters, getting flattened out like that tends of mean that they get reduced down to either their best or worst moment, depending on whether a person likes the character or not.

Second, you’ve got this tendency of fandoms to pit characters against each other even when the characters are ostensibly on the same side. Way, way back when I still had my original account on this website, I was moderately active in the Gravity Falls fandom and—holy pepperoni on a pizza—the way some subsections of the fandom would put the various members of the Pines family against each other. The takes were wild, and if someone liked, say, Mabel, they’d come up with the most wildly bad take of Ford, or visa versa I’d they liked Ford and hated Mabel, so that their favorite character would ‘win’…something. I was never sure what. And so I think what you get with The Bad Batch is people empathizing with either Hunter or Crosshair so much that whichever one isn’t their guy has to become the one true enemy of their guy.

Then, sometimes, you’ll have ideas that take hold in a fandom that end up becoming more solidified than canon. One fairly agreed upon (as far as I could tell) take I saw back when I was still on Twitter was that Hunter never shows any kind of emotional reaction to anyone or anything except Omega, which…isn’t true. At all. I mean, I’m sorry, but Hunter didn’t emote at the camera like the ground evaporated beneath his feet when Crosshair said he got his chip removed, and he didn’t have to avoid looking Omega in the eye when he had to tell her Tech didn’t make it, and a hundred other things, for us to say that he never shows emotion. And we didn’t have a whole episode explaining how a character shows and processes feelings differently just to turn around and complain about another character processing their grief differently.

And I’m rambling now, but, lastly, I think there’s kind of a tendency to want character development to go a specific way, and to decide that it’s wrong instead of maybe thinking about why when it doesn’t. And Hunter’s character development is kind of idiosyncratic for a kid’s show; he doesn’t always get things right, he makes mistakes that he can’t fix, he shows what he’s learned but never spells it out in dialogue, he gets more and more paralyzed as things go on, and at the end of the day, his best isn’t good enough, because the situation is impossible. It’s faltering and not all of his development is positive. And, on the one hand, that’s an interesting thing to do with a protagonist and I’m extremely here for it, but, on the other, it’s not going to hit with everyone. Take it not hitting with everyone and the overlap of all of the above, and you might end up with some out-there interpretations; some positive, some negative, and some in this undefinable space where you’re left wondering if everyone has the same version of the show.

And, to be completely clear, when I say fandom, I never mean that fandom is bad or that everyone has to like my blorbos or anything like that. I grouse sometimes, but that’s because I’m kind of a cranky old woman now and again, and I’m weirdly protective of my favorite characters and stories, and I find fan culture a little hard to navigate. But the bad batch fandom is mostly pretty neat. Even if I do want to dropkick some of the takes into the sun.

Yeah all of this absolutely factors in and normally I'm better at not getting too Cranky about it but it seems that the batch boys being needlessly flattened is the one thing I can't let go of.

I do love the point though that Hunter's development is not a standard hero character path - I feel like everything they're doing with him is going to come to a head and get tied together next season (which is admittedly why I'm so hoping for no character deaths, the least interesting thing ANY of them could do is die) but it does mean that right now he's become a bit of a mess. He's a series of strings that he's rapidly losing the ability to hold onto. I love it but yeah it won't be a hit with Everyone.

I think part of it too is that people want to assign Hunter a role in the story that I don't think he's supposed to fill. He LOOKS like he's supposed to be the Big Good mentor protagonist who will teach the main kid and then eventually die the standard mentor death to pass along the torch of heroism so to speak. But Hunter isn't the moral center that Omega has to learn to be like - Omega has been the moral and thematic center the whole time. The story has always felt like its them, especially Hunter, gravitating towards her point of view, not the other way around, which is an interesting choice given that she is technically older than they are.

So like if you're looking for Hunter to be The Mentor That Knows Everything, no he isn't going to measure up. Because even if he is taking on the Dad role, Omega's POV is still the destination they seem to be aiming towards. It's a very interesting track but it does mess with what people typically expect out of the character archetypes. All of the batch does this to a degree but I think Hunter's is simultaneously the one diverting the most from his assumed role and the one people pick it up from the least.

Also I admit that being a Crosshair Fan has weirdly enough made me even more defensive of Hunter, because I don't think Crosshair works as a character if you just assume everyone isn't doing enough to save him. He's someone that is trying to scrape out agency that he's never actually had before, getting away from the Empire has to be self motivated or he still never gets that agency. Which means he needs to make the mistake of going back to them. Everything people say hunter SHOULD have done just continues denying Crosshair the agency to make his own choices and WHY WOULD I WANT THAT FOR MY FAVE COMPLICATED BOY? Hunter did everything he reasonably could, and that's what makes Crosshair's arc interesting.

Oh, yeah—being a Hunter and a Tech fan right off the bat ended up making me super protective of Crosshair, especially after “Return to Kamino.” And the only couple of times Hunter could have done more for Crosshair in a way that wouldn’t have involved handcuffing him to the inside of the ship until they could find a way to remove his chip or until he decided to just agree with them (which would, as you and a bunch of people have pointed out, have never, ever happened if Hunter and the guys steamrolled Crosshair’s agency like that), Hunter had a good reason not to. For example—I think that there’s a chance that if Hunter and the guys had managed to talk to Crosshair on Ryloth and asked him to come with them, he might have done so. Ryloth seems to the the tipping point from a de-chipped Crosshair sticking with the Empire because he doesn’t have a way out or a better option without help to looking at his situation and deciding, nah, he’s not waiting for his family to come for him anymore—he’s going after them and they’re going to join him. But even if that’s the case, there’s no way Hunter could have known that. Hunter’s still operating under the idea that Crosshair’s still being completely controlled by the chip at that point. And the last time they ran into him, he tried to kill them, and he can’t risk that again. He can’t let anyone else get hurt, including Crosshair, because from Hunter’s point of view, confronting Crosshair on Ryloth probably means having to fight him, and fighting him might mean having to kill him, just to survive.

But I really like the point about people trying to shoehorn Hunter into a role he was never meant to fill, because as much as the story is told from Omega’s point of view, as much as it’s her coming-of-age story, and as much as she’s the emotional touchstone—for the target audience, especially—the guys generally and Hunter specifically that are really the main characters. And that shoehorning by viewers is also kind of true of the show as a whole.

A lot of what I think are bad faith criticisms of the show are based less around criticizing the show for what it is (because The Bad Batch isn’t perfect, no show is, there’s criticism to be had), and more for it not being things it was never trying to be. And that’s okay, people can have preferences about what they want out of a show. There’s nothing wrong about wanting The Bad Batch to have been set during the clone wars, wanting a more adult version, wanting something that is more focused on the clone rebellion, wanting a version that features Rex as the main character, wanting to see what things would look like without Omega, a version that’s basically Republic Commando: The Show or Clone Wars Season Eight, or a even a version that really is the Weekly Crosshair Suffering Hour. That’s all cool and, honestly, a lot of those probably would be really interesting. But the show we got is not trying to be any of that, and some of that criticism comes from corners that don’t seem aware that it’s not, and it does get frustrating when people complain about the show not having the guys fighting the empire right off the bat, or only paying attention to the episodes that brush up against the clone rebellion subplot, for example, because they assume that that’s the focus and then get angry when that subplot doesn’t develop fast enough when it was never the point.

And the solution to being frustrated about that sometimes is really just for me to disengage, ignore it, roll around in some grass (touching it is not enough), and go back to talking about the things I like. And I can do that most of the time with other things, but there’s a couple things where I’m maybe invested in a slightly mentally ill way, and I go from zero to “I am kicking your shins” in about two seconds, and The Bad Batch happens to be one of them. Which is on me, but still 😅

People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

Is there a real life example of this?

It happens a lot.

I know it's bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed

Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one

Also why do people make these

What do you hope to gain

There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here.  Only some are innocent, only some are malicious.  But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.

It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth.  Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions). 

But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.

Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.

And it’s not remotely helped by the fact there’s plenty of similar true stories that can be pointed to. Like, here’s a list of things: Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies, numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians, the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it, the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree), Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off, DaVinci invented a tank, Lancelot is a fanfiction OC, and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together). It’s easy to believe bullshit when the truth is just as rank.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about: confidently firing off a mix of half-remembered and out-of-context factoids with “lies and coverups in history!!!” to make them seem like they’re correcting the record rather than reducing a mix of truth, common misconceptions, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and poor reporting to pithy one-liners. Let’s go through them.

It's complicated. There's definitely a grain of truth to this, but it's not quite what the common narratives suggest. For example, eating mummies was a Medieval thing more than it was a Victorian thing; Victorians did "Scientific" mummy-unwrapping parties, but they didn't then eat them - they were collectible antiquities. For another, the mummies used by Victorians for paint were rarely ancient Egyptian humans. I'll let @thatlittleegyptologist take this one because they've talked about it. A lot. Like a lot. So often.

It's complicated. Have historians in the past denied that their favorite historical figures could possibly be gay? Absolutely. But people who were romantically and sexually involved with each other in the past very often did call each other "friend." (Or, in ancient Egypt, "brother"). Even husbands and wives would call each other "friend." (it's midnight and I am blanking on how to search for sources that show this but I have transcribed 18th century letters and diaries, I have seen this.) Like, while historical squeamishness and denial of gay relationships has been a thing... the modern assumption that friendship cannot possibly ever include any gay stuff is also not helping. And heteronormatively taking words at face value is somewhere in between. It's sometimes malicious, but you have to give space for simple hetero brain too. And give space for all the queer and queer-affirming historians working in the field. And for people like Oscar Wilde who were arrested for sodomy and the Ancient Greeks who were Ancient Greek so it's hardly like anyone's denying that, even if their interpretation was that it was Bad. It's not cut and dry.

This one isn't actually complicated, it's just a bizarre misunderstanding (generous interpretation) or an Evangelical conspiracy theory (less generous interpretation) of what the Vatican Apostolic Archive, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive, is. They're not "hoarding almost all history ever written" (how would that work?). It's an archive of the Church's and the Vatican's records, accounting, correspondence, declarations, decisions, and other various affairs. Over the past several hundred years of dutiful documentary-keeping, that does add up to a lot of history about the development of European politics, culture, and colonization! There are in fact two archives; one which has been accessible to scholars since 1881, and one which is owned unilaterally by the Pope and only extremely rarely opened for any sort of access to outsiders. John Paul II actually made it easier for researchers to access those archives, though "easier" does not mean "easy" and is still very much at the Pope's discretion. However, they are archives pertaining to the Pope's and Church's affairs, not all of human history.

True! But also a little complicated. The story about Washington and the cherry tree is complete fiction, and we know who to blame for it: Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, who wrote his famous biography of Washington right after Washington died and the nation was clamoring for tributes to him. He was kind of shameless about writing for the masses things that would sell. But at the same time, it was part of the myth-making of the new nation, part of a very common process at the time of nearly deifying Washington. But it is also true that we do in fact have a lot of letters and diaries written directly by these guys. We don't need to rely on Weems for fanciful stories about them, even if they have entered into the mythology-building of the US as a nation.

Have you ever seen what happens to painted stone when left out in the elements over time? The paint chips off. Being exposed to the elements or buried in the dirt for hundreds or thousands of years does a number on the painted exterior of a statue. Here's a Jesuit scholar from 1913 lamenting this: "It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage "comme de la fumée" [like smoke]. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts […] Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view." Honestly, as Gisela M. A. Richter (1944) says, "The fact that any color at all remains is really more remarkable than that it has disappeared in the majority of cases." Greek and Roman statues, probably even marble statues, were painted! Yes! But there was probably little paint remaining even when the Renaissance sculptors and art collectors got ahold of them. And while the discoverers deliberately stripping off the paint because they decided it should not have been there is one potential reason (note the reference to acid-washing), and the pure white marble was a very ideologically-loaded Enlightment-era aesthetic highlighting the purity of the form, and 1700s-1800s English archaeologists and antiquarians had vicious debates over whether the marble statues were painted like the fate of their cultural hegemony rested on it, "removing the paint for its garishness" was not even close to the primary reason the colored paint does not remain. These are some resources about the Gods in Color exhibition that did experimental reconstructions of the colors of some statues.

Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for many devices, including a war machine that does resemble a modern tank! It's frequently described (with hedging descriptions) like "has been seen as a prototype of a tank." But there's no evidence that it was ever built, and it's unclear if the wheels and gear system would have worked. Can he be said to have "invented a tank"? I guess it depends on your definition of "invented."

This is either a flippant or deeply disingenuous way to describe the origins, evolution, and recording of King Arthur mythology, its use in literature and nationalist propaganda, and the way this is different from the way fanfiction interacts with a canon. @chimaerakitten knows much more about this than I do.

Ohhhh boy it's complicated. I am out of energy and by god it is late but there is a reason that books and books and books have been written about the history of Christianity, the early schisms, the creation of the canon, Gnosticism, and the origins of the Catholic Church.

Basically: if it can be summed up in one sentence as a "gotcha!" it is probably More Complicated Than That.

OP, you deserve many medals for not simply having many of the replies to this post become your supervillain origin story. Sympathy from the very bottom of my soul.

#That’s a#That’s a blue ringed octopus#You’re going to die do you realise that#It is literally one of the most deadly animals in the world#Not just in Australia or just in the ocean in THE WORLD#Put it DOWN#And go to a hospital jfc via platonic-rabbit 

me tryna find out if this fool died

“The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and often painless, with many victims not realizing they have been envenomated until respiratory depression and paralysis start to set in.[8] No blue-ringed octopus antivenom is available yet, making it one of the deadliest reef inhabitants in the ocean.”

Holy shit

And this is why I don’t go in the ocean anymore

Also the blue rings literally only show up when it is distressed so this person has angered it!!! You are in danger friend!!!

Actually this guy keeps them as pets they’re on his instagram (william_exotique) and he frequently holds then and I just? Don’t know why? And also every picture or video he posts of them shows the blue rings so they’re always in distress I just do not understand why he’s doing this

#AMY EXPLAIN HOW DUMB THIS GUY IS 

I mean OP pretty much covered it.  A blue ringed octopus is almost on the level of CONE SNAIL on the list of things you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PICK UP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

But ask and you shall receive,  On this episode of “Fun Facts With Cuckoo,” DEAD.  YOU’RE DEAD.  EVERYTHING IS DEAD AND YOU SHOULD NEVER TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE OCEAN EVER AGAIN.

There are many things that will kill you. [citation needed]

There are fewer, but still many things that will kill you FAST.

There are yet fewer things that kill you fast and by such an overwhelming margin of overkill that nervous laughter is our only solace in the dark of this terrible, surprisingly Lovecraftian world of unearthly horrors that we live in.

Of the things that I know about which will kill you fast via just plain insultingly potent venom, which is a not insignificant number of things because I know a not insignificant number of things, there are about 3 things in the ocean – IN THE WHOLE OCEAN – which are so insanely, mind-bogglingly deadly that there is pretty much no possible hope for survival (I mean you CAN, but god help you if you’re ever in that situation, because god’s just about damn near the only thing that CAN help you).  THE. WHOLE. OCEAN.

Those three things are the Irukandji (a tiny (1cm) species of box jellyfish, which has stingers not only on its tentacles but on its BELL, for reasons no one has definitively figured out, and is so toxic despite its size its sting can cause a severe brain hemorrhage), the cone snail (a group of carnivorous sea snails that is accepted to be the most venomous animals on earth, with a STUPIDLY fast acting and extremely powerful neurotoxin that has in at least one case killed a human ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY, because the swimmer who found two beautiful shells (unfortunately cone snails tend to have very pretty shells which makes people want to pick them up) was holding them up for a picture and ended up being stabbed in the neck by not one but TWO cone snails at the same time, and it is believed that she was literally dead before she hit the ground, I mean LITERALLY in a 100% non-fictional and non-exaggerated way, in between the time the two cone snails stabbed her and the time her limp body hit the sand, she was not alive anymore), and the blue ringed octopus.

It is POSSIBLE to survive any of these.  But not without immediate medical attention.  Of these three, the Irukandji is by far the most treatable, because Australia and other coastal regions (including Florida and other parts of the US) are kind of experienced in dealing with box jellyfish.

The blue ringed octopus will fucking kill you.  There’s no antidote for their venom, ONE COMPONENT OF WHICH (tetrodotoxin) is 1200 times deadlier than cyanide.  It’s a powerful neurotoxin (most of the worst venoms are because the species that produce them need to kill or at least paralyze their prey quickly, like jellyfish whose fragile tentacles could be damaged if their food doesn’t stop struggling) that attacks the sodium channels and causes muscle paralysis.  It doesn’t necessarily kill you quickly.  It PARALYZES you quickly, so that you can’t really call for help or describe the problem, and you will probably end up slowly suffocating from a paralyzed diaphragm.  Tetrodotoxin can be metabolized by the body in a matter of hours, but it can also kill you in a matter of minutes if you get a lethal dose (which isn’t much, the LD50 or median lethal dose, the dose at which you have a 50% chance of survival, is only 8 MICROGRAMS per kilogram of body weight (as tested in mice)).  This is, by venom standards, not a large amount, which means the animal that is capable of putting this venom inside your body is very very good at killing the absolute shit out of you.

DON’T TOUCH THE BLUE RINGED OCTOPUS.

Now, because overkill is my motto, let me briefly explain why Conus geographus is the undisputed champion of YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE, AND FURTHERMORE FUCK YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE.

A cone snail walks into a bar.  You’d expect the bartender to ask, “what’s your poison,” but they were paralyzed before they could ask and OH LOOK they’re already FUCKING DEAD ON THE GROUND.

Conus geographus is about 4-6 inches long and nature’s equivalent of Avada Kedavra.  Cone snails literally have their own KIND of toxins named after them: conotoxin.  Not only is there no antidote, but their venom AGGRESSIVELY RESISTS our ability to find a cure, because we barely understand how it works AND conotoxins are so internally varied, even within a single species, that any one antidote isn’t going to help because they’re constantly mutating and evolving their venom to prevent their prey from evolving a resistance to it.  Plus their venom is like, a bunch of different venoms all at once JUST IN CASE any one of them wasn’t good enough.

I want you to read these two sentences from the wiki page on conotoxin:

Remember how the LD50 of tetrodotoxin is 8μg/kg?  Conotoxin is 160 times more potent.  FIFTY NANOGRAMS PER KILOGRAM HAS A 50% CHANCE OF KILLING YOU. A 220-POUND HUMAN HAS A 50% CHANCE OF SURVIVAL AGAINST JUST 5 MICROGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN.  

I DID SOME MATH.  

IT WOULD TAKE 7-9 MILLIGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN TO KILL A BLUE WHALE, THE HEAVIEST ANIMAL TO EVER LIVE. (based on weight estimates from 300-400,000 lbs.)

Conus geographus is so fucking deadly that “In two cases of envenomation, only 0.0002-0.0005 mg resulted in severe paralysis.”

THIS THING KILLS STUFF SO HARD THAT BEFORE YOU HEAR THE FIRST “MORTAL KOMBAT” IN THE MORTAL KOMBAT THEME, THERE’S PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN A FATALITY.

And guess what?  Cone snails don’t do that NOOB SHIT with the superficial biting or stinging.  Your wetsuit or gloves won’t protect you.  Because homeboy didn’t bring teeth to evolution’s knife fight.  Oh no.  It brought a motherfucking radula POISON HARPOON.  It’s lightning fast and has way more piercing power than some silly little cnidocytes or salivary bacteria.

Another component of their venom is being researched for its potential as a pain reliever.  “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT????” you might reasonably ask.  And you would be right to do so, because science has gone too far and has surely sinned against the very image of Mollusca Kedavra.  Well, it turns out the answer is “Research shows that certain component proteins of the venom target specific human pain receptors and can be up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine without morphine’s addictive properties and side-effects.”  That’s right, the part of their venom that SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T HURT YOU is up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

Also, Conus geographus (along with one other cone snail species, C. tulipa) is the only known non-human animal to weaponize insulin.  In addition to the normal insulin that the snails produce for their own use, their bodies manufacture an ADDITIONAL insulin molecule that is similar to the kind produced in fish (which they eat) for the sole purpose of stunning their prey through hypoglycemic shock.  BECAUSE APPARENTLY THEY DON’T FEEL LIKE THEY’D KILL YOU HARD ENOUGH OTHERWISE.

IF you are going to survive the ALMIGHTY CONE SNAIL, WHO KNOWS NO FEAR, TRIUMPHANT HEDGEMON OF THE MOLECULAR ARMS RACE, TRUE BORN HEIR TO THE SCYTHE OF DEATH ITSELF, FISHSLAYER, GOD AMONG MOLLUSKS, WHOSE WRATH IS MERCIFUL ONLY IN ITS BREVITY, ADMIRABLE IN ITS BEAUTY AND UNSULLIED BY THE UNWORTHY TOUCH OF MORTAL HANDS OR SCALES OR REALLY ANYTHING IN RANGE OF ITS RADULA HARPOON, then literally the only thing that’s going to save you is for you to be kept alive artificially (externalizing your respiratory functions to force your body to continue breathing, basically) until the effects of the venom wear off.  And because of how quickly this venom acts, you need to get that medical attention VERY, VERY FAST.

And if you don’t get it, you will still be conscious while the paralysis slowly suffocates you to death.

Don’t touch the pretty shells.

this is a WONDERFUL use of the medium of the tumblr post

YES.

A perfect educational rant.

Minute traces of tetrodotoxin are what makes fugu (pufferfish) sashimi such an exciting entrée. Improperly prepared fugu can be very exciting indeed, to the extent that the over-excited diner loses interest in anything else.

Like, for instance, breathing.

The end part

Can’t not reblog something this terrifyingly educational.

Every time the bad Hunter takes roll in front of me I am actively sitting on my hands to avoid getting into a pointless fight. They just keep coming back. The way that I'm putting this man in a blanket nest to protect him.

Yerp. On the one hand, no one has to like the character—people can interpret things however they want whether anyone else thinks their interpretation scans. On the other hand, I’m going to keep disagreeing with the interpretations I’m thinking are in bad faith.

Also, take this with a grain of salt, because this is just based on my observations, but I think part the reason a lot of the Hunter takes keep happening is because we’re seeing this weird intersection between a bunch of different things that sometime happen when it comes to fandom. Or subsections of fandoms—I never mean the entire fandom. Fandoms are always made up of tons of smaller pockets that all kind of do their own things and then occasionally interact with each other.

First off, fandoms can sometimes flatten characters out to the point that they’re almost unrecognizable, and the flattened version ends up being the one people think about. Like Fives, for example. Canon Fives and Fanon Fives aren’t the same character. And to be totally clear, I love fanon Fives—he’s fun and goofy and just a silly little guy, and that’s great! But he’s not Canon Fives (who I also love). Canon Fives could be a little silly and sarcastic, so it’s not coming out of nowhere, but he was also fiercely loyal, ready to break the rules to do the right thing, brave, and determined to be recognized as a person, and goofy wasn’t even close to his overriding personality trait. And with some characters, getting flattened out like that tends of mean that they get reduced down to either their best or worst moment, depending on whether a person likes the character or not.

Second, you’ve got this tendency of fandoms to pit characters against each other even when the characters are ostensibly on the same side. Way, way back when I still had my original account on this website, I was moderately active in the Gravity Falls fandom and—holy pepperoni on a pizza—the way some subsections of the fandom would put the various members of the Pines family against each other. The takes were wild, and if someone liked, say, Mabel, they’d come up with the most wildly bad take of Ford, or visa versa I’d they liked Ford and hated Mabel, so that their favorite character would ‘win’…something. I was never sure what. And so I think what you get with The Bad Batch is people empathizing with either Hunter or Crosshair so much that whichever one isn’t their guy has to become the one true enemy of their guy.

Then, sometimes, you’ll have ideas that take hold in a fandom that end up becoming more solidified than canon. One fairly agreed upon (as far as I could tell) take I saw back when I was still on Twitter was that Hunter never shows any kind of emotional reaction to anyone or anything except Omega, which…isn’t true. At all. I mean, I’m sorry, but Hunter didn’t emote at the camera like the ground evaporated beneath his feet when Crosshair said he got his chip removed, and he didn’t have to avoid looking Omega in the eye when he had to tell her Tech didn’t make it, and a hundred other things, for us to say that he never shows emotion. And we didn’t have a whole episode explaining how a character shows and processes feelings differently just to turn around and complain about another character processing their grief differently.

And I’m rambling now, but, lastly, I think there’s kind of a tendency to want character development to go a specific way, and to decide that it’s wrong instead of maybe thinking about why when it doesn’t. And Hunter’s character development is kind of idiosyncratic for a kid’s show; he doesn’t always get things right, he makes mistakes that he can’t fix, he shows what he’s learned but never spells it out in dialogue, he gets more and more paralyzed as things go on, and at the end of the day, his best isn’t good enough, because the situation is impossible. It’s faltering and not all of his development is positive. And, on the one hand, that’s an interesting thing to do with a protagonist and I’m extremely here for it, but, on the other, it’s not going to hit with everyone. Take it not hitting with everyone and the overlap of all of the above, and you might end up with some out-there interpretations; some positive, some negative, and some in this undefinable space where you’re left wondering if everyone has the same version of the show.

And, to be completely clear, when I say fandom, I never mean that fandom is bad or that everyone has to like my blorbos or anything like that. I grouse sometimes, but that’s because I’m kind of a cranky old woman now and again, and I’m weirdly protective of my favorite characters and stories, and I find fan culture a little hard to navigate. But the bad batch fandom is mostly pretty neat. Even if I do want to dropkick some of the takes into the sun.

Happy Pride! Have Some Queer AF Books and Games, FREE!

(Or pay what you want, including nothing! Tips always appreciated, but never expected!)

Yes, for the next two days only, ALL my extremely queer ebooks and indie games are pay-what-you-want on Itch.io! Eleven Things, all of them very queer sci-fi and fantasy, including:

Enjoy, and remember to celebrate yourself! <3

Now introducing our INCREDIBLE lineup of creators!! There are 70 artists, 5 merch artists, 20 authors, and 14 cosplayers among our contributors, all working hard on their pieces!

I feel like I'm sitting at the table with the cool kids! And the strangest part of all?

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Schedule Update and Contributor Applications

Hey there troopers! As promised here is an announcement letting you know that the schedule has been updated and confirmed on our carrd. In addition, our contributor applications will open TOMORROW and close on August 5th.

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