"Holmes died at the Reichenbach Falls"

starting a compilation of my favorite "no thank you" buttons from when they want you to subscribe so bad

More from the notes:

adding to the collection

fingon

everything about this little dude screams magician. they call him the wandering violin and look at his slender body. and his latin name is a fucking spell you cant convince me otherwise

they call him the roundish rounder

From a medical history perspective, nothing is more wonderful and horrifying to me than the decades between the discovery of antisepsis and antibiotics. Imagine a medical profession that already knows that bacteria cause illness, knows how to kill the bacteria on objects or on skin, but has no reliable way to kill bacteria once they are inside the body. Semmelweis intuited antisepsis in the 1840s, Lister developed his technique in the 1860ies, by the late 19th century antiseptic procedures were widely known, but the first antibiotic wasn’t invented until the 1930ies, and it wasn’t produced in mass quantities until the 1940ies, didn’t become widely available until the 1950ies. Depending on the location, that gives us fifty to a hundred years where preventing infection is possible, but fighting infection is largely ineffectual. You must stop it before it starts, because once it’s started, all you can do is pray. There was no reliable way to prevent a little infection from growing into sepsis, and if sepsis is dangerous now, back then it was wholly untreatable.

So antiseptic precautions are the matter of life and death. I’ve read instructions from 1910s children’s hospitals, instructions for 1930s midwives, and they are… intense. I mean they are a lot like present-day operating room protocols, only they apply the same strictness to the general hospital ward, or even to the home. Today, there’s a higher chance of fixing a mistake, of curing an infection, back then there was none. So using an object without boiling beforehand can kill. Touching two objects in the wrong order can kill. Pouring water in the wrong direction can kill. The slightest divergence from protocol, the slightest lapse in white-knuckled vigilance can kill.

No wonder Semmelweis went insane, and no wonder people thought he was insane long before he did. He didn’t simply order doctors to wash their hands, he had them wash using a solution of calcium hypochlorite, so essentially, bleach. Lister used (corrosive, poisonous) phenol, later doctors preferred (extremely super poisonous) mercury chloride. As a doctor, slathering yourself and all your clothing and all your equipment and your patient in dangerous poison was preferable to leaving a single germ alive.

Every time I think too deeply about how we've found the bones of thousands and thousands of years old ancient people and we've given them people names I just

Guys, do you get it? We put to name these ancient peoples whose bodies vaguely resemble us and we go, "you're one of us, and we will give you a name that we have invented". They are not here to have a voice for themselves, but they are here to be remembered.

To be named is to be loved.

And not just thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years old, but MILLIONS of years old. That is far too many years old for the human brain to properly comprehend. But we still look at them and see ourselves. We see a person, and we say "this person needs a name so that we can talk about them with the respect they deserve, because we love them"

Lucy's skeleton! The ball-and-socket joint of the femur has me so emotional... She and I look so alike on the inside. Look at the pelvis! Look at the sacrum, the mandible!!! She's like us. I'm honestly so sad when people make fun of the extinct predecessors to us, especially because we have so much in common. Don't you think people like Lucy had a community that cared that she was there? They are like us.

I challenge everyone to look at these ancient people and see how beautiful they were. Would they have known that in thousands and millions of years, there would be people who loved them? What about us - do we know if there will be people thousands or millions of years from us who love us with the curiosity and intensity we do? I think so.

One of the things you very quickly learn as an adult who's prepared to take kids' opinions on media seriously is that you're never too young to be a pretentious hater. Obviously your average six-year-old possesses neither the vocabulary nor the analytic framework to criticise a film as derivative or failing to commit to its own thematic premise, but sometimes these are very clearly the criticisms they're grasping for!

(Sometimes it's actually kind of impressive. Like, buddy, you've seen a dozen movies in your entire life and already you're dismissing this one as derivative slop. You're right, of course, but how the hell did you arrive at that conclusion?)

@deadbaguette hi i saw ur axe clytemnestra thing and got brain blasted. grins

Ok I'm not going to reply to the post directly but smoking weed on the beach is absolutely different from getting drunk on the beach because:

A) people drinking booze doesn't make the entire beach stink like the ass of a dead skunk. You do not get to nickname something SKUNK and then be shocked when people hate when you smoke it in public. It smells bad, and I can assure you I don't go to the beach to smell your shit stink

B) as an asthmatic, people drinking on the beach does not pose a health risk to me

C) I cannot get second hand drunk from people drinking on the beach

I am a person who prefers getting high to getting drunk (gummies, I am asthmatic) but you can't pretend that smoking weed in public isn't straight up obnoxious, lol

Smoking weed/vaping in public airspace is exactly as obnoxious smoking cigarettes in the same airspace. Either bring edibles to the beach or if you MUST aspirate, hotbox in your car like a normal person.

The child stared distantly at the landscape for a while and then said, “I’ve got new socks.”

YES?

“You can look, if you like.” A grubby foot was extended for inspection.

WELL, WELL. FANCY THAT. NEW SOCKS.

“My mum knitted them out of sheep.”

MY WORD.

- Reaper Man, Sir Terry Pratchett

Spring omen.

Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn. ~ Elizabeth Lawrence

~ Art 'Peaceful Place' by Olga Knezevic

I was supposed to watch a film with a friend the other night (remotely, via a synchronised video app) but I didn't have any wifi due to a thunderstorm, so I went outside to walk around looking for a bit of 4G to let her know, and on my way out I found fire salamanders on my doorstep! I was so glad; I've been visited by some of these creatures every single autumn so far :)

I managed to find a 4G spot in the woods to send my friend the photo, and a text saying I had to cancel our film night and asking to reschedule, then a third message talking about the storm and saying the wifi problem should be fixed by the end of the week.

But I went home too fast (it was raining) and the third text never left my phone. The next morning when I drove to town and became Reachable again I had a text from my friend in which she said "I have a list for you of all the questions, assumptions, and logical inferences that my brain produced upon receiving a text that said "Sorry I have to cancel our plans" followed by a photo of two lizards having sex as the only explanation"

What the fuck are yall talking about

Oscar the Grouch and the Count von Count, of Sesame Street, being in a gay relationship and one of them getting pregnant.

Tibetan fox (Vulpes ferrilata)

I saw this post on the Wikipedia

Achievement Unlocked:

Wikimedia Uncommons

Well that's not something I expected to see on Wikipedia.

“You know what should have alerted the Valar that Melkor’s repentance was feigned?” The student was clearly preparing a speech.

“The fact that he was Melkor?” suggested another, drawing laughter.

“No,” the student went on, ignoring him, “repentance has to be a possibility, forgiveness has to be a possibility, even for the worst. If we maintain that something once marred is wasted forever, then what are any of us doing here?” Murmurs from around the table.

“There is no partial repentance, no conditional reconciliation. They wanted him back as a part of the world, and as the world’s guardians, they were right to do so-“ Smothered cries of indignation. The student hastened to his conclusion. “But they should have known that he was not interested in reconciliation, even without the ability to see into his thought, because Melkor sought pardon not from those he had wronged, but from those who punished him.”

There was a brief lull, then, as the Mirdain considered this. Annatar showed no discomfort on his face, did not shift from his posture of poised relaxation. Why did Celebrimbor keep looking over at him? He waited, smiling, until he was entirely certain his departure would go unremarked, then got up and left the hall as quickly as he could.

how jingo went

close ups on his face, bc i like when hes holding on by a thread