Hi! You can call me Eli.

thinking about the video where a bunch of guys get together to un-corrupt a blastoise that got bad egged years ago in a leafgreen game and how that whole scenario is like. the loving side of cosmic horror. you are a blastoise. you trust your trainer. you've been through countless battles together, and while they never say anything, you can tell your trainer loves you. what you don't know is that your trainer is, at all times, being puppeted by intelligent forces outside of your dimension, holding knowledge far beyond the scope of anything you could ever know. they know things about your world that you do not; that nobody in your world ever could. the distinction between your trainer and this creature is minimal. at the same time, this creature is not god. it does not have infinite knowledge; it understands far greater than you, yet in still a very limited capacity. they understand what your world is made up of and how it can be manipulated to fit your whims. this creature loves you. your trainer loves you. they love you so much that they want to help you become stronger. they manipulate the very laws of your world to attain this feat. however, they did it wrong. they didn't know what they were doing, and the makeup of your being- everything you ARE- was twisted. you are no longer a blastoise. you are a bad egg. your trainer remains the same as ever. everything continues on, the same as it ever was, yet you cannot be what you once were. your trainer tries over, and over, and OVER again to hatch you, but you never become what you once were. you are a bad egg. there are other bad eggs now, other pokemon you used to know; pokemon you helped your trainer catch, pokemon you may have even fought alongside. now you're all bad eggs, sealed away by ancient protective magic known as Code. you never knew such a thing existed. you wonder if you're dangerous now. your trainer sets you in a box. over the years, he forgets which box you're in. unbeknownst to you, the creature is panicking, trying everything it can possibly think of to restore you to your blastoise state. the creature is just a child. he carries the pain of your loss long into adulthood; in his mind, he is responsible for your death. in the grand scheme of the universe, you do not matter; you're a "game". a few lines of code and some pixels. you do not Exist. and yet, you are mourned. and yet many others just like you are mourned by many others just like him. the world has been still for many, many years. you don't know this, because your world does not contain an internal clock. time doesn't really exist for you; it's a concept far outside of your reality. and yet, it is important. your creature contacts another of its kind. it shares the story of its sin, the insignificant act of corrupting you beyond repair. it shares this story in hopes that it could save you. the other creature recalls its own destruction of a world not unlike yours. it agrees to help. many creatures within the world outside of yours have gathered all together, using technologies familiar and unfamiliar with one collective goal in mind: to rescue you. specifically you. your loss is widely considered nothing. and yet, they put in incredible effort. obstacle after obstacle, they perform miracles for your sake. they copy your world; they use strange windows to view it, they layer your world over itself many times over to view it from every angle. they dig deep into the very makeup of your universe just trying to find you. one of them uses a method that only he has access to, in all the world, to find you. and they do. you have lost your name and everything else that makes you you, but there is something that remains in tact, that makes you findable; a piece of "data", an invisible quality to you that you and your trainer would never see, something you could never possibly know about. this is what ultimately makes you you, and not another blastoise. slowly but surely, they begin to put you back together. it's much harder than it needs to be, it is far too much effort for one

creature in one game that will never be touched again, and yet they do it. they race against the clock, stressing endlessly, sweating bullets and crying out in relief when they finally find the exact values, the last pieces of invisible quality that makes it YOU. you are now a blastoise. you are now "legitimate" to the game. you do not know it yet, but your trainer - your creature - is waiting for you, excited to Transfer you into new worlds until you are where he wants you. until you are safe. you also do not know that at this time, two of you exist. there is the You, here, being put together, manipulated through the fabrics of reality to restore your original form. and there is the Original you; the one waiting home, on the cartridge. the Real you. you are a clone, but you are not. you are a new pokemon, but you are the original. you are both corrupted, and legitimate. you are many things. the new you is saved, and this version of your world- this version that has fixed you, and only you- is re-uploaded, overlayed and overwritten to the original. you safely arrive. You are a blastoise. You were a bad egg, for a short time. But now you are a blastoise again. your trainer acts the same as ever, because he cannot display anything that would suggest he notices the difference. you do not know what happened. you have no idea. you have no idea how much you are loved.

I’ll just leave this here....

Just goes to show the companies complying in advance to the current administration are CHOOSING to do so and the decent ones AREN'T

Spin this dang wheel of every 5e subclass. You are hit by a truck and end up on the Sword Coast as that class, at the level you select that subclass.

Level 3 scrolls wizard on tge sword coast? I immediately go to candlekeep, join the harpers and enjoy one of the most magnificant libraries of magical lore in the setting

The pills meme but it's things i wish i had

Warding spells are real, if you want me to stay far away from you forever tell me that you practice reiki.

The nice thing is that I will probably never bring this kind of thing up. I'm never going to go out of my way to figure out if the people around me are, like, really into homeopathy. The less nice thing is that if you bring it up with me I am never, ever, ever going to shut up about it and if you attempt to show me a *study* on the healing power of prayer or the use of chiropractic to treat asthma we are forever enemies and I probably won't talk to you again but I will use the several hours of furious debunking that I did after our conversation to make arguments against your beliefs in the future. You are already a lost cause to me but other people are less stupid about the way that ice crystals form and I can work with them.

I *loathe* medical woo, it kills people and the people who engage in it are shitty human beings who are hurting other human beings.

RE: Herbalism

I don't think that there's a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn't understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.

But "medicine from plants" and "herbalism" are not the same.

The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you've got a headache.

What you can't do is control the dose. You can't do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you're measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it's not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.

That's not a huge deal if you're using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you're using aspirin as a bloodthinner.

And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn't* a big deal. The example they *don't* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that's a medicine from a plant that you can't fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it's done wrong it'll just straight kill you.

And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn't diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn't on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.

And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).

There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for "Hema Ketha" for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)

Are you attempting to take therapeutic doses of turmeric? There's some evidence that it can help relieve joint pain. However you need to take really, really high doses because the medicinal compound in turmeric has low bioavailability. And because you're taking high doses you may be swapping out the risks of NSAIDs for the risk of lead poisoning, because it is unfortunately very common for turmeric to be contaminated with lead.

One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than "allopathic" medicine. They think "it's better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea." But midol doesn't interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they're taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.

There's this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John's Wort tea that has "NOT FOR PREGNANT" on the label. It's good that they're recommending that pregnant people don't select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.

But it's just tea. And what could just tea do, right?

(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That's what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn't steeped as long doesn't hurt, so you drink it and you think it's fine, it's not a problem, and it isn't a problem until it is but you don't know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)

This is also why I'm extremely leery of the "you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor's care and you do what the doctors say" thing because that is relying on:

So long story short I'm not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you're recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.

Because that's the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren't held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don't have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that's in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they're not committing malpractice because there's no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there's no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.

I have pretty much limitless tolerance for things that people want to do to themselves. If you want to take valerian because you think it helps you sleep (in spite of essentially no evidence that it does so and more adverse reactions among natural sleep aids than things like camomile - which also has no evidence that it's an effective sleep aid) I don't care, just make sure to check for drug interactions first.

If you want to replace your elderly parent's NSAID painkillers with clove oil, fuck you.

for people on the other post who are not familiar with my position on herbalism.

It's a bit anti-rational to cut someone off for showing you a study as opposed to for not doing that. If the rules of your game set aside certain kinds of results and exclude them from being validly demonstrable, okay, but the alternative medicine advocate should still not lose points for attempting to play by your stated rules.

I'm perfectly fine with people presenting me with studies as long as they can explain the mechanism of action before they hand me the study. This excludes studies both on the healing power of prayer and on chiropractic as treatment for asthma because there is no mechanism of action that would allow prayer to heal people or chiropractic to treat asthma, and I don't have to accept "but when you clap you can prevent fairies from dying" as a reason to read whatever bullshit you pulled out of a chiropractic journal or from a homeopath's blog to show me.

Before I had tumblr and things on my dash that would get me all spun up and aggro about pseudoscience I had the Women's World magazines with Dr. Oz on the cover that my mother in law would leave on the kitchen table that I would steal to argue with the articles line by line on my blogspot blog.

People are asking for resources so here's a WebMD page that you can use to look up vitamins, supplements, and herbal cures to see what they interact with and if they are considered generally safe or not. Drugs.com is hit or miss for herbal stuff, but you can search what you're looking for and see what comes up - for instance, you can search "green tea" and one of the results that comes up is a list of drug interactions.

STOP SPEEDRUNNING MY TOWER YOU INGRATES

YOU AREN’T GIVING ME ENOUGH TIME TO RESET THE TRAPS AND HEAL MY MINIONS

WE’RE UNIONIZED I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW

*mashes the skip dialogue button*

spell issue

one thing about americans is that they know how to make a fucking milkshake

i hate the stupid milk consistency shit you get here like if you give me a milkshake it better be rock fucking solid. i want that thang thick like concrete. it should piss me off trying to drink it through a straw. i should have to wait for it to thaw

Americans are so good at making Beverage. One of our Foundational Moments was actually a party involving Making Beverage. Google "Boston Tea Party" for more

Never stop hating

Fun fact! There is at least one specific disease bloodletting is beneficial for, which is hemochromatosis! The excess absorption of iron is treated by getting your blood drawn regularly, which is why many patients aren't diagnosed until menopause.

oscar isaac's acting directions in dune were really just 'contrary to book canon you are 80% of this family's emotional intelligence and 125% of its impulse control' and he was like cool got it and then Delivered.

you think i'm kidding about leto being the only thing standing between his batshit over-powered family and some truly catastrophic nonsense, but then he dies and less than 24 hours later his son is like what if i started a new religion and became emperor of the known universe.

when you're the reasonable parent but the 'i birthed a demigod to piss off my boss' parent is left in charge dune dune spoilers vrabia

Imagine hearing this behind the bush and you thought its a cat 💀💀

Okay, but cheetahs seem to do best in captivity.

These poor anxiety ridden bastards cant handle alone time and need a canine friend to keep them from becoming an even BIGGER neurotic mess. Their anxiety can get bad enough that when it comes time to bow chika meow meow, they cant get the deed done. Their birth rates in the wild are dismal, and their survival rates arent any better. A cheetah mother will do minimal defense of her cubs, then say fuck those kids and book it like a first time shoplifter when the rent-a-cops saunter through if the fight needs more than a token effort.

Like every other predator in the world, theyd much rather take a nap than try and beat Usain Bolt in a footrace or catch a snack on hooves. Folks used to keep them as pets, once upon a time, and these failcats on speed have been trying to get themselves domesticated ever since. They meow, they purr, and it's not unheard of or uncommon for groups in the wild to cuddle-pile on a human ranger for pets and naptime.

There are NO documented records of a wild cheetah killing a human, and ONLY 2 instances in captivity. Compare that to Fido or Spot's stats, or any other wild animal, but do bear in mind the difference in numbers.

Honestly, they're trying their damndest to be friend shaped, and maybe we should let them. It could end up being the best way to save the species.

FAILCATS ON SPEED 🤣

"cheetahs want to be domesticated and we should domesticate them" isn't the take I expected but goddamn am I here for it

Listen, I am too tired to look up sources but afaik there are signs that cheetahs have BEEN partially domesticated, which may explain why they're like this, "you ruined a perfectly good wild predator" etc. I think the LEAST we can do at this point is finish the job.

Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

got curious, here's the author (Sam Anderson) and Walnut from this 2024 article/podcast

(more pictures of walnut at the link)

I don't remember what you said but for the rest of my life I will remember the car window was rolled down when you said it.

I can’t help but chuckle whenever Tails introduces himself by stating, “My name’s Miles Prower, but my friends call me Tails” because… well… Eggman calls him Tails…

Whatever you say, Tails!

Source: Sonic Universe, Issue #35 (2011)

I think Eggman thinks “Tails” Is just his real name

Eggman goes to a science conference and decides to sit in on a rocket-science lecture by some dude called Dr. Miles Prower and then has a heart attack when Tails walks onto the stage and starts talking

For some reason, when the URL is in the “www.tumblr.com/[username]/[post number]” form, this post breaks and most of the comic made by @smugbugunderarug goes missing, but the entire post loads correctly if the URL is in the “[username].tumblr.com/post/[post number]” form. I’ll re-upload @smugbugunderarug’s comic to see if it loads correctly in both URL forms this time.

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read actually

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

not to talk tough but i have sat through every pledge of allegiance in my life, and that includes the bush administration's hyper-patriotic war on terror.

you can NOT be compelled to say the pledge, and that also means you can't be given the 'choice' of doing it or taking a punishment. being sent into the hall is a grey area.

if you are punishing for refusing, parents or a more sympathetic teacher (like say a history or english teacher) can step in to intercede with the principal. do not be afraid to escalate.

it is critical now of all times that you PRACTICE civil disobedience, starting small, sticking to it, and working up, this will help you learn how very much disobedience you can actually get away with in this life, which is actually a hell of a lot.

i forget baby bugs don't really exist not in the way i want them too anywYs. i was like how come ive never seen a baby beetle i bet theyre soo cute and then i googled and i was like oh right. grub

grasshopper nymph.

hey, don’t cry— grasshopper nymph, okay?