“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life – using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family – forget about support from your PHYLUM – all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
Tags:
#I have been wavering on whether to reblog this for several months #I am not altogether comfortable reblogging something that self-describes as‚ quote‚ ”dangerous inaccuracy” #but think of it as something more like a creation myth #storytime #biology #that one post with the thing #(…I think the 37.5 degrees bit is *trying* to evoke a post-luteal body temperature) #(but I run cold and 37.5 is *definitely* a fever) #(anyway) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #discourse cw? #unreality cw? #body horror? #unsanitary cw?
i might just be autistic but data entry fucking rules dudes you just. enter the data. you take the data and you plug it in. then what? who knows! who cares. the data. has been entered. what next? buddy you’re not gonna believe this it’s more fucking data. excel used to be my enemy but now she is my best friend
The 4 approaches to “orphaned etymology” problems in fiction
1. Obviously we can’t call it French toast if there’s no France so we’re just gonna replace it with something else.
2. The word abattoir sounds too French so it wouldn’t make sense for it to be here without a France. Even though we use English without there being an England.
3. This is called a Ming vase because when you tap it it makes a “Ming!” sound.
4. I am JRR Tolkien and every single word I write has a fictional etymology attached to it that I am translating into English for your convenience.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(approach number 3) #language #writing
I’m going to show you a book cover I’ve been staring at for ten minutes with the disclaimer that this isn’t anywhere close to the wildest book cover I’ve ever seen. It simply compels me. It haunts me. It makes me want to go back to the library to check it out.
Anyway it was nearly crazy enough. It was just a competently yet blandly written romance between an Amish single father and a woman with a troubled past, BUT at one point the villain gives his name as Pete Peterson and then 70 pages later someone’s finally like “so that’s probably a fake name” and then the villain’s real name? Phil Phillipson. I’ll bump the book up to a C+ for that alone.
subv
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #names
go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish
I got one of those dinky little islands near the Canada-Alaska border! Total crapshoot whether I freeze to death before I find a human who’ll let me hitchhike somewhere.
Tags:
#latitude 33.54180 longitude -167.46516 #middle of goddamn nowhere roughly a thousand kilometres north of some tiny Hawaiian island #on my fifth attempt I hit land‚ in a field fifteen metres from a highway in Vietnam #(12.015250 108.135528) #I can probably work with that one #especially if I get dropped with my utility belt #(oh wow‚ WolframAlpha gives lots of neat fun facts about a coordinate point if you search for it) #(did you know that‚ while it’s merely 28C in temperature‚ the current UV index there is *13*?) #(I didn’t even know the UV index *went* that high) #(WolframAlpha helpfully informs me that very pale people such as myself should not be outside for more than 10 minutes) #(I still think I can probably make it work overall but it looks like I’m in for a nasty sunburn) #((at least on whatever parts I wasn’t able to cover up: I think I do have a *little* tube of sunscreen in my bag)) #((…wait‚ hang on‚ the weather station they’re pulling this from is *208km* away from and *640* metres below the actual point?)) #((honestly at that point they should just give up and admit that they have no idea what the weather is like there)) #also‚ congrats to the person in the notes who ended up in fucking London #(”LONDON???? I’LL LIVE BUT AT WHAT COST????”) #tag rambles #memes #maps #death tw?
in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him
and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming
I especially love the fact that, in many depictions, Bruce Wayne somehow ended up looking similar enough to the one Kryptonian on Earth that they can Parent Trap people
i say “somebody’s making brownies in North Dakota” whenever my irl bizarrely strong sense of smell is bugging me plz reblog so ppl will get the reference thx
There’s an episode of the Superman animated series where Superman goes to Gotham because he hears it’s suddenly full of crime, as Batman has vanished. He teams up with Robin and dressed up as Batman to get crime back under control, while searching for him.
It turns out Bruce Wayne got mind-controlled by Brainiac who went after him just because he’s a billionaire, and is using his money to build a giant rocket. He doesn’t even know he was mind controlling Batman.
So Superman learns all this (while dressed as Batman, remember?) , and Brainiac is like “Well, Batman is only a human. Time to die” and blasts him with a big laser.
Since it’s Superman, this just damages his mask a bit, revealing that he’s actually Superman. And Brainiac goes “Kal-El? This development was highly improbable.”
Understatement of the century, bud. The chances of Batman and Superman being the same guy? Pretty fucking low!
Tags:
#Batman #Superman #comics #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw #embarrassment squick #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
This blog was inspired by a long, long defunct series of blogs on Livejournal, in which people could describe bits of nostalgia that they couldn’t quite remember the name of. Readers can comment if they remember the thing and reunite bits of lost media with those longing for them. Books, games, tv shows, songs, etc. all are fair game!
A few notes:
The more people follow this blog, the wider net we cast for our questions! The blog is still very new, so not too many people will see questions at first. If you like this idea, please reblog questions or just tell a friend about this project! Those asking questions, I will try to keep tabs on those that are not answered and reblog them on occasion to bump them to the top as we gain more followers.
If you think you have an answer to a question, please don’t forget to @ the asker so they know right away!
The best way to submit a query is actually through the submit button. This is pure laziness on my part because I don’t have to add unnecessary text each time I post one.
All other thoughts please put in the ask box!
I’ll be starting a queue for new asks. Right now it’s set at 1 and 6 pm est and we’ll see how it goes from there.
This is a side blog so if I like your blog and follow you that notification will be coming from @beggars-opera
Tags:
#PSA #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 