“Hi,” he says. “I’m Lopez. Apparently I’m supposed to help you with the warped axle on this Warthog.”
Okay, no, what he actually says is more along the lines of “Hi, I’m Lopez, something something something me something something car something-that-maybe-means-pencil,” because Katie Jensen failed miserably every time she tried to learn another language and Spanish class back in high school was no exception.
“Um,” she says. She recognizes him as one of the Reds and Blues, but doesn’t know him, which means he was probably one of the people on the Fed side of the fence. She’s been so busy the past few weeks that introductions have been kinda low on the priority list. “Hi, Lopez. I’m Katie. Sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”
He grunts, folds his arms, mutters something.
“But you understand English, huh?” She brightens. “Wait, no, hang on a sec!” It takes her a moment to shuffle out from under the Warthog and dig up her pack, but right at the bottom is the ancient little datapad, and she crows victoriously when she finds it still has a bit of charge. “Hah! Got it!”
Lopez is still watching her, arms folded.
“Translator,” she says. “If you speak real slow and clear, it’s usually pretty good.”
Lopez jolts, takes a step closer. He says something that the translator picks up; she shows him the word Seriously? as it prints across the screen.
[The greatest what if that may ever exist from the tng/ds9/voy era to me will always be: what would a war between the Dominion and the Borg be like? I look at any maps that include both and the space just seems small sometimes. The Borg were supposed to have a transwarp conduit that led there, so what would that be like?]
Someone wrote in to the American Bar Association Journal to say “What do you mean most lawyers don’t know the verb ‘abnegate’? Haven’t you read Divergent?” and I think that’s great.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
There are really only four known groups of spiders with medically significant venom- the rest can’t do much worse than a bee sting. (Of course, some individuals can have allergic reactions to spider venom, just like bee stings.)
These four groups are: the widows (Latrodectus sp.), the brown spiders (Loxosceles sp.), the Australian funnel web spiders (Atraxus sp.), and the Brazilian wandering spiders (Phoneutria sp.).
Black widows are found across the U.S. and in parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Despite their reputation, most black widow bites are harmless. Many are dry, with no venom injected, and about 75% of those that do contain venom only produce localized pain with no other symptoms.
Occasionally, more severe symptoms do develop in the form of latrodectism. This can cause symptoms such as generalized pain, headache, nausea, sweating, and racing heart. Most of these symptoms resolve within a week and for more severe cases, an antivenom is available. There has only been one death recorded from a black widow bite in US in the last 50 years, and it was an elderly man. Several thousand people in the US get bitten by black widows every year without suffering any major ill effects.
The brown spiders include the brown recluse spider, famed for its necrotizing bite. However, as with the black widow, the deadliness of this spider has been greatly exaggerated. Like the black widow, brown spiders are found worldwide. Also like the black widow, their bites are often venom-free, and even envenomated bites produce nothing more than mild irritation.
Here’s a map of where brown spiders are found in the US:
The brown recluse is very rare in Ohio specifically, so you don’t have much to worry about.
Bites with high concentrations of brown recluse venom can produce a necrotic skin lesion that is slow to heal. About 66% of these lesions heal on their own without complications. Those that do not may require skin grafts or corrective surgery. A systemic response, which is the response that may become fatal, occurs in about 1% of bite victims. In the last decade there have been two recorded fatalities from brown recluse bites, and both were young children. And as a matter of fact, there are no confirmed reports of a necrotizing bite leading to amputation.
Interestingly enough, there are lots of reports of brown recluse “bites” from states where there are no brown recluse spiders. Spiders often get blamed for symptoms that come from everything from lyme disease to lymphoma. My state is not within the brown recluse range and I’ve still heard stories from a number of people who insist they were bitten by the spider.
Australian funnel web spiders are found, obviously, in Australia- specifically along the eastern coast. While it is suggested that these spiders are more likely to give “wet” bites than the others on this list, there have been no recorded fatalities from their bites in Australia since 1981!
Brazilian wandering spiders are found in parts of Central and South America and are the most venomous spider on this list. This venom, among other things, may give you a lasting erection, which is why some pharmaceutical companies are researching it for use in erectile dysfunction drugs. These spiders are the famed “banana spiders” because they have been found on shipments of bananas outside of South/Central America; however, there are only seven actual recorded cases of this happening. Only about 2.3% of wandering spider bites are medically significant, and again, there have been very few deaths attributed to them.
Spiders, by and large, do not pose a threat to you anywhere in the world.
Day-Month-Year makes the most sense to me, smallest to largest. How about you?
Tags:
#our home and cherished land #fucking Canada man #just pick one #I don’t care which just fucking pick one #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #and thus has Feelings about expiration date ambiguity
Is it plausible to unfollow people and blame it on Tumblr? Asking because I just followed three people I could have sworn I already did. (Could have unfollowed on purpose and just forgotten, but, one of them is my sister. I am pretty sure I would have remembered that.) And since it’s Tumblr, anything short of meteor strikes could be this website’s fault.
The other bottom line is that if you thought I followed you and I don’t, I probably just think you haven’t posted in a while.
It’s worse than that.
You, the people who are successfully reading my blog, may have noticed that I just reblogged a bunch of stuff from this person. This is because it turns out that, even though Tumblr claimed I was still following him, his posts have not been showing up on my dash for about the past fortnight.
You might want to manually check the blogs you follow that “haven’t posted recently” to make sure they really haven’t. If you do find one that has, unfollowing and re-following works, or at least it did for me.
There are at least two aspects to this, as far as I know, tho one of them may have changed, and others may also be in play. First, tumblr’s new layout makes it stupidly easy to accidentally unfollow someone. Secondly, and this is the part that may have changed, but at least at one point there was a limitation that only the last hundred people you followed would actually show up on your dash. This is part of why I don’t follow back all the time, because I want to keep my follow list under that limit if it’s still there.
For what it’s worth, I was definitely still officially following comparativelysuperlative: when I went to his blog, Tumblr offered me an “unfollow” button rather than a “follow” button. I’m also only following 68 blogs total, and I’ve been following some of the blogs that have been showing up on my dash for longer than I’ve been following him.
(That’s…pretty horrible about the “only the last hundred people you followed” thing. Why not just explicitly forbid people from following more than 100 people at a time if you’re going to have that limit?)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(found this post in the notes)
Is it plausible to unfollow people and blame it on Tumblr? Asking because I just followed three people I could have sworn I already did. (Could have unfollowed on purpose and just forgotten, but, one of them is my sister. I am pretty sure I would have remembered that.) And since it’s Tumblr, anything short of meteor strikes could be this website’s fault.
The other bottom line is that if you thought I followed you and I don’t, I probably just think you haven’t posted in a while.
It’s worse than that.
You, the people who are successfully reading my blog, may have noticed that I just reblogged a bunch of stuff from this person. This is because it turns out that, even though Tumblr claimed I was still following him, his posts have not been showing up on my dash for about the past fortnight.
You might want to manually check the blogs you follow that “haven’t posted recently” to make sure they really haven’t. If you do find one that has, unfollowing and re-following works, or at least it did for me.
Tags:
#PSA #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
