Science wasn’t actually certain how fungi like cordyceps “hijacked” their host’s behavior, and we always kind of assumed it was causing some relatively simplistic damage to the brain, but now it seems the truth is much more like all the dramatized versions of it in sci-fi horror.
These fungi integrate themselves on the cellular level with the host’s tissues all throughout their body, actually seem to send signals to the host’s muscles and even alter the host’s genes with their own.
And all the while, it turns out THE BRAIN ISN’T TAKEN OVER AT ALL.
These fungi, all along, have been converting their hosts into animal-fungal hybrids they control while the host’s brain and consciousness remain helplessly alive and largely unaltered.
Tags:
#ants #bugs #body horror #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the button meme) #Wildbow
reading this post is like being punched in a million directions at once
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #nsfw text? #death mention #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
proposal: unaging humans that don’t have an ongoing population crisis – instead, norms approach “spend at least 50 years learning who you are and getting settled” and “a child really needs several parents who all have stable relationships with each other, at least two of whom are willing to do full-time parenting, at least in the early years”, and nobody who would have had children because “well, if I don’t have them now I can’t have them later” or an interest in perpetuating the bloodline or an interest in support in old age has kids
additionally, the lower rate of childbirth fails to prevent children from socializing, because of denser housing and better transit, so even if everyone in the city only has a thousand kids they can all meet up, or people temporarily moving to raise kids, or whatever
“but this would make boring science fiction” just have the kid-friendly cities be oversurveilled suburbia that children are weirded out by and teenagers hate. or, like, some kind of extended metaphor where a “working parent and nonworking parent” household has as much trouble raising kids as a single-working-parent household does today, or something.
anyway, since everyone uses science fiction as an oracle now apparently, we should be a tiny bit concerned about the total unavailability of a concept in sci-fi.
Or, the central conflict actually has nothing to do with the kids and how they’re being raised; rather, the kids’ situation in the world is a background to the existing story.
When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a story that took place in a dystopia where they had rejiggered human sleep/wake cycles to give everyone more waking time, and then forced children to spend half that time in school and half that time working for a war effort, which was kind of a “we have always been at war with Oceania” kind of war effort. Except that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about three kids who find a treehouse that contains gateways to other dimensions, where they go to escape their miserable lives in the dystopia.
You could have a story about a future where humans have incredibly lengthened lifespans and there aren’t many kids and the kids that there are tend to live in specific kid-friendly places so the story is about a kid whose parents take them traveling a lot so they’re used to being in places for adults and then they move in with a more stable unit because they think the kid needs stability and the kid is bored shitless by other kids and “kid friendly” stuff. Or the kid is neurodivergent in a world that’s a lot more accepting of adult neurodivergence than child neurodivergence because kids are so much rarer than before. Or the family dynamics when your older brother is 40 and you’re 10. Or something totally unrelated, like the kid’s emotional reactions to one of the parents having a dangerous job. The conflict doesn’t have to be about the existence of the longer lifespans and the relative rarity of children but they are raised in places where children are denser than in other areas; you can follow through extrapolations of that to think, what kind of challenges would they have? Or come up with something barely related. Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom” gives us a post-humanist world where people back themselves up and death isn’t permanent and currency is popularity and reputation, and then writes a murder mystery set in that world where the main character is trying to solve his own murder after being restored from backup. The conflict isn’t about being in a post-humanist society where death is a minor inconvenience, but the story couldn’t exist without that background.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.
Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.
—
I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.
—
Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))
((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))
—
We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.
(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)
—
Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.
I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)
Ah ok, ‘occasionally receive cheques but never write them’ is closer to my experience too, although I don’t know anyone who gets paid for their job by cheque.
I also got a cheque for a scholarship type thing so it is still around very occasionally here.
#conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #long post #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.
Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.
—
I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.
—
Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))
((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))
—
We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.
(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)
—
Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.
I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)
Tags:
#long post #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #adventures in University Land
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Tags:
#adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
There are a lot of classic horror films where the defining experience of viewership is going “okay, this is definitely the director’s fetish… and shit, I think it’s mine now, too”.
(And yes, I’m aware this happens in other genres, but I wouldn’t say it’s the defining experience of most other genres. When I watch an action movie, I’m rarely seized by the creeping certainty that the director is sexually gratified by men in dark glasses walking away from explosions. I mean, I’m not ruling out the possibility, but in most cases the explosion love seems reasonably platonic!)
I am willing to believe that Michael Bay is sexually attracted to explosions.
Michael Bay wants giant robots to pee on him.
Tags:
#sexuality and lack thereof #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #nsfw text? #unsanitary cw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
#storytime #medical cw #conspiracy theories #vaccines #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
buying peaches is so stressful because you have to consume them so quickly…it’s like the moment the cashier types in that number the alpha peach turns to its brothers in the bags and says “alright listen up boys, it’s time to remember your training. i want to see immense bruising by sundown. i want to see you near inedible by sunrise. remember it is better to die a free man than to be eaten.” you gotta wolf down all of your peaches at the check out counter while the trader joe’s employees eagerly look at the Peach Consumption Countdown Clock and cheer you on. these peaches have sensors on them that can tell when they come into contact with human hands so they can begin their self-destruct sequence like you’re in a spy movie and the peach just relayed a message to you about the whereabouts of jimmy hoffa’s decayed remains
this response carries so much chaotic cursed energy. jimmy hoffa was declared dead in 1982 after disappearing in 1975. he was born in 1913, meaning he would be the miraculous age of 105 today if he wasn’t dead. “likely dead.” the fact that it’s a hetalia blog trying to tell me that he is likely dead. the fact that i specifically mention his decayed corpse in my post so there is literally no reason for someone to alert me that he is “likely” deceased. the fact that this hetalia blog is trying to tell this to me, a person who up until recently literally worked for the international brotherhood of teamsters as a person in charge of handling their historical records. i spent two years of my life answering phone calls from people asking me if i personally knew what happened to jimmy hoffa’s body. ive spent a significantly longer amount of time trying to forget that hetalia exists. my entire career as a hetalia facebook roleplayer at the age of 11 just flashed through my eyes. i legitimately cannot express how much this response has effected me. ive been staring at it for 7 minutes. i feel like ive entered the twilight zone
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #food #(OP is mostly not a relatable feel?) #(I had that happen *once* with peaches from the farmer’s market) #(but usually supermarket peaches last weeks if you keep them refrigerated) #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #unreality cw? #amnesia cw?
It’s probably gonna get old if it keeps happening but business travel is still incredibly interesting to me.
This has been one of the cooler hotel rooms. (Not featured because it films poorly in the dark: The ocean past these east-facing windows)
how is the hotel internet?
Internet is your standard Big City Scandinavia internet (75 MBps so less than at home but fast enough for my purposes – fast enough that I didn’t even think to check it before you asked)
and how is business travel interesting to you?
I’m just not super used to travelling, nor staying outside my own home. I don’t have to worry about breakfast, lunch or dinner and while I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it, I sure haven’t yet. Also if I was at “regular” work tomorrow I’d be writing some astonishingly dull product design specs for a new component in our software but tomorrow and Tuesday I’m ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ instead and that’s kind of cool.
Fair. Also that makes me want to finally visit Scandinavia and try out your hotel internet.
I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it
I’m not even business traveling that much and this rings extremely true to me and I’ve reached that point way faster than I’d ever have anticipated. I mean it’s probably different if you’re a high-class executive staying at really upscale hotels, but the usual buffet fare at 3-4 stars gets old pretty fast. Same with airport lounge food – I still eat there though, not least because it the hot buffet sure beats shelling out like €20 for a small sandwich.
So are y’all like, actually eating at the hotel? I can see the occasional convenience but isn’t there the option of just going down the street or whatever for something more interesting.
I don’t know about them, but why would I pay money to eat food from down the street when hotel food is free?
(Valid answers include “the meal the hotel was serving today was a food I find actively repulsive” and “they only serve dinner Monday – Thursday and it is dinnertime on Saturday”, but do not include “the hotel food was bland”. It’s not like I’d be able to enjoy paid food anyway, haunted by the knowledge that it was a waste of money. Plus I kind of like blandness, tbh.)
—
Context: I have not business-travelled *per se*, but when we do travel we tend to stay at hotels catering primarily to businesspeople. I am thinking of hotels mostly in Massachusetts, with occasional other states plus a couple in Ontario.
Tags:
#adventures in human capitalism #food #reply via reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #disordered eating?
Brinens and Things 