this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

chongoblog:

Every so often, I remember that like 80% of Tumblr (myself included) was completely enraptured by a show where the big twist was that the main character forgot his childhood friend was murdered by his sister, and for some reason only remembers his childhood friend ever existing as a dog.

 

chongoblog:

And in that same episode it’s revealed that the same sister…..like…..hypnotized (?) the main character’s arch rival into hating him by, like, staring at him for a few minutes.

 

chongoblog:

In our collective defense, this is when we all decided “hey we should probably stop watching Sherlock”

 

ninjakittenarmy:

5d01ab5457d2ef180d7887114afc57bd45c9df8d

 

bemusedlybespectacled:

#Sherlock #I only watched the first two seasons? (via @raptortooth)

god i wish that were me

 

piscine-unrelated:

Wait What?

 

bemusedlybespectacled:

series 3 of sherlock: john marries mary morstan off-camera, the show mocks all the fans who kept the hype up during a two year hiatus, mary turns out to be an assassin who shoots sherlock, during which time he has a near-death-experience dream about his dog redbeard who was put down. also there’s a weird scene where john is revealed to be attracted to danger and so he dated mary because he was subconsciously picking up the fact that she used to be an assassin. also the series ends with sherlock committing murder in front of witnesses to save john and mary.

christmas special: sherlock goes on a bender where he hallucinates a victorian-era case, the episode ends with moriarty seemingly returning via social media and mycroft making a cryptic reference to “the other one.” oh, also any consequences from sherlock committing murder are immediately negated.

series 4: HOO BOY.

episode 1: mary is killed due to her assassin past, but no one really cares since she’s only been in the show for all of four episodes. she keeps coming back as a recorded voice/hallucination.

episode 2: john goes to a new grief counseler. also he keeps hallucinating mary. sherlock is told to solve a murder by the murderer’s daughter, but it turns out that while the murderer has a daughter, it’s not the woman who gave him the case to solve! eurus, sherlock and mycroft’s sister, has simultaneously masqueraded as john’s grief counseler and the murderer’s daughter and a random woman who keeps following sherlock because she’s a master of disguise! (to be fair, this is a legitimately cool reveal and I genuinely didn’t see it coming)

episode 3: HOO. FUCKING. BOY. eurus is sherlock and mycroft’s sister who’s been in a prison for the criminally insane for decades. mycroft has withheld this knowledge from both sherlock and their parents by claiming she died in a fire she started. turns out she’s able to hypnotize people with ???? her superior intellect ???????? and so even talking to her makes people want to do things for her like commit murder ????????? and so she’s somehow able to do things like escape from her scary island prison and then take herself back, blow up baker street, kidnap multiple people, and then pull Saw-esque morality problems on Mycroft and Sherlock and John where she just murders people for funsies with no apparent motive. IT IS DURING THIS SEQUENCE THAT IT IS REVEALED THAT SHERLOCK HAD A HUMAN BEST FRIEND THAT EURUS MURDERED BUT REWROTE HIS OWN MEMORIES TO IMAGINE IT WAS A PET DOG WHO DIED.

Y’ALL. IT IS SO DUMB. IT IS SO DUMB THAT THE FANDOM GENUINELY HAD A CONSPIRACY THEORY GOING FOR A WHILE THAT THERE HAD TO BE A SECRET FOURTH EPISODE – OF A SHOW THAT ONLY EVER HAD THREE EPISODES PER SERIES – BECAUSE THERE WAS NO WAY THAT SOMETHING THAT BAD COULD BE THE FUCKING FINAL EPISODE.

 

earhartsease:

I am so grateful to this post for vindicating my decision never to watch s4

 

pedanther:

There is one thing in the final episode of Sherlock season 4 that I remember fondly: the moment where Mrs Holmes states, in front of her two sons – and in a tone of voice that suggests it’s an obvious fact – that of the two of them Sherlock has always been the grown-up one. I’m not convinced Sherlock had earned that, but Mycroft absolutely had.

(I stopped watching Sherlock after season 2, when I realised that the show I had hoped it would be and believed it had the potential to become was in no way the show its creators were interested in making, but I’ve seen the final episode of season 4 because I happened to be at a friend’s house when they were watching it. Everything about it confirmed that I’d made the right choice.)

 

maryellencarter:

…until I got to pedanther’s reblog (he is the sort of person who reliably snopeses things and points out when you are reading a satire piece, which I appreciate), I was about 90% convinced this was one of those facts-i-just-made-up types of performance art you get on tumblr dot com. what the entire fuck. i hadn’t even heard sherlock was *having* a series four, apparently because all my friends have better taste than to bother with… whatever the fuck that was.

we talk about shows jumping a shark, but i think this is the first time i have heard about one that not only jumped its own shark but jumped *every conceivable shark*. i am very glad i gave up after the orientalism episode, whichever season that was.

(let us say, the first orientalism episode, the one that opened with a girl sensually stroking a teapot. there was probably more than one orientalism episode, just based on how thoroughly moffat seems to keep showing his whole ass in the belief that it’s art.)

Watching the opening scene of BBC Sherlock 3×01 was the first time I had ever seriously wondered whether I was dreaming and had the answer turn out to be “no”.

I gave up about twenty minutes in.

(My mom kept going, and I saw some bits and pieces of that when I was in the same room; the stuff I saw corroborates the above thread.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #BBC Sherlock #death tw #murder cw #amnesia cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

The Gate

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

alarajrogers:

alarawriting:

When I was a child
I found a gate.

I was a bullied child, and solitary.
(Isn’t that always the way?)
It was a winter day, impossibly bright
As only winter days can be.
I was out behind the school.
(It was Saturday. That was why, really.
No other kid would be there to bother me.
On weekdays there might be other kids here
Who would bully me
If I tried to play here.)

There was snow on the ground.
The puddles of slush on the parking lot
Looked like deep, cavernous lakes of ice.
There was a mulberry bush
I called a blackberry bush
That gave up sweet fruit in the late spring
And a rock
As tall as I was
That we made believe was a mountain.

Between them there were trees
And bushes
A woods too small to be called a forest.
And today
Unlike yesterday
The bushes bent into an arch
And the arch stretched into a tunnel of branches.

Through the arch I smelled spring.
Flowers, and grass.
Anything really – in the cold you can’t smell.
Warm air wafted on my face
And I knew what this was.

Keep reading

I was reading the latest one of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and I got to the point where the child goes through the gate, and I realized… that could never have been me.

My mother really was disabled – she had fainting spells, and then she had hypoglycemia, and then she had diabetes – and I’d felt it was my responsibility to take care of her since I was four and she was crying because my grandfather was in the hospital. She also probably suffered from anxiety and was known to flip out from terror because I got on the wrong train.

For obvious reasons, no one tells the story of the child who doesn’t have the adventure because they have responsibilities at home. So I decided to. It’s a lot shorter than the story of the child who had the adventure.

It’s interesting that the protagonist assumes the portal is something *good*.

I went down a path once. Like yours, it wasn’t *quite* a forest, but the path was lined with trees and smaller plants. At the end of the paved path, what looked like a desire-path bike trail stretched off into the distant fields, leading who-knows-where.

It was…*peaceful*. Incredibly so. The trees shook in the breeze, and the leaves fluttered across my vision with different shades of green on each side, and the sound of their rustling brushed against my mind.

There was power there. It hummed in my bones, resonated through my soul.

I did linger. I let the power flow through me. Once.

And then I left, and I swore never to return. Because I know how that story ends, and it ends with me getting kidnapped by the Fair Folk. I’d walk out onto that narrow path, called by some ineffable compulsion, and never be seen again.

That’s not how I want my story to go.

Tags:

#*knocks on wood* #in which Brin tries not to become an erotic-horror protagonist #(…I never quite make that explicit up there in the main post‚ do I) #(I guess I can’t think of a good way of doing it) #(probably an important part of the context though) #reply via reblog #storytime #fae #sexuality and lack thereof #abuse cw #kidnapping cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #[epistemic status: Pascal’s Wager]

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html }}

collapsedsquid:

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

[…]

According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for roughly the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.

[…]

If we do all that, he says, the entire timeline could be compressed to as few as three months. The production and distribution of a vaccine adds considerable cost, bureaucracy, and even some chaos, as we’re likely about to see. But three months from the design of the Moderna vaccine was April 13. The second and third surges, the return to school and the long-dreaded fall, 225,000 more deaths and 50 million more infections — all of that still lay ahead. Shave another month off somehow and you’re at March 13, the day the very first person in New York City died.

The “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“ authorized $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research in 2016, don’t know what he’s planning on doing as president but this would be an excellent use of research money,  Wouldn’t say no to both though.

Where can I contribute to the Kickstarter?

(don’t say “give it to CEPI”: they don’t take small-scale donations)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #covid19 #vaccines #illness tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #also if I could throw money at the people trying to develop a 100-valent rhinovirus vaccine that’d be great too

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

mangledmouth:

i got a gig, telling stories to a gang of witches
they sit semicircle round me, cross legged and i tell them
every mundane detail of my day, draw out my fears
and shakes and angers and small, desolate disappointments
like strings of sugared candy. recount momentary crushes
on strangers in alleyways, on buses, in half-open coats
they’re all like—500 years old, give or take a decade
they don’t get these things anymore. some part of you dries up
so they just listen, and then they take me to the door and they put
eighty dollars in my hand, from a chest in the corner
piled high with cash, in layers of color, some older, some foreign
and i think about breaking in. but they could kill me
so easily, and they pay me over minimum wage, so i just smile
and cry on the bus, and feel odd thinking about telling them
next week, about crying on the bus.

i’ve got this girl, a couple weeks now, and i didn’t even mean to
swore i wouldn’t date when i got into this part of town
it’s like being a chip in a hurricane, marveling at the massive
unable to get your feet on the ground. but i got this girl
she’s got teeth made to pierce the important veins, but she swears
she’s seven years dry and she has bags of red stuff in her fridge
so I believe her. but, you know, they say vampires can do that
put thoughts in your head, so maybe i don’t believe her.

i think a lot about love
how it gets in your veins, parasitic
how it fucks up your brain
i think a lot about how it comes on you
about how it pulls the rug out
how it blows foundations open for the marrow
i think a lot about how i don’t want it
i think about that while she puts me on the floor and
puts her mouth on my neck, but doesn’t bite

love’s always coming for you. it’s an invisible force
sure and utter as the divine right of kings
as the bus charging fifty cents more every year

against my will, i am sent to bring you to dinner
against my will, i am in love with you
against my will, i am opening, i am opening
against my will i am opening the door

– urban fantasy; r.m.s

Tags:

#storytime #poetry #witches #vampires #death mention #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

twocubes:

one of those extremely-slow-aging-but-humanoid fantasy species where everyone is actually centuries or millennia old

but the twist is that because they’re so old they develop levels of maturity that are simply unattainable and unknowable to humans

hundreds of emotion-words that all seem to mean the same thing to humans because they require decades of context to distinguish

fiction and artworks that take decades of study to understand considered standard parts of adult pop culture. one of them that you’ve known for 50 years suddenly changes their habits completely, you ask one of their friends and they go like, “oh, yes, they finished reading [name of story]”. they smile at you, like you’re a child playing peekaboo for the first time

“things were better in my day” considered a sign of immaturity, diagnostic of something analogous to a second teenager phase that you go through starting around your first half-century and get out of by the time you turn 100

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

Today’s lesson on health care economics:

On GoodRx, a month’s worth of sildenafil 20 mg costs $17.25

On the same site, a month’s worth of sildenafil 25 mg costs $507.24

Does anyone buy the 25 mg version? You bet – I saw a patient who was on it yesterday (don’t worry; he’s since been switched over).

What’s going on here? Sildenafil has two FDA approvals – one, under the name “Revatio”, for hypertension. The other, under the name “Viagra”, for – well, you know.

The FDA only approved Revatio at doses of 5 and 20 mg, and only approved Viagra at doses of 25 and 100 mg. So sildenafil 20 mg has “Revatio” on the box and sildenafil 25 mg has “Viagra” on the box. Revatio is generic and dirt-cheap; Viagra is still on-patent and expensive.

But can’t people who want Viagra just buy Revatio?

Yes, totally. But the average patient doesn’t know this is going on. And the average doctor doesn’t really have any incentive to care because they’re not the one buying it (I’ve had patients who have asked their doctor to prescribe the cheaper version, and the doctor has refused because they want to do it the “proper” way). And I think it’s illegal for the insurance companies to insist, because technically the FDA only approved sildenafil 25 mg for erectile dysfunction but didn’t approve sildenafil 20 mg.

(also, some people are like “But I need a higher 50 mg dose of Viagra, and Revatio only goes up to 20 mg!” As the ancient rationalist proverb goes, have you tried thinking about the problem for five minutes?)

At the advice of my doctor, I’m on pseudo-prescription naproxen. Instead of one 500mg prescription pill, I buy the 220mg OTC stuff and take double the dose on the label: it’s close enough, and it’s somewhat cheaper per mg if you don’t have prescription coverage. She said if I ever do get prescription coverage I should let her know and she’ll write me an official prescription then.

I love my doctor.

—

(Please do not take prescription-strength naproxen without medical supervision: you can fuck up your liver.)

—

Side benefit:

People in the spring: “it’s horrible that they’re making *chronically ill* people go to a *pharmacy* *every month* and risk plague! patients aren’t allowed to keep buffers of medications they often need to *survive*!”

Me: *looks with a mixture of relief and awkwardness at my 200-pack of Aleve*

(Note: I only need it around the onset of menstruation, so 200 OTC-sized pills is about a ten-month supply.)

(Store-brand naproxen doesn’t come in 200-pack, and the bulk-discount benefit outweighed the name-brand penalty.)

Tags:

#other things my doctor has done: #prescribed prune juice for constipation #prescribed string for skin tags #used Big Pharma ”samples” to keep her poorer patients supplied with meds they would struggle to afford on their own #readily admitted that people in my situation don’t actually need gynecological checkups #and I should only see a gynecologist if something goes wrong or I decide to start having sex #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #medical cw #illness mention #covid19 #menstruation #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

discoursedrome:

voxette-vk:

I’ve got to say, it was a pretty funny joke by the government to let people advertise drugs, as long as they fill the whole ad with everything that could possibly go wrong.

those ads where an announced reads a rapidfire list of horrifying side-effects in a soothing drone while the tv shows a happy telegenic family playing are one of America’s most important cultural artifacts and it’s so crucial that they be preserved for future civilizations

*rapid voice* this is not a place of honour. no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. nothing valued is here. may cause nausea, vomiting, and erectile dysfunction. sending this message was important to us.

Tags:

#medical cw #advertising #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

The Virus

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

Like Pilate before Christ, I wash my hands.
When soap rips them to shreds, do viruses
Feel pain? And can a virus feel regret
When it has killed its host and doomed itself?
No doves or rainbows follow the great flood
Of pus and blood that laid waste to the lungs
It called its home. I thought I’d killed my host
When I was small – the pale and perfect host
that I believed was not bread but the flesh
of God. My sin infested hands with nails,
Contaminated love itself with death.
But my infecting soul could only live
in Him. Survival meant I must mutate
into a strain of self less virulent,
that doesn’t eat or fuck or rage or sleep
or hope for anything other than Him,
or feel things besides shame, or love
herself.

I’d hide like herpes simplex in my God,
and scarcely bother him. It didn’t work.
“Can you not wait and watch an hour with me?”
I tried. I can’t. I’m human. I need sleep.
My fast fails, so I vomit, so my flesh
Insists on more. I slash my arms
to drive away my rage at you, the pain
only brings further rage. I’m hollowed out,
an animated corpse. Saints you run dry
Have tired and lifeless eyes but sparkling souls.
My soul is still a fetid mass of slime,
but my dark-circled eyes stare out
from a sick-looking face. I start to ask,
who is infecting whom? Why do the hands
that flung stars into space require a girl
an unimportant girl, to tear herself
to pieces pleasing him? I realized
I’m not the virus. You are. I’m the host.
I cast the angels out and heal myself.

But now the world’s more broken than before
(And it was always broken, always cruel,
Always riddled with plagues, always unjust,
Always oppressive, always full of pain,
Always on fire, but it burns brighter now.)
Temptation whispers “Re-infect yourself
with Me. There is no joy or peace on earth,
Only on the other side of the grave.
Give up on earthly good: nothing is good
but God alone. Abandon all your hope.
See all the kingdoms of the aching world!
Watch how they writhe around in agony
All this pain I will take away from you
If you simply bow down and worship me!”
Into your hands, Lord, I refuse to give
My spirit. I don’t trust omnipotence
To save me or my neighbor. Though I have
Almost no power, still the power I have,
I use for love, including for myself.
I worship life in spite of everything.
I say the world to come can fuck itself.
This one, imperfect, finite though it is
I will protect in any way I can.
Like Pilate before Christ, I wash my hands.

Tags:

#poetry #Christianity #covid19 #illness tw #unsanitary cw #self harm cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #(I might be reading too much into it but #–knowing that the author moved from Britain to America– #I feel like there might be some layers of meaning in the fact that ”neighbor” is spelled without a ”u” here) #(something about chosen homes)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

Been spending kinda-scary-when-I’m-not-sure-when-I’ll-make-money-again amounts of money on new house stuff because we need all sorts of things likes oven mitts and bleach and plungers, etc. It’s interesting to see how much stuff is out of stock on Amazon because of the pandemic, and I really wish I had visibility into what bottlenecks are responsible. Why is this kitchen stool available in red tend days from now, but indefinitely unavailable in black? Is it some dye shortage? Why is this hand mixer available with attachments X, but not Y? What happened? I want to know but I’m destined not to

Tags:

#yes this #covid19 #adventures in human capitalism #illness tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what