“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?
goncharov this goncharov that. you fools homestuck fans did this literally like 10 years ago
what
I don’t know if this is true and honestly I refuse to learn more about it
> they dont know about the time 2010 homestuck users tried to gaslight everyone into thinking squiddles was a real show
Tags:
#…was Squiddles not the first thing other people thought of when they found out what was going on with Goncharov? #admittedly they may have heard of the Squiddles thing but *not* known it was Homestuck-related #I think it was quite some time after I learned Squiddles wasn’t real that I learned it was‚ specifically‚ a Homestuck joke #(the posts I saw were nowhere near as blatant about the Homestuck connection as the ones given here) #Squiddles #Goncharov #unreality cw? #Homestuck
Every time I see this I go “oh, neat pony” and scroll past while my brain chugs through the caption like the slowest computer on earth and I have to scroll back up to it
do you ever form close relationships with people in your dreams and then feel a little sad when you wake up
i had a son in one of my dreams, he was 3 or 4, i loved him so much, i don’t remember his name but i remember loving him so much, and then i woke up and he was gone
Hey um what the FUCk
tldr: boy have i ever
Tags:
#dreams #storytime #death tw #unreality cw? #holy *fuck* that reaction GIF #(if you don’t get why I’m going ”holy fuck” at that reaction GIF‚ watch ”The Sound of Her Voice” and get back to me) #Star Trek #DS9
The most popularly mentioned symptom of hypersensitivity is thinking or feeling that things are polluted when they aren’t. But it’s not the only one. Many hypersensitives also have “obstructed melioration”, where – especially if something is actually polluted or actually has something on it – they are so paralyzed by their feelings of disgust that they can’t take actions to clean.
You can be diagnosed with some forms of hypersensitivity even if you never make a mistake on a test of pollution identification. If you can’t touch the dishes so you can’t wash the dishes; if you can’t stand the smell of dust so you never jack up the couch to sweep it up; if something spilled in your fridge last month and you haven’t been able to open it since then even though it was only ketchup at the time, so now it’s a mold ecosystem you’d need to go after with bleach? If you have a meltdown every time you visit the bathroom and spend two hours sitting there panicking and procrastinating on cleaning up because that would mean thinking about it? If you can’t wash your hands because you’d notice the slightly less clean water rinsing off them? If you haven’t shampooed in six weeks because whenever you wash your hair it accumulates in the drain catch and then you’d have to pick it out? If you have any trouble explaining what needs doing to a professional cleaner because the words taste bad? Then you’re (insofar as you can be diagnosed online) hypersensitive.
If something is so gross that you can’t clean it – not because there aren’t enough gloves and masks and chemicals, just because you can’t stand to think about it that hard, engage with the existence of a mess that needs to be cleaned up – then that’s hypersensitivity, and it’s a disability.
Anyway, how do you all feel about cleaning reds?
#unreality cw? #yet also‚ at the same time‚ very true #I think about this post every fucking time I flinch away from cleaning my fridge #(today’s reblog brought to you by my brother finally throwing out the ~month-old corn that was‚ in his words‚ “no longer yellow”) #(I soaked the bowl with lots of soap for a day or so and managed to clean it after that) #(…now I just need to clean the *other* moldy food container‚ currently sitting beside the sink with its lid on) #(……maybe I will wash the other dishes first)
Update:
About twelve days later, my brother came home with a takeout container from his workplace. He mentioned he was planning to recycle it once he was done with it, because “we already have enough containers”.
I proposed that we instead recycle the moldy one and wash the new one, and everyone with a stake in the matter agreed. (That is to say, I did not bother to ask Dad because I knew he wouldn’t care.)
All’s well that ends well.
(In my defence, I’ve been covering a *lot* of shifts at work the past few weeks (especially those couple weeks), and had a lot less time and skin-HP [link] for dishwashing than usual. At no point during those twelve days was I caught up on all other dishes.)
Tags:
#oh look an update #reply via reblog #(ish) #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #domesticity #in which Brin has a job #food #unsanitary cw #Amenta RP #unreality cw?
The most popularly mentioned symptom of hypersensitivity is thinking or feeling that things are polluted when they aren’t. But it’s not the only one. Many hypersensitives also have “obstructed melioration”, where – especially if something is actually polluted or actually has something on it – they are so paralyzed by their feelings of disgust that they can’t take actions to clean.
You can be diagnosed with some forms of hypersensitivity even if you never make a mistake on a test of pollution identification. If you can’t touch the dishes so you can’t wash the dishes; if you can’t stand the smell of dust so you never jack up the couch to sweep it up; if something spilled in your fridge last month and you haven’t been able to open it since then even though it was only ketchup at the time, so now it’s a mold ecosystem you’d need to go after with bleach? If you have a meltdown every time you visit the bathroom and spend two hours sitting there panicking and procrastinating on cleaning up because that would mean thinking about it? If you can’t wash your hands because you’d notice the slightly less clean water rinsing off them? If you haven’t shampooed in six weeks because whenever you wash your hair it accumulates in the drain catch and then you’d have to pick it out? If you have any trouble explaining what needs doing to a professional cleaner because the words taste bad? Then you’re (insofar as you can be diagnosed online) hypersensitive.
If something is so gross that you can’t clean it – not because there aren’t enough gloves and masks and chemicals, just because you can’t stand to think about it that hard, engage with the existence of a mess that needs to be cleaned up – then that’s hypersensitivity, and it’s a disability.
Anyway, how do you all feel about cleaning reds?
Tags:
#Amenta RP #unreality cw? #yet also‚ at the same time‚ very true #I think about this post every fucking time I flinch away from cleaning my fridge #(today’s reblog brought to you by my brother finally throwing out the ~month-old corn that was‚ in his words‚ ”no longer yellow”) #(I soaked the bowl with lots of soap for a day or so and managed to clean it after that) #(…now I just need to clean the *other* moldy food container‚ currently sitting beside the sink with its lid on) #(……maybe I will wash the other dishes first) #unsanitary cw #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #domesticity
Hell, if you want to go further you probably *could* put wine in a water gun. Would probably be harder to get and keep that food-safe, though.
—
(Lacking the context of this post, if I heard someone refer to a “garlic thumper” I would just assume it was a more humourous synonym of “garlic press”.)
when you raise your front legs you DO look bigger than anything, even a tree
Tags:
#bugs #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #unreality cw?
There’s no reason to be afraid of component-level repair. Nowadays, a lot of stuff is made out of like four big parts, and the manufacturer tells you to replace the entire big part when it fucks up. It makes sense for all involved: the repairperson gets done quickly, the customer is happy that they don’t have to learn how things actually work, FedEx gets bigger boxes, and the manufacturer gets to sell a $300 replacement board for a $450 thing. What divides this kind of person from you and I, humble reader, is the desire to go deeper.
There are many motives that drive a person to consider the bottomless pit that is component-level repair. Simple curiosity. A desire to save the environment. Not wanting to let them “get one over” on you. Cheapness so severe that it borders on mental illness. Whatever the reason, all throughout the world, people are diving deep in the quest to truly understand their shit.
Sometimes you have to understand that shit better than the people who made it. After all, if they were all that bright, then it wouldn’t be broken, now would it? They’d have used the $2 part instead of the $0.17 part, like you’re about to. Now, the entire infrastructure that makes Western civilization possible has failed you, and it’s just you and your soldering iron, socket wrench, oxy-ace torch, or surgical scalpel. Finish, and you will believe you are a god. Fail, and – it was broken anyway, but at least now you sound smarter when you bitch about it at the bar.
So get out there right now, and go find something that’s busted and too expensive to replace. Then tear it apart, and figure out what tiny annoying piece of shit is making this big annoying piece of shit not work. You owe it to the rest of humanity, or at least your ego.
Tags:
#unreality cw? #(this blog’s *other* posts make it pretty clear that the blogger is a fictional character) #(but *this* one seems–while somewhat exaggerated–essentially true) #I *do* find scalpels and solder and whatnot kind of scary #(especially since usually the thing I am looking to tinker with isn’t *completely* broken) #(so I *could* very well make things worse) #but I think it’s good (if likely supererogatory) to *understand* repair even in cases where #you prefer to outsource the actual process to experts #it gives you a sense of things like ”which repairs are worth making” and ”is the repairer quoting you a price of $X fucking with you” #and for that matter ”which model should I buy bearing the possibility of future repairs in mind” #since sometimes the difference between ”DIY” and ”let’s outsource this” and ”nothing we can do about it” is in #how much the machine was set up to *allow* for repairs #(I’ve been getting into smartphone nerdery and have learned a lot about the importance of unlockable bootloaders and removable batteries) #tag rambles
Brinens and Things 