thefourthvine:

The other night, I told this story to my sister, who had somehow never heard it before. She demanded that I write it down. (I sincerely hope she’s not planning to use this as some kind of college life advice for my nephew.)

There are three things you need to know to understand this story, provided you are not my sister:

1. I started college at 15.
   
2. I almost immediately got mono and didn’t realize it, assuming that I was sleeping 16 hours a day because sleep was the best thing in the world and I’d suddenly gotten really good at it.
   
3. I made most of my bad decisions – like, most of the bad decisions I would ever make, and almost all the ones I could think of – before starting college.

These were not things I had in common with my freshman cohort. Any of them, as far as I could tell. They were all older than I was, they seemed to have all the energy in the world, and they had come to college to make those bad decisions they’d been dreaming of all these years but apparently couldn’t quite commit to until they were away from parental backup and support.

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blueeyeddl:

blueeyeddl:

Someone I’ve known for 20+ years just posted this on my Facebook wall and I’ve never felt more seen in my entire life.

Reblog to be visited by the Jeff Goldblum of Happiness, who will help you recognize that Everything Is Fleeting, Including Sadness.

(via officialkaijugroupie)

wheatley-blogs:

it was an honor being horny with you all

(via inurashii)

riddlermethis:

themessaftertheenterprise:

Star Trek can make as many new series and movies as they like, and still nothing will ever truly beat the golden awkwardness of this one shining minute of dialogue.

Someone stop me please

(via iiphides)

aliceopal:

tilthat:

TIL for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives.

via reddit.com

DELANCEYPLACE.COM 12/18/12 - WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT

In today’s selection – for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:

“Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parch­ments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ wakes up in the early morning following her ‘first sleep’ and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the ‘first sleep’ on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the ‘first sleep” and the ‘second sleep’ was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn’t always the one long block that we con­sider it today.

“From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning – the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was per­haps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French phy­sician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men ‘do it better’ and women ‘have more enjoyment.’ …

“About three hun­dred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to four­teen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experi­ment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.

“That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.

“Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the sub­jects’ brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feel­ing after an orgasm. … The subjects in Wehr’s study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.

“Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light – and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows – people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. … [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers – not to mention your average physician – have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong.”

(via lanthir)

jenroses:

heavyweightheart:

Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.

Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.

what

no seriously

what?

(via seananmcguire)

lonelymountainson:

roachpatrol:

rainaramsay:

quasi-normalcy:

sumersprkl:

quasi-normalcy:

Of course, the real way to tell whether you’re in a Hard SF novel is if people keep providing you with unsolicited explanations of basic physics and everyday technology which you should, by rights, already know.

So every single woman is in a Hard SF novel is what you’re telling me

…You know, it’s occurred to me that this would actually be a very good way to do exposition in hard SF novels without needing anyone to break character.

#‘but of course teleportation technology based on quantum displacement is common now–’#‘I KNOW’#’–ever since they replaced the old SK-400s with the newly-discovered Mega Dilithium cores–“#‘I FUCKING KNOW THIS ALREADY MARK’

oh my god, sexist dudes aren’t mansplaining, they’re providing helpful exposition to your audience

“MARK. I INVENTED THE TECH BEHIND THE SK-400. MARK!”

(via seananmcguire)

smallest-feeblest-boggart:

drferox:

the-ol-homosexual:

Can we talk about how in zombie shows/movies/books they always find a veterinarian and not a surgeon? Are veterinarians deemed more likely to survive the apocalypse?

Yup.

• One of our professional skills is ‘not being bitten by patients’
• We actually have a good broad knowledge base for both surgical, medical, and GP things
• We’re used to improvising equipment because a lot of stuff is just not made for animals
• Meat safety is part of our training
• Our cars are often full of equipment, especially in mixed practice
  
• We probably weren’t in the human hospital at the initial outbreak
  

This post is deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant as certified by the National Shitpost Registry.

(via strictlyquadrilateral)

incandescent-creativity:

whatsanwritepocalae:

writingisfancylying:

How do you write creepy stories

• Over describe things
• Under describe things
• Fingers, teeth, and eyes
• Short sentences in rapid succession build tension
• Single sentence paragraphs build dread
• Uncanny valley=things that aren’t normal almost getting it right
• Third person limited view
• Limited explanations
• Rot, mold, damage, age, static, flickering, especially in places it shouldn’t be
• Limited sights for your mc -blindness, darkness, fog, refuse
• Real consequences
• Being alone -the more people there are, the less scary it is
• Intimate knowledge, but only on one side

I don’t know I just write scary things but I don’t know what I’m doing.

Rule of Thumb: your reader’s imagination will scare them more than anything you could ever write. You don’t have to offer a perfectly concrete explanation for everything at the end. In fact, doing so may detract from your story.

(via strictlyquadrilateral)

wildehacked:

Annie and Dan are visiting his parents back East when the aliens hit New York, and then all the flights are canceled and the catsitter they hired doesn’t have any extra openings, so it’s Eddie to the rescue. 

There’s some kind of irony in Anne finally trusting him to feed the cat a year after ending their engagement. He’s walking up the hill to their apartment, Annie on the phone telling him the system Dan uses for watering his plants, because of course Dan has a system, when Venom starts freaking out hard. 

EDDIE, he says, so urgently that Eddie almost drops the phone. Eddie, something is wrong.

“What?” Eddie asks, looking reflexively around them–it can’t be Carnage again, unless–? But the street is quiet. The nearest person is an old woman pushing her bubbe cart.

“Eddie?” Anne asks, distant. “Everything okay?”

Something is very wrong, Venom repeats, and he sounds nearly distraught. He lurches sideways in Eddie’s chest, and Eddie does drop the phone this time.

“Whoa, whoa,” Eddie says, “What’s wrong?”

Instead of responding, Venom abruptly manifests, taking control of their body and scaring the pants off of the rest of the street.

“Jesus, V, what the hell,” Eddie says–or tries to say. He suddenly feels it too: something indefinable but essential is–wrong, and getting wronger.

“No,” Venom snarls out loud to the street, where the old woman–jesus christ. Where the old woman has just collapsed into dust, leaving nothing behind but her cart and her purse. A car slams into a lamppost, the driver’s seat suddenly empty. Someone is screaming, and they aren’t even screaming at them. “I said no.”

Oh, Eddie thinks, as a passenger tries to escape from the car’s backseat, and crumbles into nothing as soon as she reaches the pavement. Oh, that’s what’s happening to us.

“It is not.” Venom is surrounding him, is in him, deep as they always are, close enough that no one could tell the difference. Eddie can feel Venom repairing him, hanging onto his brain and his heart and feverishly binding atoms together that want to fall apart, and he can feel that it isn’t going to work, that not even us can stand against the unyielding pull of entropy.

I love you, V, Eddie thinks, fierce as he can.

“Don’t leave me,” Venom orders, frantic, hanging on as hard as they can, with every part of themselves. Eddie’s lost his view of the street, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s lost his eyes, or because Venom is shielding him from whatever there is to see, if the last thing he’ll see is that familiar blackness. “Don’t leave me alone, Eddie.”

Eddie tries his best to project gratitude with the last shreds of himself he can reach. He hopes Venom knows how much his life was changed, how much he wants––

*

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(via seananmcguire)

raddishface:

why-i-love-comics:

Batman Annual #3 - “Father’s Day” (2018)

written by Tom Taylor
art by Otto Schmidt

I’m sorry but this panel nearly makes me cry

(via seananmcguire)

laguerradelasgalaxias:

-I think we’ll go with a little Bohemian Rhapsody, gentlemen.
-Good call!

Wayne’s World (1992)

I know this is a dumb almost-stoner movie, but looking at these clips almost made me tear up, because the need to sing along with your friends at the top of your lungs is just so delctably human and it makes me happy every time I see it.

(via witticaster)

livia-carica:

lizawithazed:

syrenpan:

azriona:

docorwho:

M E R R Y  C H R I S T M A S 

It’s not Christmas unless this giftset has appeared on your dash at least five times.

It’s back 💕

it’s not christmas without wilf on your dash 

Annual Wilf reblog.

(via gingerblivet)

queer-taako:

ohdebt:

elodieunderglass:

crimelords:

oldhollywood:

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (Corbis)

ok. ok

all right I’ll allow it

Okay so some fun and interesting tidbits of info that @queer-taako gave me a while back regarding Katherine Hepburn: she may have possibly been either nonbinary or transmasc. She had a male persona, and gay men (as in exclusively gay men, men who only had sex with and were attracted to other men) had sex with her. They viewed her as just as much a man as any of them. In fact, the only reason I’m still using “her” and not “him”/“them” is because it was never confirmed (and let’s be real, it could have been very dangerous for her back then). But that information is out there.

This is a pretty good article going into detail about Hepburn’s identity as well as how the era sort of impacted her experience. She described herself later in life as “the missing link between genders” and even as a child, had a secret name for herself which she preferred to be called among friends (Jimmy) and the information she gave about her childhood like not getting why everyone seemed to treat her like a girl, not wanting anything to do with feminine things, having a secret name, at the very least resonates with gnc and butch women, trans men and nonbinary people.

We have no way of knowing what she really was, and we cant really ascribe an identity to her, but she had relationships with men and women and wanted pretty much nothing to do with womanhood in her private life. Being non straight and/or not cis in Hollywood, especially back then, was such a minefield to navigate, and there was virtually no language to express yourself if your identity was anything other than gay or straight cis person, and even the term ‘lesbian’ wasnt used as often as youd think.

(via strictlyquadrilateral)

siobhanblank:

the-descolada:

siobhanblank:

why’s this site so weird about horses? they’re just horses.

Are you sure

(via ofgeography)