Dog Toys That Make You Stop Dead In The Middle Of The Store And Figure Out Their IUPAC Names

Still can never let this AU go

How it feels to find a fanfic where your favorite character is going through literally the worst horrors you can imagine

Favorite pirate?

I feel like I’m expected to say Gráinne O’Malley (or the more common anglicized version: Grace O’Malley) since she is considered the “Pirate Queen of Ireland.”

But I have a personal sore spot for Zheng Yi Sao (aka Shi(h) Yang / Ching Shih and a lot others) who is typically considered one of history’s most successful pirates. I used to be able to recite the why but I’d have to look back into it for fear of misremembering lol. She was one aspect I chose for a huge essay I had to do in history and did a large deep dive and found it so cool, there is a reason she is so popular.

(The essay was on the romanticized version of pirates in media, and its the connection to queerness and minority groups, vs actual piracy and how marginalized groups were treated in that world.) Ignore the abomination of a run-on sentence, trust that my essay was much better (it was a college class)

The Victor Ninov situation is one of my favourite cases of scientific fraud because it's rare to see so straightforward an example of someone being brought low by their own hubris.

Like, okay, faking the synthesis of a previously unobserved element: it's one of the few varieties of scientific fraud that actually has a clear gameplan for getting away with it. The physical properties of unobserved elements are, in principle, predictable, and there are only so many ways to go about synthesising them. If you do your homework, it's not outside the realm of possibility that your claimed results will end up being at least mostly consistent with the results of subsequent legitimate efforts to synthesise that element, and any minor discrepancies will end up being dismissed as statistical anomalies and/or the product of sloppy experimental design. It's by no means an easy game to play, but it's a game you can conceivably win.

And Victor Ninov did it. He rolled the dice and he won – twice. His fabricated results for elements 110 and 112 were corroborated by later work, and nobody noticed that his actual data was a crock of shit. He got away with it as cleanly as he could have hoped. It was only the third time he tried it, with element 118, that he biffed it and claimed results which nobody could replicate, and this is the only reason his earlier frauds were discovered. If he'd quit while he was ahead, it's likely the first two incidents never would have come to light.

Like, they say the third time's the charm, and buddy here learned the hard way that sometimes, the opposite also holds true.

Oh jeebz

The sinking of the Black Rose - redraw

First one from may 2022

this feels a little TOO accurate

I truly don't think I will ever be over The Good Place. Especially Chidi and Eleanor.

Chidi, who agonizes over every single decision to the point of causing himself physically pain, because making a decision to deliberately hurt or inconvenience someone, even a stranger, in the slightest way is objectively, in the binary, black and white sense of the word, bad. This man basically tortures himself his whole life (a la Doug Forcett) in an impossible quest to be, objectively, good to his fellow man. To be a good, ethical person, because that is his duty as a human being.

Eleanor, who couldn't give a flying fuck about other people. Who was, in all but the legal sense of the word, abandoned by her parents. She just wants to be alone. Why should she care about other people when, inevitably, they leave her? Why put energy out into the world when it never seems to come back to her? So, she does exactly what she wants, what makes her happy, other people be damned.

And so, these two people are put together in the afterlife to torture each other, but instead they make each other better. Eleanor teaches Chidi that it's okay to be selfish some times. Telling her to shut up when she is being annoying, does not make him a bad person. That going after what he wants without stressing over the consequences can lead to new paths that he never would have otherwise had the courage to. Chidi teaches Eleanor that life is better when we are kind to each other. Connecting with other people, even though it's scary and messy and not always good, can lead to wonderful things. That when you open up and put your best out there, you will find people that will love you and want to stay with you, even through your worst moments.

These two were put together to bring out the worst in each other, and instead, their "worst" brings out the other's best. Chidi stops worrying about the consequences, Eleanor starts caring about her fellow man. Is there a word for when two foils perfectly balance each other?