Can’t stop thinking about the last time I had to go to the neurologist btw, and how the dude treated me like I was making him lose his time until I rattled off all the symptoms medications dosages interactions proved that I was serious about my treatments and knew what i was there for and skirted the line of “informed patient” without crossing into “patient thinks they know better” and and and. That’s one hell of a run on sentence to say I earned the respect of someone who should’ve extended it as a baseline, but.

One of the reasons medicine in science fiction is so interesting to me is that it could be so much better and also so much worse, it’s fun to speculate about the meds, the system, and the kind of professional they’d encourage. It’s one of the very best inventions of our species, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have horror stories. Both things are true and fuck if I didn’t wish it wasn’t the case.

There are two types of writers:

1. ‘It’s fiction, it doesn’t need to make sense!’

2. 'I didn’t account for the rotation of the planet and how that affects the constalations while my characters stargazed at different times of year, I have failed as a writer, and this entire thing is trash’

prev are you. are you okay

comrade I am having the time of my life

… I was writing a short reply and it turns out I Have A Lot Of Ideas about this entire thing. Uhm. Behind a keep reading, but I deal with the contradiction by working within four tiers and a couple of fantasy names if I have to differentiate:

Keep reading

There’s more ways to do analgesia than opiates ^^ For example, Pregabalin and Gabapentin aim for the master key of neurotransmitters, and instead of being louder than pain, they just… Block it before it can be perceived. (Not the same.) But given the question is about Preservation in specific!

Whether we’re talking recreational or medical, we’re already doing pretty incredible things with weed strains purposefully grown for their variable chemical profile. Mega-summarized, but apart of cannabinoids (the components we’ve got an inbuilt lock/key system for, like THC and CBD); there’s also the volatile compounds that give the plant its characteristic smell (terpenes) — they have different effects, get activated at different temperatures; and the whole thing potentiates each other when it’s consumed as a flower as opposed to, say, THC gummies for the high or CBD oils for pain. Full-spectrum products being more effective, accounting for strain, might sound obvious. But the science is fascinating.

If the indigenous food scientists of Mesoamerica and the Andean Highlands transformed corn and potatoes in only the span of centuries, I really wonder how far medical crops would go in a society like Preservation! I don’t think their medicine is inferior to the CR’s (for those in the CR who can pay.) Perhaps slower, and/or focused on different specialties. Bit like space Cuba: they’d have less resources and older tech but this just means they’d have to Git Gud. More generalist and less specialized, but ultimately the fact you treat the illness instead of the symptom works in everyone’s favor. I’d be very into a story exploring Preservation doctors going off planet for humanitarian work, ngl :33 Or developing vaccines. Or even just dealing with the mess that has to be Gura’s heavily augmented body, with his (at least) six-years outdated jailbroken hardware, plus the aftermath of growing up poor and being a junkie. That man has to be in so many doctoral theses it almost ain’t funny. Wish MB had stayed there too, because healing constructs as medicine instead of just repairing them has to be an undiscovered realm.

As for how augmentation is seen at the CR… I really can’t choose how the uber rich 0.00001% approaches it; but societally, it’s probs a curve between “too poor for augments” -> “just right” -> “walking dataport (/slur)”.

(PS: for the record, one excellent thing about standardized meds vs plants and fungi is that you know what the dosage is, and it’s supposed to stay consistent. I’d be the last person who’d go “throw away ur antidepressants lol get St. John’s Wort”. We love science and them always-improving findings here. Preservation is post scarcity, not agrarian: Anything medical-grade they grow would be lab-grade.)

Anyway if I had to summarize the main difference between pumping myself for starting aaaaall over again in a new place Uni Attempt #663 Take #2:

2024!Lynx: Nobody knows me here! >:3 It’s a do over!! Nobody HAS to know I used to be worse!!

2026!Lynx: Praying I don’t stumble upon anyone. It’s yet another do over – At least nobody knows I used to be better.

There are two types of writers:

1. ‘It’s fiction, it doesn’t need to make sense!’

2. 'I didn’t account for the rotation of the planet and how that affects the constalations while my characters stargazed at different times of year, I have failed as a writer, and this entire thing is trash’

prev are you. are you okay

comrade I am having the time of my life

… I was writing a short reply and it turns out I Have A Lot Of Ideas about this entire thing. Uhm. Behind a keep reading, but I deal with the contradiction by working within four tiers and a couple of fantasy names if I have to differentiate:

1- Uppers, Downers, The Opiate (commercially available) – includes Tranqs, a vapeable version (Blend) and alcohol. Everyone uses them. Save for the latter, people euphemistically call them Meds (the definition between them and actual medication is rather blurry.)

2- Uppers, Downers, The Opiate (street ver.) – are they manufactured in the same fucking labs/industries in worse conditions with unsafer ingredients and cut with whatever? Are they made by some illegal lab by randos? You can’t know. More bang for your buck, Worse For You.

3- Uppers, Downers, The Opiate (company-exclusives) – We’ve gotten to Perks, Hypnaids, and Razine. Not for the proletarian masses, they’re for the workers who’re comparatively lucky enough to die for the company inside the offices. Commercially available stuff won’t scratch this itch. They… encourage productivity. Don’t Get Laid Off.

4- Whatever the fuck was going on with Gurathin – Who on top of the third tier gets the Research Chemicals, and an automated dispenser meant to aid him during missions: the very worst version of confidence in a bottle.

This way, you get it all! All of the shame, internalized ableism, and marginalization; plus scenes like LeeBeeBee going “anyway do you want some meth from the medkit” the way someone might offer coffee. One has to keep in mind, too, that the power in the CR belongs not to the state but to the companies. I actually wonder how much of a state there is! The fact they talk of “polities” gives “this station is monopolized by”/“this is a company town”, which blurs the definition a lot.

Anyway. Sci-fi, thankfully, is forgiving of euphemistic boring names. The Most Potent Company Opiate is Razine because I was punning on resin, thinking of the opium poppy tar. I haven’t had to come up with named street drugs, and thank god because they’d likely be weird as hell: A bright pink mix of Cocaine, Ketamine, MDMA, and Oxycontin already exists – and it’s called Tusi. But yeah, I make the emphasis on these things because through the entirety of human history, they are what we’ve sought over and over: Energy, chill, and analgesia. Except… There’s also, and I’m saying this full-chest as an atheist, the spiritual: I’m not forgetting psychedelics or deliriants.

LSD is legit too pure for whatever the CR has going on. DMT is called “the god molecule” because users can experience melding with the universe/ego death. Ketamine and MDMA fiddle with serotonin and so, they’re being explored for therapeutic uses. However, I think the recreational versions of CR street drugs are psychedelic-infused to enhance how pleasant the effects can get, while the productivity-oriented Meds are not. Looking up “Research Chemicals”, you can find all kinds of fun analogues to any of these, of a dubious/grey legality, that haven’t been tested good and proper. NBOMes have been getting regularly passed as LSD for over a decade and those can have a similar effect! Or they can kill you. You can’t tell until you get there.

Keeping profit in mind, no corporate group in their right mind (legal or not) would produce drugs that aren’t addictive, or that would honestly provide more than a temporary relief. I think that, in an universe where the capitalist dystopian side prints their food, you’d be hard pressed to find the vegetable or fungi versions of anything; unlike in Preservation. Getting a replicator to spit out a bunch of capsules based on a molecular model sounds way easier than, say, printing instant ramen. The hardest part would be making it so the commercially available home printers couldn’t be jailbroken to produce the things.

But that’s what you’ve got proprietary formulae for :33 And/or a lifetime of unpaid hard labor on remote colonies if you get caught, and have no proper backing from a lab.

i started doing things scared and doing things alone years ago the real challenge is doing things tired

guy with depression: idk stories about time loops just kinda really resonate with me haha idk why

guy with depression: it’s so sad when they’re doing the same thing over and over again insisting this time it’ll be different. it sure would suck if time loops were real!

I made this in reference to comic/game stuff but I’m glad to see this one’s going over well with all the writers

Reblog to give your followers and mutuals the strength to continue

oops

tumblr filter any time there is a gurathin surgery / plugging-into-murderbot scene:

@therearesomewhocallmemari what do kids say these days… crise ontologique porno homme my beloved or whatever

I’m gonna use “crise ontologique porno homme” as my “this post is about Gurathin” tag now.

Mari i was like, hm i wonder how do you translate “he sucks his loaded surveillance state weapon ontological crisis style” and then thought jesus fuck now it just sounds Foucauldian 😭😭

On the one hand, I want to rebel against the constant pressure to relate every fucking thing to Foucault. On the other… Foucault seems extremely relevant to Gugubot, actually? Damn it.

Alright, come around everyone, it is 10 PM Pacific Time, today on the programme: would Michel Foucault’s French gay ass ship Gurabot? The vote is now open:

Writing a long multichapter fic be like

Truly, hell is forever u_u

Murderbot + text posts [124/∞]

“…So I dropped to my knees here, right … I scooped dirt into my mouth … ate until I vomited. I gathered up the bloody earth … I realised you were too much for me. This is the problem, the incorporation, this is the hardest part … It’s the human instinct, to take. When you burn your thumb, you stick it in your mouth, right? And there was still too much of me that was just a human being.”

- John 1:20, Nona the Ninth

Comic I had the opportunity to do for @thelockedtombcfp and @theriverbeyond! Thank you <3

My headcanon is that book ART would get along with book Gurathin like house on fire: they are both smart, both loyal, both hate corporations, both spies, and both assholes. It would be a friendship made in heaven.

But imagine how ART would react to show-Gurathin. Who risked his sobriety and sanity to save ART’s SecUnit by carrying its whole mind in his brain. And then let it go. (With tears in his eyes.)

My headcanon is that when show-ART will meet show-Gurathin, it will have the most lucrative, most beneficial contract prepared for him, together with the sweetest coffee and most luxurious cabin, just so that Gurathin stayed aboard. Because ART will see him not just as a friend, but as an ally who’ll always risk it all to bring SecUnit home.

my main issue with making aus is that i will also make sub aus. like the au but theres some different significant change or addition to it. and ill keep making these in my brain until theres like an entire ecosystem of them

ALT

View on Twitter

Devastating news

It’s not enough to clear him. The cases were dismissed on the grounds that the assaults did not occur in the U.S. She has to try him in New Zealand. An unfortunate technicality, but why didn’t the lawyers know that? A better headline:

Gaiman Alleged Sexual Assault Case Must Be Tried in New Zealand

no no, i get it. i can see why you’re confused- I want the CANON to be completely platonic, fucked-up exploration of intimacy that transcends human sexuality but never includes human sexuality.

I want to be the pervert that makes them fuck.

Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Murderbot (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Medical Procedures, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Temporary Blindness, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Body Horror, i guess, Gurathin in CR, Drug Use, Drug Addiction, Eye Trauma
Summary:

“It would be my fourth surgery in two years, sir.”

“Your fourth promotion in two years.” Reginald corrected. They regarded him for a long moment, and then sucked in a breath through their teeth. “Look, I can put your refusal on your file. Of course, it will be a disciplinary action.”

Or, a little snippet of Corporation Rim augmentation horrors.

Saw a comment saying character X can’t be a pervert because he’s ace. Bro. Bro. Bro. BRO. BRO. BRO. BR

THIS

stacking layers (like sediment) | WC | speccygeekgrrl

Summary: Gurathin asks for Murderbot’s help after a slip in the mud gets his port all gunky. Murderbot uncovers more than just his port pins as it helps him come clean: there’s layers and layers of emotional metadata on both sides of this connection.

Gurathin, Care and Feeding of | 4,650 | murderbot

Summary: Gurathin and SecUnit brace themselves for a very public ceremonial kiss. (It’s their wedding after all.) But Gurathin has lingering family-related trauma, and it’s nothing a Murderbot is prepared to handle.
Set in the same AU as The Long Emergency, about three years after the main events of the story. (Before the epilogue.)

(see more recommendations below!)

Keep reading

OMG OMG OMG I GOT RECCED AAAAAAAAAA

It’s an honor to be on a list this full of bangers (read the others, y'all – these are all SO GOOD ;www;) 💖✨ Thank you so much!!

sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and put “text your friend whom you love and genuinely want to talk to” on your to-do list because otherwise it is not getting done

honestly so glad this one is gaining traction. just saw it in my notifications and went “MAN ALRIGHT” to text yet another person i have been genuinely wanting to text back for days

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There’s a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there’s now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We’ve becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.

Gideon The Ninth- mock dustcover

I draw book covers for freelance all the time. I feel pretty lucky to do so, and wanted to create one with all my free will and spare time, to make just for me. Well, and for you lot as well. But mainly, for me.

I will be drawing book 2 and book 3 as well. And potentalially have prints of them later this year.

(For cover commissions email me at annalise.jensen@hotmail.com)

dr gurathin, your body temperature is spiking

#me when the suicidal character gently caresses a loaded weapon

Ffff OP I adore this tag. So which is which? ;33

people have said it before but if you read a lot of historical literature you do begin to just sort of think in that style of language. I’ll put down the 18th century journal I’m reading and have to resist the urge to send academic emails with every Noun capitalized and punctuated only by the profuse Usage of the Em-Dash — it is a deceptively challenging Instinct to resist, & worse is that Instinct when spelling certain Words to utilize what would, some Centuries prior, be an appropriate Spelling, excepting that my Correspondence occurs in the Twenty-First Century, where Men are inflexible and uncreative in their Methods, & this Propensity of mine would appear only foolish & incorrect, instead of suggesting what it in actuality reflects, which is that I am simply an Incorrigible Nerd — O! the Woes of modern Sociability! Why should I be compelled to conform to these d——d modern Conventions! Is it not enough to be unabashedly and impudently Autistic?

FIC: EVENT HORIZON

[ CH. 07: Human Behavior . ]

Rating: M (Finally Earned)

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply (But has CWs!)

Relationships: Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon / Canon Divergence, Spy!Gurathin and Bodyguard!Murderbot, Angst and Hurt/Comfort (With a Happy Ending), Drug Addiction, Pre-Hacking of Murderbot’s GovMod, The Corporation Rim Is Terrible.

Summary:

Black holes draw you in, spiraling, towards their center. Should you fail to escape the pull, you fall past the point of no return —the event horizon— with no witness but gamma radiation. Outsider observers just see the inevitable in slower and slower motion. Meanwhile, whatever happens inside the singularity at the center is between you and the void, should any ‘you’ remain.

Wormholes aren’t that different.

Anyway— They’ll be spending one week in this transport. And Murderbot refuses to be scared of fucking Gurathin, of all things.

— — — —

(Or, “Let’s Run Away, Where Nobody Can Find Us” — CR EDITION™)

FIC: EVENT HORIZON

[ CH. 07: Human Behavior . ]

Rating: M (Finally Earned)

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply (But has CWs!)

Relationships: Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon / Canon Divergence, Spy!Gurathin and Bodyguard!Murderbot, Angst and Hurt/Comfort (With a Happy Ending), Drug Addiction, Pre-Hacking of Murderbot’s GovMod, The Corporation Rim Is Terrible.

Summary:

Black holes draw you in, spiraling, towards their center. Should you fail to escape the pull, you fall past the point of no return —the event horizon— with no witness but gamma radiation. Outsider observers just see the inevitable in slower and slower motion. Meanwhile, whatever happens inside the singularity at the center is between you and the void, should any ‘you’ remain.

Wormholes aren’t that different.

Anyway— They’ll be spending one week in this transport. And Murderbot refuses to be scared of fucking Gurathin, of all things.

— — — —

(Or, “Let’s Run Away, Where Nobody Can Find Us” — CR EDITION™)

Scenes from chapter 3 of Event Horizon, an AMAZING murderathin fanfic written by @fractalspaces !!

The first time I saw your fanarts I made sounds only dogs could hear 😭💖💖💖 I STILL DO WHICH LEMME TELL YOU.

GIVEN THAT THEY’RE CURRENTLY THE WALLPAPERS FOR MY LAPTOP AND TABLET. Makes for a lot of yelling.

(I regret nothing sshfhkd thank you so much seriously 💖💖💖 I can’t even with how much it meant to me.)

how the fuck did all of those renaissance dilettantes learn so much crap? Like they spoke 3 languages and were foremost in several branches of science, plus they wrote poetry, played the violin, and were master artists? And they still had time to be gay? 

none of them ever did any laundry at all

The emotional and physical labor necessary to maintain the lifestyles of Renaissance and Enlightenment polymaths was shunted almost entirely to their uncredited servants, slaves, wives, and daughters. 

Whenever we compare ourselves to the ‘genius men’ of the past, and wonder why we fall so short, remember this: their intellectual capacity, energy, and freedom was because there was someone else washing the damn dishes.

“Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner” is a brilliant book hisyorically analyzing this exact thing!