This is the greatest progression of events I have ever read, where’s my historical gay romance novel about this
KING JAMES, CAN YOU CHILL?
Local King Cannot Stop Promoting His Boyfriend
where’s the lush period drama about this series of events?
fun thing about king James, this guy was fairly public about his bf (more public than what was acceptable). He threw lots of extravagant parties with his man on his arm. It pissed off the church obviously so to get them off his back, he’s the one that ordered the third translation of the Bible from Hebrew to English (the King James Version aka the Authorized Version) so the Bible every hot blooded all American Christian reads today was literally just written so a very gay king could fuck his boyfriend in peace.
oh my god this is hilarious
“guys, guys. I know this looks kinda gay, and i promise i have a good explanation for all this, but have you considered… that jesus… is also gay? checkmate, heteros.”
Maybe if you want to ugly cry a little bit because you need a reminder that people are still good check out this Twitter thread about the many people who helped support the Thai cave rescue. They didn’t go in and get the kids out themselves, but it would not have been possible without their help. These people include:
farmers who allowed their rice fields to be flooded so they could pump water out of the cave (and the water pumpers who will stay until they pump the water back out)
people who came just to cook food for the rescue camp, including the noodle vendors who pushed their cart up a steep, muddy road
masseuses for the rescuers
Sophia Thainant, leader of the Muslim women cave volunteers, who sourced and cooked halal food for the Muslim rescuers
the birds nest collectors (who came north on one-way tickets donated by their villages), who climbed into the caves and heard knocking
And last but not least, Saman Gunan, the ex-Thai Navy SEAL who died delivering oxygen tanks to the boys.
fanfic: this character has had several bottles of hard liquor and they’re just slurring their speech slightly and for some reason are not in the hospital with alcohol poisoning
me: ….you’ve literally never had a drink in your life have you
very good point.
Alcohol For the Non-Drinking Fanfic Writer, a primer by me
There’s a shit ton of variability in response to alcohol depending on body mass, history of drinking (your liver can upregulate the CYP450 enzyme responsible for metabolizing alcohol but only to a certain point; chronic alcoholics hit a point where their livers are so trashed they lose this and go back to getting drunk off small amounts of alcohol), and ethnicity (people of East Asian descent are more likely to lack a critical enzyme for breaking down one of the metabolic steps in the degradation of ethanol and are stuck in the shittiest part of it, with flushing and nausea), and other factors.
But if I had to guesstimate for writing:
1 drink (a tall glass of beer, a can of beer, or a shot of hard alcohol in a cocktail or alone): are you a burly dude? you may or may not feel it. are you a tiny lady? you will probably notice it.
2 drinks: burly dude may or may not be noticing it. tiny lady like me: this is a sweet spot where you’re talkative but not drunk. (Note: people don’t go from zero to “so drunk you remember nothing/are profoundly disinhibited.” There’s a lot of ground to cover in between.)
4 drinks: burly dude still feeling it, tiny lady ready to FUCKING FIGHT YOU
5 drinks: burly dude, slow down, buddy, you gonna polish off that six-pack by yourself? That’s going to hurt in the morning. Tiny lady: oh my GOD stop. Go to bed.
This is where we draw the cut-off for a “binge,” if you were wondering. More than this and you’re officially binge-drinking, where your odds of serious harm go up sharply. From alcohol, but also from the bad decision dinosaur that plagues you when you binge-drink.
a fifth of anything by yourself: Sir. Sir, can you hear me? Sir, I need you to open your eyes. Squeeze my fingers. Sir, you’re in the emergency room.
Splitting a bottle of wine between two adults: generally like three drinks each, you’ll feel it but you’ll survive. (A bottle of wine between three adults: usually not quiiiiiite enough.)
An entire bottle of wine by yourself: oh, so you enjoy suffering?
Other Fun Medical Alcohol Facts: high-proof alcohol like vodka will temporarily paralyze your pyloric sphincter, so the alcohol can’t get into your gut for about twenty minutes. Then, when it DOES get into your small intestine, enjoy getting uncomfortably drunk too fast.
Alcohol is a zero-order metabolizer: that means that nothing on Earth can sober you up except time*, and the time it takes is linear, directly related to how much you drank. Most of us can clear about a drink an hour, so if you’re drinking slowly you can stay roughly sober all day. Most of us don’t drink that slowly. Hangovers are made awful by a metabolic intermediate (literal acid in your blood!!!! it’s so shitty!!!!!!!) that makes you nauseated and feel super gross, and not every drinking episode will lead to a hangover, and severity of hangover varies greatly by person and amount drunk.
So please never write someone having coffee to “sober up.“ Now they’re drunk AND they can’t sleep. Bad combo. Sucks for driving. Splashing cold water on your face? No. Amphetamines? Good Lord what’s wrong with you. Look, the room’s gonna spin, you fucked up your endolymph in your semicircular canals, deal with it. You can partially override that with proprioceptive feedback–keeping one foot on the floor to get tactile input–but it’s just gonna suck for a while.
The variability in capacity is real; my aunt-in-law, who is roughly my size, can drink me under the table easily. She’s a high-powered business executive who has martinis with lunch. I tried to keep up with her once and had to call in sick. So you don’t HAVE to write a character having a “normal” alcohol tolerance, but don’t get into “yep, definitely alcohol poisoning” territory, please.
This has been Please Don’t Show Up In My Emergency Room, I Hate Getting Barfed On by your local friendly medical trainee.
*this is technically not true, but no substance you can get your hands on will do it. hmu if you want to hear the story of the EtOH receptor antagonist andwhy it never went to market, what with all the dying.
what’s the EtOH receptor antagonist???
okay whew. here we go. there has been a LOT more interest in this than I was expecting (I was expecting none, to be clear), and it has been approx. 8 billion years since I was in undergrad, which is the last time I can reasonably claim to have been CURRENT on Neuro research. (I did my master’s at an institution that does not have what one might call a robust Neuro department and mainly did Stats.) So if a real live Neuro person comes on here and contradicts me, you should probably believe them.
BUT. Here is the story, as I recall it:
Alcohol, or, as we fancy-schmancy-pantsy medical types like to call it to distinguish it from the bajillion other alcohols out there (”alcohol” describes a general type of molecule in chemistry, not the good ol’-fashioned Get You Drunk molecule) ethanol, abbreviated EtOH, is what’s generally called a “sedative-hypnotic.” What that means is that it doesn’t work on opioid receptors, it doesn’t work on cannabinoid receptors. It does stuff to your GABA receptors–GABA being the major inhibitory neurotransmitter–and it also binds to other stuff. We still don’t have its actions in the brain fully mapped. But we know, and we’ve known for a while, that it does stuff to GABA receptors.
A major pharmaceutical company developed an honest-to-God antagonist. If you’re not a pharm person, you may be going, “a what now?” First point: damn near everything your brain does is determined by neurotransmitters and the receptors that love them. Neurotransmitters interact with their receptors in a variety of ways, with a HUGE variety of end results. Humans love jamming other chemicals that are not neurotransmitters into their receptors. Why do opioids work? Because they mimic NTs we make ourselves. Why does cannabis get us high? Because it mimics endogenous (”originating inside”, self-made) NTs. Manmade molecules that alter us are hijacking built-in systems. Don’t even get me started on how fucking bananas cool it is that neurons can adapt to neurotransmitter levels, and in a super awesome sci-fi-like variety of ways. Take a Neuro class! Take five! Take seventeen! Most fun I ever had was in a Neuro lab.
So what’s an antagonist? It’s something that, one way or another, makes it so the NT can’t do its thing at the receptor.
The line of thinking went, if we can keep ethanol from doing its thing at the GABA receptor, we can make people sober again. They can drink and then take a pill and be sober. Wouldn’t that be AMAZING? Wouldn’t that be lucrative? These are questions that drug companies think about a LOT.
So they made the chemical! Its name is
Ro15-4513. You can Google it and get a WAY less interesting description of what went down. But how my professor explained it to us is like this:
It works. It’s an ethanol antagonist at the GABA receptor. You take it and it blows the ethanol off the receptor and you’re sober. And… because humans are awful, you get drunk again. You take another pill. You’re sober again. The time that pill is active is less than the time it takes your body to metabolize ethanol, so you’ve still got all that ethanol swishing around in your system waiting to murder you via aspirating your own vomit the hot second it wears off, but by God, you’re sober.
Except, as mentioned, the GABA receptor is not the only place where ethanol does stuff. One of the effects it has, since it’s such a teeny tiny molecule, is fucking with the lipid bilayer that forms the bulk of your cell membrane. If you’re a Neuro person, you’re getting cold chills right about now, because the only reason neurotransmission works is the properties of the lipid bilayer. You have to be able to transmit electricity down the axon of the neuron to generate an action potential. The lipid bilayer is what allows you to do that.
The pill does nothing for that. So if you take enough of the pill, and keep drinking, there comes a point where you’ve fucked the lipid bilayer beyond repair. You can’t transmit messages. Your brain doesn’t remember how to tell your body to do things like breathe, or not have seizures. And you die!
So, in summary, we have a pill that could make you a responsible designated driver, but actually fucking kills you because people have no self-control.
Moral of the story: Neuroscience Is Super Fun!!!!! It was my gateway drug into medicine. I would never have gone to medical school if it weren’t for my Behavioral Neuroscience professors.
today on: humanity’s hubris has led to so many things being bad when they were designed to be good
“I pick up the knife” is now a mini-meme among my party and obviously it just means “I did something impulsive and now it’s going to take two sessions to solve.”
“I pick up the knife” saga continues because listen we can sit around failing investigation checks all day or we could play d&d
Professionals have standards. Be polite. Be efficient. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Always have a plan. Always. And never tell a soul. 🙂
Damn.
Making notes…
This thread is unreadable to my ancient eyes, but is thankfully archived [ HERE ].
Have a free transcription:
what is the evilest thing you’ve ever done in a game?
“… A buddy of mine went off to college a few years back and ended up sharing an apartment style res with four other gamers. At first they were pretty cool guys, until I was invited to game with them. The entire lot of them were THAT guys, playing anthromorphic characters, being chaotic randum, one player had a custom made vampire race that was stupidly OP and only had a LA of +1. Shit had to stop and I knew that it was my duty to stop it. I played a LE human wizard who specialized in the creation of magical items, his character concept was that wealth was often equal to power and what better way to make cash on the up and up then by creating and selling gear catered to adventurers and the elites. Another quirk of his was that he kept a grimoire on him in which he wrote the names of those he and the party had slain, if a name was unavailable he would write a brief description, approximate age, and location of death. Whenever they’d stop in a major city he would copy the most recent additions and deliver it to the mortuaries, as an act of respect to the dead. I actually made this book in RL, and filled it out after every fight.I went full out on this guy and regularly made the parties equipment for ¾ of the cost it would have taken them to buy it, often giving discounts if it suited both of our needs for them to have the better gear.
My only stipulation was that my loot be kept on me, and not with the parties funds.
By the end of the campaign I was several levels under the party but had a huge stockpile of gold saved up to buy a nice island somewhere and live the good life. We finish off an evil draco lich that was bent on world domination and are about to go our seperate ways when the party barbarian stops my character and demands that I give them back the gold they paid for their equipment or he would kill and take it from me. I tried to reason with the rest of the party but they were all being greedy fucktards, It was four vs 1 and I wasn’t allowed spells from outside the phb, so none of the fantastic bullshit of celerity could save me, and the barbarian would unquestionably beat me on initiative if it got to combat. Resigned to my fate I did the only thing I could do, and spoke to them one last time.
“Lalilulelo” Our clerics armor suddenly burst into sunlight, the barbarians weapon animated and began to attack him, while his armor locked in place freezing him on the spot. The rogue was disintegrated on the spot as his gear spontaneously blasted him with magical rays.
Within a round the party was dead or incapacitated, save for my character, who calmly approached the frozen barbarian as he was hacked apart by his own weapon, pulled out his book and flipped to one of the first entries. As I described this I pulled out my copy of the book, and did the same, turning it so that the rest of the table could see where there names had been scrawled on the day I had met them.
“There was never any doubt in this outcome. I knew your greed would overwhelm you and took the necessary measures to stop you when it did. Perhaps if you had simply let me go things wouldn’t have gone just as planned.”
The table just kinda stared at me in silence. I didn’t play a very talkative role in the campaign, and usually kept what I did separate from the party pretty brief. They hadn’t even known my alignment, as my evil deeds were usually of the subtle sort, such as unfair contracts and manipulating the party into doing what I had planned. After the final fight I gathered the loot from the dracolich’s hoard, including the materials and instructions required to make a phylactery of my own. The campaign ended with my character getting the credit for saving the continent and being lauded as a hero, the others were quickly forgotten, as I claimed that they had fallen under the influence of the dracolich and been destroyed. The only legacy they left were their names scrawled in my book.”
Smug self-delighted players who get a kick out of being pointlessly nasty because ‘it’s just a game’ are the worst. Like dude. Bro. Your power fantasy says things about you.
I’ve been lucky to have never had one of these dolts in a group with me, the worst i had to deal with was a nerdlich who repeatedly bragged that with his stats he could “Beat Belldandy” (lol) but I’d welcome them if someone like OP was also there. Dat payoff.
My law school is in downtown Chicago, and the other day I was headed in to the library to finish up a paper. I pass a daycare every day, it’s normal to see the building, but the weather was so beautiful that the teachers had brought the kidlets outside and lined them up for a walk.
They were all Very Tiny (the oldest couldn’t have been more than four) and holding onto one of those child leads with the handles. I was completely prepared to just walk past them—the teachers were counting them off and making sure everybody had their buddy, they were clearly busy. But one of the teachers spotted me, and without missing a beat said cheerfully, “Say good morning to the nice lady!”
I have never ever been so completely and unexpectedly charmed as when a bunch of tiny children grinned, waved, and chimed in with variations of “good morning.” One of them clearly shrieked “GREEN!” probably because I was wearing a bright green t-shirt.
When I finally got to the library and sat down at the table my friend had staked out, she took one look at me and asked why I was still smiling.
The “Dread Gazebo” is one of those inside jokes that everybody in the D&D/RPG community is supposed to know, but that makes it really hard to actually learn. Everyone references it, but nobody actually tells the original story. I played D&D for years before I got up the nerve to ask why everyone made jokes about gazebos.
– urgently marched into A&E and said ‘we’re having knee pain!!’ to the confused receptionist. i had to explain that it was only my knee and that he was just worried
– when asked to tag me in a meme of ‘what water are you?’, said ‘you are the ocean: home to all friends’
– loved ‘filthy gorgeous’ and, rather than learning the words, learned ‘all three parts in the song where they ring a triangle’
– after we had an argument about him not ‘getting’ my ADHD, i caught him halfway through a three hour playlist of lectures on ADHD, with a pen in hand, taking notes
– he suffered a TBI last summer and he did not like the orienting questions they ask (’what year is it? what day is it?’ etc). when asked ‘do you know where you are?’, he cracked one eye open and angrily said ‘in bed!’
– he played knack 2 and hated it. when i asked why he was still playing it, he said ‘so i never have to play it again’. he got every achievement and as soon as he got the last one he stood up, ejected the disc and returned it to the store
– lately he’s given up on making lunch so he just drinks huel which is a meal replacement shake, except huel is kind of boring so he sometimes puts nesquick strawberry powder in there
– my favourite drink is pepsi max. when asked about his dreams for the future, they often involve ‘being rich enough to find a way to pump pepsi max directly into our house’
– one time in our first year of dating i hadn’t seen him in weeks, whereas we normally saw each other all day every day, so i was gonna go stay with him for a couple days. he had a temporary job (i’m talking 2 weeks total) at the time and i was bummed that i was gonna be alone at his for a bit, but w/e. he was texting me like ‘work is going okay, in the line for the canteen right now’ while i got on the bus. i found the key where he said it was, i found a note on the table like ‘hi love! the wifi code is [password], I’ll be back at 5!’, and then I went into the lounge and he was there. he was lying on a fold-out bed with Marvin Gaye playing. the TV was on a powerpoint slide that said ‘Welcome, Jess. I quit my job.’ he was entirely naked except for a cushion with the letter ‘D’ over his crotch. im 95% sure there were candles
– we play the game Rimworld, where you micromanage a colony of people on an alien planet. he uses it entirely to simulate a peaceful colony, mostly of women, who have a large number of animals they care for and train. one time he got this random event where all the women in the colony got a psychic mood boost and he was like ‘honestly that’s my life goal’
– when he was in hospital and his cognitive functions were slowly coming back, he looked up from twitter with horror and said ‘jess… is the american president a racist?’
– we were playing Articulate, which is a game where you have to describe a word without saying the word itself. His partner said ‘when you’re beginning sex, you are…’. he, without a second of hesitation, yelled ‘FOREPLAY’. the answer was actually ‘initiating’, but my ego grew like fourteen times
– one time he asked me what guacamole was, and i told him, and he said ‘if it’s made up of things that already have names why does it have a different name?’ i have not let him live this down yet
– i used to have an eating disorder, and whilst i’m good 99.9% of the time now i occasionally do have wobbles. one time i’d eaten some mini-donuts and i told him ‘i kind of want to check the calories on those…’, so he immediately pulled the label off and ate it
– i lost him for like twenty minutes at a uni event, and when i found him he presented me with a pepsi max badge and said ‘i rode this mechanical bull to try and win you a year’s supply but i fell off pretty quickly. sorry.’
– we won the ‘best couple’ award in our year at uni, but neither of us were there to collect it because i was ill and he left halfway through to come home and take care of me
– one time he wasn’t paying attention while making lunch and he cracked an egg directly into the bin. the look of confusion on his face was priceless.
– on the rare occasions when i wake up before him, when i kiss him/ touch him he makes these little like… activation sounds? you know like when you touch a cat? it’s like those
This is the cutest thing I have read with my own eyes
My goal is get a boyfriend this dorky and adorable
i'll apple your turnover 