Toxoplasmic Charisma

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

I walk into this little everything store (to my foreign eyes the kind of place that back home could sell you a bunch of carrots, a 6-pack of beer, pantyhose, bleach and a screwdriver set) and I see some household basics in the back but not what I need. with the confidence of a person who is only in the city for 3 days because he got bored and packed a bag and booked the cheapest flight available the week before (<= MENTAL ILLNESS), I was like no worries I know some italian, I can just ask.

I grab a bottle of water, walk up to the counter, and I'm like Ciao, hai il paracetamolo? And the guy is like che, and I'm like paracetamolo. Per la mia testa. And he's like che?

This is where I would have said 'aspirina' except I can't take aspirin for medical reasons, or 'antidolorifico' except I don't know that word and I've got no phone data for google translate and also I'm stupid. So in my fucked up leith-glasgow-italian accent I'm like paaa-ra-cetta-mollll-ooo. He's like ohhh bene, bene, and he calls another guy out of the back and asks him to go get something. Other guy then walks out of the store into the street, and before I can be like hey, che la fuck, he comes back and hands me a huge bundle of herbs.

At this point I'm like okay this entire interaction has been a bust, but these guys have been very nice and patient and they're both smiling happily at me because they've been of service, so I'm like ahh perfetto, grazie, pay them a couple of euros and leave.

EVENTUALLY I find a pharmacy that's open, and my head is fucking killing me, and my phone still isn't connecting, and now I have this small shrubbery poking out of my coat pocket, so I don't even bother looking around the shelves. I just walk straight to the counter and I'm like uhh ciao, scusi. And hearing my nightmare of an accent the guy answers in english and I'm like thank christ, do you please have paracetamol. Not aspirin, I can't take aspirin. And he's like yeah yeah hold on, goes into the back, comes out with what I need.

Only when he comes out he gives me this look, and then he starts laughing. And then he pretends he's not laughing and rings me up and I pay, and as I'm leaving I can see him losing it. But I don't care, my head is going to explode, I'm going back to the rathole to close the blinds and fall comatose for four hours.

When I get back to my hotel room I take off my coat and remember the huge bouquet of herbs in my pocket. They smell amazing, and I'm like I'm pretty sure this is parsley in which case I can just get some tomatoes and mozzarella later and make it work. but since I have no idea what that interaction was, I want to make sure. I bring out my phone to get a visual reference of what parsley leaves look like, and because I was using it for google translate earlier I put 'parsley' in the wrong box like a dope and translate it to italian.

prezzemolo

Also consider Mikinakoos' as they're extending support beyond their traditional service areas due to the scale of this emergency!

Donations for Namaygoosisagagun First Nation:

Donations for Whitesand First Nation:

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

There are a number of tells, but this is an excellent example to talk about em-dashes, which people often either take as permanent AI tells or run the other way and say "humans use em-dashes and that's why AI does, too! they're not tells!" Both are kind of right and both are kind of wrong.

What you'll see if you look closely at this text is that it ONLY uses em-dashes. Every time it needs to put in some kind of break or set off some text, it goes for the em-dash. There are no phrases in parentheses. There are commas, but only in places where the absolute rule is to use a comma (like in a series, for instance). There is one colon, again placed where the absolute rule is to use at (at the top of a list). Whenever there's an option, where a human writer would be actively making a choice about what punctuation to use, the AI defaults to an em-dash.

On top of that, look at the content. The AI bot people are obsessed with feminism, ironically. I suspect it's because very basic feminist narratives about women pushing back against barriers or doing something heroic are popular and gets shared widely. So, first of all, you should be on your guard when you see a "what this woman did CHANGED HISTORY!" kind of piece. (I wonder if the twitter/tumblr trend of BUCKLE UP history posts has affected the AI ...) And then you should check out the specific claims.

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

I can't find this anywhere else. The paper "The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science" doesn't talk about photos! The Wikipedia page doesn't talk about photos! This Smithsonian article doesn't talk about photos! Her piece on her career in Writing and Revising the Disciplines (2002) (good read) DOES mention photos, in that she got the Mount Holyoke archivist to send her a few from the 1880s showing women doing scientific work as a nice illustration that "epitomized" what she was already aware of.

Rossiter started with textual primary sources that documented women as named individuals contributing to scientific discoveries. The idea of her being confused by photos is a hallucination.

Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There's definitely something to be said about the framing of this bit as shocking!!! but since I'm talking about facts and sources, it's clear to me that the AI recognized the botany-Wellesley connection from the paper but could not parse that the reference was to a female botanist who taught at Wellesley. There is also nothing in the paper about Vermont geologists, so I have no idea where the AI got that; I would suspect it's another hallucination attempting to create a pattern from the first reference.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

Again, back to the mysterious photographs. But the rest of this text is an issue as well: what Rossiter describes in the paper is not a complete absence of these women in any official documentation, but that these women were amply documented and known to be working within the scientific community and yet did not receive public credit or awards. It's not a complete smothering out, but a sort of complacent back-burnering, which is too nuanced for the AI to be able to handle when told to "write a post about the Matilda effect that will get engagement on social media". She didn't prove that discoveries attributed to male authorship actually had women involved and only she knew their names: she collected many stories that people already knew of overlooked/underplayed female scientists and put them together to say, "This is a pattern and we should have a name for it." Some of her examples were even recent enough (1970s-80s) that she was able to point to a feminist backlash.

And again ironically, the AI itself engages in the Matilda Effect by presenting this whole thing as utter silence -> Rossiter gets curious -> the case is blown open. Rossiter actually refers to the work of other female historians and social scientists! In fact, she started this line of research after noticing the female biographies in American Men of Science when her housemate, Cynthia Thompson, recommended that she keep track of them.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick. Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize. Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed. And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Rossiter did not claim to be rediscovering these women. She refers to Franklin and Meitner as having been famously denied credit, in fact! Meitner specifically is "one of the best-known examples of the phenomenon". Stevens she uses as one in the list of examples in the paper, and Payne-Gaposchkin actually just gets a reference at the end that's doesn't even tell you the specific field of scientific study. (To be fair, there may be more about them in her other publications.) This was not about Badass Historian of Science Tells the Establishment What's What. Everybody knew about the concept of female scientists being publicly ignored as collaborators by 1993 — and women's history as a field had been around for 15-20 years. She was not working in a vacuum where nobody else thought that it was important to study these topics until she forced them to see the light.

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway. In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.

Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.

This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.

Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.

If this seems harsh: There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour. Over fifty people lost their homes. Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.

The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this

-And there is! It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)

On one hand: FAR fewer fireworks parties this year!

- Only nine to last year's thirteen - three of them had the good sense to be firing their recreational explosives out over the local reservoir - That's far from foolproof - and really bad for the fish - also y'all are RIGHT NEXT to where the Bald Eagles are nesting - but congratulations on at least attempting some risk mitigation!

On the other hand.