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[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

Now, at 29, I’m lowkey having a panic attack because my academic email is filled with middle schoolers wanting me to answer their questions about pygmy raccoons and I keep putting off answering them because I’m so overwhelmed with all the other raccoon stuff I have to do.

imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.

What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

Cambridge professor of sociology Jason Arday is accused of plagiarism by another academic

the accuser is a "race realist" who believes that in a true meritocracy all university professors would be white. this is somehow not acknowledged much during the entire ordeal

this leads to several days of media coverage demanding an investigation, or that Arday is expelled from his post immediately

somehow this accusation that has no effect on the lives of 99.99% of the population becomes FRONT PAGE NEWS in all the newspapers for multiple days, above anything else happening in the UK or the world at large

following intense media scrutiny, Arday resigns his post as a Cambridge professor

today, august 14th, days after resigning, Arday is found dead at his home in Battersea

This article by professor Kehinde Andrews clarifies more about the story of racist harassment Arday has been suffering since he fucking got a teaching job at Cambridge in the first place, in 2023, as the FIRST Black professor in that fucking stupid institution, who sure is taking it's sweet time defending their worker, despite already fucking checking his work for plagiarism and saying he didn't do it:

https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2026/08/07/ardays-resignation/

1. He wasn’t the first Black Professor at Cambridge, but he WAS the youngest X

2. He was ALSO autistic, and nonverbal for the first 11 years of his life X