Of Mind and Heart

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Disclaimer: I flunked out of chemistry and had to study English lang/lit and math in college instead of biology like I dreamed of. Now, I, at best, teach basic high school biology to speakers of cool rare languages sometimes.

Breathe in, breathe out

The main waste product of all cells on Earth is just carbon dioxide. The main way that humans get rid of cellular waste is exhaling. A major way we get the basic needs for our cells is breathing in.

The human tissues that we KNOW Murderbot (government name SecUnit) has is skin and nerves, especially human neural tissue. Now, skin gets rid of its own dead cells and excretes its own wastes (it's really hard to find a source for this, can we take this on common sense? You're shedding dead skin cells RIGHT NOW). The biggest issue it would have is that Murderbot gets injured a lot, but chances are that the technology that exists in this universe also provides a lot of the necessary medium for human skin tissue needs to repair itself.

Brain food

The problem is human neural tissue... It uses so many calories. It uses SO much energy. It actually makes perfect sense that Murderbot does things like sweat when it is overworking its brain. Maybe it can leak brain wastes out of its skin via its blood stream.

Most of the waste brains produce is still CO2, but the brain needs to make and excrete proteins all the time in addition to needing to crush crazy amounts of ATP, which requires all sorts of fun stuff and is producing all that CO2.

Bothered. Dehydrated. Anxious.

I imagine that a lot of wastes that Murderbot's human tissues produce, such as proteins and nitrogenous wastes, could probably be broken down into something it can breathe out. (Again, I did fail chemistry repeatedly, so I may genuinely be delusional about that.) However, one of the biggest issues is that Murderbot doesn't drink any water and has no way to drink water (that we know of!)... But exhaling also releases water. (Water is the other major waste product of the Krebs cycle that produces ATP.)

Maybe that water is being recaptured somehow internally? Maybe its got a little chemiosynthetic system in there making sugars and water out of its own CO2 wastes? Maybe its secretly drinking water and not telling us because that's gross and human? Maybe it is just crazy dehydrated all the time? I have a bigger issues with Murderbot's physiology than it maybe needing a gallon of glucose and amino acids squeezed into its torso every so often.

Is it possible that the adding of water and needed proteins etc happens when a SecUnit is being repaired in a cubicle? Maybe a bot that hasn’t experienced physical injury still needs to be repaired every X cycles in order to top up any inputs needed by its organic parts. And we don’t see that happen often for SecUnits and CombatUnits because they so frequently need repair from physical injury that they don’t end up going that long without repair anyway.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

No, I shan't. This is a job for @were--ralph

People whose musings and antics we're invested in.

But they're not influencers. They're not celebrities.

And, more importantly, and actually reaching the broader scope of the redditor's question, tumblr is a site where you control your own engagement. You have to actively find the content you want, it's not going to be spoonfed to you by an algorithm.

It was actually said best by a Hungarian comic, I'm paraphrasing a bit: If your house is on fire, you can't be like 'well that's not the fireman I imagined'.

I know it's been said a thousand times before, I know everybody is raging against having to vote for a less than ideal candidate, but today has proven that it fucking works. It's the only thing that works. And if the new guy is just a step closer to what you want? That's a fucking win. That's a fucking step in the right direction.