to be fair marvel movies are very thought-provoking. they ask questions such as “why am i watching this?” and “when will it end?” and “is there no god?”

i dont know how else to put this but to approach books (or any media, really) solely for the sake of relatability is genuinely incredibly heartbreaking……to have such little (or such unwilling) imaginative scope that you cannot stretch yourself, even marginally, in a different direction to what you’ve known or are used to knowing when the very POINT of stories is to transport you somewhere else, into someone else, so you can do just that……..when fran lebowiz said a book “is supposed to be a door!” and george saunders said good prose “is like empathy training wheels” they were right!!! they were so so so SO absolutely entirely right!!!!!

I needed to check that this was real, and apparently, it is. What’s more, the end goal in these experiments was to fight feline AIDS, creating glow-in-the-dark cats was a side effect. That might be the greatest sentence I write this year.

Ok, so the short version is that scientists want to insert a Useful Gene. But they have no way of knowing if the Useful Gene actually got incorporated into the cat’s (or other animal’s) DNA. So they glue the Glow Gene to the Useful Gene. If the animal glows, both genes got inserted successfully.

Yes! Pretty much every glow in the dark science animal is that way because of the above! A lot of people don’t get that, and think scientists are just screwing around and doing slightly irresponsible things with animal DNA just cuz they can. That’s not the case at all

how the fuck did this site outlast twitter

sorry professor i did not do this asisgnemtn becuase i was too sad! NO consequences please. goodbye

no thoughts, just "where is duty, where is sacrifice" and the way that alicent clings to abstract constructs like religion, honor, duty and sacrifice because her material life is so concretely terrible and empty. to have loved someone so dearly, and watch them be what you perceive as free while your entire personhood is reduced to a womb and made to serve the realm, a vessel for the rotting king to use and abuse. to not exist as a person for yourself but in only in service to others as you are ordered by your father under a patriarchal structure..........and then the contrast of that quote, which summarizes all of alicent's anguish and agony, to the classic, "what is honor compared to a woman's love? what is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms...we are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love.".................but alicent doesn't have love, not anymore. duty, honor, these concepts - they're all she's got, and the lack of the very elements that make them meaningful has corroded her inside and out. so: honor, duty, sacrifice, all without love. and here we are.

everyday i become obsessed with little stories about how life is terrible but it will always be worth living because, even in spite of our darkest moments, there will be love around the corner. let life start and end with tragedy. let us be torn apart. let everything have no meaning because the meaning is ours to create. we don’t need perfection. we don’t need a happy ending because we have each other. we are the meaning of life. each moment of laughter, every time you feel that warm feeling in your stomach, that makes life worth living. why are we here? what’s the point. maybe there isn’t one. but we still have to live in this world we created, as awful as it is. so why not love each other. why not just live and laugh and cry and be. because we can

my life was never the same after reading “the only trick of friendship, i think, is to find people who are better than you are. not smarter, not cooler, but kinder and more generous, and more forgiving and then appreciate them for what they can teach you and try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself no matter how bad or good it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. but the best, as well”

everything everywhere all at once is about intergenerational trauma. about depression and passive suicidality and the gravitational appeal of nothingness. about aging, getting older in your twenties and getting older in your fifties. about the specific hurt mothers can cause their daughters and daughters their mothers. about the harsh reality of the immigrant experience and the american dream. but it’s mostly about kindness and family and it’s about choosing to sit at home talking about taxes with someone who loves you, and it’s about telling your daughter that you’d choose her over the entire universe, and it’s about how even in the universes where life didn’t form, love can still exist. and it’s really all of that at once.