The Prophet and The Liar

HIS FACE SAYS IT ALL:

ARCTOTHERIUM ANGUSTIDENS: AN UPSETTING QUANTITY OF BEAR

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

DNA proves fearsome Viking warrior was a woman

A 10th century Viking unearthed in the 1880s was like a figure from Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries: an elite warrior buried with a sword, an ax, a spear, arrows, a knife, two shields, and a pair of warhorses. And like a mythical valkyrie (depicted above in a 19th century painting), a new study published today in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology finds that the warrior was a woman—the first high-status female Viking warrior to be identified.

World’s First Artificial Kidney Is All Set To Replace Dialysis in 2-3 Years. Here is how it works !

A team of university scientists has developed the world’s first artificial kidney technology to be implanted in the body. Their bio-hybrid approach uses living kidney cells in tandem with a series of specialized microchips powered by the human heart to filter waste from the blood stream.

The National Kidney Foundation estimates that over 100,000 patients are on the waiting list for a donor kidney, and over 3,000 are added list each year. The average patient spends 3.6 years waiting for a viable transplant, and may be treated with dialysis while they wait, but only one in three dialysis patient survives longer thanfive years without a transplant.

Transplanted organs from deceased or living donors must be carefully matched in order to avoid tissue rejection, but an artificial solution could potentially bypass these complications and be manufactured to better meet the demand. To address this unmet need, William Fissell from Vanderbilt and Shuvo Roy from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) launched The Kidney Project.

And it’s amazing.

This is a short documentary on this subject on wolves in Yellowstone:

here’s a slightly longer one (with surprise!narrator Edward Norton):

Hey dudes this is a FREE extension I just finished for Windows after ages and ages of reverse engineering of Painttool Sai. It provides thumbnails for the .sai file type from right within explorer so you can preview the contents of .sai files and it even works for .sai files within folders like this folder full of .sai files and with Window’s built-in preview panel

Welcome back to Mangled Mondays, where every Monday we talk about another facet of maiming, mangling, mauling, and mistreating your main characters — and all of their friends.

Today we’ll be talking about Stitches, Sutures, and Staples, Oh My! For the rest of the Mangled Mondays series, [click here].

First off, this title is a misnomer. That’s because sutures is the medical word for both stitches and the act of stitching.

The concept of sutures and staples for wound closure is a very simple one: in order for skin to properly heal, the edges of the skin must be held together. With shallow cuts, the tension of the underlying tissue, known as the fascia, may be enough to keep skin together for good healing, but for deeper cuts, this isn’t the case.

Sutures and staples help by making it easy for the skin to start to glom together.

Types of Closures

Traditional Sutures

Traditional sutures themselves are an art form. Humans have been stitching themselves together with horsehair for ages, and “gut” stitches made from cat intestines were popular at one time. Today sutures are typically made from nylon, which must be removed, or dissolvable materials such as Vicryl.

Suture material is rated by size, from 5 (largest, used to stitch tendons together) to 10-0 (smallest, used for eye surgeries).

Muscles are typically sewn with a 4-0 dissolvable suture (such as Vicryl). Some body elements, such as abdominal walls and deep tissues, may have non-absorbable sutures used which will eventually simply become part of the area.

A rough guide for suture size:

[Tumblr Mobile: Read More Here]

Why Can’t Cats Resist Thinking Inside the Box?

Here’s a snippet about her from this article (that also features more photographs of her work, including this sculpture):

Biologists Detect Longest Transoceanic Rafting Voyage for Coastal Species 

Nearly 300 species have appeared on the shores of Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast attached to tsunami debris, marine biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Williams College and other institutions reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

Seriously, this is the first live modern example we have of a mechanism for transoceanic species distribution that has been floated (ha) lots of times in the literature as a mechanism for explaining the appearance of new populations in far-flung locations. It’s generally been accepted by paleontologists as a Thing That Almost Certainly Happens, but this is the first time that we’ve really had any idea how large an event is necessary to cause rafting events large enough to really establish substantial new populations.

There have only been five M9+ earthquakes worldwide since seismometers became a thing in the late 1880s:

Kamchatka, 1952 - M9.0

Chile, 1960 - M9.5

Alaska, 1964 - M9.2

Sumatra, 2004 - M9.3

Japan, 2011 - M9.0

So I’ve been receiving messages and asks here and on my other blog (the Wishgranter) from some artists trying their hand at pixel art for the first time. BIG DISCLAIMER : I’m by no means an expert in the medium but I’ve been studying and working on pixel art for some time and I thought I would share some things I’ve learnt for other beginners. I will be using the following image (with permission) as an example to give tips - done by @yatagansaber​ and sent to me for feedback.

First of all, for me what defines an image as pixel art is not it’s small resolution or the fact that you can see individual pixels, but it’s the way that it’s made. The art of ‘pixel pushing’ differs from other digital mediums by the fact that each pixel - or at least most pixels - in the image are hand placed by the artist and have a purpose.

What I mean is that regardless of the size of the canvas, the artist probably went in at some point with the 1px brush and hand placed most individual pixels. For me, I usually start with a larger brush to define forms but then I switch to 1px brush very early in the process all the way to the end.

Point no. 1: Canvas size So for this case, the canvas here is pretty large and the artist is going for an armor clad character which means the canvas was probably going to get larger. So here I would strongly suggest going for a much smaller canvas especially since the artist is just starting out with pixelart and it is much easier to grasp the concept on a smaller canvas. I usually start with a 60x60 canvas and then adjust as I go, but I very rarely go over 100x100. In pixelart you will not be blending with giant brushes, so for the big flat areas you will either end up with a single flat color or do a lot of dithering which might take away from the final image.

Point no 2: Defining curves

Define your curves better. When working with pixelart, curves need to be defined properly or it will end up looking very jaggy in the end. Referencing the image, The neck area of the armor for example could be defined better to have a more presentable effect. Focus on having the lines gradually decreasing in pixel width alone the curve of the object you’re drawing.

Point no 3: Coherent Light sources

More of a general art tip. The image doesn’t seem to have a coherent light source. On the shoulder pad to the left it seems to indicate a top left art source while the neck area completely ignores that light source and indicates one to the top right. Another light source is indicated to the bottom right in the torso area. Although having multiple light sources is totally acceptable it needs to be done coherently. Artists usually stick to one main light source and maybe some back lighting for effect.

Point no 4: Light and Forms

Also a general art tip. Make sure you use lighting to define your forms. The lighting on the shoulder pad seems to suggest a flat, sharp surface while the general form seems to suggest a cylindrical object. This very important as it will help the viewer understand what they are seeing. To help with this, try to find references and see how the lighting hits specific objects.

Point no 5: Contrast

When drawing metal objects such as armor you must think about it as a very reflective surface. The light source should be much brighter and stronger then the rest of the palette to create a good contrast. Again, this isn’t exclusive to pixel art, but to art in general. The best way to get used to these things is to watch a lot of real life references and other artist’s work.

Point no 6: Color Palettes

Choose a more interesting color palette. When drawing pixelart you’re not going for realism, and even in real life, it’s very rare to see something being completely one color. Don’t simply stick to one color and increasing/decreasing brightness. Try messing around with hue variation and saturation as well to create a much more pleasant image. For this case I didn’t have time to create a new color palette so I simply added some hints of color to the shades. Ideally before starting a new piece you decide on a color ramp with different hues and stick with it till the end.

Final Thoughts

So after applying those points (except the canvas size point) to the armor piece I ended up with the result below:

It’s obviously nowhere close to being perfect since I do not have the time to keep pushing it to a good finish but it should give a good idea of how those several little points can help make your pixelart look better.