Still Dreaming about a childhood flower

my hottest take

yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety

Then how the haters loved him,

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

I was just thinking about the old Japanese censorship laws that gave birth to tentacle porn...

Wait they took it off poob?

It's not on wollop last I checked

Okay, but the grandfather clock was a motif in the original novel and was meant to represent Katya's constant gaze over the sins around her as she wallows in her own sloth and reluctant acceptance of being a mafia wife. The fact that it never shows up until that version is as wild as Kubrick Shining never bringing up the wasp nest despite the representation involved of an 'infestation' that's doomed to harm his family no matter how much he chokes it out. The fact that the femslashers had to wait until that re-release to even GET that motif instead of shopping in scenes from Barbara Hershey's first film with Scorsese and hoping no one will question why Sofia's entire style changes from staid and repressed to the little pink number is completely insane and just adds to my constant frustration.

reading about the history of the cochlear implant and i just found these incredible descriptions of ways that deaf people in the 1800s made assistive/alert devices for themselves.

the thing here is of course that it worked. it worked, so she has to do it again. she has to send him again. she's not even going to save dubois and shapiro, she's not going to save yao and ilyukhina, she's not changing anything, it worked.

and it WORKED. and she's here AGAIN, because maybe this is just what happens to you when you are the final signature on a mass extinction event. maybe this is her penance. maybe the world continues on without her, warmer and brighter, but she has to stay here in the worst of it and hold it all together.

the fifth time, she promotes him. six months from launch, that's when she wakes up, and she gets out of bed and gets presentable and walks to his door and says You're the primary science officer now. and he says What? No. No, it can't be me. and she says It has to be you. and she's not trying to do anything with her face, with her voice, but something must happen anyway because he looks at her and says You're sure? You're really sure? and she says It should have been you from the start. and he says Okay, let me– Gosh, okay, I have been awake five minutes and all I've eaten since yesterday is candy, but sure, yeah, I'll go on the suicide mission. Are you– We're getting breakfast, c'mon.

she stops the lab explosion. she keeps him out of prison by the skin of her teeth. the beetles don't come back.

she wakes up on the aircraft carrier and she lets herself lay there because he comes looking for her after half an hour and she sees his face and she says Oh, it's good to see you. and he narrows his eyes and leans forward to press the back of his hand to her forehead, and he's never done that before. he grabs her arm, he taps her shoulder, their fingers brush when he hands her something. that's it. that's all. it's like an electric shock, his hand on her forehead. his worry. she's going to kill him and he's worried she's running a fever. she doesn't deserve six months

AU where Shane and Ilya don't hook up or have a decades-long secret. They don't really know each other at all, except to play each other.