I’m only a couple phone calls out from having an apartment lined up and I’m interviewing for a year-long gig doing exactly what I was lab grown for early tomorrow. Pretty much as soon as that’s done I’ve gotta finish moving stuff to the stopgap that is my parents’ garage, but thankfully I managed to preempt that crunch by handling books last week.
Still on the long road home, but I took this picture for my own records before leaving.
Everything up to the boxes at right (plus another half box of processing supplies plus some unpictured maps) survived my relatively thorough weeding passes. It’s a huge relief to feel like everything is worthy of its space and weight costs again; been ages since I felt like things were on pace with actual usage.
No idea how much I’ll end putting back in storage, but before that decision comes due I have a lot of collating and reorganization to catch up on. Might even finally get around to whipping up a catalog spreadsheet, but I daren’t speculate on how much free time I’ll have more than a couple hours in advance.
Tooled up the road from a prospective apartment to kick around a botanical garden all yesterday morning. Felt good to be lost and confused at unfamiliar diversity; it’s been ages since I saw totally new stuff.
An old favorite, of course. I take pictures of this every time I find it, so I’ve done the whole write-up thing before. These were tucked in a garden corner growing unusually low and heavy. The fruits are still a couple weeks out, but when they’re ripe there’s nothing better. Bees may disagree, but the deer have my back on this one.
Countless movies speculate over the zombie apocalypse. Every year, at least a dozen films ponder the possibility of the dead coming back. None of us thought it’d really happen. And none of us thought it’d be like this.
The infections started quickly. One second you’d be talking to a friend in a cafe then their eyes would roll back and they pounce on you - along with twenty other customers. But they didn’t bite you nor try you limb from limb. No, theyd pin you to the ground and their hands would dig into your weak spots. Your pits, your feet, your belly, anywhere they could reach. And they’d tickle you.
Doesn’t sound too bad. But really think about it. 20+ people on you, tickling every inch of your body, never tiring? Hundreds of people were being tickled to death a day, only to get back up and join in on someone else.
The first few days of the outbreak were chaotic. The streets echoed with tortured laughter as they were snatched up by the hordes.
Eventually they evolved. Instead of killing people, they’d drag them away - poking and prodding their spots all the while. The infected would restrain them with furniture and ropes and anything they could get their hands on.
It wasn’t enough to tickle them to death, they started to draw it out. It’s been 28 days since the initial outbreak and I’m still locked in my apartment building with a few other survivors. But I don’t know how long I’ll stay alive. The hordes have gathered outside the building; I can hear the laughing of those who weren’t lucky enough to get inside. And I see they’ve learned to build stocks…
Where’s THIS zombie apocalypse?! ☠️
In hindsight, thinking of us as “zombies” might have been part of the human downfall. Really, we’re “tickle vampires” that are initially very stupid, but quickly become smarter. Much, much smarter than we were as humans. Our ability to instinctively tell who is better-fed (and therefore both smarter and stronger) has formed our basis for social hierarchy. Everyone’s immortal, so starving doesn’t mean death, but it does mean a tortured existence of maddening thirst, an animal that will do anything to feed and avoid being fed upon.
I didn’t mention that part, did I? We can feed on each other. The powerful ones have humans, kept alive as livestock because of how amazingly nourishing it is to tickle them without turning them. I used to be one of them.
The rest of us? We feed on each other. Those too ‘poor’ go insane and are very easy to catch. If not recognized and rescued by those of means, they become one of the damned. I used to own one. A metal device permanently fitted over her head, forcing her mouth open, blocking all sight, with bands tightly holding her elbows and wrists against it so that her armpits are ever-exposed, her hands encased so that she will never again use them to tickle anyone, young-looking skin that our incredible healing abilities created to replace any tattoos or other identifying marks. Part of the requirements for owning one of the damned is keeping it starved-stupid so it can’t even form words, trimming away all hair peeking out from the hood, and shaving all body hair, so that the damned cannot even be identified by hair color. Mine was female, like me. As a human I remember being heterosexual, but that doesn’t matter any more, what matters is how deliciously, desperately, ticklish she was.
My evenings were spent idly tickling one spot or the next, sometimes inviting my friends to dine with me. The body shaving became my daily breakfast, each day becoming more efficient at shaving her in a way that left her panting, squirming, whimpering, and humping the air in a way that I knew was going to make her taste even more delicious that night, fantasizing about someday, maybe, being able to afford an unturned human as well. This weekend, several friends were coming over, two of which bringing their own damned as well, so we can all become expert at mastering the current feeding fashion, seasoning their food/entertainment by feeding it just enough that they become self aware again, then putting them back in their place by tickling them through several ruined orgasms in a row.
Colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of a human blood clot.
Here it has formed inside a blood vessel following an injury. Red blood cells (a.k.a. erythrocytes) are seen trapped by a web of brown fibrin threads. The fibrin is an insoluble protein and these threads are an essential mechanism for the arrest of bleeding.
Platelets (a.k.a. thrombocytes) are a component of blood whose function (along with the coagulation factors) is to react to bleeding from blood vessel injury by clumping, thereby initiating a blood clot.
As the blood cells become trapped they lose their normal rounded shape (as at upper left). Blood clots form to repair blood vessels damaged by injury or disease.
Abnormal clotting in intact arteries and veins (as occurs in a thrombus) is the principal cause of heart attack and stroke.
On the other side of the coin, there is a bleeding disorder called, Hemophilia, where the blood does not clot properly. This can lead to spontaneous bleeding as well as bleeding following injuries or surgery.
The insects above were all killed by a predatory species of fungi common in the forests of the upper Amazon basin. This fungi’s name, Cordyceps, is derived from the Latin words cord, meaning “club”, and ceps, meaning “head”.
Specific types of Cordyceps, that infect ants and flies, can control their behavior and turn these hosts into Zombies. The fungus takes control of the ant or fly, making it climb to the highest place possible before it dies. When the fungus finally kills the invertebrate host, one or more fruiting bodies sprout from the invertebrate’s exoskeleton. Having died in this elevated position, where wind speeds are greater, the spores are more easily swept away to infect new hosts. Marks have been found on fossilized leaves suggesting that this ability to modify the host’s behavior evolved more than 48 million years ago.
The Inca civilization of Peru, as with many other ancient Andean cultures, mummified many of their dead and buried them with valuable materials such as precious metal jewellery, fine pottery, and sumptuous textiles. Important mummies could also be periodically removed from their tombs to participate in ceremonies where they were also offered food as if they were still living persons. Those mummies (mallki) which escaped looters have, in most cases, been excellently preserved, thanks to the dry climate of the Andes region, and they provide a unique insight into the culture, religious practices, and everyday life of the Incas.
Mummification was only one type of burial employed by the Incas and was an ancient Andean manifestation of ancestor worship which illustrates a deep reverence for older generations (ayllu) and kinship within communities. Considered a link between the living and the gods, these mummies could also be taken from their resting place and ‘consulted’ on important occasions so that their knowledge might serve the living community. Given places of honour and offered food and drink, mummies were involved in such ceremonies as marriages, sowing, and harvesting, or when long journeys had to be undertaken by individuals within the community.
Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of the surface of the gallbladder. Each of the small elevations on the wrinkled surface is an epithelial cell.
The gallbladder is a pear-shaped mucosal sac that serves as a reservoir for the bile fluid produced in the liver. Bile is released into the stomach after ingestion, where it plays an important role in the digestion of fats.
The bile emulsifies fats in partly digested food, thereby assisting their absorption. Bile consists primarily of water and bile salts, and also acts as a means of eliminating bilirubin, a product of hemoglobin metabolism, from the body.
Medicines and other “waste products” filtered out by the liver are also contained in the bile and are excreted in this way.
The gallbladder can be affected by gallstones, formed by material that cannot be dissolved, usually cholesterol or bilirubin. These may cause significant pain, particularly in the upper-right corner of the abdomen.
I’m not used to presenting my images in b&w, I’m also not used to making wallpaper packs. FEST is over until next year, but I want to see some of my favorite moments every day. After browsing the FEST Nerds facebook group, I was sure a lot of you did as well. Here I’ve compiled eight of my favorite moments(sets, wtvr) and presented them in a 16x9 aspect ratio.
