they should invent a desire to be desired that doesnt just make you feel humilated and guilty

oh look at me wanting to be both made useful and considered something worth wanting. like some kind of idiot

Palestine has hope. Say it with me. Palestine has hope. Palestine has hope. Shit like this has happened in the past, and there have always been survivors to tell the tale. Palestine has hope. Palestine has hope. It’s true.

Fanfic reader's prayer: may my favorite author's hyperfixation on this fandom last longer than mine 🙏

Fanfic writer's prayer: may my hyperfixation last long enough for me to write all the fics in my head.

hi, sorry to interrupt your scrolling, but I just wanted to remind you that you are beautiful and loved. thanks! carry on

we really went from "women and girls can do anything" to im just a girl i only do girl math im a passenger princess i dont drive i dont eat i just do haha girl dinner im so sillyyyy i wear makeup bc i want to i also try and define all women into categories that are marketable omg what if we were just girls and we were so useless and helpless

SCHITT'S CREEK 6.08, The Presidential Suite

~ Every day, it's a-getting closer ~

i would be the best unreliable narrator i dont know shit that goes on around me

Ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to go back to bed

some of the hardest tasks in the world include “fixing your sleep schedule” and “sending an email” and even sometimes “taking a shower.”

so this European clothing retailer decided to advertise their jean cuts on youtube and it's unintentionally the funniest shit I've seen today. why? well.

now important context here: in German, die (pronounced 'dee') is just a feminine article, it literally means "the".

but if an ad gets placed in the middle of an English video and doesn't use a single explicitly German word for most of the ad, even a native speaker is gonna think "they want me to die how?" it keeps getting funnier.

I mean, holy shit

i will use these as reaction images until i die

there is no greater mystery than What Was That Deleted Video In My Youtube Playlist

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.