u/labia--majoras--mask

had a dream we were running in a field together and then i went to see a broadway musical with her but they wouldn’t let her in, then i spent the rest of the dream trying to find her, and i woke up looking for her, but she is in another state

i have medium-long blonde wavy hair

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i go on instagram on my ipad 2-3 times a week and like and reply to everyone’s stories.

idc if i haven’t seen them in three years. i am saying “wow” to their trip to italy and “nom nom nom” to their plates of food. i am telling people they have nice kneecaps and incredible hair dos.

i am interacting with people on social media. mark zuckerberg can’t stop me.

- bayonets
- minions
- bananas, aubergines, pickles!, cucumbers,! etc.
beavers
- inflatable beach balls
- volleyball nets, hockey goals
- horseshoe crab blood
- hooves
- canyons, fissures, abyss, the cracks between tectonic plates
- anteaters
- proboscises
- tusks
- bullet trains, maglev trains, high-speed rail in general
- amoebas
- acapella groups

I’ve never had psychosis before. It seems like I am missing out on a rich part of the human experience. Although it might not be fun, I am brave and curious.

Anyone want to join me?

but there is no one to support… no one wants me to support or help them :(

i want to listen to people and wipe away their tears and help them clean their living room and make tea for them while they are working hard on a project. i want to give someone advice and then be like oh shit wait i am giving unsolicited advice please just talk and ill listen and then we laugh and that helps. i want to plan suprise birthday parties. i want to get everyone to sign a get well soon card for someone who got hit by an e-bike (not that i want any of my friends to get hit by a bike).

i feel an absence of support in my own life, but there also isn’t anyone leaning on me either. i want to support people, but no one wants my help!!!

this “you don’t owe anyone anything” mentality hurts so much from every angle. i want to give my time and energy to other people. i have so much love to give, but no one wants to receive it.

just another angle of psychic damage from our individualist culture.

They are fun. And they can be easier to work on than fiction because you don’t need to make everything up. When you are like “idk what to say next,” you just go back to the facts/opinions you are essaying about.

You can also just start talking about yourself whenever you feel like it too. Throw in a little anecdote about a date or dream or childhood splashing in the creek.

You can just start talking about your opinions whenever.

You can quote/reference other people’s writings and opinions and poems and song lyrics whenever. This isn’t considered stealing, this actually makes you seem smarter.

You don’t need to come up with characters or dialogue, and you don’t need to write out actions (for me, dialogue and action scenes are the most frustrating things to write, but I know this isn’t universal). But if you throw in a little gunfight in the middle of your essay on the reason T-rexes may or may not have feathers — awesome. Literary genius.

To write, you don’t just have to write stories or poems or journal entries. I know this might be obvious, but I was trying to force myself to write novels and short stories for like 8 years, and not having fun all the time.

But my output AND enjoyment skyrocketed when I started purposefully focusing more on nonfiction.

Even try shitposting. For example: I have been going onto r/hygeine and leaving elaborately bad advice. It is silly, but it is really satisfying to scribble something silly to get into the zone or cheer myself up — and to actually COMPLETE something. Even if it’s just a paragraph.

Just try different forms of writing and get out of your niche and try to stop worrying about what writers “”should”” write!!! Try to write things that are actually fun for you to write!!!!!!!!!!!

And researching for essays can actually be fun when you aren’t doing it for a grade :)

once upon a time, about two billion years ago, there were two bacteria. one of them ate the other, but then decided to not digest it. and then the gobbled-up bacterium became a slave forever thereafter.

this — endosymbiosis — is how the mitochondria was made. the mitochondria is not a powerhouse of the cell but an enslaved beast we force to produce energy for us. the way we farm cows for hamburger. very warhammer 40k.

this is how eukaryotes were born. and from this bacterium with a vore'd bacterium trapped in her belly came all walks of life (plants, fungi, animals, and protists). and i suppose, all swims of life, all flights of life, all infestations of life, all phototropisms of life.

now, i think we all basically know what defines animals vs plants vs fungi. animals have no cell walls. plants have cell walls made out of cellulose. and fungi have cell walls made of chitin (the stuff insects make their exoskeletons out of — and one of the tells that indicate fungi are more closely related to us than to plants).

but protists.. what are they, exactly? they are basically just… miscellaneous eukaryotic organisms. what unites them? uhh… well, they aren't plants or fungi or animals :)

that is to say that protists can be WILDLY unrelated to each other. like, the genetic distance between an amoeba and a diatom is greater than the genetic distance between me and an oak tree. and the evolutionary histories vary wildly, sooo it is hardly useful as a classification group. it's the equivalent of looking at a bird and being like, well that's certainly not a mushroom.

ENTER CHROMISTA!

now HERE is a group of protists that actually seem to have a distinct event in their (potentially…) shared evolutionary history. remember endosymbiosis? when our grandmother gobbled up grand-mitochondria?

well, it seems that chromistas endosymbiosis'd a cell that had, itself, endosymbiosis'd a cell. secondary endosymbiosis!!

and specifically, it seems they absorbed a red algae cell. chromista's chloroplasts have MULTIPLE membranes around them which indicates this endosymbiosis happened multiple times: once when proto-red algae absorbed a cyanobacterium that became its chloroplast and another time when these proto-chromistas absorbed the red algae, rendering them into mere chloroplasts.

but why does this matter? first of all, differentiating any protists into a real kingdom is helpful. it teaches us a little bit more about the tree of life.

and also, the organisms that would be in kingdom chromista are IMPORTANT!! specifically, diatoms.

diatoms are basically these little photosynthetic glass baubles that float in the seas that produce anywhere between 20 and 50% of all the oxygen on earth. so.. any guess why these guys might be more important to understand better?

diatoms emit oxygen AND sequester carbon dioxide. the same way trees do, basically. photosynthesis!! they pull in CO2 from the water they're floating in, and make sugars to feast on and release oxygen. and because diatoms are basically encased in glass (their cell walls contain silica), when they die they sink to the bottom of the ocean, and so any of the carbony sugars within them sink and are sequestered at the bottom of the ocean.

HOWEVER, because diatoms are chromists, their chloroplasts work differently, and so they photosynthesize differently than plants and algae. they use different light-harvesting pigments… which means they capture different wavelengths of light (specifically like green-blues)… which means they do better in different oceanic conditions than plant-algae.

and so, to accurately calculate the carbon sequestration and oxygen production of diatoms, they need to be treated differently than just "like plants but like underwater." especially if they are doing the lion's share of contemporary oxygen production/carbon sequestration (the diatom's share…!).

soooo understanding diatom/chromist biology as a coherent group rather than random little guys becomes a climate modeling question with existential stakes, not just a fun biological/taxonomic thought experiment.