Vulnerability Isn’t The Same For Everyone

Sometimes all you can do is breath

Don’t cry wolf when there isn’t a wolf. Even if you don’t care about your credibility, chances are you crying wolf will lower others credibility.

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Anyone else feel like life (especially in America) is like gambling in a rigged game. Like oh you have to pay $70 for each college application and even if you are a solid applicant at least 75% will reject you. Oh you want to apply to jobs. Well you need a cover letter that is specific for why you want to earn minimum wage at Starbucks and you better not put down that you need a job. We don’t want any one who isn’t committed to our corporate overlords. Oh you want to volunteer in a lab. Well not sure that you are the right fit for our lab right now. And don’t get me started on trying to get a response from potential PhD advisors that you email.

I’m just really tired.

Tinker bell is an engineer

He had failed and now his bones would turn to ash. It wasn’t supposed to be a simple mission, but he figured it was more likely he’d get a sword in the gut or fried by some electricity than burned by the dragon he tried to save.

The Rafel Alliance was a stunning beacon of justice. If your definition of justice was black and white. Even the Mor Actin Spire had a more nuanced definition of justice and they were a dictatorship. Still, dragon fire for a drunken revelry was a bit much. He probably should have stayed low after the mission. Probably shouldn’t have gotten drunk out of excitement of not having a sword in the gut, but he did. One fistfight later, and he’s thrown in jail. A week after, death by dragon flames.

Obviously he’d failed the mission. He administered the antidote to the Alliance’s chemical control of the dragon, but they all knew it might not work. Which was why he stayed in town. He got drunk, because getting in and out of the central prison and dragon grounds was a feat worthy of a legendary thief.

Which he one hundred percent wasn’t. Now, he wasn’t a bad thief, but he was more of an undercover operative than a stealth operative. So making it out with all his organs was a better result than expected. Again, why he got drunk.

The first prisoner was up, and the charges were read. The man had stolen some food and was charged with the sin of gluttony. Funny considering, the man didn’t look like he had a good meal in years. Hard to be gluttonous without stuff, but that’s how the alliance works. You get charged with a sin and you burn in dragon fire.

For his part, the man bravely faced the maw of the dragon. It was over before the smell could even fill the ground. Where the man had been was a pile of ashes already dispersing in the wind. The sentencer grinned and began reading the next sentence.

It continued. A sin of pride for illegally preaching. Raging heat encompassed the grounds. Refusing to pay rent, sin of sloth. The ash pile grew. Envious enough to burn a building. Burning flesh filled his nostrils. Greed, sloth, wrath, greed, pride, lust, lust. On and on. The ash pile rose even with the wind dispersing it. Finally it was his turn.

“Fineal Taygen, you are sentenced with the sin of wrath for assaulting innocents. Your punishment is death by dragon fire.”

Fineal was tossed onto the ash pile by the guards. In front of him was the magnificent animal reduced to a slave. The dragon’s eyes devoid of the intelligence they should have. He failed. The antidote didn’t work, and now he wouldn’t have a chance to try again. Hopefully when the dragon was awoken, they would know that he did not blame them.

He prayed for the dragon’s freedom, and for his friends’s safety before staring at the dragon’s eyes. If he was to die, he’d face it with courage. Yet as he stared into the dragon’s eyes, they stared back. He almost stepped back in shock. The dragon was waiting. All the others had been immediately incinerated, but the dragon hadn’t burned him yet. Slowly he stepped closer. The dragon just watched him. He took another step, and his nose was touching the dragon.

The dragon finally opened their mouth and he realized this was his end. Even though he wanted to have courage, he found himself unconsciously wincing for the pain that was coming. It wasn’t until he felt a warm tongue that he knew he hadn’t failed. Fineal had succeeded in his mission.

You’re a prisoner in a fantasy world. After a week in jail for (YOUR CHOICE), your true punishment has come. Death by the Dragon’s flame. One by one, you watch men be scorched. It is finally your turn. The dragon reaches its head down, but instead of death, you get a warm lick on the forehead.

Being able to read journal articles critically is also such an important skill. I’ve been reading journal articles since late high school, but it’s only been in grad school that I’ve learned how to approach them critically. Fortunately there are a few questions you can ask about any study that will help you decide how much you trust the results even if you know nothing of the field.

What journal was the article published in? Some journals are far more reputable than others. Usually a quick Google search can inform you of if a journal is considered reputable.

Do the authors list any conflicts of interest? Conflicts of interest aren’t an immediate red flag, but if the author has a strong incentive to only publish certain results then I’ll definitely be taking a second or third look at the study.

Who funded the study? If Coca Cola funded a study that says drinking one soda a day is beneficial to your energy levels, I’m not trusting that implicitly.

Is it peer reviewed? Peer review can fail, but this is the quickest test for if a study is good or not.

What are the limitations of the study? This plays into the assumptions the author made. Were the experiments only done on white men (often the first standard in medical research though it’s getting better)?

Similarly do the authors list their limitations? The best articles will have a short section on limitations or a paragraph in the discussion about limitations. I am always slightly wary when no limitations are listed.

What is the sample size in the study? This number will usually be found in methods. The bigger the number, the better. However, there are a lot of standards for what the minimum sample size should be. In small animal research, you’re usually looking at a few dozen mice or rats. In larger animal research, you may be looking at less than ten animals (pigs, horses, cows). In human trials (also known as clinical research), it tends to be dependent on what the study is on. Knee replacements probably 15 people or so. Spinal cord trauma would be more like 5 people. (Social science will also have different minimum sample sizes but I’m not familiar enough to give estimates. In general subjective surveys require a lot of people. More objective testing done by researchers will have less people involved)

How many citations does the study have? This one can be a little more hit or miss. An article published a year or two ago may be great and have no citations. While an article published fifty years ago may have a hundred citations but have incorrect information (in this case it’s usually that methods have improved and new information was discovered instead of poor research quality). Niche topics may also be hardly cited despite being good articles.

There are other questions you can ask like “Can I follow the methods?” “Does the interpretation of their results logically follow from their results?”Etc. but those tend to be harder the less familiar you are with a field. And if you’re reading about a study in a news article like CNN, Apple News, etc. there are different tricks to determining how much you trust them (I tend to look for hyperbole and rhetorical devices. One time I found a news article saying physicists had figured out faster than light travel. They were referencing a theoretical mathematics paper that stated using several assumptions hyperluminal travel is mathematically possible)

What I learn from Science & Technology Studies is that you shouldn't blindly trust science because there's a fair amount of fuckery (mostly unintentional but sometimes not) going on in the background, but you also shouldn't *not* trust science in the way that most people who don't trust science don't trust science.

Anyways, hope that helps!

It’s too lonely to think that no one thinks as deeply as you do.

If you are scared to listen to a viewpoint, because it might change your mind, you need to reevaluate your own viewpoint.

Sorta close. That’s the Tenrou island arc, and you seem to be mixing up Gray’s and Natsu’s separate fights with the time mage. Natsu never beat Ultear though. (Ultear also wasn’t able to negate Natsu’s magic but she certainly kept him from being able to hit her). Gray is the one who beat her. Ultear was also initially able to negate Gray’s ice make magic by turning his ice into water. However Gray figured out Ultear couldn’t rewind or fast forward organic organisms so he used his blood to create bloody ice and was able to beat her.

There are several times in the series that Natsu does win by saying he’ll breath more fire. Most notably (in my opinion) when he uses dragon force for the first time. It’s fair to remember that Fairy Tail is 100% the power of friendship wins the day style story so some solutions don’t exactly make sense. I always found Gray vs. Ultear to be pretty neat and help explain magic better.

Guys I think I have a false memory and I need someone who's seen fairy tail to tell me if it's a hallucination or not.

I vaguely remember natsu had to fight some girl who had a magic ball that was constantly rewinding time or something and negating his fire breathing bullshit...

And I remember that the solution didn't make sense because it was basically just natsu saying I'll just breathe even more fire...or punch it even harder??????

And I remember at the time I thought it was really fucking stupid.

Because it was brute forcing a boring solution to an interesting battle dynamic, and a classic example of an author coming up with an idea so good that he wrote himself into a corner with it???

Did something like that happen in fairy tail or did I implant a false memory in my head???