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It’s encouraging but…if it’s gotta be personalised, it’s gonna cost a pretty penny. It’s gonna cost a LOT of pretty pennies. And they’ve only tried it on one specific type of brain cancer. So there’s a very long way to go before we can say cancer is cured.

The discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

Within 48 hours, the four human study participants showed remarkable results: their immune systems went into turbo cancer-destroying mode. And without surgery, radiation, or dangerous chemotherapy.

Folks, we may have a cure for cancer within your lifetime.

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Neitokainen is a body of water in Finland, which is shaped like Finland

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Discworld inktober day 22 - Esmerelda Weatherwax

Granny Weatherwax was the strongest witch in the Discworld books. When Sir Terry Pratchett found out he was dying, he needed to say goodbye to his fans. He did that through the passing of the beloved character of Granny Weatherwax in “The Shepherd’s Crown”

Even though when he was already gone when I started reading the discworld books, it was still very heartbreaking. She also kept bees as part of her specialty and after she passed, her protégé had to tell the bees. I’ve always felt like us the readers were Sir Terry’s bees.

RIP Mistress Weatherwax

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COUNTRY GNOMES

TAKE THEIR BONES

*a bunch of gnomes in overalls run toward you and take your bones out of you*

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FAMOUS AUTHORS

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

TEXTBOOKS

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

MATH AND SCIENCE

FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.

Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.

Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.

Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.

FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.

Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.

Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.

Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.

Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.

Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.

The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.

Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.

PLAYS

ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.

Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”

ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.

Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.

Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.

Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.

The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.

Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.

John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.

SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.

Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.

ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.

Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.

Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.

Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.

KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.

Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.

Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.

Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.

CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.

HISTORY AND CULTURE

LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.

The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.

Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.

Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.

Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.

RARE BOOKS

Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.

Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.

2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.

Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.

Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.

Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.

Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.

MYSTERY

MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.

TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.

Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.

POETRY

The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.

Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.

Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.

Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.

QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.

CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.

PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.

MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.

DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.

A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.

ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.

Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.

Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

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Mildly Human-Looking Aliens though??????

Okay but with all this humans are the weird ones, space australia and humans are space orcs stuff i’ve been reading on here, imagine a race out there that looks mildly human-like. Like, maybe they only have abnormal eye colours (like liquid gold or sunset pink) or different skin colours or tails or wings or something but other than that, they look almost exactly the same. just imagine

Their entire race is now completely used to being mistaken for a human and the once weak race is has now merged into one of power and respect. The humans have no clue because they haven’t actually reached that part of the universe yet but every other alien race thinks they have and are now terrified because holy lexim the humans got there, made a home on a new planet and have somehow not been wiped out in only ‘X amount of’ Human years it took us like 10 Brilkaks how did they do this so fast w h a t

The other aliens don’t even question the wings/tails/ears etc because most of them are actually used to a rather respected human thing called ‘cosplay’. (Most of the universe actually got a very good idea of it when one of the Telk Uuns transformed into a human called ‘Harry Potter’ and was enthusiastically congratulated on ‘such a realistic cosplay it’s like you’re actually him!’. The humans, when they learned that it wasn’t a cosplay at all but merely a simple transformation, had flipped and excitedly made a large commotion in the Telk Uun’s Hall of Ushvaac, scaring the Telk Uuns out of their disguises.)

Anyway, when the humans actually do find out, they’re actually amused and make a peace treaty with their look-a-like friends. occasionally they’ll swap and a few of the Human B’s will visit Earth and a few Humans will visit Earth 2 (Krexar’un)

Back on Earth the Human B’s (also knowns as the Krexarns) make easy friends because most of the humans think the situation is hilarious. Eventually the human’s begin to make classes for the transfer Krexarns so they can learn about Human traditions and historical moments to be more convincing when interacting with other aliens. The Krexarns absolutely falling in love with some of the apparently not-pet-able animals ‘nO ILTAR THATS A SHARK DO NOT PET IT GET BACK HERE’ *cue hyperventilation* and their human friends inevitably becoming the mum friend regardless and constantly worrying that they might get attacked every time they visit the beach. (the poor already mum friends become Mum Friends 2.0.)

Over on Krexar’un, humans are treated with a great deal of respect however because they’re Very Curious, they often have to be surrounded by guards to make sure they don’t kill them selves by wandering into any native animals. Nevertheless, the humans will often escape their guards and many of the Krexarn children begin going to the Human transfers to get lessons on it. (ehhh, basically the same thing as on Earth but including lessons on how not to die on Krexar’un)

Eventually all the other aliens learn that the Krexarns aren’t human and are pissed but that soon melts away when they learn how close the Krexarns and the humans now are and oh mirtd do not cross them the humans will find out and you will make them mad

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Fun little math trick I find really helpful: the ratio of a mile to a kilometer is within 1% of the Golden Ratio. That means that if you have a good memory for Fibonacci numbers (1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89) you can convert pretty accurately by taking consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

For example, 89 kilometers is really close to 55 miles (55.3). Or, say you need to convert 26 miles to kilometers: 26 can be written as 21 plus 5, so taking the next Fibonacci number up gives 34 and 8, meaning it should be around 42 kilometers. Sure enough, it's 41.8 km!

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TIL that there's an '80s movie where they portrayed Smilodon by sticking actual fake teeth onto actual live lions.

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And they did. Remember that bit too. They did.

Anyone who thinks Jesus would be picking a political side if he showed up today has forgotten that his core followers included an anti-Rome zealot and a guy who was until then a tax collector for said Roman rulers. And he expected them to play nice and work together.

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"boop." *boops*

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lord the peasants are so loud today

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i. Sam Vimes dies at nineteen, and not in his bed. The People’s Republic dies with him, blood on the streets and blood in the river and blood in Sam’s hair, matted to the cobblestones his feet will never learn to read through his boots, and that’s life. He dies, and the Republic dies with him, and that’s life, because life, as Sam knew even at that age, isn’t fair. When they find his body, no one recognises him, and he is buried not in the grave of the unknown soldier but merely in the grave of the unknown, the tombstone which marks his final resting place left blank, eerie. When the springtime comes the lilac blooms and they remember. When he died, he died for nothing, as all men do. He died crying and afraid and for nothing, and when he died, the Republic died with him.

Without him, Vetinari dies at the end of an assassin’s blade and the city they both died for doesn’t see a real democracy for a thousand years.

But that’s life, and life’s not fair. 

ii. Sam Vimes dies at twenty-nine, and not in his bed. He dies in a gutter, and is truly forgotten, Nobby and Fred the only mourners at his graveside, a true watchman’s funeral. He dies, as all men must die, and certainly all men who drink twice as much as anybody’s liver could reasonably handle. Nobby cries and Fred pretends he doesn’t, and they flip a coin to decide who becomes Captain now. Both outcomes, be assured, are equally disastrous. 

His ancestor, the Kingkiller, becomes a footnote in history, and he too is forgotten in time. There are no more republics in Ankh-Morpork, and no more kingkillers either, and the city feels the weight of a lacuna no-one knows how to name. The city greys and dies, and there is no justice in its streets, no bravery in its hidden little cloisters. The city herself becomes forgotten, and even her gods die.

Deep beneath the earth, in what was once a little cemetery by the Ankh, there is a stirring. But that, for once, is another tale.

iii. Sam Vimes dies at thirty seven, and not in his bed. He stands up to a dragon, to the Patrician, and above all, to himself, but is caught by a piece of falling masonry as the battle rages forth. His city burns, and burns, and dragonfire spreads across the world, leaving nothing in its wake but suffering and death.

In the never-dark, they whisper: a man held his sword to the dragon, once, long ago. If he did it– if he did it. Can we?

They don’t even know his name, but it doesn’t matter. Sam Vimes was born to inspire revolutions. They don’t need him to be living to bear his name. They don’t even need his name at all.

The world burns, but fire fights fire, and, when all is said and done, what else was Sam Vimes but that? 

iv. Sam Vimes dies at forty eight, and not in his bed. He dies with a demon under his skin, after he changed the world, or most of it, perhaps even saved it, run ragged by the Summoning Dark, because the human body has limits and he’s tested them once too often to make it through this time. He dies in agony, the second most powerful man in Ankh-Morpork, the veins of his eyes shot black as night and the scar on his wrist pools blood into the dust of Koom Valley, and what use is money and power when you’re a vessel for a demi-god, or at least something like it, and he’s too human, much too human, in the end, to make it through. 

When his blood touches the ground, it sizzles. Vetinari kneels beside his corpse, and does not say that he died a hero, because he would never insult him that way. From a mountaintop, he looks down and sees the mark scored into the earth, his friend’s body the epicentre.

“This place belongs to Him now, and is protected forever,” says a grag, and Vetinari feels the initial more than hears it.

“A copper, even in death,” Vetinari does not say, for his breath catches in his throat, and some things are beyond words, even for him.

v. Sam Vimes dies at sixty nine, and not in his bed. He dies with a crossbow bolt in his heart, stepping clean between the Patrician and certain death, an automatic reflex that he would have done consciously, if that sort of time constraint had left him with the illusion of choice– and perhaps it did, time slowed down so palpably he could count every white eyelash, every thread on Vetinari’s collar. He always knew he would die for this man. He always knew he would die for this city. Same difference.

“Don’t you dare, Sam,” says Vetinari, and Sam opens his mouth to say, oh, piss off–

VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE, says a voice, and two eyes that are not eyes shine like the implosion of galaxies in the dark.

“What?” says Sam, which is odd, without a mouth.

YOU ARE THE KINGKILLER, says Death, THE LEADER OF THE REVOLUTION. WE HAVE MET BEFORE. DO YOU NOT REMEMBER?

“And now I’m sodding dead!” says Sam, “Don’t tell me Heaven’s bloody real. Another king, all I fucking need.”

THERE IS NO HIERARCHY IN WHAT COMES AFTER, says Death, and Sam smiles.

“Finally,” says Sam, that great weight slipping away for the very first time, “Well then. I might get a bloody rest.”

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after a suicide attempt in 2016

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i feel like no one really wants to hear that sleep/exercise/nutrition/hydration are major factors in treating mental health issues bc we’ve all talked to that person who thinks your depression would be cured by one good session of goat yoga or whatever but unfortunately they do help and i’m chronically annoyed about it