Chapterhouse

Mukuro Angry

Mukuro point

Mukuro salute

Do your part, troopers!

Her eyes are blue because of a heavy melange addiction.

I'm going to have to make like 100 more of these... Wish me luck!

Maybe I'll write this, maybe I won't...

I'm experimenting with masking and lighting with these pictures. They're for my upcoming one shot collection(?) Children of Doom, which takes place shortly before the second killing game in Heretics of Doom. The picture in the description is Sietch Jabberwock (aka Sietch Despair), where the Museum Despair live on the desert planet Rakistan. I tried to capture the inviting look of a home at night, with the blurry window glow and barely-visible silhouettes. To make this, I first drew the scene normally, then added the blur-glow to the windows, then applied a mask at around 90% opacity. Finally, I used the soft eraser to create the warm glow effect. I hope it doesn't look too bad.

Sietch Jabberwock is carved into sheer rock, rendering it invulnerable to sandworm attacks. It is, located many kilometers southwest of Rakinel, the largest city on Rakistan. It is also east of the Western Dune Sea, where few dare to venture unless they are properly equipped for fear of being consumed by the sandworms that live there. On ceremonial occasions the Museum Despair travel to the Dune Sea to pray to their Divided Goddess.

This is Chiaki Nanami, one of the Museum Despair, performing a ritual with a water basin. Water is very rare in Rakistan, ok? You can see the gray stillsuit mask hanging from her neck as well as part of the suit itself showing through the robes. They are ceremonial in this case, but when out in the desert similar robes are worn to protect the stillsuits and wearers from direct sunlight. Generally, they are made of extremely reflective fabric.

Finally, we have here a mural of a sandworm, the god/goddess that the Museum Despair worship. They believe (correctly) that portions of their leader's consciousness are trapped within the worms, and they often pray to these fragments to grant small wishes, good harvests, and to watch over them and their children.

Here we have Anfash. His real name is actually Leroy LeBlanche, but he hasn't told anybody yet. Nobody knows what he looks like, since his face is permanently obscured by his hoodie and bandana.

The truth is, he wasn't really much of a fascist or an anarchist---he just spent so long fighting for his survival that he got good with weapons and combat. Because everyone around him despised him, he was desperate to lick the boots of Adolfa Hitlero, the Ultimate Fascist, when she showed him even a little affection.

Unfortunately, she took advantage of him and mostly used him as a tool to get rid of her enemies, and made him brand himself as an 'anarcho-fascist' to align with her ideology. After he went to Hope's Peak Academy and befriended Pavel Arkhangelsky, however, he realized the exploitative nature of his relationship and cut ties with Adolfa.

This should be some parable about how centrism is not effective and is a dying form of appeasement to the right, but honestly I just had him die because he was pretty much the only guy with any character development.

Behold, the evidence.

Hey guys, Jonathan12345 here at Chapterhouse again with some good-old fashioned biomed.

If you've paid any attention to medicine in the recent years, you may have have heard of 'superbugs'. These bacteria are resistant to many common antibiotics. If you've ever dug a bit deeper, you might've even heard that bacteria have evolved themselves to be resistant to antibiotics.

This is complete bullshit. Let me explain why.

It's true that many strains of bacteria have resistance to common antibiotics now. However, they didn't consciously choose to evolve resistance--that's not how evolution works. As an example, could you suddenly evolve the ability to fly? I thought so.

The truth behind what happens is that bacteria reproduce so quickly, they accumulate many random mutations fast, some of which are bound to cause resistance to antibiotics. When these antibiotics are used, the bacteria that can't survive die, while the ones with resistance survive and grow more common. This process, natural selection, we touched on in my previous article about evolution.

The idea, now discredited, that beings could choose to evolve, was first proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Now, while we know that his ideas are garbage today, we can't completed discredit him as he lived before Darwin, and still managed to propose a (albeit flawed) theory of evolution.

What Lamarck believed was that animals had an innate desire to become perfect. They would try very hard to get the traits they desired (how they did this was never touched upon), and pass these improved traits to their offspring. Needless to say, this idea is stupid. If you lose an arm to a flying knife, does that mean your children will also be missing an arm? No.

The advent of genetics sealed the fate of Lamarckism. There is simply no way to modify your own genes without relying on tools, so there was no pathway left where Lamarckism would still be feasible.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Lamarckism has survived amid the populace because of its straightforwardness. Just remember that you can never consciously "choose to evolve."

That's all for Chapterhouse today, and as always I'll see you in the next one.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/48500788/chapters/122609341#workskin

I read somebody else's fic, and holy shit it was so much better than mine. I figured the least I could do was make my chapters a bit longer...

Edit: I don't know why you guys hate this so much. I'm not referring to any real world events here, it's part of my danganronpa fanfiction for fucks sake! If I'm gonna get downvoted, at least tell me why!

Duncan tossed Sayori a sword, its blade harmless rubber, while holding one of his own.

"Come on, Sayori. Time for afternoon practice."

"More swordsmanship? I'm not really in the mood for it."

"Not in the mood? If Pavel were here, I'm sure he'd want you to exercise, train, and push yourself to your limits. Isn't that right, Sayori?"

She sighed. "Alright, Duncan. I'll train with you." With some reluctance, she took the sword in her hand and stepped into the training circle they had cleared out. "Nothing too intense, Duncan."

"Since today was so tiring---sure. What say we carry a little conversation, just to make things a bit more interesting?"

She nodded. "Sounds good, Duncan."

They stood in the center of the room for a few moments before Duncan suddenly lunged. Sayori was barely able to deflect his three blows. And he was surely going easy on her.

"Now, what should we talk about?" he asked, as if they were sitting across from each other at a coffee shop instead of being locked in intense combat. "Current events, perhaps?"

Another slash, this time from the left. She could see that he was trying to back her into a corner. She suddenly ducked, knocking his blade preemptively aside, rolling past him quickly. She spun around as fast as she could, just in time to avoid another one of Duncan's carefully placed blows.

"You'll have to be more careful than that, Sayori. If I was trying to kill you, I could easily have!"

She slashed, hoping that he would be distracted. No luck; he deftly sidestepped her attack. She ducked as his sword brushed her hair.

"If it's current events you want, it's current events you'll get. What do you think of the defeatist protests?"

Sayori almost hit the wall to dodge a quick stab to her stomach, her sword nearly jolted out of her hand by the force behind Duncan's attack. Although her arms already felt like lead, Duncan seemed to not even breaking a sweat.

"Defeatism is an idiotic ideology, at least in my opinion. They see the contradictions within capitalism and offer no solutions other than to twiddle their thumbs and wait for their own demise."

After a few more failed attacks from Duncan, she felt confident enough to try her own attack. Mustering her strength, she struck at Duncan several times in different places, hoping to daze him and land a single hit somewhere, although she was aware it was unlikely. Just as she'd expected, Duncan easily moved out of her range, then nearly knocked her over by striking while she was off balance.

"Good. But you'll have to do better than that."

"The defeatists are gaining traction, though. It seems that they've finally seen through the lies, but think that there isn't a world outside of them. You know, they think that all humans are to blame for climate change! That any old factory worker is as much to blame as an oil company executive!"

Duncan was behind her suddenly, in a lightning burst of speed. The blade flickered once, twice, three times. Sayori felt the soft impacts one after the other.

Duncan threw the sword down. "You're getting better. Pavel will be pleased when he finally leaves Hope's Peak."

She sighed and wiped some sweat from her brow. They'd continue this ritual tomorrow.

Let's say that you're tasked with creating a defensive line capable of defending Moscow from attack from the west. Your enemy has access to a million poorly trained soldiers, as well as laser artillery pieces that are powerful enough to turn rocks into plasma in seconds. You have access to around 0.7 million, and you can only use weapons that don't contain advanced electronics (i.e missiles and jammers). How would you go about doing this?

This is for my fanfiction. Somebody needs to design the Kirigiri Line, and I know I'm not doing it.

Hello! I'm the leader of Chapterhouse Command, but you can think of me as Jonathan12345's assistant of sorts. He's all over the place with his works and info posts right now, so we've decided to convert this community into Chapterhouse, dedicated to letting him post--- basically whatever he wants to. And if you enjoy his stuff, then you get to see all of it, too!

The posting schedule will be just a bit erratic, so you might want to get used to that, as well as the wide variety of topics covered. Other than that, welcome to Chapterhouse, and enjoy your stay!

Hey guys, what's up, Jonathan12345 here again with today's topic: Evolution.

Just a heads up, sometimes I want to post stuff related to my own projects, (insert shameless fanfic promotion here), but can't find a good place to do it, or I'm afraid to flood other communities with my shitty content. So I might convert this community into a sort of Chapterhouse, for me to just post random things I'm thinking about or working on.

Anyways, time for the actual content. I know you're all looking forward to it.

I'm sure we've all heard evolution and natural selection thrown around a lot. From its earliest days, it was first denied by right wingers, then appropriated by right wingers to justify killing people they didn't like. So it's probably justified if you feel a bit inclined to dislike the notion of "survival of the fittest". But just because reactionaries use it as a tool doesn't mean it's false! Reactionaries also breathe air, after all.

Evolution and natural selection are not the same thing. Natural selection is a component of evolution, and an important one at that.

To understand natural selection, let's look at an example first. Now, I'm not going to steal any old example off a textbook. No, I'm going to use my own. What say a trip to Arrakis?

As everybody knows, sandworms live deep in the desert, are attracted by vibrations, and can grow to great lengths---up to over 100 meters. Since there's little food in the desert, aside from autotrophy, producing their own food, most of the sandworm diet consists of other sandworms. And what determines who is eaten and who eats? Size, of course.

So in an ideal sandworm population where they mature evenly, the main deciding factor of survival would be pure chance. If you're older, you win. If you're younger, you lose.

But what if some mature faster than others?

These new sandworms, let's call them Shaq Hulud, grow much faster than normal ones. So at a younger age they can compete with normal Shai Hulud easier, and soon phase them out to dominate themselves.

That's natural selection for you.

The "natural" in natural selection refers to the fact that humans are not intervening: nature is doing all of this, making the sandworms as fit for their environment as possible. However, there's not always a happy ending. If a sudden or too catastrophic change occurs, say the surface of Arrakis is transformed in a few hundred years into a green paradise, then it's very likely that the sandworms would all go extinct. ~~unless some were preserved as part of the God-Emperor's body~~

Aside from being big and living in deserts, sandworms are also known to produce the precious spice melange, making them a very attractive target for domestication. Now, as far as I know, nobody has been able to do this, so please don't try this at home, but let's just say it was possible. What would happen?

First of all, the breeders would want increased melange production. So they would, hypothetically, select for worms that produce the most spice. Over generations, these domesticated worms would eventually produce much more spice than their natural counterparts. Although this trait wouldn't necessarily increase their chances of survival in nature, it's desirable for humans, so specimens with this trait are continuously bred. And that's artificial selection, folks.

You may have noticed something by this point: where are these desirable traits coming from?

That's right. All these exotic favorable traits must've come from somewhere. When they weren't advantageous, wouldn't the individuals harboring them die out? And if they were always favorable, why didn't they appear and spread before? They couldn't have come out of thin air, right?

Right?

First of all, less favorable traits don't guarantee extinction, just reduced chances of success. And second, these new traits do indeed come out of thin air. Let me elaborate.

You all know that DNA decides stuff, right? How specifically it does that is a topic for another day. But the main point is that DNA can be damaged. Most of the time this does nothing, very rarely it does horrible things (as anyone who knows someone with or has a genetic disease themself can attest), and very, very rarely it produces a good change. And even then, the change is only spread if it takes place in a reproductive cell, and just the reproductive cell that is used to create offspring. if you look at it this way, it's a miracle that evolution progresses at all!

That's evolution, folks. Natural selection coupled with mutation. And as always, see you in the next one!

Hey guys, what's up, it's Jonathan12345 again, here on BioMed with today's topic: the immune system.

Experts in every field like to overestimate how knowledgeable ordinary people are in their field. And I'm definitely NOT an expert (you should not take anything I say as serious medical advice. TALK TO A DOCTOR IF YOU ARE SICK), but it's still pretty easy for me to overestimate how much people know. So we're just going to assume that you know absolutely nothing about the immune system other than "white blood cells eat bacteria".

The first thing you have to know is that "white blood cells" aren't a thing. There are many types of "white blood cells", but the ones we'll be talking about today are the Innate Immune System.

The innate immune system mainly consists of macrophages and neutrophils, both of which are made in the bone marrow. I'll explain them in more detail now.

Macrophages are very big cells that either flow around in your blood or patrol areas in your body. Their job is to detect and consume any bacteria that are found in their regions. If there are too many bacteria to handle, they'll release signals to call for reinforcements, generally in the form of neutrophils.

Neutrophils are a lot more short lived, since they can cause a lot of damage to tissues once they're activated. Generally, they die off naturally shortly after being born (we're talking about shortly in a human scale here), but while they're alive they are kind of on standby, just waiting to reinforce potential battles.

Now, both of these types of cells resemble large white blobs under microscopes, the main difference being that macrophages are larger. They both resemble amoeba and eat similarly---by engulfing their prey with pseudopods and then digesting them alive. Since they don't have eyes, they instead sense chemicals from bacteria to know which direction to attack.

Here's a video of macrophages in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlPlgGbb2IU

Sometimes, however, infections can get out of hand. In that case, the body needs a bit more than these cells to defeat invaders...

Here's a bonus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FVxYQuLOQ

Hey guys, what's up, it's me again with another episode of Biomed. Today's topic: GMOs.

Now, you've probably heard a lot about GMOs, both good and bad. They've both been flaunted as the key to future human survival, and also denounced as evil "artificial" foods that are somehow lacking in that magical nature spirit energy that organics fans lust after. My personal favorites were a few posts on the Chinese internet about how GMOs were a Japanese plot to destroy the entire population. As for the sources cited, there were none. How utterly surprising.

I'm sure you at least have some knowledge of what GMOs are. At their very heart, they're simply ordinary organisms that have been genetically modified to be better at what humans need them to be good at, like fruits with more berries, for instance.

So, why do people think they're bad? Let's break down the reasons and debunk them one by one, ranging from most sensible to least.

#1: GMOs could give genes to weeds and give them superpowers.

This is definitely a valid concern for traits like pesticide resistance and hardiness, but there's not much we can do about it for the moment. There are potential solutions, however, like making GMO crops only male/female (I know what you're going to say, Jurrasic Park fans. DON'T SAY IT.)

#2: GMOs aren't 100% safe.

Complaints of these types are mainly over concerns about new allergens that may be created. And while that's a valid concern, the idea that we shouldn't use GMOs because there's some danger is complete bullshit. Trains are dangerous. Agriculture is dangerous. Hell, surgery and medicine is dangerous. Did our ancestors stop using any of those things just because of the danger? If anything, GMOs are safer that conventional methods of producing new types of crops because we can easily contain them and control them. And even if there are allergens, they can still be identified through rigorous testing, which all GMOs are subject to. If you're going to make the case that corporations could ignore regulations and produce harmul GMOs... well, they basically do that for everything else now, does that make technology inherently bad?

#3: GMOs aren't natural so therefore they are bad.

Fat is natural, poison is often natural, sugar is natural. Does it make any of these things bad? Quite the contrary, GMOs can make us healthier by controlling what goes into our diet. Not like corporations would care, but...

#4: GMOs will somehow poison us and make the population die.

Stop watching so many scifi horror movies.

And there you have it. I hope I've dispelled some myths, and I also hope you all learned something today. Do make sure to read more, since I'm going off memory here.

Hey everyone, Jonathan12345 here, and today I'd like to discuss a topic that might have been on your minds a year or two ago: what's an mRNA vaccine, and how does it work?

Now before I get into it, I'd just like to say that I created this community because many people to increase public awareness about how these biomedical things all work to prevent the spread of ecofascist "all-naturalism" sentiments. Now, back to the article.

There were a lot of people talking about how these were "experimental," "untested", and "unsafe", which is of course anti-science fearmongering. In fact, mRNA vaccination has been around as a concept since the 1970s. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

To understand how an mRNA vaccine works, we first need to know how a normal vaccine works. As many of you may know, it takes a deactivated virus and injects it into the body, stimulating a reaction and causing immune cells to produce antibodies targeting parts of the virus called antigens. That way, when the real virus attacks, the body comes prepared with antibodies targeting it ready for production.

Some vaccines don't use a dead virus and instead use parts of the virus, directly injecting antigens into the bloodstream. It's important to know that these two methods are not necessarily better or worse, they are simply different strategies with their own drawbacks and strengths.

An mRNA vaccine takes the second concept a bit further by having the body manufacture the antigens, the virus bits, itself using mRNA, which is a long molecule used as basically a photocopy of DNA to direct the construction of proteins. Now, while a foreign substance entering your body and hacking your cellular mechanisms might sound scary, it actually isn't that big of a deal. mRNA is unstable and so naturally decays(hence the storage issues), and only a small fraction of your ribosomes (protein factories) will be making antigens anyways.

Finally, it's important to know that antigens themselves are not harmful. They're simply bits of viruses that are used by the body as markers for targeting, like a missile searching for a specific insignia on enemy vehicles.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and see you in the next post.