[ SECRET POST #3257 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3257 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.


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03. [SPOILERS for Downton Abbey Season 6]



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04. [SPOILERS for Mockingjay Part 2]



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05. [SPOILERS for Undertale]



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06. [WARNING for rape]



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07. [WARNING for rape]



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08. [WARNING for child abuse]

[King Lear]


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09. [WARNING for abuse]

[Tales From the Borderlands]


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10. [WARNING for abuse, PTSD]

[Jessica Jones]









Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #465.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Weekend Plans

[(Anonymous)]

Ergot (and related fungi).

Did you know that ergot--its scientific name is Claviceps purpurea--belongs to a genus that is kissing cousins with Cordyceps (the zombie ant fungus)? Other fungi in the same family parasitise other fungi (including ergot, which is parasitised by a fungus called Tyrannocordiceps fratricida.)

And some have developed this very interesting defensive mutualism with different grasses, where the fungus is incorporated into the tissues of the grass and transmitted to the succeeding generations of the grass in their seeds. Instead of being weakened or killed by the fungus, the grass is more vigorous, and the alkaloids produced by the fungus deter herbivores. One fungus of this sort causes any animal that eats the grass to stagger around as if it's drunk; another sends any horse that grazes on it to sleep.

(Apparently, certain native peoples of South America, when at war, would trick their enemies into camping in areas where there was a lot of this grass. The enemies would let their horses graze, and then they would be stuck on foot while the horses slept it off.)

Plus, there is a persistent argument that the Salem witch panic was caused by ergot, which is probably false, but even our instructor repeated it!

Re: Weekend Plans

[kaijinscendre]

Ah! I did not know the Salem thing was false. That is what I have most of my knowledge of ergot from (I've listened to podcasts on it).

Re: Weekend Plans

[(Anonymous)]

I'm extremely skeptical of it because while Linnda Caporael, the first person to propose it, pretty much moved on after she published the original paper in 1976, Mary Matossian took it up in a book called Molds, Epidemics, and History whose argument was basically Everything Is Due To Ergot.

The European witch craze? Ergot.

The Black Death? Ergot. (Well, specifically the high mortality from the Black Death.)

The Great Awakening (a religious revival in the American colonies in the mid-1700s)? Ergot.

The more she harps on it, the more I doubt. I mean, when a couple of teenage girls in Boston became "afflicted" (one of them after pissing off Sarah Good), Cotton Mather took them into his household to observe them. Their symptoms continued for months, and I doubt they would have been eating bread made from ergotized rye in Mather's house.