fanfic: this character has had several bottles of hard liquor and they’re just slurring their speech slightly and for some reason are not in the hospital with alcohol poisoning
me: ….you’ve literally never had a drink in your life have you
very good point.
Alcohol For the Non-Drinking Fanfic Writer, a primer by me
There’s a shit ton of variability in response to alcohol depending on body mass, history of drinking (your liver can upregulate the CYP450 enzyme responsible for metabolizing alcohol but only to a certain point; chronic alcoholics hit a point where their livers are so trashed they lose this and go back to getting drunk off small amounts of alcohol), and ethnicity (people of East Asian descent are more likely to lack a critical enzyme for breaking down one of the metabolic steps in the degradation of ethanol and are stuck in the shittiest part of it, with flushing and nausea), and other factors.
But if I had to guesstimate for writing:
1 drink (a tall glass of beer, a can of beer, or a shot of hard alcohol in a cocktail or alone): are you a burly dude? you may or may not feel it. are you a tiny lady? you will probably notice it.
2 drinks: burly dude may or may not be noticing it. tiny lady like me: this is a sweet spot where you’re talkative but not drunk. (Note: people don’t go from zero to “so drunk you remember nothing/are profoundly disinhibited.” There’s a lot of ground to cover in between.)
4 drinks: burly dude still feeling it, tiny lady ready to FUCKING FIGHT YOU
5 drinks: burly dude, slow down, buddy, you gonna polish off that six-pack by yourself? That’s going to hurt in the morning. Tiny lady: oh my GOD stop. Go to bed.
This is where we draw the cut-off for a “binge,” if you were wondering. More than this and you’re officially binge-drinking, where your odds of serious harm go up sharply. From alcohol, but also from the bad decision dinosaur that plagues you when you binge-drink.
a fifth of anything by yourself: Sir. Sir, can you hear me? Sir, I need you to open your eyes. Squeeze my fingers. Sir, you’re in the emergency room.
Splitting a bottle of wine between two adults: generally like three drinks each, you’ll feel it but you’ll survive. (A bottle of wine between three adults: usually not quiiiiiite enough.)
An entire bottle of wine by yourself: oh, so you enjoy suffering?
Other Fun Medical Alcohol Facts: high-proof alcohol like vodka will temporarily paralyze your pyloric sphincter, so the alcohol can’t get into your gut for about twenty minutes. Then, when it DOES get into your small intestine, enjoy getting uncomfortably drunk too fast.
Alcohol is a zero-order metabolizer: that means that nothing on Earth can sober you up except time*, and the time it takes is linear, directly related to how much you drank. Most of us can clear about a drink an hour, so if you’re drinking slowly you can stay roughly sober all day. Most of us don’t drink that slowly. Hangovers are made awful by a metabolic intermediate (literal acid in your blood!!!! it’s so shitty!!!!!!!) that makes you nauseated and feel super gross, and not every drinking episode will lead to a hangover, and severity of hangover varies greatly by person and amount drunk.
So please never write someone having coffee to “sober up.“ Now they’re drunk AND they can’t sleep. Bad combo. Sucks for driving. Splashing cold water on your face? No. Amphetamines? Good Lord what’s wrong with you. Look, the room’s gonna spin, you fucked up your endolymph in your semicircular canals, deal with it. You can partially override that with proprioceptive feedback–keeping one foot on the floor to get tactile input–but it’s just gonna suck for a while.
The variability in capacity is real; my aunt-in-law, who is roughly my size, can drink me under the table easily. She’s a high-powered business executive who has martinis with lunch. I tried to keep up with her once and had to call in sick. So you don’t HAVE to write a character having a “normal” alcohol tolerance, but don’t get into “yep, definitely alcohol poisoning” territory, please.
This has been Please Don’t Show Up In My Emergency Room, I Hate Getting Barfed On by your local friendly medical trainee.
*this is technically not true, but no substance you can get your hands on will do it. hmu if you want to hear the story of the EtOH receptor antagonist andwhy it never went to market, what with all the dying.
what’s the EtOH receptor antagonist???
okay whew. here we go. there has been a LOT more interest in this than I was expecting (I was expecting none, to be clear), and it has been approx. 8 billion years since I was in undergrad, which is the last time I can reasonably claim to have been CURRENT on Neuro research. (I did my master’s at an institution that does not have what one might call a robust Neuro department and mainly did Stats.) So if a real live Neuro person comes on here and contradicts me, you should probably believe them.
BUT. Here is the story, as I recall it:
Alcohol, or, as we fancy-schmancy-pantsy medical types like to call it to distinguish it from the bajillion other alcohols out there (”alcohol” describes a general type of molecule in chemistry, not the good ol’-fashioned Get You Drunk molecule) ethanol, abbreviated EtOH, is what’s generally called a “sedative-hypnotic.” What that means is that it doesn’t work on opioid receptors, it doesn’t work on cannabinoid receptors. It does stuff to your GABA receptors–GABA being the major inhibitory neurotransmitter–and it also binds to other stuff. We still don’t have its actions in the brain fully mapped. But we know, and we’ve known for a while, that it does stuff to GABA receptors.
A major pharmaceutical company developed an honest-to-God antagonist. If you’re not a pharm person, you may be going, “a what now?” First point: damn near everything your brain does is determined by neurotransmitters and the receptors that love them. Neurotransmitters interact with their receptors in a variety of ways, with a HUGE variety of end results. Humans love jamming other chemicals that are not neurotransmitters into their receptors. Why do opioids work? Because they mimic NTs we make ourselves. Why does cannabis get us high? Because it mimics endogenous (”originating inside”, self-made) NTs. Manmade molecules that alter us are hijacking built-in systems. Don’t even get me started on how fucking bananas cool it is that neurons can adapt to neurotransmitter levels, and in a super awesome sci-fi-like variety of ways. Take a Neuro class! Take five! Take seventeen! Most fun I ever had was in a Neuro lab.
So what’s an antagonist? It’s something that, one way or another, makes it so the NT can’t do its thing at the receptor.
The line of thinking went, if we can keep ethanol from doing its thing at the GABA receptor, we can make people sober again. They can drink and then take a pill and be sober. Wouldn’t that be AMAZING? Wouldn’t that be lucrative? These are questions that drug companies think about a LOT.
So they made the chemical! Its name is
Ro15-4513. You can Google it and get a WAY less interesting description of what went down. But how my professor explained it to us is like this:
It works. It’s an ethanol antagonist at the GABA receptor. You take it and it blows the ethanol off the receptor and you’re sober. And… because humans are awful, you get drunk again. You take another pill. You’re sober again. The time that pill is active is less than the time it takes your body to metabolize ethanol, so you’ve still got all that ethanol swishing around in your system waiting to murder you via aspirating your own vomit the hot second it wears off, but by God, you’re sober.
Except, as mentioned, the GABA receptor is not the only place where ethanol does stuff. One of the effects it has, since it’s such a teeny tiny molecule, is fucking with the lipid bilayer that forms the bulk of your cell membrane. If you’re a Neuro person, you’re getting cold chills right about now, because the only reason neurotransmission works is the properties of the lipid bilayer. You have to be able to transmit electricity down the axon of the neuron to generate an action potential. The lipid bilayer is what allows you to do that.
The pill does nothing for that. So if you take enough of the pill, and keep drinking, there comes a point where you’ve fucked the lipid bilayer beyond repair. You can’t transmit messages. Your brain doesn’t remember how to tell your body to do things like breathe, or not have seizures. And you die!
So, in summary, we have a pill that could make you a responsible designated driver, but actually fucking kills you because people have no self-control.
Moral of the story: Neuroscience Is Super Fun!!!!! It was my gateway drug into medicine. I would never have gone to medical school if it weren’t for my Behavioral Neuroscience professors.
today on: humanity’s hubris has led to so many things being bad when they were designed to be good
I saw EtOH antagonist and immediately knrw where thay was going.
Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year old Black man from Mali, without hesitation
scaled four stories of a Paris building to save a toddler facing certain death. Mamoudou is an undocumented immigrant. He knew getting caught would mean deportation.
But instead, France has a new hero. President Macron thanked him, granted him French citizenship plus a job at the French fire brigade.
Online 3D experiment by Ikaros Kappler which is described as a “Extrusion/Revolution Generator” ….
Created with three.js, you can alter the bezier curves and angle of the form, and is designed with 3D printing in mind (models can be exported and saved, as well as calculated weight in silicone).
Artsy depression: haunted eyes, good at art, emo hair and eyeliner on point
Actual Depression: bloodshot eyes, no longer trust themselves with pencils, has not showered in five days
Quirky OCD: organized books, clean room, color coordinated outfits
Actual OCD: Intrusive thoughts, flipping the light switch 8 times so you don’t stab your brother, picking holes in your skin
Cute eating disorders: Slim trim and beautiful, shyly refusing a second helping, dancer aesthetic
Actual eating disorders: Puffy cheeks and eroded teeth from excessive vomiting, hair growing over your freezing body and refusing to eat carrots because they’re too high in carbs
Adorable anxiety: just a smol bean, soft, must be protected from the world
Actual anxiety: crying so hard you throw up, shaking, losing sleep over a period after the “okay”
RPG PTSD: flashbacks, vietnam, u don’t know what i’ve been through kiddo
Actual PTSD: Buying your first pregnancy test at twelve, flinching at high fives, i can’t feel my hands where am I what year is it
Cartoon ADHD: look a squirrel, something shiny, fidgety loveable bufoon
Actual ADHD: rereading the same page over and over because it doesn’t make sense, hasn’t done the laundry in four months, hyperfocusing on a mushroom knowing you have work to do
stop making terrifying realities seem cute. it’s disrespectful for those of us who are actually struggling
I hope you don’t mind, but I slowed the gif down because that is a FANTASTIC move.
The sword clearly cuts his wrist and waist. I mean he took the guys sword away, sure, but also fucked up his own ability to fight at the same time. It’d be one thing if he was wearing armor, but this is like a dueling thing.
I think you give too much credence to a Sword’s ability to cut. This is from the manual I practice, “Il Fior di Battaglia,” “The Flower of Battle,” by Fiore dei Liberi. I have performed this maneuver, and I’ve gotta say, when done right, it feels good.
Point being, if you do it right, when you pivot around your guard and bring the pommel around the blade, your wrist does come into contact with the edge, but there is no sliding motion, and it’s that sliding motion that causes a blade to slice. You pivot, pull against the blade, and it goes flying as your wrist pulls away from the edge.
I’ve never made a blade go flying so far as the guys in this video, but even if I did, the blade doesn’t have the right kind of leverage and power behind it to cut into his waist there. It would strike him, and he might feel it, but I doubt it would even scratch his clothes.
FantasyBoudicca 