I sleep without rhythm. I am safe.
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Gelatin? The stuff used in culture dishes? I’d think that would get nasty pretty quickly…
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So true. Allll in my damn stumps! Hate it.
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My limited experience with culture dishes has involved agar, but, same deal.
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Synthetic. In my head I figured I’ll just order a tub of synthetic gel powder on aliexpress.com, mix it with water and stuff it into the waterbed bag.
Seems that the synthetic stuff is rare and/or expensive. Not at all like in my head…
Bonus learnings tonight: according to Wikipedia, the inventor of the modern waterbed tried Jell-O in a lounge chair, but found it had an “unfortunate tendency to decompose”.
Or maybe really thick oil…
Just because I’ve always though about this doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out…
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That’d be agar, and agar has been selected mostly since it doesn’t decompose as easily as gelatin when exposed to the stuff you usually culture on it (mostly various bacteria, molds, etc). If it did, you’d have a plate of mostly-liquid goo. Not handy for experiments.
You generally have to add some form of nutrient mixture to the agar before pouring to give something for the microbes to live off and multiply on.
That said, there’s a difference between staying solid despite having microbe growth on it, and actually still being ok for use in a water bed / etc. Not sure how it would smell after a while. Microbiology-grade agar isn’t cheap either, not sure if there are cheap-ass grades of it?
How about some product based off petroleum? Ofc might be kinda flammable, not sure the Dept of Fire Safety would take kindly to the production of what is essentially napalm-filled beds.
i wrote a story where the protagonist slept on a “waterbed” of ferromagnetic fluid while wearing snug-fitting nanosensor-perfused pseudo-silk pajamas - a detector array built into the bed frame and canopy tracked movement and position, modulating the fluid accordingly - when she hit the “hay”, she fell asleep instantly and woke up precisely 7 hours later in exactly the same position, feeling frisky as a spring lamb
i personally sleep in a chicken-skin sack on a diving board over a pit of wolverines
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18 bags and waddaya get?
Another day older and deeper in ZZZZZZZ…
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Of course what really makes this bed a good idea is the soporific effect of white marble crystal energy.
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There’s rubbers and latex compound mixes that could probably work pretty well and you wouldn’t have to worry about temperature and rot.
Anyone who has camped on a beach knows that sand makes a crap sleeping surface. Now, if they mixed the sand with silicon oil so it could flow, they might have something…
So, a quicksand bed? Maybe there’s finally a use for those Magic Fingers bed vibrators, for bed sand liquefaction. 
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This stuff?
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And how big is your fridge?
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They do make gel wheelchair cushions, made of some kind of permanent gel that doesn’t mold or deteriorate fast. You’d just need a lot of them.
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Did you get that at Mattress Discounters?
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Yes! The cheap version is sold for cooking. I buy some every so often from a Vietnamese market the next town over. In southeast Asia agar has traditionally been used as a food thickener the way gelatine is in the US. It is available in many forms such as powder, pellets, and strips. I usually buy it as unprocessed dry seaweed (aka kanten), it dissolves when boiled in water.
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Re: alternate waterbed fillings. Maybe petroleum jelly! Or the vegetable based version, the Crisco bed, so it doesn’t break down the waterbed bladder.
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(My search history now includes “sex lube barrel”.)
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Yeah, I was thinking that too. You’d need four or five 55 gallon containers for a king size bed if you’re using a conventional waterbed bladder. Hopefully you wouldn’t need something so big.
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