Dumpster Fire Time @dumpsterfiretime - Tumblr Blog

The thing is, even if you were lucky and your parents taught you how to clean, they probably didn't teach you how to clean the stuff you clean stuff with, like brushes, mops, sponges, rags, and so on. Or how to clean your cleaning appliances, like a dish washer, clothes washing machine, and clothes dryer and its ducts (if you have a ducted dryer), or a carpet cleaner, vacuum, Or how to clean up clean messes, like spilled bleach or detergent.

My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.

All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.

I'm going to reblog this post with resources for learning how to clean things and how to clean cleaning things (I'm not at my desk at the moment). If you have any favorites, please feel free to add them in too!

rogue-ai-cat

I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.

He doesn't mention though that the toilet seat comes off. I take my toilet seat off to clean under the hinges and clean the seat more thoroughly once a quarter.

rogue-ai-cat

This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.

I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.

I'm also going to recommend KC Davis' book "How To Keep House While Drowning"

rogue-ai-cat

This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.

The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.

The second is a half hour deep dive on dishwashers and detergents. The short form of that is you shouldn't need to pre-rinse anything, detergent pods are overpriced and can cause problems, some dishwashers have a filter in the bottom that needs to be cleaned (but most don't), run your sink until the water is HOT before starting your dish washer, and put a little detergent in the pre-rinse dispenser when you're washing extra dirty dishes (or on the inside of the door if your dishwasher doesn't have a pre-rinse dispenser).

rogue-ai-cat

Favorite Scrub Brushes + How to Clean Them. The right tools for cleaning tasks make all the difference! Scrub brushes are great tools and it

Here's a blog post about scrubbing brushes and how to clean them.

And a video for all cleaning tools, including scrub brushes. This video does use bleach. I'll try to find some alternatives to that.

rogue-ai-cat

How to clean a front load washer (with bleach). This should be done monthly or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

With expert tips and tricks for all types of washers.

How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

Regular cleaning of a top-load washing machine will prolong the life of the appliance and leave your laundry cleaner and brighter.

How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

rogue-ai-cat

This video is for pet owners.

These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.

A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.

This channel is gold. There's tutorials for cleaning EVERYTHING on there. Just go subscribe!

fivekoboldsinacoat

Gonna throw another potential resource at the end of this very long list, which may be potentially helpful for others like me who loathe videos. It's... the weirdest thing that has genuinely been helpful to me in housekeeping. Absolutely full of useful advice, and bizarrely still relevant in large part. (Though, caveat, research ANYTHING to do with chemicals or cleaning products more complicated than vinegar + lemon + water for modern information.)

It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).

The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".

My ADHD-having ass could cry.

aroace-ryland-grace

Hi guys! I thought I should just share my whole mini little library of Project Hail Mary-related things so they're all in one place:

It includes:

A telesync of the movie (with English soft subtitles)

A digital copy of the movie (with occasional Russian hard subtitles)

My transcript of the movie (more on that here)

Audio recordings of the movie

A PDF of the book

An EPUB of the book (for e-readers)

The full audiobook

A copy of Andy Weir's doc on Eridians

A copy of Andy Weir's spreadsheet on Astrophage physics (among many other things!)

A draft of the screenplay for the film from 2022

An audio recording of the director's commentary

My transcript of the director's commentary

The telesync subtitle SRT file

The audiobook, audio recordings, and commentary all have their properties programmed so they (should) work just like songs with a track number, album cover, artist, and so on if you download them.

There are two audios of the movie, one is the entire film untouched and one is that same audio cut up and broken down into separate scenes for convenience.

Additionally, there are two versions of the transcript, one with time stamps that match the audio and one without. The time stamps (+ their titles from the audio) are outlined in that version, so if you double-click on that tab or click "show outline," they'll all show up and you can pick a specific scene.

The first few seconds of the commentary are missing unfortunately as my US friend who was kind enough to record it for me had some technical difficulties at the start, but the commentary starts around the shot of the robot arms right before the shot of "good luck!" written on Grace's sleeping bag. It's also about 40-45-ish seconds behind the audio recording if you can only listen.

There's also a google doc with some instructions to follow if any of the files aren't working, which usually happens when too many people try to access or download something at the same time.

As always, if anything's not working right or you notice any mistakes in anything, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as I can!

aroace-ryland-grace

Apologies for the long and unexpected delay, but the transcript for the director's commentary is finished and now available in the drive!

There are two different versions of the transcript, the first is made to listen along to the commentary, while the second is more intended to be read on its own. The first is a direct transcription of everything that's said (an attempt, at least), while the second is slightly cleaned up for easier reading, meaning things like jumbled sentences and stuttering were removed or reorganised, but nothing has been actually paraphrased or anything. Both are broken down into different scenes based on how their conversation goes, and the listening version includes timestamps.

Like I said in the movie transcript's post, I am not a professional transcriber and this is just something I did for fun, so it is definitely not perfect. Additionally, there are a few spots throughout the transcript where I couldn't figure out exactly what they were saying, mostly because there wasn't enough diction, and those are all marked with a question mark in brackets. So if you know what they're saying in those spots (or any other spots I may have misheard without realising it), please let me know and I'll correct it!

homunculus-argument

I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.

The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.

alexaloraetheris

Ooooh you reminded me of that protocol I wrote about how to reinvent penicilin with only alchemical tools. You know. Just in case I did end up dumped in the past and needed a stable income.

i-have-n0-idea-what-im-d0ing

what's the protocol?

alexaloraetheris

I am so glad you asked! I unfortunately lost the protocol because it was probably on my laptop, but I remember the broad strokes. So! In case anyone does end up stuck in the middle ages and can find a kindly old alchemist willing to lend you his gear, here's the revamped Penicilin (Re)Discovery Protocol!

0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.

We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.

Find some Penicillium mushrooms!

Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.

First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.

Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?

So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:

Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.

2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms

Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.

First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:

Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)

1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)

1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)

If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.

Pinch of salt

1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)

3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)

Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.

Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.

When you're done, you should have something like this:

Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.

Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!

You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).

3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms

If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:

Well, realistically, it will look something like this:

We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.

IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.

Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.

Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.

The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.

4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom

We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.

(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)

You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.

Ideally you get something like this.

This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.

Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.

Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:

This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.

So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.

The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.

Since I lost the original protocol I'm going to need to do research all over again how to do that with alchemy equipment (or at least a microbrewery), so that will be in the next installment.

ospreyonthemoon

Fascinating.

impulsivelycontentious

You have ro ferment that shit, it's actually pretty hellish and difficult.

The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html

Being real inventing penicillin is off my list of historical time travel shit to do and I'm going to be inventing a washing machine instead.

headspace-hotel

I have no idea how accurate all of this is, but I'm reblogging it just for the demonstration of how HARD this medicine stuff was to figure out.

I'm uncertain whether glass of the sort you would need would even be available. That seems like the most difficult part of this process. You might get stuck with pewter, which is, you know, lead.

downtroddendeity

Meanwhile I'm over here going, "Wait, what do you mean 'if you're in a place where soap hasn't been invented'? If they haven't invented soap, invent soap, that's SO MUCH EASIER than the rest of this."

downtroddendeity

HOW 2 INVENT SOAP:

INVENT TALLOW. Get some animal fat. Chop it up, add some salt and water, and cook it for a few hours. Scoop the melted liquid fat off the top and filter it through something to get any meaty bits that might still be in there out. When it cools down, it will turn back into solid fat, and you can repeat the process as many times as you want to get more non-fat stuff out.

INVENT POTASH. Fill a container with wood ashes (hardwoods work best). Then pour in rain water. Then let it soak. After a while, collect the liquid, which will now be a horrible caustic alkali solution. If you dry this out, you'll get crystals of potassium hydroxide, but you don't really need to, because the next step is...

MELT THE TALLOW AND PUT SOME POTASH WATER IN IT. This will be stupid hot and there will visibly be chemistry happening. Stir it up good for a while while absolutely not getting it on your hands.

Congratulations, you have now invented soap. Aren't you glad you did this part before you tried the penicillin?

downtroddendeity

I have no idea why I'm thinking about this post again, but I am, so even without penicillin, some thoughts about how a modern person could be the past's greatest doctor* with minimal effort:

Sanitation: besides knowing about washing your hands, you know to boil water or filter it through several layers of cloth to make it safer to drink. My previous reblog said how to invent soap, and distilled alcohol is also pretty easy to invent- you heat an alcoholic liquid like wine in a container that's sealed other than a pipe/tube in the lid, which is attached to another container that isn't heated, allowing the steam to condense. The first little bit that comes out will be methanol and some other horrible poisons, but after that you'll get mostly ethanol, because alcohol evaporates much more easily than water.

Cholera and dysentery: what actually kills people with these is dehydration, which means even cholera is very treatable even without antibiotics. The most important thing is making sure the sick person drinks as much clean, boiled water as they can keep down and gets some electrolytes and calories in there too, such as by drinking broth, thin soup, or water some sort of grain has been boiled in.

Scurvy: you know this one. Cooking destroys a lot of Vitamin C, and copper stops it from being absorbed. Besides the kind of fruits and vegetables you might think of, rose hips have a crazy amount of Vitamin C, tea brewed from pine needles is pretty good for it, and while there isn't very much of it in meat, some Arctic expeditions managed to recover from scurvy by eating nearly-raw seal.

Rickets: Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe sometimes calcium. You can literally cure the first one with sunlight.

Goiter: often iodine deficiency. Seaweed and eggs are the foods of choice here.

Malaria: quinine is extracted from the bark of a tree native to Peru, which Europeans were smart enough to immediately bring over to Spain when they found out about it. Enough cloth to make mosquito nets would probably be way too expensive to be practical for normal people in most of the world until the Industrial Revolution, but at least you know.

Smallpox: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SMALLPOX, SMALLPOX IS TERRIFYING, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A DISEASE TO KILL AS MANY HUMANS ON THE PLANET AS POSSIBLE IT WOULD BASICALLY JUST BE SMALLPOX. It's insanely contagious and frequently fatal, and you probably aren't vaccinated. However, you can become inoculated, and developing a true smallpox vaccine is way easier than discovering penicillin. People in China were practicing variolation for centuries before it became a thing in Europe- it consists of taking a scab from someone with smallpox, keeping it in a bottle for a week or two to make sure most of the virus is dead, and then having someone inhale the dust or using a needle to prick their arm and get a little of it into the wound. This generally gives them a mild case, which still isn't a good time, but will make them resistant to getting the real thing afterward. Vaccination is the same procedure, but using the much less deadly relative cowpox, which is why the word "vaccine" is from the Latin vacca, "cow." The vaccine that was in use when smallpox was declared extinct in the wild was developed by deliberately passing cowpox between test animals to get it to mutate and selecting for the mildest strains.

Syphilis: the only good treatment for syphilis is antibiotics. However, syphilis is such a bastard that there are a couple of bad treatments that are, somehow, not the worst thing you can do. Insanely enough, this is the one time that mercury actually sometimes helps- like with chemotherapy for cancer today, if you catch it early and poison the bejeezus out of it, sometimes the disease will die before the person does (it's useless once the syphilis goes systemic, though). The other most effective treatment for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin was- I shit you not- giving the person malaria by injecting them with blood from a sick person. Malaria causes extremely high fevers, which kill off a lot of the syphilis bacteria. The drawbacks to this one are, uh, pretty self-evident.

As a bonus, since you probably know how a lot of these diseases are spread, you know when it's worth bothering with the full plague doctor getup! No need to bother when it's cholera or syphilis! But don't skip the mask if there's actual plague though, it's not just the fleas, plague can spread through the air and it can literally kill you in under 24 hours, don't fuck around with the plague-

*Besides time period, how much you would have it made as Superdoctor would also depend heavily on where you land. The Islamic world and China, for instance, were both working off fundamentally incorrect models of health and disease but were still generally a lot more competent than European medicine until the last century or two, while there are Inca skulls with marks from healed brain surgeries from 400 years before European doctors started to consider whether they should maybe consider washing their hands before sticking them in open wounds.

raz0rw1r3

guy(s) who doesn't know he's plural yet:

yeah i just rlly like stories where someone has another person/personality inside that's a manifestation of their anger and stress. I just relate to it a lot. for no reason. I also like headcanoning characters as systems. for no reason.

poliwhirl-plurplexed

They need to add an update to plurality where you have multiple bodies and your singlet friends can see them

pluriwinklepaints

guy(s) who don't know they're plural yet voice:

"Yeah I just really like possession stories. Specifically one where the possessor isn't just completely evil and maybe didn't even intend to possess the other guy and/or can't leave the body, I extra like when the possessions become a reocurring thing to the point of it just being normal and the characters compromise and share a life together, and all of the character's friends also become friends with the possessor and everyone's happy"

life-in-a-monospace-typeface

Basic Celestial Navigation is Hilariously Easy

I recently learned how to find North using the sky, and it turns out to be so easy that I feel stupid for not learning much earlier. Perhaps you would like to learn too! It could save your life in some unlikely scenario, I guess, but actually in everyday situations it's just pretty handy to be able to look at the sky for a couple of seconds and tell which direction you're facing.

I’m not any kind of expert at this, I just learned how to do it recently. I don’t know the proper names for things, and lots of the things I say are going to be technically not quite correct. But I’m not trying to teach astronomy, I just want to quickly find which way I’m facing, and these simplifications work very well for that.

Also, this whole thing will assume you're at a moderate northern latitude, which you very likely are if you’re in Europe or the USA.

How to start

Say you’ve got a clear night with a half moon in the sky.

Getting a rough direction with the Moon is extremely easy - all you need to know is that the terminator (the line between light and dark) points south. So you just take that terminator line and mentally extend it down to where it hits the horizon, and that's approximately South.

That’s close enough for the girls I go out with.

If it’s not a perfect half moon, so the terminator line isn't straight, you just kind of take the direction that the curved line is facing, overall. You basically want the tangent at the middle of the terminator. Or if you prefer, you can draw the line connecting the top and the bottom of the terminator, which ends up being the same angle. These images show both options:

With a crescent moon this is even easier, you can just take the line between the “tips of the horns” of the crescent.

Extend that line down to the horizon, and that’s approximately South.

Now, if the moon is very low in the sky, so the terminator is at a steep angle, then this method will be extra inaccurate. But that's ok, because if the moon is that low, you don't really need to trace the terminator line to find south, because you know that the Moon just rose or is about to set, so the moon itself is basically East or basically West, and you can tell which by looking at the terminator.

If that doesn’t feel obvious, that’s perhaps to be expected, and I should tell you about The Ecliptic.

Basically all the big stuff in the solar system is always on more or less the same plane. So the Sun, the Moon, and all the planets are always found close to a single line, which crosses the sky from East to West. If you’re near the equator it goes almost straight overhead, but at moderate northern latitudes, like you probably live at, it’s tilted over pretty far to the south. So the Sun and the Moon will rise more or less due East, be more or less due South at their highest point, and set more or less due West.

That means if the Moon is just above the horizon, like in this example, we can look at the angle of the terminator and see it’s tilted way over to the right, so we know South is to our left, and the Moon must be about to set in the West.

(In fact I got this from sky visualisation software, so it’s helpfully showing us where West is anyway)

Another way to think about this is: The Moon moves through the sky in a direction roughly perpendicular to the terminator. So we can take our terminator line and draw a line at right angles to that, and that’s roughly the path the Moon is travelling along:

We can follow that line to the horizon and see where the Moon will set, i.e. basically due West. So the Moon’s terminator points South, and kind of acts like the vertical line of a T shape, with the arms of the T pointing towards East and West.

Hopefully you can convince yourself that all this makes sense by thinking about shining lights on basketballs and so on, but you can also just use the method without being able to visualise clearly why it works.

All of this is approximate and simplified - the Moon’s orbit is actually 5 degrees off the Ecliptic, and the Ecliptic is 23 degrees off the Celestial Equator, and so on. None of it really lines up and you’ll often be off by like 40 degrees, but I don’t care. This method is extremely quick and it's usually good enough, especially in cities laid out on a grid, where you only need to get it to within 90 degrees.

And if you want more accuracy, this is still a good thing to start with, because if you can quickly find roughly-South, that makes it much quicker and easier to look roughly-North and locate the stars necessary to pin down exactly-North.

What about the daytime?

Since the Sun follows basically the same path as the Moon, you can also get rough orientation from its location. If it’s low in the sky, it just rose or is just about to set, so you know it’s East or West. You can’t tell which by looking at the Sun itself, since it doesn’t have a neat terminator line like the Moon (and you shouldn’t really look at it anyway), but the neat thing about the Sun is that, unlike the Moon, it always rises in the morning (East) and sets in the evening (West). If it’s the middle of the day it’ll be to the South.

But also, don’t forget about the Moon during daytime! It’s often out during the day. And in fact, it’s often not out at night! Or sometimes it’s out, but it’s Full or New and you don’t have a terminator line to use. You can’t rely on just the Moon, even for coarse orientation. So let’s talk about stars.

Bold Orion, Mighty Hunter

Orion is a lovely constellation that’s very distinctive and easy to spot, and you can use it to find roughly-South very quickly, just like you can with the Moon.

He’s meant to be a hunter, with a belt of three stars, and a sword hanging from it. You had to make your own fun, back in those days.

It’s a sword, ok? He has a sword on his belt.

The point is, the sword points South just like the Moon’s terminator line does. So if you can’t see the Moon, maybe you can use Orion’s sword.

Now we have two ways to quickly find roughly-South, and therefore roughly-North. Let’s get more accurate.

The North Star

The sky provides us with an improbably convenient star called Polaris, which we call The North Star, because it’s almost perfectly over the North Pole.

This location is unique, in that it makes Polaris essentially the single static point that the whole rest of the sky rotates around. For a given latitude on Earth, Polaris is always exactly the same height above the horizon, in exactly the same direction, and that direction is North, to within less than a degree.

It’s also really bright for its region of the sky - there’s no brighter star within like 30 degrees of it.

Polaris is so extremely convenient that I consider it to be (very weak) evidence of a loving god. Finding the exact strength of that evidence, in bits, is left as an exercise for the reader.

So Polaris is an A+ gold star, now all we need is a way to find it.

First off, because it’s always at exactly the same height above the horizon, once you’ve found it a few times it gets easier, because you know where it is vertically. If you’ve also used the Moon or Orion to narrow your search down to like a quarter of the sky horizontally, you can often spot Polaris very quickly.

But it helps a lot to be able to find it using constellations.

Ursa Major

This is the one everyone knows, the Big Bear. People also call it The Big Dipper, The Drinking Gourd, Big Spoon Energy, or The Plough.

Here’s an image from WaddenSky:

To find Polaris, you find the Big Dipper, take the line between the two stars on the end, and extend that line up by about 5 times its length, and there’s Polaris. Easy enough.

The main thing that can make this tricky is, as I said, Polaris is the fixed spot that the whole night sky rotates around, so the Big Dipper could be dipping bigly all over the place. It could be like it’s shown there, it could be almost directly overhead and upside down, it could even be partly below the horizon, and invisible behind the trees:

So, you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Big Frying Pan.

Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia is basically just as good as The Big Dipper when it comes to finding Polaris. She looks like a big M, or a big 3, or W, or E (Σ, really), depending on what orientation she feels like right now. And the nice thing about her is, she’s on pretty much the opposite side from The Big Dipper, so if you can’t see one, you can see the other. Learn how to spot both, and you’re set.

To find Polaris from Cassiopeia, you basically draw a line between the two ends of the zigzag, and make a right triangle twice as long, from the bottom of the 3 (or the right side of the M, and so on).

That’s really all there is to it: find roughly-South using the Moon or Orion, use that to look roughly-North until you either see Polaris itself, or find it using Ursa Major or Cassiopeia, and now you’ve got North to within one degree. Usually takes something like 5 seconds.

And there you have it! Now you can find your bearings quickly and easily using just the sky, no matter what!

Unless it’s cloudy. If it's cloudy you’re fucked.

ao3commentoftheday

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

katri-24

This page is so beautiful and honestly I hope it reaches and helps any new people that are just starting out on Ao3 because it's helping me and I’ve been using the site for 5+ years now

ao3commentoftheday

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

katri-24

This page is so beautiful and honestly I hope it reaches and helps any new people that are just starting out on Ao3 because it's helping me and I’ve been using the site for 5+ years now

thestuffedalligator

If I ever wrote a superhero story I’d want there to be a recurring shitty C-list supervillain in the background whose power was changing something’s colour and all her villainous plots would be colour-themed things like “If the city council doesn’t give me a million dollars, I will turn the city of GREEN Bay into the city of RED Bay!” and she’d turn the Golden Gate Bridge magenta or whatever.

So it’s all low-stakes villainy, but everyone absolutely hates fighting her because her very shitty superpower works really really well, and there are dozens of background characters who’ve fought her that are just permanently green now

thestuffedalligator

#the wildest thing about this is that it COULD be incredibly powerful #you turn solar panels white they aren’t gonna work anymore and that’s gonna fuck up your whole grid on a very Temperature day #you can blind people the same way #turn some water red. make your own murder scene #fuck up traffic and hide warning signs. or fences. or a building #blackmail your local hidden spy facility with neons #absolutely demolish a politician’s career because who can take a bright lime guy seriously? #red tides are devastating for a tourist beach economy #that sort of thing. you get it #but the point is she’s got all the tools and she’s hitting the nail with a wrench for no reason

@hedgewitchnecromancer yes exactly. “You can alter any material on the fly and you’re using it for superpowered vandalism?! You could destroy the environment by changing the colour of chlorophyll!”

“But I don’t want to destroy the environment. I want to turn Yellowstone purple.”

sweetwithheatwriting

@copperbadge

copperbadge

Her normie alter ego works in a children's hospital.

vetchtibbles

oh hey man so is your living weapon single or

heyluchie

Ramen are one of the best confort foods.

Food Baby, my 42 pages, full color zine, is available for individual sale !

Inside you’ll find recipe comics, food related journal comics, eggs adventures and a exclusive introduction comic.

I hope you’ll consider it !

thestuffedalligator

“But I don’t want to destroy the environment. I want to turn Yellowstone purple.”

omicheese

#‘she’s got all the tools and she’s hitting the nail with a wrench for no reason’ is a great way to describe it

machinam0ri

@thicaboi

lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

preview ~

memes!

grungetime-art

I was playing genshin when i got the notification..... ya know what i did?... you know it.

I just love making them and reading this fic.

So here they are

Poor baby, at least he didn't end up in the atrocious side of tor

And here is to our crime fighting duo

I smell a ship brewing

Just sayin

And coup de grâce

Atleast it's ending on a good note

turquoisemagpie

The Voice in the Night

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4 - end)

carnackiardent

A very cool adaptation of the short story by William Hope Hodgson!

I copped my username and blog title from his series of occult detective stories about Carnacki the Ghost Finder, but Hodgson was probably best known for nautical and horror stories, of which "The Voice in the Night" is both. It may be one of his best-known stories - it also inspired the Japanese horror film Matango.

This comic is very cool and really captures the atmosphere of the story.

redstonedust

big fan of characters who look cool and tough and stoic but only because theyre internally thinking "fuckkk what do i say. how do i make friends. they didnt teach me how to do that in sword school."

seat-safety-switch

Like with any hobby, prep in cooking is no fun. Before you can even get to the part where the pan makes cool sizzling noises and good smells, you have to cut up a million billion ingredients and put them somewhere. It's repetitive and boring, which is the greatest sin imaginable in our time. Isn't it time someone fixed prep?

Yeah, I hear you. There's a lot of expensive Silicon Valley companies out there who are willing to send you some pre-chopped ingredients in a box, in exchange for your first-born child. What is implied in all of my questions is the suffix "...for cheap-asses?" I will tell you the secret to cheap-ass ingredient preparation now.

Do you own an apron? Got a bad attitude? Know how to tell the difference between a back door and a front door? Congratulations. You already have everything you need to walk off with a bucket of prepped ingredients from your nearby hotel kitchen's walk-in fridge. Sure, you might not get exactly what you want, because you gotta move fast on this kind of deal, but you'll get something. And boy, it'll be a lot of stuff. Last week I pinched enough mirepoix to make an entire year's worth of French delectables.

Getting in is easy. Just look like you belong there, and that you hate your job. If you're really committed to the bit, you could try burning a few smokes next to the dumpster when the real prep chef is on break. They won't mind, and you can let yourself in right behind them. Swear about the customers!

Next week, we'll tell you how to get free construction materials from the city storage yards with only a high-visibility vest and a clipboard.

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