excalculus

machines and monsters

[excalculus]

I've been here for a long time and will probably continue to be here until it actually 404's. That being said we've been getting concerning news about both our glorious CEO and tumblr's long-term prospects for years now, so I'm setting up some alternate options to try out. Some other places to find me if tumblr goes down for good:

Wordpress blog - made this back around the time of the NSFW ban for updated edits of my longer biology posts, which I... never fully finished doing. Oops. Given the current problems are Automattic related, I no longer consider this to be a fully separate backup and may or may not continue to work on it.

Dreamwidth (excalculus) - newly made and currently blank, but likely this is where longer form things will be posted in the future.

Bluesky (excalculus) - also newly made and currently blank.

Mastodon - I'm still looking at servers but will be making an account soon. I'm going to be trying both this and bluesky for shorter stuff and socializing.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sam Handwich.

[sufficientlylargen]

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

[zooperdoopers]

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

[sufficientlylargen]

Oh, wary dell vone

[zooperdoopers]

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))

[ahedderick]

This is the most beautiful scientific diagram I've ever seen.

Also a great example of why pink is a tint of red, but also a completely different color. Erbium? Neodymium? So beautiful.

[excalculus]

It's pretty common knowledge that uranium glass fluoresces green under UV light, but did you know neodymium glass has a color change effect? It's a bit similar to alexandrite in that depending on the light source (sunlight vs. fluorescent lighting indoors for example) it can go from looking pink-purple to blue.

[image from here]

Also this is why some colors of glass are more expensive - not all of the metals are rounding errors when it comes to cost. You want that particular shade of red, you're paying for the gold involved. There are really neat things you can do with silver too.

Also also unless you go to great lengths to remove all traces of iron, your glass will have a faint green tint. In most applications, this doesn't matter. If you care a lot about accurately transmitting color, it does. Hence (among other things) really hardcore aquarium hobbyists paying extra for tanks made of low-iron glass.

[excalculus]

Tumblr likes the Amerigo Vespucci, right?

[literallymechanical]

"Reviewer 2 wants better citations" moodboard

[literallymechanical]

I have appeased Reviewer 2!!!

[excalculus]

congratulations, and fuck Reviewer 2

[excalculus]

Work's going great, we're about to go back in on the chemical warfare and it's probably going to fail again.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

This is a nice sign to look at. 10/10 for composition.

he looks so confident

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

don’t give me ideas

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

some design concepts

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

minor arcana concepts

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

Yes, the aces are zeros. Deal with it.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

I'm nearly done with the first draft-- I just have to figure out what the face cards should be for the swords

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

I think I should write a guidebook to go along with it.

I know nothing about tarot, so it'll just be giving the names of the symbols, giving explanations of what the symbols literally mean, and giving examples of symbolism-rich objects/substances they could apply to

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

YOU CAN NOW PURCHASE THE PRINTABLE PDF ON ITCH.IO!

Hazard Tarot by Organical Mechanical

WARNING! These cards are dangerously cool!

No guidebook yet, but hopefully I'll get around to it.

Please make me aware of any errors you encounter while printing so that I can fix them!

[seabeck]

I don’t know about kink at pride but you know where there shouldn’t be kink? my fucking hoses

[excalculus]

my vacuum tubing...

[excalculus]

nice special defense stat! would be a shame if something happened to it

Scarlet: It controls flames burning at over 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. It casually swims through the sea of lava it creates by melting rock and sand.

Violet: The envy accumulated within curved beads that sparked multiple conflicts has clad itself in fire and become a Pokémon.

(Probably no one will ever recognize this in the wild but I'm having fun so too bad.)

[sexhaver]

in Boston, they call potstickers "peking ravioli" to not confuse the Italians. this sounds like a shitpost but it's literally true

[literallymechanical]

Nearly got in trouble at work once after I moved out of Boston because I mentioned Peking ravioli and people thought I was some sort of esoteric sino-italophobic bigot. Had to frantically google pictures of menus to prove my innocence

[excalculus]

I'll raise you at least a few places in Philadelphia labeling banh mi as Vietnamese hoagies.

[excalculus]

"your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could" except instead of dinosaurs it was trying to get pawpaw seeds from the one half-squashed fruit I was given last year to germinate

I got 4 of the 9 to wake up after cold stratification and they're all making true leaves at this point so they should make it, but I have no outdoor space. These are going to be trees. Why the fuck did I do that.

boston area friends do any of you have a yard and want to try growing odd fruit

[excalculus]

Crisis averted, they have a new home!

[amber-tortoiseshell]

"With genetic test results back from U.C. Davis Laboratories of toe-hair samples from each side of his body, I am excited to share that this sheep

🌟 IS INDEED a CHIMERA 🌟

His black mouflon side is a genetically different individual from his black gray side. The lab ran the test twice just to be sure!

Oh but wait, THERE IS MORE!

He is ALSO a she!

The black mouflon side is male.

The black gray side is female!

What I can tell you beyond these test results, is that this beautiful creature successfully bred four solid patterned ewes this winter that produced a total of 9 lambs, of which all were either solid pattern or mouflon pattern; 5 rams and 4 ewes. "

Source: Grand Valley Icelandics

[king-the-pathetic]

Initially I thought the zig zag between light and dark along the spine was just the lighting but no! That's the split in coat colours!

[elodieunderglass]

Thank you so much @draconym ! Look at those differences!

[excalculus]

Based on past events I think that my minor job-related superpower is probably "hunt down obscure old zoology paper", but having swapped over to mammalian tissue culture I now really wish I had "delete fungus from small confined space" instead.

[excalculus]

Delete fungus from box would still be more useful day to day but I've still got at least a variant of the other thing. Successfully found and acquired what we're 99% sure is the good foil with nothing but the previous almost empty roll and a very vague description of how they were bought (purchased in bulk by accident years ago and ended up being everyone's favorite; packaging with any information long gone)

Sure I beef it more than half the time when I try to find weird niche things on the internet for Mystery Hunt, but my record for pulling it off at work is nearly flawless.

[sexhaver]

lmfao the Scots in town for the World Cup have made a pilgrimage to Boston's world-famous Cop Annihilating Slide

[inappropriate-umlauts]

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

Absolutely bonkers that I'm now one of those weirdos you hear about on Twitter

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

I committed to the bit so hard that I also committed misdemeanor impersonation of a government official

[excalculus]

"your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could" except instead of dinosaurs it was trying to get pawpaw seeds from the one half-squashed fruit I was given last year to germinate

I got 4 of the 9 to wake up after cold stratification and they're all making true leaves at this point so they should make it, but I have no outdoor space. These are going to be trees. Why the fuck did I do that.

boston area friends do any of you have a yard and want to try growing odd fruit

[excalculus]

Pokémon Champions is a thing and I have friends getting into it, so I think I need to get back on competitive but like... correctly this time. Wish me luck I guess.

[excalculus]

I haven't put serious effort into this yet because work is an interesting place right now, but I have progressed from 6 gimmicks in a trench coat to 2 sets of 2-3 mons that somewhat work together with a gimmick or two for flavor, and seem to be landing around mid-high great ball tier. I think this means that if/when I actually teambuild ultra ball is very doable, but the real problem is I don't know damage calcs and speed tiers well at all and that's going to take a while to fix.

also the meta has kind of gone weather wars again, rip