Wandering between topics

18+ Just your friendly neighborhood weirdo on my way to become a crazy cat lady. Don't judge me, I know what I'm doing. Invested in too many fandoms at once. Feel free to message me, I would love to hear from you! This blog is literally just a collection of stuff i find interesting, important or funny.

[coyotebabe-deactivated20230727]

leather is the halfway point between wood and fabric. and wood is halfway between fabric and metal. fabric is halfway between liquids and metal and liquids are halfway between clouds and fabric. having come back to fabric the best kinds are cotton, linen, and rayon. these are just the laws of nature

[coyotebabe-deactivated20230727]

i just realized this post is basically the 25 year old version of putting all my toys in a row

[librarianproblems]

When you have to open the day after a closing shift

[librarianproblems]

I’ve got a bad feeling about this

[librarianproblems]

EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENT eBOOK PLATFORMS AND LENDING MODELS

[librarianproblems]

WHEN THERE’S FREE DONUTS IN THE STAFF LOUNGE, BUT YOU’RE ON THE DESK

[librarianproblems]

WHEN A PATRON DOESN’T LIKE YOUR ANSWER AND ASKS A COWORKER THE SAME THING

[librarianproblems]

"BUT OTHER LIBRARIES LET ME!”

[3liza]

Bra Fitting Graphics

 

[3liza]

fyi

[3liza]

this post has been up for five hours and has two notes. i think tumblr shitcanned it because it has pictures of women wearing bras on it. very cool. no censorship message, just vanishing it

[boxingcleverrr]

AHHHHHH someone put all the info from the now-extremely-hard-to-read, 10+ year old bra post into one nice infograph! THAT POST WAS MY BOOB BIBLE. Yay Boob New Testament!

[jusjuiceboxbox]

Welcome to being an adult! Featuring such injury causing events as

- sneezed wrong

- turned your neck a little too fast

- slept weird

- took the trash out to the curb and stepped at a slightly different angle than usual

- breathed

- failed to breathe properly

- breathed in the wrong stuff. Allergy time

- looked too hard at something too far away

- knees

[sexy-people-contests-2026]

Why does my arm and shoulder hurt

Pulled a random muscle and can’t figure out how

[satan-offical]

I'm scared for adulthood. Why are constantly getting hurt

[enamorxte]

REBLOG IF YOU HAVE STRETCHMARKS

This way people can see they’re not alone. I have them and this would help me see that.

[nicryukyo]

Im craving some red harvest x reader stuff omg 😭😭

[satan-offical]

When life gives you lemons, you go NO! LIFE DIDN'T GIVE YOU LEMONS! LEMONS ARE A MAN-MADE HYBRID FRUIT! And when they go THATS PROBABLY A MYTH you squirt the LEMON JUICE IN THEIR EYES

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[the-haiku-bot]

post so nice had to

reblog it twice and force it

down everyone’s throats

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[authorkims]

[illisidifan]

This is why she’s my favorite author.

[petermorwood]

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

[bowditch]

@lurkinglurkerwholurks look it’s Cherryh of the Cuckoo’s Egg!

[snigepippi]

I have several times held winter solstice in an Iron Age replica hut. We often stayed for several days. Winter = 6-7 hours of grayish daylight and rather cold, so we mainly stayed inside.

While we could easily use camping equipment and electric torches, we usually decided to just use the fire and a few candles for light.

And it was plenty for most things. Cooking, reading, crafting and generally entertaining each other.

Light is no problem. What is very different is how long things take without modern tools. Cooking for 20 one fireplace with only raw materials and knives, spoons pots and pans and bowls. That takes time. I was usually in charge, food and baking is my special skill and I only sleeps 6 hours, and I was almost constantly preparing food to make 3 meals a day. I would rekindle the fire, start boiling water for tea, and then usually get the porridge ready. After cleaning up from breakfast I might have 1 hour and then start thinking about lunch, and after lunch about 2 hours before I would start dinner. There’s so much chopping and frying and turning and stirring the pots and checking the heat of the fire. Cleaving a bit more wood, getting water from the water post that’s 500m away. And you understand why people would always wear scarves or small hoods because there’s sooth everywhere and it’s a clay hours with clay floor and only wooden furniture so you clean and clean all the time.

Also a lot of my friends used time on reenactment tools and clothing. It takes so much time. I mean I can handsew a shift with double stiching and the right folding in about 25-30 hours, it takes me 3 hours on a machine.

If you really want to write ‘period’ and don’t only write about nobles and kings, try making stuff with what tools they had in the period. See how long it takes and calculate how valuable it were. You did non just get new clothes. There were no shame in inheriting old clothes, no we have written accounts of disputes about clothes inheritance and we know linen and tools was used as dowry.

When you write period people, consider what they are doing with their hands.

Light is easy, new socks takes hours of spinning and needlebinding/knitting.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Not superstitious and not not superstitious but a third secret thing (read a lot of fairytales as a child and doesn't believe them but also would never be rude to a mountain while still on it just in case)

[lasrina]

I've said it before but this is both the Icelandic and the Irish approach:

Of course we're modern educated people who don't believe in fairies

But we're also not gonna fuck with 'em, we're not idiots

[ficauthor]

[ungovernablecrow]

[ID: The bugs bunny in a suit meme edited to say "I wish all ao3 volunteers a very pleasant good luck with whatever the hell is happening" End ID]

[dezyj1205]

Child Percy's Atlantis Adventure Pt. 2

Triton: And then he said he'd help me find Ariel! Amphitrite, staring at the tiny demigod: That was... kind of him. Percy, staring at Amphitrite: ... Poseidon: Ah, yes. Percy seems to really like his older br- Percy, walks up to Amphitrite and stares: ... Amphitrite: Yes? Percy: You're pretty! Can I grow my hair out like yours? And will you do the braids for me?!? Amphitrite, smiling slowly: He's mine. Poseidon: My love, he is... Amphitrite, staring Poseidon down: You do not want your brothers to know about him. Triton would never take him on. He. Is. Mine. Poseidon: ...yes dear