Where there is darkness, there must also be light.
@kate-katiehawkeye
Stephanie. Formerly clevervulpus. Lots of Marvel (especially Hawkeye, Black Widow, Clintasha, & Claura), feminism, equality and equal rights, DCCU, etc. Rarely online rn as school is nuts!
We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.
I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.
It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.
(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)
Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.
My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.
When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.
We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.
Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.
The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.
I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.
Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”
Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.
But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.
The rules of Gay Pirate Plate are simple by the way.
The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.
No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.
The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.
Every time your sibling successfully absconds with the Gay Pirate Plate, you must respond with indignant fury, as if you have not also repeatedly and blatantly stolen the Gay Pirate Plate.
wohaohowhao. gears are impossibly difficult to fabricate. way, way beyond what people might expect looking at them. “oh, it is just a shape, it is simple” - imbeciles. morons
this will be VERY LONG and i am doing most of you idiots a favor by putting this here:
i’m not going to go over what a gear is or what it does, but i will be making some assumptions:
pinions are not gears
gears are made out of metal (steel)
hobs don’t exist (they’re cheating and rob you of a nuanced understanding of what goes into a proper gear)
if you tried to machine some gears “freehand” you would never actually end up creating something that can truthfully called a gear -- the best you could do is a spoked wheel with maybe 5-7% efficiency
gears are complicated to machine for 3 primary reasons
geometrical limits -- gears are circles (squat cylinders if we’re being precise) with a finite number of equally-spaced teeth at their peripheries. in order for two gears to mate (mesh, “come together”, etc) they must have exactly the same tooth geometry (e.g. exactly the same size) and exactly the same spacing between the teeth
it’s not apparent at first, but this is a pretty limiting set of requirements. remember, two identical meshed gears are not very useful; a 1:1 gear ratio just sort of transfers power from over here to over there. you usually want a big gear driving a small gear, or vice versa. since your gear tooth size and spacing is fixed, you have a greatly reduced set of gear diameters you can work with, since in order to fit one extra tooth on a gear, you have to jump up a corresponding diameter increment, and can’t use any diameters in-between. you are also restricted by a tooth/diameter minimum, i.e., you can’t have a 1 or 2 tooth gear, which is something that a computer scientists might not realize at first glance
so, this isn’t too bad altogether, you just have to do your homework before cutting some gears. don’t worry, it gets worse
tooth geometry - you might think that there are all sorts of different tooth shapes you can employ to get all sorts of results, but you’d be wrong (idiot), there is only one tooth shape:
the involute of a circle, two pictured above. don’t worry about what that means. yes i know what this shape resembles.
if you don’t cut your teeth to exactly this shape (which, btw, changes according to the diameter of the gear they’re cut into) you will not evenly transmit power between gears, which is to say your gears won’t spin at a steady RPM. this is because your fucked up wrongteeth will be slamming into each other & knocking each other into free space that should be filled by goodteeth. look:
the blue dot and red dot (respectively) in the above images represent the point of contact (thus the point of power transmission) between the two gears at any given point in time. remember, gears are metal, metal is hard, the total area of surface contact between two pieces of metal is usually hilarious small (because metal does not “give” or “soften” to normalize a traveling path of contact, and due to all of this, the point of contact between two meshed gear teeth has to travel evenly and without interruption -- just as the blue and red dots above. why? i need to digress for a second.
gear teeth can’t just whack into each other. this isn’t carpentry. gears are used to transmit power up to the order thousands of tons per revolution. they’re made out of extremely hard martensitic steel that doesn’t handle large impluse shocks very well. if you slam martensite around hard enough, it will shatter (not “bend”, or more precisely deform elastically/plastically) and if slammed around under load, it will fucking explode. again, consider the colossal amount of power being transmitted, divided by the minimal area of surface contact between two gear teeth, and you get pressures sometimes several times what exists in the core of the earth. when the tooth that is holding this pressure suddenly shatters, all that energy is released into bits of broken gear tooth that’ll cut through you like a knife through butter, that will cut through a cast iron chassis like a knife through butter, not even noticing it
but not only that -- even with indestructible handwavium gears your teeth can’t slam into each other because that scenario requires there to be uneven empty space between gear teeth, allowing unmitigated travel in, possibly, the wrong fricken direction. this kills your efficiency incredibly quickly: sudden changes in a gear’s rotational speed oppose that gear’s nominal momentum, i.e., gears that don’t spin at a constant RPM require energy to slow down/speed up as they deviate. that energy comes from your input power, which should be transferred to the driven gear, but instead is powering zero-sum deviations in spin rate. additionally, incidences of tooth contact following a period of no contact between two gears (e.g. tooth contact beginning at any point in time other than the last moment the previous two gear teeth were in contact) (e.g. two teeth slamming into each other) see a massive reduction in power transfer as most of that energy goes into friction between the teeth instead of transmitting power mechanically -- instead of the two teeth coming together steadily, you have the driving gear tooth speed up during the period of no contact only to slam into the driven gear tooth, spalling off metal from the tooth surface and heating it from the friction (sparks). these two things will drop your efficiency to less than 10%, usually on the lower side of that, but that doesn’t matter, because if your gear teeth are slamming together they’re about to explode anyway
but ok, first we solved the issue of “how do i even design working gears considering the geometrical limits”, and now we’ve solved the issue of “what extremely weird and specific shape do i make the gear teeth so my gear train does anything other than explode spectacularly/immediately” and now we can move on to
rotational compounding error, machining precision, offset -- this is the real killer, what makes machining gears truly difficult.
let’s digress again
gears are made out of metal, and people who make things out of metal are machinists, and do so using machines. when you’re machining metal, and you’re in america, you operate using two units: the mil (1/1000th of an inch which is about the smallest discrete movement a professional [piano player, diemaker, anything that requires precise small hand movements] can make with their hands consciously. the tip of a needle is around 100 mils) and the tenth (one tenth of one mil, or 1/10,000th of an inch). these are inconceivably & imperceptibly small units.
the first step to machining a gear involves cutting a perfect circle. you start with barstock, that is, a rod of metal whose diameter is a bit above what the final gear diameter should be. stock that comes out of the steel mill may look round, but it’s not, remember, we’re working in thousands of an inch here, just appearing round won’t cut it.
we stick the stock in the lathe and turn it concentric (into a perfect circle) and cut off a “slice” with a thickness as close to the design as possible without going under. we now have a squat cylinder whose edges are perfectly circular but whose faces aren’t flat enough nor square enough with the round edges. easy -- we stick it face down onto the surface grinder, grind a side flat, flip it over, grind the other side flat and then until its the right thickness. now, we have a perfectly circular, perfectly square cylinder of the right dimensions. now to cut the teeth!
here is where things get tricky and you need special hardware. you cut involute teeth using a special mill tool which you move the workpiece through axially at it’s periphery as to machine the void between two teeth -- on your second pass, you will have machined two voids leaving a perfect tooth between them. but, once you’ve made your first pass, you have to rotate the workpiece, and holy shit. you cannot be off by even 1/100th of a degree. these are perhaps the most sensitive and crucial cuts you’ll be doing, because your error adds up and if it’s too high, you’ll go to cut that last tooth and realize you still have extra surface space, or go to cut the last tooth and realize you don’t have enough space. either of these will result in a totally useless gear that won’t complete a single rotation before exploding. the solution is to mount the gear in a dividing head which allows for extremely precise, but more importantly, extremely repeatable rotations in the workpiece
machining gears requires precision on the level of mils & tenths described above, and this is due to how error compounds in a unidirectionally rotating system -- gears. normal gears rotate in one direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, continuously, without reversing. during one rotation, any error, any deviation from the design model incurred during machining translates to some positive or negative “extra” rotation. that is to say, as the first rotation of the gear occurs there is some “extra” force that causes the gear to “want” to rotate a little more or a little less than one full rotation. but here’s the kicker:
upon the beginning of the second rotation, that erroneous “extra” force remains. upon the completion of the second rotation, that “extra” force has now doubled. the error forces accrue, constructively because the gear is always spinning in the same direction, never reversing, and the error (geometric deviations from design model) is unchanging. gear trains that explode after maybe a dozen or so rotations aren’t very useful,
so what do we do ? hell, why does it even matter that we fabricate the gears to such tight tolerances if any deviation/error whatsoever leads to a functionally useless, doomed gear ?
the answer is simply to machine perfectly with no error wait no that is impossible. we need some slip space to allow accrued error force vectors to dissipate, but this is extremely precarious, as slip space both causes gear teeth to slam into each other as the point of contact between teeth doesn’t move evenly and also reduces the total tooth-contact travel distance meaning that all the force that is transferred now occurs over a shorter distance, multiplying the pressure between the teeth accordingly
“but wait ian you said that the teeth can’t slam into each other ever” -- yes, you’re right. how do we provide empty slip space between teeth without disrupting a continuous & even power transmission surface? the answer is fricken extremely calculated error analysis & gear offset
imagine you have two compatible gears and you mesh them together as hard as possible such that the teeth engage with each other as deeply as possible -- no empty space whatsoever -- this is zero gear offset. now lets say you pull them apart, to some arbitrarily large degree, but not so much that the teeth no longer engage with each other -- this is too much gear offset -- the teeth slam together and explode. but what if we very arduously and scientifically analyze and test our machining equipment as to accurately quantify the error they will impart to gears they machine and use that figure to calculate a gear offset that perfectly opposes erroneous forces ?
something beautiful happens
your slip space is perfectly large enough to dissipate all the error-borne forces, not a hair too big and not a hair too small. the gear teeth stay in contact evenly, they don’t slam into each other, and no error forces compound and cause the gears to explode. finally, a working gear: a monumental achievement that can only be properly appreciated when looked at through an engineer’s lens. proper gear trains can achieve up to like 99% efficiency (!!!) which is unheard of -- wings on a 747 commercial passenger jet are like 10% efficient, your car’s internal combustion engine is about 37% efficient.
Just want to say how proud of i am of america right now. Removing a dictator during a dictatorship is near impossible (typically it takes civil war or a death/ power vacuum) but for four years you’ve been fighting back and now you’re fighting a heavily rigged, horribly unfair election and not giving Trump that “landslide victory” dictators typically get. I want you to know that many of us across the world, see those 50/50 looking results and don’t see america as half and half but 30% cultists who were given an easy vote and 70% people who’s vote was very hard to get out (we saw the lines, we saw the fake ballotboxes) and often outright thrown away. We hear that more people voted for Biden than have ever voted for a candidate before. We see your judges fighting to have every vote counted and the diverse new congressfolks you’ve voted in. The narrative of a close race omits that one team had skates on a downhill road and the other had an obstacle couse littered with dirty needles, fences to break through, barbed wire to crawl under and rabid dogs blocking the way.
I actually needed to hear this I think. All I’ve been hearing for the last few years is how terrible America is and I know that reputation is earned but I and so many other people have been fighting this whole time because we love our country and trust our institutions and don’t want to see them fall and I know we’re not the best neighbors to have but we’re trying and it makes me so happy to see that someone, anyone, understands that we’re trying.
1. lack of female characters in spn means that there are no meaningful het romantic relationship prospects for dean
2. the only strong relationship in the show is between dean and sam
3. wincest pairing becomes most popular ship in the show
4. many fans are frustrated that the juggernaut ship in spn is an incest ship
5. castiel appears in show
6. destiel goes wildly popular as a result of fans being relieved to have a mlm ship that isnt wincest
7. resulting destiel flurry shoots the show back to prominence, ushering in a new audience of fans, including stacey abrams in 2017
8. supernatural becomes stacey abrams's new go-to relaxation show
9. stacey abrams's frustration with sam's decisions in season 10??? apparently??? helped form some of her opinions about coalition building in her campaign???? theres a 2018 interview with abrams on blackgirlnerds.com that posits this jkdfhgkjhdfghdfjkg
10. stacey abrams runs for georgia governor in 2018
11. stacey abrams narrowly loses the race in large part due to suppression of black votes
12. stacey abrams spends the next two years advocating for expanding voting access, an effort that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of first time registered voters
13. in the 2020 election, georgia goes blue by a margin of a thousand votes or so
14. stacey abrams's efforts are given credit for this shift
15. stacey abrams celebrates by unwinding with a nice relaxing episode of destiel is canon
I’ve just sat down and spent several hours actually reading all the damn plans on his website, the whole thing, so you don’t have to. And here’s the conclusion:
They’re pretty good.
Are they absolutely everything we want immediately? Maybe not. Are they a solid Democratic agenda anyway? Yes they are. Are they better than Trump?
Light years!
His Violence Against Women plan is lengthy, detailed, and pays specific attention to violence against Native, lesbian and bisexual, low-income, disabled, rural, transgender (especially trans women of color) immigrant, domestic abuse victims, and other vulnerable women. He calls for replacing and expanding Obama-era policies and funding for campus sexual assault programs that DeVos trashed, and for providing money for culturally specific services that are sensitive to the diverse backgrounds of survivors. He also notes that sexual assault, while it predominantly affects women and girls, needs to be taken seriously and addressed for people of all gender identities.
His gun safety plan is forceful and lays out several steps for banning assault weapons, taking existing weapons from offenders, closing gun purchase background check and other legal loopholes, addressing the intersection between domestic violence and weapons ownership, and reducing or eliminating weapons and ammunition stockpiling.
His plan for tackling climate change and creating green jobs is also lengthy. He makes the connection between economic, environmental, and racial justice. He pledges to immediately rejoin the Paris Agreement and restore American leadership on the issue in pushing for even stronger climate standards, make climate change a central part of our trade, international, and justice goals, demand a worldwide ban on fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks (!!!) and if the Green New Deal is passed, to sign it, as well as for the U.S. to achieve 100% clean energy and zero percent net emissions by 2050.
His healthcare plan is decent. It offers an immediate public option for all Americans regardless of private, employer, or no coverage, and generous new tax credits to put toward the cost of coverage. It strongly protects abortion rights and federal funding for Planned Parenthood, as well as rescinding the “gag rule” that prevents U.S. federal aid money from being used to provide or even talk about abortions in NGOs abroad. It attacks generic and drug price gouging. It calls for doubling the capital gains tax on the super-wealthy (from 20% to 39.5% paid on capital gains by anyone making over $1 million) to help fund healthcare reform. He also has a separate plan on the opioid crisis in America, and on older Americans and retirement, including the protection and re-funding of Medicare and Social Security.
His immigration plan is lengthy and detailed. He apologizes for and acknowledges the excessive deportation that occured during the Obama-Biden administrations, pledges to do better, and attacks Trump’s current inhumane acitivities on every front. The policy of children in cages, indefinite detention, the metered asylum system, and the Muslim Ban are gone on day one. In this and his LGBTQ plan, he notes the vulnerability of LGBTQ refugees, incuding LGBTQ refugees of color. He proposes streamlining of visa applications and prioritizing the immediate reunification of families. It also specifically states that ICE and CBP agents will be held directly accountable for inhumane treatment.
Speaking of which, his LGBTQ plan is comprehensive. It pays attention to multiple intersectional issues, down to the high rates of incarceration among trans people of color. (He also notes the rates of violence against trans women of color particularly.) He calls for a complete ban on conversion therapy and the discrimination against HIV-status individuals, as well as removing the ban on blood donation from gay and bisexual men. He will remove the transgender military ban immediately. He calls for funding for mental health and suicide prevention among LGBTQ populations.
His plan to empower workers calls for raising the federal minimum wage to $15, as well as indexing this to median hourly wages to ensure that working-class and middle-class wages grow closer to parity, and implementing strong legal protections for unions. He expresses support for striking workers and to empower the National Labor Relations Board in workplace advocacy. Farmworkers, domestic workers, gig economy workers, and other non-traditional labor groups are included in this. He will restore all Obama-Biden policies related to workplace safety and regulation.
His plan to restore American dignity and leadership in the world calls for immediately investing in election security and reform, restoration of the Voting Rights Act, immediately restoring White House press briefings and other Trump refusals of information, tackling criminal justice reform and systematic racial discrimination, calling for campaign finance reform, and basically blowing up all the stupid things the Trump administration does on a daily basis. It also calls for an end to all ongoing wars in the Middle East, restoring the Iran nuclear deal, and new arms control treaties with Russia, among general repairing of international alliances.
His plans for K-12 education and post-high school education call for greatly expanded funding across all levels of 2-year, 4-year, and other educational options. There will be no student loan payments for anyone making under $25,000 a year; everyone else will pay a capped amount and be completely forgiven after a certain period. Public servants qualify for up to $50,000 in loan forgiveness. This is not total loan forgiveness for everyone, which is obviously important for me and many of us, but it’s acceptable to start with. Additionally, his wife is a teacher and has a proven track record of calling for education investment and supporting public school funding.
His plan for housing addresses the needs of formerly incarcerated, LGBTQ, veteran, low-income, sexual assault survivor, black and Hispanic, and other vulnerable populations at risk of losing housing. It calls for a tax on companies and corporations with in excess of $50 billion in assets to fund comprehensive new housing initiatives, including $100 billion in accessible and low-income housing development. It includes extensive investment in public transportation and a high-speed rail system. This ties into his plan to repair infrastructure and invest in new technologies across the country.
His plan for criminal justice reform calls for the end of mass incarceration, the decriminalization of marijuana, the automatic expunging of all cannabis convictions, and an end on jail sentences for drug use. It highlights systematic institutional racism and the impact on black and brown people particularly. It calls for an end on all profiteering and private prisons. It focuses on reintegrating offenders into society and funding the needs of people released from prison. It proposes to “expand and use the power of the U.S. Justice Department to address systemic misconduct in police departments and prosecutors’ offices.” It broadens funding for social services and other programs for people who are otherwise placed into the prison pipeline.
There are more plans, which you can find here. These are the ones I read top to bottom. I am not by any means a Joe Biden fangirl; he was not my first choice, my second choice, or really anywhere on my list. However, having carefully read through his policy documents, I can say that:
He has at the least a good team of advisors who are keenly aware of the political climate, and is willing to both restore Obama-era standards and to improve on them where necessary. Obviously, all politicians’ promises are politicians’ promises, but this is a solid Democratic platform with obvious awareness of the progressive wing of the party.
If progressive legislation is passed in the House and Senate, he will sign it, including the Green New Deal.
He represents a clear and definite improvement over Donald Trump.
Is he everything we want? No. Are his policies better than I was expecting? Yes. I advise you to read through them for yourself. It has made me at least feel better about the likelihood of voting for him.
I realize it’s an unsexy position, especially on tumblr, to advocate for an old centrist white man. I’m not thrilled about having to do it. However, speaking as someone who was very resistant to Biden and still doesn’t agree with all of his previous legislative track record, that’s my consensus. He is a candidate who broadly aligns with values that I care about. His policies represent a concrete end to the damage of the Trump administration and gets us on the right track again.
Joe Biden, if he is the Democratic nominee, will receive my vote on November 3, 2020. I urge you to consider what I’ve laid out above and join me.
And remember to vote down the whole ballot - we need Mitch McConnell OUT. blue senate, blue congress, blue president means that when AOC & other progressives bring forward the legislation we need, it gets passed. That is the point of voting for biden.
I like everyone @‘ing me over Legolas in the background. Like does everyone else not have a life size cardboard cutout of Orlando Bloom in their living room?
When you forget to turn your party elf off and get up to get a glass of water and almost have a heart attack in your living room at fOuR IN THE BLOODY MORNING
Geralt meets Jaskier and is like *sniff sniff* ‘yeah this guy’s part elf, I’m not going to comment on this because it’s a very personal thing to bring up in mixed company and also none of my business’ & never once questions that Jaskier knows this bcos like, that’s the kind of thing people know about themselves, right? and it’s a touchy sort of subject so it’s understandable that Jaskier doesn’t really talk about it, w/e
& then years later Yennefer comments on how improbably youthful Jaskier is and Geralt’s like ‘yeah he’s part elf’ (cause like, we’re all ambiguously-human friends here, nbd)
but Jaskier is like ‘what the fuck? are you talking about?? no I’m not???’ and Geralt is like ‘…..fuck.’
