
⁂

Discoholic 🪩

Janaina Medeiros
Sade Olutola

shark vs the universe

Kiana Khansmith
noise dept.
ojovivo

Kaledo Art
trying on a metaphor
Show & Tell
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

titsay
YOU ARE THE REASON

@theartofmadeline
sheepfilms
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

roma★

No title available
DEAR READER

seen from Australia

seen from Malaysia

seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Australia

seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from Canada

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Australia
seen from China

seen from United States

seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from Singapore

seen from Australia
@kindofdistracting
shrimp flavour, part 1
i miss vhs tapes and cds i miss feeding my computers and tvs yummy treats. now theyre eating nothing. theyre being born without mouths
mutuals if you were a video game character I would do every step of your questline and get your good ending
What would you do with non mutuals? Cause speedrunners are always killing me for my crystal scythe before doing my quest
Well now that I know you have a crystal scythe I'm definitely killing you for your crystal scythe
I think a lot about who I am to other people in the world–particular who I am to strangers as a mere concept in their lives.
Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”
And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.
Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.
“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”
They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”
And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.
And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.
I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.
Amazing.
I’M LAUGHING!!! THEY DIDN’T EVEN ASK WHO I AM.
when i blacklist something because i don't care about it i never feel compelled to open the posts and they just wash over me like white noise. when i blacklist something because i actively dislike it i end up opening that damn post like 85% of the time just to go yep. hated that.
by far the best ad I’ve gotten on this app entirely because I tried rotating it out of sheer curiosity and absolutely nothing happened
Study with Sandro Botticelli and "What's it like working at Lush"
its a mystery
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artif
An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.
Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.
Anthropeum.com · Jun 8 2026 🟩🟦🟦🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦🟦🟩 79,001 · top 3% of players today!
oh this is extremely fun. i did NOT do all that well but i can see myself getting good. i will be doing this regularly.
Anthropeum.com · Jun 8 2026 🟩🟦🟦🟨🟨🟦🟥🟩🟩🟦 68,088 · top 12% of players today!
The Threshold Kids!
things in fic I'm used to people kind of faking their way through writing about:
the city of los angeles
the city of new york
sex
how drinking alcohol works
how getting high works
how a child of any age speaks
how nuclear physics work
how [my job] works
how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is
how hypothermia works
things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:
what french toast is
read through the notes on this one trust me
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
dave and busters what the fuck is a sticky creebler
First of all put some respect on my name
Salt was hugely important before refrigeration, and one of the ways of getting salt was from the sea or from brine springs. There were a few ways of doing this, which depended on the natural resources available in the area. You could put the saltwater into a large, flat pool and wait on dry air and the sun to do evaporation until there was no water left and you just had the salt, or you could boil saltwater using enormous quantities of fuel to get rid of the water.
But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.
Enter the graduation tower!
The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.
Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.
And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.
There are still a few working thorn towers that you can go visit, mostly in Germany or Poland, but they're either historical curiosities keeping a tradition alive, or health and wellness centers, distilling down a brine spring for supposed special properties.
materialist-scumbag
reblogged from [op] — on graduation towers, salt, fuel, and the Bad-prefix town
Yes, all of this is correct and I want to add a thing, which is that the fuel side of the salt industry is genuinely the part of the story that breaks open if you push on it. Salt-making in pre-modern Europe was, for most of the medieval and early modern period, the single largest industrial consumer of firewood on the continent. The salt-makers ate forests. They ate forests at a rate that beat shipbuilding, beat iron smelting, beat glass furnaces, beat domestic heating in any one region you'd care to name. The salt pans of Lüneburg — which produced something like 40,000 tonnes of salt a year at peak in the 16th century — went through fuel at a pace that essentially deforested an enormous radius around the town and then kept going, importing wood from further and further out as the nearby supply collapsed.
The Bad Reichenhall saltworks in Bavaria, which are the oldest continuously operating inland salt works in Europe (first written mention 696 AD, when the Bavarian Duke Theodor II gave the bishop of Salzburg twenty brine pans), spent literal centuries chasing the forest line backwards into the Alps. By the early 19th century they had to commission a guy named Georg von Reichenbach to build a brine PIPELINE — like, a literal pumped pipeline (completed around 1816) going over Alpine elevation changes — to move the brine itself to where the wood still was, which is a kind of insane engineering project to undertake for what is, again, table salt.
(That's the kind of thing that drives the graduation-tower invention. Reichenbach's brine pipeline is from 1816. The graduation towers in Reichenhall are 16th century. The reason you build a graduation tower is exactly the same reason you eventually build a 20km brine pipeline: you've run out of nearby trees and the option of relocating the saltworks is off the table because the brine springs are where the brine springs are, geologically, and they're not moving.)
So when you say "fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect, drives up costs," what's actually happening on the ground is that the salt industry is in a permanent slow-motion race against its own appetite. Every saltworks of any scale eats through the wood available within economic transport distance, and then it has to either (a) get more efficient, (b) reach further for wood, or (c) die. The graduation tower is option (a). The Reichenbach pipeline is a particularly insane version of (b). And there are SO MANY salt works that went with (c) — abandoned medieval salt towns are a thing, you can find them all over central Europe, places that had a brine spring and a thousand people and a church and then ran out of nearby wood and just… wound down.
A separate but related thing the OP isn't quite getting at: the demand side of pre-refrigeration salt economics is overwhelmingly about one particular preserved-fish trade, which is salted herring from the Baltic and the North Sea. The herring shoals would show up seasonally in massive numbers off Scania (now southern Sweden) and the Baltic coast, you'd haul them in by the millions, you'd salt them in barrels, and then you'd ship the barrels everywhere across northern Europe because they kept basically indefinitely and Catholic Europe needed protein on Fridays and during Lent and there were a LOT of Catholics and a LOT of Fridays.
This is why Lüneburg, an otherwise unremarkable town in Lower Saxony, becomes one of the wealthiest cities in medieval Germany. It sits on a colossal salt deposit. Lübeck, which is the actual port city, controls the trade route. Lüneburg salt goes to Lübeck. Lübeck ships it to Scania. The fishermen salt the herring. The herring goes back through Lübeck and out to Cologne and Bruges and Bergen and Novgorod and everywhere. The whole Hanseatic League is, to a pretty significant degree, a salt-and-fish cartel running on a single chemical transformation: chloride ion plus protein equals food that doesn't rot.
Lüneburg's salt works, the Saline Lüneburg, was the largest industrial operation in medieval Europe by some metrics. Over a thousand years of continuous operation, depending on which century of monastic-era boiling you want to start counting from. The town minted its own coins, kept its own army, negotiated as a peer with kings.
And the buildings in Lüneburg today lean.
They lean because the salt mine ran underneath the town for centuries and the ground gave out. Subsidence. The medieval city center is gorgeous and it is also visibly buckled — gabled facades that slump in the middle, towers that aren't quite vertical, doorways that aren't quite square. The whole town is sitting on a thousand years of hollowed-out salt and gradually settling into the cavity. Which, like, what a perfect physical record of where the wealth came from — the town that the salt built is collapsing into the hole the salt left behind.
The fuel problem is what kills Lüneburg, eventually. Well, the fuel problem and competition from French and Portuguese sea salt, which the Hanseatic League couldn't keep out forever, because solar-evaporated sea salt produced in places like Setúbal didn't need fuel AT ALL, which meant it could be made cheaper than anything you could boil in Lower Saxony no matter how much your graduation towers helped. By the 16th and 17th centuries the Atlantic sea salt is coming in by the shipload and the boiled-brine economies of northern Europe are in slow decline. Not gone — Lüneburg keeps boiling salt until 1980, which is its own incredible story — but no longer dominant.
(The 1980 closure date for Saline Lüneburg, by the way. Eight hundred and some years of continuous industrial salt production at one site, finally shut down inside the lifetimes of people still walking around there. We tend to think of medieval industries as having ended at some clean historical break point and they basically never did — most of them limped along for centuries in increasingly marginal forms until something specific finally killed them in living memory.)
OK so the OP's actual question, which is about the second life of graduation towers as healthcare facilities. This is also where it gets more interesting than "they noticed the air was nice."
The 19th century in Germany is the absolute peak of a particular institutional form, which is the spa town — the Kurbad or Bad — and the political-economic role of the spa town is to take a body of bourgeois and aristocratic visitors with non-specific health complaints (stomach troubles, "nerves," respiratory issues, gout, syphilis they can't talk about) and give them a structured environment with a doctor's supervision, a mineral water source, a set of physical activities, a defined social calendar, and — crucially — a duration of stay measured in WEEKS rather than days. Six weeks at the spa was the normal prescription. You'd go through a full season of treatment.
The German spa towns — and there are dozens of them, the "Bad" prefix means they're officially recognized as one — are basically nineteenth-century wellness corporations operating under royal patent. The Prussian state regulates which springs count, which doctors can practice there, what claims can be made, who can build a hotel, what the bathing schedules look like. It's a real industry. It supports its own architecture (the neoclassical Kurhaus, the colonnaded pump room), its own medical literature, its own social rituals (the daily walk, the brine inhalation, the regulated diet), and its own resort towns that are economically dependent on the annual influx of Berlin civil servants and their wives coming to take the cure.
So when a salt-works town like Bad Reichenhall or Bad Kissingen finds itself with obsolete industrial infrastructure in the 1850s-1890s — when modern salt mining and solar evaporation and rail freight have made the local salt-boiling business uneconomical — what they have on hand is (a) a town with the existing infrastructure for visitors, because saltworks workers needed places to live and eat, (b) a brine source still flowing, (c) a giant wooden structure that produces salty air, and (d) a state apparatus actively LOOKING for new spa towns to certify, because the Prussian and Bavarian and Saxon governments understood that spa tourism was a significant source of regional revenue and tax base.
The standard story you'll see about this is "they noticed the workers were healthier and started inviting visitors." What actually happened: the salt economy died, the town needed a new economy, the spa-town industrial pattern was the obvious one to pivot into, and the graduation tower was the asset that justified the pivot. Same with every Bad-prefix town in Germany. The brine spring became "healing waters." The wooden tower for industrial concentration became an "open-air inhalation chamber." The salt-boiling house became a thermal bath. The salt master's office became a doctor's consulting room. The entire former salt industry got rebadged as health infrastructure within about a generation, because there was a state-backed industry actively seeking exactly that kind of asset and the towns with the assets were happy to oblige.
(This is the same move you see at basically every other obsolete extractive site in 19th century Europe, by the way. The mines became "deep mineral spas." The iron springs became "ferruginous tonic waters." The coal towns with bad ventilation became respiratory wellness destinations. The waste heat from blast furnaces became "warm springs." The 19th century basically inherited the entire pre-industrial extractive infrastructure of central Europe and figured out how to monetize the byproducts as health goods. You can read this charitably as adaptive reuse or cynically as a kind of medical-tourism asset stripping. Both readings are correct.)
The Polish ones at Ciechocinek and Inowrocław are an interesting variant on this because Poland during the 19th century is partitioned and doesn't have a German-style coordinated state spa industry — Ciechocinek's spa development happens under Russian rule, starting in the 1830s, and the graduation tower there gets built on a much larger scale than the German ones precisely because it's being designed FROM THE START as a spa attraction rather than an industrial facility that pivoted. The Ciechocinek towers are like 1,700 meters long, which is on an order beyond any of the German ones, and they're built that way because the brine concentration is a secondary concern; the primary function is to produce a long impressive promenade-able salt-fog environment for the visiting bourgeoisie of Warsaw and Łódź to walk along on doctor's orders.
(Bad Salzuflen in Germany also has a 300m+ tower for similar reasons. The really big towers are post-industrial. The original 16th-17th century graduation towers were smaller and uglier, built as industrial equipment with no thought given to how they looked.)
The mucus thing is real, by the way. Inhaling fine-particle salt mist does thin respiratory mucus, which can provide genuine relief for people with chronic obstructive conditions, asthma, post-viral congestion, and so on. There's a study from the Paracelsus Private Medical University in Salzburg that worked with the Bad Reichenhall clinic showing measurable effects. So the wellness claims aren't ALL bullshit. But the historical structure of the claim is interesting because what got medicalized was a thing that happened to exist because of an entirely different economic process, and the medicalization was driven by the need to find a use for the existing infrastructure, and the population that benefited was very specifically the population that could afford a six-week stay at a Kurbad in the 1880s.
The contemporary version is mostly Polish and German pensioners and people on insurance-subsidized rehabilitation stays. The economic model is national health insurance plus aging-population wellness tourism. The structural pattern hasn't changed since 1880 — find a state-backed reimbursement scheme for non-specific health-adjacent activities, locate it in a town that needs revenue, build the patient flow around the legacy industrial infrastructure of a vanished extractive economy. The asset that was originally a 17th century answer to "how do we boil less wood" became a 19th century answer to "what do we tell the bourgeoisie they need" and then a 21st century answer to "how does a small Saxon town stay solvent."
Same as it ever was.
The thorn trees, incidentally, get replaced every 5-10 years as they get encrusted with mineral deposits — the calcium and magnesium and iron compounds that aren't sodium chloride precipitate onto the wood as the brine concentrates, and the encrustation eventually clogs the airflow and reduces evaporation efficiency. The replaced thorn bundles are full of a hard greyish-white mineral concretion the Germans call "Dornstein" or thornstone, which is one of those gorgeous accidental side products that nobody knew they were making until they were stuck with tons of it. The thornstone has some use as a soil amendment but mostly it just piles up around the saltworks as a kind of geological record of which minerals were in the brine and how dry the summers were when the bundles were last replaced.
If you ever go to Bad Kösen there's a thornstone exhibit. It looks like coral.
#salt #materialist scumbag #amhist #infrastructure #the bad prefix #white gold #hanseatic league #graduation towers #thornstone #lüneburg
for anyone curious what thornstone looks like, my mom just plucked these from the walls when i was at a spa as a child for my skin condition, much to my mortification
Sound on