Lighthouse Lesbian

Just your run of the mill lesbian lighthouse keeper living a weird fairy tale life amidst a capitalistic hellscape. she/her/they

[prismatic-otter]

You should always take another shell of kava, why would that even be a question it’s kava. In a SHELL

[prismatic-otter]

It hasn’t guided mariners for coming up on a century now, but that doesn’t stop it from trying

[prismatic-otter]

I’m not happy with it, but I am getting better.

[prismatic-otter]

The wind blows the wrong way tonight. The little cottage tremors in the gusts, its long timbers not built for the sea’s rage from that angle. The normally calm sea down the cliff our house is perched on roils like some giants cauldron, as violently as every other side of the island does every day. The eucalyptus shudder and shake, and I wonder if the boughs would reach the wall. They’re strong, and weather many storms, but every tree has its limits.

It lacks the ferocity of the normal gusty days, the bite of the Pacific torn away by the mountains, and it’s certainly no troll wind of the wintery north, but it pounds and roars nonetheless.

And yet, despite all that, it’s so quiet. No birds, no distant city, no electronics, no fisherman. The wind hollers and the waters froth, and the wood frame shivers from the force. But it’s quiet.

[prismatic-otter]

[prismatic-otter]

[prismatic-otter]

My tomatoes are ripening and omg I’ve missed that taste

[prismatic-otter]

Just a few weeks apart, they grow so fast. This little baygull came out of the egg as a fluffy ping pong ball trying to fly right away, and is now learning to fly and fish under the watchful eye of their parents.

[prismatic-otter]

Nursing harbor seal! I’ve been hoping to get this shot since they were born about a month and a half ago, but I swear these seals can see as well as I can and they shimmy their cute little seal butts into the water at the slightest inkling of feeling unsafe.

[prismatic-otter]

My wonderful love got me this little forge for winter solstice, and while this job is pretty demanding, I’ve snuck some(I dunno maybe ten?) hours in, and have finally finished my very first forgery: a pair of tongs!

They’re kinda shitty, but they’re my first and they’re mine.

[prismatic-otter]

[viktor-sbor]

A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.

[e-102]

damn that shit is light lmfao

[telltaletypist]

[vienna1954]

Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!

Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.

Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful

[ben-the-hyena]

I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons

[macleod]

In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”

Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.

Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society

[sashaforthewin]

Ah to be a sailor in 1890 who has to turn to his fellow men and ask "is it just me or are the lighthouses flashing faster?"

[asteroidtroglodyte]

They had been slowly getting faster for decades.

It mattered for optics reasons.

Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.

The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.

This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.

What’s a little Madness, in the face of Progress?

[myth-myth-yeth]

mods are asleep, post the fresnel lens

[relevant-wikipedia-articles]

History of lighthouses - Wikipedia

[swordseer]

The Lighthouse that I work at has the only working Mercury float on Lake Superior. It took me forever to figure out how it worked, this post is great,

[prismatic-otter]

Mama Goose has successfully hatched! After the trials and tribulations of two storms and ravenous seagulls, she and Daddy Goose are now the proud parents to five adorable little yellow fluffs. Soon to hatch, are the broods of Other Mama, Cynthia, and Bernadette. All those downy feathers on top of six baby seals and who knows how many seagulls to come, it’s a busy busy spring for East Brother Light Station.

[prismatic-otter]

Seven! Seven baby goosies! One got stuck in a crevice and I had to pull it out. Gosling was okay and reunited with their parents. Daddy Goose astoundingly didn’t try to murder me during the procedure, I guess that’s the reward for saying hi every morning for a month.

[prismatic-otter]

Mama Goose has successfully hatched! After the trials and tribulations of two storms and ravenous seagulls, she and Daddy Goose are now the proud parents to five adorable little yellow fluffs. Soon to hatch, are the broods of Other Mama, Cynthia, and Bernadette. All those downy feathers on top of six baby seals and who knows how many seagulls to come, it’s a busy busy spring for East Brother Light Station.

[prismatic-otter]

Coming in on a bumpy salty ride

[prismatic-otter]

Genderbent Willy. Robin can stay with Demetrius. We’ll sip mead watching the winter storms lash the Gem Sea into a frenzy that threatens to rip the pier out from under us while our dog snoozes by the wood stove waiting for the fish and chips to finish baking.

In the spring she’ll go on week long fishing trips while I manage the farm, ripping out the insatiable weeds with an equally insatiable hole in my heart, waiting for my salty love’s return to my arms, for while I long to be by her side forever, her first love is the sea and alas I must share my sea faring lass.

[prismatic-otter]

After moving to a run down plot of dirt in some backwards tiny town with like three people on it, I couldn’t help but wondering what happened in life to get here. Working for joja was a living hell, and all of a sudden I’m a farmer? That old mayor guy said grow a parsnip, but I don’t even know what that is! So when I got a note saying to meet Willy at the docks, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get away from the back breaking work of tiling dirt that hadn’t been moved in thirty years.

What I didn’t know, was that the crusty old mariner who lives in a shack on the end of a battered pier Pierre had mentioned was, well, crusty. She had salt streaks in her salt and pepper hair and patches on an old wool coat. Smoke from a pipe clutched in chapped lips curled through her hair. Her green eyes sparked like the water behind her when she smiled. “You must be the new farmer! Come on in, I have something I want to give you”

[prismatic-otter]

Genderbent Willy. Robin can stay with Demetrius. We’ll sip mead watching the winter storms lash the Gem Sea into a frenzy that threatens to rip the pier out from under us while our dog snoozes by the wood stove waiting for the fish and chips to finish baking.

In the spring she’ll go on week long fishing trips while I manage the farm, ripping out the insatiable weeds with an equally insatiable hole in my heart, waiting for my salty love’s return to my arms, for while I long to be by her side forever, her first love is the sea and alas I must share my sea faring lass.