I dont really like making rebloggable posts but I haven’t seen anyone mention them yet: terracotta heaters are really easy and effective DYI heaters for cold emergencies and I think it might be helpful considering, you know
TDLR, place a candle of any size down, and put a terracotta pot (as large as possible preferably) over it, with something non-flammable and balanced to keep the bottom an inch or two off the ground, like bricks.
The candle will heat the terracotta, which will put off heat, while the space underneath lets smoke out and oxygen in. I’ve used these all 3 times we had outages here in Maine during blizzards to keep my aquariums warm, the weather outside had been easily -20 F with high winds, and not only was I cozy, that shit kept the water 10 degrees above room temperature. If it can heat the aquariums, it’ll heat a small room.
They work so much better than you’d think, the heat they put off is insane. Obviously be careful because smoke and open flame, but they’re very easy to make and just need an eye kept on them on all times.
Don’t touch the heated pot bare-handed, it’ll burn like a motherfucker, they get VERY hot. Use thick oven mitts or layered rags to remove pot, put the candle out first if you can manage. Don’t do more than one or two in a non-ventilated or closed room, it’s still making smoke and that can make it harder to breathe.
[ID: Two bricks are laid flat, two bricks are stacked on top on their sides. A candle is in a jar inbetween and is lit. A large terracotta pot is balanced on the second, higher set of bricks so it is above the candle and off the ground. End Id]
works!… heated our entire Master Bedroom for the last 3 nights, and (2) at opposite ends of the hallway at the front of the house helped stop the furnace constantly running, in the 30 min to 1.5 hours tops we had power
Addendum to this: make sure you do this in a well-ventilated space or keep your windows cracked. Just enough to keep the airflow going.
I know that might seem counterintuitive to trying to stay warm, but it's better than getting carbon monoxide poisoning, which can occur if you burn candles in an enclosed space for too long. It can take several hours for a single candle to build up enough carbon monoxide in an enclosed room to cause health problems, but if you're burning more than one, as is suggested in the video, that time frame is much shorter.
Also, get yourself a battery-powered carbon monoxide alarm. They're cheap and they'll keep working once the power goes out.
This is a narrowboat. You normally only find them in the UK because it’s a stupid fucking design for a boat. Several thousand people live permanently on them in various states of prosperity, in a strange chaotic quarrelling nomadic community that ranges from the nearly-homeless to the prosperous-retiree, the crunchiest off-gridders you’ve ever met and glossy professionals from London who can’t afford to live in London, and is mostly connected at specific nexi like freshwater refill points, Party Trees, and Facebook groups. The liveaboard community is often referenced in your favourite fantasy fiction novels set in Britain, because authors consider it very áësthétîqûę. Okay, so now you know what a boater is in this context.
Anyway, you don’t know this, but “flowerpot tea light heaters” are a boater meme! It’s a perennial autumn meme, usually posted around October, and all you need to do is post a picture of a tea light heater to send a few hundred people instantly feral. In around 2013, it originally kicked off with London Boaters, I think, but it instantly entered everyone’s consciousness forever. It’s still going strong nearly 10 years later but the nature of the subculture is that it MUST be resurrected around October/November, and also during summer heat waves, in which people post jokes about putting an ice cube under a flowerpot to make an air conditioner. This is a crunchy deep fried consistent subculture meme.
See, a lot of boaters are marginal. Off-grid, often jobfree, living nomadically - a difficult thing in the UK! A difficult thing anywhere! The marginalisation of those without addresses is one of the oldest and most universally enduring axes of oppression - untaxed, unfindable, going everywhere by bicycle, powered by a solar panel, foraged firewood, and homebrew scrumpy from the engine room. Please believe me that if tea light heaters worked, this class of boaters would be all over it. But of course tea light flowerpot heaters don’t do anything: it’s physics: so it’s a perennial autumn meme. You have to understand. You have to understand that this is a meme laughed at by…. By the crunchiest, most paranoid van-living anti-vaxxer you’ve ever met.
If you live in a house and you think you’ve unlocked the first principles of non-Newtonian witch-fire with a flowerpot and a cake rack, just know that a dishevelled old white British man named Whiskey Hamish, who is layered in greasy rags and waxed overcoats and Dickensian neckerchiefs, who stinks in all weathers of leather/woodsmoke/wet cat/diesel/wood shavings and is permanently slightly drunk and also incredibly healthy on account of being completely smoked/pickled - a man covered in grease on every layer of clothing to which sawdust is stuck all over, a man with an equally characterful terrier dog named Digger; both of them are eating baked beans from a tin right now - is the person on the other end of the internet encouraging you to do so in apparent concern for your warmth, while he screencaps you and memes about you. You do not normally think of Whiskey Hamish as the memer who memes about you, but he is. He thinks it’s great that you’re actually sitting there thinking that “heat” is a property of the universe that can be “amplified,” a piece of utterly boggled physics that never ceases to amuse him so he can post about it to his pub cronies on Facebook. Whiskey Hamish is, perhaps to you, unexpectedly educated about the laws of thermodynamics, on account of also being a highly qualified engineer. Every time someone reinvents this concept to get views on Facebook/twitter/instagram/TikTok - whatever platform it is, Whiskey Hamish and this meme have outlived them all - Whiskey Hamish increases in his power.
“Tea light heater” at this point means “foolery.” When someone recently asked if a piece of American folk craft (putting pennies in a bag of water and nailing it to a doorway to deter bugs who believe that the pennies represent the flashing eyes of a larger flying bug that has staked a territorial claim to the doorway) had any merit that could be applied to boats, someone else responded that this was a “tea light heater kind of idea” to instant understanding.
After several years of enjoyment, posting now usually starts by mutual agreement in October. Here is one of this year’s entries.
Whence the enduring resurgence of the tealight flowerpot heater? Is it that there are reservoirs of cold, delusional, desperate people who convince themselves of the increased warmth in a kind of feedback loop, and hang their identities on it against evidence and logic, so that tealight flowerpots spring back perennially from this pool of achingly tragic true belief? Is it simply that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on, and if it gets enough views then it’s real, despite being fake? Is it that Whiskey Hamish is secretly planting these memes on every form of social media to increase his wizardly status on the canal? Or is it simply that it’s of no consequence to social media influencers that desperate people set their homes on fire? Anyway, it’s of no material interest to me whether or not your POWERFUL BELIEF in the tealight heater is enough to warm you, but I do feel that you ought to know exactly how powerful Whiskey Hamish is getting from it. If he breaks containment this year it’s all on you. I wash my hands of it; I’m rooting for him.
[Image ID: A picture of a bee and a wasp, both labeled. Both are colored yellow and black. Facts are listed about each one in their respective columns.
Bee:
Cute and fuzzy, like a friend
Make honey
Come in pretty colors with different occupations (blue orchard bee, carpenter bee)
Pollinators!
Freeloaders who will come build hives in the walls of your house
Communicate with dancing
According to all known laws of aviatin, honey bees can fly up to 15 mph
Like sweet things
Over 20,000 species--not just honeybees!
Wasp:
Cool and sleek, like a motorcycle
Prey on pests
Come in pretty, iridescent colors (ruby tailed wasp)
Will try to mooch off your drinks (so check your cans!)
Pollinators!
Leave you paper nests that you can sell to collectors
Communicate with smells
Like sweet things
Over 30,000 species--not just [kind I hate]
At the very bottom, in smaller text, is the URL bug-maniac.tumblr.com. /End ID]
New quickie of this gorgeous creature, J'mon Sa Ord, the Soul of the Jeweled City, is the ruler of Ank'Harel. Loved the latest season of The Legend of Vox Machina, wish I had more time to draw for myself, but I am currently too overwhelmed with work and charity projects. Still I could not hold back from drawing such a beautiful character, I hope you people like them too.
If you like my art, consider tipping!
MY TIP JARS HERE ❤️🩹
One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
i never understood what made steampunk punk. romanticizing georgian era england and industrial revolutions are some of the least punk things ever. youre putting gears on a top hat
i genuinely believe that you can directly blame steampunk directly cribbing from cyberpunk for the fact that solarpunk is an aesthetic and not an ideology. the roots of considering a civilization for its trappings and appearance rather than what it does goes back to that. cyberpunk was punk* because of the stories it told** not because of its aesthetics***
*extremely debatable depending on which punk you ask.
**objectively debatable depending on the game and system
***cyberpunk as a modern franchise not a genre is absolutely a prioritization of aesthetics over punk ideology. you cannot be punk if youre a fuckin franchise of a corporation idk i feel like this should be obvious
Hi hello, Steampunk here: the 19th century was punk as fuck actually, and the active steampunk scene in 2005-2010 was very much aware of and into it. You're citing the Spirit Halloween version.
Way back in November 2013 I made a post about the aestheticization of the subculture that STILL stands:
Steampunk: VICTORIAN LONDON VICTORIAN LONDON TOP HATS CORSETS ARISTOCRACY GLORIOUS BRITISH EMPIRE AIRSHIP PIRATES RAY GUNS APOCALYPSE APOCALYPSE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!
Me: …Industrialization, colonialism, imperialism, exploitation of the working class and oppression of POC culminating in violent socialist revolution because fuck yeah the working class and don’t you dare forget it?
Steampunk: ::crickets::
[Steampunk]: THE GREAT GAME COGS GEARS VAMPIRES BUSTLES EXOSKELETON GOGGLES ANGLOPHILIA SUPER CREEPY OBSESSION WITH ORIENTALISM INCLUDING CLOCKWORK GEISHAS MANOR HOUSES TEA!
Me: ::sigh::
^ you are doing exactly this.
The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action, and not "selling out". That is what 'punk' means, in terms of subculture.
When steampunk arose as a subculture, out of Goth mind you, it was entirely a DIY and small business scene.
What steampunk music, fiction, craft groups, or meetups have you been to? Steampunk is, like cyberpunk, about the stories it told/is telling. Often stories of revolution (often violent), the overthrowing of governments and toppling of monarchies, civil rights movements (emancipation from chattel slavery! Indian wars! Rising against colonial powers!), the dawn of first wave feminism and women's suffrage, the original source of communist and socialist thought, workers' rights movements, the fucking enlightenment...
What is more punk than The Communist Manifesto(1848)
What is more punk than The Battle of Greasy Grass(1876)
Who's a more OG Punk than John Brown?
Steampunk literally music and fiction set in and about the Age of Revolution.
Judging Steampunk as a subculture by the part that was heavily commercialized is like judging all of Goth and a subculture by Hot Topic (which is not punk rock).
Go read China Mieville's Bas Lag cycle.
Go read Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
Go read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Go read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (crossover with dieselpunk and biopunk!)
Go read Steeplejack by AJ Hartley
Go listen to some The Cog is Dead and some Abney Park and some Rasputina and some Steam Powered Giraffe and, hey, let me link Painless Parker one more time. You will note that that recording is from Occupy Wallstreet.
Also keep in mind that labor/union songs are wildly popular steampunk standards; you will hear Solidarity Forever and other songs from The Little Red Songbook at steampunk song circles. You will hear marching band and orchestral covers of The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen and The Clash's London Calling. You'll hear songs from Chumbawumba's album English Rebel Songs 1381-1984.
I'm gonna linkspam a bunch of my older writings on this:
#50 Overcoming the Noble Savage & the Sexy Squaw: Native Steampunk–Guest Blog by Monique Poirier
#98 Musing about Native Steampunk-Guest blog by Monique Poirier
Some of you already know Monique Poirier, either from her Beyond Victoriana essay , or from Tumblr , or you know her from cons and stuff. S
Other steampunks of my followers, please reblog with more recommendations about Steampunk stuff that's actually PUNK.
@sapphoandvanzetti , would love to hear you chime in.
Well shit yknow what I retract my statements because I had no idea about any of this! And the fact that the Spirit Halloween version was the only one I'd heard about is actually insulting with how cool a lot of this stuff sounds! Thank you for spending the time to drop all this, it's really appreciated!
One day, Clark is bored at work so he messages Bruce saying as much, hoping they could talk for a bit to help pass the time.
What he did not expect was for Bruce to tweet 'ostriches arn't real'.
The office becomes alive with activity. Perry marches over and tells Clark to write an article about how one of the richest men in the world does not believe a bird exists.
The interview?
Clark Kent: "Would you care to elaborate on what you meant about not believing ostriches exist?"
Bruce Wayne: "No."
Others then ask Bruce what his thoughts on other birds are. Penguins? Real. Flamingos? Not real. Pigeons? Some are, some arn't. It depends.
On the upside Clark's afternoon became a whole lot less boring. On the downside there is now a Twitter account called 'BirdsBruceWThinksArntReal'.
[Image: comment from lirabuswavi which reads "Clark, dieing internally: What are they, then? Bruce, knowing full well his kids are going to shout at him for this later: Bats, of course. Why would Batman have a BIRD sidekick, that's absolutely ridiculous." /end ID]
I'm thinking about the argument I got caught in yesterday- the subject of it doesn't matter.
Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the 'I encourage you to do your own research' statements real obnoxious. If it's phrased in a way that's impossible to navigate, good luck.
It sucks, but you gotta.
If you don't want to fact check individual words, that's fine. That's a lot to ask of someone that's just trying to figure out whether something is true.
This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.' Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.
This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.
Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.
i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it
INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE
zetabrarian's blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source -- anyone can say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information
FIND BETTER COVERAGE
if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn't necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information
TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT
A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.
I could not find a post or page about SIFT written by Mike Caulfield himself, so i went to the University of Washington's website for this page about it, since that is the university that employs him.
It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the "trace to original context" section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.
EXTRA CREDIT
I personally find that it is important to outright search for the opposite information. For example, I put in a few searches like "Mike Caulfield discredited" "Mike Caulfield wrong" "SIFT method bad" etc. I found nothing showing me any indications this method has any problems. Interestingly, somehow this did turn up an article about news literacy on Medium, which was actually written by Mike Caulfield in April of 2017
By sheer chance I found your Mass Effect posts and can I say, after YEARS of a hellscape of everyone constantly delighting in playing ultra racist Renegade Shepards it is SUCH a breath of fresh air to see Paragon Earthborn Shepards that defend batarians
I pretty much exclusively play Colonist in part BECAUSE with all of a colonist Shepard's history, I think that her choosing not to hate all batarians because of it hits in exactly the best way.
(I've also got some fic if you're interested! If you like the exploration of a paragon Shepard's compassion for the batarian people, Aren't You Supposed To Be-- is probably a good place to start)
I think at its core ME is about.... People aren't perfect. Sometimes they're not even all that good. Pretty much every single character in Mass Effect starts as kind of a shitty person. Garrus is shitty copaganda made flesh, Ash sucks, Kaidan has never met a moral stance he wouldn't compromise instantly if he met literally any pushback at all, Tali is horrifying about the geth, Wrex is a jaded misanthrope lashing out at the world... the list goes on. Jack started out viewing you as her ticket to a nice long vacation as a serial killer on the way to dying bloody and mean in her 20s. I mean, look at Miranda. Christ.
And what ME is about, in the end, is..........who can we become, we imperfect kind of shitty people shaped by the way the world has failed us and the way we've failed the world? Who can we become with a little bit of time, a little bit of patience, a single second chance? Just a little bit of guidance, a little bit of challenge, a well-timed "you did good"? A support system? One person who looks us in the eye and says "you're better than this" and believes it when we can't? Who acknowledges that sometimes people don't earn that faith, but when they don't, well, we'll deal with it then--we're not going to break faith first.
I won't let fear compromise who I am.
What can we become, when someone it would be justified to give up on is met with an open hand, and a promise that there's a future if they have the courage to believe it's not a trick?
Mass Effect is about how cruelty is easy. It's not "making the hard choice", it's not "doing what has to be done when no one else is willing to". Being cruel and petty and short-sighted is easy. It's so, so easy. It's easy to see a possible threat and kill it, right now, immediately, so it can't hurt you. It's easy. It feels safe. It feels like you're taking control, taking matters into your own hands, being strong and decisive, but it's not. It's weak, it's fear-based, it's lazy, it's cowardice, it's easy. It's so easy. It destroys the galaxy.
Compassion is so fucking hard. Making yourself vulnerable on purpose, showing good faith that a lot of people don't earn, that backfires sometimes, that can get you hurt--showing mercy without knowing whether that mercy will help or hurt you in the long run--that's scary. It doesn't feel safe, it doesn't feel strong, it feels like giving up control because that's true; controlling someone isn't compassion, and trust requires you to let go of control.
Mass Effect is about how a thousand tiny moments of the courage to be kind save the world. It's about how people become better when they're allowed to--given an exit ramp from a dark path, reminded of the person they once wanted to be. It's about gripping someone by the hand and telling them you are better than this until they, too, start to believe it.
Except for Liara. Liara gets like exponentially worse on every possible moral level and that is, to be clear, a compliment made with deep affection.
part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.
I'd like to add the appearance of the craft for anyone that hasn't seen it
Look at that thing. We get used to sci-fi where the spaceships try to look aerodynamic and cool, and the Nostromo went in the exact opposite direction. It is an entire industrial refinery floating through the void, matching the interior of overly complex panels, cramped spaces and chimneys dripping with water, chains dangling and clinking in the factory shafts.
It's enormous. It gives the impression of being understaffed by its sheer size - it doesn't seem to fit that a crew of seven, only two of whom are engineers, can be responsible for this towering manufactory, an implicit reference to the corporate mishandling at the core of the story.
It takes the symbol of antihuman greed - the factory with its barely paid, unsupported, physically endangered workers - and slaps it directly into space. It tells you that Weyland-Yutani did not invent exploitation, but is part of a repeating cycle that never ended even once we commodified travelling to the stars.
Its labyrinthine layout, exposed piping, its ridiculous size, it all gives the alien a perfect place to hide and hunt the crew, as if the alien turns the very ship against its passengers, which Ripley then discovers was an intentional collaboration from the start. Even the vent shafts they believe they can corner the alien in have an unforseen advantage in the alien's favour.
The alien doesn't want them, their employer doesn't want them, even their very ship doesn't want them, and it's the only thing between them and the vacant hostility of space.
"sex scenes have no narrative purpose" is such a funny take on so many levels. people will really believe that the whole human experience is valuable to portray artistically except sex, which of course has never held emotional weight or significance for anybody
yeah ok but i dont wanna watch straight sex scene number 1231234837582 in the middle of some movie thats clearly not fucking high art or anything, like please, tell me how the sex scene made jason X a deeper movie ill wait
you genuinely think that "the sex scene in Jason X, the movie about jason from Friday the 13th killing people in space, is bad" is a rebuttal to this point? like genuinely? genuinely? like you think that's the kind of sex scene I was talking about in the original post? you think when I'm talking about the artistic merit of sex scenes in movies you think I'm talking about the bit with the dominatrix in Jason X (2001) dir. James Isaac, the movie where Jason from Friday the 13th gets put in cryosleep and wakes up in the future on a spaceship where he starts killing people in outer space? you genuinely think this is the kind of movie and scene I'm referring to when I'm arguing for the potential artistic value of a type of scene? Jason X? Jason X? the one with Jason on a spaceship? you think that "well Jason X, the movie about Jason on a spaceship killing people in space, is bad" is a rebuttal to my point? Jason X? Jason X? J
the funniest part of the jason x sex scene post is actually watching jason x and finding out that the sex scene was plot relevant because jason revives at the very same time they were having sex in the room next door and it's implied that jason could sense them having sex while he was cryogenically frozen and it pissed him so much (because he hates sex) that it revived him. if you removed it you would make the movie less funny.
i think mass effect should have a cut scene where Shepard is failing miserably at assembly a spaceship model. Nothing else happens it's just like two minutes of you accdientally super gluing mini spaceship parts to your fingers
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