"Bridge-town on the Green River" Interested in drawing, watercolor, web design & photography. Active in fandom. Loves to read whenever possible. Self-taught bookbinder.
*Commissions *ko-fi
I lovelovelove the "Grace is a predator at heart and is built for speed and instincutal action, which scares the ever loving FUCK outta Rocky" posts, so I'm gonna expand upon it a bit.
- Eridian scientists and doctors doing their best to help him when they first get to Erid. A few weeks in, he's in and out of consciousness but doing better, a doctor (in a xenosuit obviously) comes in to check on him, sees he's asleep, so goes to examine him closely, because, you know, alien. Grace, who was only dozing, jerks away so fast it gives poor Dr Limestone a heart attack.
- the rest of the doctors make an agreement to give Grace plenty of warning before coming near him when he's half asleep again. Rocky explains that yes, Grace just is that quick, and he knows when things are going down.
- when the biodome is done, Grace and Rocky take a trip around it and explore. Rocky thinks it will be funny to throw a stone at Grace. Grace friend has no sound perception, silly. Grace can't view things when he's facing away, Grace will never see it coming. Grace hears Rocky scuffling around and gets the weird human sixth sense, so turns at the last second and catches the rock mid air, in one hand, then skims it across the water. Rocky is VERY unnerved, and also cant work out which bit is more impressive, the catch or the skim.
- later, when teaching the pebbles, they go on a heavily supervised trip into the biodome. One little pebble breaks off and hides in a rocky outcropping. Teacher Grace will never find them here. Cut to Grace stalking through the rocks like a true predator, all senses straining, and eventually snags the wayward rock and carries it back to the group. None of the other pebbles consider going AWOL again. Teacher Grace can find them.
- Grace deciding he needs more exercise, so going for runs around the biodome. He decides to go for endurance. Rocky comes to visit only to watch in horror as Grace runs for an hour pretty much straight. "How long can you do that for, question?" "With proper hydration and calorie intake, and rests, pretty much as long as I like." "What the fuck, question."
I wish we lived in a beautiful world where people did not use things for evil because I wish I could send gifts to people without knowing their address or asking them to doxx themselves. because like. for example sometimes i will be like oh that's a cute guinea pig plushie I wish I could send it to my guinea pig mutual who I've never spoken to or interacted with because I think they'd like it. but I can't do that without being like, hi, I'm a stranger on the internet you've never spoken to, tell me your home address, I want to mail you an object. I just want to be able to hand a box to the post office worker and be like, hello, this is for guineapigmutual, and they will nod and say yep we know exactly who that is and they will take it and mail it and I don't need to ever know the actual address or name or anything. unfortunately things cannot work like this but I can dream
Oh, shit yeah, you know, there should be a company that does privacy-based shipping. Like, if someone wants to send you something, you can give them a code or something, and when you ship through that company's facility, you give the code number and they ship to that address, but the original sender never has any idea where they're sending.
It would have to be total privacy-focused, not just shipping to your local post office and picking it up there. I mean, it should be that you don't even know what state (or country) you're shipping to. The codes would have to be totally randomized, no state or city/zip identifiers. And no selling of your address or other nefarious uses once they have it. TOTAL. PRIVACY.
Bonus points for integrating with USPS or FedEx so you could just use your usual shipping method with the address being that code, they'd send it on to the facility, who would then take it from there, etc etc.
And the code would be the same for that person at that address so it would be like having an address or phone number you are able to give out. And if you move, you get a new code for wherever you move to, and the person who moves to your former address also gets their own new code.
Come on, someone has to have come up with this. I bet it's some luxury shit that only rich people can afford, but imagine it was just a tiny bit more than shipping USPS. Total game changer.
Let me know if it exists, internet. I'm feeling way too lazy to—
Dammit I went and looked it up anyway and, lo and behold, they definitely exist. [It's like a sickness; I can't not know things once I get curious]
There are variations; I didn't see one that fit all my criteria, tho, but someone could make a killing with this. It's only a matter of time.
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
"this is an inaccurate adaptation" okay but is it good "this didn't happen in the book" does it make sense in the context of the new work though "they totally changed the plot" and is the new one good or bad "it's completely different" not what I asked "they changed all the stuff I like" then I get why you wouldn't be into it but I'm asking about its own artistic merits "this character is meant to be blonde" I couldn't give less of a fuck
Conservative beauty standards are back with a vengeance which means it's especially important to go out this summer with bellies out and bodies unshaved. Also be unapologetically disabled with mobility aids and wearable medical devices and stim toys and ear defenders and all that stuff. You need it. People need to see it. Everyone needs to be reminded that life is unquestioningly more enjoyable when you're not living inside an arbitrary set of rules created by people who are offended by all the wrong things.
About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.
It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.
So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.
So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.
Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.
The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.
... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.
Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.
Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.
And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.
OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)
Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.
Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.
This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.
During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.
The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).
Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.
Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.
OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!
First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!
(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)
Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3
