Hi! Call me Neil. they/her. I'm a 36 year old blogger who loves stuff. And things. I am super into Thomas Sanders Sander's Sides, right now. (Always subject to change or be added to) I reblog anything that strikes my fancy. Seriously. Nothing is off limits, particularly if its hilarious. Or feels inducing. Or interesting. I ADORE fanfic, and will read practically anything- even if its not in my specified fandoms. Pro-shipper, multishipper, kinktomato- yadda yadda. ( I have been on Tumblr so long guys. I am so old )
whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions
Meanwhile every time I watch a video clearly made by one guy in his living room and it has complete descriptive subtitles, I feel more love in me than I can contain.
The Watchtower has a perfectly normal and totally ordinary Mechanic. Except that it doesn’t, Danny just hasn’t found the right time to tell them that yet.
Danny, as Phantom, decided to live in the Watchtower without asking. It was in space, it was away from the GIW and his parents, and it was cool. Really it was the best Real Estate he could want. It would be difficult, but Danny was full confident he could do it.
Except it was easy?
Like, really easy.
Day one, he had dropped his Phantom Form and was in the cafeteria when it was empty, and the Head of Engineering tugged him aside and scolded him for like twenty minutes on leaving without the proper uniform or badge.
So he got a uniform and badge.
Day two he met the Big Three as they walked down the hallway, and Batman handed him a busted up helmet with the instruction “Fix this”. So he did.
And on it went, on and on, until Danny was paying rent by being a Mechanic on the Watchtower.
This really doesn’t change anything for anyone, until the Watchtower is hacked by an enemy and all listed personnel are gathered up.
Al listed personnel.
Danny isn’t actually listed.
Right as the villain is video conferencing his monologue to the heroes trying to get in, Danny walks into the room, gently nudges the man aside, and starts pulling out wires from the console.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh, I don’t get paid enough to deal with these stupid glitches. The airlocks are down again, fuck me, right?”
“What-I shut those down! Cease this!”
“Sorry, what? Ope, doesn’t matter anymore. Already fixed it. Shields are operating normally, zetas are online, and air locks are active-sorry ‘bout that.”
With the villain still spluttering and in shock, Danny nudges past him and his lackeys again and out of the room.
I didn’t clock the body language in the first pic as aggressive on a quick scroll, I thought it was a cute noses-touching pic. The second pic came along and just burgled my bones.
And like, I was chuckling I realized that in the first pic they are right in each other’s faces MOANING FURIOUSLY in that horrible way territorial cats do, which struck me as really funny. Then I laughed harder because they’re nose to nose like the enemies-to-lovers trope. I started wheezing as I looked at the second pic some more, with the cow cat just BODY SLAMMING the ginger in the stupidest-looking way. Almost got it together when I suddenly thought “This is how ridiculous those super intense cat fights in the Warriors series would actually look like.” I didn’t start to cry until my brain reached “Bro got pushed too far and fuckin buttered that Jorts.”
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting
and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm,
a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
Something deeply painful is the fact that seasons, especially fall, dont feel the same. Not because of individual maturity but because climate change has impacted the weather patterns so so so much that we cant even experience the same annual shifts that our ancestors have for centuries
I feel displaced, i yearn for the spring, summer, fall, and winter that i can barely remember experiencing
To make things worse, if you’re under 50-60 years old, you can’t even remember what normal seasons were like because you weren’t alive to experience them
In the graph above, you can see how there’s a clear tipping point in the late 1970′s, which is when global temperatures first began to really skyrocket.
I was born in 1997, so about 20 years after this shift occurred. There is an immense difference between the climate now and the climate I remember growing up in, but the way I experienced the seasons in my childhood was already fundamentally different from what the seasons were supposed to be like! My parents were pretty much the last generation to experience a normal climate, and that’s just… incredibly sad
I am processing this information in a normal way devoid of rabid rage and bloodlust i am processing this information in a normal wa-
I owe a lot to that vanished group. Were you in it? I miss you. Made this short comic for Dirty Diamonds #4- breakups. If you missed it at MICE and SPX this year, it’ll be at Asbury Park Comic Con in 2014, and fingers crossed for TCAF.
this comic is ten years old!!!! The obfuscated forum was a matrix fanfic/RP guild on neopets around 2000-2001 . I’ve never been able to find any of the people in it, but I still think a lot about the slightly older mod who ran it and the folks I bumped into in fandom spaces who helped me figure out how to survive online; I owe a lot to them.
As a Taylor Swift expert, Gaylor hater, and recovering 1989er, you probably don't want to know that apparently in the notes of the re-recording Taylor Swift talks about how she wasn't dating any of her female friends, and the Gaylors are having meltdowns on twitter. Words like "gaslit" and "queerbaiting" are being used.
Ive noticed recently that my generation has… no concept of what the various economic classes actually are anymore. I talk to my friends and they genuinely say things like “at least i can afford a middle class lifestyle with this job because i dont need a roommate for my one bedroom apartment” and its like… oughh
You guys, middle class doesnt mean “a stable enough rented roof over your head,” it means “a house you bought, a nice car or two, the ability to support a family, and take days off and vacations every year with income to spare for retirement savings and rainy days.” If all you have is a rented apartment without a roommate and a used car, you’re lower class. That’s lower class.
And i cant help but wonder if this is why you get kids on tumblr lumping in doctors and actors into their “eat the rich” rhetoric: economic amnesia has blinded you to what the class divides actually are. The real middle class lifestyle has become so unattainable within a system that relies upon its existence that theyve convinced you that those who can still reach it are the elites while your extreme couponing to afford your groceries is the new normal.
Middle class is being able to live 3 months comfortably without a paying job.
contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid
I want to thank all the gif-makers of tumblr for allowing me to experience all of the best, funniest, hottest,
most poignant,
most romantic, most intensely heart-tugging moments of shows that I will absolutely never watch.
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