desmothene

[desmothene]

Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight launches tomorrow!

Hello, friends! Jesse is here once again to let you all know that the moment you've been (possibly?) waiting for is here, and the first episode of Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight drops tomorrow, December 28, at 6:00 PM CST! You should be able to listen to Roy Kaplan on any RSS feed aggregator and most podcast aggregator services, but also I'll be trying out the YouTube premiere feature if you'd like to make an event of it and chat along as the episode premieres! That will be happening here:

(If people like the premieres I can also do it for future episodes. I'll probably make a poll about that later in the week.)

Roy Kaplan will be releasing a new episode every other Saturday at 6:00 PM CST, with Patreon supporters able to access new episodes one week early (except this premiere episode, of course). This first season, Out of Sight, is twelve episodes, all 30-40 minutes long and encompassing a largely self-contained mystery for Kaplan to solve.

What is Roy Kaplan? Why, it's the newest paranormal cyberpunk detective audio drama, delivered straight to your ears courtesy of yours truly. It's about Roy Kaplan--private investigator, ex-burglar, and psychic--solving all sorts of crimes across the city with the occasional help from his ghost roommate Wes. It's heavily inspired by old time radio shows like Richard Diamond and hardboiled detective fiction of the 30s-50s, and it's episodic in format so you can pretty much listen to any episode on its own without needing too much context. If you want more detective fiction that remembers a detective needs to actually investigate things, with a touch of paranormal and cyberpunk to spice things up, Roy Kaplan could be the show for you!

If you'd like to support the show and help make a second season possible, Patreon is the main place to do it: https://www.patreon.com/jessepinwheel

Patreon supporters can get new episodes early, as well as PDF transcripts which are better formatted for print (web transcripts are available for free on my website https://www.thepinwheellab.com/rk/oos/ )

If you're excited and you want to chat about it, you can join The Pinwheel Lab on Discord, where I post updates on this and my other projects: https://discord.gg/vtAfkyjVfs

It's been a long road to get everything together and ready for this launch, and I know some of you have been waiting quite a long while for this release. I hope all of you enjoy Bomber Blackout and the other episodes that will release over the next five months.

Happy listening, and I'll see you on the other side :)

[desmothene]

Love the idea of collective Jedi parenting. Like technically I only have one padawan but my friends' padawans are also coincidentally my padawans. My padawan’s friends are also my padawans. This padawan who got separated from their master? My padawan today. This other padawan who needs to learn to pilot but their master is afraid of flying? Now my padawan twice a week.

[desmothene]

Jedi Knight Finn

Artist is Andres Bellorin, who's thoughts on the design can be found here:

[desmothene]

Y’all my best friend and I have been having this debate for the past year.

Who do you think is hotter/more attractive/better, Anakin Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi, specifically in Revenge of the Sith?

[desmothene]

I think there's something that needs to be said about encouraging readers to leave feedback.

For me it's not about "tell me my writing is amazing and stroke my ego"

It's more about "please engage with me so that I can experience your joy secondhand and foster a connection with you"

I understand that not everyone wants this in their reading experience, some people are shy and a million other reasons why maybe someone wouldn't want to engage and that's perfectly fine!

But what I'm trying to steer away from is being a passive content creator with passive consumers. What I want to steer toward is fostering a community that is essential to fandom. I want to see your reactions because it makes me feel like I'm a part of something.

On encouraging reblogs —

I understand that not everyone is comfortable reblogging, especially explicit content. This is ok!

But just consider that the only reason you were able to enjoy a fic or fanart is because someone else shared it, and by not sharing it yourself you are potentially robbing someone else of the opportunity to enjoy it as much as you did.

As OPs our reach only goes so far and this website relies on reblogs in order for anything to truly get seen by a wider audience.

So that's really it! That's why I encourage these two things at the end of every story I post. Not because I'm trying to be demanding and "make people feel bad" if they don't do it.

I know most other social media sites encourage mindless content consumption and that's just the way of the world nowadays, but I am from a time when community was at the heart of fandom and I just don't want to lose that.

[desmothene]

Attack of the Clones (2002) Hayden Christensen is photobombed by George Lucas.

[desmothene]

so, you’re finally awake, onii-chan

[desmothene]

[desmothene]

For the Badass Couple prompt for Codywan Week 2021! I just want an excuse to put them in fancy clothes, someone doing an insane acrobatic kick with a dress and here we go XD The handcuffs is a thing that came from the codywan week server when we figured wait what if their captors thought cuffing them will slow them down but Cody goes haha I’m left handed and as a result we have a trail of competent destruction and the ultimate super couple. Maybe this is a universe where they’re both a super spy couple like Mr and Mr(s) Smith? Obi Wan worked for the Jedi Order and Cody for the Kamino Institute and they both work to take down S.I.T.H when it turns out they’ve been sabotaging the Jedi spies and had a hand (many hands) in the traumatic training regime every Kamino Institute spy has to go through as a child.

[desmothene]

Keldabe

Ref from Brokeback Mountain (image under cut)

[desmothene]

Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too

[desmothene]

*if it changes every time or something, just go with your immediate instinct

[desmothene]

WHAT???? Fuck him

[desmothene]

I understand the "I will die for you" ship dynamic, but what about the "I will not let you die, I will not let myself die- we will, at any cost, survive" kind of couple?

[desmothene]

something that really annoys me is how female jedi will often have less layers on their robes and get this ugly V neck down to their boobs or just get drawn with a tight body suit instead of robes OR some other atrocity like whatever the fuck aayla and ahsoka ended up wearing i think some sw character designers got allergic to putting women jedi in classic well tailored robes pls let them have layers like onion

[desmothene]

Oho? Do I hear art requests?

First of all, I just want to say you’re awesome and your art is amazing. The way you draw the characters, even in angsty situations, is just so adorable and yummy. And the ships you draw are just so heart-wrenchingly wholesome, I could stare at them for hours.

May I ask for Cody and Obi-Wan with some domestic fluff? They deserve to be domestic and fluffy. Bonus points for a kiss.

Thank you!! You’re too kind 🥰 I’m so happy you like the art (and ships!) codywan was my first ship I did art for, it holds a special place in my heart. I’ve only ever done one sort of kiss years ago so I just thought I’d try another 😅 in the early desert husband days ✨

[desmothene]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024