#Cement and Concrete Association

[sheltiechicago]

Interchange, Guangzhou, China – Chek Poh Wong

The Global Cement And Concrete Association’s Competition

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

Architectural applications of concrete in buildings. By Portland Cement Association, 1961

[ivysanctum]

🌗✨ Burn the Last Bridges with the Last Quarter Moon ✨🌗

Hello lovely witches and magickal creatures 💫

The Last Quarter, or Third Quarter Moon, is a powerful time for final closures and concrete actions to end what no longer serves us, and clear out stubborn old habits or situations definitively. 🧹

This phase is distinct from the earlier waning phase as it calls not only for gradual releasing from negative influences, but for cementing those decisions with definitive actions and making sure there’s no turning back.

🕰️ Phase Duration: 2~3 days

🧙‍♀️ Suggested Rituals:

This is a period for deeper introspection and reflection on what truly must be removed from your life. It’s the perfect time for cycle-ending spells that ensure readiness for the new beginnings the New Moon will bring.

Consider cord-cutting spells to sever emotional ties, cleansing rituals using sage or salt to purify your space, and banishing negativity through focused visualizations or affirmations.

Elements Associated with the Last Quarter Moon

These elements align with the Last Quarter Moon's themes of reflection, release and removal of negative influences, and preparation for new beginnings. Use them to support your magickal rituals and spells during this time:

🕯️ Candle Colors: Black to banish negative energies and provide strong protection. Brown complements this by grounding and neutralizing. Yellow brings clarity and illumination.

💎 Crystals: Black Tourmaline for protection and grounding. Smoky Quartz clears negativity and promotes release.

🌿 Herbs: Sage cleanses and purifies the space, removing negativity. Bay Leaf supports manifestation and wisdom, aiding in releasing old patterns. Lemon Balm Soothes and heals emotionally, preparing for renewal. Dandelion aids in divination and connecting with deeper spiritual insights. Wormwood helps remove bad habits and supports psychic work.

🌬️ Incense: Myrrh deepens spiritual cleansing and protection. Cedarwood grounds and purifies your energy.

☘️ Essential Oils: Lemon cleanses and refreshes your space. Juniper protects and purifies the surroundings.

🎴 Tarot Cards: The Tower signifies major change and breaking down old structures. The Star brings hope and guidance. The Hermit fosters introspection and wisdom.

Incorporate these elements into your ritual to fully embrace the transformative energies of this powerful moon phase and amplify your intentions for closure and renewal.

Reblog if you find this post useful and follow for more magick and witchy tips💜

💫 Blessed be 💫

#IVYSANCTUM

[pinnithin]

im very compelled by the role memory loss plays in shadowheart's story, not only for the narrative flow of learning more about her alongside shadowheart herself, but also by the way its shaped her as a person, because how do you develop a personality when you so frequently cant remember who you are?

the trip back to the house of grief reveals that shadowheart's mission to retrieve the astral prism is far from the first time she's had memories removed. her past as a selunite, incidents throughout her sharran training, atrocities she's committed, the associated feelings of guilt and pain and loss - they've all been removed. several times over, in some cases, such as when she remembers her parents while in the process of torturing them.

but as in most cases with trauma and memory loss, she may not be able to remember what happened, but she remembers how it made her feel, and so she's learned to listen when her brain is giving her alarm bells. without anything concrete to make her decisions off of, she's built her identity around caution and heeding that inner voice when her instincts are trying to tell her something.

she wants to place her faith in shar. as far as facts go, serving her goddess is all she has to work with. its a comforting constant when her memory is so spotty and unreliable. but when she finds herself in situations where she should feel convicted in her actions but every instinct is telling her otherwise, her faith can't help but waver because she's learned over the years that her instincts can't be ignored.

she doesn't remember details, but she's skeptical and pragmatic enough not to just believe anything anyone tells her. she trusts her gut and sticks to her principles because that's all she has. and unfortunately for shar, its hard to brainwash someone into blindly following her faith when that person is a skeptic by default. especially when the methods shar uses to control people have only cemented shadowheart's tendency to question everything.

she trusts shar, yes, but she trusts herself more, and that's what ruins the plan to sacrifice the nightsong in the shadowfell, and i see that as a major factor in why shadowheart throws away the spear of the night. (i imagine viconia sees this coming, which could be why she sent her on the suicide mission for the prism to begin with) not necessarily because of anything alyn told her, but because it feels wrong. and when things feel wrong she's learned to listen.

idk i just find her so complex and interesting. here's a character who is so driven by very objective and practical standpoints but can only really trust her feelings because the part of her mind that's supposed to draw conclusions from fact is just lacking the necessary information she needs to make decisions. its a compelling mingling of character traits.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

New modelling reveals that low-carbon concrete developed at RMIT University can recycle double the amount of coal ash compared to current standards, halve the amount of cement required and perform exceptionally well over time. More than 1.2 billion tonnes of coal ash were produced by coal-fired power plants in 2022. In Australia, it accounts for nearly a fifth of all waste and will remain abundant for decades to come, even as we shift to renewables. Meanwhile, cement production makes up 8% of global carbon emissions and demand for concrete -- which uses cement as a key ingredient -- is growing rapidly. Addressing both challenges head-on, engineers at RMIT have partnered with AGL's Loy Yang Power Station and the Ash Development Association of Australia to substitute 80% of the cement in concrete with coal fly ash.

Read more.

[vintage-london-images]

Some of us have driven over the Hammersmith Flyover whilst travelling to and from the West and driving around London, but have we given it a thought how or why it was built. The Hammersmith Flyover was built between January 1960 and November 1961 but had first been suggested in the mid to late forties. This film Commissioned by the British Cement and Concrete Association gives us an interesting insight into its construction and innovation over sixty years ago. I hope you enjoy it. I have had to split the film into segments, this is Part One with other parts to follow.

Please check out other posts with hashtag #video on @vintage-london-images

[blueiscoool]

Roman Concrete: Mystery of Why Roman Buildings Have Survived so long has been Unraveled

The majestic structures of ancient Rome have survived for millennia — a testament to the ingenuity of Roman engineers, who perfected the use of concrete.

But how did their construction materials help keep colossal buildings like the Pantheon (which has the world's largest unreinforced dome) and the Colosseum standing for more than 2,000 years?

Roman concrete, in many cases, has proven to be longer-lasting than its modern equivalent, which can deteriorate within decades. Now, scientists behind a new study say they have uncovered the mystery ingredient that allowed the Romans to make their construction material so durable and build elaborate structures in challenging places such as docks, sewers and earthquake zones.

The study team, including researchers from the United States, Italy and Switzerland, analyzed 2,000-year-old concrete samples that were taken from a city wall at the archaeological site of Privernum, in central Italy, and are similar in composition to other concrete found throughout the Roman Empire.

They found that white chunks in the concrete, referred to as lime clasts, gave the concrete the ability to heal cracks that formed over time. The white chunks previously had been overlooked as evidence of sloppy mixing or poor-quality raw material.

"For me, it was really difficult to believe that ancient Roman (engineers) would not do a good job because they really made careful effort when choosing and processing materials," said study author Admir Masic, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Scholars wrote down precise recipes and imposed them on construction sites (across the Roman Empire)," Masic added.

The new finding could help make manufacturing today's concrete more sustainable, potentially shaking up society as the Romans once did. "Concrete allowed the Romans to have an architectural revolution," Masic said. "Romans were able to create and turn the cities into something that is extraordinary and beautiful to live in. And that revolution basically changed completely the way humans live." Lime clasts and concrete's durability

Concrete is essentially artificial stone or rock, formed by mixing cement, a binding agent typically made from limestone, water, fine aggregate (sand or finely crushed rock ) and coarse aggregate (gravel or crushed rock).

Roman texts had suggested the use of slaked lime (when lime is first combined with water before being mixed) in the binding agent, and that's why scholars had assumed that this was how Roman concrete was made, Masic said.

With further study, the researchers concluded that lime clasts arose because of the use of quicklime (calcium oxide) — the most reactive, and dangerous, dry form of limestone — when mixing the concrete, rather than or in addition to slaked lime.

Additional analysis of the concrete showed that the lime clasts formed at extreme temperatures expected from the use of quicklime, and "hot mixing" was key to the concrete's durable nature.

The benefits of hot mixing are twofold," Masic said in a news release. "First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction."

To investigate whether the lime clasts were responsible for Roman concrete's apparent ability to repair itself, the team conducted an experiment.

They made two samples of concrete, one following Roman formulations and the other made to modern standards, and deliberately cracked them. After two weeks, water could not flow through the concrete made with a Roman recipe, whereas it passed right through the chunk of concrete made without quicklime.

Their findings suggest that the lime clasts can dissolve into cracks and recrystallize after exposure to water, healing cracks created by weathering before they spread. The researchers said this self-healing potential could pave the way to producing more long-lasting, and thus more sustainable, modern concrete. Such a move would reduce concrete's carbon footprint, which accounts for up to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the study.

For many years, researchers had thought that volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples, was what made Roman concrete so strong. This kind of ash was transported across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Masic said that both components are important, but lime was overlooked in the past.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

By Katie Hunt.

[henrysglock]

I wasn't that asker but I agreed hard on condensing the cast, so now I have to ask: how would you, exactly? who's getting cut in the king james version of ST

Ough, a good question. I'm really waiting to see how the story ends before I make any concrete judgements, just in case there's something coming that cements certain characters as Necessary.

However.

I'd condense Eddie and Jonathan. We already had a town freak whose family carries a bad/creepy reputation. The only thing Eddie seems to do atp is deliver subtext, and it's subtext that could be delivered by the Byers family given all the fucked up things that have happened in association with them. Make Jonathan the snooty artsy guy, we'd see even more where Will gets it from.

I'm waiting to see what happens with ST5+TFS before I make any final judgements, but I even feel like the Munsons in general were very accessory. We already have a down-and-out "no one believes me" parent who knew the Creels (Wayne) in Joyce, we already have an absentee deadbeat dad (Alan) in Lonnie, and we already have a "creepy" high school senior making money on the side for his family in Jonathan. Jon and Lonnie were both suspected of killing Will right away, with varying degrees of seriousness. It wouldn't be a stretch to have people pin the ST4 deaths on him. It's in keeping with the "psycho older brother toooootally killed his younger sibling" Creel thing, so why not put the rest of Eddie's Creel subext into Jonathan? It would also pull the Byers family back into the center of the supernatural drama. Maybe then I could believe that ST5 is actually going to be "Will's season" 😂

Call him Eddie Byers instead of Jonathan, too, if you're an Edward Creel truther. [insert long tangent about the hypothetical Eddie Byers paralleling Edward Creel/the older brother version and Will paralleling Henry Creel/the younger brother version here]

I would also have kept the Byers family in Indiana, but w/e. That's my personal bone to pick until they give me a better reason why all that had to happen in Cali/Nevada.

Moving on:

I'm waiting to see what they end up doing with Vicki, but unless she's really important in some way that couldn't be fulfilled by Nancy...I'd remove her and make ronance a thing instead. Again, though: waiting to see what they do with her. She just feels very accessory at the moment. Fingers crossed she'll become more relevant.

I'm also very much waiting for them to all be congregated in Hawkins again so that we don't have a small army of minor antagonists that we have to deal with :// I get why it had to be like that, but it was also...A lot.

Also, I would have nixed Dottie in ST2. Everyone else in the Kali arc served, tbh, but she annoyed me and her subtext could have been reistributed 🤷🏼 (I hope we return to the situation with Ray Carroll, though, even in a small way. Like. Pleasepleasepleaseplease)

[neechees]

I wanna ask where the racist assumption associating indigenous people with wolf where that come from

I literally have no idea. Afaik it's not from any one specific source, but might be an amalgamation of ideas over time to associate Native Americans with specifically dogs (& by extension, wolves) when dehumanizating us. I think there is some associations with wolves that come from many Native beliefs (as many Native people think wolves are sacred, & feature prominently in our legends) that Europeans & White settlers decided to take & use to demonize us. I can see the association appearing possibly due to some of the following historical contexts, but this is just me hypothesizing, just my opinion, & I could be wrong:

The general Noble Savage idea that Native Americans were/are subhuman at best, & we're what "untamed humans" apparently looked like. We were closer to animals than humans to them. Dogs are also something you can tame & train, & assimilation is one way White people wanted to "tame" Native people, & thought that Manifest Destiny would be them "taming" Turtle Island, so maybe the thinking was similar. This in addition to thinking of Native people as wild, dangerous, scary, etc, so therefore they chose dogs/wolves to help represent that idea.

Wolves in the U.K had largely become extinct in the 16th century, which lines up at around the time colonization of the Americas started really taking off & Britain & colonizers from the UK entering the picture. Wolves were seen as a nuisance & dangerous & scary, & so they thought it better to kill them. You can see similar sentiments regarding Native Americans being deemed as scary, a danger to Whites, inconvenient regarding settlement & trying to replace bison or Native animals with European livestock, AND all that in addition to many Native American tribes thinking wolves are good.

Most dog breeds Native to North America that Native people worked with & lived alongside went extinct as a result of colonization, such as the Salish wool dog & the Chiribara dog. Settlers obviously wanted to do the same to us, so they could've made the connection to dogs as a reference to this. There's also events in which settlers would kill our dogs to try kill or assimilate US, such as the Canadian government mass killing Inuit sled dogs

Racist science, the idea that humans are like "dog breeds", & the creation of the Métis slur "halfbreed". This really helped to cement the association of Native people with dogs in particular, because it implies Métis & Native people are dogs & referring to us by that terminology. The things above may have helped to be the precursor (or maybe THIS was), I'm not sure, but again this definitely cemented it

This would be a bit more recent, but like the bastardization & fetishization of Native culture & representation in media. It is true that many Native Nations think wolves are sacred & they play a prominent part in many of our cultures & spiritualities, but this isn't represented accurately or respectfully by many white people, so you get things like the stupid "two wolves inside of you" meme or those weird paintings of Indian maidens hanging out with random wolves, & so on. It's the fetishization of our culture plus mixing that in with White ppl thinking wolves are cool, so they just mesh them together however they want, & this helps to support the more negative associations of Native people with dogs & wolves (like the halfbreed slur)

I havent really been able to find scholarly research done on this or anything, & it's one of those things that aren't really talked about or looked into, but it's there. Maybe we'd be able to find more concrete answers if there wrre more research done on it, but for now the above can just be speculation. It's really common for oppressed groups to be compared to animals for dehumanization, often with specific animals to reinforce racist ideas or to justify their oppression, but why Native people are called dogs in particular I'm not entirely sure.

[thegreatunifier]

☁️ (first a soft one)

Making plans of any sort for Billy Kaplan and Teddy Altman always felt like a game of Russian Roulette, where instead of 5 empty chambers and 1 bullet, it was the opposite. Because inevitably, whenever they made plans with friends or family or just the two of them, someone decided that it was their day to wreak havoc somewhere in the universe and either one or both would be called to duty at the drop of a hat. At first, it was small things like the bank being robbed while they were visiting their favorite comic book shop down the street, or someone deciding that bringing a semi automatic to the mall while they were out with Billy's brothers and having to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the mess. But now that they are more well known with being associated with the Avengers and Dr. Strange and even some of the X-Men when the situation demanded, the occurrences seemed to be coming more frequently. Which wasn't a problem, really it wasn't. Teddy knew that this was one of the downfalls that came with being a hero. He knew that crime waited for no man, woman or child, human or no. But sometimes the constant running and dodging and saving and protecting had them so caught up in everyone else's problems that the two of them often forgot about their own. Like today. Today was forecasted to be a perfect, New England autumn day. The sky was cloudless, the air was crisp, clean and sweet with the scents of sun warmed leaves.

And the two of them were strolling leisurely through Central Park with no real destination in mind. It was a day that felt infinite, where time stood still despite the bustle of the city around them. Teddy had been on a mission to find every single hidden nook and cranny within the 843 acres that he could, and so far he estimated he only found less than 1/10th of what could be here. Sure, he could ask Billy to scan the place, sure he could do his research but exploring without a plan, rhyme or reason was part of the adventure. So now, with them trekking off the concrete path, moving randomly through the trees and crevices of rock, Teddy suddenly stopped in his tracks. It wasn't something that was even semi remarkable. It was simply a huge boulder that jetted up from the earth like a whale breaking the surface of the waves. While the lower parts were covered in moss, the higher the granite grew it became more weathered and sun bleached. It was a testament to how long it had been there, undisturbed, withstanding the elements of weather, time and human. "There it is!" He grinned, taking Billy's hand as they carefully made their way to the boulder's base. He had seen it from above, flying back from one mission or another in the dark and the light of the full moon had glanced upon the stone so perfectly that he knew he just had to find it again. "Tee, you know both of us can fly right?" Billy chuckled when his fiancée had let go of his hand to start scaling the stone. Despite it being quite cemented, there weren't a lot of places where one could get a hold of if they did ever want to mount the summit.

"yes, but where is the fun in that?" Teddy called over his shoulder before focusing back on the task at hand. While the main body of the bolder was slanted at an angle that would help climbers, the base was nothing but a near vertical wall of granite, smooth and hard against his skin. Okay, maybe he could cheat a little bit. He added a few inches to his height just so he could get the angle he needed when he jumped from the ground and caught the top of the stone that made up the base wall. He pulled himself up, making sure his center of gravity was secure before turning around. "Come on, jump and I'll pull you up." Teddy's grin widened when he saw Billy roll his eyes, but follow his command nonetheless. It was a stretch, but after a moment or two, they were both standing at the crest of the stone, a good 20 feet from the ground.

""I... am King of the Rock." Billy snorted and shoved Teddy gently against his shoulder, but not nearly hard enough for them to lose their balance. "And there's nothing you can do about it." "Oh yeah?" There was a small opening in the trees above them, and it was at that exact moment that a crack of thunder echoed off the trees and buildings like a cannon. Teddy looked up, frowning at the suddenly black clouds that were pressing down on them. And before he could even think to curse them, the roar of the rain rushed upon them, soaking them through in minutes. "Well, I guess the weather man was wrong after all." Teddy chuckled, looking back down to the man before him, brushing the dark bangs out of the way of the most beautiful pair of amber eyes he would ever see. "Yeah, well it wouldn't be the first time would it?" Billy grinned before pulling Teddy into a kiss. Yes, their lives were crazy and dangerous. But it was the moments like this that made every single ounce of pain and suffering worth it.

[sheltiechicago]

Rice mill, Bangladesh – Azim Khan Ronnie

The Global Cement And Concrete Association’s Competition

[go-to-the-mirror]

this is the georgie and martin one... oh no...

HI @a-mag-a-day IM ABOUT TO BE SO NORMAL. anyway um conflicts of interest: i love jonathan sims head archivist of the magnus institute london more than anyone else in the world barring my cat and my partner.

so let's just. go then, i guess.

I had a half blue in modern pentathlon and another in orienteering from my undergrad days.

I've done a couple of triathlons before, and a few aquathons (see, my favourite part was cycling, and second favourite was swimming, so I wish there was a swimming and cycling one I could do, instead of just swimming and running), but I've never heard of a pentathlon before. Apparently - according to the CBC - it's fencing, swimming, horse riding, and combined running and shooting.

Obviously, we wanted to leave him to his own stupidity and let the Amazon deal with him, but we both knew that it just wouldn’t be worth the paperwork.

ajhdshaghfhg they should have

As I got closer to the shabono, it became clear what was wrong with it. Although each roof was thatched like normal, the stands weren’t made of leaves, but all kinds of different materials instead: long strands of plastic, shards of rusted metal, even oddly shaped hunks of cement.

Hmm

But the inside was just like the outside, and in the worst possible way. There were no people in there, but that’s not the same thing as it being empty. Instead there were … figures. From a distance, they looked like human beings standing impossibly still, but getting closer quickly revealed the lie. They were just the rough shapes, cobbled together out of a hundred different pieces of garbage: a broken metal clothes horse for a ribcage, a plastic chair leg for an arm, rusted screws for teeth. In some cases, it looked like someone had gone to a lot of effort to match anatomy with construction. I saw one with a broken water cooler where its stomach would be, and another had a pair of old oxygen tanks standing in for lungs.

That's really spooky!

He started convulsing, as grey, liquid concrete began to pour from his mouth, from his nose and his eyes. His limbs went rigid and I could see his body starting to swell with it. I don’t know if it was me or Fernanda screaming, maybe it was both of us, but I know it was her that first spotted that the detritus figures were no longer choosing to stand still. That was the last I ever saw of Dr Nikos Anastas. There was never any question of trying to save him.

Oh that is quite spooky. Did they move? Did they become statues? Tis left to the imagination, for your mind to come up with the scariest possible answer while you try to sleep.

In the end, we crossed paths with a group of real Yanomami tribesmen. They were really friendly and, once they figured out that we were lost, they were very happy to return us to a part of the jungle we knew, near our facility. Of course, we didn’t have a good explanation for what happened to Dr Anastas, so we lost our jobs pretty much immediately. But you know what? That’s fine. I’m done with the jungle. There’s something in there, and I don’t know which scares me more: the thought that it’s more than just the things we left behind; or that that’s all it is, and we can’t escape the ruins of our own future.

that is a GREAT last line. ✨spooky!✨

GEORGIE Oh… Because I think he’s going to destroy himself and anyone who lets him get too close. And I don’t want that to include me. Or Melanie.

Alright, alright. Firstly, do I get where Georgie's coming from? Yes, I do. It's hard, having to step away from someone you love because they're going to get you hurt. Giving up one people is hard, and it's shitty when other people tell you that you need to not do that, different situations, but still, same principle. You decide who to associate yourself with, and it's fine to give up on people.

But... being alone sucks, being given up on sucks. I've been there. I've been given up on. You know what sucks more than the fear that everyone hates you? That fear being realized. And that fear was realized for Jon, he wakes up from a coma and has Georgie basically tell him she wished he was dead - maybe not what she said, but that's an interpretation, and if I know enough about anxiety - I know that interpretation is what Jon believes.

Good for Georgie, I guess, doesn't get her life ruined by a monster, I guess. But I sympathize more with Jon. Justified? Sure, but hey, me being alone was justified too. Does it still hurt? Yeah. Is it still a shitty situation to be in, does it still ache to be written off by someone you trusted? Yeah. Yeah, it probably does.

MARTIN Well, sometimes helping people hurts. GEORGIE Sure, but that doesn’t mean everything painful helps. Sometimes people have problems that will wreck you long before you can make a dent in them. And some people don’t want help; they just want other people suffering with them.

And here's the thing, right. I don't have one singular take on this. There's ✨nuance!✨ Like, yeah, does it suck to be written off by a friend? Yeah! Yeah it does! But then, Martin's all... he's doing this whole... hurt himself for Jon - something that, yeah, isn't helping. He's just hurting himself, he's just putting himself in these dangerous situations because maybe it'll help Jon.

Georgie has every right to leave, to protect herself and Melanie. She can't help Jon. Sure, she's saying it in a vaguely victim blame-y way, most seen in the whole "throwing a grenade and jumping on it" thing, cause he didn't chose this, at least not fairly, but she's right to leave, she's right to say this, she feels that she'll just get herself hurt if she tries to help and I get that.

You don't want to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

GEORGIE He doesn’t know what he wants. And from the sound of things, he’s run out of time to figure it out. MARTIN It’s easy to pass judgement from the outside. GEORGIE One more reason to stay on the outside.

AND YEAH, IM A LITTLE ANNOYED AT GEORGIE HERE, because she doesn't know what's going on, she doesn't understand and she doesn't get to pass judgement on what other people are feeling and doing and thinking and deciding as someone who's not involved and doesn't want to be involved. Great for her, she isn't trapped in an evil job and gotten turned into a bloody monster. Yeah, I think Martin's right here, for a given value of right. Right is subjective.

MARTIN A-a-and wh-what, you think Melanie’s worth saving? GEORGIE It’s not about worth, but yeah, she’s actually trying to get well, so I’m going to help her. MARTIN This place isn’t a sickness. GEORGIE No, I think it’s worse. MARTIN Look, we’re all just trying to do the right thing. GEORGIE Maybe. Look, life forces you to make hard decisions, but I can never trust someone who goes around looking for hard decisions to make.

You sure that's what's happening? You sure it's not - I dunno - a lot of intentionally crafted rock and hard place decisions for the purpose of ending the world? You sure it's not magically knowing that your... colleague has a ghost bullet in her, and having to decide between violating her trust or asking her and potentially her actually hurting and/or killing you? Sure it's not someone's trapped in a coffin and you're like well, hey, at least I can do something useful? Get her out? Die trying? It's so easy to pass judgement from the outside, to call it a stupid decision when it wasn't. You know what sort of decision it was? A decision from someone who didn't care whether they lived or died in part because of your actions.

GEORGIE Oh, I was, um… … Huh. No-one, apparently. MELANIE Yeah, this place will do that to you. Come on. GEORGIE Sure.

I ONLY NOW REALIZED MARTIN TURNED INVISIBLE WITH HIS SPOOKY LONELY POWERS??? WHAT???

Huh.

Well, in conclusion, really cool statement, I have Feelings about the post statement, and I just think that although Georgie has every right to leave and a point in some things that she was saying, she still said it in a really victim blame-y way, and I'm a little annoyed at her perspective on things. Also, Martin's in like season 3 Jon level of monsterhood, I don't know why he thought he wasn't an Avatar in season 5. Was he doing it unconsciously? Is he at season 2 level, actually?

Right...

Oh! Tomorrow is Cul-de-Sac, one of my favourite episodes... ever. So, look forward to that :3

[jitteryfool]

Saw a post with a photo of black sesame milk and someone added a meme about how it looks like concrete which, yeah, made me chuckle a bit because fair. Only to make the mistake to go into the notes and being hit with frankly offensive and, dare i say, racist comments making fun of the drink which just immediately soured my entire view on the concrete meme. Like, before it was just a harmless joke I didn't think much about but scrolling through dozens of comments calling it disgusting and wondering how anyone could drink it, all of it then being followed by the cement comparison, really just puts me off and now, the innocuous 'it's cement!' comments don't appear in good faith for me anymore because I just associate it with those bigoted remarks.

And it's just a good case example how this shit works in general, doesn't it?

[warningsine]

Aside from water, concrete is the most-used material in the world, with about 14 billion cubic metres being used every year. Of that, 40% of that is used to build places for people to live.

If you were to pour that amount of concrete to make a paving slab ten centimetres thick, it would cover all of England and about half of Wales. In the US, the same amount would cover the state of New York.

But concrete production releases carbon dioxide (CO₂), one of the greenhouse gases that drives climate change. About 90% of emissions associated with concrete come from the production of Portland cement – this fine grey powder, the part that binds concrete ingredients together, was named after its resemblence to stone from the Isle of Portland, Dorset. Portland cement accounts for 7%-8% of the world’s direct CO₂ emissions.

Production of a more sustainable and cost-effective low-carbon cement, often nicknamed “green” cement, is scaling up. A new plant next to an existing cement plant in Redding, California, will produce about 15,000 tonnes of low-carbon cement every year. This could be used to make about 50,000 cubic metres of concrete, which is less than 0.0004% of the world’s concrete production.

At Redding, materials technology company Fortera turns CO₂ captured during conventional cement production into ready-to-use green cement, a form of calcium carbonate. This could reduce carbon emissions of cement by 70% on a tonne-for-tonne basis, according to Fortera.

A concrete issue

People have been using concrete for more than 2,000 years, by blending gravel, sand, cement, water and, sometimes, synthetic chemicals. It’s used to create everything from paths and bridges to buildings and pipes.

Currently, the EU uses more than two tonnes of concrete per person per year – 325kg of that is cement. That’s equivalent to the amount of food the average European person eats in five months.

Cement production is an energy-intensive process and the greenhouse gas emissions are hard to cut. When limestone is heated in a kiln, often fuelled by coal, nearly half that limestone is lost as CO₂ emissions.

This happens because limestone (calcium carbonate) breaks down in heat to form clinker, a mix of calcium oxide and CO₂. For every tonne of ordinary Portland cement made, 0.6-0.9 tonnes of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere.

So many industries rely on this material. The main challenge facing the cement industry is reducing CO₂ emissions at the same time as meeting global demand.

So as well as developing new technologies, low-carbon cement production must be established on a global scale to meet infrastructural needs required of economically developing nations.

Low-carbon alternatives

Other ways to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete include using fly ash (a by-product from burning coal in power plants) or slag (a by-product from steel production) to partially replace Portland cement.

However, sources of these materials will reduce as other industries decarbonise. Over time, less iron ore will be used to produce steel as more steel is produced from recycling existing steel, so there’ll be less available slag.

Current strategies for decarbonising cement and concrete rely heavily on using carbon capture and storage technology to capture unavoidable process emissions from cement plants.

So low-carbon cement production doesn’t have to involve replacing every cement production plant in operation. Low-carbon cement facilities can be retrofitted to capture CO₂ emissions released from manufacturing conventional cement. Plants can also use that captured CO₂ within the cement that they are producing or as a product for the food and chemical industries.

In Norway, Heidelberg Materials are building an industrial-scale carbon capture and storage plant at a cement facility that could capture and store an estimated 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year – that’s half the existing plant’s emissions.

However, this technology has a high investment cost for cement producers. Captured CO₂ can be stored underground, but this requires specific geological characteristics that aren’t guaranteed at cement production sites.

Greenhouse gas emissions in the cement sector are regulated by the EU’s emissions trading system. This was established to make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, reduce emissions and generate revenues to finance the green transition.

This legislation has not significantly reduced carbon emissions in the cement sector over the past decade, according to the International Energy Agency, mainly due to free emissions allowances being granted to cement manufacturers.

Despite sustained healthy profits in the cement industry, there hasn’t been enough investment in the widespread uptake of cleaner technologies and the sustainable use of materials. Greater financial incentives could help whereby companies have to pay for emissions associated with the production of cement.

As a design engineer, I appreciate that material choice and good design play a major role in the sustainability credentials of construction. Before low-carbon cement technology becomes more widespread, engineers, designers and builders can use construction materials more efficiently and choose products with lower embodied carbon – that’s carbon emissions released during the life cycle of building materials, from extraction through to disposal.

This approach could easily save 20% in embodied emissions associated with new building design.

Some governments could move towards only permitting the use of low-carbon cement. In Ireland, the Climate Action Plan 2024 requires that low-carbon construction methods and low-carbon cement are specified where possible for government-procured or government-supported construction projects.

Could all cement in the future be low-carbon or “green”? How “low-carbon” is defined will play a very important part in how this is translated into practice in the industry.

Retrofitting technology to large-scale existing cement production plants will prove that it’s technically possible to produce low-carbon cement efficiently at scale. With the right incentives in place by governments and the construction sector, almost all cement produced around the world could be low-carbon.

[kitakataramen]

Hi! I'm sorry if this is a strange or out of place ask, but you seem very knowledgable, and I was wondering if you had any advice. I am learning Japanese, and I can read quite a lot of it without issue. I don't know what any of it means, though... Like I'm seeing the words, and know how to say them, but not what they mean. I don't know what to do. Did you ever go through this? Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi! I definitely did go through this and continue to do so. I first had this issue when I was studying N5 level material, because that tends to have mostly hiragana and very little kanji, so I could read the syllables but couldn't differentiate where one word ended and another began. There are so many words/combinations of words that sound similar that my brain really struggled to find meaning.

Now I'm studying things in the N4/N3 range and I still struggle, mostly in cases with grammatical points written in hiragana. Often I can understand the individual words, but can't parse out the overall meaning of the phrase or sentence.

My advice as both a language teacher and language learner is this:

Study vocabulary, and start studying kanji as soon as possible! Kanji is essential to meaning in Japanese. The quicker you learn to associate meaning with kanji, the easier a time you'll have. I've just purchased すみっコぐらしはじめての漢字辞典 (Sumikko Gurashi Hajimete No Kanji Jiten) to help myself review some old kanji and learn new ones.

I love using material that actual Japanese students use, and I find that starting from around 3rd grade material is most helpful because by 3rd grade they've started adding useful kanji to the text, but they still have furigana to help you read it.

If you don't have the funds to buy a Japanese exercise book like this (it runs around $27 on Amazon and I believe it is called "The Secret Dictionary of Summiko Gurashi" in English) you can find all kinds of free printouts and materials by grade on this website:

2. Immerse yourself in the language. Quite a bit of meaning is garnered through context and body language, so without these, it can be difficult to understand what you're reading/listening to. You can immerse yourself in different ways; for example, watching Japanese TV (I like to watch it with both Japanese audio and Japanese subtitles on), chatting with someone in Japanese (I used HelloTalk to find people to chat with when I was first starting out), or playing Japanese videogames. The best thing to do is do something you already like and are very familiar with in your first language, but in your target language. This way, you can add some context to what you're reading/hearing, and this will help your brain associate a concrete meaning to the language.

3. Keep a notebook in which you write down any new words you encounter. Personally, I like to keep my notebook on hand when I'm reading. If I encounter a new word or grammar point, I'll write it down to help cement the meaning in my brain. Don't expect to remember everything the first time you read or hear it! While some people are proven to have an aptitude for language learning and can pick up new words and their meanings almost immediately, most of us can't, and some of us struggle harder than others. That's totally okay! Again, you need to find some way to associate the words you're learning with their meaning. Different methods work for different people.

4. Try putting the new words/grammar you've learned in action! Once you've studied something, practice producing that language yourself. You can do this by writing in a diary, or by recording yourself saying it, or using the word/phrase in a conversation with someone else in the target language. This will also help the meaning to stick in your brain better!

5. Keep going! Don't give up. Language learning is not a linear process. You will have periods of progress and periods of stagnation (these are known as language learning plateaus). It's natural. And just because you feel like you aren't making any progress doesn't mean it's true. Set an attainable goal for yourself ("I am going to read this book about cats" or "I am going to play Mario Kart in Japanese") and keep working towards it a little every day, and you'll find you're improving more than you think.

[gribblehusband]

*crawls out of the depth of the earth*

I arrived!

I would have asked more questions earlier but life got in the way. Sadly I didn't come so far to listen to the other playlist on YouTube BUT my god I have been listening to the music on Spotify so much.

It's too the point where I hear certain songs from the playlist and think about your fic.

I vaguely remember that you said it's alright to ask what you have planned for the side fanfiction and I stand here to ask just that :33

omg im so curious about which songs specifically you associate with dotf. the one i associate most with vos isnt even a serious one (xoxo kisses hugs) but everytime i hear it i see that little freak doing a little dance in my head

alas i dont have a lot planned out for balm for the soul. i wanna finish dotf first, which im currently taking a break from writing right now until i get some stuff sorted out. however! i will tell you my unorganized thoughts i have right now.

if the main three love interests from balm for the soul were animals theyd be: tes would be a wolf, helex would be a grizzly bear, and tarn would be a bird of some sort. probably a bird of prey.

i have a scene planned out where helex and the mc lady and the tramp a really juicy peach reminiscent to how he was supposed to do that with a brain in the comics before it was scrapped. and it will be sexually charged mark my words.

tarn is going to nickname the mc after a city on cybertron to cement their place by his side. because hes possessive like that. you will see this in dotf btw.

tes will have long fluffy hair that’s naturally very soft. he melts when you run your fingers through it.

im still working on exactly how tarns transforming addiction will translate when he literally can no longer transform. he will take up a vice of some sort to replace it. im considering smoking although i do think hed be the most insufferable pretentious vaper to ever walk the earth

the mc knows how to play various instruments. violin and piano being two of them. i headcanon that music on cybertron is very synth heavy and industrial so itd be new sounds to tarn that he would appreciate and be fascinated by. its what bonds him and the mc together at first. thinking about having him call them his songbird.

some songs that remind of of balm for the soul include: concertina ballerina by alternative radio and like a dog by ferry!!

this is so disjointed and im sorry i have nothing actually concrete but i thought i should share what i do have >:33