#clipper class

[pretty-little-fools]

[lonestarflight]

Recovery Helicopter 66, also known as "Old 66", on USS HORNET (CVS-12), with the operation’s motto "Three More Like Before." This helicopter was used to recover the astronauts from Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13.

"Following the Apollo 11 mission, the Navy switched to a three-digit designation system and Helicopter 66 was retagged Helicopter 740. Recognizing the fame Helicopter 66 had achieved, the Navy began the practice of repainting Helicopter 740 as Helicopter 66 for the later recovery missions in which it participated, Apollo 12 and Apollo 13, painting it back as Helicopter 740 at the conclusion of each mission."

- Information from Wikipedia: link

Later, it crashed in the Pacific Ocean in 1975 during a training exercise. At the time of its crash, it had logged more than 3,200 hours of service.

Date: November 24, 1969

WA – Navy Apollo 12 – recovery 12, Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-NASA-01

NASA ID: link

[jrueships]

Pg's weaponized incompetence meets kawhi's unmoving boulder-like stoicism, worlds collide

[aldieb]

unlocking new areas of the [redacted] riverfront. level 1 enemies were cyclists and level 2 enemies are geese

[lonestarbattleship]

A 1941 Packard Clipper pressed into Military service, on the pier with an Iowa Class Battleship in the background.

source

[spyroz]

bro i have the worst fucking luck with machinery. my fur clipper blade won't cut no matter what i do T_T ive tried sharpening it with my own whetstone, ive deep cleaned all the fur particles out of it, ive even replaced the blade drive assembly bc the old one was a bit nasty, it still won't fucking cut

why!!! why does this always happen to me!!! i absolutely despise troubleshooting tech and machinery, i wish i had a local friend who was good with this type of thing

[skrunksthatwunk]

yeah i can't come to class today, sorry. yeah. yeah. it's cause my hair's too long. mhm. gonna put me out of commission til the weekend at least

[the-starlight-papers]

Shoutout to all the trans and non-binary people in the comments section of the Hairdressers Guide To Cutting Your Own Hair And Not Ruining It (mens edition) video

You all are amazing and not helping my urge to cut all of my hair off during my week and a half back at school before winter break.

[haven-gum-rockrose]

What if it's not an imposition to strengthen the material bonds that bind us as people? What if you can just accept favors for kindness's sake and not feel obligated to return or refuse because the beauty comes from the lack of expected reciprocity. It's just an expression of care and that holds a value that cannot and should not be pushed aside. What then?

[rodrickheffley]

my hair is sooo bad rn but i have to go to class

[pretty-little-fools]

[lonestarflight]

"A United States Navy Underwater Demolition Team swimmer assists the Apollo 12 crew during recovery operations in the Pacific Ocean. In the life raft are astronauts Charles Conrad Jr. (facing camera), commander; Richard F. Gordon Jr. (middle), command module pilot; and Alan L. Bean (nearest camera), lunar module pilot. The three crew men of the second lunar landing mission were picked up by helicopter and flown to the prime recovery ship, USS HORNET. Apollo 12 splashed down at 2:58 p.m. (CST), Nov. 24, 1969, near American Samoa."

Date: November 24, 1969

NASA ID: S69-22271

Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-recovery-03, Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-recovery-05, Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-recovery-06, Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-recovery-07, Hornet-CBS-A12-HS4-recovery-08

[glorious-spoon]

i respect the school coach/counselor steve movement, but in my heart of hearts i know that steve is going to grow up and become a hairstylist. he'd love it. the bitchy gossip, the human drama, the satisfaction of making someone feel comfortable and look how they want to look

maybe he follows robin to the big city for college. tries a couple of classes, drops out, goes to cosmetology school

(does NOT tell the kids until after he's finished. they still tease him within an inch of his life, but like - whatever. he fought interdimensional monsters on like five different occasions before he was old enough to legally drink, he can handle dustin hassling him for knowing what a strand test is)

(eddie is not around to hear about this. he lit out of town as soon as he finished summer school, diploma in hand. steve can't blame him. hawkins was never a good place for eddie munson, and even after the murder charges were cleared, it got worse)

(he still misses the guy, though. they ended up hanging out a lot that summer, and it sort of felt like the start of... something, but it'll take years for steve to work out exactly what)

anyway, eventually he uses some of his government hush money to set up a salon. he settles into his life as a regular person, and it's nice, it's good, it really is. eventually he gets around to figuring out why eddie's over the top flirting always made him feel clumsy and thrilled, and that's another part of himself that he settles into. finds some more family. some more community

he still keeps in touch with the hawkins crew, of course. robin lives nearby, and dustin calls all the time. nancy, too, when she can. she's overseas now reporting in war zones. it was never gonna work out between them

he hasn't seen eddie munson in almost ten years on a brisk day in february when the door to the salon swings open to admit a swirl of snow and a lanky figure wrapped leather, and steve drops the clipper he's holding and thinks, shit, what happened now and then, absurdly on the heels of that, he's going to freeze dressed like that

and then he's crossing the salon to yank eddie into a hug and getting hugged back just as hard, and ten years feels like nothing all of a sudden, and maybe he wasn't too late, maybe neither of them were, maybe they were right on time.

(eddie drifted out of touch with almost all of them other than dustin, who was tenacious, brilliant, and just unprincipled enough to track him down every time he moved

he told eddie to look up steve when he moved to the city, and eddie did, then dithered outside the door for twenty minutes freezing his ass off before he could make himself go in)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.

We're a decade and a half into the "common core" experiment in educational standardization. The majority of the country has now signed up to a standardized and rigid curriculum that treats overworked teachers as untrustworthy slackers who need to be disciplined by measuring their output through standard lessons and evaluations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core

This system is rigid enough, but it gets even worse at the secondary level, especially when combined with the Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which adds another layer of inflexible benchmarks to the highest-stakes, most anxiety-provoking classes in the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.

But the joke's on the middle-class families who backed standardized instruction over standardized funding. Their own kids need slack as much as anyone's, and a system that promises to put the nation's kids through the same benchmarks on the same timetable is bad for everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/give-me-slack-2/

Undoing this is above my pay-grade. I've already got more causes to crusade on than I have time for. But there is a piece of tantalyzingly low-hanging fruit that is dangling right there, and even though I'm not gonna pick it, I can't get it out of my head, so I figured I'd write about it and hope I can lazyweb it into existence.

The thing is, there's a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA "car cigarette lighter") didn't just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs. The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.

Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications. Think of the EU's requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There's a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs). USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it's so flexible that some people complain that it's not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.

And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up. We've continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I'd happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.

The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization – a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system – without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there's a massive opportunity for a commons to go with the common core.

For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about "persuasive rhetoric" like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of "Indian atrocities."

It's good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it's a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can't imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.

But there's nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds – for example, kids could also read core Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.

But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized "essays" for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they're easy to grade in a standardized way).

That's where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What's more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA. And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.

The closest thing we have to this are "marketplaces" where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials. As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.

Like I said, I've got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I'd be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.

It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like Git, but there's already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019's Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that's hosted at scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch's online version is basically a kid- (and teacher-)friendly version of Github. Find a project you like, make a copy in your own workspace, and then mod it to suit your own needs. The system keeps track of the lineage of different projects and makes it easy for Scratch users to find, adapt, and share their own projects. The wild popularity of this system tells us that this model for a managed digital commons for an educational audience is eminently achievable.

So when students are being asked to study the rhythm of text by counting the numbers of words in the sentences of important speeches, they could supplement that very boring exercise by listening to and analyzing contemporary election speeches, or rap lyrics, or viral influencer videos. Different teachers could fork these units to swap in locally appropriate comparitors – and so could students!

Students could be given extra credit for identifying additional materials that slot into existing curricular projects – Tiktok videos, new chart-topping songs, passages from hot YA novels. These, too, could go into the commons.

This would enlist students in developing and thinking critically about their curriculum, whereas today, these activities are often off-limits to students. For example, my kid's math teachers don't hand back their quizzes after they're graded. The teachers only have one set of quizzes per unit, and letting the kids hold onto them would leak an answer-key for the next batch of test-takers.

I can't imagine learning math this way. "You got three questions wrong but I won't let you see them" is no way to help a student focus on the right areas to improve their understanding.

But there's no reason that math teachers in a commons built around the (unfortunately) rigid procession of concepts and testing couldn't generate procedural quizzes, specified with a simple programming language. These tests could even be automatically graded, and produce classroom stats on which concepts the whole class is struggling with. Each quiz would be different, but cover the same ground.

When I help my kid with her homework, we often find disorganized and scattered elements of this system – a teacher might post extensive notes on teaching a specific unit. A publisher might produce a classroom guide that connects a book to specific parts of the common core. But these are scattered across the web, and they aren't keyed to the specific, standard components of common core and AP.

This is a standardized system that is all costs, no benefits. It has no "architecture of participation" that lets teachers, students, parents, practitioners and even commercial publishers collaborate to produce a commons that all may share and improve upon.

In an ideal world, we'd get rid of standardization in education, pay teachers well, give them the additional time they needed to prepare exciting and relevant curriculum, and fund all our schools based on need, not parents' income.

But in the meanwhile, we could be making lemonade of out lemons. If we're going to have standardization, we should at least have the collaboration standards enable.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

[eddieboi23]

Hello I'd like to ask if u can do a Wednesday x Always tired reader , plz and thank u if ur able to do it

Tiredness

Wednesday Addams x tired reader

(Wednesday )

Summary: Wednesday notices you always tired , she can’t help but admire it

Tw: insomnia, depression, death mentions??

Y/n)=your name

-this is thoughts-

“This is talking”

——————————

You are always tired, a night owl. You’re not sure why, maybe it’s the insomnia, maybe it’s you watching Netflix til 3 am, or maybe it’s the depression.

Netherless, you’re always tired, while most of the students don’t question it and just see it as a character trait, Wednesday was a curious one.

She always liked to find out stuff about people that interested her, and right now she wonders why you always seem half dead, not that there’s anything wrong with it in her books.

—-

You wake up early on a dark and somber day. You roll over in bed and stares up at the ceiling.

You have class today once again and all you feel is this never-ending sense of fatigue.

You slowly drag yourself out of bed and take a shower.

The warm water running over your body somehow only makes you feel more tired.

You stand in the bathroom, staring at your reflection, trying to convince yourself to get ready for the day, soon you put on your uniform and head to class.

——-

Wednesday is in class early as usual, in her normal black uniform.

She watches you walk in and sit across from her, right in her line of sight.

She noticed you.

You looked absolutely exhausted. half-dead even…Just barely functioning.

Wednesday couldn't help but admire it, it was her kind of aesthetic after all. She then snaps out of it her thoughts when she realized you were speaking to her.

“What did you say?” She says in her monotone voice.

“I said are you ok..? You were staring..”

She huffs. “Of course I’m fine, you’re the one who looks half dead.” She scowls. You rolls your eyes. “Ok ok sorry.. geez.”

She then looks away. “Why do you look so half dead, just out of curiosity.”

Her tone sounds as if she actually cares. You raise your eyebrow but brushes her tone off as you being tired.

“Dunno…depressed…can never sleep.”

She hides her surprise. She never thought of depression, you never spoke negatively so she chalked it up to you staying up to late, now realizing it’s deeper than that, she can’t help with the tiniest bit of concern that she feels in her black heart for you.

“I see.”

-

Soon classes carry on, you’re in the same ones as her so now she’s truly studying you. She’s now noticing how you carry yourself, half dead, like a zombie.

Classes end after awhile and she seems you by the fountain. She decides to do something risky. She’s going to make you do some self care and sleep.

Enids been talking her ear off about all of that so she knows a bit.

She approaches you without a word and grabs your uniform sleeve and starts to drag you, being freakishly strong for such a small person.

You try to protest but she ignores you, so you let her.

She drags you to your own door, and pushes you inside.

You grunt and look at her confused.

“Ok what’s going on Wednesday? Are you gonna murder me, if so please not in my own room-“

Wednesday shoves you on your bed and you see Thing on your bedside table, hes has some nail clippers, nail polish,nail file ,face masks, drinks and snacks. Thing waves and you wave back hesitantly, then look at Wednesday with a questioning look.

She sighs and rolls her eyes. “You’re always, i did not know you were depressed. I’d rather you not die from exhaustion…so Thing is going to do a “self care” day. I will be cleaning up your room because it’s absolutely atrocious.”

You don’t know what to say, you know not to make a big deal out of it or she will take it back, but you can’t help but tear up. “Th-thanks Weds…”

Wednesday huffs and rolls her eyes. “Whatever”

You and thing starts doing your little spa day as Wednesday cleans up your “depression cave”.

You get your nails done, your face exfoliated, and your belly full of your favorite snacks and drinks.

Within the time of you doing that, Wednesday has joined in despite saying she didn’t want to.

You ask…”hey…weds…be honest, why did you do this for me?”

She hesitates…then sighs. “Look. It’s possible I care about you, maybe I even…like you. DONT let it get to your head though.”

You try to stay calm and just smile.

After all this pampering you start falling asleep and subconsciously lean on Wednesday.

Her immediate response is to want to shove you off, but seeing you so peaceful, she lets you fall asleep on her.

She stares at your face, then slowly kisses your forehead, her cold lips on your warm skin…she sighs and watches you sleep.

—————————————-

Sorry this is late I was super busy!!!

Hope you like it

[ltwilliammowett]

Ships and their names

We had already discovered a lot of things here, including funny, unusual names and how ships were named at different times. And which names should be avoided on clippers. But names in general were once again such a thing in the world of the superstitious sailor. A name should have seven letters and preferably contain three A's to ensure good luck.

Bad luck, however, was conjured up by not naming the ship at launch and or naming her after it. Choose a name beginning with an A, or even worse, name a ship after a snake or a reptile. Never rename a ship and please don't give her the name of a sunken predecessor, she will follow her sister into the depths.

Also, don't give a ship a high and mighty name if it can't do so because of its stature and class. So don't name a sloop Winged Victory or Sovereign of Seas just as an example. That would anger the sea gods and it could end badly for the little one at sea.

Choose a name that is easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, easy to understand and, last but not least, easy on the ears. It's best to ask your lady herself what she thinks. The only question is how she will answer you, but somehow she will manage ;)