#construction onboarding services

[hybridpayroll]

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[mariacallous]

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”

“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.

The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.

The disaster captivated and horrified the world. Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation. Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.

A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design. The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.

A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.

[mindblowingscience]

During the wee hours of Christmas Eve this year, before the gift wrapping begins and the aroma of gingerbread brightens the air, a spacecraft is set to launch to the moon.  It's called the Peregrine Lunar Lander, named for the fastest flying bird on Earth. If all goes to plan, the robotic avian will zoom through space and fly into the moon's gravitational tides, then meticulously lower its orbit until eventually touching down on a region of ancient lunar lava flows known as the Bay of Stickiness, or Sinus Viscositatis.  This mission will be one for the history books for several reasons, one of which is the fact it'll be the first to launch under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, created as a way for the agency to bring payloads to the moon without having to construct all the spacecraft necessary to bring those payloads there. In this case, the company Astrobiotic is behind the Peregrine lander and NASA's paying to stash a few things onboard.

Continue Reading.

[ri47]

The LMR47 (known more simply as the rail) is possibly the most infamous of the KHU's service rifles. While the exact circumstances of its adoption are poorly documented, it was doubtlessly the end result of a vicious bidding war between the arms-manufacturing families of the seneschal board.

A marvel of standard technology, those familiar with the rail often remark on how little recoil it generates. Although not quite the "zero-recoil" promised by the standard foregrip's branding, the rail remains a surprisingly manageable weapon, further eased through the liberal use of alloy laminate in its construction.

The rail is technically capable of automatic fire. Realistically, the thermal limits of its onboard power unit constrain this to controlled bursts.

[lonestarflight]

STS-400: The planned (if needed) rescue of STS-125

Unofficial crew patch *

On LC-39A STS-125 Atlantis (left) and on LC-39B is STS-400 Endeavour (right).

In the wake of the Columbia Tragedy, NASA prepared several contingency missions in the event a shuttle could not return safely. Most of the shuttle missions post STS-107, involved the construction/support of the International Space Station. If there were any instances where the shuttle was deemed unfit to return safely, the crew would stay on the ISS until a relief shuttle could be sent. However, STS-125 Atlantis was to service the Hubble Space Telescope and was not on the same orbital plane as the ISS. The Atlantis wouldn't have enough fuel to reach the station, so another Shuttle (Endeavour) was kept on standby on LC-39B. STS-400 would have been crewed by Christopher Ferguson, Eric A. Boe, Robert S. Kimbrough and Stephen G. Bowen.

On the first day, the crew of Atlantis would use the Canadarm to inspect the bottom of the shuttle for damage to the Thermal Protection System. Had there been any damage deemed unrepairable, the plan was to launch Endeavour 5 days later. Atlantis would be put into powered-down mode to conserve power and consumables.

Endeavour will have Altitude Control with Atlantis serving as a Micro-Meteoroid Orbiting Debris shield.

"On flight day two, Endeavour would have performed the rendezvous and grapple with Atlantis."

Crew locations during EVA-1

"On flight day three, the first EVA would have been performed. During the first EVA, Megan McArthur, Andrew Feustel and John Grunsfeld would have set up a tether between the airlocks. They would have also transferred a large size Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) and, after McArthur had repressurized, transferred McArthur's EMU back to Atlantis. Afterwards they would have repressurized on Endeavour, ending flight day two activities."

Crew locations during EVA-2

Crew locations during EVA-3

"The final two EVA were planned for flight day three. During the first, Grunsfeld would have depressurized on Endeavour in order to assist Gregory Johnson and Michael Massimino in transferring an EMU to Atlantis. He and Johnson would then repressurize on Endeavour, and Massimino would have gone back to Atlantis. He, along with Scott Altman and Michael Good would have taken the rest of the equipment and themselves to Endeavour during the final EVA. They would have been standing by in case the RMS system should malfunction. The damaged orbiter would have been commanded by the ground to deorbit and go through landing procedures over the Pacific, with the impact area being north of Hawaii. On flight day five, Endeavour would have had a full heat shield inspection, and land on flight day eight."

Information from Wikipedia link

STS-400 Middeck Seating

The additional crew members on Endeavour would have been accommodated via additional seats installed on the middeck. The autopilot onboard Atlantis would be used to de-orbit the orbiter tail first, to destroy it over a region north of Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean.

Another unofficial crew patch.

View from LC-39B of the launch of STS-125 Atlantis on May 11, 2009. This was the fifth and final Space Shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Fortunately, STS-400 was not needed and Endeavour was returned to the VAB from LC-39B for STS-127.

* "As a contingency mission, STS-400 was not given official support by NASA for the production of a crew patch or emblem. However this artwork was created for use by the mission team as an unofficial emblem by Mike Okuda [the same person who worked on Star Trek and most of the LCARS], who also illustrated the official patch of STS-125, the flight to be rescued by STS-400."

Date: September 9, 2008

source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source , source

[bestworstcase]

I am really surprised that it seems no major time fuckery happened between time spent in the everafter and time passing on planet remnant. It seems like /at most/ a week or two has passed in remnant but it might honestly be a one to one on only a few days have passed. I really thought rwbyj would be coming home to major time loss like a few months because this show is so mean and the hits simply do not stop coming

i have a lot of questions about the time skip bc of this:

rwbyxjl2 suggests that it’s only been a few weeks since part one, which might just mean from team rwby’s perspective (ie, the elapsed time on remnant while they were in the ever after is not included)?

but by the time they get back, amity looks like that. it’s been converted into a fuckoff huge battleship (<- confirmed in screenshots of the script i think eddy shared on twitter last year) which is a very time- and labor-intensive process. i also simply do not believe it is feasible for this work to have been completed in vacuo, with everything so in shambles.

so my working theory right now is that qrow, robyn, and the ace-ops rendezvoused with maria and pietro onboard amity and helped pilot and/or haul it to argus, where they rendezvoused with cordovin, who has the means to take over the amity project and get it into working order as a military vessel with a labor force drawn from argus. (giving the citizens of argus a massive project like this to focus on will also be good for morale, win-win)

global comms are still down. once the plan was squared away with cordo, qrow and robyn and the ace-ops booked it straight to vacuo to update the coalition on the pledged future help from argus. all of that would have taken a few days to a week or two, tops.

(i imagine pietro and maria stayed behind in argus to help with amity; pietro’s expertise is most useful there, and she’d want to be there for him while he grieved and worried about penny.)

qrow and the rest aren’t there during the initial memorial service at the start of the epilogue but are present in the later gathering in winter’s monologue; because the mantelian civilians are present in the first but not in the second, i assume this is not an error but rather there was a second, smaller gathering once qrow, robyn, and the ace-ops arrived and learned that rwby and jaune were gone. so i don’t think the monologues/montages are happening concurrently; they’re in sequence.

grimm attack vacuo for days. things settle down for a while, with tensions still high. merc and tyrian spring the twins within a couple days of things starting to calm down, then qrow and everyone shows up not too long after with news about amity and help on the way if they can hold out for a few months. a little while after that, the refugee ship from vale arrives and grimm hammer the city again. an indeterminate amount of time passes—i think it has to be a few months, to give the amity construction time to finish and travel halfway around the world—before reinforcements arrive from argus, boosting morale and probably giving the coalition just enough of an edge to reestablish a sense of normalcy, with the result that the crown’s skyrocketing popular support plateaus. then team rwby and jaune return.

which is a fair bit to catch up on, but also not too bad, and tracks with “when you’re needed most”—the blacksmith probably sent rwbyj to the exact moment when the coalition stabilized so that they could help figure out a plan for what comes next.

[scotianostra]

Maid of the Loch.

A few pics from Thursdays visit to Balloch. PS Maid of the Loch is the last paddle steamer built in the country in 1953. She operated on Loch Lomond for 29 years and as of 2022 is being restored near Balloch pier.

The boat is the last of a long line of Loch Lomond steamers that began about 1816, within four years of Henry Bell's pioneering passenger steamboat service on the River Clyde.

After construction the "Maid" was dismantled, and shipped to the loch by rail to Balloch at the south end of the loch, and there the sections were reassembled on a purpose built slipway.

Maid of the Loch provided a service from Balloch pier, initially to Ardlui at the north end of the loch, but later her last call was a few miles short of this at Inversnaid and she would cruise to the head of the loch. She was transferred to the Scottish Transport Group in 1969; then in 1973 to Caledonian MacBrayne.

As with other steamers, cost pressures led to her being laid up after a last commercial sailing on 31 August 1981. One problem was that some of the piers on the loch would become unusable, either because of poor state of repair, or silting making the area around them too shallow; some of these piers had not been built to take a vessel as large as the Maid of the Loch. A series of attempts to return the vessel to service under a succession of owners was unsuccessful, and she presented a sad sight gradually deteriorating at the side of the loch.

Dumbarton District Council bought the Maid of the Loch and restoration work started. In 1995 the Council supported a group of local enthusiasts in setting up a charitable organisation, the Loch Lomond Steamship Company, to take over ownership and carry on restoration.

Part of the problem that held up the restoration was the pier had to be adjusted, with no sea port, there was no easy way to take her to a dry dock. With a lottery grant and donations the pier was rebuilt and the Maid was hoisted out of the water in 2006, to where it now sits.

With help from funding from The Scottiah Governement and other bodies work has been ongoing to restore her, but they were dealt a blow in 2018 when a further Heritage Lottery Fund of £3.8 million was withdrawn.

Restoration work continues on the ship, with her interiors being returned to their original 1950s appearance while adding modern conveniences like a lift between decks, and also enabling her engines and paddles to turn slowly fed by a package boiler mounted on the pier.[14][15]

In 2019 the project was again set back due to a failed bid to the National Lottery Fund. However, it received £950k from the Scottish Government and £50k from the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society. This funding was used as described above. The charity has now built a new, more robust Slipway carriage using funds supplied by a variety of sources, most notably, Historic Environment Scotland as the slipway and the Steam Winch House form a Grade A listed structure.

You can get updates on the work, and how to make visits onboard to see how things are progressing, along with where to make a donation if you can, that will see The Maid of The Loch sail once again.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

y'know I find it so funny how (before hopefully I shut up about them for good), that like a month after I started at my old cadetship workplace back in 2022, they made me sit through a fucking 45minute [but I dragged it out for 2hrs trying to guess the perceived right answers they wanted] personality test that listed my top like 10 strengths, weaknesses and other skills to develop (eg one skill to develop was 'influencing and motivating' or whatever, one weakness was that i often act without thinking or something like that, and my obvious strength was writing).....

and like we had full meetings about my results on that test, and how it might "hinder or aid your (my) productivity" and bullshit like that..... but then they blatantly did fuck all to develop my influencing/motivating, or whatever the fuck that bs test called them skills. they fully ignored that I was a good writer, so they never gave me blog posts or social media posts or got me to write a newsletter article to do with the marketing team. the only VAGUELY writing oriented task I did was copy and pasting case notes from the social worker/tenancy support worker into an excel spreadsheet where I (probs illegally tbh) edited the spelling, grammar and other issues with the case notes bc some of the typos drove me insane tbh. for other things, they never developed or helped curb/develop in a more positive way for my weaknesses.... and just endlessly criticised me instead or never gave real constructive feedback to help me improve.

hell, i could've even helped write the case notes for tribunal for this one tenant we had committing centrelink (aussie social services) and rent fraud wouldve been great! but NO! even that was irrelevant to me, even though I sat directly between my team leader/manager AND rent review, who talked over me about it every fucking day for 3 months. we ended up backdating their unpaid rent 30k if you're wondering. like ok yeah. given this was a management and senior management issue, that was obvs too big for a trainee to be part of. but also! I'm DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE of the two people investigating it???? why won't you INCLUDE me???? when you talk over me about it constantly??? dumbass workplace. I swear to fuck.

and I only say this bc I scrolled past this one shitty asf recruiter yesterday on linkedin, who was all like "one whole reason, YOU PERSONALLY have an employment gap on your resume is bc the YOU took too long to be trained by a company and that's just tooooooo expensive and wasteful on company expenses 😥😭 consider that YOU created this problem and the company SHOULD NOT have to train you well enough to do the job!"

like joey. I was IN a TRAINING PROGRAM and the useless ass company I was at REFUSED to train me at all costs and then told me to get assessed for a learning disability/depression/anxiety, bc "you just cant learn fast enough"..... when I was LITERALLY SIGNED UP TO BE TRAINED.

this WAS NOT MY FAULT. there should be adequate onboarding practices and training provided in every workplace, but I was actively being denied it bc I wasn't the bitchy backstabbing type to get anywhere in that workplace. I did not take "too long" to get trained when they actively denied me training opportunities EVERY time I asked for them, by telling me that "thats irrelevant to you!" and "just accept that it's not in your journey with us 🤷🏻‍♀️😬" . fuck you and fuck the corporate overlords who think that training people properly and adequately is just "toooooo expensive and employees should train themselves for free/at their own cost". most esp in fields like social and community work that I was in.

this workplace just did NOT want me to develop and hone my skills in any way, shape, or form, really. they instead dragged me through a useless ass personality test and deliberately ignored my interests, strengths, and weaknesses to develop and then blamed me for "being too slow" and "can't you just teach yourself?? are you Special™️ bc you can't interpret the tenancy succession policy and tenancy software procedure on your own without explicit inperson direction????" they refused to walk me through complicated tenancy procedures and policies when they'd do it with every other new hire.

I did not "take too long be trained"..... when they just actively treated me as a useless intern my entire year there. so I might as well just act as a trainee the entire time and continually ask for help even though it pisses people off (besides the point the ONE TIME I tried to solve a call on my own in the dumbass fucking 2min call window (I usually took like 15mins lmao).... I got told off bc I didn't ask for the correct paperwork and evidence (power of attorney bc the lady just said 'I think my mum has dementia.... so I'm just taking over ALL of her accounts for her) all became they NEVER let me sit on a call and listen in on what the hell to ask for (ie a living skills assessment) because THEY REFUSED to give me training on it (and also I think they thought my cert IV in housing course covered this issue. it didn't).... so how the fuck was I SUPPOSED to just automatically and INTUITIVELY KNOW what questions to ask and what paperwork and assessments etc I needed from the client???? fucking bizarre. and to this day I still have no idea if my mentor/manager ever bothered to follow up and rectify the issue for me.

also, right before i left in 2023, they actively KICKED ME OUT of an external (but internally in the office) all day training session on home visits/inspections bc "oh we booked the whole customer service team by accident!!! we booked you in error. so delet yourself now from the training invite right now!" literally the DAY BEFORE the training was to happen. yet they let the new (at the time) cadet go. and yet, they lectured me all the time on my "poor time management" and "poor planning and timetable coordination" or whatever the fuck skills. like ok given that I left that week, so in a sense, that training would've been wasted on me. but also. you told me THE DAY BEFORE and not 3 MONTHS PRIOR (ie when they booked it in the calendar and invited me to it) thag I wasn't invited??? how am I the one with poor time management in this scenario???? fuck you. bc it was the only other external training they'd offered me other than child safety and mandatory reporting.... which is understandably mandatory in this field. WHY can't you spare me ONE FUCKING DAY of outside training??? like they even denied me fucking first aid and CPR???? which is also usually mandatory in this field. all bc "you'll be with someone whose qualified??? why should we bother putting you in CPR and first aid training???"

but yeah. fuck that useless as workplace and fuck recruiters which think people who have gaps on their resume are jobless bc "oh. you just take too long to be trained, huh? what a suck on resources YOU PERSONALLY must be for ANYONE to hire to successfully carry out any role!" and my point is, they even denied me BASIC mandatory training in things like cpr/first aid??? how the fuck was I supposed to excel and be trained here????

bc it also largely falls on companies who REFUSE an employee who was ACTIVELY a trainee adequate training for dumbass toxic workplace reasons.... and also blame employees for issues they CANNOT rectify... like the shitty government aged care call centre that I worked at in feb and march this year.... all bc my phone app (which is THEIR back-end tech issue) that I couldn't fix by simply turning a computer on and off again) was back connecting to calls ALL the time, which meant I couldn't take calls during my training weeks (only 6 weeks).

so they did call me a "drain on resources" because the people who I sat with actively took quality on my calls and were apparently put in like "off boarding" mode bc they weren't actively doing the job of taking at least 30 calls per an 8hr shift.... but instead assessing me for quality. so it's also shit employers in general. so I quit instead of being fired.

[warderfromtheborder]

I spent three hours today helping a renewed acquaintance get back into destiny. He played through D1 to just before Shadowkeep (his fit was all leviathan gear and I was super jelly), and I had to figure out what I actually needed to figure out to explain to him to catch him up to be able to play.

Anyway; three hours. Half that time was in missions actually playing, and half that time was me helping him navigate menus and popups.

I get now (better understand, at least) why some folks are so comfortable shitting on Bungie the company over this game. There is so much poorly designed UI and confounding quest structure and information that appears only in HUD obscuring popups that disappear never to be retrieved.

And, I'm not willing to entertain that the UI and UX problems are a matter of 'they're doing their best' BECAUSE

There are places where it is crystal clear to see that the UI points the player in a Specific Direction to a Specific Place with a SPECIFIC GOAL IN MIND (you only get one guess but if you're a lifer like me you know the answer in your heart already) and it is clear that the UI can in fact function perfectly well but is Not Allowed To, in service of that Specific Goal

This game is a cult. This game is a cult and I am a cultist. Its non-euclidian pathways are second nature to me, and the omnipresent Silver Light of the eververse is my accustomed daylight. Why would I question it? I already live here. I already love it here.

I love this game. I love the people who make the actual game I play. I hate the people who constantly try to make an extra 10-20-70 bucks off those who aren't going to be long-term players. These greedy fucking cash-scraping funnels they've constructed around the player onboarding experience have turned the game into a venus fly-trap.

(pictured: bungie C-suite trying to get big publisher investment without letting go of the most offensive monetization on the market)

I don't want to sound like Tassi or SkillUp too much right now, but I get the part of them that says 'dont give bungie credit for reversing a decision they knew was a bad one in the first place. Don't give this company extra grace for not tightening their fist as much as they could have. Don't let them act like the greedy part of the game's design isn't greedy, and couldn't be done better.'

The two needs are in direct tension with each other. The game can be easy to play, and a paid subscription game, or it can be what we have now: free and greedy and unnecessarily labyrinthine to teach. They don't coexist.

I love it here already.

[girderednerve]

apologies dear friends i continue to be: a grouchy old man, obsessed with libraries

my new job is fine objectively like there is nothing wrong with it but my boss is very "do storytime, do more storytime, we must schedule storytime," and does not really listen to anything i say, such as 'i would like to do less early literacy programming so that i have some time to do programs for elementary & early middle schoolers,' or 'please schedule me on the youth desk instead of giving me nothing but unstructured office time, leaving me isolated & uninvolved in the day-to-day operations of the library, with which i need to rapidly develop familiarity,' or 'our desk schedule actually should not be rigidly set a month in advance, because we need to be flexible & can work out desk coverage on a department level,' or 'you actually do need to have a clear & specific plan for emergencies, including severe patron issues, & this plan should be communicated to all staff instead of vaguely stashed four folders deep in the shared drive'. (actually when i repeatedly pressed for clarity on who is in charge at any given time she posted an updated chain-of-command document which listed, for some reason, me? as third in line in case of emergency? which is just bugfuck)

it feels very frustrating & i know that many of these problems will resolve themselves as i begin to actually do programs—i haven't been able to because all programming at this library must have at least 2 weeks' advance notice, and i came onboard right after thanksgiving/needed time to get my bearings at least a little—so we can get some cute kid pictures to placate the board & build more of a sense of what is needed. but i still don't really know how to pull reports so i can't weed, i only just got ordering credentials this week & have had to find $2k of books to add to a library collection with which i am largely unfamiliar & for which i have absolutely zero circulation numbers, & nobody has actually given me an up-to-date budget (i am meant to guess, i suppose?). it feels kind of like a slow ongoing disaster; i know this feeling is partially because i have 2 hours' round-trip commute to worry & stew & so on, but i also am just like. girl you are a bad manager. you have persistent staff issues because you are not good at managing people. every meeting you are in is worse because you are in it. you cannot handle interpersonal tensions by having your assistant make friendly 'reminders' to all staff which are obviously about a single person, that never works. i have really strong feelings about management for a person who does not want to be in management! should probably try to walk that one off!

i cornered the adult services/sysadmin librarian today to talk to him about some stub ideas i have for kid programs about 'learning to code,' because we have (apparently) gotten lots of requests for this kind of thing, & basically everything on offer is just buzzwordy bullshit like 'make a bracelet that spells your kid's name in binary using different color beads!' or 'buy this expensive piece of edtech which will be unsupported in six months & anyway only introduces kids to our very closed environment!' or 'just let them spend some time on the computer, so their elastic little brains can pick up digital literacy skills by exposure :)'. so i had some ideas which seemed less like, um, nonsense, but i don't actually know how to code (am stupid) so i wanted to run them past him to get a sense of whether there was any real content there. i want to build a little model transistor & talk about why computers use binary. i want to use a makey makey to have the kids construct a sort of human circuit by holding hands, so we can model a logic gate. i want to write an if-then chart together & roll dice to determine which dance moves we do (cf. a ucla comp sci prof's exercises with her four-year-old). i want to use a makey makey to make a simple morse code transmitter so we can talk about encryption & transmission. i want to make an escape room so we can practice some very basic math & simple decryption (& also persistence!). i want to have tweens play scaled-down capture the flag to think about security. my boss just wants me to do three storytimes a week into infinity

anyway i am still marinating on my computer skills for kids concepts (it's mostly buzzwordy bullshit! even the stuff i want to do is kind of bullshit, lol) & plotting my wind tunnel/paper airplane prototyping program & figuring out when i can schedule my middle grade graphic novel book club. i am trying to figure out how this job might be doable. maybe someday i will want to go to work. america autem delenda est

[hybridpayroll]

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[mariacallous]

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the fate of global shipping, even though all of us depend on it for our daily supplies. Everything from bananas to toilet paper to iPhones travels by sea at some point. But we only pay attention when something goes wrong, whether that happens in the Red Sea, the Suez Canal—or underneath what used to be Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. This week’s accident, which occurred when the container ship Dali lost power and headed straight into a support pillar, has delivered a reminder of the sheer overlooked scale of the shipping industry—and how unprepared many systems are to handle it.

Part of this is the massive size of today’s container vessels themselves. A few minutes before 1:30 a.m. on March 26, the Singapore-flagged container Dali issued a mayday call, which allowed construction workers on the Key Bridge to get a few cars to turn around. Down below, the Dali appeared to have engine problems; camera footage shows its lights flickering before smoke emerges and it hits the support pillar. Within seconds, the bridge collapses into the water. Some of it collapses onto the Dali, too, and with the bridge, cars plunge into the water. At the time of writing, six people are unaccounted for and presumed dead.

Now lots of ordinary citizens around the world are discovering marine websites such as vesselfinder.com and marinetraffic.com, which track merchant vessels. They will have learned that the Dali has a gross tonnage of 95,128 tons, a summer deadweight of 116,851 tons, and that it’s 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) long.

When it struck the Key Bridge, the Dali had 4,679 TEU (20-foot-long shipping containers) onboard and was crewed by 22 Indian seafarers, who had been joined by two pilots from Baltimore. Merchant vessels are predominantly crewed by relatively tiny staffs that are usually made up of people from India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Russia, and Eastern European countries. Indeed, it has been decades since it was common for Western Europeans and Americans to go to sea. Today’s seafarers are skilled, but they do hard and lonely work with long absences from home—and when disaster strikes, shipping can be extremely dangerous. Earlier this month, a Houthi attack in the Red Sea cost the lives of three seafarers—two Filipinos and one Vietnamese.

All this is in service of the goods that make our lives so convenient—and which require a vast and largely invisible ocean network to support.

Just consider the arrivals, off-loading, loading, and departures at the Port of Rotterdam, which is merely the world’s 10-busiest container port. Last year, Rotterdam handled 13.4 million TEU at its 14 terminals. That’s 36,712 TEU every day of the year. In the afternoon on March 26, 149 ocean-going ships were docked in Rotterdam, where cargo containers were being offloaded and new ones added. Another 132 were about to arrive, and another 161 had just departed. The expected arrivals included the Ever Living, a sister to the ill-fated Ever Given, of Suez Canal fame.

At a length of 335 meters (nearly 1,100 feet), width of 45 meters (145 feet), and with a deadweight of 104,653 tons, the Ever Living is almost as massive as the Ever Given. But only almost. With a capacity of nearly 10,000 TEU, it’s very similar to the Dali. The Ever Given, by contrast, has a capacity of just over 20,000 TEU, and it’s not even one of the world’s largest container ships.

Indeed, these days, the world’s fleet of ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs)—vessels of more than 14,500 TEU capacity—features a growing number of beasts that can transport 23,000 TEU and more. The MSC Irina, for example, can carry an astounding 24,346 TEU. Today, in fact, the Dali’s capacity of 10,000 makes it a midsize box ship. Compare that to container ships in 1972, when construction began on the Key Bridge: Back then, the largest container ship in the world had a capacity of a mere 2,984 TEU.

The shipping industry keeps making things more efficient—and thus more cost-effective and more attractive. It’s thanks to shipping that it has made so much sense to build a globalized economy: It’s so cheap to ship goods globally that people in wealthy nations can have them made elsewhere, transported across a few oceans, and still pay less than if they were made at home.

But the massive ships come with equally massive logistical demands. Ports have to be expanded to be able to receive and service them. The port service, for example, involves higher cranes with a wider reach: just imagine 24,000 containers stacked upward and sideways. The ports also need larger storage facilities to hold such vessels’ cargo until it’s picked up by trucks. The financial picture involving ULCVs is clear on the vessel-owner side, because buying a ULCV eventually pays off.

Ports are usually public-private partnerships, which means that investment often involves the taxpayer. The Port of Virginia in Norfolk, which the Dali had left just before its ill-fated call at the Port of Baltimore, has just allocated $1.4 billion to widen the port to make it accessible for two-way ULCV traffic. Norfolk is also currently being dredged to the tune of $450 million, after which it’s expected to have the deepest and widest channels on the east coast of the United States.

“This is a true advantage for anyone delivering to or from America,” said Stephen A. Edwards, the CEO and executive director of the Virginia Port Authority, in an interview with World Cargo News. “Our wider channel sets The Port of Virginia apart by allowing for consistent vessel flow, increasing berth and container yard efficiencies, and further improving harbor safety.” It’s a competitive marketplace, and lots of Chinese ports are already set up for ULCVs. Ports and countries that can’t afford ULCV-worthy expansion are out of luck.

And as the Dali has taught the world, accommodating large vessels is not just about ports. They traverse oceans, sail under bridges, and sail through canals. Imagine if the Ever Given or another ULCV were to strike a bridge. Even a sturdier bridge than the Key Bridge (which received a rating of “fair” during its most recent federal inspection) would struggle to withstand such a blow.

Such calamities happen very rarely. It would be extraordinarily expensive for cities and countries to strengthen bridges and other infrastructure that a massive container ship might hit. The Dali’s crew and pilots appear to have tried their hardest to steer the ship away from the Key Bridge when the power supply failed, and they issued a mayday call to alert authorities to the fact that the ship was approaching the bridge. This, though, is unlikely to be the last time that machines fail man.

Even as ships get bigger and bigger, with more and more sophisticated technology, the human brain and hands are an indispensable backup. Giving crews a few more tools with which to manually counteract technology may be the best way of avoiding another Key Bridge disaster.

Shipping—an industry that involves ratings, officers, stevedores, crane operators, ship managers, insurers, and many others—goes on delivering your favorite consumer goods around the clock. It remains a miracle that mishaps involving their floating fortresses occur so rarely.

[nikproxima]

Horizon, in her fully complete configuration. Shown with Shuttle and Venturestar. Done by Jay.

As the Olympus program continued to hit its strides, it became clear that the premier international space outpost, Odyssey, had reached the end of its usable life. By the mid 2010s, she was approaching nearly 30 years old, having her first components launched in the late 1980s. While the modular assembly ability of the Space Shuttle had been proved useful in assembling Odyssey, it sat for nearly 4 years before crews could regularly access her and rotate through her, due to the lack of availability of lifeboat spacecraft. It was in this frame of mind that a new station concept would be considered, based on a concept called "Supermodule" from Ames, a giant, monolithic core leveraging the powerful Jupiter-OPAV system. She would be constructed using similar structures to that of the external tank, sharing the same 8.4 meter diameter, and augmented by 4.3 meter modules which could be launched onboard the Space Shuttle or Venturestar SSTO. On February 26th, 2014, OPAV Adventure would launch from Kennedy Space Center with the monolithic station core stacked on top, for a flawless 8 ½ minute ride to orbit. Here, she would be checked out by a variety of station crews, and only 3 assembly flights later, she was ready to support crew operations. Anna Douglass, commander of Olympus 3, would see her return to flight with Olympus 9 veteran Christopher Taylor - a heartwarming reunion and a symbol of strength in the face of adversity. Horizon would, after the retirement of the Shuttle, go on to be serviced by ACEV, Liberté and Venturestar, before the station was ultimately decommissioned in the late 2040s. Her replacements would be similar in form and function, forming a fleet of Horizon class stations served by both government operators and private corporations. Starlight, the first orbital tourism hub, would be based on the Horizon class, and grow into a popular tourist destination in the late 2030s. Horizon would pioneer the future of in space habitation, with future Interplanetary Transfer Vehicles incorporating lessons learned in habitat manufacturing and interior design.

[if-confessions]

My confession is that i regret posting an intro post without a demo… I’m terrified i won’t live up to the expectations and it’s taking the joy out of writing. Whenever i receive asks it give me so much anxiety my stomach starts hurting. I wish i waited an released a demo at the same time so that people who followed me are here because they actually like my writing and story… I’m not english and i’m a beginner so i’m scared i’m going to loose all support when i post it

Oh, Anon....

I'm not going to lie to you and say it will get better as soon as you post a demo. This feeling can come back every time you post an update (have seen many authors worry about this on my feed) or even when posting a change in the game (locking a character aspect - gender, sexuality, race, etc...; re-writing a part/the whole thing; going on hiatus; answering a difficult ask; etc.... Or just come back... just because.

Creating IF is not easy to begin with, because of how the medium is constructed (whether it's choice-based or parser... so much variation to take into account sigh), where you are (usually) both the writer and the coder. But advertising your project adds another layer to it, because now you need to deal with expectations and feedback and comments and ratings and questions (a.k.a a customer service position), on top of making announcements and posting extra content (a.k.a a marketing position), and maybe even set up beta-testing rounds (a.k.a a quality control position). It's really a lot...

There are some advantages of releasing an intro post before having a demo. That's what I did with Harcourt, teasing the announcement, then posting an intro post with a release date, then posting the demo. All this spanned half a year. But I still got some lovely return from it. CRWL also didn't have a demo when I started posting about it. Building some hype about a project is a good marketing strategy!

The worse that can happen is that the demo doesn't live to your follower's expectations....

And that's fine. If some people leave, you will probably have other people coming onboard that like what you do. You will make mistakes along the way (everyone does), what is important is how you respond to them and how you grow from them. We all have to start somewhere :)

So right now, take a deep breath, maybe have a drink and a snack, maybe even a nap or a walk outside. Maybe take a little break from Tumblr or turn off the asks box for a while. And when you come back to your project, don't think about anything but what you want to do with the story. And maybe, when you have a bit ready (like a prologue or a chapter), have a beta-testing session for feedback.

Creating IF should be about having fun (even if writing/coding is frustrating), not tormenting yourself with what could happen.

~~~

If you want to get a little more experience before you go on tackling (back) your big project, may I suggest participating in a small game jam to test the waters and create something small? There are currently two unranked jams on itch that you might like: the Anti-Romance Jam and the Neo Twiny Jam (@neo-twiny-jam).

[whoneedsapublisher]

Tune Up

I've had this unfinished HK-47 centric story sitting around for ages and I finally went back to clean it up and work a conclusion into it.

Words: ~700

Summary: The Exile is starting to get a little frustrated with just how esoteric HK-47's construction is. Prideful as he is, HK-47 obviously has a justification.

Also on Ao3

********************

“Hey, HK?”

“Query: What is it, master?” HK-47 glanced down at the exile with what she perhaps too charitably interpreted as mild interest. That was the problem with droids whose heads were too face-like. She always tried to read expressions into them, even if she knew that there was no actual actuators there to react to what the droid was thinking.

“Why did Revan design you so... “ she made a vague gesture, and then settled on the diplomatic option. “..strangely?”

She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. She’d probably gotten oil on it from doing that, but she’d deal with it later. She was going to need a shower after this anyway. What did a little more oil matter?

“Resigned statement: Come now, master. Surely you must be able to figure that out.

Alright, now she was sure he was making a face at her. Although maybe that was just his extremely expressive tone doing all the work.

“No, I’m serious,” the exile said, frowning. “Look, even aside from the all the memory core issues, a lot these systems are- sorry if you take offence, but like, you have to know that this stuff is really inefficient for combat, right?”

“Patient reminder: Master, I am not a combat droid. I am an assassin droid.”

“So?” the exile said. “That still means shooting people.”

“Disappointed correction: Master, an assassin droid’s combat capacity is only half of its functionality. An vital part of assassination is target access.” HK-47 raised a finger as if delivering a lecture. “Suspiciously specific hypothetical: Imagine I needed to infiltrate a civilian cruiser, owned by a paranoid crime boss, who demanded that all droids who entered his vessel be examined by his personal mechanic. If my design was overtly designed for combat efficiency, my target would be immediately suspicious. However, as my chassis and many of my features are designed to mimic a sophisticated protocol droid, any cursory examination of my functions by a mechanic, either for inspection or maintenance reasons, would not immediately reveal my true purpose. Amusing anecdote: In fact, when Revan lost his memory, he reacquired me due to needing my translation functionality, not the raw might of my assassination protocols.”

“I guess that makes sense,” the exile said, peering back into the labyrinth mess that comprised the inside of HK-47’s chest chassis. “It would be pretty hard to tell that you’re an assassination droid if you didn’t find the protocols for it. Almost none of your assassation stuff is in the hardware, after all. No onboard weapons, no obvious interfaces with weaponry… just sophisticated enough motor control of your hands to operate a weapon the way a human would.”

“Pleased agreement: Exactly, master. And such precise motor control is quite typical of high-end civilian droids without any combat programming.” HK-47 flexed his fingers. “Speculation: I believe that the problems with my memory core come from it being designed to easily obfuscate information until certain conditions were met so that memory scans would not reveal my missions, while also being resistant to core wipes. That way, if my core was wiped while in service to a target, I would not forget my original purpose. Extrapolation: This may lead to unintentional cases of certain portions of my memory being encrypted when my core is tampered with in any way, such as when Revan deleted any knowledge of his destination and his recent locations.”

The exile nodded, rubbing her chin in thought. It did make a certain kind of sense. If you were designing a droid that was going to be fully at the mercy of maintenance techs mid-mission, you’d have to put a lot of effort towards dealing with core wipes.

“Prideful assertation: Master, I believe that while my design is unusual, it is the single best implementation of the core concept available in this galaxy. Supporting evidence: Look at how successful those distasteful knock-offs of my model were, despite their obvious inferiority.”

“Well, I guess you’re right,” the exile said, closing HK-47’s front panel. “Still, sometimes I wish you were little easier to tune up.”

“Mollifying reassurance: Do not worry, master. I am sure that your skills are up to the task.”

The exile frowned.

Next time, she was going to open up his faceplate. Just to make doubly sure that it was impossible that he was smirking at her.

[libertineangel]

The Custodial Iivarian Republic made yet another new contact, this one even more unusual and unexpected. They were approached by what appeared to be a partially-constructed bipedal body, a torso and head connected to a vast and intricate array of machinery, and it introduced itself as Xondar.

Xondar revealed himself to be the last of a far-flung lost culture, formerly an organic who successfully uploaded his consciousness to a mechanical form to escape the ravages of age and sickness, and to directly interface himself with the onboard computers of military starships. He was a formidable commander, and his offer of service was immediately accepted, reassuring many who remained wary of the Pliff-Plaff.