#just going to be the most ubiquitous option for us right now

[marshmellowtea]

What's the non sexual age play tag? Or is that what the tag is? (Asking because I want to look in it for genuine reasons not hate reasons)

that's what the tag is called, yeah. it's an ao3 tag that i frequent a lot because that's where a lot of age regression fics end up—i don't think a lot of younger people realize this, but before there was a significant, distinct age regression community, things that we now just consider age regression would just be lumped under sfw age play/cgl. that was technically a kink community, though, and eventually people realized that no, age regression is its own distinct thing that a lot of minors wanted to partake in for a variety of reasons, and people started to branch off into their own genuinely sfw, non-kink affiliated communities like cglre and chire and such. at least, that's the way i experienced it growing up and watching these communities divide, so idk if that's universal, that's just what i saw happen on tumblr.

i have.....some things i could say about the way it rose up and the harm it has done to contribute to this general atmosphere of hostility toward kink and adult spaces it's caused, but on its own, i really don't think it's inherently a bad thing for these spaces to have their own names and rules. that's not really my beef here, and i'm gonna.....reel in this side of the discussion before i go on a tangent here.

what is prevalent is that since age regression as we know it today wasn't really a thing when ao3 started, most fics that would be considered genuine, nonsexual regression ended up under the non-sexual age play tag, and because agere being a community of its own is still a relatively new phenomenon, it just kind of stuck that way. most "proper" age regression fics end up under the nsap tag, while the actual age regression tag is grouped with de-aging and thus generally implies physical regression. that doesn't mean you can't use it for mental regression, though—i actually generally prefer to use both tags on my agere fics—but it definitely has a different connotation than the one most people want for their agere fics.

i go into all this to say that there are people, probably mostly younger people, probably people who aren't aware of this history, who seem outright disgusted by the fact this is the case. i don't wanna demonize people for being uncomfortable with the tag—age play is still technically a kink term and age regression is generally understood to be separate from kink nowadays, and so it's perfectly fair to be uncomfortable with that!—but the problem comes when people do use this tag, claiming they're being ~forced~ into doing so (ao3 doesn't really force you to use any tags but okay), and throw big whiny fits about how their fic isn't ICKY AGE PLAY but rather PURE, WHOLESOME AGE REGRESSION, they're not DISGUSTING for using this tag cuz it's out of their hands, they can't help it, and isn't ao3 so wrong for making them do this???? they really should've fixed this by now, just more proof the site is evil!!!1!.....nevermind the fact there have been attempts to make a separate age regression tag for the agere community (that have mostly failed because people haven't properly mobilized to make them usable, but still), and that, once again, ao3 isn't making you use the damn tag in the first place and if you're that uncomfortable with it, then why are you using it at all?

it's....more a matter of tone, and also a complete and utter lack of self awareness that bugs me. there are people who do this in a less self pitying, virtue signaling way by putting a small a small "age regression not age play" in the tags that still kind of make me roll my eyes, but it doesn't feel as irritating to me as the people putting full on rants in the tags about using a tag no one is making them use in the first place. and, of course, they'll use the excuse of "well, it's the most popular tag, i do have to use it!!!" which is just a silly argument to me because they're just openly admitting their exchanging their personal discomfort for hits, which is....a superficial reason to use a tag that gives you an apparent full on meltdown, honestly.

sorry for going off on your very simple ask about this topic hglkdsajfkl, it's just......one i'm passionate about and i never really had the chance to properly express all my feelings on it. like i said, i really don't want to demonize people's very valid discomfort, it's just the hypocrisy and the lack of giving a shit of how we go to this point that bothers me. they don't care about why this tag is the most popular tag, they're just mad that it is. this isn't even getting into the kink negativity aspect of it all, but i think i've rambled long enough, so i'll stop here now.

[booasaur]

As someone at 27 y/o bi leaning towards women.. who’s born in a country that doesn’t support lgbt rights and also in the closet because of homophobic dad/relatives, im honestly so upset by this. The only way I can live my truth is to live vicariously through the wlw media that I consume and it fuckin hurts. It’s heartbreaking that even just being who I am is impossible and the only way I can is being ripped away from me. I don’t know how much more I can take, especially during pride month

Oof, I get you, anon. When it's your only outlet to something that for others can manifest in so many life-changing ways, crushes, first kisses, dating, sex, marriage, children, it can be so stifling when even the one avenue you have is closed off. And however far away it's happening, it's a reminder of the same homophobia and restrictions you see right around you, so it feels even more hopeless, knowing that in places that are supposedly better off, there are still these major battles to be fought.

I don't know your exact situation, but here are some of the things that helped me come to terms with these same frustrations:

First, focus on individual people more than trends. That's tough to do, for sure, especially when, again, you see so much homophobia directly around you so it seems ubiquitous, but if you're particularly taking WN's case to heart, remember that as much as Netflix tried to shut it down, the cast and crew fought for it! For all these cancellations, there are people who made the original media in the first place and tried to keep it going. It's not hopeless, there's so much support and so many allies.

This next part might be hard to accept, and you know, maybe it's not what'll work for you, but for me, I really did have to learn to not get really deep into any one show or ship. When things are good, they're so good, it all sucks you in, you check the updates all the time, and maybe most importantly, there's this whole community you become a part of. But when you lose it, not if, because in f/f you will, even if things end well, there aren't enough people to keep it going, the more you've made it a part of your life, the more you feel that loss.

All fans should exercise moderation and keep things in perspective, but I'm speaking more to people like us, who don't have anything in real life to balance out what we experience through media.

I answered this ask a little late because I did get sucked up into other shows airing right now that have f/f and that doesn't negate the core issue, this will be the final season for most of them, if not all, but there's still something to get into, even just in f/f media. Perhaps you may prefer lesfic, or the f/f Youtube/Tiktok scene, or webseries.

It's also worth getting into non-media hobbies. Or, you know, at least consuming non-f/f media. I remember being angry at seeing the m/f couples in pretty much everything else while we couldn't have anything, so I just didn't watch anything at all and instead just did those elaborate adult paint by numbers and listened to comedy podcasts. And once I did feel more in the mood to watch stuff again, it was goofy sitcoms and old school murder mysteries, where it wasn't really like, oh, I wish this had more of us. :P

Lastly, it really does sting at you if you feel isolated and alone even from your own family, so try to see if there are other ways you can connect with them. Otherwise it just adds to your negative feelings to resent and fear them.

None of this may work for you, there are so many other possibilities, moving away, coming out, getting involved with LGBT organizations near you or just meeting other queer people, but I'm sure you've already considered those options and they're not currently doing enough for you. But I would at least give some of this a shot, try some distance at first, and hopefully it'll start to feel better. It really doesn't help that we're globally going through a pretty rough time, but just focus on feeling better yourself.

[no-side-us]

Letters From Watson Liveblog - Mar. 22

The Red-Headed League, Part 3

Oh, poor Watson. It does make me wonder though how Sherlock felt when he eventually reads this story, if he ever reads it that is. I can imagine him feeling a bit prideful, but also upset with himself for making his friend feel like this.

Watson has the most interesting descriptions some times. It turns the mind, gets the brain thinking. How is a frock-coat so respectable it becomes oppressive? Does it just look really, really rich or what?

I've noticed Holmes often uses a hunting crop as his go-to armament of choice. I suppose compared to his revolver it's non-lethal, and if the situation does require a gun then he has Watson or other police backup. Still an interesting choice though.

I don't know if Inspector Jones here is simply unaware of how effective Holmes is, or if he is purposefully downplaying his successes. I could see the latter being true, but since Holmes later says Jones isn't that bad a guy, I'll trust his opinion and go with the former.

Imagine being so ubiquitous in your country that people start calling the currency your name. Then again, I've seen TV shows and movies refer to US dollars as "Lincolns" and "Benjamins," so who am I to say.

What an oddly considerate move on Holmes' part. Not odd because he was thinking of someone else, but odd in that it's such a small thing for anyone to have remembered.

Ah, so Mr. Clay is not only a "murderer, thief, smasher, and forger," he also thinks he's better because he's related to royalty. Honestly, he seems less like a master criminal and more like a shitty rich kid.

I wasn't the only one who saw how rude Watson was to Mr. Wilson, and now Holmes is doing it too! At least it's only Mr. Wilson's intelligence he's insulting, and not his build.

I can't think of any right now, but surely there was a better way to get Mr. Wilson out of the house then to concoct a whole fake organization and backstory regarding hair color. Yes it worked, but it was also very close to not working at all.

Well I don't want to be pedantic, but there was a 14 year-old maid in the house. Fortunately though, this story doesn't even consider that as an option here.

Oh, poor Holmes. It must be burdensome to have such a mind with nothing to occupy it. Hopefully he gets a new, interesting, and puzzling case soon.

Or maybe not. This next case certainly looks intriguing.

The Red-Headed League was great! I loved it and it's one of my favorite Holmes mysteries. It's a bit absurd, but also a lot of fun. That's all.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

[xtruss]

Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage!

The green-hydrogen industry is a case study in the potential—for better and worse—of our new economic era.

— July 14, 2023 | Foreign Policy | By Adam Tooze

An employee of Air Liquide in front of an electrolyzer at the company's future hydrogen production facility of renewable hydrogen in Oberhausen, Germany, on May 2, 2023. Ina Fassbender/ AFP Via Getty Images

With the vast majority of the world’s governments committed to decarbonizing their economies in the next two generations, we are embarked on a voyage into the unknown. What was once an argument over carbon pricing and emissions trading has turned into an industrial policy race. Along the way there will be resistance and denial. There will also be breakthroughs and unexpected wins. The cost of solar and wind power has fallen spectacularly in the last 20 years. Battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) have moved from fantasy to ubiquitous reality.

But alongside outright opposition and clear wins, we will also have to contend with situations that are murkier, with wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. As we search for technical solutions to the puzzle of decarbonization, we must beware the mirages of the energy transition.

On a desert trek a mirage can be fatal. Walk too far in the wrong direction, and there may be no way back. You succumb to exhaustion before you can find real water. On the other hand, if you don’t head toward what looks like an oasis, you cannot be sure that you will find another one in time.

Right now, we face a similar dilemma, a dilemma of huge proportions not with regard to H2O but one of its components, H2—hydrogen. Is hydrogen a key part of the world’s energy future or a dangerous fata morgana? It is a question on which tens of trillions of dollars in investment may end up hinging. And scale matters.

For decades, economists warned of the dangers of trying through industrial policy to pick winners. The risk is not just that you might fail, but that in doing so you incur costs. You commit real resources that foreclose other options. The lesson was once that we should leave it to the market. But that was a recipe for a less urgent time. The climate crisis gives us no time. We cannot avoid the challenge of choosing our energy future. As Chuck Sabel and David Victor argue in their important new book Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, it is through local partnership and experimentation that we are most likely to find answers to these technical dilemmas. But, as the case of hydrogen demonstrates, we must beware the efforts of powerful vested interests to use radical technological visions to channel us toward what are in fact conservative and ruinously expensive options.

A green hydrogen plant built by Spanish company Iberdrola in Puertollano, Spain, on April 18, 2023. Valentine Bontemps/AFP Via Getty Images

In the energy future there are certain elements that seem clear. Electricity is going to play a much bigger role than ever before in our energy mix. But some very knotty problems remain. Can electricity suffice? How do you unleash the chemical reactions necessary to produce essential building blocks of modern life like fertilizer and cement without employing hydrocarbons and applying great heat? To smelt the 1.8 billion tons of steel we use every year, you need temperatures of almost 2,000 degrees Celsius. Can we get there without combustion? How do you power aircraft flying thousands of miles, tens of thousands of feet in the air? How do you propel giant container ships around the world? Electric motors and batteries can hardly suffice.

Hydrogen recommends itself as a solution because it burns very hot. And when it does, it releases only water. We know how to make hydrogen by running electric current through water. And we know how to generate electricity cleanly. Green hydrogen thus seems easily within reach. Alternatively, if hydrogen is manufactured using natural gas rather than electrolysis, the industrial facilities can be adapted to allow immediate, at-source CO2 capture. This kind of hydrogen is known as blue hydrogen.

Following this engineering logic, H2 is presented by its advocates as a Swiss army knife of the energy transition, a versatile adjunct to the basic strategy of electrifying everything. The question is whether H2 solutions, though they may be technically viable, make any sense from the point of view of the broader strategy of energy transition, or whether they might in fact be an expensive wrong turn.

Using hydrogen as an energy store is hugely inefficient. With current technology producing hydrogen from water by way of electrolysis consumes vastly more energy than will be stored and ultimately released by burning the hydrogen. Why not use the same electricity to generate the heat or drive a motor directly? The necessary electrolysis equipment is expensive. And though hydrogen may burn cleanly, as a fuel it is inconvenient because of its corrosive properties, its low energy per unit of volume, and its tendency to explode. Storing and moving hydrogen around will require huge investment in shipping facilities, pipelines, filling stations, or facilities to convert hydrogen into the more stable form of ammonia.

The kind of schemes pushed by hydrogen’s lobbyists foresee annual consumption rising by 2050 to more than 600 million tons per annum, compared to 100 million tons today. This would consume a huge share of green electricity production. In a scenario favored by the Hydrogen Council, of the United States’ 2,900 gigawatts of renewable energy production, 650 gigawatts would be consumed by hydrogen electrolysis. That is almost three times the total capacity of renewable power installed today.

The costs will be gigantic. The cost for a hydrogen build-out over coming decades could run into the tens of trillions of dollars. Added to which, to work as a system, the investment in hydrogen production, transport, and consumption will have to be undertaken simultaneously.

Little wonder, perhaps, that though the vision of the “hydrogen economy” as an integrated economic and technical system has been around for half a century, we have precious little actual experience with hydrogen fuel. Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of hydrogen skeptics. The most vocal of these is Michael Liebreich, whose consultancy has popularized the so-called hydrogen ladder, designed to highlight how unrealistic many of them are. If one follows the Liebreich analysis, the vast majority of proposed hydrogen uses in transport and industrial heating are, in fact, unrealistic due to their sheer inefficiency. In each case there is an obvious alternative, most of them including the direct application of electricity.

Technicians work on the construction of a hydrogen bus at a plant in Albi, France, on March 4, 2021. Georges Gobet/AFP Via Getty Images

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

The Hydrogen Council boasts corporate sponsors ranging from Airbus and Aramco to BMW, Daimler Truck, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, Siemens, Shell, and Microsoft. The national governments of Japan, South Korea, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., and China all have hydrogen strategies. There are new project announcements regularly. Experimental shipments of ammonia have docked in Japan. The EU is planning an elaborate network of pipelines, known as the hydrogen backbone. All told, the Hydrogen Council counts $320 billion in hydrogen projects announced around the world.

Given the fact that many new uses of hydrogen are untested, and given the skepticism among many influential energy economists and engineers, it is reasonable to ask what motivates this wave of commitments to the hydrogen vision.

In technological terms, hydrogen may represent a shimmering image of possibility on a distant horizon, but in political economy terms, it has a more immediate role. It is a route through which existing fossil fuel interests can imagine a place for themselves in the new energy future. The presence of oil majors and energy companies in the ranks of the Hydrogen Council is not coincidental. Hydrogen enables natural gas suppliers to imagine that they can transition their facilities to green fuels. Makers of combustion engines and gas turbines can conceive of burning hydrogen instead. Storing hydrogen or ammonia like gas or oil promises a solution to the issues of intermittency in renewable power generation and may extend the life of gas turbine power stations. For governments around the world, a more familiar technology than one largely based on solar panels, windmills, and batteries is a way of calming nerves about the transformation they have notionally signed up for.

Looking at several key geographies in which hydrogen projects are currently being discussed offers a compound psychological portrait of the common moment of global uncertainty.

A worker at the Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research Field, a test facility that produces hydrogen from renewable energy, in Fukushima, Japan, on Feb. 15, 2023. Richard A. Brooks/AFP Via Getty Images

The first country to formulate a national hydrogen strategy was Japan. Japan has long pioneered exotic energy solutions. Since undersea pipelines to Japan are impractical, it was Japanese demand that gave life to the seaborne market for liquefied natural gas (LNG). What motivated the hydrogen turn in 2017 was a combination of post-Fukushima shock, perennial anxiety about energy security, and a long-standing commitment to hydrogen by key Japanese car manufacturers. Though Toyota, the world’s no. 1 car producer, pioneered the hybrid in the form of the ubiquitous Prius, it has been slow to commit to full electric. The same is true for the other East Asian car producers—Honda, Nissan, and South Korea’s Hyundai. In the face of fierce competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles, they embrace a government commitment to hydrogen, which in the view of many experts concentrates on precisely the wrong areas i.e. transport and electricity generation, rather than industrial applications.

The prospect of a substantial East Asian import demand for hydrogen encourages the economists at the Hydrogen Council to imagine a global trade in hydrogen that essentially mirrors the existing oil and gas markets. These have historically centered on flows of hydrocarbons from key producing regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and North America to importers in Europe and Asia. Fracked natural gas converted into LNG is following this same route. And it seems possible that hydrogen and ammonia derived from hydrogen may do the same.

CF Industries, the United States’ largest producer of ammonia, has finalized a deal to ship blue ammonia to Japan’s largest power utility for use alongside oil and gas in power generation. The CO2 storage that makes the ammonia blue rather than gray has been contracted between CF Industries and U.S. oil giant Exxon. A highly defensive strategy in Japan thus serves to provide a market for a conservative vision of the energy transition in the United Sates as well. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, by far the world’s largest oil company, is touting shipments of blue ammonia, which it hopes to deliver to Japan or East Asia. Though the cost in terms of energy content is the equivalent of around $250 per barrel of oil, Aramco hopes to ship 11 million tons of blue ammonia to world markets by 2030.

To get through the current gas crisis, EU nations have concluded LNG deals with both the Gulf states and the United States. Beyond LNG, it is also fully committed to the hydrogen bandwagon. And again, this follows a defensive logic. The aim is to use green or blue hydrogen or ammonia to find a new niche for European heavy industry, which is otherwise at risk of being entirely knocked out of world markets by high energy prices and Europe’s carbon levy.

The European steel industry today accounts for less than ten percent of global production. It is a leader in green innovation. And the world will need technological first-movers to shake up the fossil-fuel dependent incumbents, notably in China. But whether this justifies Europe’s enormous commitment to hydrogen is another question. It seems motivated more by the desire to hold up the process of deindustrialization and worries about working-class voters drifting into the arms of populists, than by a forward looking strategic calculus.

In the Netherlands, regions that have hitherto served as hubs for global natural gas trading are now competing for designation as Europe’s “hydrogen valley.” In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inked the contract on the SoutH2 Corridor, a pipeline that will carry H2 up the Italian peninsula to Austria and southern Germany. Meanwhile, France has pushed Spain into agreeing to a subsea hydrogen connection rather than a natural gas pipeline over the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal have ample LNG terminal capacity. But Spain’s solar and wind potential also make it Europe’s natural site for green hydrogen production and a “green hydrogen” pipe, regardless of its eventual uses, in the words of one commentator looks “less pharaonic and fossil-filled” than the original natural gas proposal.

A hydrogen-powered train is refilled by a mobile hydrogen filling station at the Siemens test site in Wegberg, Germany, on Sept. 9, 2022. Bernd/AFP Via Getty Images

How much hydrogen will actually be produced in Europe remains an open question. Proximity to the point of consumption and the low capital costs of investment in Europe speak in favor of local production. But one of the reasons that hydrogen projects appeal to European strategists is that they offer a new vision of European-African cooperation. Given demographic trends and migration pressure, Europe desperately needs to believe that it has a promising African strategy. Africa’s potential for renewable electricity generation is spectacular. Germany has recently entered into a hydrogen partnership with Namibia. But this raises new questions.

First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

A variety of conservative motives thus converge in the hydrogen coalition. Most explicit of all is the case of post-Brexit Britain. Once a leader in the exit from coal, enabled by a “dash for gas” and offshore wind, the U.K. has recently hit an impasse. Hard-to-abate sectors like household heating, which in the U.K. is heavily dependent on natural gas, require massive investments in electrification, notably in heat pumps. These are expensive. In the United Kingdom, the beleaguered Tory government, which has presided over a decade of stagnating real incomes, is considering as an alternative the widespread introduction of hydrogen for domestic heating. Among energy experts this idea is widely regarded as an impractical boondoggle for the gas industry that defers the eventual and inevitable electrification at the expense of prolonged household emissions. But from the point of view of politics, it has the attraction that it costs relatively less per household to replace natural gas with hydrogen.

Employees work on the assembly line of fuel cell electric vehicles powered by hydrogen at a factory in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, on March 29, 2022. VCG Via Getty Images

As this brief tour suggests, there is every reason to fear that tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, vast amounts of political capital, and precious time are being invested in “green” energy investments, the main attraction of which is that they minimize change and perpetuate as far as possible the existing patterns of the hydrocarbon energy system. This is not greenwashing in the simple sense of rebadging or mislabeling. If carried through, it is far more substantial than that. It will build ships and put pipes in the ground. It will consume huge amounts of desperately scarce green electricity. And this faces us with a dilemma.

In confronting the challenge of the energy transition, we need a bias for action. We need to experiment. There is every reason to trust in learning-curve effects. Electrolyzers, for instance, will get more affordable, reducing the costs of hydrogen production. At certain times and in certain places, green power may well become so abundant that pouring it into electrolysis makes sense. And even if many hydrogen projects do not succeed, that may be a risk worth taking. We will likely learn new techniques in the process. In facing the uncertainties of the energy transition, we need to cultivate a tolerance for failure. Furthermore, even if hydrogen is a prime example of corporate log-rolling, we should presumably welcome the broadening of the green coalition to include powerful fossil fuel interests.

The real and inescapable tradeoff arises when we commit scarce resources—both real and political—to the hydrogen dream. The limits of public tolerance for the costs of the energy transition are already abundantly apparent, in Asia and Europe as well as in the United States. Pumping money into subsidies that generate huge economies of scale and cost reductions is one thing. Wasting money on lame-duck projects with little prospect of success is quite another. What is at stake is ultimately the legitimacy of the energy transition as such.

In the end, there is no patented method distinguishing self-serving hype from real opportunity. There is no alternative but to subject competing claims to intense public, scientific, and technical scrutiny. And if the ship has already sailed and subsidies are already on the table, then retrospective cost-benefit assessment is called for.

Ideally, the approach should be piecemeal and stepwise, and in this regard the crucial thing to note about hydrogen is that to regard it as a futuristic fantasy is itself misguided. We already live in a hydrogen-based world. Two key sectors of modern industry could not operate without it. Oil refining relies on hydrogen, as does the production of fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch process on which we depend for roughly half of our food production. These two sectors generate the bulk of the demand for the masses of hydrogen we currently consume.

We may not need 600 million, 500 million, or even 300 million tons of green and blue hydrogen by 2050. But we currently use about 100 million, and of that total, barely 1 million is clean. It is around that core that hydrogen experimentation should be concentrated, in places where an infrastructure already exists. This is challenging because transporting hydrogen is expensive, and many of the current points of use of hydrogen, notably in Europe, are not awash in cheap green power. But there are two places where the conditions for experimentation within the existing hydrogen economy seem most propitious.

One is China, and specifically northern China and Inner Mongolia, where China currently concentrates a large part of its immense production of fertilizer, cement, and much of its steel industry. China is leading the world in the installation of solar and wind power and is pioneering ultra-high-voltage transmission. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has shown no particular enthusiasm for hydrogen. It is placing the biggest bet in the world on the more direct route to electrification by way of renewable generation and batteries. But China is already the largest and lowest-cost producer of electrolysis equipment. In 2022, China launched a modestly proportioned hydrogen strategy. In cooperation with the United Nations it has initiated an experiment with green fertilizer production, and who would bet against its chances of establishing a large-scale hydrogen energy system?

The other key player is the United States. After years of delay, the U.S. lags far behind in photovoltaics batteries, and offshore wind. But in hydrogen, and specifically in the adjoining states of Texas and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, it has obvious advantages over any other location in the West. The United States is home to a giant petrochemicals complex. It is the only Western economy that can compete with India and China in fertilizer production. In Texas, there are actually more than 2500 kilometers of hardened hydrogen pipelines. And insofar as players like Exxon have a green energy strategy, it is carbon sequestration, which will be the technology needed for blue hydrogen production.

It is not by accident that America’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, targeted its most generous subsidies—the most generous ever offered for green energy in the United States—on hydrogen production. The hydrogen lobby is hard at work, and it has turned Texas into the lowest-cost site for H2 production in the Western world. It is not a model one would want to see emulated anywhere else, but it may serve as a technology incubator that charts what is viable and what is not.

There is very good reason to suspect the motives of every player in the energy transition. Distinguishing true innovation from self-serving conservatism is going to be a key challenge in the new era in which we have to pick winners. We need to develop a culture of vigilance. But there are also good reasons to expect certain key features of the new to grow out of the old. Innovation is miraculous but it rarely falls like mana from heaven. As Sabel and Victor argue in their book, it grows from within expert technical communities with powerful vested interests in change. The petrochemical complex of the Gulf of Mexico may seem an unlikely venue for the birth of a green new future, but it is only logical that the test of whether the hydrogen economy is a real possibility will be run at the heart of the existing hydrocarbon economy.

— Adam Tooze is a Columnist at Foreign Policy and a History Professor and the Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the Author of Chartbook, a newsletter on Rconomics, Geopolitics, and History.

[mariacallous]

With the vast majority of the world’s governments committed to decarbonizing their economies in the next two generations, we are embarked on a voyage into the unknown. What was once an argument over carbon pricing and emissions trading has turned into an industrial policy race. Along the way there will be resistance and denial. There will also be breakthroughs and unexpected wins. The cost of solar and wind power has fallen spectacularly in the last 20 years. Battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) have moved from fantasy to ubiquitous reality.

But alongside outright opposition and clear wins, we will also have to contend with situations that are murkier, with wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. As we search for technical solutions to the puzzle of decarbonization, we must beware the mirages of the energy transition.

On a desert trek a mirage can be fatal. Walk too far in the wrong direction, and there may be no way back. You succumb to exhaustion before you can find real water. On the other hand, if you don’t head toward what looks like an oasis, you cannot be sure that you will find another one in time.

Right now, we face a similar dilemma, a dilemma of huge proportions not with regard to H2O but one of its components, H2—hydrogen. Is hydrogen a key part of the world’s energy future or a dangerous fata morgana? It is a question on which tens of trillions of dollars in investment may end up hinging. And scale matters.

For decades, economists warned of the dangers of trying through industrial policy to pick winners. The risk is not just that you might fail, but that in doing so you incur costs. You commit real resources that foreclose other options. The lesson was once that we should leave it to the market. But that was a recipe for a less urgent time. The climate crisis gives us no time. We cannot avoid the challenge of choosing our energy future. As Chuck Sabel and David Victor argue in their important new book Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, it is through local partnership and experimentation that we are most likely to find answers to these technical dilemmas. But, as the case of hydrogen demonstrates, we must beware the efforts of powerful vested interests to use radical technological visions to channel us towards what are in fact conservative and ruinously expensive options.

In the energy future there are certain elements that seem clear. Electricity is going to play a much bigger role than ever before in our energy mix. But some very knotty problems remain. Can electricity suffice? How do you unleash the chemical reactions necessary to produce essential building blocks of modern life like fertilizer and cement without employing hydrocarbons and applying great heat? To smelt the 1.8 billion tons of steel we use every year, you need temperatures of almost 2,000 degrees Celsius. Can we get there without combustion? How do you power aircraft flying thousands of miles, tens of thousands of feet in the air? How do you propel giant container ships around the world? Electric motors and batteries can hardly suffice.

Hydrogen recommends itself as a solution because it burns very hot. And when it does, it releases only water. We know how to make hydrogen by running electric current through water. And we know how to generate electricity cleanly. Green hydrogen thus seems easily within reach. Alternatively, if hydrogen is manufactured using natural gas rather than electrolysis, the industrial facilities can be adapted to allow immediate, at-source CO2 capture. This kind of hydrogen is known as blue hydrogen.

Following this engineering logic, H2 is presented by its advocates as a Swiss army knife of the energy transition, a versatile adjunct to the basic strategy of electrifying everything. The question is whether H2 solutions, though they may be technically viable, make any sense from the point of view of the broader strategy of energy transition, or whether they might in fact be an expensive wrong turn.

Using hydrogen as an energy store is hugely inefficient. With current technology producing hydrogen from water by way of electrolysis consumes vastly more energy than will be stored and ultimately released by burning the hydrogen. Why not use the same electricity to generate the heat or drive a motor directly? The necessary electrolysis equipment is expensive. And though hydrogen may burn cleanly, as a fuel it is inconvenient because of its corrosive properties, its low energy per unit of volume, and its tendency to explode. Storing and moving hydrogen around will require huge investment in shipping facilities, pipelines, filling stations, or facilities to convert hydrogen into the more stable form of ammonia.

The kind of schemes pushed by hydrogen’s lobbyists foresee annual consumption rising by 2050 to more than 600 million tons per annum, compared to 100 million tons today. This would consume a huge share of green electricity production. In a scenario favored by the Hydrogen Council, of the United States’ 2,900 gigawatts of renewable energy production, 650 gigawatts would be consumed by hydrogen electrolysis. That is almost three times the total capacity of renewable power installed today.

The costs will be gigantic. The cost for a hydrogen build-out over coming decades could run into the tens of trillions of dollars. Added to which, to work as a system, the investment in hydrogen production, transport, and consumption will have to be undertaken simultaneously.

Little wonder, perhaps, that though the vision of the “hydrogen economy” as an integrated economic and technical system has been around for half a century, we have precious little actual experience with hydrogen fuel. Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of hydrogen skeptics. The most vocal of these is Michael Liebreich, whose consultancy has popularized the so-called hydrogen ladder, designed to highlight how unrealistic many of them are. If one follows the Liebreich analysis, the vast majority of proposed hydrogen uses in transport and industrial heating are, in fact, unrealistic due to their sheer inefficiency. In each case there is an obvious alternative, most of them including the direct application of electricity.

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

The Hydrogen Council boasts corporate sponsors ranging from Airbus and Aramco to BMW, Daimler Truck, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, Siemens, Shell, and Microsoft. The national governments of Japan, South Korea, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., and China all have hydrogen strategies. There are new project announcements regularly. Experimental shipments of ammonia have docked in Japan. The EU is planning an elaborate network of pipelines, known as the hydrogen backbone. All told, the Hydrogen Council counts $320 billion in hydrogen projects announced around the world.

Given the fact that many new uses of hydrogen are untested, and given the skepticism among many influential energy economists and engineers, it is reasonable to ask what motivates this wave of commitments to the hydrogen vision.

In technological terms, hydrogen may represent a shimmering image of possibility on a distant horizon, but in political economy terms, it has a more immediate role. It is a route through which existing fossil fuel interests can imagine a place for themselves in the new energy future. The presence of oil majors and energy companies in the ranks of the Hydrogen Council is not coincidental. Hydrogen enables natural gas suppliers to imagine that they can transition their facilities to green fuels. Makers of combustion engines and gas turbines can conceive of burning hydrogen instead. Storing hydrogen or ammonia like gas or oil promises a solution to the issues of intermittency in renewable power generation and may extend the life of gas turbine power stations. For governments around the world, a more familiar technology than one largely based on solar panels, windmills, and batteries is a way of calming nerves about the transformation they have notionally signed up for.

Looking at several key geographies in which hydrogen projects are currently being discussed offers a compound psychological portrait of the common moment of global uncertainty.

The first country to formulate a national hydrogen strategy was Japan. Japan has long pioneered exotic energy solutions. Since undersea pipelines to Japan are impractical, it was Japanese demand that gave life to the seaborne market for liquefied natural gas (LNG). What motivated the hydrogen turn in 2017 was a combination of post-Fukushima shock, perennial anxiety about energy security, and a long-standing commitment to hydrogen by key Japanese car manufacturers. Though Toyota, the world’s no. 1 car producer, pioneered the hybrid in the form of the ubiquitous Prius, it has been slow to commit to full electric. The same is true for the other East Asian car producers—Honda, Nissan, and South Korea’s Hyundai. In the face of fierce competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles, they embrace a government commitment to hydrogen, which in the view of many experts concentrates on precisely the wrong areas i.e. transport and electricity generation, rather than industrial applications.

The prospect of a substantial East Asian import demand for hydrogen encourages the economists at the Hydrogen Council to imagine a global trade in hydrogen that essentially mirrors the existing oil and gas markets. These have historically centered on flows of hydrocarbons from key producing regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and North America to importers in Europe and Asia. Fracked natural gas converted into LNG is following this same route. And it seems possible that hydrogen and ammonia derived from hydrogen may do the same.

CF Industries, the United States’ largest producer ammonia, has finalized a deal to ship blue ammonia to Japan’s largest power utility for use alongside oil and gas in power generation. The CO2 storage that makes the ammonia blue rather than gray has been contracted between CF Industries and U.S. oil giant Exxon. A highly defensive strategy in Japan thus serves to provide a market for a conservative vision of the energy transition in the United Sates as well. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, by far the world’s largest oil company, is touting shipments of blue ammonia, which it hopes to deliver to Japan or East Asia. Though the cost in terms of energy content is the equivalent of around $250 per barrel of oil, Aramco hopes to ship 11 million tons of blue ammonia to world markets by 2030.

To get through the current gas crisis, EU nations have concluded LNG deals with both the Gulf states and the United States. Beyond LNG, it is also fully committed to the hydrogen bandwagon. And again, this follows a defensive logic. The aim is to use green or blue hydrogen or ammonia to find a new niche for European heavy industry, which is otherwise at risk of being entirely knocked out of world markets by high energy prices and Europe’s carbon levy.

The European steel industry today accounts for less than ten percent of global production. It is a leader in green innovation. And the world will need technological first-movers to shake up the fossil-fuel dependent incumbents, notably in China. But whether this justifies Europe’s enormous commitment to hydrogen is another question. It seems motivated more by the desire to hold up the process of deindustrialization and worries about working-class voters drifting into the arms of populists, than by a forward looking strategic calculus.

In the Netherlands, regions that have hitherto served as hubs for global natural gas trading are now competing for designation as Europe’s “hydrogen valley.” In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inked the contract on the SoutH2 Corridor, a pipeline that will carry H2 up the Italian peninsula to Austria and southern Germany. Meanwhile, France has pushed Spain into agreeing to a subsea hydrogen connection rather than a natural gas pipeline over the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal have ample LNG terminal capacity. But Spain’s solar and wind potential also make it Europe’s natural site for green hydrogen production and a “green hydrogen” pipe, regardless of its eventual uses, looks in the words of one commentator looks “less pharaonic and fossil-filled” than the original natural gas proposal.

How much hydrogen will actually be produced in Europe remains an open question. Proximity to the point of consumption and the low capital costs of investment in Europe speak in favor of local production. But one of the reasons that hydrogen projects appeal to European strategists is that they offer a new vision of European-African cooperation. Given demographic trends and migration pressure, Europe desperately needs to believe that it has a promising African strategy. Africa’s potential for renewable electricity generation is spectacular. Germany has recently entered into a hydrogen partnership with Namibia. But this raises new questions.

First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

A variety of conservative motives thus converge in the hydrogen coalition. Most explicit of all is the case of post-Brexit Britain. Once a leader in the exit from coal, enabled by a “dash for gas” and offshore wind, the U.K. has recently hit an impasse. Hard-to-abate sectors like household heating, which in the U.K. is heavily dependent on natural gas, require massive investments in electrification, notably in heat pumps. These are expensive. In the United Kingdom, the beleaguered Tory government, which has presided over a decade of stagnating real incomes, is considering as an alternative the widespread introduction of hydrogen for domestic heating. Among energy experts this idea is widely regarded as an impractical boondoggle for the gas industry that defers the eventual and inevitable electrification at the expense of prolonged household emissions. But from the point of view of politics, it has the attraction that it costs relatively less per household to replace natural gas with hydrogen.

As this brief tour suggests, there is every reason to fear that tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, vast amounts of political capital, and precious time are being invested in “green” energy investments, the main attraction of which is that they minimize change and perpetuate as far as possible the existing patterns of the hydrocarbon energy system. This is not greenwashing in the simple sense of rebadging or mislabeling. If carried through, it is far more substantial than that. It will build ships and put pipes in the ground. It will consume huge amounts of desperately scarce green electricity. And this faces us with a dilemma.

In confronting the challenge of the energy transition, we need a bias for action. We need to experiment. There is every reason to trust in learning-curve effects. Electrolyzers, for instance, will get more affordable, reducing the costs of hydrogen production. At certain times and in certain places, green power may well become so abundant that pouring it into electrolysis makes sense. And even if many hydrogen projects do not succeed, that may be a risk worth taking. We will likely learn new techniques in the process. In facing the uncertainties of the energy transition, we need to cultivate a tolerance for failure. Furthermore, even if hydrogen is a prime example of corporate log-rolling, we should presumably welcome the broadening of the green coalition to include powerful fossil fuel interests.

The real and inescapable tradeoff arises when we commit scarce resources—both real and political—to the hydrogen dream. The limits of public tolerance for the costs of the energy transition are already abundantly apparent, in Asia and Europe as well as in the United States. Pumping money into subsidies that generate huge economies of scale and cost reductions is one thing. Wasting money on lame-duck projects with little prospect of success is quite another. What is at stake is ultimately the legitimacy of the energy transition as such.

In the end, there is no patented method distinguishing self-serving hype from real opportunity. There is no alternative but to subject competing claims to intense public, scientific, and technical scrutiny. And if the ship has already sailed and subsidies are already on the table, then retrospective cost-benefit assessment is called for.

Ideally, the approach should be piecemeal and stepwise, and in this regard the crucial thing to note about hydrogen is that to regard it as a futuristic fantasy is itself misguided. We already live in a hydrogen-based world. Two key sectors of modern industry could not operate without it. Oil refining relies on hydrogen, as does the production of fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch process on which we depend for roughly half of our food production. These two sectors generate the bulk of the demand for the masses of hydrogen we currently consume.

We may not need 600 million, 500 million, or even 300 million tons of green and blue hydrogen by 2050. But we currently use about 100 million, and of that total, barely 1 million is clean. It is around that core that hydrogen experimentation should be concentrated, in places where an infrastructure already exists. This is challenging because transporting hydrogen is expensive, and many of the current points of use of hydrogen, notably in Europe, are not awash in cheap green power. But there are two places where the conditions for experimentation within the existing hydrogen economy seem most propitious.

One is China, and specifically northern China and Inner Mongolia, where China currently concentrates a large part of its immense production of fertilizer, cement, and much of its steel industry. China is leading the world in the installation of solar and wind power and is pioneering ultra-high-voltage transmission. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has shown no particular enthusiasm for hydrogen. It is placing the biggest bet in the world on the more direct route to electrification by way of renewable generation and batteries. But China is already the largest and lowest-cost producer of electrolysis equipment. In 2022, China launched a modestly proportioned hydrogen strategy. In cooperation with the United Nations it has iniated an experiment with green fertilizer production, and who would bet against its chances of establishing a large-scale hydrogen energy system?

The other key player is the United States. After years of delay, the U.S. lags far behind in photovoltaics batteries, and offshore wind. But in hydrogen, and specifically in the adjoining states of Texas and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, it has obvious advantages over any other location in the West. The United States is home to a giant petrochemicals complex. It is the only Western economy that can compete with India and China in fertilizer production. In Texas, there are actually more than 2500 kilometers of hardened hydrogen pipelines. And insofar as players like Exxon have a green energy strategy, it is carbon sequestration, which will be the technology needed for blue hydrogen production.

It is not by accident that America’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, targeted its most generous subsidies—the most generous ever offered for green energy in the United States—on hydrogen production. The hydrogen lobby is hard at work, and it has turned Texas into the lowest-cost site for H2 production in the Western world. It is not a model one would want to see emulated anywhere else, but it may serve as a technology incubator that charts what is viable and what is not.

There is very good reason to suspect the motives of every player in the energy transition. Distinguishing true innovation from self-serving conservatism is going to be a key challenge in the new era in which we have to pick winners. We need to develop a culture of vigilance. But there are also good reasons to expect certain key features of the new to grow out of the old. Innovation is miraculous but it rarely falls like mana from heaven. As Sabel and Victor argue in their book, it grows from within expert technical communities with powerful vested interests in change. The petrochemical complex of the Gulf of Mexico may seem an unlikely venue for the birth of a green new future, but it is only logical that the test of whether the hydrogen economy is a real possibility will be run at the heart of the existing hydrocarbon economy.

[candy-floss-crazy]

Quirky Food Trucks, From A Container To A Rocket Launcher

At one time mobile catering consisted of almost entirely box shaped 'burger vans'. Occasionally someone with a touch of flair, or perhaps just a bit mad, would put together something quirky. With the dawn of the instagram generation, boxy burger vans suddenly dropped out of vogue. To get ahead you really needed people to be sharing your set up. Sure, good food was important, but it was no longer the sole arbiter of success. Your food truck needed to look better. We are going to be taking a look at some of the quirky, weird, wonderful and downright strange catering outlets around the world. Happy Larrys Shipping containers are ubiquitous throughout the world. A standardised method of transporting goods via road, rail and sea. Many of them however do find a second life as something totally different. From bars, to offices to mobile toilets. They have also found favour with catering vendors. The basic container is a strong watertight structure, that is built to accurate dimensions, and lends itself to conversions. Happy as Larry is an Australian company that specialises in selling Napoli-style wood fired pizza. A nice touch in this container conversion is that they have replaced much of one side with huge glass pains to give a real contemporary feel to it. Space Shuttle Cafe If you are looking for something to convert into a food truck, the most obvious thing you could think of is an aeroplane. Probably not! This one was converted to a mobile eatery by GMC in 1976. But it started life as an actual flying machine in 1944. Cotton Candy Jeep One of our favourites this, take an iconic WWII off road vehicle, and shove a cotton candy (candy floss if you live this side of the pond) machine in the back. Oh and for good measure paint it all pink. Walls Mini Ice Cream Truck Walls ran a campaign called 'Goodbye Serious', where they built a miniaturised ice cream truck designed to drive into offices and dispense their best selling goodies. This is one seriously quirky little food truck. Though some of our taller staff might struggle to operate in this one. K99 Ice Cream Cart This one is notable, not for being a different type of food truck. But because of its target market. This sells ice creams for your canine companions. That's right, doggy ice creams. Seems that scientists have discovered  that gammon and chicken-flavored ice creams really hits the spot for our doggy friends. Vintage Caravan These are gaining in popularity, and are being used for everything from a gin bar to a burger joint. The ironic thing is, was during the late 90's, the fairground industry used these for staff quarters, then tended to scrap them at the end of the season. If they were scrapped, it wasn't unknow to just remove all identifying marks and leave them in a layby for the council to dispose of. You try buying one now, I have seen them advertised for upwards of £30k. Step Frame Food Truck More of a Stateside set up, they have a plethora of large step fram delivery vehicles from the likes of Dodge, Ford, GMC etc. These are pretty near the size of a 7.5 tonne lorry in the UK and make an ideal blank canvas to fit out as a mobile eatery Airstream Style Food Truck Another option hailing from the good ole US of A. Airstreams were originally touring caravans. Till some adventurous soul decided to cut the side out and add a kitchen. They are now a fairly regular sight on the UK scene. With both the original Airstream brand and a number of both EU based and Chinese manufacturers building similar looking trucks. Converted Vintage Horsebox Stunning Horsebox Food Truck Hire A regular sight nowadays, horseboxes are easy to obtain, pretty easy to convert and very flexible, though a bit on the small side for some catering options. Prices are steadily rising, to the benefit of anyone needing to dispose of a horsebox that's past it's sell by date. What you once would have scrapped, you can now get a tidy few grand for. Snow Mobile Food Truck This one is as far as we know, pretty unique. A burrito joint on a tracked snow mobile platform. Great for last minute corporate jobs in the arctic. Bloody noisy if you need to take it down the M1 motorway to London. London Red Bus Yoghurt Truck An iconic British vehicle this time, an ex London Routemaster bus, turned into a yoghurt dispensary by Snog. A cool vehicle for a cool brand serving a cool product (literally)! The Peanut Van Occasionally there are totally custom built trucks out there. I've seen vehicles that look like hot dogs, doughnuts, oranges. This one is a peanut. Leaves you in no doubt what the product is. Land Rover Ice Cream Truck Another off road vehicle pressed into service. We have already had a Willy's Jeep with a candyfloss machine. This one is the UK equivalent. In vehicles that is, not food. This is one cool ice cream truck. Monster Truck Another ice cream van. This time shoehorned into a monster truck. Unless you are 6ft 6 you need step ladders to be served here. Rocket Launcher Coffee Truck A big boys toy this one. A coffee truck on a rocket launcher. Though it didn't work out too well for two of the staff when they were arrested for causing panic on the streets of Malaysia. What's next, doughnuts served from a Challenger tank? Tactical Tapas Another paramilitary offering. Tapas from a tactical armoured car. It's all starting to get a bit Mad Max. Fire Engine The last couple of options were built on trucks designed to blow things up and start fires. These were designed to put them out. Popular both sides of the pond, though the US fire trucks just seem to be a lot more jazzy. Read the full article

[gotolundon]

How To Create A Custom Neon Sign Yourself (And Why You Should)

When it comes to it, there are many different approaches and viewpoints to consider custom LED neon sign; custom bar signs neon;

Neon signs are ubiquitous in today’s world. From pubs and clubs to retail establishments and even homes, neon signs are everywhere. So it’s no wonder that many people want to create their own neon sign. But is it really that simple? Actually, yes, it is. In this blog post, we will show you how to create a custom neon sign yourself with just a few simple steps. And not only that, but we’ll explain why you should do so too. Neon signs are a great way to add an element of visual interest to any space and can really liven up a dull exterior or interior. So don’t wait any longer; start creating your very own ( custom neon signs ) today!

What You Need

If you’re in the mood for a little neon sign creativity of your own, then this guide is for you! In just a few easy steps, you can create a custom neon sign that will brighten up your space. Plus, there are plenty of reasons why you should go ahead and make one yourself—here are five of them: 1. Custom Neon Signs Are Fun It might sound obvious, but if you want something that’s going to be fun to look at, custom neon signs are definitely the way to go. They’re striking, eye-catching and sure to turn heads—making them perfect for any room in your home. 2. They're Economical In addition to being fun and visually appealing, custom neon signs are also budget-friendly. Rather than spending money on generic signs that will only last a short while before they need to be replaced or upgraded, invest in a custom sign that will look great for years to come. 3. They're Sustainable Finally, one of the biggest benefits of using custom neon signs is their environmental impact. Not only do they look great and add character to your space, but they’re made from recycled materials which means they help save resources both now and in the future.

How to Choose the Right Neon Sign

Neon signs are one of the most popular forms of advertising in the world, and for good reason. They're visually stimulating and relatively inexpensive to install. Plus, they can be customized to fit your business perfectly. Here are five tips for choosing the right neon sign for your business: 1. Consider Your Message One of the most important things to consider when choosing a neon sign is what message you want to send. Do you want to emphasize a particular product or service? Are you looking to attract customers during specific times of the day or week? Once you have a good idea of what you want, look at neon signs that match your message. 2. Think About Your Budget Neon signs aren't exactly cheap, so be sure to factor that into your decision-making process. A few high-quality neon signs can run you anywhere from $100-$300, but there are also plenty of lower-priced options available as well. Do some research and find a sign that meets your budget while still meeting your needs. 3.Consider Your Location and Space Once you have an idea of what type of neon sign you want, it's time to think about where it will go and how much space it will require. Will it need to be mounted on a wall? In front of a window? Keeping these factors in mind will help you decide on the perfect sign for your business. 4.Think about What You'll Display The Sign

How to Assemble and Install Your Neon Sign

If you’ve ever wanted to create your very own neon sign, now is the time! Neon signs are a relatively simple DIY project that can be completed in just a few hours. Plus, they make an amazing addition to any space. Here’s how to assemble and install your neon sign: 1. First, gather all of the materials you need for your project. You will need a neon sign kit (or some other type of signage hardware), paint or neon adhesive, wire cutters/strippers, screwdriver, and measuring tape. 2. Next, measure the space where you want your sign to be installed and cut the necessary pieces of signage hardware to fit. Make sure that the measurements you take are precise – if there’s even a small discrepancy between the size of the piece of hardware and the space it needs to fit in, your sign will not look correct when it’s installed. 3. Once you have all of your hardware pieces cut out, it’s time to start painting or adhesiveing them onto the wall or surface where you plan on installing your sign. Be sure to use plenty of heavy pressure when applying the adhesive/paint – too much lightness will cause your signs to come loose after a while. 4. Once everything is fully dry (usually overnight), it’s time to attach your signs using screws and wirecutters/strippers as needed. Again, make

Tips for Making Your Neon Sign Look Great

1. Choose the right material: Neon signs can be made from a variety of materials, but the best ones are usually made out of metal or plastic. 2. Get creative: neon signs are meant to be flashy and eye-catching, so don't be afraid to get creative! 3. Consider your design goals: What do you want your neon sign to look like? Is it just for aesthetic purposes, or do you also need it to function as a marketing tool? 4. Plan ahead: Make sure you have the dimensions of your neon sign planned out before starting to create it. Otherwise, you could run into some issues later on.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Drafting the Adventure: Dungeons, an Introduction. 

For a long time now I’ve been wanting to share my advice on how to build dungeons but after months of trying to turn the knowledge I'd collected on the subject into a distinct methodology I’ve realized that there’s just too much for it to fit into a single post. Even beyond how diverse they are in terms of layout and underlying theme, the mechanical gameplay purpose that dungeons serve have a huge impact on how they’re built/designed, meaning any “ how to build a dungeon” checklist would need to be able to account for far too many options. 

Instead I’m going to do a series of posts, developing the idea of dungeons layer by later, focusing on specific topics and design goals which you can then pick and choose from when building your own player vexing labyrinths. 

Today we’re going to start with how to best use dungeons in your adventure, which I think is a topic that doesn’t get talked about enough. When I started DMing I heard a piece of advice that there should be atleast three dungeons per settlement the party visited, which led to me doing a lot of extra work creating caves, castles, and ruins that my party never ended up visiting.  I didn’t really know how to include them in my stories and my players didn’t want to be sidetracked from the story they were experiencing to risk dying in a hole. 

The problem is that dungeons are so ubiquitous that they’re in the name of the game, most players who get into the hobby have at least a general idea of what a dungeon is “supposed to be”, and DMs feel obligated to include them despite not knowing how to employ them for best effect. Much like a fight scene or a loredump or a big villain reveal, there’s a specific time and place to employ dungeons in your campaign for maximum benefit, leading into the tempo of your campaign rather than breaking it for some smash and grab archeology. 

Below the cut I’m going to go in depth on story structure and how dungeons can fit into this, but right now I’m going to give you a simple tip that you should keep in mind as we go forwards: Dungeons come in about three sizes and these sizes determine how they fit into your campaign. 

Plot relevant dungeons: These are the smallest type, effectively consisting of a few challenges between the party and their plot relevant objective. They’re made to use the idea of a “dungeon” to funnel the party through a specific high stakes gauntlet that might have a few branches but always leads to where the story needs them to go. 

Sideshow Dungeons: Small to Medium in size this type of dungeon provides the party a hack n slash/puzzlesilving pallet cleanser from the drama of the campaign to be completed in one or two sessions. or they can serve as set ups storybeats to follow up on once the party gets back to town. I call these sideshow dungeons because they are best employed as something your players can “opt in” to of their own volition, rather than something the plot makes mandatory. 

 Exploration Dungeons: Medium to large in size These dungeons are entire adventures unto themselves, and will likely have the party circling back to town multiple times to rest up and resupply before heading back to their delve. Dungeons of this type tend to be more intricate and sprawling than the others, hosting challenges across interconnected levels that reward players for keeping a map. 

Trying to use one of these sorts of dungeons when another type is called for risks breaking the momentum of your game and worse yet forcing you to do a lot of work for an inconsistent amount of reward. 

What IS a dungeon?  As I mentioned before, dungeons are sort of ubiquitous to gaming as a whole, and while the current DMG gives us an idea what a dungeon looks like, it’s sparingly brief on what a dungeon is in terms of game design. 

Dungeons are a series of encounters and challenges blocked off from the world so that the players have to face them in a certain order. You as the DM can’t predict how the party is going to act in each instance, but the structure of these encounters lets you build in interesting mechanics and set pieces. 

Dungeons have a goal which determines their shape: this is most evident in the case of plot relevant dungeons, where a party might say, be trying to stealth through a fortress to rescue an important NPC and have to be quick and clever enough to avoid raising the alarm or else risk having to fight the whole garrison and imperiling their hostage. In the case of more open ended, or exploration based dungeons, the challenges tend to revolve around navigation: forcing the party to brave the unknown while finding shortcuts around hazards that imperil their progress.  

Dungeons are areas high risk, high reward: D&D characters are made to get into fights and usually have enough of a reserve to handle a couple of skirmishes per day. dungeons are where you put your party’s abilities to the test, throwing them against escalating hurdles with the temptation of greater and greater prizes as a reward. On that note, dungeons should be chock full of rewards, which will make your party want to push forward and brave whatever horrors their dm has planned. 

Dungeons are Mysterious: This might seem like it’s surface level at first, but the whole reason characters in d&d are called “adventurers” is because there is something essential to being human in our desire to explore the unknown. Dungeons are secret places removed from the world, filled with the unexpected and hints at a dramatic past. A dungeon without mystery might as well be a series of fights in a succession of rooms, a purely mechanical exercise forgotten about as soon as your players receive their numerically mandated loot drop. 

With these in mind we can begin to think about actually constructing our dungeon. I’m going to leave my tricks on designing a layout to another post, but for the time being, let me give you my rubric for how many encounters you should be putting into your dungeons: Since the average party can handle 5-8 encounters between long rests, the indicator of a dungeon’s size is how many of those rests it will take for them to get to their goal and back out again.   Also notice that I said “encounter” not “combat”, as there are plenty of other sorts of challenges that can drain a party’s resources that don’t require rolling imitative. This includes a majority of small scale combats against enemies that can be cleaned up in a couple rounds, representing enemy patrols, random encounters, or incidental foes faced along the way to greater challenges.  Likewise, this introduces the idea that smaller dungeons might take up half a rest’s worth of encounters, especially if the adventure surrounding it is busy enough. 

[sigmaleph]

@serinemolecule asked me for hot takes on this 2006 article on Argentinian food, which I am now reorganising into a proper post for y'all's consumption. you're welcome.

First of all: the titular thesis that you should eat two steaks a day. I am forced to clarify that as 'should's go you should eat zero steaks a day, but this is ethical rather dietary advice and I don't follow it as well as I should, so, y'know. I would engage with this on the level it was stated, but I actually have no opinion on it. Moving on...

Argentine beef really is extraordinary. Almost all of this has to do with how the cows are raised. There are no factory feedlots in Argentina; the animals still eat pampas grass their whole lives, in open pasture, and not the chicken droppings and feathers mixed with corn that pass for animal feed in the United States.

This is, as it happens, completely false. There absolutely is plenty of feedlot beef being eaten in Argentina, and this was also the case back when this article was written. There's grass-fed beef too, and maybe the writer structured their life around only eating those, but the claim that there are no feedlots is just not true.

if you let them make the call, you get a two-inch thick of meat[...]The Argentine steak stands alone, towering three inches over the plate,[...]This gorgeous specimen is called a lomito; it's a standard lunchtime steak, clearly so thin that the Argentines are embarrassed to send it out into the world without a protective wrapping of ham and cheese

I have no idea what their obsession with steak thickness is; meat exists at various levels of thick and thin to suit various tastes. If you like yours thick that's fine but quit the projecting, y'know.

As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. One's diet will accordingly lean heavily on pastas, gnocchi, salads, and (for the less squeamish ) fish. Vegans will not survive in Argentina.

This is, unfortunately, true (well, hyperbole, but). Rinna had a rather bad time trying to find vegan food when fae came over for visits. The situation is improving slowly, at least.

The homemade cookies bought in the minimarket downstairs taste of steak. [picture of alfajores de maicena[

Jesus. Find somewhere better to buy your snacks.

It should be no surprise that the land of beef also has excellent milk and butter. The milk comes in plastic bags that would give any American marketing department a heart attack. They proudly advertise "GUARANTEED 100% BRUCELLOSIS AND HOOF-AND-MOUTH FREE". One brand even brags that its bacteria count never exceeds 100,000 per mL, and prints daily statistics to prove it (only 82,000 bacteria/mL on Monday! mmm!).

Are you under the impression American milk doesn't contain bacteria and that when it spoils it's because of the molecules' sheer willpower? Or do you just object to the reminder that they exist?

This menu is delicious, but with rare exceptions it is all you are going to get. People coming for more than a few weeks are advised to bring a discreet bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Eat at better restaurants.

With any order from the master menu comes the Bread Basket, which should be treated as you would treat a basket of wax fruit, that is, as a purely decorative ornament. It is considered bad form to actually eat anything from Bread Basket

What are you talking about. Do all your dining companions just suck, eat some bread.

Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says "save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives". This cloying dessert tar is so impossibly sweet that you wish you were ten years old again, just so you could actually enjoy it. It is everywhere. There is a special dulce de leche shelf in the supermarket dairy case, and the containers go up to a liter in size. Even the churros are stuffed with it - the churros, Montresor!

It is rare that I feel insulted for the sake of my country, but this? How dare you.

Yes, of course we fill churros with dulce de leche; the real question is why anyone doesn't, short of dietary restrictions. Finding out that people do otherwise was like learning that in other countries, "sandwich" just means two slices of bread. Live a little. Eat a real godsdamned churro.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how meals work in Argentina, and they remain a mystery to me. Dinner is clear enough: people tend to go to restaurants beginning at ten o'clock (for those with small children), with the main rush around eleven, and dinner is pretty much over at one or so in the morning. And breakfast - or rather, its absence - follows as a logical consequence of eating a steak the size of a beagle at midnight. But I have yet to figure out whether people eat some kind of meal in the afternoon, and if so, when.

At... noon? Like. We eat lunch. Usually somewhere around 12:00. I am eating lunch right now, and I have done so essentially every day of my life. This is just baffling.

I've come to think the culprit in the missing Argentine lunch scene is yerba mate.

how.

Where the ignorant foreigner may see just another kind of herbal tea (yerba mate is a very unassuming shrub that grows in the northern parts of the country) the Argentine sees a taste treat of unimaginable subtlety, and a tonic for all his problems. The Wikipedia article on proper mate preparation should give you a warning of the level of obsessiveness attainable here (the Urugayans are even worse). To the virgin palate, mate tastes like green tea mixed with grass clippings. The beverage is traditionally drunk out of a little gourd, through a metal straw called a bombilla, with hot (but not boiling!!) water poured into it (without wetting the surface!! clockwise!!) from a thermos.

Yeah, this is accurate. Well, not the clockwise part, never heard anyone complain about that and I can't imagine it mattering.

What distinguishes mate from coffee and tea is the social context - two or more people share a gourd, with a designated pourer in charge of refilling it with hot water after each turn. The ritual is low-fuss but indispensible. You can buy mate gourds and thermoses in any grocery store, and get your thermos filled with hot water at any convenience store or gas station, but you will never see mate served in restaurants or sold in little disposable paper gourds, to go. it's not that people refuse to drink mate alone - anyone working a solitary shift will have a gourd in hand - but that the concept of being served mate by someone who does not share it with you seems impossible.

This is also true. Attempts have been made to sell to-go mate but it's never very popular, the social ritual is important. Also unfortunately a disease vector, I haven't had any mate in a year and a half.

Mate aficionados will tell you that mate contains a special compound, mateine, that serves as a tonic and mild stimulant, promoting alertness without making it hard to sleep, reducing fatigue and appetite, helping the digestion and serving as a mild diuretic. Scientists will tell you that mateine bears a suspicious resemblance to a chemical called caffeine. Mate aficionados will then grow indignant, explaining that mateine is really a stereoisomer (mirror image) of caffeine, with different effects, which will in turn irritate the scientists, who will snap that caffeine doesn't have a chiral center, so it can't have a distinguishable mirror image, and why don't the mate aficionados just put a sock in it.

The first part of this is true; some people definitely think "mateine" is different from caffeine and it absolutely isn't. Never heard the stereoisomer claim before but googling it does confirm some people say so.

still have no idea what any of this has to do with lunch, though. I promise you nobody skips lunch because mate is just too filling.

The wine here is very good (something has to stand up to that steak), but Argentina has no liquor to call its own, relying on whiskies like Old Smuggler and the low-maintenance Don Juan cognac to carry the flag.

There's a fundamental omission from this list and it's called fernet.

Beer is ubiquitous and comes in a bewildering variety of sizes, although there is a skittishness about the full-on liter. Things level off at 970 mL. In my case, it means I end up drinking 1940 mL of beer as a kind of personal protest, and all is well with the world. To make up for the abundance of sizes, beer comes in only one variety, Quilmes, which inevitably comes served with a tripartite platter of snacks - nuts, salty cylinders, and aged potato chips.

I never had trouble buying beer by the litre, but I confess I never tried to do so in 2006 on account of being under 18 at the time.

Anyway, beer comes in a lot more varieties today, thankfully, because Quilmes sucks. I'll never be a beer person, but at least these days there's options I tolerate.

[original post]

[purplesurveys]

1304

Have you ever been to a Chinatown in any of the cities you’ve been to? No. Not interested; and besides, the one that we have is in Manila and I fuuuuuuucking hate going there.

How old was the oldest person you’ve dated? I’ve only dated one person and we were the same age.

Do you know anyone who has their own podcast? Yes! Quite a number actually – Andi had a whole season; a classmate from one of my history classes who eventually turned into somewhat of a friend just started her own; my aunt Claire also dabbles in podcasts sometimes.

Who is the first person under C in your phone’s contacts? How old are they? Hahaha Mike, the guy I nearly dated five years ago. I believe he’s the same age as me, so 23. If he isn’t, my next best guess is that he’s a year older.

Have you ever been to couple’s counseling? No.

How often does your employer ask you to work overtime? A few times a week, which is fine because I get paid for every hour and because I never really have to overtime alone (my manager tags along with me haha). It also helps that I love my job and don’t have a problem with having to work a little extra for it.

What did you have for dinner last night? Oh I got McDonald’s takeout haha. Quarter Pounder and Shake Shake Fries. I also ordered Twister Fries but I decided to just give it to my sister.

How many children do you want, and how did you decide on this number? Two or three have always sounded like a decent amount to me.

Where did your last kiss take place? Just outside of my house.

Did you often read for fun when you were a kid? Yeahhhh I was a huge bookworm. I often had to smuggle books in school since we weren’t allowed to bring books not related to our subjects, aka books we read for leisure...which I’m now realizing is really fucked up because it seemed as though they were discouraging us from reading :/ Anyway, my love for reading faded sometime in like high school and I haven’t read a lot since, which is unfortunate.

^ What were some of your favorite books? I was really into the Septimus Heap series. I also liked reading Goosebumps.

When and why did you last feel lonely? Ooh, good question. I don’t actually know; I think it’s been a while. I’m glad to have healthy circles both in my personal and work life, and I don’t really feel lonely whenever I’m out and see couples either. I’m at a really good place in life right now, essentially.

Are you more of a visual learner or an auditory learner? Auditory. I appreciate it more when things are explained to me in detail and I tend to struggle with catching up or retaining information whenever my only option is to watch.

Do you have any dietary restrictions? Eh, not really. I’m slightly lactose intolerant but that has never stopped me from enjoying my dairy heheh.

Do you prefer Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, or something else? I only use Waze.

What is your favorite coffee brand? Doughnut brands tend to have really good coffee, like Dunkin’ or Krispy Kreme. But I usually frequent Starbucks just because it’s the most ubiquitous one, and they have good pastries too.

What is your favorite tea brand? I don’t drink tea.

Have you ever worn false eyelashes? Yeah but just once. That one evening is a bad memory though, so I don’t like wearing faux lashes because of it.

How old does someone have to be for you to see them as an adult? I don’t think is something you can determine by age. People go through all kinds of shit in life and some mature far more quickly than others. In the same way, I know lots of 40 or 50 something year olds who still act like kids, so.

Do you ever ‘manspread’ when you sit down? Hmm sometimes. The position I do most often is crossing my legs in a way that my ankle is resting on my other knee, which also takes up some space.

Which of your good habits has made the biggest positive difference in your life? Welp I stopped impulsively buying merch, for one.

Have you ever dated someone who was very lazy? No. I wouldn’t even start to go for someone if I knew they were lazy.

Have you ever turned down a job offer? Nah. I received an opportunity to be in talks with another PR agency a few months ago, but when I scanned their clientele it didn’t really seem all that impressive to me compared to the accounts I actually handle now, so it was a very easy decision for me to like...not do anything with that opportunity haha. What was the last medical appointment you scheduled? I haven’t had any appointments other than last weekend when I had to take an antigen test before our trip.

What are some of your favorite alcoholic drinks? Flavored soju, cocktails, and tequila.

Have you ever taught an elderly relative how to use a computer/smartphone? No. Sometimes I’ll teach my mom how to work stuff around on like Google or Netflix, but I haven’t had to teach anyone really from scratch.

Where did you get the shirt you’re wearing? A small business.

How many people can be seated at your kitchen table? We don’t have a kitchen table but the one in our dining area can seat six.

[jed-thomas]

Debt and Unreality at a British University

Most of the time, when journalists or researchers ask students in Britain about their “concerns” and their “experience”, they’re not looking for answers like: ‘I don’t feel real.’ Because, well, what do you do with that?

A friend of mine sat on a stiff leather couch in the hallway, tiredly scrolling. She’d just clocked out. For nine grand, we were getting about 7 hours of teaching a week. The rest of the time, of course, was supposed to be devoted to reading all the material we’d be discussing in seminars or attending lectures on. But she was working part-time at a Pizza Express. The maintenance loans only stretch so far, especially with rent around here. And you have to catch a bus to get to campus. Lots of us, our parents helped out. But if the ‘rents can’t or won’t pay, you’re a little stuffed.

In 2019, it was reported that over half of young people are now attending university. These figures represent the fulfilment of a target set by Tony Blair at a Labour Party conference in 1999, during his first term as Prime Minister. In July of the year before, Blair’s parliament passed the Teaching and Higher Education Act, introducing tuition fees for universities across the UK. In 1990, around 25% of young people stayed in some form of full-time education beyond the age of 18. Today, most young Britons will have experienced the presumption that they’re a university student and frequently, the expectation.

Yesterday, the University of Warwick’s official Twitter account shared a link to a blog post on how to ‘relieve intense stress in 60-seconds.’ The post was written by a current student.

In 1962, towards the end of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative premiership, “ordinarily resident” students were exempted from tuition fees and made eligible for a means-tested maintenance grant. Shortly after the Teaching and Higher Education Act of 1998, maintenance grants were replaced with loans. In 2004, the cap on tuition fees rose to £3,000 and by 2010, it had risen to its current rate of around £9,000. There were protests over that last increase, of course. The protests were in 2010 and I went to university in 2017. I now owe the British government around £27,000 for tuition and around £10,000 for maintenance. If you’re going this year, you’ll end up owing roughly the same - more, if your family earns less than mine.

You hear things. “Oh, they’re antidepressants.” A friend with a weird flatmate who never leaves their room. Oddly intense desperation eking out of drunk students from some corner of a smoking-area. Vaguely recognisable names and their time of death. “Honestly, just couldn’t be bothered to get up.” An acquaintance from your course drops out and moves back home. Barely concealed frustration in your professor’s tone, hushed rants in faculty corridors. And you notice other things. Admissions of 'suicidal ideation' and life-crises on a FaceBook page which is supposed to be about students sending anonymous messages of romantic interest. Sarcastic tweets about ‘mental health dogs’ and ‘mindfulness seminars’ have become cliché. A routinely empty chair in your seminar room. Strained eyes staring into the middle-ground, silence attending the teacher’s question. Dysfunction as normality. Your diagnosis in your bio next to where you go to uni.

In 2014, it was reported that one in seven full-time students also work full-time. The same report put the proportion of full-time students working part-time at a third. A number of reasons were given as to why they were doing this. I wonder, when they look at their bank accounts, or their accommodation, or their text on sociology, on Latin American history, on virology, existentialism, do they feel they have a handle on things? "I’m a full-time barista, full-time student." "Hello, I’m an impossibility."

For students, the British university is an experiment in unreality. Am I a customer or a pupil? Am I demanding a service from a business or being educated by my elders for my own good? Will it be my fault for selecting a ‘non-applicable’ degree or their fault for selling it to me? Everything is optional, even when it isn’t. You spend all week pouring over the text but feel embarrassed to correct or question the people who clearly didn’t because the professor doesn’t: “Don’t worry if you haven’t done the reading.” Next time, you just put in a sentence or two to fill one of the many silences, improvising off of what others have said, pretending you read whatever it was. Then, of course, coursework is set assessing your knowledge of the curriculum. You spend a couple of days stressed out, hoping to turn your lack of knowledge into a scholarly tone of caution and hedged bets. You go to a careers fair, a student union election, a party, a debate. Nothing sticks, tomorrow is the same day. Your teachers are devotees of a faith but you have to fill the ranks of their picket against the Church. The protestors mass, fill the campus with tension and noise, and then, in a couple of weeks, you’re sitting in the same seminar room with the same professor doing the same thing. You have to think surprisingly hard to remember that past, fugitive now in an opaque present. The only thing that changes is that a few new buildings emerge from their shells of scaffolding. When you miss almost five weeks, there is an email or two. One time, because of your chronic truancy, you get some mark or something, some strike against your name. Nothing happens. In fact, you find it incredibly hard to even find the place where that warning is actually recorded, displayed. You graduate with a First.

Recently, there has been a steady trickle of data, news items, and reports, gradually exposing the rate of suicide in higher education in the UK. It came to a head last week, as a Conservative peer, Lord Lucas, called for a bill which would give British universities a duty of care in the mental health outcomes of their students. Lord Lucas’ plea represents the mainstream of a movement by aggrieved parents of young people who took their lives whilst at university. One of these young people was Benjamin Murray, a 19-year-old in his first year studying English Literature at Bristol University. Shortly before falling to his death, Murray was told by the university that he would have to leave. A local newspaper reports that, according to sources at the university, his attendance was ‘sporadic’ and he had ‘failed to hand in expected work’. Discussing interactions he had with Murray which revealed that the undergraduate was suffering with an anxiety disorder, senior tutor Ben Gunter remarks that: 'A large number of students we see have varying levels of anxiety.’

I mean, look at it this way. You’re saddled with a debt, a sizeable debt. It makes you nervous just looking at all the zeroes. But this moment of selling your soul was planned, it was expected from the beginning. And there are voices all around you that keep coming up and whispering in your ear. It’s just a tax on spending after education. No-one’s expecting you to pay it back. It all gets forgiven when you hit 40. What’s a person to do in that situation? The same government that portrayed the national debt as an existential threat is the same government that turns around and says: Don’t worry. Does debt matter or doesn’t it? Is this real or isn’t it?

People are screaming, again. It's 5:35 in the afternoon. Earliest you’ve heard it this week. They’re really drunk. Or on something. You’re only dimly aware of it, really. It’s ubiquitous, it’s ambiance. Dimly, you wonder if they realise how loud they are being, how obvious their public intoxication is. You perk up when you recognise a few voices. People on your course - you’ve got an essay due tomorrow at noon. Down the ages, goes the cliché, students are drunk and reckless with deadlines. But you’ve been wondering whether it really matters if you get a 1:1 instead of a 2:1. Don’t they inflate the numbers, anyway? And besides, it's experience that matters on a CV, everyone’s got a degree these days. I’d just be another idiot with a 1:1. Your flatmate drunkenly knocks on your door and you seriously consider going back on your refusal to go out tonight.

A survey of undergraduates in seven universities in England reportedly found very high rates of dangerous drinking, with 41% identified as ‘hazardous drinkers’. It also considers that one in five students were likely to be diagnosable as alcoholic.

Every weekend students give in to the unreality. I know what you're thinking. Of course, young people have always experimented with substances, acted like they were invulnerable, ignored consequences. But many of the young people before us were unfamiliar with this level of unreality, this level of confusion. So the recklessness intensifies in those claustrophobic spaces that remain open to us.

I have deadlines, right now. A few days to go. I’ve been looking at the news, all the statistics on internships and jobs falling through for graduates and young people, in general. The worst hit. I’ve been talking to my friends, moaning about the job hunt, the rejections and the no-replies. Anecdotes tumble down the grape-vine of graduates from respected universities not even being able to get a part-time job at a supermarket because of the number of applicants or whatever. A couple of my friends are intermitting due to mental health problems. When I was home, before the most recent lockdown, a number of my friends and I worked at a pub. I’m back at uni and they’re still there. Class of 2020, all of us. Of course, they like it, it’s fine. But where do we go from here?

Don’t ask me, mate, I’ve got deadlines.

[joomtechsolutions]

10 tech tricks you'll use again and again

Everyone enjoys a good prank. There's nearly always some shortcut we've never learned, no matter how well we know an app or program. The same is true with hardware: we may use gadgets on a daily basis without realizing their useful features.

Zoom is an excellent example, which millions of Americans have only just found. Tap or click here for 11 Zoom tips you'll wish you'd known sooner.

You may spend a lot of time in quarantine using the technology you already own, especially if you work from home. You may be doing things “the hard way” when you could be saving money by cutting corners.

Speaking of free, touch or click here for 15 free tech upgrades, including free products like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

Here are a few of my favorite popular tech tips, tricks, and shortcuts for various apps and tools:

1. Insert your USB drive correctly the first time.

It feels like a no-brainer to connect a USB cord correctly. So, why do we frequently do things wrong on the first try?

Here's the deal: Take any USB cable you have lying around the home. Notice the emblem on one side? It is more than just branding or adornment. If you plug in horizontally, the USB symbol will face you; if you plug in vertically, the USB symbol will face you. You are now aware.

While you're organizing your tech life, tap or click here for seven tips on how to save money on your internet service.

2. Reopen a previously closed browser tab

It occurs on a regular basis. You have a dozen tabs open in your browser and unintentionally close one of them. You could either access your browser's history and reopen the tab from there, or you could accomplish it with a few keystrokes.

To reopen the tab you just closed, press Ctrl+Shift+T on a PC or Command+Shift+T on a Mac.

3. At a specific point, share a YouTube video.

If you see anything in a YouTube video that you want to share at a specific point, you can obtain a link that brings people directly to that spot. Click the Share icon to the right of the video. Look for a checkbox to the right of the link. It will automatically indicate the time at which the video is currently paused.

You have the option of continuing at this time or changing it. Copy the link and share it on your chosen social media platform or send it to a friend through email. When someone clicks on the link, the YouTube video will immediately go to the point you specified.

4. Use "Site:" to find content like a ninja.

Millions of results can be returned by a Google search. Reduce that greatly by using Google's Site: option to search only one site. Open Google in your browser and type "site:" followed by the website you want to search for. Just like this: “site:joomtechsolutions.com,” but without quotation marks.

A tip on a tip: Instead of going to Google, insert “site:joomtechsolutions.com search term” in your browser's URL bar. Again, no quotation marks are required.

5. Report junk texts and stick them to the scammers

Junk SMS messages are vexing, to say the least. You can block them, but taking action also feels fantastic.

With just a few clicks, you can report SMS to the GSMA's Reporting Service. Send the message to 7726 (can you guess what that means?) Alternatively, in your messaging app, simply select "Report Junk."

6. In Google Docs, you can use your voice.

I'm sure you already use your phone's speech-to-text feature to dictate texts or emails, but did you know you can do the same in Google Docs? It's free and surprisingly effective.

Open a new Google Docs document and select Voice Typing from the Tools menu. Then you can begin dictating. Voice Typing also understands commands like "comma," "period," and "new paragraph."

7. Use Disney Plus to download movies

Downloading video content and watching it offline is handled differently by each streaming service. Until 2016, Netflix was a huge holdout. However, Disney Plus immediately allowed this choice. At the bottom of the menu, there is a download icon. You can also download as many titles as your hard disc can store with the Disney Plus app.

8. Take a screenshot and crop it.

Screenshots are ubiquitous, but you frequently capture more than you require. Exposing too much of your screen in a single image can put your security at risk. Instead, snap a screenshot with exact cropping to ensure that only what you want is included.

Press Command + Shift + 5 on a Mac to bring up a rectangle that you can alter as much as you want.

On Windows 10, go to Start, type Snipping Tool into the Search Bar, then press Enter. This will give you a comparable box that you may move around your screen in any shape you choose.

9. Look through WhatsApp chats.

Messages accrue over time, regardless of platform. We're looking for that one funny quotation or a crucial street address, but it's buried in a jumbled sea. Although WhatsApp is the most downloaded software of the decade, many users are unaware that you can search your messages in the same way that you can with Google.

There is a search bar in iOS versions and a search icon in Android versions. In any case, seek for words that are distinctive to a particular conversation to help you identify the exact message you're looking for.

10. Cancel an email

Did you just send an email to everyone that was intended for only one person? Gmail, on the other hand, allows you to unsend an email by modifying one setting before to writing your email.

This message recall also allows you to change spelling mistakes, erroneous recipients, the subject line, and even append missed attachments.

Bonus Tip: How to Sign a PDF Electronically

In many offices across the country, PDFs are already replacing printed papers. They are more adaptable, portable, and convenient to use – but not everyone is aware that you can sign a PDF document in the same way you would a real one.

Almost every PDF-reading application includes a capability for electronically signing papers and forms. To learn how to do it, tap or click here.

The Kim Komando Show, the nation's largest weekend radio discussion show, will keep you up to date on all the latest technologies. Kim answers phones and gives guidance on today's digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacking.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

Draw a Flower

This is the season of colorful flowers and we can truly appreciate their vibrance after a typical grey and chilly winter.  One way to make the beauty last and keep a reminder of springtime all year-round is to draw a flower.

Andrey Avinoff was an entomologist and Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1926 to 1946.  But he was also an illustrator and painter in his free time!  Many of his beautiful illustrations can be found in “Wild Flowers of Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Basin,” a botanical guide authored by the botanist Otto E Jennings, and later Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

One of the most ubiquitous flowers of the season, for me, is the violet.  I love the way they sprout up through lawns and in the forest alike.  They come in a dazzling array of colors—pink, white, yellow, blue, and purple—and the detail when you look closely is inspiring.  There are about 600 species in the Viola genus, so there are plenty to choose from.

Before we get started you might need to gather some supplies.  Use a pencil and eraser, just in case you make some mistakes (it’s okay to make a mistake).  Get some paper and a comfy spot to draw—make sure you cover your table to avoid making marks on it.  Don’t forget the colors!  I like colored pencils, but you can use markers, crayons, paint, or anything else to color with.

Here’s a tip: try out some ideas on scrap paper so that you know what works best for you.  Practice makes perfect!

Step 1: Shapes

Use some basic shapes—circles, triangles, squares, and lines—to make up the general shape of your flower.  You can draw little lollipops or popsicles for now and we’ll add more details as we go.  Use light pencil strokes so that they’ll be easy to erase later.

Try to keep all of your flower shapes the same size—you want all your flowers to be similar in size.

I also draw some leaf shapes.  Make sure your leaves are balanced to your flowers and don’t worry about how they overlap just yet.

I also like to have a photo that I’ve taken or found online to use as a reference for what I’m drawing.  I even picked some flowers to get a good idea of what they look like—just make sure you leave some flowers for the wildlife.

If you want to take it to the next level, you can also check out some botanical illustrations (like Andrey Avinoff’s) where individual flower parts, seeds, leaves, and roots are sometimes drawn to help with identification.

Step 2: Silhouette

Next let’s draw individual flower petals.  It’s good to know how many petals your flower has and how they look—violets have five that look a little like a butterfly.  Flowers come in a lot of shapes, so take some time studying the flower and practice drawing the shape.  If you haven’t already, you can also draw the flower stalks, or petioles.

The leaf shape is important too, leaves come in lots of shapes like the violet’s heart-shaped leaves.

Step 3: Details

Add more details.  Mark where colors might change on flower petals and if there are any veins on the leaves or petals.  You can add details to the leaf edges to make them wavy, scalloped, or toothed.

It’s also important in this step to know how detailed you want to be. Remember: a smaller sketch doesn’t need as much detail, but a bigger sketch can have more.  Whatever you think looks best.

Step 4: Color

This step is optional, sometimes a black and white sketch can tell a great story.  However, if you have some time, then adding color to your drawing can also really bring it to life.

You can use crayons, markers, paint, or any other color tool you want.  It’s always a good idea to test your colors on a separate piece of paper to see if they’re right for you or to try out a mix of colors.  Flowers are many colors, so you can be really creative!

Be proud of your sketches!  No one else could have made it the same way that you did.  By drawing and coloring plants, animals, and other nature you can sharpen your observation skills and gain a better appreciation for the beauty and uniqueness of all life.

Aaron Young is a museum educator on Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Outreach team. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[sublimeheartwizard]

What Your Sunglasses Say About You

Sunglasses are a real character builder. Or at least they play a large roll in the character that you play to others. They’re front and center and they can literally change the shape of your face. So before you buy your next pair of shades, think about what you might be saying to the world.

With that said, here are some popular sunglass shapes along with what what they might be saying about your style.

Sunglasses are one of the world's most ubiquitous fashion accessory, but also play an important part in protecting our eyes from harmful UV rays. The earliest known use of glasses to protect eyes from the sun was the Inuit use of “sun goggles” to shield their eyes from the blinding glare of light reflected off the snow. These were made from carved driftwood, bone, walrus ivory, or caribou antler that formed a strip worn across the eye area, with thin slits that the wearer could see through. The goggles were cut so that they fit tightly to the face, and often soot or gunpowder was rubbed on the outside to absorb the light and further cut down on glare. The use of these goggles dates back to around 2,000 years ago, and as a bonus, even improved the wearers vision as the narrow slits helped focus eyesight.

unglasses protect your eyes from harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays, reduce eyestrain in bright conditions and protect you from flying debris and other hazards. Finding the right pair is key to your comfort, whether you’re driving to work or climbing a mountain.

All acetate sunglasses offered at REI block 100% of ultraviolet light. UV protection information should be printed on the hangtag or price sticker of any sunglasses you buy, no matter where you buy them. If it isn't, find a different pair.

Types of Sunglasses

Casual sunglasses: Best for everyday use and basic recreational activities, casual sunglasses do an excellent job of shading your eyes from the sun while you drive to work and walk through town. Casual sunglasses are typically not designed to handle the intensity of action sports.

Sport sunglasses: Designed for activities such as running, hiking and biking, sport sunglasses offer light weight and an excellent fit for fast-paced adventures. High-end frame and lens materials are more impact-resistant and flexible than casual sunglasses. Sport sunglasses also typically feature grippy nose pads and temple ends, a feature that helps keep the frames in place even when you're sweating. Some sport sunglasses include interchangeable lenses so you can make adjustments for different light conditions.

Glacier glasses: Glacier glasses are special sunglasses designed specifically to protect your eyes from the intense light at high altitudes and sunlight reflecting off snow. They often feature wrap-around extensions to block light from entering at the sides.

Sunglass Lens Features

Polarized lenses: Polarized lenses substantially reduce glare. Polarization is a great feature if you enjoy water sports or are especially sensitive to glare.

In some instances, polarized lenses react with the tints in windshields, creating blind spots and diminishing the visibility of LCD readouts. If this occurs, consider mirrored lenses as a glare-reducing alternative.

Photochromic lenses: Photochromic lenses automatically adjust to changing light intensities and conditions. These lenses actually get darker on bright days, and lighter when conditions get darker.

A couple of caveats: The photochromic process takes longer to work in cold conditions, and it doesn't work at all when driving a car because UVB rays do not penetrate your windshield.

Interchangeable lenses: Some sunglass styles come with interchangeable (removable) lenses of different colors. These multi-lens systems allow you to tailor your eye protection to your activities and conditions. Consider this option if you need reliable performance in a wide variety of situations.

The benefits of metal sunglasses

If you prefer to keep it lightweight and classic, you can’t go wrong with sunglasses with metal frames.

Metal frames are usually relatively thin, making them a great lightweight sunglasses option for everyday wear. Metal is also durable and resists corrosion. Metal frames also usually are outfitted with nose pads to help keep your sunglasses in place and prevent slippage (for a more comfortable fit).

Metal-frame sunglasses are typically made of aluminum, nickel, titanium or stainless steel, and come in a variety of styles, from iconic aviators to classic round frames.

When shopping for higher-end metal-frame sunglasses, consider aluminum and titanium. They’re both flexible, strong and corrosion resistant. Titanium sunglasses also are hypoallergenic, making titanium a great choice for those with skin sensitivities and allergies.

Metal sunglasses made from beryllium and stainless steel are also popular choices, due to their strength and resistance to corrosion. In fact, beryllium is especially appropriate for those who spend a lot of time in or around salt water and other abrasive environments.

Do you play sports or wear performance sunglasses? Look for metal sunglasses made with monel or flexon. Both are exceptionally malleable, and flexon will return to its original shape after twisting or bending.

Note that metal sunglasses may not work for lenses that require a strong prescription. Due to their thinner frame construction, metal frames may be unable to accommodat

WHAT IS TR90?

TR-90 Sunglasses has been manufactured using TR90, an incredible new material that you’re sure to love. So what is TR90?

TR90 was produced through Swiss technology as a thermoplastic material that is incredibly durable, flexible, and lightweight. Glasses made with TR90 are extremely comfortable because they have a flexible quality. Since they are flexible, they can bend under pressure and contour your face comfortably.

This flexibility also makes TR90 glasses resilient to damage. Because the material is pliable, they are far less likely to break or bend from impact. If you’re guilty of constantly dropping your glasses, fear not! TR90 frames can prevail!

Finally, and most remarkable of all, TR90 glasses are supremely lightweight! Even the boldest, biggest styles don’t feel bulky when made with TR90. The thermoplastic material has a barely-there feel that you truly have to wear to believe.

How Your Glasses Can Become Your Main Accessory

PC or CP sunglasses, although they are a necessity to some, don’t have to be a boring accessory to be stuck with. In 2020, we have seen a rise in popularity of amazing new glasses of all shapes and sizes. Don’t just stick with your old tired eyewear because you’re used to it; your glasses are the most noticeable accessory on your body, and they are the first thing people will see when they look at you. So, why not treat yourself to some cool, fresh glasses to revamp your look? Here is a short guide to help you along the way.

Before Choosing Glasses

It is so important to go for regular check-ups with your local eye doctor to see if anything needs changing in your prescription or if you have any eye health problems that need checking. You should go for an appointment at least every two years as not only could straining your eyes make your vision worse, it could be causing health problems like headaches and migraines too. If you have existing health problems with your eyes, you may have to visit slightly more regularly depending on the advice from your eye doctor.

Good Quality Frames

When looking for your next pair of glasses, it is so important to make sure you are getting some high-quality specs. Don’t be tricked by the price tag, as some extremely cheap glasses may not be very good quality and may break after a short time of having them. So, it is better to spend a little more to ensure you are getting the best quality you could possibly get. Sites like artofoptiks.com are experts in eyecare, and a great example of a supplier of high-quality glasses. There are so many on trend styles to choose from, so don’t limit yourself to basic frames.

On Trend Eyewear Styles

Transparent eyewear is definitely on the rise. Round shaped frames with transparent edging are such great alternatives if you just don’t like the idea of having a frame color to match your clothes with all the time. On the other hand, slightly tinted transparent frames are now becoming more and more popular, as they are like a slightly upgraded version of the clear version, with not so much color poking through, but just enough to give them a quirky edge.

Geometric glasses are another alternative option shape wise. If you’re bored of the classic round shape, maybe give these a try as they almost imitate the rounded shape but with a slight edge. You can get all manner of geometric shaped glasses including square, hexagonal and even octagonal.

Glasses a new fashion essential?

Judging from the plethora of eye-catching eyewear that’s been getting face time over the last few years — be it on the European ready-to-wear runways or in the adjoining office cubicle — it’s clear that glasses have gone from nerd necessity to chic accessory.

It’s a shift reflected in the current look-at-me trends — retro, vintage-inspired frames, chunky tortoise shells and geometric shapes that attract rather than deflect attention — and reinforced by the laundry list of fashion-focused brands with a presence in the eyewear arena. These include high-end European luxury labels like Prada, Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana as well as American contemporary brands Brooks Brothers, Tory Burch, Tiffany & Co. and Sperry Top-Sider, which aims to translate the brand’s footwear DNA into a line of licensed sunglass and ophthalmic frames due to hit the market next year.

While it might seem logical to blame the deteriorating eyesight of the aging baby boomer population or the ever-increasing computer- and smartphone-induced strain on our collective eyeballs, consumer behavior statistics don’t show a jump in the number of people who need prescriptions. What they do show, however, is an increase in the number of people who wear glasses without prescription lenses — presumably to look cool.

Dorothy Parker famously observed, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” How did we go from that image to bespectacled bombshells? How did eyewear go from the disguise that turns Superman into his milquetoast alter-ego to an individual expression of signature style?

Some in the eyewear industry point to the traditional pop-culture petri dishes of Hollywood celebrity and fashion runways. “Maybe they’re seeing more celebrities” wearing glasses, said Larry Leight, co-founder and creative director of boutique brand Oliver Peoples. “And there are more … fashion magazines and runway shows where designers are accessorizing their shows with ophthalmic glasses — the kind that aren’t sunglasses — with either clear lenses or only slightly tinted colored lenses.”

Milena Cavicchioli, vice president of marketing for Luxottica Group — the Milan-based eyewear company that owns Ray-Ban, Oakley and Oliver Peoples, among others, and which also makes eyewear and sunglasses under license for some 20 fashion labels — points to the recent Hollywood award show season as evidence. “Think of Meryl Streep on Oscar night,” Cavicchioli said. “She was wearing beautiful frames. And she’s not the only one. Jennifer Garner and Demi Moore are two I often see in clippings. When people are looking at [celebrities like] them to see what the latest trends are, them wearing frames is a huge support and endorsement.”

She said there have also been other factors at work over the last half decade, including fashion designers’ approach to eyewear both in the frames that bear their names and in the styled looks that hit the runways during fashion week.

“The [optical] collections themselves are becoming more elaborate,” she said. “There are some [styles] that are like jewelry pieces, that make a big fashion statement — like Prada’s Baroque frame, for example. The collections are being treated in a more fashion-forward way.”

Fashion designers have realized just how powerful a brand extension eyewear can be, especially in comparison to some other offshoots. “It’s difficult for a brand to be visible with a fragrance because you’re the only one who knows what you’re wearing,” she explained. “But when you wear a pair of blue light glasses or optical frames, the brand itself gets exposure in the most prominent way because this is something you wear on your face. It’s not like a wallet that you put in your bag. I would say that it is as powerful as a [designer hand]bag as a brand statement, as brand exposure.”

Not just a powerful statement, but an economical one too, points out David Rose, vice president of design and manufacturing at Costa Mesa-based Salt Optics. “A few years back, before the economy took a hit, people would spend a lot more money on their bags and their shoes,” Rose said. “But now eyewear is an accessible way to have a quality accessory.” Rose also said that switching out the spectacles provides a quick and easy way to create a whole new vibe. “It’s like getting a haircut — going from [having] long hair to buzzing your head — it really changes your overall look.”

It’s not just the designers who’ve seen the value of cultivating the eyewear-as-fashion-accessory notion. Cavicchioli said that over the last five years Luxottica has increased its advertising in fashion magazines and worked to get its brands noticed by influencers and trendsetters. “We’re using the category to make a statement as well,” she said.

[candy-floss-crazy]

Quiry Food Trucks, From A Container To A Rocket Launcher

At one time mobile catering consisted of almost entirely box shaped 'burger vans'. Occasionally someone with a touch of flair, or perhaps just a bit mad, would put together something quirky. With the dawn of the instagram generation, boxy burger vans suddenly dropped out of vogue. To get ahead you really needed people to be sharing your set up. Sure, good food was important, but it was no longer the sole arbiter of success. Your food truck needed to look better. We are going to be taking a look at some of the quirky, weird, wonderful and downright strange catering outlets around the world. Happy Larrys Shipping containers are ubiquitous throughout the world. A standardised method of transporting goods via road, rail and sea. Many of them however do find a second life as something totally different. From bars, to offices to mobile toilets. They have also found favour with catering vendors. The basic container is a strong watertight structure, that is built to accurate dimensions, and lends itself to conversions. Happy as Larry is an Australian company that specialises in selling Napoli-style wood fired pizza. A nice touch in this container conversion is that they have replaced much of one side with huge glass pains to give a real contemporary feel to it. Space Shuttle Cafe If you are looking for something to convert into a food truck, the most obvious thing you could think of is an aeroplane. Probably not! This one was converted to a mobile eatery by GMC in 1976. But it started life as an actual flying machine in 1944. Cotton Candy Jeep One of our favourites this, take an iconic WWII off road vehicle, and shove a cotton candy (candy floss if you live this side of the pond) machine in the back. Oh and for good measure paint it all pink. Walls Mini Ice Cream Truck Walls ran a campaign called 'Goodbye Serious', where they built a miniaturised ice cream truck designed to drive into offices and dispense their best selling goodies. This is one seriously quirky little food truck. Though some of our taller staff might struggle to operate in this one. K99 Ice Cream Cart This one is notable, not for being a different type of food truck. But because of its target market. This sells ice creams for your canine companions. That's right, doggy ice creams. Seems that scientists have discovered  that gammon and chicken-flavored ice creams really hits the spot for our doggy friends. Vintage Caravan These are gaining in popularity, and are being used for everything from a gin bar to a burger joint. The ironic thing is, was during the late 90's, the fairground industry used these for staff quarters, then tended to scrap them at the end of the season. If they were scrapped, it wasn't unknow to just remove all identifying marks and leave them in a layby for the council to dispose of. You try buying one now, I have seen them advertised for upwards of £30k. Step Frame Food Truck More of a Stateside set up, they have a plethora of large step fram delivery vehicles from the likes of Dodge, Ford, GMC etc. These are pretty near the size of a 7.5 tonne lorry in the UK and make an ideal blank canvas to fit out as a mobile eatery Airstream Style Food Truck Another option hailing from the good ole US of A. Airstreams were originally touring caravans. Till some adventurous soul decided to cut the side out and add a kitchen. They are now a fairly regular sight on the UK scene. With both the original Airstream brand and a number of both EU based and Chinese manufacturers building similar looking trucks. Converted Vintage Horsebox Stunning Horsebox Food Truck Hire A regular sight nowadays, horseboxes are easy to obtain, pretty easy to convert and very flexible, though a bit on the small side for some catering options. Prices are steadily rising, to the benefit of anyone needing to dispose of a horsebox that's past it's sell by date. What you once would have scrapped, you can now get a tidy few grand for. Snow Mobile Food Truck This one is as far as we know, pretty unique. A burrito joint on a tracked snow mobile platform. Great for last minute corporate jobs in the arctic. Bloody noisy if you need to take it down the M1 motorway to London. London Red Bus Yoghurt Truck An iconic British vehicle this time, an ex London Routemaster bus, turned into a yoghurt dispensary by Snog. A cool vehicle for a cool brand serving a cool product (literally)! The Peanut Van Occasionally there are totally custom built trucks out there. I've seen vehicles that look like hot dogs, doughnuts, oranges. This one is a peanut. Leaves you in no doubt what the product is. Land Rover Ice Cream Truck Another off road vehicle pressed into service. We have already had a Willy's Jeep with a candyfloss machine. This one is the UK equivalent. In vehicles that is, not food. This is one cool ice cream truck. Monster Truck Another ice cream van. This time shoehorned into a monster truck. Unless you are 6ft 6 you need step ladders to be served here. Rocket Launcher Coffee Truck A big boys toy this one. A coffee truck on a rocket launcher. Though it didn't work out too well for two of the staff when they were arrested for causing panic on the streets of Malaysia. What's next, doughnuts served from a Challenger tank? Tactical Tapas Another paramilitary offering. Tapas from a tactical armoured car. It's all starting to get a bit Mad Max. Fire Engine The last couple of options were built on trucks designed to blow things up and start fires. These were designed to put them out. Popular both sides of the pond, though the US fire trucks just seem to be a lot more jazzy. Read the full article

[foxtennessee59]

Protrader

PTMC is a powerful trading software from creators of Protrader. PTMC gives traders more ways to reach the right decisions on different markets, include Forex. Financial freedom made easy. A mobile first trading and investment platform that integrates with the market exchanges and invests your savings.

If you scroll down you will see that there is a lot of stuff that will help you with your trading here. In addition, we’ll add more as the trading landscape changes and new resources become available. You can click on the logo to the left of the text to open a new tab featuring whatever is being discussed.

Think or Swim

This platform was purchased by TD Ameritrade a number of years ago and is one of the most sophisticated options trading platforms available today. You can also trade stocks and futures with them. If you are into options it is extremely worthwhile to open a small account with them so that you can use their option analyzing tools. In this area, they are well above all but the most expensive option tools out there.

TradeStation

Tradestation has been around for a long time and is well known in the industry. They offer some of the best charting software in the business. You can enter orders right from the software and they support many different order types. You can also trade futures and stocks from the same account.

LightSpeed Trading

These guys are geared toward the active semi-pro or professional trader. You can do all your trading from a single Lightspeed account whether you’re trading equities or options, trading to multiple destinations, or trading for multiple funds. Lightspeed is an introducing broker to Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing, and Wedbush Clearing and Execution.

Interactive Brokers

An excellent broker if you know what you are doing. Their customer service used to have a bad reputation but seems to improved significantly in recent years. They offer very competitive pricing and do expect you to be quite knowledgeable. They are a good choice for experienced active traders. Their commission structure allows easy scaling in and out of positions and they have an extensive set of order type choices.

Ally Invest

This broker tries to combine low commissions with good tools and customer service. There is no commission fee on U.S. listed stocks and ETFs and no ticket fee on option trades and a contract fee of just 50¢ per contract. They started out with the idea of fostering a trading community and claim focus on customer service by offering knowledgeable staff who answer the phone quickly as well as easy access to chat and quick responses to e-mails.

Fidelity

Fidelity has traditionally been more geared toward the investor than the active trader, but over the past five years or so they have also catered more to active traders. While not a direct access broker, their commissions are very competitive. They offer zero commissions on stock and ETF trades and $0.65 per contract on option trades. They also offer more robust customer service than most direct access brokers.

E*Trade

E*Trade is well known for it’s ubiquitous advertising. They have been around for a while and now offer zero commission on stocks and ETFs with $0.65 per contract on options. They claim to cater to all types of traders and have a special platform they call eTrade Pro for active traders.

Tradezero

Tradezero is an offshore broker which allows small accounts to daytrade. There is no commission on limit orders that add liquidity. They clear with Vision Clearing. They offer 6 to 1 leverage. You can read the FAQ here. They have recently opened a US branch with regular leverage and zero commissions as well. As with many brokers, you might want to use them for trade executions but use a separate charting package for your charts.

Schwab

Charles Schwab was the first of the major US full service brokers to switch over to zero commission stock and ETF trading. They charge $0.65 per option contract. They have generally offered superior customer service in tandem with low commission structures over the years and are a very reasonable choice for a broker.

Tastyworks

Tastyworks is a relatively new brokerage started by Tom Sosnoff who was instrumental in starting thinkorswim and sold it to TD Ameritrade. They offer a competitive commission structure which you can check out here. You can use a small cash account to daytrade options and start each day with your settled funds balance as your buying power for the day.

Robinhood

Robinhood is a mobile app that allows you to trade stocks, ETFs, options and crypto. A major feature is that the trades are “commission free”. It looks like they now do their own clearing. You can read about that here. There are some distinct disadvantages to trading off of a phone, but you can also use a full featured platform along with robinhood to help you analyze the market.

TradeStation

The TradeStation platform has been around for many years and originally started out as Omega Charts. For a long time they were way ahead of the competition and likely pushed the evolution of trading platforms forward. They have integrated trading into most aspects of their software, so you can easily trade from the platform which is a very good feature. If you are into backtesting and system building, they have a programming language called EasyLanguage® which allows you to build and test systems. They also provide you with an extensive historical database to facilitate backtesting.

MultiCharts

MultiCharts is a charting and trading platform with a robust set of features. The platform allows backtesting and indicator creation with EasyLanguage. As with many of the better software packages you can do market replay which allows you to practice your trading risk free. It is a very customizable package so you have a lot of flexibility to set up your workspace in a way that suits your trading style.

TC2000

The TC2000 platform has very good clean, sharp looking charting with many added features. The watch lists are also very configurable. Another favorable aspect of this package is that you can add trendlines, etc. and they will still be there the next time you go to the chart. The following is from the TC2000 website: Scan and sort through 1000’s of stocks per second. Screen from hundreds of indicator & fundamental criteria customized with your parameters and time frames. Just follow the step-by-step wizard to build your custom conditions. No programming is required, but you can optionally write condition formulas to refine your results. TC2000 helps you find the charts you are looking for in real-time.

eSignal

eSignal has been around for a long time. They are one of the more pricey packages. Their charting is quite clean looking and their data is pretty good. They used to be at the forefront of charting packages, but others have caught up to them in recent years. You can check out their promo video here

AmiBroker

Amibroker has been around for almost thirty years. It is a charting and back-testing package that is extremely powerful and fast but not especially intuitive. It’s user base is fiercely loyal, but a large percentage of them are quite code savvy. For the average user, there will probably be a steep learning curve. All that would be well and good, except for the fact that the user manual is a bit much to decipher and the tech support is done mostly by e-mail and a yahoo message group of all things! Here is the user database. I would highly recommend this software if it had more user friendly support. The pricing is very reasonable.

Trading View

Here is what Tradingview has to say about their services: Easy and intuitive for beginners, and powerful enough for advanced chartists – TradingView has all charting tools you need to share and view trading ideas. Real-time data and browser-based charts let you do your research from anywhere, since there are no installations or complex setups. Just open TradingView on any modern browser and start charting, learning and sharing trading ideas! It’s basically a community platform for sharing trading ideas and also offers real time charting capabilities.

Medved Trader

Jerry Medved is a programmer who developed and founded “QuoteTracker” years ago and eventually sold it out to TD Ameritrade. QuoteTracker was an excellent charting program that was very reasonably priced and could be had at a discount through various brokers. When Jerry sold it out to TD Ameritrade, he apparently was not able to compete with them for a set amount of time. It appears as though the non-compete is expired because he recently came out with Medved Trader. In the spirit of QuoteTracker, Medved Trader is a full featured, reasonably priced, well put together trading software package. Here is a demo of Medved Trader done by Jerry himself. You can get it for free from some brokerages including TradeKing and Tradier brokerages.

NinjaTrader

NinjaTrader’s platform is a capable charting package with numerous valuable features. You can add indicators and trade off the charts if you like. It facilitates back-testing as well. Here is the platform purchase page. You can download and try out simulated trading for free in order to get to know the platform. It can be configured to work with a number of different brokers and comes free with a NinjaTrader account if you do a certain volume of trades per month.

SierraChart

SierraChart is an excellent charting program which is compatible with a number of broker datafeeds as well as with many third party datafeeds. The price is reasonable and it is possible to trade right from the platform.

Sterling Trader Pro

A professional level platform, Sterling Trader Pro is used by prop firms, broker-dealers, and active traders. You can connect from your desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, or Android.

DAS Trader

DAS Trader is a high end trading platform which you can get through many brokers. It’s available on desktop, laptop, iPhone, or Android.

FinViz

These guys provide one of the best free scanners available on the net today. It’s so good, as a matter of fact, that you don’t really have to sign up for their paid service if you don’t want to. Although it seems as though they are geared toward the lower priced stocks when you look at the landing page, you can click on the screener section and set the parameters to your liking. It’s a great tool for getting quick background news and other info on stocks you are interested in. Simply click on the ticker and you’ll get a page with much of the pertinent fundamental information as well as recent news and a daily chart. For more info and intraday charts, you can subscribe for a very reasonable price.

Protrader.com

Trade Ideas

This service is a sort of artificial intelligence trading helper. You get to program the scans according to criteria that fits your scan ideas. If you get stuck, this software has many pre-frabricated scans that you can mix and match. The scanning is very current and you will get as many alerts as you can handle provided you give it enough to look for.

Your Broker’s Stock Scanner

Don’t forget to check out your broker’s scanner. Many brokers license commercial scanning software either in whole or part. You might be surprised how close the results are to those of software you would pay a significant extra fee for. I highly recommend that you check this out first before spending extra money on a paid service.

Protrader Web

Market Watch

MarketWatch is a subsidiary of Dow Jones and Company, the same company that owns the Wall Street Journal and Barrons. Although the news is not timely enough for active day trading, it offers a lot of useful news covering all sorts of things and can give you an overall look at what is happening in the Market. It has a lot of entertaining and fluff news as well.

CNBC

As you already probably know, CNBC is a financial news network covering current events related to the world markets. It is up to you to decide how useful the information presented here is. There is no doubt that there is a lot of “hype” on this station, but they do cover breaking events that are important to daily trading activities. You can find the pertinent info faster with subscriber news services, but a lot of people enjoy watching CNBC for entertainment purposes as well.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg.com is a business news website that covers news pertinent to the Markets as well as business in general. In some ways it is similar to CNBC but more sophisticated with less hype.

Yahoo Finance Economic Calendar

The Yahoo Economic Calendar is a good place to get the run down on what important market related announcements are coming up. If you don’t have this info elsewhere, it’s worth checking out before the market opens. They don’t update the results fast enough for active day traders, but at least you can be aware of when important reports are coming out and adjust your trading accordingly.

World Charts

Allstocks.com is a funky little website that features a lot of useful information for traders. The main page I use on this site is the world charts page which shows a time delayed read out of how the world markets are doing. It’s a quick way to get a snapshot of what occurred overnight around the globe.

Yaba Daba Doo!

Www.protraderinstitute.com

Rebate trading is an equity trading style that uses ECN rebates as a primary source of profit and revenue. Most ECNs charge commissions to customers who want to have their orders filled immediately at the best prices available, but the ECNs pay commissions to buyers or sellers who “add liquidity” by placing limit orders that create “market-making” in a security. Rebate traders seek to make money from these rebates and will usually maximize their returns by trading low priced, high volume stocks. This enables them to trade more shares and contribute more liquidity with a set amount of capital, while limiting the risk that they will not be able to exit a position in the stock.