#lift operator

[shafaqmum]

("Operator Rates - Modern Crane Operator Design" Premium T-Shirt for Sale by Colorful-Garden gönderdi) operatorcrane operatortruck mounted craneconstructionheavy machineryratesservice ratesprofessionjobworkmodern designtypographybold textprofessional

[ghostwarriorrrr]

The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) - MH-47G Block II Chinook

[rottmnt-residuum]

Hey.. I saw your answer to someone's ask.. And well- I just wanted to encourage you. :)

Please- please, PLEASE, take all the time that you need to make your story. Take lots of breaks, make sure you are sleeping, go out with friends, all the things. LIVE and THRIVE. Don't think of yourself as some puppet used to make comics, pulled by strings of love for your fans.

Use the passion and inspiration to create something amazing in your own time. Don't try to rush or stress because of needy people.

You are not only an artist, but a HUMAN as well, with emotions, energy levels that come and go, most likely a job, and so many other things.

So, I guess all that to say is, take your time. :) REST. Draw when you want to draw, and don't force it. Your fans can wait. :) Your work is worth it to wait for.

Hope this encourages you.

~ Melissa

[lonestarflight]

"First Look: Spaceplane Stacked and Shaken at NASA Test Facility

Nose-up and bathed in soft blue lights, Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane and its Shooting Star cargo module cast dramatic shadows onto the walls of NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, as members of the media got their first glimpse of the towering 55-foot-tall stack."

Credit: NASA/Jef Janis

Date: February 1, 2024

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center: link

[alinedreams]

Once I've learned about diagnostic bias, I got really darn angry because that was one of the reasons for most of my suffering.

Is autism more prevalent in AMAB because of a greater genetic propensity, or is it better diagnosed in AMAB because the belief of autism being more prevalent in AMAB makes many professionals ignore or downright refuse to diagnose AFAB unless there's an intellectual deficit, thus leading to a statistical bias confirmation?

Is autism more prevalent in white, middle class and above kids because autism is correlated to race and financial success, or is it more prevalent in those kids because poor and black kids are less likely to be diagnosed due to diagnostic bias making doctors ignore symptoms in Black kids and hike up prices because "well, it's less common in poorer kids, so, there's no reason for diagnosis to be cheap", difficulting the access to proper diagnosis to those who can't pay?

Autism is just one example among many, but do you understand my train of thought? Just how many people had to suffer or even die because of diagnostic biases? How many had to be dismissed, ignored and mismedicated (or even self-medicated) because of outdated statistics and scientific approaches? Just how many were victims of, may I dare to call it that way, MEDICAL FREAKING SUPERSTITION?

[livwritesstuff]

So I’ve made a few references to Steve being an Excel guy as an adult (because someone had to be in charge of Steve and Eddie’s money and it certainly wasn’t going to be Eddie).

He’s got the classic spreadsheets – monthly budget, college savings projections, income tracking because he and Eddie both work jobs with variable incomes (Steve is a counselor and Eddie is an author), the whole nine yards.

Steve also has some “extracurricular” spreadsheets. I’ve talked about how Steve has a spreadsheet tracking the combinations of Mario Kart racers/vehicles he tries out (there’s a ranking system involved, it’s very complex). He’s got one for his fantasy football league, obviously, and he and Moe put money on their March Madness brackets so there’s a spreadsheet for that too.

Eddie’s personal favorite is the one comparing monthly expenses by kid, which isn’t exactly a necessary metric per se, but from it stems a game Steve and Eddie secretly play: who is the most expensive Harrington daughter?

The winner tends to rotate throughout the year, but Hazel is usually their least expensive child in the long run. She does ballet, which isn’t too bad when she’s little but then she graduates to pointe shoes, and Steve had no idea that not only do pointe shoes set you back $100 minimum, they also wear out ridiculously fast, and, as he’s been told many times, you can’t wear the dead ones.

Moe usually takes that top spot in the winter – elite basketball teams aren’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, and then in high school she gets into snowboarding, which is somehow even more expensive. She’s also consistently the reason they hit their health insurance deductible every year. 

Robbie is their overall most expensive kid by a mile. She drove up their car insurance by getting into an accident a month after she got her driver's license, had braces for five years, and the prescription on her glasses has changed every eighteen months since she was seven. She’s notorious for breaking her phone, so she racks up quite a tab in that regard too (the one year they got a protection plan was also the one year she had no phone-related incidents, so they didn’t even bother renewing it – they just make her suffer with a cracked screen for a few months before they finally drag her to the mall to get it fixed). There’s also the year Eddie bought her an electric violin which was, naturally, not cheap (Eddie argues it shouldn’t count because he was the brains behind that operation).

[trans-axolotl]

one of my fav bus drivers was driving the bus home today it was so nice to see her :)

[checkthebox]

cosplaying a cosplayer

[queenlua]

30's meme: 1, 11, 45, 52?

1. What was the first piece of furniture you bought?

my *very* first piece of furniture was a futon whose cost i split with three other roommates, freshman year of college. i napped/lounged/homeworked on that futon probably more than anyone else all four years of undergrad, lmao. we got it from a habitat from humanity sale and it was CLUTCH

my first non-cheapo/non-ikea furniture would be the wooden dinner table i split with my husband when we moved in together. it's SO pretty and nice and i love it so much... and he DEFINITELY had to talk me into it because i have no sense of ~*~interior decoration aesthetics~*~ and was like "do we really need this idk it seems too fancy...." (he was 100% correct and, come to think of it, is responsible for pretty much all our furniture. it's ok, i contribute all the stuffed animals, i'm helping)

11. What’s something you saved up for and then regretted buying?

for years all my skibrah buddies were like "bro you gotta get an Epic Pass it's the only way to ski bro" & one year i FINALLY caved and got an epic pass and... then due to illness/injury i wasn't even able to USE the thing to the fullest, and also, most of the bit of skiing i wound up doing was at a NON-EPIC MOUNTAIN, so. all i got was the warm n fuzzy feeling of "paying lots of money to the evil conglomerate that's slowly jacking up the price of skiing all across the entire world." UGH

45. What’s something you wish you had more time for?

if i had an extra three hours a day i could do job + all my hobbies + get adequate sleep. however i do not have those three hours so more-often-then-not i sleep less than i'd like (and uhhh sometimes i job less than i should, but, don't tell my boss that)

52. Did your relationship with your parents get better when you stopped living with them?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Though I guess there was a little back-n-forth, like...

High school: Relationship with mom was so-so but overall fine

College: Relationship with mom gets much worse. In hindsight, she was definitely working through some Empty Nester Feelings TM and i kinda got the brunt of that, but also, I probably wasn't as nice about it as I could've been haha

First job out of college: Mom's SO much more chill. So chill that, when I end up doing a residency in another city & plot to land a job on the west coast, I'm like "why don't I just move back home for a bit in-between gigs"

Living at home again: BAD idea lmfao. Things are really tense and bad

West coast job: Both mom & I are still a little wounded for a year or two, but stuff's much better from there on out, and nowadays I definitely count mom among my best friends.

(my dad was present through all this but that relationship's always been stable, by the virtue of me being Basically The Same Person As My Dad, lol)

[anghraine]

Meanwhile: I have so much I have to do, and so much I want to do, and suddenly my brain was possessed by an incredibly niche AU fanfic plotbunny.

It's not only for the Guild Wars video games (hardly the most popular series out there!), and not only GW1 fic in particular (the first game was on a far smaller scale than GW2 and had a much smaller userbase with maybe five fics on AO3). The fic concept specifically appeals to me as a way to unfridge Althea Barradin, an NPC I latched onto in 2005 out of all proportion to her screentime and frankly how well her lines were written. But it's not only that she's an underwritten GW1 character, or even just that she's one who only appears in Guild Wars: Prophecies—the very first GW game. She's actually only alive in the tutorial zone and is a mentor to PCs of one specific class that happens to be my personal favorite, mesmers (they're elegant spellcasters specializing in chaos magic, illusion magic, and other sneaky, unpredictable stuff).

There's a cataclysmic war crime committed against your people at the end of the tutorial, and a time jump to two years later, when you discover that Althea disappeared in all the upheaval and has not been seen since. You get a quest to discover what happened to her, only to find out that the answer is "dragged off and burned alive by the war criminal invaders." The worst resolution for my teenage pixel crush :( Anyway, you briefly interact with her ghost and gather her ashes to take to her father so both of them can find some kind of peace.

BUT

I sometimes think about how Althea's father (Duke Barradin) was originally next in line in the royal succession. He has already stepped aside for a popular war hero to become king instead when GW1 starts, and there's even a quest in the tutorial to make sure he and his people are faithful to the war hero king, Adelbern. At that point, Adelbern seems to be a good stabilizing authority figure after a lot of internal conflict, but he can be a bit short-sighted and self-aggrandizing in ways that become disastrous when his subjects are massacred in a massive magical attack that devastates the land and people (even GW2 acknowledges that this was so destructive that the aqueducts ran red with the blood of his people).

Adelbern is very obviously not equipped to handle the absolutely dire situation he ends up facing. He's already snapping under this incredible strain in GW1 and disowns his adult son (and it seems only child) for rightly questioning him, only to break even further when said son dies tragically. From what can be pieced together, he only went further downhill after that, becoming more unreasonable, absolutist, and desperate until he completely lost his mind.

Meanwhile, Duke Barradin—Althea's father and the guy who got skipped over for Adelbern in the first place—seems a far steadier and less egocentric figure. He gracefully accepted Adelbern as king before the game, and serves him with loyalty and discipline for the rest of his life, rather than taking Adelbern's ascension as a personal affront or holding a grudge or turning on him in the face of his own tragedies or anything. So I occasionally wonder what would have happened if Ascalon had kept to the traditional succession and Duke Barradin had become the next king, rather than Adelbern.

The cataclysm and invasion still would happen, but I think Duke Barradin would have been more resilient and less obsessed with his personal power and authority. He seems deeply fond of his daughter and I suspect wouldn't have disowned her over a tactical disagreement. Basically, from everything we saw of this guy, I think he'd have handled this situation a lot better than Adelbern—but this is such a niche scenario that requires so much information that I didn't feel like writing it.

But yesterday I was re-reading an idle post I'd made a couple of years ago that mentioned the concept in passing and suddenly realized that in that scenario, Althea would have been the heir rather than her canonical fiancé, Prince Rurik. Instead of tragic war victim Althea whose awful, awful death in an atrocity of war matters mostly because of how terrible her father and fiancé feel about it, she would be Princess Althea, the heir to a now desperate and struggling kingdom. We'd get Althea prioritizing saving her people above everything else, while Rurik gets the horrible death that illustrates the stakes of the war.

In a way, that would even make a bit more sense, logistically. In the game, Althea is a fancy illusionist strongly associated with her theatre just outside of Ascalon City, at this point the seat of Ascalonian power. Even after all this devastation, it took decades for the Charr armies to get far enough into Ascalon to seriously besiege it (before the remaining population was reduced to undying vengeful ghosts, too). It's not beyond belief that a warband could have reached the theatre, and it's also possible that Althea might have been in a more dangerous location at the time of the Searing, since lots of people were dragged off, including children. Just a bit odd in terms of where you would expect a fancy civilian noblewoman specifically to be, even a powerful and highly skilled spellcaster like Althea.

Rurik, on the other hand, is an intimidating warrior, and he's heavily involved with Ascalon's military, especially the Ascalon Vanguard that he himself leads. There's every reason for him to be fairly near the battle lines even without expecting the Searing. The fact that he's one of the main leaders of the Ascalonian military defense would hardly save him from being sacrificed in this terrible way.

(And this might still be a better end than the one he actually gets in canon, in which he's resurrected as an undead servant and forced to serve an evil lich until you kill him for good, freeing him. Getting reduced to ash by the Charr would at least spare him that.)

Despite a certain degree of pathos, though, Rurik was always a bit annoying IMO. He is a very archetypal honorable warrior dude, not as hidebound as Adelbern nor as blind to the reality of the threat they're facing, but his personal approach still tends towards an attitude of "if hitting my problems with my sword doesn't solve them, I didn't hit them hard enough." The PCs really have to handle anything that needs more diplomacy or subtlety.

Althea, though, is a very different kind of person—subtle, tricky, versatile—so I don't think a Princess Althea would necessarily be nailed to the same path as Prince Rurik is in canon. Mesmers in GW2 canonically use their powers of illusion to make themselves appear they're in a particular place when in reality they're skulking invisibly somewhere else, which could easily keep her from being an identifiable target where Rurik was striding around a snowscape with a giant flaming sword when he was killed. I don't think the premise requires Princess Althea dying the same way at all.

I can imagine, for instance, that the AU king might send a reliable, competent, and trusted figure like Althea to ensure the refugees get across the mountains, especially if he wants Althea "safely" out of the country. But as an illusionist, Althea could definitely take precautions that were not available to Rurik, and would be expected to do so.

So there's this whole "okay, if Althea isn't killed like in canon or even like Rurik is in canon, and I manage to completely unfridge her, how does her survival and the AU in general affect the GW1 plot? What is changed about the later canon revelations of what's going on in this era from Eye of the North and GW2?"

I don't have time for this and it's so incredibly specific that it's difficult to even explain to anyone else, but it's also possessing my brain ;_;

[quasi-normalcy]

.

[vampyroteuthid]

i love him it must be said

[lonestarflight]

"The first in a fleet of spaceplanes, Dream Chaser 'Tenacity' and its Shooting Star cargo companion are shown stacked inside a thermal vacuum test chamber at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility."

Photo Credit: Joshua Teplitz

Date: April 26, 2024

source

[kindahoping4forever]

Ash @ Take My Hand Perth

[justjonesingaround]

exciting developments at work

[eunhos]

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