#my bits

[crannog-beag]

Occurs, I never updated my progress on the tinplate train. Or why I called it Slieve Glah. So here are the last pictures I took of it.

Full assembly of the parts I had made.

And after attaching the cab/splashers/firebox assembly to the footplate. Firebox extends forwards to hide the motor when assembled. 'Rivets' on smokebox and cylinder cover made by using a punch on the other side of the sheet, in roughly the right places. It's not meant to be a perfect replica, more of a 'that sure is a train that looks vaguely similar to the original!

Speaking of the original this is based on a S-class from the Great Northern Railway (Ireland), or GNRI. Specifically the only survivor No.171 Slieve Gullion, now owned by the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland. They use Slieve Gullion as one of their excursion trains on Irish mainline, albeit the engine is undergoing overhaul right now. (Link)

Anyway, the engines of this class were all named after mountains. I looked up 'Slieve G' in honour of the original. Slieve Glah is what came up, and I thought that sounded nice. The mountain is in County Cavan, within a few miles of the GNRI branch to Cavan town, which is another point in favor as far as I'm concerned.

[crannog-beag]

Can't disagree, dragged out pictures of a cottage from who knows when in the Cavan Burren. Quite a nice fireplace.

[hauntingrabbits]

comic

[paintedcrows]

They do this every year...

Happy 25th to Dipdop and Lebam!! and Happy 17th to Hatsune Miku!! 🎉🎉

(comic continued: The M&M stands for...)

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I think one of the kindest things you can do for people with various mental health struggles is just... let people back into your life after they've been absent for a while.

Making friends as an adult is so fucking hard already and isolating yourself from other people is a very common symptom of depression, anxiety, burnout, ocd, trauma, grief, etc. Which means that someone will do the hard work of recovery/healing and resurface back into a world where their previous friends have written them off because they stopped showing up.

So if you know someone where you're like "yeah we could have been better friends but they fell off the map a bit" and that person suddenly reaches out, or starts showing up to events even though you kind of forgot they were still in the group chat... well they may have been Going Through It and you don't actually have to punish them for their absence you can just be glad that they're back.

[crannog-beag]

As someone with some Horological training (clockmaking), I'm going to have to disagree with this. I've not seen this set up before, and while OP doesn't specify what kind of clock and I'm hardly about to claim I know every kind of clock, there are some issues with this idea.

The problem is that a second hand has to make one revolution per minute, ideally advancing 60 times during that revolution although you can get away with less if you're willing to have it only show every two or three seconds. The setup in the gif only advances 6 times for one rotation, meaning each movement represent 10 seconds if a full rotation takes a minute. I don't think it's possible to get anywhere near the necessary amount of teeth for this kind of mechanism to serve as a second wheel

So how is it normally done? (Mechanical clocks at any rate)

Well, usually when you see a second hand it's a sub-dial towards the top of the dial, and I'll explain it in a minute. But first a quick explanation of how a clock like this actually counts out the time.

In other words, what makes it tick?

(Yes this is relevant, no I don't regret the pun)

The clock is regulated by the pendulum, this swings back and then forth within a set and regular period. For example in a longcase (grandfather) clock like the one above the pendulum will take one second to swing from one extreme to the other, so two seconds to return to where it started.

The pendulum movement is connected to the gears by the escapement. Put simply (I hope!), the escapement is the last wheel on the geartrain, known as the escape wheel, and a V shaped piece of metal with two prongs (known as pallets) that moves with the pendulum, the pallets interacting with the escape wheel. When the pendulum swings one way, the pallet currently blocking the escape wheel is lifted from the tooth it is against, allowing it to start to spin while also putting some energy into the pendulum so it continues to swing. The escape wheel can only turn for about half the distance between each tooth before the second pallet blocks a different tooth. This process now repeats for this pallet. And this is what makes the tick and tock noises!

Make sense? Probably not, but here's an example gif of a recoil/anchor escapement, one of the most common clock escapements. Any guesses why it's called a recoil?

Hopefully by their powers combined you get some idea of what I mean.

Here's a second example, a deadbeat escapement. So called because it stops dead after being released, unlike the bounciness of the recoil.

If you were to count the teeth on the wheels in the gifs (couldn't blame you if you don't!) both have 30 of them, which is a fairly standard number. 30 teeth on a wheel that moves twice for each tooth means this advances 60 times per rotation. Sound familiar? Pair that up with a pendulum that swings from one side to the other in a second, and we have a wheel that completes one revolution in one minute, advancing 60 times during that revolution. Stick a hand on the end of it and voila, a second hand with no extra work needed!

The fun thing with this is that you can tell when a clock like this has a recoil escapement because that snap forwards, slight back, slight forwards, snap forwards etc motion is carried into the hand, so you can watch it do it's little dance! (Can't immediately find any footage of this, just look at the first gif and imagine a second hand on it!)

Hope that made some kind of sense! This is the most common method (that I'm aware of), but there are going to be various alterations. An immediate example would be to run a second hand from the centre would probably be done with by motionwork like how a central hour hand works, but gearing up instead of down. Here's an example I've worked on. (Big gear at the bottom and small gear above it, ignore the levers they're for striking) (This clock also has a second hand, which it managed by having a teeny tiny escape wheel so the next gear down revolves once a minute)

As a bonus, where can you find the mechanism shown by OP in a clock? Stopwork! (Where fitted).

Known as Maltese stopwork, it limits how much the spring can be wound and can then unwind in turn, based off the idea of keeping a steady power output by not using the ends of the springs capacity, as that is more likely fluctuate then the middle part. Here is another handy gif.

How the Geneva Drive (the mechanical step that makes the second hand on a clock work by turning constant rotation into intermittent motion) works.

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[mushyooms]

he's so real

[snowstories]

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

[ionomycin]

temple at the end of the road

[unsung-idiot]

some quick drawings of little Soos I made a while ago

[noodles-and-tea]

Twins in time au but they have slightly different reactions….

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[punkitt-is-here]

Horse Court

[loullipopx]

My Pokémon ❤️💙