#so is it just standard electricity? some kind of battery?

[south-sea]

mysteries of the universe (or i’m just incredibly out of the loop): what is metal sonic powered by

[briarpatch-kids]

Let's talk mobility aids!

Canes

Canes are for when you need to take a little bit of weight off of one side of your body, need a little help with balance, or need a little extra stability when you walk. It's an easy mobility aid to find and get, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to use. Have the cane sized so the handle sits at wrist level, then hold it on the opposite side to the one that hurts. Match your cane strikes to the steps on the hurt side. It will hurt your arm, elbow, and shoulder sometimes, but having a properly sized cane will help.

Rollators

Rollators are kind of the "next step up" in support. They come with more restrictions, you get limited to ramps and stuff, but they're also the least restrictive wheeled mobility aid because they're light and easy to pick up and toss around. They also have a seat a lot of times and a basket so you don't need to carry stuff. They're for when you need a place to rest, something to lean on when you walk, better balance assistance than a cane, and less weight bearing than a cane. I also found that it helped me with fatigue quite a bit. There's two main kinds, euro style like the first, and regular like the second. There are other fancier ones but I'm covering the basics here.

Rollators are my favorite mobility aid and I've used everything from canes to a fancy high grade power chair. They're just the perfect balance of help and freedom. They provide so much support for how far they go.

Crutches

Arm crutches are pretty neat! They're a lot more ergonomic than a cane. In fact, some people use a single arm crutch as a cane. They distribute the weight a little better, so it's not all on your wrists, and they support you better than a rollator can. The major cons I found are that they take two hands to use so you can't carry much and I had a really hard time trying to learn to walk with them. A lot of people who use forearm crutches have other mobility aids and use the forearm crutches when they want to or need to walk.

Manual Wheelchairs

These are for when walking becomes more difficult than pushing a wheelchair. There's no weight being put on your legs and feet and depending on your needs, you can get really specific with your adaptations if you have a custom wheelchair verses a standard wheelchair. My first custom chair looked like a monster truck because i took in the woods and gravel, my second custom chair after I got sicker has a head rest, a backrest that holds me up, and a little electric box that I can attach that helps me push. The difference between getting a standard and custom wheelchair is dependent on how much money the user has, what kind of needs they have, and what kind of medical access they have. (One is not more "real" than the other.) I highly recommend getting a cushion for under your butt if you have a standard chair without a cushion, I used a standard full time for 6 months and a cushion made a huge difference.

Mobility scooters

Mobility scooters are for people who can't walk long distances, but can still walk with the help of a cane or unassisted. If you can walk around your house, but not really much else, a mobility scooter might be the aid for you! There's a lot of different styles and battery life lengths and handling abilities so try a few different scooters out if you can.

Powerchairs

Powerchairs come in a couple different types or "groups" depending on your needs. Group 1 is the kind of chair you're probably most familiar with. It's basically for someone who needs a powerchair to get around their house, the doctors, office, and grocery store. You can't do any custom seat cushions or anything, but it's for people who don't need it. Think of like... someone who can walk pretty okay still, it just hurts to walk or they're off balance or a little weak feeling. A lot of times more elderly people will use these, if you're more active look into group 2

Group two chairs are little more durable, a little more stable, sometimes you can switch the captains seats out for custom seating... They're what a full time powerchair user would use if they don't need specialty functions like tilt or recline. They also often have 6 wheels rather than 4 like the group 1 chairs have.

Group 3 powerchairs are reserved for specific diagnoses like muscular dystrophy, ALS, and other severe neurological and neuromuscular illnesses. These are also called "rehab" chairs because they're for making sure severely disabled people have quality of life. The tilt function is for pressure relief, though you can also get things like elevation so you can raise and lower your chair, and some of them can recline flat. There are other avenues of moving grade 3 power chairs beyond the joystick as well in case someone can't use their hands or doesn't have them. (Head controls, torso controls, and straw controls called sip and puff are alternatives.) They can go on a little worse terrain than group 1 and two chairs and go a little farther, but if they get stuck they weigh 350 lbs and it's awful.

There's a few other types of mobility aid that I don't know enough about, like ankle foot orthotics and gait trainers, but these are the basic "mobility aid" most people will come across.

If you use another type of mobility aid and want to educate people, add it on!!

[wirewitchviolet]

How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

[quirkwizard]

What do you think Class 1-A's action figures would look like in universe?

Non-quirk related question haha. What do you think class 1A's barbie-ken taglines would be? Not sure how to frame the question but for example for Tokoyami it could be, "This Ken is gothic" or for Ochako it could be, "This Barbie is on cloud nine" (due to her quirk)

I mean, I'm not sure if there is much to say on that. I feel like any taglines for actions figures would just be pretty generic, but I can talk about action figures.

Sato: Comes with a series of small snacks that you can feed him to cause him to bulk up and you pop open the stomach to get them back.

Koda: Just a simple figurine of him with a bunch of small animal models that you can play with as well. Comes with a button to play animal sounds.

Mineta: Orbs on the head are removable and the toy comes with arms that catapult the orbs forward. Possibly with a pointless target pad that no kid will use.

Sero: His tape dispensers can be pulled out like a rip cord, letting the action figure pull itself to whatever you put the doll on. Filling them with regular tape did not work well with test audiences.

Aoyama: Armor is made of a super reflective material that shimmers and has a flashlight in the belt to replicate his beam. Also comes with a lot of costume variants and accessories at Aoyama's instance.

Hakagure: Like Aoyama, her toy is very reflective, almost like a giant prism that gives off colorful lights when put up to any light. A stocking issue made it a hard to find collector's item for a time.

Ojiro: The tail can be curled up and then released, causing the action figure to fling forward. This curling can be used to make it hang on stuff as well. His tail also comes with "kung fu action grip", because of course it does.

Denki: Comes with a bunch of flashing lights and sounds for his electrical attacks. Has a swithcable head for his regular face and his low power face, much to Denki's chagrin. Batteries are not included for some reason.

Jiro: Definitely has some music aspect for it's main gimmick, like being able to use her jacks to plug your MP3 player into it to play music on it or having recordings of her songs on it when you press a button on it.

Kirsihima: Either has a bunch of plates on it that you can put on him to harden him up or you push a button to pop them out of the toy. Had issues in production because of how dangerous the hair spike was for kids.

Mina: Has an action figure with a lot articulation. It's main feature is a goo that comes with it that kids are suppose to put in and fire out of the toy. They fill it up by removing head and pouring the goo in, much to Mina's horror.

Shoji: The main feature would obviously be his arms. They'd either work like super stretchy arms or have a much of attachments that a kid could connect and stack on top of each other to add on whatever organs they want.

Iida: This figure with a set up buttons that can kick the legs forward, able to demolish any stack of cups that you happen to set up. He happens to be bundled a lot with overly complex, Ingeium themed cars, much to Iida's confusion.

Tsuyu: Has a lot of suckers on the hands and feet so you can stick it to surfaces. The tongue can be shoot out as well to grab onto stuff, kind of like those sticky hand toys. Yes, it is water proof and a popular bath toy for young children.

Tokoyami: Probabley has a standard figure with Dark Shadow with larger versions of it being sold separately. The parts of Dark Shadow can be removed and put onto Tokoyami for his armored form. It has a glow in the dark feature, without a doubt.

Shoto: Comes with fire and ice attachment to simulate shooting it out of his hands and feet. The scar was on the wrong side of a better part of it's run and it's occasionally bundled with Endeavor toys to help increase Enji's poor sales.

Momo: Her costume had to be changed on the figurine in order to be sold in stores. She comes with a massive amount of accessories to have her wield, along with little facts and tidbits about them. Momo demanded that her toy had some educational merits.

Katsuki: Probably has some spring power launcher in his arms that you can use to fire out plastic darts. Definitely has something that screams out catchphrases like "Die!" and "I'll kill you!" that would have to be rewrite and recorded several times to get them published.

Uraraka: Has a button that makes her hands glow like she does when she uses her powers along with has wench systems like Sero for her grapple hooks. Probably has a weird spin off line based around it, like Uraravity's Space Adventures featuring the Alien Queen Pinky.

Izuku: The most popular and with the most variations, though the standard ones glows with a button press, has spring shoots for the boots, and an spring in the hand to fire plastic air blasts. Sometimes comes out with special versions that come with other Quirks he had.

[redpenship]

cosmic wip

an: this fic is taking me FOREVER to write and i like this convo quite a bit so I am posting it on tumblr!!

---

This was a huge claim. Starline blinked in surprise. “You . . . stabilized an energy circuit? Without a surge protector?”

Ivo gave him another paper from the folder. Starline stared at it blankly. On the paper was a schematic for a capsule; in the main section was a drawing of a small bird, and attached to the bottom was a battery. The title read: animal-powered battery. 

“This must be some kind of joke,” Starline mumbled incredulously. In what world could animals power a facility like this on their own? He couldn’t even begin to imagine how they would stabilize his energy electrical circuit. That was a feat physicists had been trying to achieve for decades. And here, Ivo was claiming to have done it own his own. Without training. 

“It’s not a joke! I’ve been using those batteries as my main source of power for many years, now.” Appearing excited, Ivo leaned forward and tapped the schematic with a finger. “They work because I adapted our laws to the conditions of this world. You are a biologist first, so I will explain this simply: Chaos Emeralds respond to the needs of living creatures. Without their interference, the animals inside the capsule would die during the energy extraction process. The emeralds protect the animals by supplying the electrical circuit with enough energy to function without killing them.” 

Starline blinked. Ivo was right—he was a biologist, not a physicist. He hadn’t looked at energy physics in a very long time. But despite his inexperience, he understood just how big this stable energy capsule could be. Ivo had made a breakthrough in Earth’s sciences. Unstable energy had suppressed the planet’s sciences for millions of years. If Ivo’s invention really worked . . .

“Given your silence, I can only assume that you’ve come to understand the grander implications of this capsule,” Ivo said. He took the schematic and put it back into the folder. “Don’t get too excited. I have no intentions of sharing this with anyone else for the time being.” 

He was keeping it for himself? “Why?” Starline demanded. “You could help science everywhere!” 

Ivo shook his head. “This will not help science. It is a temporary fix to a much larger problem. To help science, I will need to present a complete solution to the energy crisis.” 

“This is a good first step!” Starline argued. “Other physicists could use this to find the solution!”

As Starline spoke, Ivo’s face fell. He said his next words sternly. “If human science was capable of solving the crisis, we would have done it by now. I accomplished what I did by abandoning our methods completely. No other scientists would have been willing to do such a thing.”

They were right back to Ivo’s initial argument: humans, and by extension their science, are idiots. “What makes you think so?”

“Anyone who is allowed to practice science in a lab has completed the circuit of higher education. To survive such a circuit, students must depersonalize themselves and accept rigorous training. They are traumatized into accepting academic dogma even if it seems unnatural to them. Upon graduation from such a system, how many of them will be willing to abandon everything they’ve learned to perform ‘unscientific’ experiments?”

Starline immediately disagreed. “They’re rigorously trained to meet scientific standards.” 

“On a non-standard planet! Everything they’re learning is useless until we can solve the energy crisis.” 

The logic didn’t add up. “Then the crisis is unsolvable. Unless you mean to say that you’re the only one who can do it?”

Ivo crossed his ams with a huff. “I’ve hit a road block in my research. Now that I have the capsules, I am finding it more and more difficult to pretend that I don’t have expectations for my experiments. Staying away from university could only bring me so far. No matter what I do, I will always make assumptions about the future and my experiments. It is an unconscious way of thinking that I cannot overcome; my brain simply cannot accept the uncertainty created by Chaos Energy.” 

Unconscious ways of thinking. It all clicked at once. Starline looked to the cognitive tests on the table in front of him and realized exactly what conclusion Ivo had drawn from them.

“You think only someone with a traditional Mobian worldview can solve the energy crisis,” he said. Ivo nodded his agreement and Starline kept going. “It has to be someone comfortable with uncertainty . . . someone with an intuitive understanding of Chaos Energy.” 

“Precisely! The energy crisis will only be solved by someone whose first reaction to learning the law of conservation of energy is to refute its existence.”

[clatterbane]

That was some more excitement we did not need.

Dumbass here just managed to short out a 21700 battery, of all fucking things, a little while ago. They are relatively big, they hold a lot of energy by Li-ion cell standards, and they are potentially VERY full of fire and explosion.

So yeah, working with loose Li-ion cells all the time and knowing my battery safety? (Seriously, if you want to learn a lot about that, check out that guy's YouTube channel. If you ever mess with loose lithium cells for any reason, this electrical engineer is your new best friend.)

I did notice a tear in the insulator wrap on one, but did I replace it immediately? 😩 "It'll be fine for the moment."

It was not, in fact, fine.

I then compounded this error by proceeding to charge the thing. On the way out of the charger, freshly refilled with spiciness, was when I managed to short it. Because of course I did.

No actual harm done, though, and no dramatic video like with that power bank incident years back. I was right there holding the charger when it started venting and starting to smoke. I unplugged the charger as soon as I heard worrying noises, and carefully carrying the whole thing at arm's length toward the bathroom and its big solid containment vessel just in case. In the absence of any convenient bucket of sand.

This is a slightly more complicated task when you're using a manual wheelchair, do not have a Hindu iconography number of arms, and also need to pop small wheelies over thresholds in your house. So, I called for Mr. C as calmly as my excitable ass could manage, informing him that we had a battery situation andto PLEASE bring first himself and second an extinguisher. (Which I know he has somewhere in his little lair. I couldn't safely get to the kitchen one right then.)

So yeah, then we played pass the threatening charger, and he promptly ferried it and dislodged the battery into the tub. After it had calmed down enough after a couple minutes, he actually settled on taping it to the end of a wooden stick to carry it down and temporarily stash it in one of the grills outside until he was sure it was safe to dispose of more properly.

I did appreciate the prompt cool response and assistance from someone who knew what they were doing. And the lack of bitching after things had calmed down enough for me to say what had happened. (Which I probably would have just kept to myself, if I was not expecting that kind of reception.)

As it was? There was no need for the extinguisher, or eventual cleanup from that. I don't think there were actual flames at any point. Nobody got hurt. .

That charger is toast, we needed to open some windows for a while in chilly weather, and everybody here got jolts of adrenaline they weren't looking for. That was thankfully the worst that happened.

I guess any moral of this little story would have to be that, if you're going to be handling high-powered especially loose Li-ion cells? Please be careful and educate yourself about how to do it as safely as you can. Please DO NOT do like me and turn overconfident.

Also, please make sure you have some plan in case things should suddenly go south. If you manage to catch a problem promptly, it might hopefully just turn into an unwanted adrenaline and toxic fumes situation like this one, rather than something much worse in potentially painful incendiary ways.

[catsharky]

I totally agree that Wheatley wasn't himself after he got plugged in! I think is reinforced by how GLaDOS was nicer when she was unplugged even before the Caroline revelations. Part of that might be that being a potato battery is pretty humbling but I like to think it's the facility messing with her and Wheatley!

Yeah! I think it's pretty much canon that being plugged into the facility does have at least some kind of mind-altering effects as a result of the scientists trying to control GLaDOS (I can't say that's a fact only because I haven't played it through in full recently enough to state it as fact)

I go into my thoughts on the whole thing a bit more under a read-more because it got kind of long:

With GLaDOS not being true AI but a digitized human mind, controlling her would have been more than just a coding problem. It was a question of how they could force control onto a person who was intended to hold power over you. Fortunately (or rather unfortunately) for Aperture scientists, morality wasn't an issue. They would have been free to use whatever methods were necessary until they found a combination that finally broke Caroline, stripped the person she had once been out, and turned her into what we see in the games.

Whatever 'conditioning' they used, it would have had to be extremely complex to keep GLaDOS from circumventing it, and in the time period the story takes place in (and even by today's standards, honestly) that would have been extremely resource intensive. Think rooms full of servers. Additionally, based on how the core transfer works in Portal 2, the part that makes up GLaDOS herself seems to be entirely contained within her 'head'. So you have miles of circuitry and computing power that's not actually needed to run the 'AI', while also needing a lot of resources to actually keep the AI in check, and it needs to be in a way that she can't sabotage to take full control. How do you do that? You hard code it into the system itself so it can't just be ripped out at the root... and then add a little Skinner box conditioning for good measure.

To further support the idea, GLaDOS shows that she's fully aware of at least some of the controls that were placed on her. Things like the testing euphoria and electric shock that's dispensed to keep her from sabotaging the tests. I find it very hard to believe that GLaDOS would be aware of those things and not be able to find a way to circumvent or disable them if she could, which implies that she flat out can't. Now look me in the eyes and tell me something could have full access to manipulate GLaDOS without her being able to reverse engineer and destroy it in the amount of time she's had to devote to it. Exactly, you can't, which means there's a different reason why she can't shut those things off, potentially because they're linked to necessary functions.

Would it not make sense if the thing keeping her from say, releasing all the test subjects were fundamentally tied to her control over the areas the test subjects are kept in? Then, if she were to break past those safeguards and gain the freedom to set them free, it would come at the expense of actually being able to do so.

So with all that in mind, Wheatley's sudden change of heart makes total sense. Experiencing awe and wonder isn't a problem because it doesn't prevent or go against what the scientists wanted. But like I said, allowing a test subject to leave? That absolutely would have been something the scientists would have had to stop a caring human mind (Caroline) from trying to do. The minute that became the topic at hand, the system pounced, the controls kicked in and 'I Am Not a Moron' became my favourite song on the soundtrack.

-

(On a related note, I also do believe that Wheatley is likely another human mind- which is pretty widely accepted by the fandom, so I'm not breaking any new ground here- but I specifically think he's not a whole human mind. It would make sense to me if he was a follow up to GLaDOS- the scientists looking into whether only using part of a mind would give them an 'AI' that would serve their purpose and not ask questions, only to find that the end result wasn't viable. After that failure they tried repurposing him as the intelligence dampening sphere like GLaDOS mentions, before shuffling him off to a job in title only. The Extended Relaxation Center is shown to be fully automated, and wouldn't have required any actual outside oversight, so Wheatley was almost definitely just running around doing busy work for a few decades until the events of Portal 2.)

[donman2112]

"We have the standard 6 ft. Fence in the backyard, and a few months Ago, I heard about burglaries increasing drmatically in the entire City. To make sure this never happened to me, I got an electric Fence and ran a single wire along the top of the fence.

Actually, I got the bggest cattle charger Tractor Supply had, made For 26 miles of fence. I then used an 8 ft. Long ground rod, and Drove it 7.5 feet into the grund. The ground rod is the key, with The more you have in the ground, the better the fence works.

One day I'm mowing the back yard with my cheapo Wal-Mart 6 hp big Wheel push mower. The hot wire is broken and laying out in the Yard. I knew for a fact that I unplugged the charger. I pushed the Mower around the wire and reached down to grab it, to throw it out of The way.

It seems as though I hadn't remembered to unplug it after all.

Now I'm standing there, I've got the running lawnmower in my right Hand and the 1.7 giga-volt fence wire in the other hand. Keep in Mind the charger is about the size of a marine battery and has a Picture of an upside down cow on fire on the cover.

Time stood still.

The first thing I notice is my pecker trying to climb up the front Side of my body. My ears curled downwards and I could feel the Lawnmower ignition firing in the backside of my brain. Every time That Briggs & Stratton rolled over, I could feel the spark in my Head. I was literally one with the engine.

It seems as though the fence charger and the piece of shit lawnmower Were fighting over who would control my electrical impulses.

Science says you cannot crap, pee, and vomit at the same time. I beg To differ. Not only did I do all three at once, but my bowels Emptied 3 different times in less than half of a second. It was a Matrix kind of bowel movement, where time is creeping along and You're all leaned back and BAM BAM BAM you just crap your pants 3 Times. It seemed like there were minutes in between but in reality It was so close together it was like exhaust pulses from a big block Chevy turning 8 grand.

At this point I'm about 30 minutes (maybe 2 seconds) into holding Onto the fence wire. My hand is wrapped around the wire palm down so I can't let go. I grew up on a farm so I know all about electric Fences ... But Dad always had those piece of shit chargers made by Intrnational or whoever that were like 9 volts and just kinda tickled.

This one I could not let go of. The 8 foot long ground rod is now Accepting signals from me through the permadamp Ark-La-Tex river Bottom soil. At this point I'm thinking I'm going to have to just Man up and take it, until the lawnmower runs out of gas.

'Damn!,' I think, as I remember I just filled the tank!

Now the lawnmower is starting to run rough. It has settled into a Loping run pattrn as if it had some kind of big lawnmower race cam In it. Covered in poop, pee, and with my vomit on my chest I think 'Oh God please die ... Pleeeeaze die'. But nooooo, it settles into The rough lumpy cam idle nicely and remains there, like a big bore Roller cam EFI motor waiting for the go command from its owner's Right foot.

So here I am in the middle of July, 104 degrees, 80% humidity, Standing in my own backyard, begging God to kill me. God did not Take me that day ... He left me there covered in my own fluids to Writhe in the misery my own stupidity had created.

I honestly don't know how I got loose from the wire ...

I woke up laying on the ground hours later. The lawnmower was beside Me, out of gas. It was later on in the day and I was sunburned.

There were two large dead grass spots where I had been standing, and Then another long skinny dead spot where the wire had laid while I Was on the ground still holdng on to it. I assume I finally had a Seizure and in the resulting thrashing had somehow let go of the wire.

Upon waking from my electrically induced sleep I realized a few things:

1 - Three of my teeth seem to have melted.

2 - I now have cramps in the bottoms of my feet and my right butt cheek (not the left, just the right).

3 - Poop, pee, and vomit when all mixed together, do not smell as bad as you might think.

4 - My left eye will not open.

5 - My right eye will not close.

6 - The lawnmower runs like a sumbitch now. Seriously! I think our little sesion cleared out some carbon fouling or somthing, because it was better than new after that.

7 - My nuts are still smaller than average yet they are almost a foot long.

8 - I can turn on the TV in the game room by farting while thinking of the number 4 (still don't understand this???).

That day changed my life. I now have a newfound respect for things.

I don't care what type of humor you like this is funny

I appreciate the little things more, and now I always triple check to make sure the fence is unplugged before I mow.

The good news, is that if a burglar does try to come over the fence, I can clearly visualize what my security system will do to him, and THAT gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling all over, which also reminds me to triple check before I mow.

Credit Goes To The Respective Owner"

[sadwinning]

Devlog 1 (1/25/24): Why This Is Pointless

In my intro post, I mentioned how it would be much easier to map the 12 chromatic notes of Western music to the 3 action buttons and 8 directions of Undertale, and how I won't be doing that for purely aesthetic reasons. I also want to mention why everything I'm doing to my violin is completely stupid.

If you want to follow in my footsteps, you shouldn't do it the way I'm doing it. You probably can't.

My violin is a Yamaha EV-205 five-string electric from the late aughts/early 10's. I recently learned that this violin is no longer in production, so there's no way your standard Joe Schmoe can pick up this tutorial, nor would they want to if they were in the market for an electric violin, because they already sell electric violins that are MIDI controller enabled. You should buy that and follow the software specs of CZR drums and their MIDI-to-controller software partner/whatever. I simply do not want to spend more money on an electric violin when I already have one with the right hardware (individual pickups for each of the five strings). So I will be voiding the warranty that likely no longer exists and busting open my violin to see what I can patch together.

When I busted this component (pictured above) open I immediately found a not-so-complex PCB where I could locate each of the individual string inputs. I have yet to see whether those ports will give me the inputs I need - golly, I have yet to learn how to solder enough to access those ports!! - but the visibility gives me hope. it doesn't look hard, especially for someone who has been low-key interested in soldering for like 15 years (since my Pokemon Gold copy's battery died and I learned the ways to replace it) but I can't say I know exactly what data flows through that part of the circuit and how easy it would be to extract and manipulate.

I've done a lot of research into what I would need to take analog audio signal(s) and transform them into MIDI or some other binary/digital data. The first thing I found was an Arduino library, so I knew this wouldn't be hard. I only have one Arduino (knock-off) and I didn't like the idea of buying four more (one for each string) to get the MIDI values when I would probably be connected to a computer the whole time no matter what.

This led me to where I'm sitting pretty right now, at a Python library (Python being my favorite language) that uses its GitHub .md file to explain why Markov chains are important. Reader, do you know how much I love Markov chains? Did you know that in my sophomore year of college I created a musical AI by programming Markov chains in Python??? How is it that all of my interests loop in upon each other in the same way that my first and only job out of college involved natural language processing in Python just like my senior project where I did language analysis on okcupid profiles???? Is time in fact a flat circle? I don't have time to think about this because I want to program violin to play undertale pleas

Where I'll be starting is with this library and with monophonic input (one note at a time rather than interpreting multiple notes at once e.g. multiple strings played simultaneously) to make a controller of any kind work. But I have a lot of reading to do to see how Markov chains are involved. With it being both Python and linear algebra, I have the capacity to adjust the code to do whatever I want it to do. Given this insane opportunity I can't not do all the research possible to finetune things to my precise desires. If I were satisfied with "good enough", I would be playing monophonic input the whole way through. Let's go insane, boys.

[semper-legens]

59. Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play, by Anne Washburne

Owned?: Yes Page count: 91 My summary: After. People huddle around a campfire, trying to remember an episode of the Simpsons. But this is no idyllic campsite. Something has happened, something that ravaged the world. The survivors are trying to pick up the pieces, keep what they remember alive. But culture warps and changes over word of mouth. What will remain of our world after the end? My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Well, this is something new for this blog. A play! I know, I know, plays are better experienced than read, but a) as far as I know there are no currently-running stagings of this play and b) I supplemented reading the script with watching a version of the play staged by a group who posted it to YouTube, so I have seen an iteration of this. Anyway. Ever since I first heard about it some years ago, this play has deeply interested me. A couple of months ago, a YouTuber I really like posted a video essay about it, which inspired me both to watch it and to read through the play script. It's an odd play. Set shortly after, seven years after, then seventy five years after an unspecified apocalypse, the main thrust of the narrative concerns a small group of survivors attempting to remember the Cape Feare episode of the Simpsons. It turns from an idle pasttime to a paid performance to a ritualistic ceremony over the time periods, and warps and changes as the post-apocalyptic society does. And it was so good.

First of all, I'm in love with how this play is written. Standard sentences, punctuation, and capitalisation are eschewed in favour of a more naturalistic speech pattern that reminds me of how we had to transcribe interviews for English Language classes. Sentences are left unfinished and interjections and filler words are transcribed. It's odd to read on the page, at least at first, but that coupled with actually seeing the dialogue performed leads to a much more realistic flow. You don't just see what they say, you see how they say it, and that betrays some of the thought and motivation behind their actions. It's very slickly done.

Were I a smarter person (or, you know, Kyle Kallgren the aforementioned video essayist) the rest of this post would be devoted to a complex analysis of the play and what it has to say about memory, humanity, capitalism, and the things that will survive after the end. Alas, however, I am not a smarter person, but I shall try nonetheless. The choice to focus around the Simpsons is an intriguing one. The Simpsons, almost accidentally, have become an idealised family of a byegone age - even the show is now quick to point out that the kind of idealised suburbia in which the Simpsons live, where an unqualified man can get a solid union job that supports his entire family on one salary, is a thing of the past these days. For a group of ragged survivors living in the aftermath of a cataclysm, it's no wonder that sort of thing is comforting. And further - in Act Two, the largest part of their performance that we get to see is 'commercials', playacting advertising based around a comfortable, stereotypical middle-class existence. A far cry from bartering batteries for necessities.

The issue of power - as in, electrical - is also highlighted by the text. Batteries are exchanged for goods. Nuclear plants are left unattended and irradiate the land and the people, leaving large parts of America as no-go zones. Lighting in the play is done by natural (or faux-natural) sources; the flickering light of a TV set on an actor's face turns out to just be candles in the shell of the casing. It's something we take for granted here in the present, but it's a vital part of life as we know it. Electrical light is comfort, it's safety. It's stabler than fire - tamed, almost. Without it, we are quite literally shrouded in darkness. And yet, it is one thing that is lacking. And, in the case of the nuclear plants, our past reliance on power damns us. But it's Mr Burns himself who provides the largest embodiment of this theme. Despite not being much of a player in the actual Cape Feare, Mr Burns becomes the major antagonist of the future play, a murderous maniac bent on destroying the Simpsons. It bears repeating that we the audience don't know what ended this world. But capitalistic greed covers a lot of scenarios.

More than that, however, I really enjoyed how achingly human this play is. The first act is heartbreaking, with the survivors desperately trying to remember Cape Feare then being interrupted by the arrival of another survivor, one who opens the audience's eyes to just what has happened here. He is the one who brings in reports from the road, of other settlements…and the list of names. Everyone has a list that they recite, and everyone has a notebook filled with names and fates. It's never quite stated what the deal is, but it's clear that these are friends and loved ones who have disappeared. And the names in the books are those who are known. The name ritual is formal enough that it seems to be a custom in this new world - people wanting to know what happened, wanting closure. Closure that we the audience never get. We see these people, see their desperation and fear in Act Two, and then we hear gunshots and we don't know. It's a short amount of time, and a small window of characterisation. But all the same, we feel for these characters. We want them to be okay - want someone, anyone to be okay. We see ourselves in them. They're not special, not talented, not anything but a bunch of people from the old world making their way through the new. And there's just something special about that.

Next, back to the streets of Yharnam.

[subwaytostardew]

Thinking of some Pokémon related flavour text again and something happened.

Ingo: Hello Farmer. I have to ask, have you ever been to Galar? No? Sorry, its just that I could imagine you with a Galarian Pokémon. I'll have to tell you about Galar some time, they have the second best railway system in the world. First place being the Battle Subway, of course.

Emmet: Hello Farmer. I challenge you to a friendly Pokémon battle, tomorrow at dawn. A 1V1. Be warned, you may be verrry resistant to Electric but Galvantula can counter with Poison and Bug! Huh? You don't have a Pokémon? But I am Emmet! I swear I've seen a Shiny Applin following you around! Strange.

(Junimos make me think of Shiny Applins since they're both apple shaped, I know they're considered fairy tale creatures in Stardew but maybe prolonged exposure to a Ghost-type would allow them to see the little forest spirits?)

Funny you bring up Junimos and people mistaken them as Pokémon…

In Stardew Valley they are basically forest spirits. You go see the wizard etc to be able to read Junimo text and talk and understand the Junimos. The strange creatures in Stardew aren’t Pokémon… (or maybe they are… who knows… no one does) so people outside of Stardew could mistake them. (Which can be dangerous if you ever go to the mines)

One of the many item drops you can give Ingo is Void Essence and Solar Essence basically the Stardew Valley equivalent of souls… which he will give to Chandelure to consume.

As for Junimos well… people don’t see them. Not unless your the Wizard or Abigail.

When you yourself the farmer first see Junimos which is in the first community center event with Lewis you see them try to point them out and well he just thinks your seeing rats.

Ingo and Emmet prob won’t notice the Junimos… Chandelure most definitely will. Ingo small maybe but he is to busy with the railroad alongside Emmet to see them.

Now you as the farmer. You can see the Junimos. You can understand them. And strangely enough…. You can understand the Pokémon too…

The heck did the Wizard give you?!?

When 1.6 comes and we are able to implement non-standardize NPCs sprites. You can interact with Ingo and Emmets Pokémon but instead of hearing their crys you can actually talk to them like a human would to another human.

Think like N from Pokémon BW/BW2

(Plus… it fun and easier dialogue wise to not just type there crys out or repeat there names… or text boxes that say a narrative. Plus we can come up with fun heart events for them!)

Ingo and Emmet have no idea that you the farmer can understand Pokémon and it basically kept as a secret between you and the Pokémon themselves…. Plus.. be kinda a crazy claim to say - I can talk to Pokémon.

Here are some dialogue we have come up with. Of course all the Pokémon have there own personalities.

Just one of the many examples. (Yes I used Dark Mode….) You the farmer can understand the Pokémon everyone else can’t.. and that all thanks to that weird drink you took with the Wizard and saw all the trees…… swirling…..

During heart events where the farmer is with other people with Pokemon around. The Pokemon when speaking will either say there names or sound effect dialogue prompt thing..but there actual translation which you the farmer will hear will be in ()

For example.

Joltik: Hi! Your going to give me that battery right?

Joltik: *Squeaks* *Squeaks* (Hi! Your going to give me that battery right?)

That way when during events.. with say People around.. they will hear the sound of the Pokémon. While you the farmer well… you can hear them talk!

We will be posting an event soon that does have this kind of dialogue as an example.

Hope you enjoy that little tidbit and some dialogue stuff on how we are going to be handling Pokémon interactions.

— ◁ Station Stewardess Kade

[coolcarsntrucksngunsnusa]

We have the standard 6 ft. fence in the backyard, and a few months ago, I heard about burglaries increasing dramatically in the entire city. To make sure this never happened to me, I got an electric fence and ran a single wire along the top of the fence.

Actually, I got the biggest cattle charger Tractor Supply had, made for 26 miles of fence. I then used an 8 ft. long ground rod, and drove it 7.5 feet into the grund. The ground rod is the key, with the more you have in the ground, the better the fence works.

One day I'm mowing the back yard with my cheapo Wal-Mart 6 hp big-wheel pushmower. The hot wire is broken and laying out in the yard. I knew for a fact that I unplugged the charger. I pushed the mower around the wire and reached down to grab it, to throw it out of the way.

It seems as though I hadn't remembered to unplug it after all.

Now I'm standing there, I've got the running lawnmower in my right hand and the 1.7 giga-volt fence wire in the other hand. Keep in mind the charger is about the size of a marine battery and has a picture of an upside down cow on fire on the cover.

Time stood still.

The first thing I notice is my pecker trying to climb up the front side of my body. My ears curled downwards and I could feel the lawnmower ignition firing in the backside of my brain. Every time that Briggs & Stratton rolled over, I could feel the spark in my head. I was literally one with the engine.

It seems as though the fence charger and the piece of shit lawnmower were fighting over who would control my electrical impulses.

Science says you cannot crap, pee, and vomit at the same time. I beg to differ. Not only did I do all three at once, but my bowels emptied 3 different times in less than half of a second. It was a Matrix kind of bowel movement, where time is creeping along and you're all leaned back and BAM BAM BAM you just crap your pants 3 times. It seemed like there were minutes in between but in reality It was so close together it was like exhaust pulses from a big block Chevy turning 8 grand.

At this point I'm about 30 minutes (maybe 2 seconds) into holding onto the fence wire. My hand is wrapped around the wire palm down so I can't let go. I grew up on a farm so I know all about electric fences ... but Dad always had those piece of shit chargers made by International or whoever that were like 9 volts and just kinda tickled.

This one I could not let go of. The 8 foot long ground rod is now accepting signals from me through the permadamp Ark-La-Tex river bottom soil. At this point I'm thinking I'm going to have to just man up and take it, until the lawnmower runs out of gas.

"Damn!" I think, as I remember I just filled the tank!

Now the lawnmower is starting to run rough. It has settled into a loping run pattern as if it had some kind of big lawnmower race cam in it. Covered in poop, pee, and with my vomit on my chest I think, "Oh God, please die ... Pleeeeaze die!" But nooooo, it settles into the rough lumpy cam idle nicely and remains there, like a big bore roller cam EFI motor waiting for the 'go' command from its owner's right foot.

So here I am in the middle of July, 104 degrees, 80% humidity, standing in my own backyard, begging God to kill me. God did not take me that day ... He left me there covered in my own fluids to writhe in the misery my own stupidity had created.

I honestly don't know how I got loose from the wire ...

I woke up laying on the ground hours later. The lawnmower was beside Me, out of gas. It was later on in the day and I was sunburned.

There were two large dead grass spots where I had been standing, and then another long skinny dead spot where the wire had laid while I was on the ground still holdng on to it. I assume I finally had a seizure and in the resulting thrashing had somehow let go of the wire.

Upon waking from my electrically induced sleep I realized a few things:

1 - Three of my teeth seem to have melted.

2 - I now have cramps in the bottoms of my feet and my right butt cheek (not the left, just the right).

3 - Poop, pee, and vomit when all mixed together, do not smell as bad as you might think.

4 - My left eye will not open.

5 - My right eye will not close.

6 - The lawnmower runs like a sumbitch now. Seriously! I think our little sesion cleared out some carbon fouling or something, because it was better than new after that.

7 - My nuts are still smaller than average yet they are almost a foot long.

8 - I can turn on the TV in the game room by farting while thinking of the number 4 (still don't understand this???)

That day changed my life. I now have a newfound respect for things.

I don't care what type of humor you like this is funny

I appreciate the little things more, and now I always triple check to make sure the fence is unplugged before I mow.

The good news, is that if a burglar does try to come over the fence, I can clearly visualize what my security system will do to him, and THAT gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling all over, which also reminds me to triple check before I mow.

[the-firebird69]

Electric vehicles suck they're susceptible to EMP And there are factories that are going to be taking engines out and there are cars that are intact and those cars will be salvaged and you need to have rebuild motors or new ones and we're looking into that as to what to do we are checking to see if we can retrofit and turn them into regular vehicles with gas engines but rebuild motors or new ones and there are cars that are the motor quits that have low miles there's several places that are starting these factories today they're starting them up on a limited basis. And they will be doing this. I'm going to go ahead with it and we're going to start making it work a car with the electric system is a lot harder to knock out than a motorcycle and the system he's talking about is much harder and it is a new system and he wants the government to put out a request for proposal to beign retrofitting imedialty as a study on a new type of electric engine. leaving your transmission in. we agree they make it too complcated and difficult and ridiculous. The vehicle does not need a new transmission that works fine off the same type of horsepower and torque and you don't exceed it and you can put the batteries for the gas tank is it's an ideal place these people are full of **** but nonetheless it's an idea because it'll put more cars back on the road both ideas are good and to rebuild motors is a good idea we know which cars to do and we should open a rehab facility for our area and we're actually planning on doing that coming up very soon actually we have the facility picked out and we have the equipment picked out and we need manpower yes. he did design this electric system and BG has a couple prototypes that actually work and it kind of looks like it's battery powered you have the batteries and they're about 1/3 the size total of the original ones but the original ones are humongous these batteries would be the size of a standard gas tank and yeah they're about 8 inches deep and 3 feet wide and 2 foot wide the other way and weighs it pretty much a lot of weight it's like 200 pounds so you have to put it in a car that can handle it but there are some cars that are midsized cars like the Kia then it would work in and the battery is giant but you don't need the battery and you might wanna make you the half the size that's gigantic but really start out with that battery that size is good it'll work and there's all these **** who want the thing if they just shut their **** mouth for a second I don't know what their damn problem is you want this stupid battery you don't want the battery why don't you go to **** hell and stick it up your **** cut **** **** off and throw it at the Mac proper jesus Christ do you **** annoying So we want someone to try and propose a study for a grant to get these out and test them it goes like 400 miles which is around what it take a gas can do that's what people need to know it's slightly different technology it still uses your terrorist type battery cells There's a few reasons why the electric car doesn't work and one of them is the mileage sucks and the power level sucks. Once again BG needs to increase the size of the motor and he'll say it might run the battery down and we say maybe well we don't think so

Thor FReya Olympus

[stevedeschaines]

Coming Clean on Clean Energy: It’s a Dirty Business

By Kristen Walker August 06, 2024

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are probably aware of the massive push to transition to green energy. The goal is to have wind and solar replace coal and natural gas; the electric vehicle (EV) will supposedly replace internal combustion engines. Directives are coming from the highest office in the land; the current administration has made green energy a large part of its agenda.

We are being told that these technologies are clean and will save the planet from climate change. However, these alternative forms of energy being espoused are riddled with their own problems.

Hidden behind the solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries are some dirty secrets that get swept under the rug and ignored by climate enthusiasts. Fossil fuels are constantly put under a microscope and condemned as an evil destructive polluter; green energy is typically put on a pedestal. Green energy, however, is not as perfect and wonderful as we are made to believe. Yet, we are putting a lot of trust into these energy sources, without considering their ramifications.

The American Consumer Institute just released a report detailing many of the environmental impacts associated with the so-called green energy forms being heavily promoted. The life cycle of all three—the wind turbine, solar panel, and EV battery—involve significant environmental consequences that should not be overlooked and need to be part of the discussion when implementing energy policies.

One of the biggest issues involved with these forms is the extraction and manufacturing processes of various critical minerals that are required for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries. Many underdeveloped nations, where there’s an abundance of minerals, are at risk. The operations and procedures not only overtake land but contaminate surrounding soil and water sources. In the worst cases, this work is accomplished through slave labor.

Various toxins and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, where workers and even nearby communities are potentially affected. Landscape is tarnished and various animal habitats are shrinking and/or experiencing stress. The massive amount of land occupied by both wind and solar may never be recoverable.

China dominates the green energy supply chains, but their environmental standards are subpar. CO2 emissions associated with refineries in China are 1.5 times greater than those in the EU or U.S.

All three energy sources are also creating a huge waste problem. Since any kind of recycling is very limited on a large scale, more than 90% wind turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries end up in landfills. By 2050 it is predicted that used turbine blades will exceed 43 million tons of waste worldwide. Solar waste is predicted to be close to 80 million tons. And with the U.S. projecting 33 million EVs on the road by 2030, that is a lot of batteries to end up in landfills.

Ironically, the same folks who want to charge customers for every plastic bag they use at the grocery store, out of fear of single-use plastics ending up in landfills, don’t seem to have a problem with potentially toxic machinery filling that space instead.

In a penchant for trying to solve one crisis, we are creating others.

Some of the environmental impacts and hazards posed by green energy are far more detrimental than fossil fuels, and yet the latter is often dismissed. Such risks associated with green technologies should actually be an argument against vigorous pursuit of them. 

Each energy source, including fossil fuels, should be considered as part of an all-of-the-above strategy for supplying the necessary energy to power homes, businesses, and the U.S. economy at large. All of them come with some degree of environmental concerns, and each should be weighed and measured—along with costs, logistics, reliability, and geopolitical factors—when developing public policy. Instead of completely trying to phase out fossil fuels, a robust and healthy energy mix ought to be established; we need a balanced approach that does not breed additional problems.

It is past time to come clean on so-called clean energy. The real-life consequences and detrimental effects of it demand more honest conversations and a thoughtful course of action.

Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal

[andyhe]

How to choose an RV solar battery

Wondering how to choose an RV solar battery charger? This is the post for you.

They say the best things in life are free. That’s certainly true when it comes to powering your RV off grid. Instead of paying for earth-unfriendly generator fuel, why not harvest clean and free energy from the sun?

Of course, to do this you’ll need to make an initial investment with an RV solar battery charger. Plus, you’ll need some knowhow to build your own solar setup. Sound daunting? It’s probably easier than you think! We’ll cover the basics below and do what we can to help you get started.

What’s An RV Solar Battery Charger?

Simply put, it’s a solar panel setup that charges your RV battery. Solar panels convert the sun’s rays into electricity. You can store this energy in batteries, and use it to power appliances in your RV.

That can really come in handy when you’re boondocking (parking your RV off campgrounds) or dry camping (RVing without electrical hookups).

So what components will you need for your RV solar battery charger? That depends on how much energy you need, and how long you want to run your appliances. But the basics remain the same:

Solar panel(s)

Charge controller (regulates the current)

Battery (or batteries)

Choosing An RV Solar Battery Charger

Before you choose your solar panels and batteries, figure out how much energy you’ll use in a typical day.

If you run lights and a water pump only, it’s possible you can get by with just 1 solar panel and 1-2 batteries. If you’re looking to plug in lots of gadgets, like cell phones, computers, microwaves, and TVs, 2 solar panels and 2-4 batteries will do the trick.

Get stuck? You can find worksheets online that can help you “translate” your energy consumption into the battery capacity (measured in amp-hours) and solar panel rating (measured in watt hours and volts) you’ll need.

Or, you can  for advice on creating the perfect RV solar battery charger setup for your needs.

Next, we’ll discuss the types of solar panels, batteries, and charge controllers available on the market.

There are also a few other factors to consider, of course. What if the large solar panel you need doesn’t fit on your RV roof? If this happens, you could install several smaller panels instead.

Weather is a factor as well. The bottom line is that solar panels need sun to work. But not every day is sunny! If overcast days are a concern where you travel, look for panels that will still produce power when it’s cloudy.

What about price? In the end, you get what you pay for. So the highest performing solar panels are those with the highest price tag. If having consistent power is top on your list, go for quality panels made by reputable manufacturers.

Best Batteries For Solar Setups

Choices, choices, choices! What kind of battery do you need for your RV solar battery charger? The standard choice is a . But amp-hour rating and the type of battery can vary.

Consider the following:

Amp-hour rating (Ah). The higher the Ah, the more energy stored. Some RVers can get by with 50-100Ah. But if you want to take longer trips or power more appliances, you might want a 125Ah-200Ah (Or, you can hook up more than one battery).

Battery type. You can get a cheaper lead acid battery, or go for “the gold” and get a high-performance LiFePO4 lithium battery. Lead acid may be adequate for those looking to test the waters. But lithium batteries last far longer, use energy more efficiently, and charge faster. They’re also better for the environment. Additional options include AGM and gel batteries, but they don’t hold a handle to lithium.

What Are Charge Controllers?

The last basic component of your RV solar battery charger is the charge controller. Also called regulators, these gadgets control the flow of energy that enters your batteries from the solar panels. They make sure your batteries don’t get overcharged.

There are two basic types of charge controllers: simple and sophisticated. The simplest kind is the shunt controller. It stops energy from reaching the battery once it’s full. The other kind, a series controller, can gradually reduce the energy flow as the battery charges.

What About Portable Solar Setups?

Sometimes you just need a little extra power to charge small but essential gadgets, like your cell phone. Portable solar setups are perfect for this!

They’re also a great introduction into the RV solar battery charger world. You can give them a test run when you don’t want to mess with installing large panels, or aren’t ready to make a large investment yet.

Portable panels unfold like a pamphlet, and you can place them anywhere! (In the sun, of course). Connect them to your battery…and voila! An instant way to charge while off-grid.

Titan Power -battery offers 40W and 20W versions that can charge 12V batteries. You can fold them up and stash them in a backpack. Paired with a lightweight lithium battery, it’s a breeze to take them on a hike or boat trip.

Whether you’re in need of a small portable setup or are searching for the best 12v batteries to accompany your setup, here at Titan Power -battery, we’ve got you covered!

[scentedchildnacho]

I told David a pool crowd is way better here at night then during the day.....I had a stalker that was trying to call something my spot......it's way better to get kicked out by community ownership then by my stalkers plans to see a jail rape....ya know the type that wants to see four armed uniforms use random objects to molest a lady

The democrats have a hard time doing anything until things are shocking enough....

Ya know if it's finally about chaining people up or children getting cancer or unarmed undamgerous and defenseless civilians like women then they finally stop processes

They could have made a decision awhile ago to just not enjoy the executive corporatism as much as something snobbier but it only gets better if I'm under threat of more cop rapes and the cops with serial night stalking habits constantly put up on TV for it

The pool isn't a resort it's a sport pool like it use to be for school districts so I asked David if he actually knew any of these families

Or do they all travel to here?......David said he didn't really know.....

I started realizing it's not just me that has to find them very unfriendly strangers

I confessed to David I just feel very laid over here I want to get to California as soon as possible I don't ever want to spend a winter as cold as Las Cruces ever again it was so cold my hands and feet felt battered with something electric....and I was screaming at shelter staff that I don't care if their given assault and battery records for human trafficking and claiming aid just to sell people very very cheaply

I've thought of surrounding populations are involved and it is just the shelter system and the creepy executive that owns it

I explained otherwise new Mexico is way too awful for migrantcy if you don't have state sponsorship there is no peace it's so awful the worst most unregulated space ever so awful

So the dark people were showing me about work that they go through these weird shock processes so I would stop finding the pool too inexplicable

Pushed back into the water that's the fishing to do though

David thought more lights on the lawn so I said no David please don't God....if it was Alaska where a natural gas economy makes sense near Russia I would say yes but when it's here....you are technically suppose to be allowed to train to see in very dark spaces....

No one can see in the dark anymore?

Everything is light you can train to see very microscopic light levels...

Most people with natural gas here display that their need for schedule causes them homicidal ideation there were several hit and run threats

I'm not sure about locomotion and renewable energy but gas pumps have a lot of personal solar on them

Dermatology most spaces can be sued for taking in excess retail theft then never augmenting their business to a resort standard none of the money stays in the space...

Like this space could really benefit from filters on the outside security lights it's always a cop drama

That's what I have learned about perpetration in my life it can't be provoked if you play the scene or fantasy it wants it's psychopathy just kind of gets bored or better then you and leaves you alone

I told David I was welcomed here but even if it hadn't been shockingly psychologically and emotionally abusive to me in new Mexico I don't want to fit in here...I think about getting a glass ceiling complex and feeling old and trying to be young again but I really wouldn't want it here

Anyway I told her even if the situation wasn't abusive in my world if seasonal one can't stay because it's make believe and others get to go otherwise the united States is a harsh climate

I have had to learn about myself that my relationships are much better if I give others personal freedom....if people may come and go I avoid a lot of the awfulness some of my bad relationships were