#solar-powered boat

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - February 8-14

(I’m finally starting to get better from having had pneumonia for 2+ weeks, hopefully next week’s news should be on time)

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles!

1. Solar-powered device captures carbon dioxide from air to make sustainable fuel

“[The] solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes[.… It] does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight.”

2. How artificial light can boost coral reef recovery

“UZELA is [an autonomous submersible] designed to attract zooplankton […] by emitting specific wavelengths of light. [… In a ”six-month testing period,” it] significantly increased local zooplankton density and boosted the feeding rates of both healthy and bleached coral.”

3. Next-gen solar cells now fully recyclable with water-based method

“The recycled solar cell has the same efficiency as the original one. The solar cell is made of perovskite and the main solvent is water. […] They are not only relatively inexpensive and easy to manufacture but also lightweight, flexible and transparent.”

4. Green walls cool cities and create urban habitats

“The researchers measured a cooling effect of up to 0.6–0.7 degrees Celsius [… which] could help combat the urban heat island phenomenon. […] The researchers [also] found that plant-covered facades hosted over 100 animal species, including insects, spiders, and birds.”

5. Major cause of honeybee mortality can be easily reduced

“If treatment occurs too soon, it may not fully eliminate the mites, allowing them to rebound before the season ends. […] Similar to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, mites that survive mistimed or improperly applied treatments become more resistant to future applications.”

6. Uganda community group restores shea groves and livelihoods

“As part of a larger effort to restore Uganda’s shea parklands, the cooperative has successfully rehabilitated more than 500 hectares (1,240 acres) of degraded land, integrating shea trees (Vitellaria paradoxa) and other native species with maize and sunflower crops.”

7. Senate Renews Commitment to the Great Lakes

“The [Act] represents the most significant federal investment in the health of the Great Lakes, addressing critical challenges such as pollution, invasive species, and habitat restoration. The Great Lakes […] hold 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater[….]”

8. Earth Gets Its Largest Protected Tropical Forest Reserve

“The Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor will […] protect 108,000 square kilometres of primary forest and support 60 million people who depend on the forest for food, energy and jobs. […] Through this approach, the DRC is empowering local communities to protect the forest while fostering economic growth.”

9. Australia’s Rarest Bird of Prey Spotted in Central Australia After 30 Years

“Dr. Henderson’s finding is an encouraging sign of the health of the sanctuary’s ecosystems as well as the bird’s continued migration into new areas. This bird’s presence in the sanctuary is particularly significant as it is the first confirmed sighting in the region since the mid-1990s.”

10. Australian company wins contract to design “hydrogen ready” high speed ferry

“The ferry, the Horizon X, will have capacity for 1,650 passengers and 450 cars, and will be able to travel at a speed of up to 35 knots. […] The ship will also have a specially-designed propulsion system arrangement that repurposes exhaust from the engine to help propel the vessel, in theory reducing its emissions.”

February 1-7 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[moneyisnobject]

"Awakening"

Courtesy: Edvin H Design

[cognitivejustice]

How solar power is changing life in Ecuador's Amazon basin

For more than 40 years, the local Indigenous people, the Achuar, have been advocating to stop oil development, which has ravaged large swaths of the Ecuadorian Amazon. But even as they fought against fossil fuels, gasoline was their only option to light their homes and power the boats tied to their livelihood. This area has the thinnest electric coverage in the country. But now a smattering of solar panels across 12 villages in a couple of Ecuador’s deeply forested eastern provinces are transforming life.

Solar power is shaping how they go about daily life in ways big and small, from how they get to work to how they negotiate their connections to the world beyond the Amazon.

Photo above: A solar-powered electric boat

For generations, young men farmed the land, built huts or left their village to find work outside the jungle. Now solar panels are opening up other options.

In the Kapawi Solar Center, an open structure overlooking the Pastaza River, 20 solar panels power a dozen outlets strapped to bamboo poles. There, technicians such as Óscar Mukucham can charge up and hold workshops on how to install panels.

As a boy, Mukucham, now 23, had visions of solar boats moving through the river. Now he teaches others how to maintain them in the Amazon humidity.

Solar power is also fueling eco-tourism. The Kapawi Ecolodge, a hotel managed by the community, boasts 64 panels that illuminate 10 cabins, the dining room and other hotel facilities for 24 hours a day.

The solar boats are so quiet, they make for ideal vessels for nature tours: They don’t scare away dolphins or birds.

For Canelos, the lamps and panels are enabling a bigger vision: powering the Amazon without scarring it with roads and poles. Solar energy connects them to the world beyond their home, while preserving the ancient traditions that have sprouted from its rich rainforest floor.

“We cannot talk about the fight against extractive activities if we are consuming fuel,” he said. “Just as the sun makes life possible on the planet, it also allows the Achuar to keep their culture alive.”

Source

[cxpowers]

12V Car Jump Starter help you solve the problem of car power failure and unable to start.

[goatman647]

Do you guys think I’m going to get an A?

I had to make a commercial for a school project I hope my teacher enjoys the car boat!!

It only moves if you scrape the oars across the ground or if you’re down hill

[nasa]

5 Unpredictable Things Swift Has Studied (and 1 It’s Still Looking For)

Our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — Swift for short — is celebrating its 20th anniversary! The satellite studies cosmic objects and events using visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Swift plays a key role in our efforts to observe our ever-changing universe. Here are a few cosmic surprises Swift has caught over the years — plus one scientists hope to see.

#BOAT

Swift was designed to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. These bursts occur all over the sky without warning, with about one a day detected on average. They also usually last less than a minute – sometimes less than a few seconds – so you need a telescope like Swift that can quickly spot and precisely locate these new events.

In the fall of 2022, for example, Swift helped study a gamma-ray burst nicknamed the BOAT, or brightest of all time. The image above depicts X-rays Swift detected for 12 days after the initial flash. Dust in our galaxy scattered the X-ray light back to us, creating an extraordinary set of expanding rings.

Star meets black hole

Tidal disruptions happen when an unlucky star strays too close to a black hole. Gravitational forces break the star apart into a stream of gas, as seen above. Some of the gas escapes, but some swings back around the black hole and creates a disk of debris that orbits around it.

These events are rare. They only occur once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our Milky Way. Astronomers can’t predict when or where they’ll pop up, but Swift’s quick reflexes have helped it observe several tidal disruption events in other galaxies over its 20-year career.

Active galaxies

Usually, we think of galaxies – and most other things in the universe – as changing so slowly that we can’t see the changes. But about 10% of the universe’s galaxies are active, which means their black hole-powered centers are very bright and have a lot going on. They can produce high-speed particle jets or flares of light. Sometimes scientists can catch and watch these real-time changes.

For example, for several years starting in 2018, Swift and other telescopes observed changes in a galaxy’s X-ray and ultraviolet light that led them to think the galaxy’s magnetic field had flipped 180 degrees.

Magnetic star remnants

Magnetars are a type of neutron star, a very dense leftover of a massive star that exploded in a supernova. Magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields we know of — up to 10 trillion times more intense than a refrigerator magnet and a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star’s.

Occasionally, magnetars experience outbursts related to sudden changes in their magnetic fields that can last for months or even years. Swift detected such an outburst from a magnetar in 2020. The satellite’s X-ray observations helped scientists determine that the city-sized object was rotating once every 10.4 seconds.

Comets

Swift has also studied comets in our own solar system. Comets are town-sized snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust. When one gets close to our Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing halo.

In 2019, Swift watched a comet called 2I/Borisov. Using ultraviolet light, scientists calculated that Borisov lost enough water to fill 92 Olympic-size swimming pools! (Another interesting fact about Borisov: Astronomers think it came from outside our solar system.)

What's next for Swift?

Swift has studied a lot of cool events and objects over its two decades, but there are still a few events scientists are hoping it’ll see.

Swift is an important part of a new era of astrophysics called multimessenger astronomy, which is where scientists use light, particles, and space-time ripples called gravitational waves to study different aspects of cosmic events.

In 2017, Swift and other observatories detected light and gravitational waves from the same event, a gamma-ray burst, for the first time. But what astronomers really want is to detect all three messengers from the same event.

As Swift enters its 20th year, it’ll keep watching the ever-changing sky.

Keep up with Swift through NASA Universe on X, Facebook, and Instagram. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[elodieunderglass]

Hey bestie whats a narrow boat? I saw you tag that on something you reblogged and I'm pretty curious now!

- Terry Darlington, Narrow Dog to Carcassone

A narrowboat (all one word) is a craft restricted to the British Isles, which are connected all over by a nerve-map of human-made canals. To go up and down hills, the canals are spangled with locks (chambers in which boats can be raised or lowered by filling or emptying them with water.) As Terry says above, the width of the locks was somewhat randomly determined, and as a result, the British Isles have a narrow design of lock - and a narrowboat to fit through them. A classic design was seventy feet long and six feet wide. Starting in the 18th century, and competing directly with trains, canal “barges” were an active means of transport and shipping. They were initially pulled along the towpaths by horses, and you can still see some today!

Later, engines were developed.

Even after the trains won the arms race, it was a fairly viable freight service right up until WW2. It’s slow travel, but uses few resources and requires little human power, with a fairly small crew (of women, in WW2) being capable of shifting two fully laden boats without consuming much fossil fuel.

In those times the barges were designed with small, cramped cabins in which the boaters and their families could live.

During its heyday the narrowboat community developed a style of folk art called “roses and castles” with clear links to fairground art as well as Romani caravan decor. They are historically decorated with different kinds of brass ornaments, and inside the cabins could also be distinctively painted and decorated.

Today, many narrowboats are distinctively decorated and colorful - even if not directly traditional with “roses and castles” they’ll still be bright and offbeat. A quirky name is necessary. All narrowboats, being boats, are female.

After a postwar decline, interest in the waterways was sparked by a leisure movement and collapsing canals were repaired. Today, the towpaths are a convenient walking/biking trail for people, as they connect up a lot of the mainland of the UK, hitting towns and cities. Although the restored canals are concrete-bottomed, they’re attractive to wildlife. Narrowboats from the 1970s onward started being designed for pleasure and long-term living. People enjoy vacationing by hiring a boat and visiting towns for a cuter, comfier, slower version of a campervan life. And a liveaboard community sprang up - people who live full-time on boats. Up until the very restrictive and nasty laws recently passed in the UK to make it harder for travelling peoples (these were aimed nastily at vanlivers and the Romani, and successfully hit everyone) this was one of the few legal ways remaining to be a total nomad in the UK.

Liveaboards can moor up anywhere along the canal for 28 days, but have to keep moving every 28 days. (Although sorting out the toilet and loading up with fresh water means that a lot of people move more frequently than that.) you can also live full-time in a marina if they allow it, or purchase your own mooring. In London, where canal boats are one of the few remaining cheapish ways to live, boats with moorings fetch the same prices as houses. It can be very very hard for families to balance school, parking, work, and all the difficulties of living off-grid- but many make it work. It remains a diverse community and is even growing, due to housing pressures in the UK. Boats can be very comfortable, even when only six feet wide. When faced with spending thousands of pounds on rent OR mooring up on a nice canal, you can see why it seems a romantic proposition for young people, and UK television channels always have slice-of-life documentaries about young folks fixing up their very own quirky solar-powered narrowboat. I don’t hate; I did it myself.

If you’re lucky, you might even meet some of the cool folks who run businesses from their narrowboats: canal-side walkers enjoy bookshops, vegan bakeries, ice-cream boats, restaurants, artists and crafters. There are Floating Markets and narrowboat festivals. It’s generally recognised that boaters contribute quite a lot to the canal - yet there are many tensions between different kinds of boaters (liveaboards vs leisure boaters vs tourists) as well as tensions with local settled people, towpath users like cyclists, and fishermen. I could go on and on explaining this rich culture and dramas, but I won’t.

Phillip Pullman’s Gyptians are a commonly cited example of liveaboards - although they were based on the narrowboat liveaboards that Pullman knew in Oxford, their boats are actually Dutch barges. Dutch barges make good homes but are too wide to access most of the midlands and northern canals, and are usually restricted to the south of the UK. So they’re accurate for Bristol/London/Oxford, and barges are definitely comfier to film on. (Being six feet wide is definitely super awkward for a boat.) but in general Dutch barges are less common, more expensive and can’t navigate the whole system.

However, apart from them, there are few examples of narrowboat depictions that escaped containment. So it’s quite interesting that there is an entire indigenous special class of boat, distinctive and highly specialised and very cute, with an associated culture and heritage and folk art type, known to all and widely celebrated, and ABSOLUTELY UNKNOWN outside of the UK - a nation largely known around the world for inflicting its culture on others. They’re a strange, sweet little secret - and nobody who has ever loved one can resist pointing them out for the rest of their lives, or talking about them when asked to. Thank you for asking me to.

[moneyisnobject]

Selar’s cruise ship "Captain Arctic"

[canmom]

I've been watching Star Trek, and also been learning about boats. Like, a big boat is more stable in the water, so you don't get tossed and turned so much when it's rocked by waves or turning.

Now, on Star Trek, they do the dramatic tilt-y cam and actors flinging themselves around. This makes sense when the ship is hit by weapons, but sometimes they do it when they are navigating asteroid fields and such. The original Enterprise (from the 60s) is 288m long, similar to a modern cruise liner, 127m wide, 73m wide, and 190,000 tonnes. Surely even a high-speed jaunt through an asteroid field would be barely felt on the bridge (which is the tiny raised part in the centre of the saucer)?

Hello anon! You're not wrong that like, there is a lot of artistic license in Star Trek's treatment of astrophysics.

The 'asteroid fields' seen in Wars and Trek are presumably inspired by the asteroid belt in our solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is true that there are a lot more big space rocks in the asteroid belt than there are in much of the rest of the solar system. However, space is really very big so there's a lot of room for big rocks. Spacecraft are routinely able to pass through the asteroid belt without coming anywhere near an asteroid (which is good, because at space velocities, collisions are really catastrophic).

The largest asteroids such as Ceres are nowadays classified as 'dwarf planets'; they might be as big as around 1000 kilometres in diameter, which is about 1/12 the diameter of the Earth. Many other asteroids are also hundreds of kilometres big. With the dimensions you've given me, if the Enterprise collided with such an asteroid, it would be a 'bug on a windscreen' kind of situation and the Enterprise would certainly not come off better for the experience.

However, most asteroids aren't quite so big. Here's a log-linear graph of the size distribution of asteroids:

There's about a million asteroids a kilometre big, and about ten million a hundred metres across; at some point the asteroids become too small for us to track, but I assume this approximately power-law distribution holds down to some small size.

Now, that sounds like a lot of asteroids, but the thing is they're spread across an absolutely enormous region of space. They cover a range of orbital radii of about 1 AU, which is to say the distance between the Earth and the sun, and a range of orbital inclinations about 20 degrees:

So, assuming we had about 10 million asteroids of 100m or bigger, that turns out to be about 1E-27 asteroids of that size per cubic metre of space. Which is to say you'd need to explore a cube of about 900,000km on a side to find even one asteroid that big. Space is really, truly, extremely very big. So, far from this kind of scene (src)...

...you'd be lucky to see even one rock outside the window. As Wikipedia puts it:

Contrary to popular imagery, the asteroid belt is mostly empty. The asteroids are spread over such a large volume that reaching an asteroid without aiming carefully would be improbable.

Now, OK, that's our solar system's asteroid belt. What about in deeper space? The thing is, big space rocks don't tend to just hang out. Our solar system's asteroid belt is presently thought to be a result of Jupiter disrupting the coalescence of planetesimals into a planet during the formation of the solar system. So in general, without a Jupiter, either your big bundle of space rocks has enough kinetic energy to spread out into space like a gas, or it doesn't and their mutual gravity causes them to collapse into a big clump, forming something planetish.

The Star Trek/Wars picture of a bunch of space rocks just kind of floating around doesn't make any sense on astrophysical timescales; about the only way you might see that is if some kind of much bigger rock has very recently exploded, and especially if you're in orbit around something or other which can keep the particles reasonably close together. The rings of Saturn are a great example, consisting mainly of bits of ice smaller than 10m. Saturn's rings are probably the closest place we know to a scifi asteroid field, but they are also incredibly thin, in many parts only tens of metres across.

So in short 'asteroid fields' in the depths of space are kind of not a thing. But what if they were?

On a boat, you are held against the water by gravity; you have various restoring forces, e.g. if the boat dips under water, it gets pushed back out by buoyancy. This causes, in physics-speak, oscillations on various timescales. The dynamics of ships are very complicated, but it has a lot to do with the buoyancy of water rather than collisions with solid objects. Here's Casual Navigation, pretty much my go-to source for any questions about how boats work, explaining the physics of ships rolling, and ways we mitigate that:

Water buoyancy applies a kind of 'soft' force spread relatively evenly across the surface of a ship, so the ship responds mostly rigidly by rolling around, maybe flexing a bit. But when ships actually hit something hard, even something like a sandbank, it tends to go very poorly for them.

In general, a spaceship is not very much like a boat. Space is, notably, a place where there aren't any fluids. Most of the ways that vehicles move on Earth don't really apply in space.

On the ocean, land or even air, objects in motion tend to stop (or at least fall downwards) due to friction and drag, and you need a constant supply of energy to stay moving in a straight line. In space, the opposite is true - you keep moving along your orbit unless you provide energy to change direction. Rocket acceleration is very limited and you try to do as little as possible. With real spacecraft, you mostly move along a ballistic trajectory, applying 'burns' with your rocket at just the right moment to push you onto a new trajectory - or you have a very weak but efficient engine like an ion drive which very gradually nudges you onto the trajectory you want.

In hardish scifi, we can handwave a lot of this complexity away by imagining amazing futuristic technologies like fusion torches and antimatter drives, which allow us to follow 'brachistochrone' trajectories, where you accelerate at something like 1g all the way up to the midpoint of your trajectory and then flip around and slow down. These have their own worldbuilding implications (which is to say the difference between a really fast spaceship and a weapon of mass destruction is basically which way you point it), but it allows you to get on with your plot without having your characters spending years in transit.

Star Trek is not hard scifi, although it sometimes likes to cosplay as it, so trying to apply this kind of standard is a fool's errand. Still, let's consider it. In Star Trek, spaceships move around in two ways. They have something called a warp drive, which allows FTL by distorting spacetime - it is presumably inspired by the Alcubierre metric (edit: no it isn't, it actually predates Alcubierre and he took inspiration from star trek in naming his solution a 'warp drive'), a solution to the field equations of general relativity that allows you to move a 'bubble' of spacetime at FTL speeds. There are many reasons to think the Alcubierre metric wouldn't actually work, or be survivable inside the bubble if it did; how it would interact with matter in the path of the bubble is unclear, but it seems quite likely it would scrape it all up at the front of the bubble and then perhaps release it at the destination in a blast of ultra-high-energy radiation. At least getting hit by asteroids is not a concern...

For slower-than-light travel, Star Trek ships apparently move around with something called an 'impulse drive', which is just a fusion rocket. (We shouldn't ask questions like 'where do you keep the reaction mass' or 'why doesn't the spaceship spin when the force vector is off-axis').

So, as far as space rocks, the big concern is that at high velocities, collisions with any tiny meteorites on your path have more and more energy, much like being shot with a bullet. It's less about shaking the ship around and more about damaging it, because at this kind of scale and energy, rigid things don't tend to stay rigid when they collide. Real solutions to this problem include things like layers of thin 'whipple shields' which break up the meteorite into small fragments before they hit the spacecraft. There's some crazier ideas out there, like spraying hot droplets from your engine's cooling system ahead of the ship to intercept dust grains and catching them with magnetic fields as you accelerate forwards.

I don't know that much Trek lore, but my understanding is they have some kind of magic 'shield' that prevents damage when they git hit by weapons. This presumably stops any space rocks from smashing right through the decks. But as you observe, the rapid camera shaking doesn't make a lot of sense either: it suggests some kind of shock going through the structure of the vessel. The ship is somehow getting hit by something with enough momentum to shake it violently but not throw it off course or severely damage it. That's not really how structures on this kind of scale work.

Of course, the main purpose of the screen shake is dramatic: you need to convey the characters are in a dangerous situation, and if they're all just sitting calmly in the set watching things play out on the screen, that doesn't really 'sell' it. Just like a wrestler pretending to be injured, you need your actors to convey the stakes of the space battle, and throwing themselves around the set is a very cheap way to do it. The asteroid field serves as a scifi version of a choppy sea or ice floe, adding an extra element of constant tension; it doesn't really matter that it doesn't make sense.

Much the same dramatic techniques are still used in more recent scifi, even relatively hard scifi such as The Expanse - observe the use of camera shake (though milder than in Star Trek), reaction shots, characters helpfully providing commentary ('they were expecting that', 'I'm putting us into a spin'). Or this scene; we link the action 'outside' (the full 3DCG space scenes) to the action 'inside' by changes of lighting (there's no real reason for turning the lights blue during combat except that it looks cool), bullets punching through the ship (so scary), and characters getting pushed around by g-forces. The plot contrives for the ships to do a close flyby while strafing each other with machine guns. This is a thrilling scene, and it relies on much later iterations of the 'shake the camera' concept - to link what is happening 'outside' to the characters we care about 'inside'.

Here is a breakdown of what is apparently the first, iconic Star Trek battle scene from which everything else follows:

This sequence is essentially taking most of its cues from submarine movies such as The Enemy Below: the two ships are attempting to figure out where the other is and get in an advantageous position. It is mostly a prediction battle between the two captains, both presented as honourable gentlemen types in what is essentially a duel. The mechanics of the ships is largely based on thin scifi skins over boat stuff.

In general, Star Trek takes various measures to make the captain and bridge crew the main people who 'matter' to a story, which keeps the cast and sets to a manageable size. The thing is, of course, that modern ships are much bigger than the sort of historical ships that could be imagined to be led by a charismatic captain having heroic exploits. There are thousands of people supposedly on board the Enterprise, but you wouldn't know it from the way the characters act.

It's notable that the inspiration here is a WWII movie, pretty much the last time big ships fought big ships. (Star Wars also takes most of its cues from WWII). The principle activity of modern warships seems mostly to be making a political gesture by floating around somewhere, maybe launching some missiles or planes. It's been a long time since we've seen ships having battles with other ships, and ships were a lot smaller then. A military officer is, as I understand it, someone who's a lot more like a politician or company manager, whose job is to keep a large and complex organisation running smoothly. (No doubt you remember the old saying about logistics and tactics.)

So more than the dubious engineering of having the bridge rattle around, I think 'the bridge crew are all charismatic geniuses from whom all the action flows' is the really big liberty that Star Trek takes with its storytelling, from which a lot of other things follow.

Everything in the sequence from Balance of Terror is designed to ratchet up tension for the bridge officers as much as possible - and we see the screen shake and actors getting thrown about here too. In a naval battle, this makes sense: a big explosion near your ship will cause a wave in the water which will rock the ship. In space... not so much. For example, a big shake happens when a nuclear weapon goes off near the Enterprise. A nuclear weapon deployed in space is mainly there to cause heating, not to push things around. But the big moves of the battle are punctuated by everyone getting thrown about: it's a way of saying 'something important just happened'. If the nuke went off and we didn't hear anything, but Kirk was just like 'ok cool, that missed us, good job' it would feel less significant.

Over time I'm sure this device got diluted down until nearly anything would result in people flopping about! But yeah, tl;dr: it is purely a dramatic convention leaning hard on WWII movies, not something that makes a lot of within-the-fiction sense if you think about it at all.

What would space battles look like in real life? We can only speculate, of course, it may never come to pass at all. But if it does, probably it's going to be more a story of shooting expensive missiles at extremely long range to hit things that are too far away to see without a telescope, rather than thrilling close-range dogfights or tense naval mind games. And with humans being very squishy and not taking well to extreme acceleration, you probably want to avoid having them on your ships if you can help it. Which is a bit of an obstacle for a dramatic presentation, unless you want to focus on the disconnect between the comfy air-conditioned drone control room and the horrible destruction being wrought on the ground - and honestly that is a very relevant thing to want to do in the present era.

Plenty of people would still presumably be in harm's way in the space war. But the problem is that in general, the story that people want to tell with military fiction is about heroic characters whose individual efforts make a difference to the course of The War. Not just someone having a bunch of meetings full of incomprehensible acronyms and then randomly dying to a missile that was launched from the other side of the solar system that their side's interceptor system failed to catch.

[ganondoodle]

so, inspired by the warm welcome the captain received with that rough doodle i posted, i made an updated design for Ki'ita as well (basic and with clothes)

i removed the piercings she had bc considering that they spend the majority of their time in arctic waters i think having metal directly in your skin is a bad idea, no matter how thick your blubber is; i also gave her typical white markings a green hue bc ... i liked how it looked and makes them stand out a little more

(i will not repeat what i wrote on the post about the captain but wanted to add a bit of more info about Ki'ita herself)

(i dont have ALL of their backstory done yet but) the captain and Ki'ita worked together in another organization, one in which the father of the captains child also worked at, before being betrayed and barely managing to escape, after which the both of them founded their pirate crew (possible name is the Solar Pirates bc of their solar powered boat stuff); since the captain had her daughter shortly afterwards Ki'ita managed most of the organisational matters at first, including the construction of their base on an abandoned island they had initially fled to

over the years they invented the solar powered ships that allowed them to gain control over a large part of an important trade route, leaving normal ships (mostly) alone but attacking those of hunters and similar, rescuing demons and mutants, even some humans from them, most of which also join the crew and it quickly lead to them becoming their own little community

Ki'ita does not like to spend alot of time among large groups of people, no matter how much she cares about them, and her originally being from norther lands gave her the idea to explore, and if viable, do underground missions in those norther areas to disrupt the infrastructure the hunters had built in recent years and overall keep the crew informed about things that may otherwise stay hidden; with each of their travels her time absent from the base increased but the patience of the captain is wearing thin so its likely a serious talk is underway on Ki'itas third solo mission she nearly died due to entanglement in abandoned nets made by hunters from an unknown material that she could not break, the massive scars on her tail especially come from that, only surviving bc the date they were supposed to return to the crew had passed and the captain grew to worried about her and made the entire crew rush into an emergency search, including the captain herself and her toddler, who were not suited for the cold climate just like the rest of crew, taking a huge risk that Ki'ita still feels ashamed of for causing; they stayed within the base for a whole year afterwards, not just to recover but also as a silent apology, taking time preparing herself to ensure theyd not get into a situation like that again

(before departing on their next mission the captain gifted her a sword with the blade made from the material of the net, a wooden handle, bc of the cold, and a blue wrap around it reminiscent of the captains striking blue teeth; a reminder of what had happened, a means to defend herself when their strength and teeth are not enough, and also a promise to always return again)

the oldest members of the crew know Ki'ita well and treat her like an old friend, among the newer members she has more of a .. cryptic status, the mysteriously absent vice-captain who only appears every few months or so out of thin air, throws a big party, sleeps for a few days and then vanishes again, the only hint to when they will return soon again being the captain getting noticably grumpier

(OC art, Ki'ita, she/they)

[scotianostra]

On March 3rd 1883 three hundred inhabitants of the remote Shetland island of Foula were on the point of starvation as the first supply boat of the year reached the stormbound community.

Foula, often described as the "Edge Of The World" is our most remote inhabited island. It is situated in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 20 miles to the west of the Shetland mainland. It is an island of crofting townships, breath-taking sheer cliff drops, and a wealth of wild flowers and wildlife.

Over a century ago, in 1881, Foula had a population of 267, mostly employed in fishing...at the last census in 2001 that figure had dropped to just 38.

On March 3rd 1883 the Shetland Times published this;

The Weather and Mails – Foula

Nine weeks have now expired since our last mail was landed, and all our resources are almost exhausted. Sugar and tobacco have been all done for more than a fortnight, and tea, coffee, etc, are now done also. Those who had a little meal to spare have helped those who had none, a thing often done in Foula, but if the weather does not moderate we will soon be all alike. The boat has been in readiness now for some time to go to Walls for supplies, and as the weather has become a little more moderate today they are going to make a start, so we hope that they may get safe through, and a chance to return again soon. But we doubt if the mail boat will be able to cross today yet, as the wind still inclines to the westward.

There isn’t much more than this about their plight, but it seems that same day they breathed a sigh of relief as a boat must have made it to Mainland and back successfully.

Today crofting as well as fishing are the main activities, half the population living at Hametoun in the south east and the remainder to be found at Ham near Ham Voe on the east coast. The island is not connected to any mainland electricity grid system. In 1987 a community electricity scheme was constructed, comprising a 3.3kV island grid which linked diesel generators, a wind turbine and a hydroelectricity scheme to the island’s properties. This scheme gradually fell into disrepair and has undergone a major refurbishment, funded primarily through grants.

Before refurbishment, the entire island's power was supplied by one of the two diesel generators which operated between approximately 7.20am and 00.30am. That’s not to say they were without power for the, just under 7 hours the generator is off, a battery/inverter system was installed between 2006 and January 2007, a solar charging array helps top up the batteries as well . The system was fully commissioned at the beginning of March 2007 and already the islanders not only have continuous power ( instead of the previous 17 hours per day) but are noticing considerable savings in diesel fuel use. Since diesel has to be shipped in by ferry (and often the weather is too bad for the ferry to run for up to 3 weeks on end) this of huge value.

An interesting feature of the island's people is that they still observe the old Julian calendar, replaced in 1752 in Britain by the present Gregorian system which deleted 11 days from the year. Remote areas of the country kept to the old calendar, adding an extra day in 1800, which was a leap year, and some parts of Shetland continued to observe festivals 12 days after the dates in the new calendar. The most remote areas kept to the old calendar longest, and the people of Foula still celebrate Christmas on 6 January and New Year's Day on 13 January

Travel to the island is by sea or air and is completely dependent on suitable weather conditions.

A wee bit more, and a short video can be found at the link below.

[cognitivejustice]

Food, fertiliser, fuel … seaweed has been a life force for centuries. On a coastal foraging trip in Pembrokeshire, we discover it’s now behind a new green initiative in Wales

 A happy combination of increased environmental awareness and more people seeking vegan alternatives has taken seaweed mainstream. It’s estimated that the industry in Europe will be worth €30bn by 2030, with seaweed already used for food, plastic alternatives, biofuel, fertiliser and cosmetics. In Asia, it’s always been a dietary staple, but in Welsh cuisine (despite the earliest written record of seaweed eaten here dating from the 12th century), it’s lost favour in recent years

A new collection of chefs and farmers has started to change that. I meet Jonathan Williams the next morning in driving rain at the Freshwater West Beach seaweed hut. A tent-like building that juts bravely into the horizon. This is the last survivor of a group of about 20 that were used to dry seaweed in the early 20th century, and it was this hut that first inspired Williams (the founder of the Pembrokeshire Beach Food Company and the solar-powered seaweed boat kitchen, Cafe Môr) to rediscover a taste for seaweed. Laver seaweed has been eaten in Wales since at least the 17th century.

[marsprincess889]

About Bharani

Fate, The female and Desire.

Venus ruled, Mars's sign, Rahu's birth, Saturn's debilitation.

A kind of love letter to myself and other bharanis, especially bharani moons.

So, aren't we amazing? 😄 jk, but in all seriousness, I have some opinions and want to express them.

We're mleccha(outcaste) and venus ruled. What the hell is that? We're precious, that's the truth.

If there is one nakshatra that caters to females exclusively, this has to be it. This is no male territory. They wouldn't even understand. They don't. Think of how helpless they are when a female is birthing, how clueless they are about what menstruating feels like. We know some things have to be gatekept, for our sake. That's what we are about: guarding, protecting, gatekeeping, and we do it harshly, mercilessly, there's no other real way of doing it anyways.

I want to talk about what i think Bharani nakshatra is truly about: Fate.

Fate, choicelessness, being at the mercy of higher beings, authority, hierarchy...

Bharani's symbol is widely known to be the yoni(female sexual organ), a gateway to another world. Another symbol is the boat. In Greek mythology, souls were transported to the underworld via a boat. In various cultures, when a person died, people would put the corpse on a boat and let it burn while it floated away on water. Bharani-death association is no news, but why are females the key to all this?

After the freedom in Ashwini, the Sun's exaltation, we come to restraint, and not restraint from our own will, but the restraint we have no choice but to accept. This is the first nakshatra where we see the female. This is Saturn's debilitation, and amidst all this restraint we have the birth of planet Rahu, the birth of desire. Makes for a thrilling combination, does it not? While the male is cerebral, solar, the female is material. She IS the nature. While the male does, female is. The male's the user, the female's the used, and she can be used unfairly, poorly, incorrectly. This is the place where the female gets her revenge. Bharani is like a protection mechanism for ladies, she's given the right to refuse and if that right is violated, the will get her revenge. I'd say she has the power, but that would be wrong, because she IS power.

After all, all that male energy needs grounding, or it will disperse, that's why the female and her body, as well as mother nature that we all live on, are vessels_ material manifestations of the male energy that they hold. Bharani is about the rules that the universe is governed by, the unchangeable rules, the simple truths that have to be accepted. When you realize that the female perfection can be so easily ruined by the incorrect use of male energy, the choicelessness gains a whole new meaning in this context. It's the female that is choiceless, she's simply replicating the energy given to her on the material plane, giving it a shape, its proper shape, and if they don't like what they see, the blame should not be placed on the feminine.

So the female is the material and the rules,the boundaries, the limitations. That's why, in the most stereotipical way, many men fear women or are annoyed by them. The fate cannot be escaped, fortunately or unfortunately, and it does not really care what any individual thinks, it's much bigger than that.

Mythologically, various cultures have attributed fate to the feminine. The fates in greek mythology, three women with their threads of human fate, are one one of them. Another one that comes to mind is the norse goddess Frigg. Although I wouldn't coorelate her to Bharani, I think it's interesting that the highest standing(debatable) Norse goddess has a spinning wheel and a spindle, and it had been said that she knows the fate of everyone and eveything but keeps silent. Another interesting example would be Arianrhod from Welsh mythology. Her name literally means "The Silver wheel". Her various symbols include the tools used for weaving. The wheel-fate coorelation is apparent, and it's also interesting that fate is something to be "weaved" in all these mythologies I've mentioned.

The movie Brave(2012) comes to mind, where the rebellious princess Merida wants to change her fate, without any spoilers, there's a scene in the end where she has to repair a tapestry to avoid some disaster. She also has a tumultuous relationship with her mother, something that is also closely connected to Bharani. A really good example of this is the movie Ladybird starring Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalfe, both Bharani moons.

Now we come to the part where I mention my personal life. As Bharani moon my relationship with my mother has been chaotic and full of tension, it's not exactly easy to talk about or explain. I've also noticed this in almost every Bharani person I ever knew. We always have that passion to stand up to authority and injustice, and it frequently leads to quarrels.

TRIGGER WARNING (gaslighting)

So I always thought that the gaslight gatekeep girlboss term was very Bharani. We've discussed the gatekeeping part, the girlboss part is obvious, and about gaslighting... the yoni is called "the great deluder"(source_claire nakti. Had to credit her!).

I want to talk about the movie Tangled and about Rapunzel's tale in general. The original story goes like this: A couple want a child(that venus, rahu's birth, desire theme) and the wife is pregnant(another bharani symbol) and she's craving a plant- rapunzel, that grows in their neighbor's garden(again, the desire-craving theme). Their neighbor is a sorceress. The husband ultimately steals the rapunzel, but he is caught by its rightful owner. They strike a deal: he can take all the rapunzel he wants in exchange for the baby. The man agrees.

After some time, the baby girl is born, and the witch comes to claim her. She names her Rapunzel, after the plant, and eventually, when she's twelve, locks her up in a tower. Let's pause for a moment to note the fact that we already have the Bharani themes of karma, cause and effect, desire and now claim and ownership(bharani, as the first venus-ruled nakshatra often tries to claim things and label them as their own and then gatekeep it harshly, just like the sorceress in this story. It's also interesting that the OWNED is also feminine).

Now, I really relate to Rapunzel. I also feel like I'm always missing something and that I could attain if only i could escape my current circumstances(the tower). Despite this state, I'm also full of desire and enthusiasm. When I was 8 (?) I won the tickets for my family to the premier of Tangled at my friend's birthday party. I obviously loved it(I still do), loved the story, the animation, THE MUSIC, Eugene... but never did I ever imagine that it would be so emotionally relevant to my life 12 years later. I kinda cracked the code and realised why I love it so much, it's cause she's basically me, and to be honest, she's every human in the truest, simplest way possible.

Anyways, let's continiue wuth the story. Rapunzel is locked in and while she's safe from the world, she's not safe from her "mother". Here I want to move over to the movie Tangled, but before that I'll finish the original. A prince finds her, they become lovers behind the sorceress's back, she eventually finds it out because Rapunzel can't keep her mouth shut, she cuts off Rapunzel's long golden hair and exiles her. When the prince comes to the tower he is greeted by Dame Gothel instead of Rapunzel, she tells him he's not to see Rapunzel again, he falls from there into the rose bushes and blinds himself. After years of wandering, he and Rapunzel finally find each other, Rapunzel's tears heal his blindness, they go to his kingdom and live happily ever after. Now, to Tangled.

The relationship between Rapunzel and and Gothel in Tangled is explored well enough for the audience to realize that she's abusive and a gaslighter(watch cinema therapy on youtube, they have a video about Tangled. They're also very wholesome). She's lying to her to keep her to herself, not really caring about her at all. The way Rapunzel feels misunderstood by the person who raised her feels very personal to me. This theme of gaslighting is very Bharani, as well the theme that love conquers all which is prevalent in the original tale. Also, I think that the damsel in distress archetype is very Bharani, as is the princess in the tower trope. She is power herself, so she's this completely passive power, waiting to be seen and be of use, longing for the other side while being trapped(saturn's debilitation). Bharani is about that leap of faith, to approach the female, to stand up to authority, to be brave, to follow your heart...

My another point is what drives these actions, which is desire and love. Overcoming fear through desire is the theme of Bharani. That's the very basis of life. There are tons of things to be wary of, but if we had no desire, no lust for life, we might not have lived at all. It's no secret that life and death, or birth and death, nourish each other. It's simply a matter of time(saturn, the material. The illusion of time is nessecary for life, limitations are nessecary for life, as bharani teaches us, the point is, are your limitations correct for you and your desires?), it's a process created by the illusion of time, and all that is driven by desire. While analyzing the tale of Rapunzel, I've noticed that most people focus on her long golden hair, ignoring what this tale is truly about, which is destiny, karma, cause and effect, bravery, how desire can lead to actions that have undoable consequences, how helplessly we are driven by desire.

One of my favourite movies, Tristan + Isolde (2006) is about the famous couple written about in medieval texts. They live in a cruel world but they're still driven by love, even though everyone and everything around them urges them towards restraint. They choose the limitation based on their hearts, knowing of the consequences that they would most likely have to face. I won't spoil it for you, but there's a quote in the end that i think really represents the essence of Bharani, at least, from the human perspective: " I don't know if life is greater than death, but love was more than either." This is very poweful. Life and death are just opposite sides of the same coin, death leads to birth, birth leads to death, and it's all driven by desire, it's all driven by love. And whether or not we have choice in all of this, we still simply have to accept the truth, we have to accept our truest limitations, as that is only way of growth and self-realization.

I'll leave you to that movie, that quote and this song. Love all of you, take care ❤

Please, interact with me. Like, reblog, COMMENT, especially if you're bharani, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[seat-safety-switch]

My house is on the migratory route for ducks. Every fall, and every spring, there's a bunch of noisy ducks flapping over my home, quacking their nightmare noises. There's poop, sure, but the bigger problem is all the lost sleep. Quack, quack, quack, all night long.

At first, I figured I would be a good global citizen about it. We're all part of the same ecosystem, and ducks have just as much of a right to be here as anyone else. As you have been trained to do with so many other things in today's world, I put up with it. I bought noise-cancelling headphones, I set up a noise-cancelling fan, and I hired a guy to play the cymbals all night in my backyard to scare them away. Nothing doing: it turns out the sound of cymbals crashing makes ducks extremely horny, and I had to find a new cymbal player, plus also settle with the old one in court for his (valid, but disgusting) workman's injury claims.

The next tactic was simple redirection. I put a kiddie pool in the dog park down the hill, filled it with water, and left a few loaves of dumpster-dove bread out to attract the fowl. This seemed like it would work great, until I remembered that the ducks are generally bright enough not to fall for a trap that involves getting eaten by dozens of hungry Schnauzers. Two-nothing, then.

Ultimately, I hit upon the right solution while doing something else entirely. There's a very expensive lake community a few minutes away from my house, and while I was there raiding their dumpsters, I noticed that there was a perfectly good pedal-driven swan boat in the trash. Some kids had set off some fireworks in it, so it was a little singed in places and melted in others, and surely no longer watertight. What it did have, though, was duckness.

With help from a gas-powered go-kart frame, a GPS unit from one of the self-driving delivery robots that I "accidentally" struck with my car to receive free burritos from, and about four nights of banging on it with a wrench, I soon had a duck decoy of a whole new kind. It worked better than I ever could have imagined, luring the ducks away from their prescribed flight path and directly onto the highway.

There's just one flaw: the go-kart ran out of gas about an hour into the trip. I went to go get it back, because I'll need it for the fall, but a protective swarm of vicious waterfowl surround their wounded-but-huge brethren at all times. It just goes to show you that electric cars are the future. If I had solar-powered this sucker instead, I bet I could have run it on the interstate for like a day or two before the accumulated poop blocked out the light.

[comicaurora]

thoughts on Castlevania: Nocturne?

HO BOY WHAT A RIDE

ok to start off, the short list of things I wasn't a huge fan of

The dialogue was a little bit wack in places; Richter's extremely badass "there's something you've forgotten about belmonts, I'd forgotten it too" line fizzling out into "ok I was gonna do a one-liner but eh fuck it" was a pretty representative example. Kinda snapped me out of the scene when I was otherwise hella invested

Erzsebet's dumb onion haircut

this is a nitpick but solar eclipses are only visible from very small areas of the earth because the moon's shadow is much smaller than the earth so even if Erzsebet is magically holding the moon in place it'll only produce eternal night in like a third of france

castlevania let even one mom survive a season challenge 2k23

On to the good stuff!

Every character, even the nastiest antagonists, being clearly and consistently motivated by core traits that sometimes lead to them switching between opposing and helping Team Good Guy, I lost it when Olrox smoked his way into Casa Good Guy to give them a plot device in the most unnecessarily threatening way possible

Love that Richter's brand of snark is a blend of Trevor and Sypha's, he's just as sassy as Trevor but all his quips show Sypha's chipperness. Also love that he copes with the Belmont Trauma by constantly deflecting and light-heartedly downplaying The Horrors until he finally cracks

Maria's cute lil pokemon

Richter getting his magic back!! What a beautiful scene, what good animation, what powerful shots

Richter's unique fighting style! As soon as his magic comes back it's All Throwing Hands All The Time and I really appreciate how anime protagonist he is about it

ALUCARD'S RETURN

Edouard's singing being so good it keeps giving people their souls back, also one of the most gorgeous night creature designs ever put to paper

Annette's entire deal is so profoundly powerful and I love how they're using her ancestral magic to expand on the ramifications of Castlevania's "all legends are true" undercurrents

This show feels extremely focused on the specific political landscape of the historical period it takes place in unlike Castlevania's more loose historical setting

The THEMES of colonialism and vampirism being one and the same

Olrox being like "oh you want to make a new world empire of absolute conquest? heard that one before" and somehow none of the other bad guys pick up on the subtext of "and it was FUCKING BAD"

Sekhmet-Erzsebet's cape shoulder-halo thing being the Egyptian sun-on-a-boat symbol is subtle and it slaps

"who's dracula" lmao

[aliteralchicken]

i do think Tim has redbirded that murder shack boat, we already know it’s got a computer and dna analyzer built in the kitchen and everything but I think he’s gone further

you’re telling me Tim drake who made his skateboard go seventy mile an hour (by I’m pretty sure it was powered by laughing gas?) and had his whole ass safehouse boobytrapped into a hidden bunker via trapdoor trapfloor, hasn’t rigged that shit to be a certified tank on the water? I don’t believe you

you could tell me that floating fire hazard could fly by a combination solar power and a comically large fan and I wouldn’t question it I’d just go yeah he’s a weirdo what about it, surprised he hasn’t added another popcorn machine yet