#was working on a smaller scale this time

[aceofturtles]

Putting Up the Decorations

Please enjoy this little poem. <3

I don't have a lot of time to do Christmas stuff this year, but I thought some poetry might be an easy way to participate in all of the festivities. {:

Transcription:

Up go the stockings of “E” and “C,”

Up go the lights on the Christmas Tree,

Down comes the snow on old London-town,

The skies turn grey, and there’s white on the ground.

Right! There’s the angel up on the bough,

at the top of the tree, looking all around,

Down at the presents wrapped red and green,

Down at the candles, that flicker and gleam.

Over at the lovers in the doorway too,

Under the mistletoe— 

SMOOCH!!

@dbdayuletide

[galactaknightyaoi]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GALACTA KNIGHT!!!! And congratulations to Meta Knight for experiencing the Cain Instinct for the first time.

Galacta Knight, as you might've been able to tell already, is one of my favorite characters, and KSSU is one of my favorite games (the original SS was my introduction to Kirby!) so I wanted to go all out. Happy day, old man. I pray for at least 20 more years.

Oh, and don't worry! He's not upset about the cake smash, he thinks it's funny. And he got back at him.

As for the in-universe explanation for there being 16 candles in his cake?

... 500+ didn't fit in safely.

The birthday boy and his family were just a bit too flammable.

[delphi-shield]

my fave thing is seeing people describe raccoon city as a huge city and it's like. that is a town with a population of 100k. i understand the portrayal is wack but literally it's a town of 100k people.

that is, at best, a mid-size town. they got lucky and were selected as a pilot program for a subway system that never got rolled out to the rest of the us because our infrastructure is garbage. umbrella put their lab there BECAUSE it's unassuming. everywhere we walk through in re2 and re3? that's just downtown. the rest of the city doesn't look like that. it's wide roads and cospes of businesses. chris leans over jill's desk in the morning and asks, "did you see they're building something on the corner of north and main?" and jill doesn't even look up because "it's probably another bank."

when rebecca, fresh out of college, selects STARS out of all the organizations vying for her talent, people scratch their heads. she could be living somewhere much more glamorous. somewhere you don't have to drive 45 minutes to find something to do. but rebecca sees potential in everything. she's got a real sixth sense for when a place is about to blow up.

[blackwallmancer]

Tiny DOS2 Ifan amigurumi be upon ye

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy

Imperial space opera trilogy

a soldier who was once a starship AI with thousands of bodies but was betrayed and is now a single human body, encounters one of her old lieutenants on an ice planet and helps her while on her mission of vengeance

in book 2&3 she becomes part of a new ship, protecting a remote system & becoming familiar with the different people & culture while discovering injustices, politics, and murder

interesting cultures, characters, and use of a singular pronoun (she)

[jakamores]

Okay, here's something a bit different. This project was actually from way back at the end of 2020-start of 2021. It was a pretty ambitious idea that I got stuck on right when it was nearing completion.

I got stuck on the lighting/shadows, shelved it, and then never got around to doing the finishing touches (the shading is still unpolished if you squint/look at certain parts). Honestly though, it's still pretty good, and I'm proud of it, so I figured I may as well post it anyway.

[svampira]

i think im going to try and make longer comics about my ocs' contained stories next

[ssspringroll]

very pleased with how it WORKS though, even if the actual braid chunk needs more tweaking shape-wise. check it out, no need to worry about stretching it out super long if you want a longer braid. dont need to lop off the ends if you want a shorter one. it just goes along with the length of the curve :)

[boopboops22]

Yall i've spent the past 6 hours making a (nearly) to scale bonnethead shark sculpture. Also I have to wake up for school in 5 hours

[loumauve]

Obligatory but no less meaningful honesty hour ask: what is one pretty cool thing that's happened today in your life?

I managed to remember the magic-circle start for the new crochet project (a dice bag for my cousin who has turned out to be a DnD nerd to my absolute delight) and figure out the amount of stitches I need to increase by in each new round.

which.. is all stuff I've known before, and done a bunch of times, it's just been over a year since I last seriously worked on anything crochet related, so getting back into it and figuring out some vague idea of a pattern that might work for a two-layer bag with scale stitches on the outside layer.

crochet in the round requires a forever-surprisingly high and tiring amount of math to figure out how many stitches you need for those and where to place them etc etc etc, so getting this right on my first attempt in a long while has been a real good feeling

[smuclge]

jumping through all these fucking hoops to try and get paid leave is genuinely about to turn me into the fucking joker

[crystalkitty1220]

Welcome back to tumblr! Hope you enjoyed your break

It was very stressful. Ended up failing the marking period for English, but not by as much as I was failing before. Could still pull up the overall grade by the end of the semester.

[captorations]

what if i listened to "we are one" from lion king 2 and mentally recontextualized it to be about camilla and palamedes and paul. what then. what fucking then.

[arolesbianism]

I've been playing oni all day again and I'm rotating various dupe hcs in my mind... Might take a stab at designing some random dupes later to fuck around and wait nvm it's past midnight god damnit

[foldingfittedsheets]

When deciding who to work for there is a sliding scale of employers that goes from lil mom and pop shops up to corporate monoliths. I have worked at both ends of the spectrum and I can pretty definitively say that tiny businesses are hands down the most insane employers.

The sweet spot is a place that has like 10-20 stores; that’s the best possible work environment. They’ll be polished enough to have protocols that make work structured, but not so bogged down with bureaucracy that nothing can ever get done.

This story is not from that sweet spot. This story is from my time working at Oil and Vinegar. Now, like many little franchise stores, the idea was solid. There was on tap imported olive oil and vinegar and it was really delicious. Top shelf. Unfortunately, each location was like the Wild West because owners varied wildly.

My owner was the human embodiment of Mr. Krabbs. His eyes were just constant dollar signs. Throughout my training he informed me of the price of every single piece of equipment I touched and how much it cost to replace it.

He had cameras set up to watch us, and an app on his phone to access the live feed. He’d call us to ask what we were doing when he’d just checked a camera to make sure we were being honest.

Now, the trouble was he had two locations. His location further south did amazing. It was way more centrally located and got three times the foot traffic. The one I worked in was in the snottiest mall possible in Arizona and consequently the rent was through the roof.

It was not going well for my store. We didn’t get as much traffic, so there was only so much I could do in a day. I could dust, sweep, and wait for customers. I read a lot and was frank when he called to interrogate me. I always asked for additional tasks but he never had any. What could I do to prop up a failing business?

But this man was convinced there was some Secret Reason that the store I was in was doing worse. He crunched numbers, looked at staff, and eventually hit upon the most insane possible solution.

We used too much toilet paper.

We were probably stealing toilet paper! Bleeding him dry one single ply square at a time! How dare we need to use the bathroom?! His south location used half as much toilet paper as we did, we must be thieving little monsters!!!!

Friends. The south location was populated entirely by men. My location had three people on staff who had to sit to pee. It was so blindly transparently the source of the discrepancy but this man was convinced we were making off with toilet paper to bankrupt him.

So he implemented what he believed to be an entirely reasonable response to this base treachery. We were allowed to have one roll of toilet paper. At any given time, one roll was permitted to us. This was so transparently unhinged that we protested but he insisted. If we were low on toilet paper we needed to call him to drop off a roll that he brought from his home. Smiling jovially, he assured us he lived so close by that it would be no problem!

When we needed to call him often for more he started tearing his hair out. What were we using toilet paper for?! Why wasn’t his genius plan to stop our scandalous waste working??!

Finally, the manager, the only man on staff had to pull the owner aside and be like, “Look, man, their bladders are smaller. They need to wipe every time they pee. They need to pee even more on their period. Is this really the hill you want to die on?”

Yes. It was. The manager was fired unrelated reasons and denounced as a traitor. The toilet paper ration lasted until I quit and probably until the store closed six months later.

[reasonsforhope]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024