“I’m afraid of getting cancer from the cadmium in my painting supplies” I’m not 😌 I love you cadmium yellow. I love you vermillion red. I love you uranium orange, haven’t worked with you but I love you nevertheless. Most of all I love you arsenic green.

This dress could kill you but I completely understand why people in the late 19th century were willing to take that risk.

Here is uranium orange fiestaware, proving that beauty truly is pain.

just found out about London purple 🤤

I was wondering what was involved with London purple so as to merit its inclusion alongside such stars as arsenic green and uranium orange, and --

Ah, cool, gotcha

Do you like the color of the poison?

Ok but most paints nowadays are not gonna have actual metals in them, unless maybe you're paying for the really expensive oil paints. And even then you will probably run into more danger if you're using turpentine/other solvents and don't ventilate your studio well. Just don't lick your brushes.

While I just posted this poll last night, I want to do a related one that accounts for some options I missed.

Feel free to go to the other poll for more specific usage periods! No one has to give any personal details! If you want to specify what kind of libraries you traverse and/or often use their online resources (public library, school library, academic library, special libraries, etc.), feel free to say what kind in the tags!

And for any library workers, feel free to put your job position you're in (only if you want to, do not feel pressured to!)

(Plugging @queerliblib for their fantastic selection of queer books through Libby! Here's their website!)

Here's a few pics of my cats with books I've read 😊:

Risa is next to Amanda Gorman's poetry book, Call Us What We Carry, which was FANTASTIC! She is an amazing writer!

Luffy in next to The Library Book by Susan Orlean, but #1 FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL-TIME! 😁💖

IDs in the alt (I tried my best, I hope they're good for the most part 😅)

Anyway, support libraries 💜

Certified Library Post

Mostly I just stop in to pick up my holds. And I usually only get a physical book if the ebook isn't available on Libby.

This is why I keep box brownie mix in the cupboard. Because sometimes my day is shit and I just need some chocolate and sugar to feel a little better.

Albinykus😴

there needs to be so much more legislation when it comes to advertising, especially mobile adverts which are 99% lies and often predatory.

my suggestions:

-adverts cannot lie about the product they are advertising

-adverts cannot trick you into clicking them (eg. false X's to close the ad)

-adverts cannot pretend to be the app you are currently playing and say "you need to update the app!"

-adverts cannot, under any circumstance, have strobing lights

-adverts cannot bully or belittle the viewer (genuinely why is this one a thing ads do)

-advertising gambling should be illegal

-advertising addictive products should be illegal

-no hate speech of any kind

-no attempting to convert the viewer to any religion

-ADVERTS SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO FORCE OPEN THE APP STORE ON ANY DEVICE

I'd also add to the "false x" point above -- the ad must be easy to close/dismiss. None of these too small a set of pixels to accurate tap with a finger thing.

Once closed, an ad cannot return nor can it be replaced with a new ad.

Once you hit the x it should immediately close the ad instead of taking you to another stage of the ad that you will not be able to close for a certain amount of time

-no fucking autoplay video ads, especially not with sound!!

USA please listen to me: the price of “teaching them a lesson” is too high. take it from New Zealand, who voted our Labour government out in the last election because they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted and got facism instead.

Trans rights are being attacked, public transport has been defunded, tax cuts issued for the wealthy, they've mass-defunded public services, cut and attacked the disability funding model, cut benefits, diverted transport funding to roads, cut all recent public transport subsidies, cancelled massive important infrastructure projects like damns and ferries (we are three ISLANDS), fast tracked mining, oil, and other massive environmentally detrimental projects and gave the power the to approve these projects singularly to three ministers who have been wined and dined by lobbyists of the companies that have put the bids in to approve them while one of the main minister infers he will not prioritise the protection of endangered species like the archeys frog over mining projects that do massive environmental harm. They have attacked indigenous rights in an attempt to negate the Treaty of Waitangi by “redefining it”; as a backup, they are also trying to remove all mentions of the treaty from legislation starting with our Child Protection laws no longer requiring social workers to consider the importance of Maori children’s culture when placing those children; when the Waitangi Tribunal who oversees indigenous matters sought to enquire about this, the Minister for Children blocked their enquiry in a breach of comity that was condemned in a ruling — too late to do anything — by our Supreme Court. They have repealed labour protections around pay and 90 day trials, reversed our smoking ban, cancelled our EV subsidy, cancelled our water infrastructure scheme that would have given Maori iwi a say in water asset management, cancelled our biggest city’s fuel tax, made our treasury and inland revenue departments less accountable, dispensed of our Productivity Commission, begun work on charter schools and military boot camps in an obvious push towards privatisation, cancelled grants for first home buyers, reduced access to emergency housing, allowed no cause evictions, cancelled our Maori health system that would have given Maori control over their own public medical care and funding, cut funding of services like budgeting advice and food banks, cancelled the consumer advocacy council, cancelled our medicine regulations, repealed free prescriptions, deferred multiple hospital builds, failed to deliver on pre-election medical promises, reversed a gun ban created in response to the mosque shootings, brought back three strikes = life sentence policy, increased minimum wage by half the recommended amount, cancelled fair pay for disabled workers, reduced wheelchair services, reversed our oil and gas exploration ban, cancelled our climate emergency fund, cut science research funding including climate research, removed limits on killing sea lions, cut funding for the climate change commission, weakened our methane targets, cancelled Significant National Areas protections, have begun reversing our ban on live exports. Much of this was passed under urgency.

It’s been six months.

Day and night at the Parthenon. Yoshida Hiroshi, 1925.

I’ve featured this artist on my personal ‘artist of the week’ segment before! For anyone curious, these are actually woodblock prints, not canvas paintings! Hitoshi is well-known for incorporating western art techniques and sensibilities into his prints, which is why these almost feel like 19th century oil paintings rather than traditional Japanese prints.

Something to note is that both of these prints were made with the same wood blocks and inked separately, which is a process known as ‘betsu-zuri’. You can read more about that process here. Hitoshi used this technique a lot; his ‘Sailing Boats’ print set is my favorite example.

Anyway. Woodblock printing is a very cool process that I highly recommend you check out! The site I linked above has some great explanations if you’re interested.

What’s remarkable about Aziraphale’s Jane Austen inspired Ball plan, well apart from the creepy-near-manic way he controls everyone to make everything perfect, is how much this just didn’t make sense to begin with. It doesn’t make sense on many levels, but I mean on the one level Aziraphale should have had right. It isn’t a sensible interpretation of Jane Austen.

I mean yes, there are Balls in Jane Austen’s novels. Of course there are. They are set in regency England. But Jane Austen doesn’t use the Balls as a literary device to get her characters to realise that they misunderstood each other and are actually deeply in love. If anything, it is the exact opposite.

The Balls, and other larger social events, are where Jane Austen’s characters misunderstand and hurt each other. They learn to understand each other and realise that they are in love in smaller social groups and quieter moments when they have the opportunity to truly be themselves.

Yes, Balls in the regency period were all about matchmaking, but were they about love? Not really. Not the way Aziraphale means or wants it to be. Balls were steeped in proprietary, in expectations, in fulfilling your designated social role and making a “good” match, that is, a match that was appropriate to your rank and that fit with the expectations of your family. Does that sound like a place where the kind of love that Aziraphale and Crowley share can flourish?

Returning to Austen, take Lizzie Bennet from Pride and Prejudice as an example. Lizzie dates her love for Darcy from first seeing Pemberley. That is, it comes from getting to know the aspects of Darcy that are never on ready display at a Ball. Likewise, Aziraphale and Crowley’s love is grounded in seeing each other as they truly are, in understanding the parts of themselves that they do not readily display to the world at large.

Crowley’s plan— little us time in the form of an alcoholic breakfast at the Ritz—was the better one for moving to genuine understanding and far more likely to be what Austen herself would have recommended (if she’d given Aziraphale romance advice in between her master spy work).

Does that sound like a place where the kind of love that Aziraphale and Crowley share can flourish? You are so right for this and you should say it. I think there’s something here too in Aziraphale misunderstanding this aspect of Austen because HE is still trapped in the idea of propriety; he is often still performing instead of being himself. He is still torn between being A Good Angel and acting like Heaven expects and actually being his authentic self. He and Crowley can’t be together until he’s able to fully let go of Heaven’s expectations.

These good points are said better than anything I could add, really.

The Ball flagged up for me just how little Aziraphale understands how things work outside of his angelic influence. He’s doing his best (and that’s still scads better than most other angels we see) but he’s not really grounded in reality at all. And it makes me wonder how often he really reads the books he loves, rather than just collecting them - as a collector of more books than I can read, I don’t condemn!

Really it’s a microcosm of how he and Crowley are stuck in this dance they can’t safely step out of - just like he does to the humans, Heaven and Hell are doing to them. The Ball is a horror show in its implications.

I’m thinking about this again and I think another thing it shows is that Aziraphale is desperate for structure. He needs Rules to follow, and since he no longer has to follow Heaven’s Rules, he’s struggling to find some replacement structure. We see it a little in episode 1, when Crowley mentions that Aziraphale has been calling him to report his good deeds.

The Lockdown video is extra-canon, but I got the same sense in that– Crowley asks to come over, and Aziraphale says no, its Against the (humans’) Rules. Nevermind that neither of them can get sick, or that Crowley could just miracle himself over and never have to go outside.

When it comes to romance, Heaven doesn’t have any Rules, so he looks to a favorite author and human rules of propriety from the time period he seems most comfortable in.

I think it’s another level to why he went back to Heaven– I think there would be real relief for him, in returning to that familiar structure. He’ll be in a position of authority, so he won’t have to worry about having to follow decisions that he doesn’t agree with, but he also won’t be completely adrift like he has been. I

"This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to 72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels will provide power to family homes, to local electricity collectives, to specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost every other setting imaginable.

Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution nonetheless.

Over the course of 2023 the world’s solar cells, their panels currently covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600 terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a trillion watts). That represented about 6% of the electricity generated world wide, and just over 1% of the world’s primary-energy use. That last figure sounds fairly marginal, though rather less so when you consider that the fossil fuels which provide most of the world’s primary energy are much less efficient. More than half the primary energy in coal and oil ends up as waste heat, rather than electricity or forward motion.

What makes solar energy revolutionary is the rate of growth which brought it to this just-beyond-the-marginal state. Michael Liebreich, a veteran analyst of clean-energy technology and economics, puts it this way:

In 2004, it took the world a whole year to install a gigawatt of solar-power capacity... In 2010, it took a month In 2016, a week. In 2023 there were single days which saw a gigawatt of installation worldwide. Over the course of 2024 analysts at BloombergNEF, a data outfit, expect to see 520-655gw of capacity installed: that’s up to two 2004s a day...

And it shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down. Buying and installing solar panels is currently the largest single category of investment in electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental think-tank: it expects $500bn this year, not far short of the sum being put into upstream oil and gas. Installed capacity is doubling every three years. According to the International Solar Energy Society:

Solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026 Than its wind turbines in 2027 Tthan its dams in 2028 Its gas-fired power plants in 2030 And its coal-fired ones in 2032.

In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind’s largest source of primary energy—not just electricity—by the 2040s...

Expecting exponentials to carry on is rarely a basis for sober forecasting. At some point either demand or supply faces an unavoidable constraint; a graph which was going up exponentially starts to take on the form of an elongated S. And there is a wide variety of plausible stories about possible constraints...

All real issues. But the past 20 years of solar growth have seen naive extrapolations trounce forecasting soberly informed by such concerns again and again. In 2009, when installed solar capacity worldwide was 23gw, the energy experts at the IEA predicted that in the 20 years to 2030 it would increase to 244gw. It hit that milestone in 2016, when only six of the 20 years had passed. According to Nat Bullard, an energy analyst, over most of the 2010s actual solar installations typically beat the IEA’s five-year forecasts by 235% (see chart). The people who have come closest to predicting what has actually happened have been environmentalists poo-pooed for zealotry and economic illiteracy, such as those at Greenpeace who, also in 2009, predicted 921gw of solar capacity by 2030. Yet even that was an underestimate. The world’s solar capacity hit 1,419gw last year.

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

--

Note: That graph. Is fucking ridiculous(ly hopeful).

For perspective: the graph shows that in 2023, there were about 350 GW of solar installed. The 5-year prediction from 2023 said that we'd end up around 450 GW by 2030.

We hit over 600 GW in the first half of 2024 alone.

This is what's called an exponential curve. It's a curve that keeps going up at a rate that gets higher and higher with each year.

This, I firmly believe, is a huge part of what is going to let us save the world.

like you really aren't allowed to say shit about southerners until you have firsthand seen how people live deep in the appalachian hollers because it is fucking tragic. the poverty and the food desert and the lack of resources in general is so bad. the drugs. yall dont understand

also mississippi and louisiana are in the top five poorest states and also just so happen to have the highest black populations in mainland us. like. i don't think you guys know what you are talking about. when you talk shit about southerners. can i introduce you to a little something called gerrymandering

This is us specific but if you are looking at this from outside the US and going "haha we don't have an Appalachia, we just have [area where everyone is poor and under employed and drugs are a problem and isolation kills people and most people are some form of discriminated-against minority] but those people bring it on themselves". Then maybe re-consider.

Appalachia is that poor partly from slavery, but also largely from COAL. Coal mining was THE industry in many of those towns, and the coal companies exploited the fuck out of those workers, because they were the only jobs in town. They were company towns that paid their workers in scrip and had company doctors to tell you that no, that cough definitely wasn't black lung, you're fine. Company lawyers to refuse to pay out when men were disabled or killed on the job because the company wouldn't pay for safety measures or bribed inspectors to look the other way. There's a reason some of the biggest, strongest, early unions were coal miners. And the companies fought very real wars to prevent them gaining every scrap of better treatment, every rule and regulation for better pay and safer work places. And those areas are still often desperately polluted and suffering ongoing effects from the damage coal companies and other industry left behind. Other countries might not have Appalachia, but they absolutely have shitty, exploitive companies grinding the poor into dust for profit. Those folks being a minority just makes it easier because it means there's no one to fight for them.

since i mentioned abortion... i don't see a problem with a statement "the life of the mother matters more than the life of the fetus/infant" like. there will be anti abortion people going "oh so you think her life matters more than the baby's?!?!?!" i do actually. she has already lived outside of the womb and currently has goals and ambitions and fears and hobbies and friends and maybe a job and maybe goes to school. she has already been experiencing the world as a person. a fetus has known nothing but a life inside the womb. there are no ambitions, no fears, no hobbies, no friends, no jobs, no school, no anything for it in its current state. i do value the woman's life more than the fetus's simple state of being alive and i don't find any issue with that statement. just because a fetus has the potential to become a person in the future does not mean a woman who is living life right now should be forced against her will to drop everything and restructure her entire life around pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing. what is so wrong with saying that why does it make people so mad

probably because many of the people making these laws don't think women are people with their own hopes and dreams and needs, only an inconveniently necessary requirement to making babies (and thus building a man's legacy)

Cackling.

In case the original goes away:

Text version:

Washington State Department of Natural resources tweets:

(Falling to my knees, begging, pleading)

Please.

Folks, seriously.

PLEASE.

Do not - and I can’t emphasize this enough - set the state on fire this weekend.

Fire danger is abnormally high this holiday weekend.

URGING you to consider firework alternatives:

- screaming “bang! boom!” at the sky

- dropping a stack of large books on the floor

- wrapping a toga around a candle

- play America the Beautiful while combining Coke and Mentos

oh try tossing lightsticks in the air. You could make a small catapult!

or juggling cheerleaders' pompoms while singing "Yankee Doodle"

cats are really good at looking at things. very useful

having two cats essentially means you have a bug and rodent triangulation system. if they are both looking at something you know for damn sure there is some unauthorised fucking thing there.

I'm not really a HanLuke shipper but I can imagine them hooking up early in their friendship & then Han later after various revelations having a personal crisis over whether or not it's weird to have sex with both halves of a set of twins

& like he can't ask anyone if it's weird without admitting that he's already done it. he could talk to Luke about it bcos obviously Luke already knows but he's kind of avoiding the subject with Luke in case drawing attention to the fact that he's dating Luke's sister prompts a shovel talk. he's pretty sure Luke can kill people with his brain now and he doesn't want to have that particular shovel talk if he an avoid it.

Years later he fesses up to Luke that he was worried about the shovel talk and Luke gets super offended at the suggestion that Leia couldn't kill Han herself if she wanted to

When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

(Source 3)

I imagine that this also made the local people far more willing to work with conservationists in the future, given there might be another flock of chickens in it for them.

something else that keeps me up at night, by the way, is Crowley getting sloshed in that pub the night he thinks he's lost Aziraphale in the fire, like, the moment the lightning flashes and he sees Aziraphale and breathes his name?? Because it takes him a second to realise it's real, that it's actually Aziraphale. Like for a split second, Crowley just accepts that he's drunk enough to have perfectly conjured up the memory of his dead best friend. like im normal about that for sure