#iron processing

[aftabmachine]

iron processing

Iron processing is an amazing and complex journey that extracts the precious metal of iron from the heart of lifeless stones and gives it to the heart of industry and civilization. This process is a testimony to human creativity and innovation in taming nature and creating amazing achievements. Iron processing is a multi-step and complex process during which low-grade iron ore is transformed into pure and usable iron metal. This process includes various stages including iron ore extraction, crushing and grinding, separation of impurities and reduction of iron ore to iron metal.

[oluka]

My first contribution to the 2025 @cap-ironman RBB! For which I got this extraordinary and amazing fic by @mobiusonajetski!! Bonus (kind of spoilery) doodle under the cut.

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[obsob]

one small step for. kitties

[prof-president]

ina mother 3 era again and something that frustrates me about lucas depictions is how people can’t help but project either themselves or just socialized traits of stereotypical masculinity onto him.

lucas is a very emotional kid, and despite the absolute trauma and horror he went through, he never focuses on his own pain but instead will always, always try to help others.

the day after the drago kills hinawa in front of his eyes, the same day claus dies to the same monster, lucas goes to the forest and befriends the remaining dragos. the same animals who kills two of his closest family, killed his mom in front of his own eyes, but he knows the other dragos are hurting just as much as he is, so he comforts them

he does still spend the next 3 years crying, but even still, he never harbors ill will towards flint or any of the other townsfolk who shit on him for grieving. he even pulls himself from his depression once he knows there’s a chance he can help find duster, because again, he knows exactly what it’s like to lose a family member, so he’ll pick himself up and help others.

at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how awful people are towards him, whether they’ll praise/accept him, or even if they deserve it; lucas knows it’s the right thing to do

he’s an easy character to understand in terms of his plight, but an incredibly difficult character to understand himself, which is why i really do understand when people interpret lucas with a little more snark, a little more self-deprecating sarcasm, a lot of apathy, but whenever i do, i just see claus staring back at me.

because lucas feels, cries, and understands so desperately the pain of others, and he never distances himself from that trait that makes him himself. he’s tired, and he wants to cry, but he’ll feel it if it means that others won’t suffer as much anymore. he will always, ALWAYS put other people above his own emotions, and i think he’d even feel guilty if he were to even consider distancing himself from the pain of others

it’s what separates him from flint and claus, what makes him the absolute ideal candidate to pass his heart onto the dragon. compared to the individualistic, angry, single-mindedness of his dad and brother, lucas is an emotional, deeply feeling child who finds strength in sharing your love and alleviating on the burdens of others

and part of me is just frustrated abt this because i KNOW that if lucas was a girl most people would have no issue at all understanding his character

[outofangband]

“the most ancient songs of the elves of which echoes are remembered still in the West, tell of the shadow shapes of walked on the hills above Cuiviénen would pass suddenly over the stars, and of the dark Rider, upon his wild horse, that pursued those that wander to take them and devour them”

I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot in general but right now I’m thinking about it in the context of the elves who never left Middle Earth

First, I absolutely love the love they have for these lands, that despite Morgoth’s encroachment upon it, despite the vile structures he raises, and the terror that creeps around them, there are the forests and hills and stars and they are beloved by these elves. There are their communities that have roots in this land and while their songs may speak of the shadows, they speak of love and hope too. I believe that love for these lands played as much of a role in the decision not to go to Valinor as any potential mistrust of the Valar.

While most tales focus on the struggle of the Noldor and their allies against Morgoth, the elves of Middle Earth have suffered under the shadow of Utumno then Angband for centuries longer.

Most of the elves taken by Morgoth at the time Angband was created were presumably Sindar elves (basing this primarily on geography; I also have so many thoughts on how this effects the culture of Angband, I went into it some on my language post but I’ll definitely write more)

The entire war is imbued with this trauma. If one goes with the version of the orcs in The Silmarillion, then the orcs who attack them are the descendants of stolen kin.

The king of the green elves was killed by Morgoth’s soldiers, forcing many of them to flee from their homes in Ossiriand to the eastern parts of Doriath. Though many flourish there, so much of their lives and customs are destroyed when Denethor is killed on Amon Ereb

Even during the period of Morgoth’s confinement by the Valar, these forces were alive in their lands. Utumno has collapsed but there is no liberation like there is at the end of the war of wrath. Any elves imprisoned under its reign either die, are brought to Angband, or escape into a hostile wild

And when black smoke rises from the Thangorodrim, the Avari, Sindar, and Silvan who see it know exactly what it means. They remember the black smoke of Utumno, they remember their kin vanishing in the night.

And they are afraid. Some scatter, some leave over the Ered Luin, some prepare to fight. But the cultural fear exists among them and in that memory there is no knowledge of a true escape or victory.

[the-dye-stained-socialite]

The Regent of Hats Hearts, or Favoured in Two Courts, or Is and Is-Not

A piece of my OC Elias Leroux, the Regent of London, and Bride of the Red-Handed Queen.

Based on the official Marvellous deck of which i shall someday aquire a Violant copy

Happy four years, Elias! 🎉

[serpentface]

A Nesi male showing off his brightly dyed cloak and hood to a partnered pair of prospective suitors (a hen and a faeder, these are not constructed as wholly separate genders by the Nesi), in hopes that he will be chosen to sire and raise their offspring.

Ornamentation that so thoroughly conceals a cock’s breeding plumage is relatively rare among qilik peoples. The exception here is due to the extreme significance of trade and mercantilism in this culture, resulting in a heavy prioritization of the quality of the costuming over the quality of one's own plumage. Colorful, high quality decoration emphasizes that a suitor comes from a wealthy family with secure trade connections, an ideal situation for one’s offspring to be raised in.

There is no permanent association between parents, rather the goal of this union is to best provide for the resulting offspring and to receive a hefty child price from the male suitor’s family (children of all sexes remain with the father’s family, and are effectively ‘bought’ by them.) The mother's family benefits from the money and goods received in this exchange, the father's family benefits from having additional children who will eventually provide labor and care for other family members.

This particular individual is of upper-middle class means, an especially rich mercantile family can afford more ornately woven robes with a greater variety of colors. The parts of the body deemed most attractive (the tail fan, the brow plumes, the seasonally bluish legs) are the only parts exposed. There is some intra-cultural division over whether even these parts should be exposed, as it is sometimes seen as a desperate or wanton diversion from a suitor being unable to afford more extravagant costuming.

Hens, faeder, and cocks all wear minimal clothing in day-to-day circumstances, with the exception of headdress (as seen here with the couple)

Nesi are a relatively genetically isolated population in spite of their significant trade relations, maintained partially by cultural resistance to reproduction with foreigners who do not share these customs. The population is distinguished by many individuals having naturally whitish and brown-gray feathering that acquires bright reddish pigmentation from a diet heavy in crustaceans.

[iamthepulta]

@joemomrgneissguy SPACE MINING. HO BOY.

So when mining comes into a conversation, there are several 'laws' of mining and processing that I like to consider that people tend to forget:

Location and rarity of commodity

Location and rarity of extraction techniques/reagents

What is necessary for this operation to work?

Where does the finished product go?

Some of these are extraneous. Theoretically, we don't have to care that iron is common on earth and might be present on the moon, so it changes the conversation from "why?" to "how would we?". Same with extraction and reagents. If you don't care how expensive it is to ship- for example: water and carbon dioxide to the moon because you want to process He-3, nothing can stop you.

However, what will stop planning, is processing. Blowing up a rock is easy. Collecting the rock and breaking it into a usable form is not. If there isn't a plan for exactly what commodity is being mined and how to separate it and all the equipment that needs to be made to get it into a usable form, and a plan to get that equipment into space. God help the poor bastard.

And fundamentally, no matter HOW you turn it, people use the finished product. If there are no people where you are mining the Thing, you need to have a way for the Thing to get back to the people who need it. WHY are you mining the Thing? What is economic about the Thing being made? and Is it worth the money?

[angry geologist rant under the cut]

So the thing about space and asteroids is metals come in native form a lot of the time because there's nothing to oxidize them; it makes processing simpler and the density increases profit. This is usually what people talk about when they go off about space mining: Ohh, if we just reach this asteroid 400 years away there's so much Gold and Platinum! Ohh, if we just crashed a FUCKING ASTEROID INTO EARTH OR MARS we could be so rich!

However this is a LIE for two reasons: It's actually harder to process straight sulfides or straight metal because they aren't brittle. Instead of breaking into smaller pieces you can separate and process, they jam the crusher. Universities with mining departments often have huge chunks of impressive high-grade sitting around that were donated by companies when they jammed their fucking system. If you can't break it down, it's a useless fucking clump of rock.

Secondly, even if you have native metals clumped together like an iron-nickel asteroid, unless you want an iron-nickel product, you have to separate them. Since it's not brittle, you would have to pour a bunch of hydrochloric on it and wait for the reaction to dissolve the outer surface.

And all this is assuming the metals are on Earth. If not, you have to figure out how to do this in space. How much HCl will you need? How are you going to fly it up there? How are you going to break it down? How are you going to replace parts when they inevitably break?

The big "commodity" on the moon is Helium-3, which is extremely rare on Earth. (So yes, we have a need, and yes, there's substantial reason to mine it in a place where it's more accessible.) The logic starts breaking down around "getting it back" and "how does the operation work": In moon quantities (up to 15 parts per billion (ppb)), you have to mine about 150 tons to extract 1g of He-3. That's not unreasonable, to be honest, since economic gold hovers around 7-12 ppb. And technically you'd only have to heat the rock to 600-700 C. However, things do melt at those temperatures. Then you have to get it back to earth. Either a SpaceX-style return and come back, or a drop shipments- It's just insane to me though that we would use SO MANY RESOURCES to rip up the fucking moon, even with an automated system, when if you look at He-3 we already produce what equals 11 pounds of He-3 yearly from Oil and Gas deposits, it's just not collected.

I have more beef with planets that are theoretically resource-rich, but people just- don't care about getting them back to Earth? Venus has significant metal-Sulfides and Tellurides in its atmosphere, which is why people joke about the "floating oxygen colonies" on Venus. But congratulations! You've colonized a planet that is inaccessible to human technology because anything we've ever designed will dissolve. Same with Europa. To design something that works on Venus - not to mention extracts things in the proper form to be used in human conditions - and/or get them back to Earth means redesigning how we think of the properties of the periodic table.

With extraction, we play a lot with oxidation states, and one of the rules is to stay within Earth's aqueous conditions. If you oxidize anything too much, your solution will want to vaporize to oxygen. Reduce anything too much, and your solution will want to vaporize to hydrogen gas.

So, if you design anything on Earth designed for conditions on Venus, it will be unstable. If you design anything on Venus meant for Earth, it will be unstable.

Which is kind of the end of my rant, I guess. Don't crash something into Earth unless you can process it. If you can process it in space, can you get it back? Who's responsible when the thing breaks? Why the fuck is money being spent when 9 times out of 10 we have it here on earth with the conditions we're familiar with?

If we've somehow depleted Earth enough that we need resources from other planets, which would insinuate we have not figured out how to recycle our own metals, which is untrue, and likewise we have no business in space anyway- Where did all our resources go? Are we leaving for those other planets? Do we have faster-than-light travel to collect the new resources in a timely manner?

There isn't even water in space half the time and if you do have a colony on Mars and tech bros are going to process all the hematite to build their shitty underground Martian city, are they shipping water from the north and south poles to do this? Have they figured out how to renew the carbon filters that are going to be needed to get all the waste and organics out of it once it's used?

In my opinion, it's all just fucking stupid. Space mining tries to answer a question that doesn't need to be asked with people who don't know how mineral processing works who haven't thought what the logistics require and don't care that entropy demands even minerals in stasis don't last forever. But it's ~new~ and the dollar signs on metallic asteroids gleam in their eyes and I want to take out Elon Musk's kneecaps.

[mylo-space]

something i think about a lot is Demon Bull King falling in love with Princess Iron Fan, like, head over heels, and he just can't help but sneak off to see her--he knows he shouldn't, his sworn allies would most certainly have his head, but he can't not be near her, so it it doesn't matter. He abandons the fight of a millennia for a celestial princess and every single member of the Brotherhood is so shocked and angry and betrayed, except one.

Because one of them could hear Demon Bull King sneaking off and never stopped him, could hear two starcrossed heartbeats dance every time they met on the field of battle and off of it. One of them never wanted to fight Heaven in the first place, and maybe he's just relieved that at least someone gets to escape it, even if it isn't him. One of them knows before the others, he knows even before Bull King decides it, that there will be a betrayal.

He knows it, swatting Wukong away from the piece of clothing he's trying to adjust, that there will be one less of them when the Celestial Armies descend. He knows, watching Wukong's eyes brighten at Azure’s praise, that Demon Bull King will abandon the war. He knows, following the Brotherhood into a battle doomed from the start, that Demon Bull King will always choose Princess Iron Fan; he knows, the same way he knows that he'll always choose to fight at Wukong's side.

Because there simply isn't a future where they don't.

[fayzart136]

Hello! I’m absolutely enraptured by your mechanisms designs and all the details and thought that goes into each one.

Since the references were written directly on the images for the HNOC and UDAD characters, I could see it all, it was really comprehensive and I had a really fun time reading through it.

Unfortunately in the case of the OUATIS and TBI designs, that info was placed under a cut on the original posts , and because your old blog was deleted I don’t see a way to open the Read More ://

If there’s any way you might have any of it saved I’d be thrilled to see what details I’ve missed in how you decided to draw them :)

Thanks so much!

Aw thank you for sending me this ask! I cannot open the readmore either, but I do remember my thought proces! I will recreate the details to the best of my ability. For legibility and not making this a super-long post, I'll put them in the alt text. I'll also put my other Mechs lineups in here, I like having all of them in one post.

[milkweedman]

When you get to a point in fiber arts where you start wanting to learn other crafts just so that you can better make what you're making, that's when you know you're screwed

I keep eyeing inkle looms because I need to make woven straps for the handspun crochet bags I keep making and the knit icord strap is so annoying to make. And I will never know peace until I can make the Perfect Bags.

[vertigoartgore]

Comic Art Process (from the original pencils to the published page) : 1971's Avengers Vol.1 #93 pages 1-2. Pencils by Neal Adams, inks by Tom Palmer, lettering by Sam Rosen and a script by Roy Thomas (and also an uncredited colorist).

[vidra-comprehends]

TES Gala - Morndas

Event organized by @tes-gala and hosted by the honorable House Nivulirel.

Article written by Yivohn Malril.

Today's highlight: Herma-Mora

Guests presenting:

Lady Ithruen

Miraak (?)

This is going to be one of the weirder entries in this review. Brace yourselves, because we are diving into the inky depths of Apocrypha with Lady Ithruen (see my Sundas article) and none other than the double warlock half-man-half-beast dragon rider Miraak... or not.

Okay. A quick disclaimer here. I value both the trust of the esteemed readers and my own integrity as a journalist, and this is why I will admit that I am not entirely sure what I saw was real. Later in the evening, when I requested audience with Lady Ithruen and showed her my drawings, she gave me an uncomfortable but negative answer; she claims to have never worn this outfit. "Ven Ghul", "Wuth Sunvaar" or "Not Miraak Anymore", as she referred to the other figure, was completely unavailable for questions… or anything else, really. Still, if this is my punishment for speaking ill of the prince last week over dinner, I better get it out of my system. So, did I sketch these from memory or vision? I truly have no idea... I feel very far from myself at the moment.

My assistant suggested I sketch him to get my mind off the whole topic. He was not in costume, but perhaps my disturbed readers will appreciate "something of finer nature". I certainly did.

Another disclaimer. Any possible resemblance to known government officials is purely coincidental.

[mblue-art]

out w these tall clowns 🌲🌸

[angelsfalling16]

I just finished reading Onyx Storm and all I can say is, What the fuck?

I keep trying to turn the page to find more, but there are none. I just need one more page. One more page, a few more answers. The book can't have just ended there. There has to be more. I don't want to wait for the next one. I need answers now.