haruka89

[haruka89]

How I paint strawberries! 🍓

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(Sound on.) Bonus clip today: Penguins navigating stairs.

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[haruka89]

a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

[haruka89]

Life Support Issues

“All right, so… where do you have the plans?” the Rebel technician asked. “An R2 unit like this could have a hundred hiding places.”

R2 beeped and whistled.

“Ah, I see,” Threepio said. “Yes, Artoo has reminded me that in fact the plans are not only in a data card, but also redundantly stored inside his own system – that’s how he was able to access the systems so readily. He will be able to transfer them quite readily through a standard data access port.”

“We can get that set up, sure,” the tech agreed, gesturing, and his assistant brought over a cable.

As he did, though, Threepio looked with interest at his old friend and counterpart.

“Were you supposed to do that?” he asked.

R2 beeped again.

“Yes, I suppose it is a good thing that you did, but I’m asking if you were supposed to,” Threepio replied. “Don’t try and play semantics with me, Artoo.”

R2 provided a long string of bleeps and whistles, and C-3PO stepped back.

“You did?” he asked. “Oh my… well, I suppose I did ask you to do that first one.”

“Do what?” the tech asked, halfway through plugging in the cable.

“Well, we were on the Death Star,” C-3PO replied. “And while rescuing Princess Leia, Master Luke and their friends, I had Artoo shut down all the garbage compactors on the Death Star, and then open the door to the one that they were in. Artoo has informed he that, in fact, he opened all the entrances shortly before we left.”

He made a displeased noise. “In addition, he flushed all the drinkable water into the black water systems, raised the temperature in the food storage areas to two hundred and fourteen degrees centigrade, and sealed the doors to every lavatory on the ship. I am also reliably informed that the artificial gravity generators have been independently set to what he calls ‘shuffle’ and that the plumbing system on the Death Star is comprehensive enough to permit him to transport fluids randomly around the entire plumbing system through a series of several thousand distributed commands which trigger on and off at random, at times ranging from five minutes to three days.”

A pause.

“Also, that reversing the gravity in the shuttle and vehicle maintenance bays produced a quite satisfying crunching sound of valuable equipment breaking. Artoo, did you really have to do all of that?”

R2 whistled, helpfully.

“Yes, I suppose they did blow up Alderaan,” Threepio admitted. “I’m just worried that at this point we might be committing war crimes ourselves.”

“This is becoming ridiculous,” Tarkin said, as blaster fire crackled up and down the corridor. “Half the ship is fighting itself and the other half is trying desperately to find a fresher.”

The firing intensified outside, then Darth Vader loomed imperiously out of the door and the various factions went from exchanging fire to fleeing.

“Have you found anything about what happened?” the Sith Lord asked, returning his attention to Tarkin. “I could believe one of these failures was accidental, but this is clearly deliberate.”

“It has been a little hard to gather information,” the Grand Moff replied, testily. “Since my analyst team is having to defend their access to a shuttle bay which might have an intact shuttle and the last Star Destroyer to try and render assistance was destroyed by two thousand turbolaser batteries all firing on it at once on automatic. But clearly there has been some sort of unauthorized access.”

“The plans,” Darth Vader said, firmly. “The Princess clearly passed them off to someone. The same group as her rescuers… Kenobi’s team. Kenobi is dead, but the smuggler ship must have had a strike team…”

He trailed off.

“But this is the work of an expert slicer,” he resumed. “A normal commando team couldn’t have done this much damage this quickly.”

“There is a report that one of my analysts found,” Tarkin said. “That a golden protocol droid and a blue-white astromech droid were acting suspiciously near Docking Bay 327.”

“Ah,” Darth Vader said, his tone somewhat different. “That explains everything. In fact, I am suspicious that there must be something we have missed.”

“Vader?” Tarkin asked.

“R2 has left us something else,” Vader answered. “I can feel it.”

Tarkin started giggling.

“...ah,” Vader declared. “There it is.”

“Nitrous oxide?” C-3PO asked. “Really?”

R2 whistled.

“I don’t care if you had to improvise and that it’s easily produced from available life support gases,” C-3PO replied, shaking his head. “Really, R2.”

[haruka89]

It really is 2003 again Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Like, all Republicans did was replace Iraq and gay people with Iran and trans people.

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Anybody else have a growing fear of updating their tech cuz everything seems to be getting worse and worse

[haruka89]

Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.

Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?

Me: I am going to eat you

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deeply grateful to DuckDuckGo both for autocorrecting this search and for having the grace to forego even mentioning it had been corrected

[haruka89]

“i’m not the same as who i was before [x] thing happened to me” does it help to know that you would not have stayed that person regardless

[haruka89]

If you live in a building without AC that is well-insulated (very common in Europe, especially if the building is pre-WWII):

Close all windows and doors during the day. Completely. You don't want air travelling between the inside and outside. If you have blinds/curtains*, close them during the day, especially if you get a lot of sun.

At night, when things cool down, open all the windows and doors before going to bed and leave everything as open as you safely can (don't risk unnecessary break-ins) and close everything up in the early morning before it starts to get warm again. If you can't leave any windows open at night, do it for a while in the morning while it's still cool outside.

This should keep the temperature in your home several degrees Celsius below what's outside. Depending on your building and the floor you live on ymmv, so you'll need to do some testing on what does and does not work.

Just remember that isolation works both ways, as long as you actually properly use that isolation. That cold box won't keep your stuff cold if it's open.

(Yesterday, for example, temp got to around ~34°C. One room in my flat gets almost direct sun through a couple of trees from around 2 pm until around 8 pm, some of that time straight on. When I got home around 11 pm last yesterday, that room was ~27°C. It was noticably cooler than outside, the room temp was ~26°C when I'd left ten hours earlier, the temp couldn't have decreased much in the couple of hours since sundown.)

Also, if you don't have a basement, tiled bathrooms tend to feel cooler. As do the staircases in pretty much every building I've been in.

* There is also sticky foil you can stick on your windows that will reflect heat/solar radiation.

Saw this in my weather news. Seriously, y'all, I beg of you to take care of yourself and those around you in these hellish days.

@thatdisasterauthor This feels up your alley, any tips on dealing with extreme heat?