#800 questions survey

[camotherogue]

lmao does anyone wanna send me five bucks for sdv mobile i take ca$happ or commissions yea thats right ill draw shit for ya in return

[todays-xkcd]

Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!

US Survey Foot [Explained]

Transcript

[Closeup on Cueball.] Cueball: We thought it was over. After 60 years of struggle, the US survey foot was dead, deprecated by NIST in 2023.

[Cueball is shown to be talking to Ponytail, Hairy, and Megan. He has a presentation behind him.] Cueball: We thought architects and engineers could rest east, free of the headaches of having two conflicting definitions of the foot that differ by 610 nanometers. International foot: 0.304 800 000 m US survey foot [crossed over in gray] R.I.P.: 0.304 800 609... m

[Cueball points at an image of Black Hat] Cueball: But I bring dire news: Cueball: Someone has started using the US survey foot again.

[Closeup on Cueball again.] Off-panel voice: Why!? Cueball: We don't know. Cueball: Some people just want to drag the world 610nm closer to madness.

[Farther view of Cueball only. He clenches a fist.] Off-panel voice: What can we do!? Cueball: A NIST team is already in the air. We will capture the scofflaw and end this nightmare.

[Two helicopters flying, with mountains in the background.]

Caption: 8,000 miles away [Two operatives in a forest with "NIST" helmets. One talks on a walkie-talkie.] Operative: We've reached the coordinates of the target's device. There's no one here. Voice from walkie-talkie: How!?

Caption: 8,000.016 miles away [Black Hat walking elsewhere in the forest, very close by.] Black Hat: ♫ ♪

[yuoimia]

I CAN’T SAY ANYTHING TO YOUR FACE!

summary: they think you’re too pretty for your own good, really.

characters: wriothesley & alhaitham

notes: gn! reader, lighthearted fluff n teasing, wc: 800.

wriothesley

Does he think he can trick you again?

It’s almost funny, you muse to yourself as he routinely leads you through the fortress’ weaving labyrinths, the delicate wafts of Fontaine’s finest decadents alongside the sweet, slightly floral mist of Earl Grey tea increasing in strength with every step, naturally forming a semblance of a smile before you quickly regained your composure with a disappointed slap to the forearm.

Focus, you reprimanded to yourself. Stop thinking about cakes.

“What’s got you scowling like that?” Wriothesley lifts a curious eyebrow, surveying your face as he lightly closes the door behind you. “Pick a seat; I bought some new cushions since you complained last time that they made your back sore.”

He enunciates the complained with an air as if dealing with a petulant toddler’s meaningless tantrum.

Wriothesley notices how you don’t take a seat.

“Thank you,” you answer, prodding the rounded corners of the flowing material. It’s your favorite color, your favorite fabric.

He gazes up expectantly from his seat, taking a small sip from his teacup, swallowing with analytical attentiveness. “You know, it’s considered impolite to just stand and stare.”

“Wriothesley,” you interpose, crossing your arms behind the chair in front of him, examining his presence with a contemplative look. “What are you getting at?”

You continue theatrically spurring points when met with only silence. “Private teatimes? Customised cushions? Sigewinne’s stickers of you on my clipboards?” You take a generous breath and step, zeroing in on him over the tiers of desserts and frothing drinks, arms encasing his frame over the table. “If I didn’t know better,” you slyly whispered into his unblinking eyes. “I’d assume that you like me.”

The tension was hazardously electrifying, eliciting a sense of exhilaration with the mere possibility of a confession concocting itself into reality.

Wriothesley lets out an animated mixture between a sigh and a chuckle, dropping his head into his hands, before raising his head once more.

“You’ll need to repeat a few points again,” he muttered, smiling to himself, sounding almost disappointed. “Preferably with your back turned to me.”

“Why?” You furrow your brows; each second spent with Duke brought you with an ever-growing list of concerning questions to answer.

“Seeing you that close was quite dangerous,” he replied breathlessly. “I’m surprised you’ve never been labeled guilty.”

alhaitham

Alhaitham was stubborn. Yes, he admits, he could be fairly hardheaded and temperamental, but in comparison to you? Well, he considers that a new territory entirely.

“Birds of a feather,” Kaveh had nonchalantly shrugged at Alhaitham’s situation, nearly trickling an onslaught of sarcastic enquiries about this and last month’s missing rental payments and his growing apprehension towards Kaveh’s financial management, but that, alas, would just prove his point further. Alhaitham would rather have three meals of soup a day than let his agitating roommate emerge victorious in a verbal debate.

Thoughts surrounding soups reminded him to check in if you really had gone to bed after dinner, as you had reluctantly agreed, though not spared a wry roll of your eyes when you thought he had turned away.

It was common knowledge that if a person was sick, they should take it easy, rest often, and avoid strenuous activity and demanding tasks. While you were eager to comply with doing practically nothing all day, when the pedestal of stars rose above the fallen west horizon, so did your desire to defy anything Alhaitham suggested. And this part he fully blames himself, although grudgingly, that it was arguably a hundred percent his fault ninety-nine percent of the time. The factors? This he’s comfortably justified to alleviate restless nights—decisions were almost always influenced by bias, no? It was human, and Alhaitham was nothing but a human with human cognition.

The deliberate turn of the door handle, languid and surprisingly unlocked (what sort of scheme could you be possibly planning now?) has Alhaitham nearly stumbling out suppressed laughter of incredulity.

“What are you doing? Didn’t you promise me you'd go to sleep?” he gapes, the expression bearing comparable similarity to a blown-up pufferfish, not that you’d tell him that.

“Watching a movie. Would you like to join?” you push over blankets and pat an empty spot next to you. “I’m about halfway done so far. I’ll warn you, the protagonist is absolutely insufferable sometimes.” You release a long, suffering sigh, rubbing your forehead as if the character’s choices were causing you great distress. “Honestly-“

Alhaitham sits himself on your bed, much closer than you anticipated, cocking his head at your rapidly stumbling words.

“You’re so stubborn,” Alhaitham scowls, gently wrapping your waist with the loosened blankets. His voice carries no trace of malice, rather weaved with soft fondness. “Come on, let me see this protagonist that is causing you so much grief.”

[delcakoo]

hiii emaaaa

ok so i have a request if you can write something for riki 😋

i have this like randommmm prompt in my head “can we js forget about it?” “you mean forget about when we kisse-“”STOP”.

like an e2l 🫣 if u can write it omg its totally okay if u cant!!

mua ily 💗

part 2

SUMMARY ! how is niki supposed to focus on biology when his shy tutor is so irresistible and fun to tease?

PAIRING ! jock!niki x tutor!gn!reader

WC ! 800

WARNINGS ! smooching in the library smh

a/n: lilly baby !! this prompt is so cute omg thank u for the req <3 i hope u enjoy and ilyt :D

3:39PM — being assigned to tutor the star player on your school’s basketball team — aka the biggest slacker of them all, nishimura riki — was probably the biggest obstacle you’d face during the entirety of your high school career.

you didn’t think he was unintelligible beyond saving — no, niki was rather quick with catching onto things when he actually tried. the real problem was that he preferred to stare at your pretty face (his words, not yours) all period then listen to the mumbo jumbo of you explaining the human body’s skeletal system to him, which turned out to be a detrimental issue during your sessions.

there you both sat; legs crossed and eyes focused as you point around different parts of the skeleton in your textbook while niki rested on his elbow, staring holes into the side of your face with a tiny smirk. every once in a while you pause and look up to ensure he’s listening, which he seemed to be doing okay at to your surprise.

“and right below the patella, we have the..?” you look up at niki with a questioning gaze, waiting for him to continue your sentence and demonstrate his listening.

the boy blinks, following your finger that’s pressed on the page, tapping the answer for him blatantly. then, he smiles, biting his lip mischievously. “mm.. if you recreate what we did at our last session, i’ll say it.”

you don’t need to pause and think to remember exactly what he’s referring to. gulping slightly, you glance off to the bookshelves nearby. “look, can we just forget about that?”

“what?” his expression grows brighter, enjoying your shy reactions to the fullest, “forget about when we kissed?”

“niki, stop talking so loud-“

“why? does it make you nervous?” you don’t reply, turning away only for him to lean over the desk to see you better. “ay,” he snickers, “what’s that on your face, y/n? are you blushing for me?” he giggles proudly, reaching over to push some hair behind your ear, successfully revealing more of the apple color painting your cheeks.

the only reason you’d agreed to the whole mess that ocurred last week was because niki promised to study for his upcoming test in return, which he did. in fact — he passed with flying colors, and it only encouraged you more to help him one way or another. the potential he held was begging for assistance, and if a kiss was the cost of that, it was a price you were willing to pay.

and maybe, just maybe because deep down, you’ve been wanting to kiss him as well. niki didn’t need to know that, though.

“shut up, that was for the sake of your grades, and grades alone,” you insist sternly. “now answer my question, what’s below the catella?”

“c’mon, don’t act like you didn’t enjoy it too.” annoyingly, the jock dodges your inquiry, much too intrigued with the new conversation at hand.

“yeah well i- i didn’t.” shit, did you have to stutter now of all times?

before you could process anything, niki gently grabs your jaw, angling it back towards him softly. he waits for any signs of protest while staring down at you, curly black bangs covering parts of his sharp eyes, challenge burning in them at your previous denial. when you don’t push him away, he grins cheekily before bending down to meet your lips.

the kiss was soft and quick, but the plushness and confidence in his movements still made your head dizzy even as he pulled back and surveyed your dazed features, all while licking his lips again to taste the remnants of your own.

“how about that one?” he demands.

it takes you a moment to come back to earth, shaking your head dumbly as you realize he’s asking you to rate his kissing skills. “i- it was alright..”

his tongue clicks in offense, scooting closer to you with a damaged ego and flaring determination. “never would’ve thought my little tutor would be so hard to please.” as you open your mouth to protest, niki’s lips are back on yours, and this time he’s holding the back of your neck to deepen the contact as his other hand reaches over to slam your textbook shut, making you flinch slightly in his hold. “fuck bio,” he murmurs against your lips, “i can’t let you bruise my pride like that and get away with it.”

you gulp, glancing at the library clock only to have your eyes widen in horror. shit. your session with niki ended three minutes ago, and pretty much all you’ve done is make out.

yet.. you can’t find it in you to complain when the pretty boy leans back down for more.

basketball player niki,, 😇

[sixteenseveredhands]

Medieval Hermitage atop Katskhi Pillar, in Georgia (South Caucasus), c. 800-900 CE: this church was built during the Middle Ages; it sits atop a limestone column that has been venerated as a "Pillar of Life" for thousands of years

Known as Katskhi Pillar (or Katskhis Sveti), this enormous block of limestone is located in western Georgia, about 10km from the town of Chiatura.

The church that stands atop Katskhi Pillar was originally constructed during the 9th-10th century CE. It was long used as a hermitage for Stylites, who are sometimes referred to as "Pillar Saints" -- Christian ascetics who lived, prayed, and fasted atop pillars, often in total isolation, in an effort to bring themselves closer to God. This tradition originated in Syria during the 5th century CE, when a hermit known as Simeon the Elder purportedly climbed up onto a pillar and then stayed there for nearly 40 years, giving rise (no pun intended) to the Stylites. Stylitism managed to survive for about 1,000 years after its inception, but it gradually began to die out during the late Middle Ages, and by the end of the 16th century, it had essentially gone extinct.

Researchers don't really know how the monks originally gained access to the top of Katskhi Pillar, or how they were able to transport their building materials up to the top of the column. There's evidence that the Stylites were still living at Katskhi Pillar up until the 15th century, but the site was then abandoned shortly thereafter. This was the same period in which Georgia came under Ottoman rule, though it's unclear whether or not that may have played a role in the abandonment of the site.

The hermitage continued to lay abandoned for nearly 500 years after that. No one had been able to gain access to the top of the pillar, and very little was even known about the ruins that lay scattered at the top, as knowledge about the site's origin/history was gradually lost. There are many local legends that emerged as a way to fill in those blanks.

The site was not visited again until July 29th, 1944, when a mountaineer finally ascended to the top of the column with a small team of researchers, and the group performed the first archaeological survey of the ruins. They found that the structure included three hermit cells, a chapel, a wine cellar, and a small crypt; within the crypt lay a single set of human remains, likely belonging to one of the monks who had inhabited the site during the Middle Ages.

A metal ladder (the "stairway to Heaven") was ultimately installed into the side of the pillar, making it much easier for both researchers and tourists to gain access to these ruins.

The hermitage at the top of Katskhi Pillar actually became active again in the early 1990's, when a small group of monks attempted to revive the Stylite tradition. A Georgian Orthodox monk named Maxime Qavtaradze then lived alone at the top of Katskhi Pillar for almost 20 years, beginning in 1995 and ending with his death in 2014. He is now buried at the base of the pillar.

While the hermitage is no longer accessible to the public, and it is currently uninhabited, it's still visited by local monks, who regularly climb up to the church in order to pray. There is also an active monastery complex at the base of the pillar, where a temple known as the Church of the Simeon Stylites is located.

The Church of the Simeon Stylites: this church is located within an active monastery complex that has been built at the base of the pillar; several frescoes and religious icons decorate the walls of the church, and a small shrine containing a 6th century cross is located in the center

There are many lingering questions about the history of Katskhi Pillar, particularly during the pre-Christian era. There is at least some evidence suggesting that it was once the site of votive offerings to pagan deities, as a series of pre-Christian idols have been found buried in the areas that surround the pillar; according to local tradition, the pillar itself was once venerated by the pagan societies that inhabited the area, but it's difficult to determine the extent to which these claims may simply be part of the mythos that surrounds Katskhi Pillar, particularly given its mysterious reputation.

Sources & More Info:

BBC: Georgia's Daring, Death-Defying Pilgrimage

CNN: Katskhi Pillar, the Extraordinary Church where Daring Monks Climb Closer to God

Radio Free Europe: Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar

Architecture and Asceticism (Ch. 4): Stylitism as a Cultural Trend Between Syria and Georgia

Research Publication from the Georgian National Museum: Katskhi Pillar

Journal of Nomads: Katskhi Pillar, the Most Incredible Cliff Church in the World

Georgian Journal: Georgia's Katskhi Pillar Among World's 20 Wonderfully Serene and Secluded Places

[skyeslittlecorner]

Guys, we're doing it!

Do you remember this survey? I didn't expect such a great response. If that many of you really want to participate, I guess I'll have to do more than one batch of the draw to choose as much of your MC's as I can.

More info under the cut!

Time for some rules, so we won't get lost

The concept is simple. You give me your precious OCs/MCs, I adopt them for a while, write fanfic (related to WHB, of course) and hand them over to your loving hands.

For now, I plan to choose 3-5 people to write for. This may change if more people apply. If one applies, I will write for one. If 96 apply, I will choose more. We'll figure it out.

You can apply in two ways. One is to reblog this post and describe everything in reply, the second is to create your own post with the hashtag #whbmcshuffle Preferably both at once. I don't want to accidentally lose any application. I also recommend following this tag for the time being because I will post further information under it.

The people I will write for will be drawn randomly. I want it to be fair, and I guess this is the only way I won't be biased when I see mutuals I like or Andrea my favorite demons.

You can apply for one week. Since we may all be in different time zones, submissions will close when this survey ends.

Feed me information. Since I want to write something good, I would like to ask you for some information. Here's the list:

Name and pronouns: Quite obvious. Short bio: Who are they? Any difficult past or traumas? What were they doing on earth? Did they get to hell like in canon? How do they feel in hell? Where they live? Character: What are their main character traits? How do they usually behave? How do they behave in crisis situations? Voice: (Not mandatory, although, very helpful.) What would the narrative look like? More calm or energetic? Confident or not at all? Funny or serious? Calm or nervous? Laid back or distrustful? You can even paste here a song or a link to some story that you think reflect your oc's voice well. Important facts: Free space, you can put whatever you want here and whatever you think is important. Demons to include in the fic: (from 1 to 3) Brief description of relationship with chosen demons: I guess that's obvious. The tone in which it should be written: (i.e. spicy, angst, fluff, funny or other) Narrative type: Second person (addressing as 'you') or third person (addressing with selected pronouns) The script you would like to see: (Not mandatory, although, very helpful) For example, a date on Earth, cooking together, whatever you come up with.

I know it's a lot to ask. This is a minimal list, but the more information you give me, the better I will be able to empathize with your MCs and hopefully imitate their character. If you have already written about them, for example in your other posts, feel free to include links, so I can take a better look at them. Of course, you can add photos, or a song, or memes, anything you want!

I didn't mention the length of the fic, but it depends on how I will feel writing it. But I'll want it to be at least 800 words.

Most important. Have fun! It's mainly about getting to know each other's OCs/MCs. Who knows, if there's a lot of interest, maybe we'll do more draws. 👀

I tried to include everything, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

Hello again!

We're back with another pilot survey for the AO3 Demographics Survey 2023 - an independent research project about the demographics and behaviours of AO3 users, which is planning to launch at the end of this year or early next year. (Please note that we are in no way officially endorsed by or affiliated with AO3!)

The purpose of our pilot surveys is to seek feedback about which questions should be included, the best phrasing of questions, and similar design concerns. After analysing the results of the initial pilot surveys, we now have a final draft of the complete survey. These questions are intended to identify any remaining issues in the final draft, and any guidance which needs to be placed in the FAQs or similar in order to help the final survey run smoothly.

If you are willing to give feedback, we estimate the survey will take about 15 minutes. No data collected as part of this survey will be included in the final project; it is for survey design purposes only.

We regret that due to the use of images in this survey to display how questions will look, it may not be accessible to those using screenreaders. The final survey will not have this issue.

This pilot survey will run for about a week, or until we have received 800 responses, whichever happens first. Signal boosts are appreciated. Thank you!

[littlenightma]

Sick | T-1000 x Reader

It was two in the morning when you felt your stomach cramp. You clutched yourself while you stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom. Falling to your knees, you not-too-prettily expelled the contents of your cramping stomach into the toilet. From behind you, Austin’s lean figure hovered defensively.

“What is wrong?”

You dunked your head one more time before answering, pushing the leftover bile back down your throat.

“I’m sick.”

Sick.

He took in your shivering form hunched over the toilet and the glaze of perspiration coating your skin. He did not like seeing you in pain and he wanted the wretched sounds coming from your mouth to cease.

His internal database held a plethora of files on the human anatomy, among other useful topics, which served to help him take down targets proficiently. He was created to kill, not to protect. In other words, he was out of his element when it came to nursing a human back to passable health.

He knelt down and felt your slick forehead with the tips of his fingers. The nanobots quickly pick up on your high body temp.

“Your temperature is 2 degrees above what it should be.”

“How did you do that without a thermometer?”

“Stop evading the issue.”

Evading the iss- God, he’s so dramatic.

You shoot him an annoyed look, “It was a genuine question,” you paused, “And there is no issue.”

“You have a fever.” He pressed.

“It’s barely a fever.”

“Your body is overheating.”

You winked, “So you’re saying I’m hot, huh?”

It did not register on his face, but Austin was growing frustrated at your nonchalantness. “Why are you disregarding the state of your well-being?

Starting to feel uncomfortable, you sat down with your back against the toilet. The cool porcelain felt good on your warm skin. You were in no mood to be chided by the machine about your well-being when not too long ago he was the reason it was in danger - on multiple occasions.

“Because,” you began, wiping the side of your mouth with the back of your hand, “I’ve been sick before. I know what to expect. Everyone gets the stomach bug. I will be fine in a few days.”

Austin internally bristled. “That long?”

You shrugged your shoulders, “Give or take. There’s medicine I can take that will help make me feel better.”

Austin stood up, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“No, you’re not. It’s not that serious, Austin.”

“It is to me.”

Thankfully, T-800, Uncle Bob, appeared in the doorway wearing his signature shades, holding a small, plastic bottle in his large, mechanical hand.

“I heard you from downstairs. Here,” he offered you the bottle.

Before you could take it, Austin had snatched it from Bob, scrutinizing it. He ran his index finger down the back label and shook his head. “There are too many side effects.”

“Just precautions. The medicine will help them.”

You nodded enthusiastically along with Bob’s words. Austin glanced at you and reluctantly uncapped it with more force than necessary. He held the bottle in the air as he dropped the thick, red liquid into the cap, making sure you received the exact dosage for someone of your age and weight needed.

You shot it back with a grimace. “Hm, disgusting,”

Bob chuckled as he took the medicine back. “You sound like John.”

You perked at John’s name, “I haven’t woke him up, have I?”

“No.”

“Thanks, Uncle Bob,” You smiled weakly from the floor.

The T-800 had been around humans long enough to comprehend sarcasm. “No problemo, kiddo.”

You giggle even though your stomach gurgled threateningly. “Good one.”

Austin handed back the medicine and T-800 bid his goodnight, going back to do his nightly routine of surveying the perimeter of the house.

Austin helped you off the floor and you went over to the sink to brush your teeth. He stood behind you like a shadow, electric eyes never wavering from watching you, as if waiting for you to suddenly fall apart.

“Austin?”

“Yes?”

“Will you lay with me?”

His head lifted at your question. “If that’s what you want, I will.”

“It is.”

Back in your room, he slid into your bed, carefully positioning himself in a way that prevented him from touching you. You may have been human, but you were by no means fragile. Austin didn’t fight you when you pried his arms open and settled within them.

As your head rested on his chest, you couldn’t hear the rhythmic thrumming of his heart or feel his chest rise and fall from breathing. He lacked everything that provided humans natural comfort, lacked any kind of genuine emotion or feeling and most of the time he was an asshole. Did it make sense to find safety in the arms of a killing machine? If he could kill you, that meant he could protect you all the same, right?

Right?

“If your temperature rises I am taking you to the hospital.”

His t-shirt hid your slight eye roll, “I’m not dying here, Austin.”

His fingers momentarily pressed into your ribs. His next words meant to comfort you, but they possessed a certain level of threat, briefly reminding you that the man holding you was not a man at all, and his whole existence, his whole purpose, was to dispose of people like you by ridding the world of the boy sleeping soundly in his bedroom just a few doors down.

“You’re not going to.”

Knowing you weren’t going to convince him otherwise, you didn’t argue. When your breathing evened out and your mouth fell slightly open, Austin shifted, lowering his head to your ear. Believing you wouldn’t hear him, he whispered two simple words.

“Get better.”

Little did he know that by laying in his arms, you already were.

[discount-shades]

Sleepy Baby is Joe Cool

a/n: So I had the costume idea back in February or March and I have been holding on to it until now. It has been forever since I've written at all let alone for these two and I'm feeling pretty out of practice.

Pairing: Jake “Hangman” Seresin/reader

Warning: none, Fluff

Word Count: 800 ish

Summary: It's Halloween!

Previous          Masterlist          Next

“Jake, you have to wear them.” You can’t help but whine, holding up the headband with the floppy dog ears made from felt and hot glue. “You wouldn’t let me paint your face so if you don’t wear the ears you're not Joe Cool. You are just a guy in a red sweater and sunglasses.”

Jake frowns down at you and you go to place your hands on your hips but are blocked by the red cardboard doghouse hanging off your shoulders that you had spent weeks carefully building. “You don't have to wear ears.” He replies. 

“I’m World War I Flying Ace Snoopy,” you explain patiently with a roll of your eyes, “He wears an aviator hat and a red scarf.” Spinning the scarf in question around you grin as you let it brush Jake's nose.  

“I don't see why I couldn’t be Flying Ace Snoopy, I’m the fighter pilot of the two of us.” Jake is now the one whining. 

“But Flying Ace Snoopy is in the Air Force and you made it very clear to me the day we met that you are in the Navy.” Your grin widens at the pout on Jake’s face. “Besides, you get to be the pilot every day, let me be it for once.”

“Fine,” Jake huffs as he puts on the dog ear headband, “But only because you look cute in the hat.” You lean forward to give him a kiss and are forced to stop when your cardboard dog house bumps into him. “How are you going to get into the truck with that thing on?”

 After carefully redressing in the cardboard doghouse part of your costume in the parking lot you edge into the Hard Deck as Jake holds the door. Catching hold of his hand you make your way over to the boisterous group at the pool table near the back. After your engagement dinner your group of friends had sort of melded into the Dagger Squad. Occasionally meeting up for backyard barbecues and nights out. 

A grin splits your face as you walk over to the cheers at your Snoopy alter ego costumes. Jake gives your hand a gentle squeeze as he goes to get drinks. Surveying the group's costumes you are glad you went all out to build your Snoopy doghouse. Almost everyone has dressed up. “Really, Bradley,” You turn to the one person who looks almost identical as he looks in his everyday life. “Magnum PI?”

“I can’t help it if I’m always this sexy.” He puffs out his chest and glances at Grace as if to make sure she is looking. You roll your eyes and look over to see Grace, dressed as Sandy from Grease, leaning against the wall talking to Bob.

“Keep telling yourself that.” The voice comes from behind a white stormtrooper helmet to your left. You smile at who can only be Mickey. 

“Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?” You ask him and he laughs as Jake returns with your whiskey sour. 

“Hangman, your fiance is cooler than you are.” You feel Jake bump into your box and press a kiss to the leather helmet you are wearing. 

“She’s cooler than you too, Fanboy.” 

– – – 

The evening continues with everyone talking and laughing. At some point Jake 'loses' the headband and asks Penny for a stool without a back so you can sit down in your doghouse costume. It is late when you finally leave with Jake, and Bradley follows. 

“She really doesn’t like me does she?” Bradley asks mournfully as Jake helps you out of your costume when you reach his truck. 

“Who?” You ask as you smooth your mussed hair. 

“Grace.” He looks at you with puppy dog eyes. “She just rolled her eyes and ignored me all night.”

“I mean you were flirting with her in front of her boyfriend.” You shrug. “What did you expect her to do?”

Bradley freezes as he goes to open the truck door for you. “Her boyfriend?” he repeats in confusion. “She was next to Bob all night.”

“Yeah,” You glance over at Jake and see his equally shocked expression. “They’ve been seeing each other for months now.”

“She is dating Bob?” Bradley shouts out.

At the same time Jake says, “Bob was the guy dressed as Danny Zuko?” 

“Wow.” You glance between the two men in disbelief. “You both really are oblivious.”

“How could you not tell me?” Jake almost sounds offended and you can't help but laugh.

“We literally went on a double date together last Saturday.”

“I thought we were all just hanging out and I was pretty focussed on you and not Bob.” Jake says as he tries to remember the interactions between Bob and Grace. “Well good for them.” Jake opens the truck door and you climb in after putting the doghouse in the truck box. 

“What about me?” Bradley asks.

“Go find someone else, Magnum, Sandy is taken.” You call out the window as Jake drives away. 

[mariathechosen1]

Queer participation and representation in fanfiction: An update

Hello! 

Some people might be aware of the fact that last week I posted a survey I was doing as part of research project for a Norwegian research competition. I was expecting about 50-80 answers, but instead got about 8300…this is a lot of answers. For quite some time this was more ‘Maria’s silly little fanfiction project’ and so, due to the nature of the competition and the expected sample size, official university requirements weren’t prioritized. Since then, me and my research supervisor have been in contact with the university organizing the competition to ask them “What the hell do we do?” and after much discussion we’ve decided to redo the study.

The survey itself can be found here: https://forms.gle/Tcoafs9dU627PNcn8

Update: The survey is now closed!

 FAQ:

‘What does this mean?’

The main differences are that we’ve had to remove the two questions asking the survey taker about their gender identity and sexuality as these are considered to be sensitive information. We’ve also decided that to participate in the current study, you have to be over 16 and we’ve changed the requirements so that this study is only for queer individuals. There’s an added ‘terms and conditions’ page that one must consent to before taking the survey to confirm this.

  ‘I participated in the past study, what happens to my answer?’

Any past data from the former survey will be deleted. I know that some people might be a little frustrated over this (A big thank you to all those who wrote 800 word essays in the original survey), but the past data would simply not be valid. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused, but that’s what we’ve been recommended to do. If you want, you send in a new answer to the updated study.

 ‘I didn’t participate in the past study, can I still answer?’

Yes! Anyone who is 1) queer, 2) over 16 years old, and 3) familiar with fanfiction, whether that be through reading or writing it, can participate in the new study.

 ‘Why didn’t the original survey follow these new criteria?’

The simple answer is that getting 50 answers is very different from getting 8000. Getting this much engagement made us realize that this was actually a topic that a lot (and I mean A LOT) of people are engaged about. The research competition is, for the most part, designed to introduce younger students to proper research and study methods, and so requirements weren’t as strict as they would be for a scientist with years of experience. Now that we’ve realized the potential of this study, though, we’ve decided to try and conduct it befittingly.

If it weren’t for the fact that the competition deadline is in April, we probably would have applied for special permission to ask more specific questions about sexuality and gender, but alas.

 ‘Will I be able to read the project after it’s done?’/’Will you post the survey results?’

This is still under consideration, but if the project does manage to win the competition, the organizers will publish it on their website. If it doesn’t, we will most likely decide to publish it on our own. I also feel it’s relevant to mention that even though it’s slightly frustrating to have to do the survey all over again, the positive side is that after many emails with the organizing university, they’ve gotten very interested in this project and has, along with us, realized that the potential for fan studies is a lot bigger than what one might have thought. The future is still unknown, but they have inquired about doing something more with the research in the future, so who knows?  

 ‘I have a different question about the survey questions/project/research.’

If (and this is a big if) you have a casual question or inquiry about any of the survey questions or the project details, you can send me either a message or an ask (Though I would prefer a message). I get that some people feel a little awkward sending a full email if they have a small informal question about how something is phrased, for example, but please send any serious questions about methodology, data privacy or our qualifications to the study’s research supervisor. Preferably in a respectful manner.

[mariacallous]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village—a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.

Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the past few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.

The arc of St. Paul’s recent story has become a familiar one—so familiar, in fact, that I couldn’t blame you if you missed it. Alaska news is full of climate elegies now—every one linked to wrenching changes caused by burning fossil fuels. I grew up in Alaska, as my parents did before me, and I’ve been writing about the state’s culture for more than 20 years. Some Alaskans’ connections go far deeper than mine. Alaska Native people have inhabited this place for more than 10,000 years.

As I’ve reported in Indigenous communities, people remind me that my sense of history is short and that the natural world moves in cycles. People in Alaska have always had to adapt.

Even so, in the past few years I’ve seen disruptions to economies and food systems, as well as fires, floods, landslides, storms, coastal erosion, and changes to river ice—all escalating at a pace that’s hard to process. Increasingly, my stories veer from science and economics into the fundamental ability of Alaskans to keep living in rural places.

You can’t separate how people understand themselves in Alaska from the landscape and animals. The idea of abandoning long-occupied places echoes deep into identity and history. I’m convinced the questions Alaskans are grappling with—whether to stay in a place and what to hold onto if they can’t—will eventually face everyone.

I’ve given thought to solastalgia—the longing and grief experienced by people whose feeling of home is disrupted by negative changes in the environment. But the concept doesn’t quite capture what it feels like to live here now.

A few years ago, I was a public radio editor on a story out of the small Southeast Alaska town of Haines about a storm that came through carrying a record amount of rain. The morning started routinely—a reporter on the ground calling around, surveying the damage. But then, a hillside rumbled down, taking out a house and killing the people inside. I still think of it—people going through regular routines in a place that feels like home, but that, at any time, might come cratering down. There’s a prickly anxiety humming beneath Alaska life now, like a wildfire that travels for miles in the loamy surface of soft ground before erupting without notice into flames.

But in St. Paul, there was no wildfire—only fat raindrops on my windshield as I loaded into a truck at the airport. In my notebook, tucked into my backpack, I’d written a single question: “What does this place preserve?”

The sandy road from the airport in late March led across wide, empty grassland, bleached sepia by the winter season. Town appeared beyond a rise, framed by towers of rusty crab pots. It stretched across a saddle of land, with rows of brightly painted houses—magentas, yellows, teals—stacked on either hillside. The grocery store, school, and clinic sat in between them, with a 100-year-old Russian Orthodox church named for Saints Peter and Paul, patrons of the day in June 1786 when Russian explorer Gavril Pribylov landed on the island. A darkened processing plant, the largest in the world for snow crabs, rose above the quiet harbor.

You’re probably familiar with sweet, briny snow crab—Chionoecetes opilio—which is commonly found on the menus of chain restaurants like Red Lobster. A plate of crimson legs with drawn butter there will cost you $32.99. In a regular year, a good portion of the snow crab America eats comes from the plant, owned by the multibillion-dollar company Trident Seafoods.

Not that long ago, at the peak of crab season in late winter, temporary workers at the plant would double the population of the town, butchering, cooking, freezing, and boxing 100,000 pounds of snow crab per day, along with processing halibut from a small fleet of local fishers. Boats full of crab rode into the harbor at all hours, sometimes motoring through swells so perilous they’ve become the subject of a popular collection of YouTube videos. People filled the town’s lone tavern in the evenings, and the plant cafeteria, the only restaurant in town, opened to locals. In a normal year, taxes on crab and local investments in crab fishing could bring St. Paul more than $2 million.

Then came the massive, unexpected drop in the crab population—a crash scientists linked to record-warm ocean temperatures and less ice formation, both associated with climate change. In 2021, federal authorities severely limited the allowable catch. In 2022, they closed the fishery for the first time in 50 years. Industry losses in the Bering Sea crab fishery climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars. St. Paul lost almost 60 percent of its tax revenue overnight. Leaders declared a “cultural, social, and economic emergency.” Town officials had reserves to keep the community’s most basic functions running, but they had to start an online fundraiser to pay for emergency medical services.

Through the windshield of the truck I was riding in, I could see the only cemetery on the hillside, with weathered rows of Orthodox crosses. Van Halen played on the only radio station. I kept thinking about the meaning of a cultural emergency. 

Some of Alaska’s Indigenous villages have been occupied for thousands of years, but modern rural life can be hard to sustain because of the high costs of groceries and fuel shipped from outside, limited housing, and scarce jobs. St. Paul’s population was already shrinking ahead of the crab crash. Young people departed for educational and job opportunities. Older people left to be closer to medical care. St. George, its sister island, lost its school years ago and now has about 40 residents.

If you layer climate-related disruptions—such as changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and shrinking populations of fish and game—on top of economic troubles, it just increases the pressure to migrate. 

When people leave, precious intangibles vanish as well: a language spoken for 10,000 years, the taste for seal oil, the method for weaving yellow grass into a tiny basket, words to hymns sung in Unangam Tunuu, and maybe most importantly, the collective memory of all that had happened before. St. Paul played a pivotal role in Alaska’s history. It’s also the site of several dark chapters in America’s treatment of Indigenous populations. But as people and their memories disappear, what remains?

There is so much to remember.

The Pribilofs consist of five volcano-made islands—but people now live mainly on St. Paul. The island is rolling, treeless, with black sand beaches and towering basaltic cliffs that drop into a crashing sea. In the summer it grows verdant with mosses, ferns, grasses, dense shrubs, and delicate wildflowers. Millions of migratory seabirds arrive every year, making it a tourist attraction for birders that’s been called the “Galapagos of the North.”

Driving the road west along the coast, you might glimpse a few members of the island’s half-century-old domestic reindeer herd. The road gains elevation until you reach a trailhead. From there you can walk the soft fox path for miles along the top of the cliffs, seabirds gliding above you—many species of gulls, puffins, common murres with their white bellies and obsidian wings. In spring, before the island greens up, you can find the old ropes people use to climb down to harvest murre eggs. Foxes trail you. Sometimes you can hear them barking over the sound of the surf.

Two-thirds of the world’s population of northern fur seals—hundreds of thousands of animals—return to beaches in the Pribilofs every summer to breed. Valued for their dense, soft fur, they were once hunted to near extinction.

Alaska’s history since contact is a thousand stories of outsiders overwriting Indigenous culture and taking things—land, trees, oil, animals, minerals—of which there is a limited supply. St. Paul is perhaps among the oldest examples. The Unangax̂—sometimes called Aleuts—had lived on a chain of Aleutian Islands to the south for thousands of years and were among the first Indigenous people to see outsiders—Russian explorers who arrived in the mid-1700s. Within 50 years, the population was nearly wiped out. People of Unangax̂ descent are now scattered across Alaska and the world. Just 1,700 live in the Aleutian region.

St. Paul is home to one of the largest Unangax̂ communities left. Many residents are related to Indigenous people kidnapped from the Aleutian Islands and forced by Russians to hunt seals as part of a lucrative 19th-century fur trade. St. Paul’s robust fur operation, subsidized by slave labor, became a strong incentive for the United States’ purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867.

On the plane ride in, I read the 2022 book that detailed the history of piracy in the early seal trade on the island, Roar of the Sea: Treachery, Obsession, and Alaska’s Most Valuable Wildlife by Deb Vanasse. One of the facts that stayed with me: Profits from Indigenous sealing allowed the US to recoup the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska by 1905. Another: After the purchase, the US government controlled islanders well into the mid-20th century as part of an operation many describe as indentured servitude.

The government was obligated to provide for housing, sanitation, food, and heat on the island, but none were adequate. Considered “wards of the state,” the Unangax̂ were compensated for their labors in meager rations of canned food. Once a week, Indigenous islanders were allowed to hunt or fish for subsistence. Houses were inspected for cleanliness and to check for home brew. Travel on and off the island was strictly controlled. Mail was censored.

Between 1870 and 1946, Alaska Native people on the islands earned an estimated $2.1 million, while the government and private companies raked in $46 million in profits. Some inequitable practices continued well into the 1960s, when politicians, activists, and the Tundra Times, an Alaska Native newspaper, brought the story of the government’s treatment of Indigenous islanders to a wider world.

During World War II, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and the US military gathered St. Paul residents with little notice and transported them 1,200 miles to a detention camp at a decrepit cannery in Southeast Alaska at Funter Bay. Soldiers ransacked their homes on St. Paul and slaughtered the reindeer herd so there would be nothing for the Japanese if they occupied the island. The government said the relocation and detention were for protection, but they brought the Unangax̂ back to the island during the seal season to hunt. A number of villagers died in cramped and filthy conditions with little food. But Unangax̂ also became acquainted with Tlingits from the Southeast region, who had been organizing politically for years through the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Sisterhood organization.

After the war, the Unangax̂ people returned to the island and began to organize and agitate for better conditions. In one famous suit, known as “the corned beef case,” Indigenous residents working in the seal industry filed a complaint with the government in 1951. According to the complaint, their compensation, paid in the form of rations, included corned beef, while white workers on the island received fresh meat. After decades of hurdles, the case was settled in favor of the Alaska Native community for more than $8 million.

“The government was obligated to provide ‘comfort,’ but ‘wretchedness’ and ‘anguish’ are the words that more accurately describe the condition of the Pribilof Aleuts,” read the settlement, awarded by the Indian Claims Commission in 1979. The commission was established by Congress in the 1940s to weigh unresolved tribal claims.

Prosperity and independence finally came to St. Paul after commercial sealing was halted in 1984. The government brought in fishermen to teach locals how to fish commercially for halibut and funded the construction of a harbor for crab processing. By the early ’90s, crab catches were enormous, reaching between 200 and 300 million pounds per year. (By comparison, the allowable catch in 2021, the first year of marked crab decline, was 5.5 million pounds, though fishermen couldn’t catch even that.) The island’s population reached a peak of more than 700 people in the early 1990s but has been on a slow decline ever since.

I’d come to the island in part to talk to Aquilina Lestenkof, a historian deeply involved in language preservation. I found her on a rainy afternoon in the bright blue wood-walled civic center, which is a warren of classrooms and offices, crowded with books, artifacts, and historic photographs. She greeted me with a word that starts at the back of the throat and rhymes with “song.”

“Aang,” she said.

Lestenkof moved from St. George, where she was born, to St. Paul when she was four. Her father, who was also born in St. George, became the village priest. She had long salt-and-pepper hair and a tattoo that stretched across both her cheeks made of curved lines and dots.  Each dot represents an island where a generation of her family lived, beginning with Attu in the Aleutians, then traveling to the Russian Commander Islands—also a site of a slave sealing operation—as well as Atka, Unalaska, St. George, and St. Paul.

“I’m the fifth generation having my story travel through those six islands,” she said.

Lestenkof is a grandmother, related to a good many people in the village and married to the city manager. For the past 10 years she’s been working on revitalizing Unangam Tunuu, the Indigenous language. Only one elder in the village speaks fluently now. He’s among the fewer than 100 fluent speakers left on the planet, though many people in the village understand and speak some words.

Back in the 1920s, teachers in the government school put hot sauce on her father’s tongue for speaking Unangam Tunuu, she told me. He didn’t require his children to learn it. There’s a way that language shapes how you understand the land and community around you, she said, and she wanted to preserve the parts of that she could.

“[My father] said, ‘If you thought in our language, if you thought from our perspective, you’d know what I’m talking about,’” she said. “I felt cheated.”

She showed me a wall covered with rectangles of paper that tracked grammar in Unangam Tunuu. Lestenkof said she needed to hunt down a fluent speaker to check the grammar. Say you wanted to say “drinking coffee,” she explained. You might learn that you don’t need to add the word for “drinking.” Instead, you might be able to change the noun to a verb just by adding an ending to it.

Her program had been supported by money from a local nonprofit invested in crabbing and, more recently, by grants, but she was recently informed that she may lose funding. Her students come from the village school, which is shrinking along with the population. I asked her what would happen if the crabs fail to come back. People could survive, she said, but the village would look very different.

“Sometimes I’ve pondered, is it even right to have 500 people on this island?” she said.

If people moved off, I asked her, who would keep track of its history?

“Oh, so we don’t repeat it?” she asked, laughing. “We repeat history. We repeat stupid history, too.”

Until recently, during the crab season, the Bering Sea fleet had some 70 boats, most of them ported out of Washington state, with crews that came from all over the US. Few villagers work in the industry, in part because the job only lasts for a short season. Instead, they fish commercially for halibut, have positions in the local government or the tribe, or work in tourism. Processing is hard, physical labor—a schedule might be seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with an average pay of $17 an hour. As with lots of processors in Alaska, nonresident workers on temporary visas from the Philippines, Mexico, and Eastern Europe fill many of the jobs.

The crab plant echoes the dynamics of commercial sealing, she said. Its workers leave their homeland, working hard labor for low pay. It was one more industry depleting Alaska’s resources and sending them across the globe. Maybe the system didn’t serve Alaskans in a lasting way. Do people eating crab know how far it travels to the plate?

“We have the seas feeding people in freakin’ Iowa,” she said. “They shouldn’t be eating it. Get your own food.”

Ocean temperatures are increasing all over the world, but sea surface temperature change is most dramatic in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. As the North Pacific experiences sustained increases in temperature, it also warms up the Bering Sea to the north, through marine heat waves. During the past decade, these heat waves have grown more frequent and longer-lasting than at any time since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago. Scientists expect this trend to continue. 

A marine heat wave in the Bering Sea between 2016 and 2019 brought record warmth, preventing ice formation for several winters and affecting numerous cold-water species, including Pacific cod and pollock, seals, seabirds, and several types of crab.

Snow crab stocks always vary, but in 2018 a survey indicated that the snow crab population had exploded—it showed a 60 percent boost in market-sized male crab. (Only males of a certain size are harvested.) The next year showed abundance had fallen by 50 percent. The survey skipped a year due to the pandemic. Then, in 2021, the survey showed that the male snow crab population had dropped by more than 90 percent from its high point in 2018. All major Bering Sea crab stocks, including red king crab and bairdi crab, were way down too. The most recent survey showed a decline in snow crabs from 11.7 billion in 2018 to 1.9 billion in 2022.

Scientists think a large pulse of young snow crabs came just before years of abnormally warm water temperatures, which led to less sea ice formation. One hypothesis is that these warmer temperatures drew sea animals from warmer climates north, displacing cold water animals, including commercial species like crab, pollock, and cod.

Another has to do with food availability. Crabs depend on cold water—water that’s 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit), to be exact—that comes from storms and ice melt, forming cold pools on the bottom of the ocean. Scientists theorize that cold water slows crabs’ metabolisms, reducing their need for food. But with the warmer water on the bottom, they needed more food than was available. It’s possible they starved or cannibalized each other, leading to the crash now underway. Either way, warmer temperatures were key. And there’s every indication temperatures will continue to increase with global warming.

“If we’ve lost the ice, we’ve lost the 2-degree water,” Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Cold water, it’s their niche—they’re an Arctic animal.”

The snow crab may rebound in a few years, so long as there aren’t any periods of warm water. But if warming trends continue, as scientists predict, the marine heat waves will return, pressuring the crab population again.

Bones litter the wild part of St. Paul Island like Ezekiel’s Valley in the Old Testament—reindeer ribs, seal teeth, fox femurs, whale vertebrae, and air-light bird skulls hide in the grass and along the rocky beaches, evidence of the bounty of wildlife and 200 years of killing seals.

When I went to visit Phil Zavadil, the city manager and Aqualina’s husband, in his office, I found a couple of sea lion shoulder bones on a coffee table. Called “yes/no” bones, they have a fin along the top and a heavy ball at one end. In St. Paul, they function like a magic eight ball. If you drop one and it falls with the fin pointing right, the answer to your question is yes. If it falls pointing left, the answer is no. One large one said “City of St. Paul Big-Decision Maker.” The other one was labeled “budget bone.”

The long-term health of the town, Zavadil told me, wasn’t in a totally dire position yet when it came to the sudden loss of the crab. It had invested during the heyday of crabbing and with a somewhat reduced budget could likely sustain itself for a decade.

“That’s if something drastic doesn’t happen. If we don’t have to make drastic cuts,” he said. “Hopefully the crab will come back at some level.”

The easiest economic solution for the collapse of the crab fishery would be to convert the plant to process other fish, Zavadil said. There were some regulatory hurdles, but they weren’t insurmountable. City leaders were also exploring mariculture—raising seaweed, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins. That would require finding a market and testing mariculture methods in St. Paul’s waters. The fastest timeline for that was maybe three years, he said. Or they could promote tourism. The island has about 300 tourists a year, most of them hardcore birders.

“But you think about just doubling that,” he said.

The trick was to stabilize the economy before too many working-age adults moved away. There were already more jobs than people to fill them. Older people were passing away, younger families were moving out.

“I had someone come up to me the other day and say, ‘The village is dying,’” he said, but he didn’t see it that way. There were still people working and lots of solutions to try.

“There is cause for alarm if we do nothing,” he said. “We’re trying to work on things and take action the best we can.”

Aquilina Lestenkof’s nephew, Aaron Lestenkof, is an island sentinel with the tribal government, a job that entails monitoring wildlife and overseeing the removal of an endless stream of trash that washes up ashore. He drove me along a bumpy road down the coast to see the beaches that would soon be noisy and crowded with seals.

We parked, and I followed him to a wide field of nubby vegetation stinking of seal scat. A handful of seal heads popped up over the rocks. They eyed us, then shimmied into the surf.

In the old days, Alaska Native seal workers used to walk out onto the crowded beaches, club the animals in the head, and then stab them in the heart. They took the pelts and harvested some meat for food, but some went to waste. Aquilina Lestenkof told me taking animals like that ran counter to how Unangax̂ related to the natural world before the Russians came.

“You have a prayer or ceremony attached to taking the life of an animal—you connect to it by putting the head back in the water,” she said.

Slaughtering seals for pelts made people numb, she told me. The numbness passed from one generation to the next. The era of crabbing had been in some ways a reparation for all the years of exploitation, she said. Climate change brought new, more complex problems. 

I asked Aaron Lestenkof if his elders ever talked about the time in the detention camp where they were sent during World War II. He told me his grandfather, Aquilina’s father, sometimes recalled a painful experience of having to drown rats in a bucket there. The act of killing animals that way was compulsory—the camp had become overrun with rats—but it felt like an ominous affront to the natural order, a trespass he’d pay for later. Every human action in nature has consequences, he often said. Later, when he lost his son, he remembered drowning the rats. 

“Over at the harbor, he was playing and the waves were sweeping over the dock there. He got swept out and he was never found,” Aaron Lestenkof said. “That’s, like, the only story I remember him telling.”

We picked our way down a rocky beach littered with trash—faded coral buoys, disembodied plastic fishing gloves and boots, an old ship’s dishwasher lolling open. He said the animals around the island were changing in small ways. There were fewer birds now. A handful of seals were now living on the island year-round, instead of migrating south. Their population was also declining.

People still fish, hunt marine mammals, collect eggs, and pick berries. Aaron Lestenkof hunts red-legged kittiwakes and king eiders, though he doesn’t have a taste for the bird meat. He finds elders who do like them, but that’s gotten harder. He wasn’t looking forward to the lean years of waiting for the crabs to return. Proceeds from the community’s investment in crabbing boats had paid the heating bills of older people; the boats also supplied the elderly with crab and halibut for their freezers. They supported education programs and environmental cleanup efforts. But now, he said, having the crab gone would “affect our income and the community.”

Aaron Lestenkof was optimistic that they might cultivate other industries and grow tourism. He hoped so, because he never wanted to leave the island. His daughter was away at boarding school because there was no in-person high school any more. He hoped, when she grew up, that she’d want to return and make her life in town.

On Sunday morning, the 148-year-old church bell at Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church tolled through the fog. A handful of older women and men filtered in and stood on separate sides of the church among gilded portraits of the saints. The church has been part of village life since the beginning of Russian occupation, one of the few places, people said, where Unangam Tunuu was welcome.

A priest sometimes travels to the island, but that day George Pletnikoff Jr, a local, acted as subdeacon, singing the 90-minute service in English, Church Slavonic, and Unangam Tunuu. George helps with Aquilina Lestenkof’s language class. He is newly married with a 6-month-old baby.

After the service, he told me that maybe people weren’t supposed to live on the island. Maybe they needed to leave that piece of history behind.

“This is a traumatized place,” he said. 

It was only a matter of time until the fishing economy didn’t serve the village anymore and the cost of living would make it hard for people to stay, he said. He thought he’d move his family south to the Aleutians, where his ancestors came from.

“Nikolski, Unalaska,” he told me. “The motherland.”

The next day, just before I headed to the airport, I stopped back at Aquilina Lestenkof’s classroom. A handful of middle school students arrived, wearing oversize sweatshirts and high-top Nikes. She invited me into a circle where students introduced themselves in Unangam Tunuu, using hand gestures that helped them remember the words.

After a while, I followed the class to a work table. Lestenkof guided them, pulling a needle through a papery dried seal esophagus to sew a waterproof pouch. The idea was that they’d practice words and skills that generations before them had carried from island to island, hearing and feeling them until they became so automatic they could teach them to their own children.

This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

[licncourt]

Where would you recommend someone start if they wanted to learn more about rome?

I think Mike Duncan's The History of Rome podcast is the best place to start if you're REALLY interested in learning the nitty gritty of Rome from start to finish, but it is long, like 70+ hours I think. The beginning is a little questionable in terms of audio quality, but it improves vastly a few episodes in.

If you're looking for something comparatively less intense, SPQR by Mary Beard is widely considered the most authoritative but readable survey of the Romans. It's still 800 pages/18 hours of audio though. The shortest true intro I can recommend is probably Pax Romana by Adrian Goldsworthy about the golden age of Rome, 500 pages/15 hours. Unfortunately once you get past basic Netflix documentaries, it's just a long and complicated history that can't be told adequately in a couple hundred pages.

If you want more in-depth looks about common topics within Roman history later, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy also has wonderful books on Caesar, Augustus, various aspects of Roman military history, international politics, and more! I also suggest the audiobooks of his work read by Derek Perkins, they're fantastic!

[idiotacadamia]

Hey y’all, I’ve been gone for a good while but I’m currently doing a psych project on stress. I’ve made a survey that I need people to do so I can gather data for my study- don’t worry it’s completely anonymous so The only info I get it the raw data and no one’s identity !!

That’s the link above - please participate and send to others! The larger the population who take part, the higher the validity of my data analysis!!

Tagging some people to help spread the message @ddepressedbookworm @sophiliated @austin13kai @1-800-pastelskies @wyrm-in-a-closet @justmemyselfandthefridge @darkshadowqueensrule @hiineedholywater @genderfluid-and-confuzled @vampyrean @starrycatlover @yourmum069

[nodynasty4us]

The FBI said early Sunday it had identified the man who shot former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler on Saturday as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park. 

The U.S. Secret Service said Saturday night that the shooter “fired multiple shots toward the stage from an elevated position outside of the rally venue,” adding Secret Service personnel “neutralized the shooter, who is now deceased.” 

Trump was pronounced safe shortly after the incident. A spectator at the rally were killed and two others were injured in the shooting. The victims’ identities have not yet been released by law enforcement.

“Tonight we had what we’re calling an assassination attempt on our former president, Donald Trump,” Special Agent in Charge Kevin Rojek of the FBI Pittsburgh field office said at a press conference late Saturday. “We do not currently have an identified motive.”

Trump thanked well-wishers in a post to Truth Social Sunday morning. “Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” he wrote.

“Our love goes out to the other victims and their families,” he continued. “We pray for the recovery of those who were wounded, and hold in our hearts the memory of the citizen who was so horribly killed. In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win. I truly love our Country, and love you all, and look forward to speaking to our Great Nation this week from Wisconsin.”

The site of the shooting at the Butler Farm Show Inc. about 40 minutes north of Pittsburgh, remained an active crime scene, although authorities said they did not believe there was any ongoing threat. 

Anyone who attended the rally or has information is asked to call 1-800-call-fbi, or go to fbi.gov/butler.

The shooting began shortly after Trump took the stage at about 6 p.m. Saturday. Several loud pops could be heard and a bloodied Trump was whisked from the stage, but not before pumping his fist toward the crowd.

Trump confirmed he was shot in a post to Truth Social a few hours after the shooting.” I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” he wrote.

How the shooter was able to get so close to the former president was not clear. Rojek said it was “surprising,” and added “the Secret Service really needs to answer that question, they conduct the initial site survey, they do the initial security assessments and determine where the different security locations should be, and they’re the ones who are in charge of securing the scene.”

President Joe Biden condemned the shooting in a brief statement from Delaware Saturday night “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” Biden said.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have initiated an investigation into the incident. U.S. Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent an email to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle requesting her to appear at a committee hearing July 22.

The Trump campaign said Saturday the former president, who was out of the hospital and at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, would attend the Republican National Committee in Milwaukee this week as planned. He will receive the GOP’s formal nomination as its 2023 presidential candidate on Thursday.

Updated at 8:40 a.m. July 14, 2024 with new Truth Social post from Trump.

Republished under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

[spacenutspod]

If alien technological civilizations exist, they almost certainly use solar energy. Along with wind, it’s the cleanest, most accessible form of energy, at least here on Earth. Driven by technological advances and mass production, solar energy on Earth is expanding rapidly. It seems likely that ETIs (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using widespread solar energy on their planet could make their presence known to us. If other ETIs exist, they could easily be ahead of us technologically. Silicon solar panels could be widely used on their planetary surfaces. Could their mass implementation constitute a detectable technosignature? The authors of a new paper examine that question. The paper is “Detectability of Solar Panels as a Technosignature,” and it’ll be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Ravi Kopparapu from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In their paper, the authors assess the detectability of silicon-based solar panels on an Earth-like habitable zone planet. “Silicon-based photovoltaic cells have high reflectance in the UV-VIS and in the near-IR, within the wavelength range of a space-based flagship mission concept like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO),” the authors write. The HWO would search for and image Earth-like worlds in habitable zones. There’s no timeline for the mission, but the 2020 Decadal Survey recommended the telescope be built. This research looks ahead to the mission or one like it sometime in the future. Naturally, the authors make a number of assumptions about a hypothetical ETI using solar power. They assume that an ETI is using large-scale photovoltaics (PVs) based on silicon and that their planet orbits a Sun-like star. Silicon PVs are cost-effective to produce, and they are well-suited to harness the energy from a Sun-like star. Kopparapu and his co-authors aren’t the first to suggest that silicon PVs could constitute a technosignature. In a 2017 paper, Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics wrote that silicon-based PVs create an artificial edge in their spectra. This edge is similar to the ‘red edge‘ detectable in Earth’s vegetation when viewed from space but shifted to shorter wavelengths. “Future observations of reflected light from exoplanets would be able to detect both natural and artificial edges photometrically if a significant fraction of the planet’s surface is covered by vegetation or photovoltaic arrays, respectively,” Lingam and Loeb wrote. “The “edge” refers to the noticeable increase in the reflectance of the material under consideration when a reflected light spectrum is taken of the planet,” the authors of the new research explain. Satellites monitor the red edge on Earth to observe agricultural crops, and the same could apply to sensing PVs on other worlds. This figure shows the reflection spectrum of a deciduous leaf (data from Clark et al. 1993). The large sharp rise (between 700 and 800 nm) is known as the red edge and is due to the contrast between the strong absorption of chlorophyll and the otherwise reflective leaf. Image Credit: Seager et al. 2005. While Lingam and Loeb suggested the possibility, Kopparapu and his co-authors dug deeper. They point out that we could generate enough energy for our needs (as of 2022) if only 2.4% of the Earth’s surface was covered in silicon-based PVs. The 2.4% number is only accurate if the chosen location is optimized. For Earth, that means the Sahara Desert, and something similar may be true on an alien world. The authors explain, “This region is both close to the equator, where a comparatively greater amount of solar energy would be available throughout the year, and has minimal cloud coverage.” The authors also work with a 23% land coverage number. This number reflects previous research showing that for a projected maximum human population of 10 billion people, 23% land coverage would provide a high standard of living for everyone. They also use it as an upper limit because anything beyond that seems highly unlikely and would have negative consequences. On Earth, the entire continent of Africa is about 23% of the surface. The authors’ calculations show that an 8-meter telescope similar to the HWO would not detect an Earth-like exoplanet with 2.4% of its surface covered with PVs. If an ETI covered 23% of its surface with energy-harvesting PVs, would that be detectable? It would be difficult to untangle the planet’s light from the star’s light and would require hundreds of hours of observation time to reach an acceptable Signal-to-Noise (S/N) ratio. “Because we have chosen the 0.34 ?m–0.52?m range to calculate the impact of silicon panels on the reflectance spectra, the difference between a planet with and without silicon is not markedly different, even with 23% land cover,” the authors explain. Technological progress adds another wrinkle to these numbers. As PV technology advances, an ETI would cover less of its planet’s surface area to generate the same amount of energy, making detection even more difficult. This figure from the research shows the planet-star contrast ratio as a function of wavelength for2.4 % land coverage with PVs (blue solid), 23 % PVs (red solid) and 0% (green dashed) land coverage of solar panels. “This suggests that the artificial silicon edge suggested by Lingam & Loeb (2017) may not be detectable,” the authors write. Image Credit: Kopparapu et al. 2024. Solar energy is expanding rapidly on Earth. Each year, more individual homes, businesses, and institutions implement solar arrays. Those might not constitute technosignatures, but individual installations aren’t the only thing growing. China built a vast solar power plant called the Gonghe Photovoltaic Project in its sparsely populated Qinghai Province. It generates 3182 MW. India has the Bhadla Solar Park (2,245 MW) in the Thar Desert. Saudi Arabia has built several new solar plants and intends to build more. Other innovative solar projects are announced regularly. But will we realistically ever cover 2.4% of our planet in solar arrays? Will we need to? There are many questions. Generating solar power in the heat of the Sahara Desert is challenging. The extreme heat reduces efficiency. Building the infrastructure required to deliver the energy to population centres is also another challenge. Then consider that silicon-based PVs may not be the end point in solar panel development. Perovskite-based PVs hold a lot of promise to outperform silicon. They’re more efficient than silicon, and researchers frequently break energy records with them (in laboratories.) Would perovskite PVs create the same “edge” in a planet’s spectra? The authors didn’t consider specific technological advances like perovskite because it’s beyond the scope of their paper. The bottom line is that silicon-based solar arrays on a planetary surface are unlikely to create an easily detectable technosignature. “Assuming an 8-meter HWO-like telescope, focusing on the reflection edge in the UV-VIS, and considering varying land coverage of solar panels on an Earth-like exoplanet that match the present and projected energy needs, we estimate that several hundreds of hours of observation time is needed to reach a SNR of ~5 for a high land coverage of ~23%,” the authors write. The Bhadla Solar Park is a large PV installation that aims to generate over 2,000 MW of solar energy. Image Credit: (Left) Google Earth. (Right) Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2020, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90537462 The authors also wonder what this means for the Kardashev Scale and things like Dyson Spheres. In that paradigm, ETIs require more and more energy and eventually build a mega engineering project that harvests all of the energy available from their star. A Dyson Sphere would create a powerful technosignature, and astronomers are already looking for them. But if the numbers in this research are correct, we may never see one because they’re not needed. “We find that, even with significant population growth, the energy needs of human civilization would be several orders of magnitude below the energy threshold for a Kardashev Type I civilization or a Dyson sphere/swarm which harnesses the energy of a star,” they conclude. “This line of inquiry reexamines the utility of such concepts and potentially addresses one crucial aspect of the Fermi paradox: We have not discovered any large-scale engineering yet, conceivably because advanced technologies may not need them.” The post Could Alien Solar Panels Be Technosignatures? appeared first on Universe Today.

[aesethewitch]

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