#How To Install Insulation

[aainsulators]

Learn how to properly install insulation in your attic with our expert tips. Increase energy savings and enhance indoor comfort.

[queerautism]

I was very very good and didn't bite the contractor guy that came into my house today even though I wanted to very much

[waterbottlegrey-blog]

this looks fake but if it isn't. you could actually actually make a real life house out of actual legos???

Hydraulic press vs Legos

[atlantic-foundation-crawl-space]

Protect Your Home with Comprehensive Crawl Space Drainage Solutions

A well-maintained crawl space is vital for the health of your home. Moisture problems, such as standing water and excessive humidity, can lead to mold growth, wood rot, and pest infestations. Without proper crawl space drainage, these issues can cause costly structural damage and poor indoor air quality.

At Atlantic Foundation & Crawl Space Repair, we specialize in crawl space drainage systems, including French drains, sump pump installation, and crawl space encapsulation to protect your home from moisture damage and improve its energy efficiency.

Get a Free Crawl Space Inspection Today!

Why Crawl Space Drainage is Crucial Neglecting proper crawl space drainage can result in:

Mold & Musty Odors – Excess moisture encourages mold growth, triggering allergies and respiratory issues. Wood Rot & Structural Damage – Standing water weakens your home’s foundation and structural stability. Pest Infestations – Damp crawl spaces attract termites, rodents, and other pests. Higher Utility Bills – Elevated humidity forces your HVAC system to work harder, increasing energy costs. Crawl Space Flooding – Poor drainage can lead to flooding, affecting your entire foundation. Investing in crawl space French drains and effective drainage solutions prevents these issues and ensures a healthier, more energy-efficient home.

How Our Crawl Space Drainage System Works Our expert drainage solutions are designed to keep your crawl space dry and safeguard your home from moisture damage:

Inspection & Assessment – We identify moisture problems, potential flooding, and areas of concern. Drainage System Installation – We install French drains and sump pumps to divert water away from your foundation. Crawl Space Encapsulation – We install a vapor barrier to prevent moisture rise, creating a controlled, dry environment. Re-Grading Floors & Moisture Barriers – Ensuring proper slope and installing barriers to maintain a dry crawl space. 

Benefits of Crawl Space Drainage Solutions

 ✔ Prevent Mold Growth – Proper drainage reduces moisture, keeping mold in check.

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✔ Reduce Energy Costs – Eliminates excess humidity, easing the strain on your HVAC system.

✔ Keep Pests Out – Reduces the dampness that attracts termites and rodents. 

✔ Improve Indoor Air Quality – Minimizes mold spores and contaminants circulating in your home.

Additional Crawl Space Services Crawl Space Waterproofing & Drainage Systems Foundation & Crawl Space Repair Mold Remediation & Prevention Sump Pump & Dehumidifier Installation French Drain Installation & Maintenance Moisture Barriers & Crawl Space Encapsulation

Get a Free Inspection Today! If you're dealing with moisture in your crawl space, don’t let the problem escalate. Contact Atlantic Foundation & Crawl Space Repair today for a free inspection and quote. Our experienced team is ready to provide the ideal solution for your crawl space drainage needs.

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Our Other Services

Crawl Space Encapsulation in Raleigh, NC

Foundation Repair

Home Structural Repairs

Chimney Repair

Basement Wall Repair

Masonry Repair

New Construction

[reality-detective]

Would you install this fridge in your home?

The installation requires digging a hole approximately 2.5 x 2.5 meters wide, and 2.2 meters deep, and the fridge weighs about 300 kg (661 pounds). 👇

An underground fridge, also known as a Groundfridge, can cost around $10,000 and up. The price depends on the model and whether it includes shelves, ventilation, and light. 

Cost:

The Plain model costs around $12,799, and the Complete model costs around $14,999. 

The price doesn't include installation, which you'll need to arrange yourself. 

What's included: 

The Complete model comes with shelves, ventilation, and light.

The Plain model doesn't contain these features.

How it works: 

The Groundfridge uses the insulating effect of the ground and the cooling effect of groundwater.

The temperature inside remains stable between 10 and 12°C throughout the year.

What it's good for: 

It's ideal for storing fruits, vegetables, wine, cheese, and more.

It's a modern take on the traditional root cellar.

Additional considerations:

You'll need somewhere to bury it, and something to dig the hole. 

You should check with your local council to make sure you don't need a permit. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who Broke the Internet, Part IV

HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

"Kick 'Em In the Dongle" is the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?", a podcast series I hosted and co-wrote for the CBC. It's quite a finale!

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16148346-kick-em-in-the-dongle

The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that the internet turned into a pile of shit because named people, in living memory, made policies that were broadly "enshittogenic" because they insulated businesses that tormented their end users and business customers from any consequences for their cheating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw

Moreover, these people were warned at the time about the certain consequences of their policies, and they ignored and dismissed both expert feedback and public opinion. These people never faced consequences or any accountability for their actions, as tech criticism focused (understandably and deservedly) on the businesses that took advantage of the enshittogenic policies and enshittified, without any understanding that these firms were turning into piles of shit because of policies that reward them for doing so.

Episode one of the series tells the story an enshittification poster-child: Google. We look at the paper-trail that emerged from the Department of Justice's successful monopoly prosecution of Google, and what it reveals about the sorry state of internet search today:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

That paper-trail documents an intense power-struggle within Google: in 2019, Google's ad revenue czar went to war against Google's search boss, demanding that search be deliberately worsened. This may sound paradoxical (or even paranoid), but for Google, making search worse made a perverse kind of sense. The company's search revenue growth had stalled, for the obvious reason that Google had a 90% market share in search, which meant that basically everyone was a Google search user, leaving the company with no new potential customers to sign up.

In 2019, Prabhakar Ragahavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Ragahavan's nemesis was Ben Gomes, an OG googler who'd overseen the creation of the company's server infrastructure and had been crowned the head of search. Gomes hated Ragahavan's idea, and in the memos, we get a blow-by-blow account of the epic fight inside Google between the enshittifiers and the anti-enshittification resistance, who are ultimately trounced, which is how we get today's sloppified, ad-poisoned, spam-centric Google search.

Ragahavan and his clique are obviously greedy monsters, but that's not the whole story. The real question is, how did we get to the point where Google, a company justly famed for its emphasis on search quality, abandoned its commitment to excellence? That's the question we explore in the next two episodes.

Episode two is "Ctrl-ctrl-ctrl," and it reveals the original sin of tech, the origin of the worst tech policies in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

This is the tale of another epic struggle inside another giant institution, only this struggle takes place in government, not Google. We travel back to the Clinton years, when Vice President Al Gore was put in charge of demilitarizing the internet and transforming it into a service that welcomed the public, as well as private firms. Gore's rival in this project was Clinton's copyright czar, the white shoe entertainment lawyer Bruce Lehman.

Lehman wanted Gore to install an "anti-circumvention" policy on the new internet: under Lehman's proposal, copyright law would be rewritten to ban modifying ("circumventing") digital products, services and devices, whether or not those modifications led to anyone's copyrights being violated. Anti-circumvention would let dominant companies conscript the government to punish upstart rivals and tinkerers who dared to improve their products, say, by blocking commercial surveillance, or by turning off checks that blocked generic parts and consumables or independent repair, or by making existing products more accessible to people with disabilities.

Experts like Pam Samuelson hated this proposal and made a huge stink about it. This led to Gore categorically rejecting Lehman's ideas, so Lehman (in his own words) did "an end-run around Congress" and got the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to turn "anti-circumvention" into an international treaty obligation. Then he went back to Congress and got them to pass an anti-circumvention law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that went even further than the WIPO treaties demanded.

Almost instantly, the direst predictions of Lehman's opponents came true. A Russian computer scientist named Dmitry Skylarov was arrested by the FBI for giving a technical conference presentation about the weaknesses in Adobe's ebook software, in which he explained how these allowed Adobe customers to do legal things, like transferring their ebooks to a new computer (Adobe's software blocked this).

The chilling effect of DMCA 1201 was deep and far-reaching. It created (in the words of Jay Freeman), a new "felony contempt of business model" system, in which a business could threaten to imprison anyone who tried to disenshittify their products, for example, by making it possible for hospitals to maintain their ventilators without paying a med-tech giant for overpriced, slow service:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland/

Anticircumvention law lets John Deere stop farmers from fixing their own tractors. It stops independent mechanics from fixing your car. It stops you from using cheap third-party inkjet cartridges. It's why Patreon performers lose 30 cents on every in-app subscription dollar, because only Apple can provide iPhone apps, and Apple uses that control to extract a 30% fee on in-app payments. It's why you can't stop apps from spying on you – and why Apple (which does block other companies apps from spying on you) can track every click, message and movement you make in order to target ads to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Anticircumvention let the garage-door opener company that bought every one of its rivals block integration with standard home automation tools, forcing you to use an app that makes you look at ads before you can open your garage-door:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Anticircumvention is why there's no such thing as a Tivo for streaming services, letting you record the programs you enjoy so you can watch them later (say, when Prime charges moves Christmas movies into the paid tier between October and January). It's why you can't get a scraper that lets you leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon or Bluesky, and continue to interact with your friends who are stuck on zuckermuskian legacy media:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

It's why you can't get an alternative Instagram client that blocks spying, ads and "suggestions," just showing you the latest updates from the people you follow:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

Of course, companies that abuse this government-granted weapon might still face consequences, if their behavior was so obnoxious that it drove us into the arms of their competitors. But for that to happen, we'd need to have meaningful competition, which brings me to episode three, "In God We Antitrust":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned

Episode three goes even farther back in time, to the early 1980s, when a racist pig and Nixon co-conspirator named Robert Bork led a successful counterrevolution that destroyed antitrust enforcement in the US, and then around the world. It's thanks to Bork – and his idea that monopolies are "efficient" – that we got what Tom Eastman calls an internet of "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." It's why every sector in our economy is controlled by a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

If Bruce Lehman paved the way for Prabhakar Ragahavan's enshittification of Google, then Robert Bork laid the road that Bruce Lehman traveled to Geneva and the WIPO Internet Treaties. Industry consolidation always leads to regulatory capture, because a handful of gigantic companies can easily collude to present a disciplined message to its regulators and the fact that they don't compete with one another lets them steal so much from us that they have huge warchests they can use to get their policies enacted.

40 years of Bork's pro-monopoly policies has produced…monopolies. The reason a handful of powerful executives have more power than any of the world's governments – the reason the public is thwarted on everything from healthcare to climate, minimum wages to privacy – is that Robert Bork overturned generations of antitrust practice and created pro-oligarch policies that created a modern oligarchy.

The 2020s have seen an impressive and heartening global surge in antitrust activism, motivated by an urge to blunt or even shatter corporate power, bypassing apologetics about "efficiency" that can only be understood through mastering an esoteric mathematics whose own practitioners cheerfully describe as disconnected from any observable reality:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0039368122000693

This global, grassroots movement has provoked a massive backlash from our technofeudal overlords, culminating in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, which is where we open our the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" Trump's inauguration stage featured some unusual attendees: the CEOs of the largest tech companies in America, who had personally donated a million bucks each to Trump's inauguration fund. These are some of the richest men in human history, and they were all in on Trump.

Trump lost no time in inflicting misery on the American people, illegally firing the agency personnel most closely associated with the antitrust movement and canceling many of their key policies. But for the rest of the world, the most prominent effect of Trumpism was the imposition of tariffs on every country in the world, including islands without any human inhabitants:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands

The world is changing before our eyes, and it needn't change for the worse. As Trump transforms America into a hermit kingdom, countries around the world have a chance to consider what their policies might be like if they weren't organized around US priorities. That includes Canada.

Canada could retaliate against Trump's tariffs by legalizing and incubating Canadian companies that find ways to improve America's enshittified products, creating mods, plugins, alternative software and other tools that Canadians – and the world – would snap up. Every customer for these disenshittifying tools would constitute a targeted strike against technofeudalism, against Trumpism, against the companies whose CEOs sat behind Trump on the dais.

More: the Canadian companies that raided America's high-tech giants could use the sky-high rents they extracted through anti-circumvention laws as a kind of disposable rocket stage to boost a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit, giving Canada a global tech standing comparable to the power and wealth Finland enjoyed during the Nokia years.

That's something Canada could do, only it can't, because of a 13-year old anti-circumvention law that was crammed onto Canada's statute-books by two ministers in Stephen Harper's government, James Moore and Tony Clement:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Harper charged Moore and Clement with getting an anticircumvention law because the US Trade Representative had made it clear that failing to do so would result in the US imposing tariffs on Canada. But Canadians hated the idea of this law. In 2004, a Liberal MP named Sam Bulte lost her Toronto seat after she attempted to ram an anticirumvention law through Parliament. The Tories tried to pass another anticircuvmention law in 2007, and faced so much pushback that the bill died.

Moore and Clement's tactic for defusing this opposition was to have a public consultation on anticircumvention law, to make it seem like the government was listening to the people. Boy, did that idea backfire: 6,138 Canadians wrote in to oppose the proposal. 54 supported it:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

But Moore and Clement pressed on. Moore explained to an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto that he would be discarding nearly every consultation response he'd received, on the grounds that people who disagreed with him were a "babyish…radical extremists":

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

The most remarkable thing about Canada's 2012 adoption of anticircumvention law is that it came 14 years after the US passed the DMCA. We already had a thick record of the damage that law had done. We have all the evidence we needed to see how this US law had hurt everyday Americans. But Moore and Clement still tabled their bill, with language that was actually worse than the American law, dispensing with the largely ineffectual safeguards Congress had put in the 1998 DMCA.

More than a decade on, Canada's "digital locks" law has stalled the country's tech sector and left Canadians defenseless against American enshittification. Even the country's pioneering Right to Repair and interoperability laws, passed last year, can't undo this damage, because they only give Canadians the right to fix or improve things if they don't have to break a digital lock to do so, and everything has a digital lock these days, from ebikes to car parts.

Moore actually gave us a comment for the show, once again dismissing his critics by claiming there was no evidence that his law had created a chilling effect that stopped Canadians from making products and services that unrigged the game American big business forced us all to play. It's nice to see that Moore hasn't changed since his days of calling his detractors "babyish radical extremists." The very nature of "chilling effects" is that they can only be observed by looking at what didn't happen: Moore seems to interpret the fact that Canadians haven't shipped a privacy tool for phones, or an alternative app store for Xboxes, or a service that jailbreaks your car so any mechanic can fix it as evidence that Canadians wouldn't want these things (or that Canadian technologists are too stupid to deliver them).

Repealing Canada's anticircumvention laws would mark a turning point in tech regulation. For decades now, countries that are upset with tech companies' greed and cruelty have created policies that demand that Big Tech wield its extraordinary power more wisely. Think of content moderation laws, or laws that try to get tech companies to share some of their monopoly ripoff money with news outlets. These laws don't seek to take away power from tech giants – they just try to turn it to socially beneficial uses. This is a huge mistake. For a tech company to control its users' behavior, it must have power of those users, must observe every action they take and retain the ability to stop them. For a tech company to share its billions with news outlets, it must continue to make billions by ripping us all off:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

The only tech regulation that will truly make us all better off is a regulation that shatters tech power – not one that seeks to harness it. That's what getting rid of anticircumvention would do: it would give us – internet users – the right to defend ourselves against exploitation, manipulation and abuse. It would let us decide how the devices, products and services we use work. It wouldn't just make it illegal for tech giants to use our technology to attack us – it would make it impossible for them to do so, because our technology would take orders from us, not them.

Repealing anticircumvention laws in Canada and around the world is the best path forward. Ironically, Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" has created the conditions for every country to liberate itself from America's grotesque tech policies – and to export our tools of technological liberation to our American friends, who were the first victims of US Big Tech.

I'm so pleased with how this show worked out. My collaborators – especially showrunner Acey Rowe and producer Matt Meuse – were stone brilliant as was our sound designer, Julian Uzielli. The whole team has done smashing work getting the word out about the show and making it sound smart and accessible. I couldn't have asked for a better group of colleagues to produce this show, and I couldn't be prouder of how it sounds.

You can subscribe to "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" on any podcast app, even the enshittified ones, and you can get the RSS here:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

[arkangelo-7]

What do the members of the Batfamily want for Christmas? No one asked but I headcannoned it either way:

Bruce: Nothing. At least, that’s what he says. But it’s a boldfaced lie. What Bruce actually wants for Christmas? One of those cheap ass plastic drones you can buy at Best Buy or Walmart. He’s saw them on a commercial once and back in ‘08 and has wanted one ever since. Dick is the only one privy to this information, and as such makes it a point to get one for Bruce each year. (They have a tradition on New Years to fly it around the Batcave until it inevitably breaks and cackle wildly at how stupid it looks.)

Dick: Olaplex and a 401k. However, when Christmas Day comes around, he gladly accepts the bougie shampoo/conditioner but refuses to accept the half-mil check Bruce left in his stocking. (He doesn’t need daddy’s money, Bruce, seriously lay off—)

Jason: a crowbar. He asks for this as a joke and gets pissed when Dick actually gets him one. He spends half an hour chasing Dick though the Manor, cursing him out and threatening to beat him up with the menorah. They almost set the Christmas tree on fire. When they’re done Bruce awkwardly gifts Jason a signed, collector’s copy of the Hunger Games trilogy. (He’s wanted it since he was twelve.)

Cass: she’s more of an experiment type of person, and asks to go see a new ballet that’s premiering in downtown. Bruce gives her a cute card with a promise to take her out on a daddy-daughter date to the Gotham Theater. (He rented out the whole place—they’re getting a private showing.)

Tim: Starbucks. Like, the company. Says it’s because he wants to start a monopoly on coffee to insure that his supply won’t be cut off, and price cap the Carmel macchiatos at $3. Bruce gets him a gift card instead.

Steph: Ugg Slippers. Remember that infamous video of that teenage girl getting Ugg slippers and being so so excited and running around the house screaming while her dad was confused and saying, “they’re just slippers…?” Yes. Yes this is Steph and Bruce.

Duke: for a heating system to be installed in his armor. Jesus Christ, it gets cold in Gotham in February, and the insulation is good but Duke’s the type of person who always had cold hands and feet, so he really fucking needs that armor update. (Bruce actually fixes this before Christmas and gets Duke a subscription for Planet Fitness because he saw a commercial for it at work. Duke is confused. Bruce is trying.)

Damian: an Alpaca. Surprisingly, he actually gets this. Bruce legit imports an alpaca from, like, whenever the heck those things come from and gifts it to Damian on Christmas with a bright red bow. (When Dick asks why he never got a hamster all those years ago when he asked, Bruce says it’s because Damian will actually keep the Alpaca alive. Dick has no further argument.)

(Bonus +!) Alfred: a Keurig. He asks for this every year. At this point he has a stockpile of Keurigs and truly, truly does not need an another one, but it’s all that he asks for so that’s what he’s getting. (The kids all write heartfelt letters though to put in his stocking, which is what Alfred actually wants for Christmas.)

[queervulturecreature00]

Shared Warmth

hi hi ! :3

dottore x gn! reader

sfw, fluff !!!, just me coping because I can’t feel my ears in this cold

u get cold and he helps !! just fluffy

≪ °❈° ≫ ———————-——-≪ °❈° ≫

The lab was always cold. A part that comes with having a sterile and bland workroom, it seemed. You were always cold. The lack of heating and insulation didn’t help either, the freezing air of ruthless winters seeping in through the cracks.

    When you visited him in the lab, it was usually because the man would overwork himself half to death. And of course, you had to be there to snap him out of it ! God knows how long he’d go without sleeping if you didn’t practically drag him to bed every once in a while.

     Today was one of those cold and overworking days. You were perched on a couch he had installed specially for you, lazily reading some book of his and watching him work on some new type of poison. He never understood why you would just sit and watch him work for entertainment, nor how you were content with this. But hey, it’s not like your company was unwanted.

      After about an hour of comfortable silence, save the occasional vial clanking and pages turning, you spoke out. “Dottie, it’s so cold in here…i’m freezing !” You exclaimed with a dramatic tone.

       He paused his writing and turned to you. Face changing from focus to slight amusement as he heard your complaints, he replied. “Dear, I always brought in a couch and a myriad of blankets. How in Teyvat and you still cold ?” He put a vial down and vaguely gestured to the stack of blankets surrounding you like a fort. 

      You merely replied with a huff before explaining. “Yeah…but we’re in Snezhnaya. In the winter ! How can you get used to this?”

       His small smile grew and a chuckle left his lips. “I’ve acclimated over decades, darling. It seems you simply are still used to the warmth of other nations.” He teased, now disregarding his work to focus on you. 

       You grumbled at the fact that he was right. He was always right. “Exactly, that’s why it’s so unfair. Not even a mountain of blankets can keep me warm.”

        He simply sighed lightheartedly at your remark, smile still present. “Darling, acclimation takes time.” He paused. “…My dear, come here for a moment, will you? I have a hypothesis.” Dottore questioned, lightly patting his thigh with a now sly smile. He always had a certain glimmer in his eyes when he was up to something.

      Skeptical, you questioned him, “…why? I don’t feel like getting dissected.” 

       He laughed, shooing away the idea, “dear, you know I would never hurt you. Without your consent.” He added the last part with a grin. “No, I merely had an idea on how to keep you from freezing.” His proposal was…interesting, you admit. Usually his experiments were more morally questionable than this. But hey, you chose to be with him, lay in your grave.

      He cleared his throat. “My dear, come. Must I repeat myself?” He almost reprimanded, though with no seriousness behind his tone. You mumbled a “coming”, before bookmarking your page in the book and leaving the comfort of the couch to come sit with- or more so on him. Adjusting yourself to comfort, you finally settled and relaxed on his lap.

      Dottore wrapped his arms comfortably around your waist, holding you close with no room to escape and resting his head atop yours. “Body heat, love, now you won’t need a mountain of blankets.” He went on about the specifics of this, and while you drowned it out, you felt he was right. You felt…quite warm. And comfy. As much as you were concerned in how he would do his work like this, you were much happier knowing his attention was on you solely.

       His chest pressed to your back, your waist was held to his hips, and head warm from his breath. It was comforting. Unusual for him, but it seems he was feeling oddly wholesome today. You closed your eyes and cuddled up to him. Dottore noticed this with a chuckle, giving your forehead a kiss. 

      “Warm? I told you this would work.” 

       You huffed at the fact that he was right. He was always right.

     “Rest, dear, when you wake up I will be here, keeping you warm.”

══✿══╡°˖✧✿✧˖°╞══✿══

[quicksilversquared]

The landlord has bought (and installed) a window AC unit for me huzzah

had to rearrange an entire side of my room to get it in (my dresser was formerly in front of the window and the window sill is ~8 inches lower than the top of the dresser), but worth it to not have to have my door open all evening in hopes that I could pull in a little bit of cold air from the hallway.

It is becoming steadily more apparent that having my window blinds open all day (because, y'know, plants) is rapidly becoming no longer an option, because it's sunny AF and my room will heat up to 82 (it was only 84 outside!!!!), even with the central air in this house.

....hopefully my second plant light will arrive soon?

[brimbrimbrimbrim]

A Ruined Ratio (Muse/Sculptor!Reader) pt.1

🖤A Ruined Ratio 1/7 🖤

Muse x F!Sculptor!Reader

Rating: Explicit (18+) Word Count: 2.3k Warnings: Sexual Awakening, Rough Sex, Knifeplay, Cumplay, Sexual Tension, Voyeruism, Bloodplay, Blood & Gore, Dubious Consent, Violence, Choking, Light BDSM, Toxic Relationship, Branding/Marking, Stalking, Multiple Orgasms, Vaginal Fingering, Yonic Symbolism, Liberal use of Artistic Rhetoric. Genre: Dark Romance / Horror / PWP

Part 2

Summary: As a celebrated sculptor spiraling into creative stagnation, you strive to capture some sense of soul after stumbling upon one of Muse's violent, gruesome art installations. Muse thinks you're derivative but not without potential. He just has to strip you down to a blank slate first.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

The studio smells like home, a faint thread of something acrid rising from the heater vents that haven’t been cleaned in months. Your hands tremble as you peel off your coat, nape damp with a rain-sweat sheen you didn’t realize had settled there until the draft caught it.

That fucking gallery show. Too bright. Too many voices.

Your jaw still aches from all the polite smiling. There’s pressure behind your left eye, thudding in time with the headache blooming across your temple. You didn’t eat enough. Didn’t drink enough either… not until the end, when you escaped the critical crowd to suck down a rum and coke near the bar, hidden in a pocket of shadows like a subway rat.

Now, home, away from it all, you step over scattered drop cloths on the concrete floors, unleveled by the building’s age: an old factory floor planned into penthouse-style apartments that never saw completion before the development company went belly up.

You stand at your kitchen counter, overlooking the living room with its rug rolled out into the mouth of the studio space, rubbing your elbows without thinking. The pressure of your arms crossed under your chest, hands rubbing the bony bend of each arm, brings comfort, cleaning away a memory. Sylvan’s hand had lingered too long on that very spot earlier—fingers slick with desperation as he complimented your ‘chaste subject matter’ and how your sculptures ‘speak of a purity that’s tragically absent in most female-centric art.’ As if you're a female artist first and foremost, never just an artist…

You wanted to punch his teeth down his throat… Instead, you gave him a smile that felt like a paper cut, thin and stinging, and moved to the other side of the gallery. He followed anyway. Sylvan never misses an opening and never leaves you alone…

Of course, they all said the same thing with different words, like ‘brevity of womanly empowerment’ and ‘rebellious innocence,’ and they all got different faux smiles in return. You’re playing it safe these days. Conservative, even. Chaste, comes that word again, whispering near your ear, too close, the breath of it tracing your neckline. You barely managed not to tear and yank your nerves from your throat.

Thankfully, you’ve always had this place—this sanctuary where the insulation was stripped to bone and brick, purchased when you were still hungry, still raw from the academy. It was a shell then—beautiful in its emptiness. A void begging to be filled. Now, it’s cluttered with your ambitions. Sculptures half-finished. Some crouch in corners like oppressed animals, others stretch toward the exposed beams overhead, tongues of wire and clay gathering dust. But the majority of them glare at you like virginal effigies that would be happier if you’d just go fuck yourself instead of birthing them into existence. 

You hate all of them. And they hate back. 

You take a sip of the cherry juice and seltzer you poured when you got home—flat and syrupy now, still a promise of a good night’s rest—and let your eyes drift to the loft windows that take up the entire northeast corner from floor to ceiling. No curtains. Never needed them. No one to look in from the condemned warehouse across your building where the subway beneath makes the bones of it moan every day at noon sharp.

Sirens start up in the distance. It’s routine around this time as well. White noise. They’re like pigeons here—circling, crying, always feeding on something. You used to flinch at them. Used to double-check the locks. Now, you sip your tart drink and think maybe someone should come . Take the sculptures. Smash them. Take you. Soil you. Anything to undo what you’ve done to yourself. Perhaps then, once ruined, your art—your very self—would have some meaning.

The sirens grow louder—urgent now. Your gaze lifts from your drink to the window. The color of the red-blue reflections doesn’t fade; it grows. Ear-splitting sirens merge with the wobble of ambulances. You step to the window, mason jar sweating in your grip. Curiosity piqued. 

Outside, the street is bathed in chaos. Flashing lights. Pedestrians being shoved aside by pigs in uniforms, each of them shouting for different reasons. A bright yellow tape ripples in a cop's hand, wrapping around rusted parking meters and tacked to a brick wall.

Gunshots. Not distant. You hear them with the crispness of immediacy, and it startles something awake in your chest. That was close. Your eyes dart to the rooftops blackened under light-polluted skies, and it could be a trick of an over-exhausted mind, but you swear there’s a figure bobbing—running—against that dark backdrop of the city skyline… away from pursuers. 

‘Get them out of here!’

Below, cops are pulling a human shape from the scene, assisting paramedics haul it onto a gurney. You look back into the depths of your studio, finding several sheet-covered statues lying in the darkness, more alive now than that body below, similarly covered in alabaster white.

Someone shouts, and your gaze trails back through the window to the scene below. There’s something on the pavement that catches the headlights: red and glossy, half a word. Too greasy to be anything but the material of violence.

The sight should repulse. Instead, it pulls you closer as though hypnotized. That word chaste rings in your ears again as your eyes widen on the crime scene.

You press your hand to the cold pane, breath fogging the glass. The implication of a dead body—its burning of monotony, its heat—somehow centers you. The horror of it threads down your throat and settles in your lower stomach as a slow, trembling ache.

It’s not innocent . It’s hunger—hungry .

You inhale slowly, unevenly. Down on the street, the sirens begin to fade. The crowd gradually disperses. You watch until the last flashing light turns the corner, the last echo of rubber tires vanishing into the dark. Only then do you turn back to your studio.

You don’t bother changing out of your dress—just tug an oversized hoodie over your head. The hem nearly swallows up the pinstripe skirt—casting an allusion of wearing nothing but the hoodie—but you don’t care. The modest black heels get kicked into a corner as your heart skips. You slide into boots with crusted clay and dried paint on the toes.

Outside, the concrete is slick from oil leaks, damp from the rain that hadn’t had time to dry before nightfall. A smell lingers—something you think you noticed when you arrived home, but can’t be sure—burned rubber, faint metal, something… astringent like a perfumed musk.

The alley below your window is still choked off with yellow tape, but you need to see it up close. Not from behind glass. Inside it. You press your fingers into the pockets of the hoodie, hunching forward as you step beneath the police tape, its edge damp and snagging on your shoulder like a wet ribbon.

The moment you step into the decorated alley, the noise of the city relaxes. No honking. No sirens or screams. Just your own breath, catching when your eyes lock on the dining table.

It’s long—absurdly long for this space, claustrophobic against the alley walls. A sheet of linen clings to its warped length, soaked through in the center where something dead may have been, leaving behind a spattering blush of browns and blacks dried into dark textures like brushstrokes. The bloodstains are still moist in the middle, weighing down the fabric to the wood beneath it. Fingerprints—partial, frantic—dot the end of the tablecloth where someone must have clutched it, making sure it was even on either end. 

You take a step further within, feeling much like a vulture picking apart roadkill. Your gaze travels up the table to the chair at the head. It’s been pulled out at an angle, and you wonder if that was intentional or left by a cop with no eye for design. Closer now, you see there’s a smudge of red on the seat cushion. You can almost picture it—the slump of a body, its fluids settling with gravity, leaving behind something like a blotter stamp.

A sound. A clatter above. Ice down your spine, a supine rattle of panic. You whip yourself around to the noise, staring at the steel bones of a fire escape. One of the platforms sways just an inch, just enough to supply the terrible thought that someone is watching… or was, and yet—

Your hands clench in your pockets. You feel everything. Sensory input condensed like a star between your eyes, projecting a funnel of undulating gleam. Exhaustion, just tired—or drugged somehow. But you're not, and you blink and blink until you see it—a $100 bill, folded once, torn at the edge, and stuck to the brick wall. It's soaked through, crinkled from blood, dried into the grout line. 

Tacked newspaper clippings are plastered above like graffiti, some curled at the edges, others nailed down by force. Headlines run jagged as torn thoughts: 

TAX BILL PASSES — HOMELESS DISPLACED . CORPORATE PROFITS HIT RECORD HIGH . CONTRACTS FUNNELED TO DEFENSE INDUSTRY . ART FUNDING SLASHED FOR THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.

You picture crime scene cleanup crews cataloguing the remaining cash as they did the body parts left behind, snapping pictures of everything, especially the news clippings. But that bill, its unsubtle symbolism, almost more so than the headlines completes it—makes the alleyway feel like a perverted banquet hall fit for an oligarch. This, the critic says, is what artists spend their whole lives searching for: true meaning.

Another groan of steel resounds above, amplified by the narrow space. This time, you hug yourself, fingers worrying your elbow through thick fleece,e and ignore it. You're too dialed in on the art now.

Your stomach turns. Sure. But not from nausea, from something that twists hot and slow under your ribs. Your cheeks burn. You’re sweating under the hoodie. Between your legs, a pinpoint awareness throbs. It's arousal , though your body doesn't remember that feeling, so you call it thrill, excitement, inspiration, and lick your lips twice. 

You shift your thighs where they’ve started to stick together beneath the dress. The blood... the violence… the message—the art of it makes you want to—

Your phone buzzes, a dissonant hum in your pocket that breaks the hypnotic hush. You don’t want to look, but the spell is broken and reality demands you look.

Sylvan: I was passing by and saw the lights on in your studio. Late night, huh? Let's have dinner sometime, talk about your next series. I think there’s something special in your future. I want to be part of it. We can go over the numbers then. 

You read it once, then again, your thumb hovering over the screen like it might burn you. His words are soaked in the same syrup he dripped all over you at the show— “I believe in your message , I see something rare . We should spend more time together.” 

You know exactly what Sylvan wants, what that look in his eyes meant when he praised your restricted philosophy, how his voice got low when he said your work presented “so much beauty unspoilt.”

He doesn’t want your art. He wants your body. He wants to crawl inside you, fuck you, wear you like greasepaint, get off on the idea of sullying you—squirting his name all over you until its his, leaving you nothing but last season's art trend. But what else are any of them meant to think when you've spent years showing them falsehoods groped together with clay?

You shove the phone back into your pocket, ashamed of the reputation you’ve spent over a decade forming. Something odious and dishonest, nothing like…

"Nothing like this…" you whisper.

You step forward, heel dragging over the cracks in the pavement where blood still pools in stiff, black globs. You move slowly, circling the table, breathing in the rot and the faint scent of something aromatic—expensive. Cologne maybe. Maybe whoever did this wore it, or maybe the victim did. Either way, it lingers, delicate and predatory .

You stop beside the head chair.

Your chest is tight. You feel light-headed again, as if overloaded by sensory detail: the smells, the feel of the air in temperature and weight, the edges of everything hyperrealized. Your skin is on fire, but your fingers feel cold. You grip the edge of the table and look down at the blood-stained linen, the trail of red fingerprints, and feel someone watching you partake.

You swallow. There’s a pulse in your ears. Something flickers in your chest.

This… this is art. Not slipped, carved, baked clay. This is flesh and passion. This is something stripped bare to pentirsi layers, offering previously unseen details unappreciated by the uniforms that dismantled it. But you're here now, you see it. .. smudged within the image as a coffee stain in a sketchbook. 

You smile as the fire escape sways, metal bones screeching beneath heavy steps. The cold licks your legs beneath the dress, but someone's breath warms your nape, gushing through cotton fleece to bare skin where fine hairs rise above gooseflesh. You’re soaked in something deep as a threadbare exhale titters over your shoulder—too hot to be real. 

You’re not alone anymore. 

The artist is here, maybe , pressed into your back, fused to your spine, reaching under the hoodie one-handed to hold the flutters to your abdominal wall where they want to dig out and fly away. You cramp, or the hand squeezes and something in you—some endlessly regurgitating thing —finally matches the phantasmal breath heaving down your collar...

“Eyes open, finally... Tragic how long you chose to stay blind.”

Check it on AO3 HERE

[creations-by-chaosfay]

Commission Menu!

I've removed the "Pay What You Want" commission option, though you can pay more than my asking price on any of the commissions. The commission menu itself has been increased though! I had originally intended to open commissions in September, but emergencies happened, forcing me to open them early.

On the menu are:

A set of four quilted magnets or decorative pins.

A set of four coasters, with several options for more coasters as well as insulated batting to make them into hot pads/pot holders.

A single mug rug, with insulated batting as an option. For my shop, I use insulated batting for the mug rugs. For commissioned pieces, it's two layers of cotton batting or an extra $5 for insulated batting.

Due to popular demand, a single serving dining set. This is for a single placemat and matching coaster.

A four piece placemat set. If you would like me to make more placemats for a set, please contact me about this.

A single mini quilt. These range from 18x18 inches to 25x25 inches. They're excellent wall and table decorations!

A single table runner. I'm rather fond of these because of how flexible they are with regards to use. How so? Hang them on a wall, drape over the back of a couch, lay across a car seat, use it on an altar or shrine, etc.

A pine tree wallhanging. These are an excellent alternative to a Yuletide tree. They're hung on a wall and you can decorate it with your favorite pins or buttons. If you would like some decorative pins, I can make those (see the first item on this list). No trees will be cut down, cats won't be climbing up it nor break ornaments, it takes just a couple minutes to set up or take down. Storage is also very easy! Oh, and it can be made with a wide range of colors.

A rag quilt. I have different size options available! These are made using a quilt-as-you-go technique and are very quickly made. Oh, and they're EXTREMELY warm! My house gets very chilly in winter, and the rag quilt I've made for myself works like magic.

Just the quilt top. This is available in several sizes, the largest being twin. This is for just the quilt top. You will need to purchase backing, batting, and either do the quilting yourself or hire someone else. You will also receive all fabric scraps left after the sewing is done.

Please read over the details and don't be afraid to ask questions. If you're a monthly supporter, you will automatically receive a 15% discount, but you have the option to pay more than my asking price should you decide you don't want to use the discount.

Please reblog! It's the only way other people will see this post. Liking this is only a bookmark for you. Remember, Tumblr is a blogging site with social features; it's not a social media site. You are, however, welcome to share this post on any social media site you use.

Remember: commissioning me, purchasing anything from my shop, or donating to my goal will earn you an entry into winning a free quilt when said goal is reached.

Commissions close November 1st.

After November 1st, I'll be focusing on making a stack of quick and easy quilt tops to practice free motion quilting. Those quilts will be sold at a steep discount. Once I'm comfortable with FMQ, I'll be making larger quilts again, and these will be listed in the shop.

At some point, I'll take a break. Financially speaking, that's not really an option unless we pay off the last vet bill and the water heater installation. If those goals are met, then yes, I'll take a long overdue and well-earned break.

If you're willing to give me full artistic license and the only input you give is choosing the size range from the commission menu, use GOHOGWILD for a 15% discount. Please know there's a 90% chance it will be a Halloween quilt. Halloween is my favorite month, and celebrating it with quilts is always a pleasure. You are not required to use the coupon code, and there's the option to pay more than my asking price. I just really want to make some Halloween quilts.

Here are samples of my work, some of which you can purchase from my shop here.

[dearyanderenewspaper]

📰 DEAR YANDERE – Special Report from Obsession Weekly

🏡 LOVE LOCKDOWN: Housing Reviews for the Hopelessly Devoted

1. Secluded Forest Cottage

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4.5/5)

Overview: A charming, rustic getaway deep in the woods. Zero cell service, plenty of scenic walking trails (for supervised strolls), and a roaring fireplace for cozy nights in.

Pros: ✔ Remote and escape-proof (if they don’t know how to navigate a forest). ✔ Cozy, romantic aesthetic—feels like a fairy tale! ✔ No nosy neighbors or unexpected visitors.

Cons: ✖ Hard to get deliveries. You’ll need to plan supply runs in advance. ✖ Wild animals may pose a minor inconvenience (or opportunity, depending on how you spin it). ✖ If Darling does escape, it could take days to track them down.

Review: “Absolutely stunning location! My Darling cried for the first few weeks, but once they realized nobody could hear them, they really settled in. Only downside is the occasional bear sighting, but hey, that just keeps them from wandering too far! Would rent again.” – User: ❄️ColdEmbrace98

2. Basement in Your House

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5)

Overview: Classic, reliable, and convenient! Keep your Darling close while maintaining total control.

Pros: ✔ Always within arm’s reach (perfect for clingy Yanderes!). ✔ Easy to renovate for maximum comfort or security. ✔ Can be soundproofed to avoid unwanted attention.

Cons: ✖ Potential mold issues—invest in a dehumidifier! ✖ Darling may try to appeal to guests or family members. ✖ Frequent stairs can be a hassle if you’re carrying meals daily.

Review: “10/10. Zero escape attempts after the first month. I installed a little skylight so they wouldn’t get seasonal depression (because mental health matters!!). Basement life is simple, yet effective. Highly recommend.” – User: ChainsOfLove444

3. High-Rise Apartment

⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ (3/5)

Overview: Urban convenience meets security! A high-rise unit minimizes escape routes while keeping you close to modern amenities.

Pros: ✔ No easy exits—unless they develop Spider-Man skills overnight. ✔ Access to takeout, shopping, and other city luxuries. ✔ Soundproofing available in most upscale buildings.

Cons: ✖ Maintenance workers and nosy neighbors may cause problems. ✖ Darling could try signaling from the window—blinds are a must. ✖ Noise complaints if they get too loud.

Review: “Not bad, but high rent makes this a questionable long-term solution. Almost got caught when my Darling ‘accidentally’ waved to the UberEats driver. Security deposits don’t cover claw marks on the front door, FYI.” – User: CityObsessed_Yan

4. Abandoned Warehouse

⭐️☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

Overview: Industrial chic or just a terrible idea? While spacious, an abandoned warehouse may not be the best place for long-term Darling storage.

Pros: ✔ Tons of space for… activities. ✔ No risk of surprise visitors. ✔ Surprisingly good acoustics (if you enjoy dramatic monologues).

Cons: ✖ Zero insulation—freezing in winter, boiling in summer. ✖ High chance of squatters or urban explorers discovering your setup. ✖ Echoes make Darling’s screaming extra dramatic (not always a plus).

Review: “Look, I thought it would be ‘mysterious’ and ‘cool,’ but it’s just cold and creepy. My Darling called me ‘the Dollar Store Jigsaw’ and honestly? They’re not wrong. Left a bad taste in my mouth. 0/10, had to move out.” – User: MaskedLover99

5. Underground Bunker

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5)

Overview: The ultimate prepper’s dream! Underground bunkers provide unmatched security and long-term sustainability.

Pros: ✔ 100% escape-proof. ✔ Completely private—no one will ever find you. ✔ Great for doomsday scenarios (or just keeping Darling forever).

Cons: ✖ Hard to get fresh air and natural light. ✖ WiFi connection? Forget about it. ✖ Darling may develop a bunker-induced existential crisis.

Review: “PERFECT. My Darling gave up on escape within two weeks. Installed a fake window with LED screens to simulate the outdoors, and now they barely remember life outside. Highly recommend investing in one if you’re serious about this lifestyle.” – User: EternalDevotionX

6. Houseboat

⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ (3/5)

Overview: Love the open water? A houseboat offers a unique, mobile captivity experience.

Pros: ✔ Escape is nearly impossible unless they can swim for miles. ✔ Constantly moving means nobody will find you. ✔ Romantic sunsets on the water? Yes, please.

Cons: ✖ Limited space—cabin fever is a real thing. ✖ Risk of Darling figuring out how to operate the boat. ✖ Docking fees add up over time.

Review: “Not bad, but I had to sleep with one eye open after my Darling almost threw me overboard. Great for short-term stays, but for long-term captivity? Stick to land.” – User: OceanBoundObsession

7. RV / Van Life

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5)

Overview: Portable, flexible, and fun! Travel with your Darling without staying in one place too long.

Pros: ✔ No fixed address = harder to track. ✔ Cozy interior can feel homey with the right setup. ✔ Road trips!

Cons: ✖ Gas prices make this lifestyle expensive. ✖ Darling may attempt escape at rest stops. ✖ Limited space for, well… anything.

Review: “I liked the mobility, but my Darling managed to honk the horn and draw attention at a gas station. Would recommend for shorter-term ‘acquisitions,’ but not ideal for permanent setup.” – User: WanderlustPossessive

[sir-adamus]

Ironwood's spiral from volume 4 (closing the borders, recalling the military, Dust embargo) to volume 7 (Mantle's become a police state, diverting supplies meant for the undercity to his secret projects, putting Penny alone as the sole realistic defense Mantle has and acting more and more without Council oversight) all happens in just over a month

Weiss leaves Atlas in volume 4, gets to Anima a few days later and is caught by the Branwens, who hold her for a short period of time before Yang shows up, at which point the two reunite with Ruby shortly after - this all takes place within the month leading up the Battle of Haven

volume 6 starts two weeks after the Battle, and the journey to Argus, then onto Atlas, takes about a week in terms of days passed

Weiss left and was back in Atlas in just over a month - but while we see Ironwood has clearly deteriorated in that time, we don't actually know how bad conditions in Mantle were before Weiss left, because we see in volume 8 that Atlesians are kept incredibly insulated from what's going on below (meaning Penny was probably restored and installed in Mantle for months and Weiss just never heard about it)

the Dust embargo was also likely Ironwood attempting to appropriate the SDC's Dust stores for the Amity project by preventing exports (though clearly without much success, considering the increasing tensions between him and Jacques - also that was another red flag, that they were 'friends' despite their arguing. like, it's telling that Ironwood was more willing to butt heads with Jacques than he was to even talk to Robyn)

[maniacwatchestheworld]

The Aesthetics and Environmental Storytelling of the Society of the Blind Eye

This is the third post to try and make sure that we're all on the same page as to where I get my ideas and thoughts about the Society of the Blind Eye! So in the last part I discussed the Blind Eye's symbol and how it can be used to indicate that they oppose Bill Cipher. If you thought that I was pulling that idea out of my ass in the previous post, then guess what! I have further evidence of it! And that evidence is the hideout of the Society of the Blind Eye itself! Because if you pay attention, it seems that the Society's hideout was built on top of the bones of a temple dedicated to Bill Cipher!

Now it's not too outrageous to think that there was probably a cult dedicated to Bill Cipher in Gravity Falls at some point, right? It's never mentioned in Journal 3 nor the Book of Bill, but Gravity Falls is very much a place of interest to Bill Cipher, and his influence there stretches back thousands upon thousands of years. And the hideout where the Society now resides... It honestly doesn't seem like something they would have constructed themselves. In fact, it seems to have originally been a temple to Bill Cipher that the Society has since retrofitted to fit their own purposes.

The connections between Bill Cipher and the Society's hideout are evident from the very outset with trying to get into the hideout in the first place.

Now obviously eyes are a symbol and motif that Bill Cipher and the Blind Eye both share. This room doesn't necessarily hint at a connection to the hideout and Bill Cipher inherently, right? To that I say, look at image above the door and secondly, to get into the Blind Eye's lair...

Well then, that's just a Bill Cipher right there! A triangle with an eye in the middle of it? You could even make the argument that the etchings indicating the X could be a stylized depiction of Bill's eyelashes! No hat or bow tie, sure, but that's still very much a Bill within the context of this series!

Now once you start making your way into the Blind Eye's lair, it's very clear that this place is old. Very old. Much much older than the building above it.

This place is entirely made of stone with no insulation. It's lit and probably heated by fire. This place is starting to crumble and fall apart, the cracks in the walls being held together by metal brackets.

By contrast the building above it...

It's a modern building with the electricity being wired through the walls and a modern lighting and heating system that's not dissimilar to what you'd normally expect out of any other building in Gravity Falls! Sure, it looks like there might be some cracks and dents in the plaster on the walls, but it's nothing too worrying or indicative of these structures falling apart! The building's been around for a while. And given the pneumatic tubes that Fiddleford likely had to have installed both within the Blind Eye's lair and the museum above it himself, that means that this building had to have been around for ~30 years at minimum. But that's nothing compared to how old the structure beneath it seems to be. It really does seem that the hideout had to have been built first and then the museum was later built on top of it. And the Society has just not been around long enough for them to have been the ones to have built the hideout!

Besides. It's a bit of an odd fit, right? A cult built around the idea of forgetting their own pasts placed underneath a location dedicated to remembering and maintaining objects from the past...? Or maybe it's just some delicious irony. I mean, the memories that they had erased are kept down there too after all. But if this building was originally run by a Bill Cipher cult...? Oh yeah! That absolutely makes sense! Of COURSE Bill would want his temple hidden underneath a museum! He basically IS human history after all, right!? He's had a hand in so many historical people's lives, events, and is part of their cultures! A temple dedicated to him underneath a museum that would basically be a shrine full of artifacts dedicated to him? He'd LOVE that! I mean, Ford had to get his various pieces of Bill Cipher memorabilia for his shrine/home from SOMEWHERE, right!? Additionally...

What right and under what circumstances would the Society be allowed to have these ancient Egyptian artifacts!??? Why would the Society even WANT something like these!? The Society has nothing to do with Egypt and their artifacts, so why are these here!??? But if this place was originally dedicated to Bill Cipher... Well then... That ENTIRELY makes sense!! OF COURSE there would be ancient Egyptian artifacts in a temple to Bill Cipher! He was the inspiration for the pyramids!

I also want you to take note of that light and how you can see the electrical wiring that powers it coming out of it and running along the wall. That's a clear indication that this building was built before electricity would or could have been installed into this lair and that the electricity was installed later. Another indication that the hideout is likely much MUCH older than the building on top of it!

And as one more pretty definitive piece of evidence that this lair had originally been built by a Bill Cipher cult... THESE PILLARS!!!

Now do those symbols look familiar from somewhere...? Well, some of them pretty heavily feature triangles and have a very Bill-adjacent aesthetic to them... But then there's also THIS!

Here you can see that those symbols on the pillars ARE Bill Cipher symbols! It's very likely that those symbols have always been there, long long before the Society took up residence within these temple walls! From this, I think that it's pretty clear to say that this hideout existed LONG before the Society of the Blind Eye existed, and that a group of people who dedicated themselves to Bill Cipher inhabited it long before the Society became the modern, current day inhabitants of it.

... But as the modern day inhabitants of this space, it doesn't seem that the Blind Eye cares much for preserving the historical sanctity of this place.

The Society seems to have taken what was there since long before them and vandalized it to suit their own iconograpy and purposes. Just like their very symbol. The evidence that I've shown thus far could be used to suggest that Bill Cipher had influence on the Society of the Blind Eye and perhaps used the Society to enact his own desires in the physical world, but I don't personally buy that idea because A) It would be EXCEEDINGLY dangerous for Bill to do so and B) The lack of care and in fact blatant defacing of this temple's features suggests the opposite to me! Hell, they don't even keep the place clean!!

Other than the main chamber: Canisters. EVERYWHERE! Entirely unorganized as far as we can tell. Hoarded in piles on the floors, not even on the tables that seem to have just been placed in here willy-nilly! Put into crates without a care. It's a mess! And that's not even mentioning the pneumatic tubes!

The pneumatic tubes were certainly not built at the same time as this structure and must have been installed later, likely by Fiddleford himself! They curve around everything, bracketed into place along walls and columns alike! And when they do go through the pillars...

Where the tubes go through the walls and columns, the stone is cracked, holes probably having been driven into them without a care or thought about how that would effect the building's structural integrity. The sheer number of pneumatic tubes and the haphazard way they seem to have been placed everywhere is likely even more of a reflection to how much Fiddleford had damaged himself and his own mind as he desperately sought to forget. And in that state, Fiddleford probably didn't even think nor care to think about what he was doing and how it would effect this base of theirs. And besides. What would it matter? This was a temple to Bill Cipher before them. And certainly no one would remember being in such a cult after the Society was done with the town.

And so that's all I really have to say about that. The Society's aesthetic is cool! You could call it something akin to Steampunk, but I think that the better keyword here is retrofitted. Or perhaps its darker counterpart- defaced. After all, retrofitting is something that Fiddleford does all the time and is all about!

Using bottle caps to make memory guns, mattress springs and jugs to make sea monsters. And I imagine that the Society was built much the same way... But in a darker sense. Taking the remnants of a temple to Bill Cipher, destroying its previous aesthetic and purpose and making it suit his own to create a cult of his own that would wipe away people's memories from them until he himself would deface his own memories so thoroughly that he could only become a mere shadow of who he used to be. Very tragic for Fiddleford himself. But a very interesting implied history and aesthetic for the rest of us!

[network-rail]

Third rail or overhead?

Well, it depends! If you want a more detailed answer, here you go:

Overhead line electrification is typically better than third rail for a few reasons, ranging from physics related to safety conscerns. The higher voltage of overhead wires compared to third rail means there are smaller power losses due to ohmic heating, and fewer substations are required to power the lines. Overhead lines being AC rather than DC helps with this, since they can use transformers to change voltage, although some places do use DC overhead (no British mainlines do, however). The other area where overhead is better is safety, as it is rather difficult for passengers to touch the overhead wires and even harder to ground themselves while doing so (unless they're trying to electrocute themselves), whereas with third rail you can easily touch both the live rail and another piece of metal (such as the running rails). This is one reason why you shouldn't trespass on the railway, as you will die.

There are a few other areas where overhead is better, such as allowing for faster speeds (the contact shoe for third rail is much easier to damage than a pantograph, especially since the third rail has to stop briefly at switches & similar places) and how overhead lines can't really get covered in leaves that insulate the electrical current.

Looking at all of the advantages of overhead lines compared to third rail, you might wonder why third rail is used at all. However, there are still some advantages to using third rail. One big advantage is that third rail is much, much simpler than overhead wires, since it just needs a third rail; instead of stanchions, gantries, cables, weights, and pulleys for keeping the wires suspended, level, and under constant tension. The less complicated infrastructure does also mean third rail is easier and cheaper to build, which is one reason why a lot of older systems used it. In Britain, most of the trains south of London are third rail since the Southern Railway used it extensively, and changing it over would be rather pointless and expensive.

Another advantage is weather: strong winds don't affect third rail, and while you could have a strong storm blowing over caternary poles, you wouldn't have any problems with third rail. Also, neither system does well with ice.

A less important advantage of third rail is that some people don't like the look of overhead wires, and third rail can be a way of electrifying without having to deal with their complaints or resorting to battery electric trains (which are terrible and worse than either). This is a stupid reason for choosing third rail instead of overhead wires,

One final way in which third rail is better than overhead wires is that it is less restrictive in loading gauge – trains can't be taller than the overhead wires, and also need some clearance so they don't clip the wires or support structures. This is why most third rail systems around the world are metro systems, where it's very important to fit large trains into small tunnels, but high speeds are less important, so third rail works well (the same applies to fourth rail, used by the London Underground and almost no one else). However, this is less important for more recent metro systems, as advances in technology mean it is both possible to have larger tunnels and reduced clearance between overhead wires and trains; which can be seen in the use of overhead wires for modern metro systems such as the Delhi Metro.

Overall, both systems have advantages and disadvantages, but overhead wires are generally better than third rail. The reasons for third rail's use are largely historical, and it continues to exist because it would be too expensive to replace and for very little benefit – it is still electrification, and it's better to install new electrification than to swap one system for another.