#converted convent

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Bring the whole squad. Someone converted this huge 1917 former convent in Butte, Montana into a home and they want to sell it. 5bds, 5.5ba, $929K. It's so plain, though, it needs some nice colorful decor. Take a look.

They are calling it a luxury residence, but this is the main hall.

Off the main hall is a large sitting room.

I'm sure that it took a lot of work to open and brighten it. There's a nice stone fireplace. They must've replaced the old exposed pipes with the new copper ones. The radiators look original.

New modern kitchen. I think it has potential, though. It's a blank slate waiting for some color and interest.

The kitchen's big and bright with double islands.

It's a huge kitchen with exposed brick and big new beams.

Very large dining room. In a convent the dining room is called the "refectory." I would have a sign made for it.

They've got this bedroom set up for two.

This one features a walk-in closet and en-suite.

They also installed a sauna, which is very nice.

Plus, a home gym.

Here's another nice bath.

Original stairs.

This is very nice- an exposed brick sun porch.

I guess that this could be a rec room or something. It even opens to a sun room, too. Nice built-in table for plants, crafts, work desk, etc.

Another new bath.

Spacious bedroom.

This bedroom has a big en-suite.

It does have potential to be a cool home.

The land is 0.138 acre or 6,011 sq. ft., so it's pretty big. I think it has potential.

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1131-W-Copper-St_Butte_MT_59701_M71929-49786

[illustratus]

The Divine Office of Massimiliano Locatelli

Architect Massimiliano Locatelli converted a 16th-century church in Milan, complete with original frescoes, an altar and a crypt, into the perfect workspace for his growing firm. San Paolo Converso, a 16th-century former church and convent in Piazza Sant’Eufemia, not far from Milan’s celebrated Duomo.

The Fresco in the background depicts The Martyrdom of St Paul by Antonio Campi

Photograph by François Halard

[etirabys]

twitter is not as foreign a country as you may think. I have a mutual there who is trying to get me into Martin Luther as a new blorbo

[triviareads]

Well..... I can now confirm Tiffany Reisz inspired Sierra Simone to write the Priest series.

[alsaurus-loves-dean]

.

[cheapcheapfaker]

trying to brainstorm names and gilgamesh goes “what about Adam?” And I was like waow… irl oc real?

[baynton]

idk how to make this into a fic but it's the best exchange i've ever written (it's patcap i wrote this for patcap)

[enderspawn]

holy shit just realized a character i made a few years back for a monster of the week campaign would be fucking like. Ideal deadwood resident.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

OMG, the coolest, awesome, magnificent, probably haunted, home converted from a 1522 convent in Pitigliano, Italy, in Tuscany, has the witchiest fireplace just in time for Halloween. 10bds, 8ba, $5,177,453.

How many skeletons are down in this rusty old well?

The entrance hall. Look at the ancient walls, now whitewashed.

Is this not the consummate witches fireplace? The living room is gorgeous with its tile floor and curved wall.

Amazing. The kitchen looks like ancient catacombs. Look at the old vats that they must've stomped on grapes in and the old wine barrels on display. How cool is that? The nuns must've had purple feet for sure.

A cozy sitting area with fireplace outside the kitchen. This home is gorgeous - the ancient walls!

This looks like a pantry.

Lovely reading room. Look at the niche in the wall. You can't see much of the ceiling, but it looks brick and vaulted.

Great bath with the antique tub resting on stones.

Elegant bedroom. Look at the flower pattern in the floor tile and the way they made the closet in the corner.

This large bedroom has a heat hearth.

This bath looks like an elegant French style.

Beautiful smaller bedroom. Notice the ancient doors.

Cheery yellow-striped bedroom.

This long hallway has a brick heat stove.

Like a fairy tale.

The lush green grounds are stunning.

I wonder what behind the gate. Maybe a chapel or wine cellar?

This place is so dreamy.

Ancient walls. This area looks like the perfect spot for a garden.

But, that's not all. Look at this beautiful pool.

Stunning property on a 26 acre lot.

[sminor]

The cast and orchestra of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” recording their soundtrack album in 1961 (Library of Congress).

[ostensiblyfunctional]

Okay so I recently reread all the Magus of the Library books I own and something about the Kadoe niggled at the corner of my brain that now permanently and inexplicably owned by Star Wars. Such as the fact that the Kadoe widely use masks, but not all of them, and of the ones that do, the only ones that can see their face are their family or spouse. And also, it is highly inappropriate for others to refer to a Kadoe by their given name. And also, but less relevantly, the Kadoe used to have a prolific empire, and were ostensibly very good at fighting considering that their contribution to the Seminal Scripts is a trio of grimoires that are apparently the most terrifying in all of history, before the empire fell to the Rakta.

Now, I dunno about you, but that sounds like a Star Wars group of people who are sworn to never reveal their face to anyone other than family, who restrict use of their personal name, and who used to have an empire before it fell. And are also really good at fighting.

Also, uh. Well. Haupi and Jedi and systematic massacre of an entire people. Y'know. Some parallels could be drawn there. And also maybe between Sith Lords, the Emissary of Wormwood, and great evils making things worse for everyone everywhere.

All I'm saying is that it wouldn't feel out of place if some Kadoe—maybe a Tass or Sooni or whatever subclassification is listed in the books—who comes from a highly traditional, secretive sect who obscure their names and bodies in addition to their faces, coming across some long-lived yet still childlike remnant of the Haupi, and being tasked with returning this child to whatever of their people is left.

[hbmmaster]

I used to think of braille like it's a digital text encoding scheme (if you know a little bit about how braille works and a lot about how computers store text, it feels "obvious" that braille dot patters are six-bit binary encodings of characters) but the more I've learned about it the more I've understood how wrong that is.

for one, braille is not an encoding of the latin alphabet. you can transliterate between the latin alphabet and braille the same way as you can transliterate between any two writing systems, but they really are completely separate scripts that follow completely different rules. converting to and from braille is a hard problem that depends on the specific orthography of the language being used, and within individual languages still is often very context sensitive.

for example, english braille (in some standards) spells the word "a" differently from the letter "a": they both use the same character that's used when the vowel appears within longer words, but when the letter "a" is used as a letter and not as the word, it (in some standards) requires an additional character to specify that you mean the letter.

also, braille isn't digital at all. it's designed for people, not computers. the earliest version of braille is from 1824, decades before the earliest machines you could reasonably describe as computers. braille was designed for humans, and it follows conventions that are reasonable for people but make no sense for computers. it's rare for two related dot patterns to be differentiated by "flipping one of the bits" like you'd do with a binary text encoding; instead you get things like rotating flipping or moving the pattern, which certainly feels a lot more like a writing system than an encoding of a writing system.

[reasonsforhope]

Scientists have developed a new solar-powered system to convert saltwater into fresh drinking water which they say could help reduce dangerous the risk of waterborne diseases like cholera.

Via tests in rural communities, they showed that the process is more than 20% cheaper than traditional methods and can be deployed in rural locations around the globe.

Building on existing processes that convert saline groundwater to freshwater, the researchers from King’s College London, in collaboration with MIT and the Helmholtz Institute for Renewable Energy Systems, created a new system that produced consistent levels of water using solar power, and reported it in a paper published recently in Nature Water.

It works through a process called electrodialysis which separates the salt using a set of specialized membranes that channel salt ions into a stream of brine, leaving the water fresh and drinkable. By flexibly adjusting the voltage and the rate at which salt water flowed through the system, the researchers developed a system that adjusts to variable sunshine while not compromising on the amount of fresh drinking water produced.

Using data first gathered in the village of Chelleru near Hyderabad in India, and then recreating these conditions of the village in New Mexico, the team successfully converted up to 10 cubic meters, or several bathtubs worth of fresh drinking water. This was enough for 3,000 people a day with the process continuing to run regardless of variable solar power caused by cloud coverage and rain.

[Note: Not sure what metric they're using to calculate daily water needs here. Presumably this is drinking water only.]

Dr. Wei He from the Department of Engineering at King’s College London believes the new technology could bring massive benefits to rural communities, not only increasing the supply of drinking water but also bringing health benefits.

“By offering a cheap, eco-friendly alternative that can be operated off the grid, our technology enables communities to tap into alternative water sources (such as deep aquifers or saline water) to address water scarcity and contamination in traditional water supplies,” said He.

“This technology can expand water sources available to communities beyond traditional ones and by providing water from uncontaminated saline sources, may help combat water scarcity or unexpected emergencies when conventional water supplies are disrupted, for example like the recent cholera outbreaks in Zambia.”

In the global rural population, 1.6 billion people face water scarcity, many of whom are reliant on stressed reserves of groundwater lying beneath the Earth’s surface.

However, worldwide 56% of groundwater is saline and unsuitable for consumption. This issue is particularly prevalent in India, where 60% of the land harbors undrinkable saline water. Consequently, there is a pressing need for efficient desalination methods to create fresh drinking water cheaply, and at scale.

Traditional desalination technology has relied either on costly batteries in off-grid systems or a grid system to supply the energy necessary to remove salt from the water. In developing countries’ rural areas, however, grid infrastructure can be unreliable and is largely reliant on fossil fuels...

“By removing the need for a grid system entirely and cutting reliance on battery tech by 92%, our system can provide reliable access to safe drinking water, entirely emission-free, onsite, and at a discount of roughly 22% to the people who need it compared to traditional methods,” He said.

The system also has the potential to be used outside of developing areas, particularly in agriculture where climate change is leading to unstable reserves of fresh water for irrigation.

The team plans to scale up the availability of the technology across India through collaboration with local partners. Beyond this, a team from MIT also plans to create a start-up to commercialize and fund the technology.

“While the US and UK have more stable, diversified grids than most countries, they still rely on fossil fuels. By removing fossil fuels from the equation for energy-hungry sectors like agriculture, we can help accelerate the transition to Net Zero,” He said.

-via Good News Network, April 2, 2024

[lovelylovelyartist]

Lol love when I work on a project for an hour and then realize I've been working on the wrong versions of the files and have to start over 🥲

[whatsupspaceman]

the corinthian is THE character ever. motherfucker has sauce for days. he’s a nightmare personified chilling on earth. he drives a convertible. he eats eyeballs but he doesn’t even do it with the teeth he has in place of his eyes. he charms everyone he meets. he’s a keynote speaker at a serial killer convention. he was even gay.

[internationem]

Just a reminder: intent is much, much more important to genocide than the amount of people dying. simply put, the amount of dead civilians isn't what makes a genocide a genocide.

for example, up to 33k bosnians are estimated to have died because of the bosnian genocide. in contrast, the estimated amount of japanese civilians dead during WWII is between 330k and 900k. yet most (serious) people wouldn't ever consider that there was a genocide against the japanese people. why? well, no government wanted to, planned or carried out systematic attacks with the intent of erasing, in whole or in part, the japanese people. yet, however, it is fairly easy to prove that the serbs wanted the bosnians gone and acted accordingly. You can even fullfill the material criteria for the Genocide Convention (ie killing people, or causing body or mental harm to a population) to a certain extent but if the intent behind those actions isn't to destroy a national/ethnic/etc group, then it's not genocide, the fullfilment of the material elements themselves aren't proof that there's a genocide without fullfilment of the mental element.

This isn't to overlook civilian deaths, but truth is, in modern warfare, civilians ARE gonna die, and that sucks massively, but we have a a whole branch of international law that help mitigate a lot of civilian deaths and allow for criminals to be held accountable for violation of civilian rights and livs, without having to erroneously call every single conflict where people die a genocide.

Similarly, it may be true that a lot more people are dying in the Israel-Gaza war than in the 7/10 attacks, but why did Hamas attack Israel in the first place? Why has Israel been attacked fairly frequently since it's independence? Because they want to completely erase Israel as a whole and expel (and kill, or best case scenario, convert) the jewish people out of the Middle East. This is very easy to prove, read Hamas founding charter and literally any history book that talks about wars against Israel or the expulsion of Jews from several ME countries. It's what the whole "from the river to the sea" slogan is about. It's also the very reason Israel needs to exist. But meanwhile, there's little to nothing that points out Israel wants to wipe out Palestinians as a group: 20% of their citizens are Palestinians who enjoy the same rights as Jewish citizens of Israel and aren't targeted, even Palestinians of the West Bank aren't usually targeted in a way that would even imply the IDF wants to erase them as a group, and even considering the Gaza campaign, its objective is to erradicate Hamas, not Palestinians, and nothing in Israel's policy outwardly implicates they want to erradicate all Gazans. Palestine, and especially Gaza, has massive population growth, which wouldn't make sense if there was a genocide campaign against them. This isn't to say the IDF is doing everything perfectly or that there aren't war crimes being commited. But war crimes don't mean genocide.

Calling what's happening in Gaza genocide is antisemitic, because not only are we applying different standards to Israel than we do any other country, we are also saying that Jewish people defending themselves is, inherently, a crime, one of the worst crimes defined at that. But it's also harmful to palestinians, because claiming that Israel's war against Hamas is a war against Palestinians equates Palestinians (many of whom just want to live regular lives, not war) with terrorists (who also target them, by the way), which seems islamophobic as hell if i'm being honest. it is also insensitive and damaging to every group that has been the victim of genocide, and every group which might be a victim of a genocide in the future, because how you're twisting the definition of the word to mean whatever you want it to mean. If everything is a genocide, nothing is.