#exposed to the elements

[den-of-whump]

Whumpee who despises being touched and so Whumper decides to "train it out of them" by putting them in a freezing cold room or putting them outside in the snow or something, leaving them there for a while, and then coming to get them like, "If you want to be warm, it will be through me holding you."

[doctordiscord123]

Whumptober 2024: Shipwrecked

Dark washes up on an island, alone. When he finally gets the help he needs, it is from an...unexpected, dreaded source.

Written in part with @regalrain!

For @whumptober, @whumptober-archive

Commission Info | Buy me a ko-fi

+++++

Dark woke up coughing.

Eyes still closed, he pushed himself up onto his forearms, coughing up sand and saltwater. Blearily, he opened his eyes, and glanced around. He was on a beach, the ocean lapping at his legs, and a little farther inland stretched some kind of tropical forest. His clothes were soaked and full of sand and salt, his hair wasn’t faring much better, and he’d lost his shoes at some point as he’d been washed ashore. The little rowboat he’d been in was not too far away…half sunk into the beach, crashed against a rock with a gaping hole in her hull.

Dark staggered to his feet, wiping the sand from his hands off on the remains of his shirt before wiping the debris from his eyes. Well…shit. He grimaced, licking his lips, and spat out more sand. His mouth tasted like he’d sucked on a raw oyster shell fresh from the sea floor, and he was so thirsty from baking out in the sun for God knows how long…

Read the rest on Ao3!

[tenth-sentence]

If you have never been in the wild wilderness, day and night, for weeks, you will hardly understand how they felt.

"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair" - C. S. Lewis

[thebrainrotsreal]

Eve, Kate, Mark and Rex! Nailing some ideas down on how I wanna draw them in the future, and enjoying messing with their designs like usual! Not a fix-it whatsoever just fun + ref for the future! I cannot do realistic styles so translating them into something I can do while still being recognizable is peak. I will mess with Rex's suit more. Trust. I Kate so much now. Look at her <333333

[iamthepulta]

@joemomrgneissguy SPACE MINING. HO BOY.

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

Location and rarity of commodity

Location and rarity of extraction techniques/reagents

What is necessary for this operation to work?

Where does the finished product go?

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

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

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

[angry geologist rant under the cut]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[huggywuggysuppy]

Piggybacking off @applepixls hermitcraft economy post, what’s up with Pearl and Keralis’ surprisingly lucrative flowers and dyes shop?

Flowers and dyes are ideal for shops. They’re used a lot in building and material gathering, but are generally too tedious to make a proper farm for. For example, black dye commonly comes from squids, which are annoying to kill in bulk. Unlike Joel’s glow ink where he’s pretty much the only one using glow ink in enough bulk to buy — aside from Impulse and other redstoners who can make their own farms. Also, there’s a wide variety of product, to match the assortment of constant demand. False needs dye for her concrete shop, as do some of the glass collective. All builders love spore blossoms and most hermits haven’t bothered playing around with sniffers to have easy access to their flowers. Every hermit has at least one need from the flower and dyes shop.

Importantly, the shop has unique infrastructure only Pearl can take advantage of. Dye-duction is the stand out, being on the higher end of minigames, both in replayability but also quality like Oli’s custom soundtrack. Speaking of, Pearl’s drawn several other neighbors to her side of the shopping district. Along with Gem who was already there, Impulse and False directly themed off Pearl’s building — even including mini-games — for plant shops cohesion and Pearl’s own friendly relationships (soup group!) The greatest location benefit of all is Pearl building the secondary shopping district portal directly nextdoor. All these qualities bring in customers and keep the shop fresh in their minds.

The flower shop dodges many of the permit system downsides too. As applepixl described: its very difficult to build let alone stock so many shops singlehandedly. But the flower shop is a joint venture with Keralis and they very much split the work. She handles the operation and publicity/events (ex: Doc’s llama tour, eventual Peardle tournament,) while he supplies the wide array of products. Even being in opposite work hours helps: there’s always someone to catch if the store needs restocking. (Their efficiency is very similar to the Post Office — down to Pearl as the public-facing operative.) The flowers and dyes shop has steady demand, amplified by intentional infrastructure and management, which is sustained through a joint venture. If only they could split and use the well-earned profits!

[probably-bad-idea]

Ok so theory time

In the beginning of Frankenstein, Victor says he made the creatures limbs perfectly proportional and that he was perfect, the only thing that was "wrong" with him was his eyes

But now I'm at the end and Walton says that the creature is horribly disproportionate and that his hands resemble a mummy

Could that mean that while Victor did make life, the corpse parts are still decomposing so Adam has become more and more monstrous as the years have passed?

Like.... the creature decays unbelievably fast and Victor just gets worse in health making them weirdly mirror each other with how their mutual hatred is literally consuming them and ruining their respective lives

[emperor-forneus]

i have like three episodes left of quadstrike before i'm finished with it and i'm STILL mourning what i thought it would be. i genuinely thought everyone was gonna get their own assigned element and upgrade their beys based on that. like imagine shu with fire (which has always been a thing with him LMAO) and having to make a brand new spriggan which can handle this overwhelming new power system the season is talking about. but no. we only got pax thinking he's the new avatar and everyone being shocked by the fact that the beys glow (AS IF THEY HAVEN'T BEEN DOING THAT AND WORSE FOR THE PAST.... ≈231 EPISODES??)

[midwest-of-weird]

take your seats.

[thecrowsart]

This was technically inspired by a post made by Mirai, but it ended up pretty far from the prompt so I won't link it here. I'll follow through on the original prompt soon, I promise <3 But I had this thought and I liked it

[vynegar]

Vyn's "Journey Forth With You" SSR // Main Story Episode 2, "The Unbearable Love"

[clowndensation]

getting to the point at work btw where i'm actually being like. combative.

like we're trying to decide on a company vehicle, and they chose my vehicle for it. while ignoring the fact that i've already told them my vehicle isn't ideal for this job (and it like Really Isn't. it sucks for this job. i put up with it because as a personal vehicle, it rules). and then they went out and bought two of them before they even finished creating the new standardized equipment we're supposed to use. and now we're testing it all out and it's not working. shockingly.

so i told them point blank "i chose this car because i'm willing to be frustrated with it at work just so that i can use it for fun on weekends. solely as a work vehicle, it's a bad choice, and all of your workers will be unhappy with it. we can't get the new standardized cart to work in it, and we're coming up with a bunch of convoluted solutions instead of facing the real solution: we need a bigger car for this to work well."

and the stupid ass motherfucker i was talking with was like "welll actually we asked people, and they said this car was workable (i know this. you asked ME. because it's my car model. workable doesn't equal ideal, and i TOLD YOU THIS. i SAID that my car is adequate but NOT actually great for the job) and also they said that if the choice was between a less than ideal (but cheaper than a van) car, but the amount we save goes into their pocket via benefits and pay, vs a more ideal van that costs more, meaning we can't give you guys the benefits we otherwise could, everyone agreed that the cheaper, more frustrating car would be better"

and i went. "interesting. when did you ask this, because i don't remember hearing about it, and nobody i've spoken with agrees with what you just said."

and he had to backtrack and be like "well i didn't mean to imply we asked EVERYONE it was just generally what i've heard from some people"

and i full stop was like "well it sounds like you've made up your mind. if you've assigned a dollar value to the comfort and happiness of your technicians, and the math works out that the money you're saving with these cars is worth more than that dollar value, then there's not much more to say." and left.

but also for the record. techs are not seeing a fucking dime of the money they're allegedly saving with these cars lmao. "you'll see it reflected in your benefits" what a nebulous thing to say. show me the math you're doing that proves that. set me up with some solid number expectations that i'll see reflected on my paycheck. fuckhead.

[a-gay-little-cat]

things are coming up joshua

[casperth3ghost]

i love all my ocs from all the fandoms im in because they arent like kids or siblings or oc x canon or wtv

no its my self instert thats there to fuck around with everyone

[carrionfourth]

ocd, more like curse of "every time you go outside you will worry that you are hallucinating your pants and have to repeatedly check that they're there lest you discover you are out in public butt naked"

[megazumi-world]

Goobun be upon ye ₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎