thomastheunwise

[thomastheunwise]

“Are you the witch who turned eleven princes into swans?”

The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and it was the kind of question she tried to avoid.

Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.

“You a cop?”

The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”

A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.

Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”

A nod.

“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”

A nod.

“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”

A tiny, miserable nod.

“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’

“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”

Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.

The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.

“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”

The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.

“I can work with that,” said the witch.

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the sun and the moon

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Art by Rebecca Rebouche

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6 zoo myths that arent true

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Alright, so. A friend linked me a video that seemed like it contained some dubious information, and I went on a deep dive to see if it was legit or not. I don't want to link the original video, because it contains a lot of misleading information, but the topic was on experimental weather control and how it might have contributed to hurricane Helen.

So, the first big red flag in the video is a lack of sources. The creator of the video fails to site any source other than "I asked AI." She also does not provide links to any sources in the video description. That alone should make anyone watching the video view it with a healthy does of skepticism. She does show screenshots of text to occasionally support her claims, but does not say where they come from. Most of them look like the output of ChatGPT. Since AI has famously gotten some things very wrong and fabricated others seemingly from nowhere, I don't think we should rely on AI as a reliable source. Not yet.

I'm honestly not sure what the main point of the video even was, but I THINK it was that some nebulous "they" used weather modification, specifically cloud seeding, to create hurricane Helen for.... Reasons? Something to do with quartz? There was a quartz mine that was pretty thoroughly trashed, so maybe she was saying that the hurricane was deliberately created just do that? That seems like a stretch. There are many, much easier ways to commit industrial sabotage that don't involve nearly as much collateral damage.

Now, weather modification through cloud seeding is a real, experimental technology. The idea being to kick-start the formation of clouds and increase precipitation to alleviate drought. It's typically done by spraying particulate, usually sodium iodine, into a cloud formation. Water and ice crystals attach to the particle, accumulating until the cloud drops them as precipitation. The results of cloud seeding attempts have been mixed, and the efficacy of such efforts is questionable at best. You can read more about it here:

Then there was the infamous NOAA project Stormfury, an attempt to seed clouds in such a way as to weaken hurricanes or even disperse them entirely. It was deemed ineffective and abandoned in 1983.

But to date, no one has had much success with cloud seeding or weather modification in general. Certainly not anything close to producing hurricane level storms or precipitation.

Now, the frequency and intensity of hurricanes IS increasing due to human activity. But NOT from experiments with weather modification. The increase in tropical storm activity is due to anthropogenic climate change. We pump BILLIONS of tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. Carbon gas acts a blanket, trapping thermal energy in. The ocean, making up most of the surface area of the earth, comes in the most contact with the thermal energy in the atmosphere, and water is an excellent thermal conductor. Thus, our oceans are absorbing about 90% of the excess heat that is trapped in the air due to greenhouse gas emissions. One of the ways all that heat in the oceans gets dispersed by re-aborbing into the atmosphere, providing fuel for bigger and badder storms. So we get storms of ever greater frequency and intensity forming over the oceans and pummeling our coastal regions. This is well understood and documented by NASA and NOAA

Now, back to content of the video and some of the specific claims made there.

She starts by talking about some mysterious "blue jelly balls" that "fell from the sky" and were found in a man's back yard somewhere in Britain. To her credit, the video creator acknowledged that scientists did examine these balls. The conclusion was that they were gel capsules filled with solidum polyacrylate. Sodium polyacrylate is an extremely water absorbent substance used in diapers and in gardening. Cut open the thick part of a diaper and you'll find a bunch of tiny gelatin beads of sodium polyacrylate. A larger version of these beads is sometimes placed at the bottom of flower pots. In both cases, the purpose is the same: Absorb moisture and prevent leakage. This presents a much more likely explanation for the presence of these "blue jelly balls" in a man's garden than that they "fell from the sky." They could have spilled out of some broken plant pottery or been carelessly tossed out by an inconsiderate neighbor. But no, that's not the conclusion that this video creator goes to. Occam's razor? She's never heard of it.

Before I go on, there is another more recent use for sodium polyacrylate. It is being studied for its ability to absorb heat and emit cooling mist. There is some hope that it could be incorporated into building materials or even clothing to replace air conditioning, reduce energy consumption, and thus help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

The video creator seems to have found this information. She also found a video clip of a droplet of liquid being stimulated by a piezoelectric transducer. Piezoelectric materials are materials that can produce an electric current when subjected to physical pressure. Among these materials are ceramics and quartz. Piezoelectrics have a variety of uses. More information on them:

Anyway, the droplet in the video clip she showed was spherical and blue, just like the beads of sodium polyacrylate found in the man's garden. Put a pin that for now.

She claims that piezoelectric transducers seed clouds using ultrasonic sound waves. I did find that piezoelectric devices can be used for generating ultrasound, but I couldn't find a single reliable source saying that ultrasound had ever been used for cloud seeding. I'm not even sure how that would work, since cloud seeding relies on water and ice crystals clinging to some kind of particulate. I'm no physicist, but I don't see how pumping sound into the cloud would help. If I'm missing something here, please point it out to me.

That aside, the "evidence" she presents that ultrasonic sound waves are being used to seed clouds is a video clip of people standing outside in a storm and hearting a very loud, grating sound seemingly coming from the atmosphere. Now, I'm not going to speculate on what that sound actually was. But I can tell you what it wasn't: It wasn't ultrasonic. Ultrasonic, by definition, means sound in a frequency wave too high for a human ear to detect. If ultrasonic sounds were being used to modify the weather, we wouldn't hear them at at all.

So, getting back to the mysterious "blue jelly balls." She took the superficial similarity of a drop of liquid being stimulated by a piezoelectric device to a bead of sodium polyacrylate, the polyacrylate's usefulness for absorbing water and heat, and came to the conclusion that.... These blue beads are piezoelectric weather control devices? Do I have that right? I honestly don't see the connection here. The beads were filled with sodium polyacrylate. Not quartz or any other piezoelectric material. So... Huh?

She also talks about how piezoelectric devices can be used in "energy harvesting." I find it interesting that she uses that term. She talks about the "magical means" by which energy is converted from one for to another and keeps using "energy harvesting" like it's some sinister term. But the thing is? We harvest energy every day. Every time a wind turbine rotates, it's harvesting the kinetic energy of the wind and turning it into electric energy to power homes. Coal plants burn coal and use the heat to boil water which produces steam that then spins a turbine. Potential energy (coal) converted to thermal energy (fire) converted to kinetic energy (steam pushing a turbine) converted to electrical energy (a magnet on the turbine oscillates around a conductive wire, creating electrical current). There's nothing magical or sinister about it. And as for piezoelectric devices being used to harvest energy? Well, sure... In that piezoelectric materials are used in most digital devices today. Which brings us to the last point.

She spends some time at the end of the video sort of demonizing quartz because it is a piezoelectric material, which is apparently bad because they're being used for weather control (they're not). But she then goes on to say that quartz is being used by AI, not to power it directly, but to make the hardware that runs it. And like... No shit? Pure, high quality quartz is a semiconductor. AI runs on computers. Computers use microchips to rapidly perform calculations. Every microchip we have made to date has been composed of transistor gates made of semiconductive materials, including.... You guessed it, quartz!

She ends the video by pointing out the dollar value of quartz. As I said at the beginning, I'm not sure what the point of all this mess actually was. My best guess is that, because Helen took out a quartz mine and that will have an impact on the supply chain for tech products (including AI), some people think that the hurricane was created deliberately? I don't know. I don't really follow the logic. I mostly just wanted to try to debunk the misinformation presented. I hope I managed to do that. If you want to watch the original video and draw your own conclusions, I can provide the link to it.

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This seems like a good day to post thought about "I Was a Teenage Slasher" by Stephen Graham Jones. I'll say up front that I loved this book! 5/5, no notes. BUT, if you like a happy ending, you might want to skip this one. This ending made me cry, and I don't often get emotional over books.

Though not a direct sequel to his Indian Lake trilogy, it definitely follows them thematically, as meta exploration of the slasher genre. In this book Jones posits a world where being a slasher is almost like a form of lycanthropy - a disease or blood curse that can be transmitted from one person to another. After witnessing the brutal slaughter of several of his classmates at the hands of a vengeful undead slasher, Tolly Driver wakes up one night to discover he is enacting a scene of bloody retribution all his own, and he is powerless to stop it. He confides in his life long best friend, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies. Together they test his new abilities and weaknesses, trying to find a way to stop what they become increasingly sure is inevitable.

There were some fun scenes as they discovered his strange new abilities - the most fun of which being that he cannot pick up or put down any bladed instrument without it making a distinctive shting! sound - but always undercut by the knowledge that he could "turn" at any moment and become a walking nightmare for anyone around him. But despite the tragedy of it all, it was a story about love and friendship and how far we'll go to protect he people we care about most in the world.

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The Priory of the Orange Tree - Book Thoughts

Swords and sorcery and sapphic romance!

This is maybe the best fantasy novel I've read in a long time. I've seen some criticism online that it was too simplistic, lacking in complexity. And honestly, I can see where they're coming from. It is a very straightforward story, with several subplots being introduced and resolved quite quickly. But I didn't mind that. I'm getting tired of grimdark, "realistic" fantasy. Sometimes you just want a story about an epic battle between good and evil, and that's what this book delivered.

The pacing was a little slow at the beginning, with the first 3rd of the book being mostly one long introduction to the world. A lot of names and titles are thrown at you with no explanation and you just have to go with it until context makes things more clear. After that lengthy intro, the book really hits its stride and I didn't want to put it down. It kept me turning the pages wanting to know what would happen next.

If I have one really complaint about the book, it's with how quickly and "easily" the final conflict is resolved at the climax. I mean, I'm sure the heroes of the story would say it wasn't easy at all, but from a reader's perspective it was a lot of build for... not much.

BUT, unlike a lot of fantasy novels out there now, this book is a fully self contained story. There was some room at the end for a sequel, and apparently a prequel novel has already been published, but this book can and does stand on its own.

If you want a nice, long book of epic fantasy fun with a solid lesbian romance at its core, definitely check this one out.

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I saw an article yesterday that said this guy was "almost impossible" to beat now in Patch 7 on Honor difficulty due to his new Diamond Scales passive. "Almost impossible", huh? To quote Ryan George, actually it was super easy! Barely an inconvenience!

I am technically on Custom difficulty here, with the Honor rule set and all other settings configured for maximum difficulty. It was still super easy. I don't know what the author of that article was on about.

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😈🌶

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All 13 full moons of 2023 | by Ivana Fanti, @moonwise8

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