nientedenada
Niente de Nada
More Elder Scrolls Lore than is Good For You. Joyofthejoui on AO3. Browse all my lore posts under the tag niente lore. Drop me an ask if there's a subject you want to read about. I probably have resources to share.
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If I was in the elder scrolls universe I'd either get cancelled or cause a political incident by frequently and inadvertently offending Alfiq Khajiit by saying things like "aw little guy!" to like these grown ass merchants and bankers and such
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Time Cube
I wish there was a story to tell about Time Cube. I discovered the website in the mid-1990s, and was fascinated by Gene Ray’s incoherent theory of everything. For decades I’ve meant to write up my take on the whole thing, but I never got around to it. I suppose that’s because there really isn’t a point to all of it, much like Ray’s concept of how the universe works.
In retrospect, there isn’t anything particularly special about Ray posting a crank manifesto on the web. Twenty-five years ago, though, I didn’t know that. The world wide web was young and so was I. I was only beginning to discover that people could have the means to access the internet and nevertheless be inarticulate, or incompetent, or irrational. I approached Ray’s oddly hostile demands for people to prove him wrong in good faith, figuring that reason could unravel any sort of nonsense. I had a lot to learn.
It’s tempting, at first glance, to interpret Time Cube as an argument that everything exists in one of four states, and that anything moving to another state implies that three equivalent things must make correlating movements. That’s kind of weird, but it at least resembles a falsifiable premise, which lures you into trying to make sense of the rest of it, the better to debunk it on its own terms. But there isn’t a “rest of it” to make sense of. Ray never actually applied this “four corners” premise to any meaningful conclusion, except that academia and organized religion have conspired to suppress his brilliant discovery.
A newcomer to Time Cube might realize that right around the time they started noticing all the odd references to the Clintons, or Jews, or cannibalism, or various things that are supposedly “queer.” The only ideas Ray truly articulates are his contempt for anyone who can’t understand his ideas, and his certainty that no one but himself can understand.
Over the years I’d occasionally remember Time Cube was a thing, and poke around to see if anything new had developed. Usually there was nothing new. Now and then Ray would be contacted for an interview or invited to “lecture” for the amusement of some college kids. Surviving footage of these events suggests Ray had a far more gentle demeanor in person than you’d think from reading “You Word-Murder Your Children“ on his site.
Gene Ray passed away in 2015 at the age of 87, and his site went down shortly thereafter. Snapshots of timecube.com are available on archive.org, although the novelty of reading the site is blunted by knowing that no one alive today actually believes that stuff. Today’s internet has its hands full with a wider variety of more prolific cranks, producing more intricate charts and spreading more dangerous misinformation. Maybe that’s why I look back to Time Cube, with nostalgia for a simpler era of gibberish.
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"It’s certainly possible that part of the class replication strategy for upper- and upper-middle-class literati involves suppressing mention of money in literature. If so, I can only lament the harm this suppression does to the work in question."
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The Elder Scrolls Travels: Jiub’s Quest
Sidescroller Shoot Em’ Up mockup based on Jiub’s eradication of Cliff Racers
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bro didn't like being interrupted while working in his youth
he wasn't quite friendly neither
(without text)
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some self-indulgent Tia/Hadvar to get me through the night
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SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN dir. Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly
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i do desperately need everyone on this website especially people who arent american but want to rag on america to familiarize themselves with the basic romanized spelling conventions of native american languages because every day i come on here and i see people making fun of massachusetts or connecticut or mississippi or passamaquoddy or mashpee or nipissing and its like PLEASE. PLEASE THEY ARENT ENGLISH WORDS. PLEAAAAASEEEEEUUUHHH. USE YOUR MINDS TO IDENTIFY WHEN A WORD LOOKS LIKE IT MAY NOT BE ENGLISH. I DONT CARE IF YOU MAKE FUN OF AMERICA JUST PLEASE STOP BEING RACIST WHILE YOU DO IT
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As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
-via Wired, February 19, 2024
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oh I almost forgot to post this but I came back to weynon priory and found prior maborels corpse t-posing. they were already doing 80% christianity so yeah why not throw the crucifixion in there. is Jauffre gonna show up with stigmata next. what's that TV trope page called crystal dragon Jesus or something.....that is literally. martin septim.
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Here’s a comic I made for today’s edition of Le Monde Diplomatique in Germany. Click to enlarge the images and read it in English, or click here to read it in German.
-Jake
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I don't like how people are saying the Wonka factory thing is a consequence of AI. That's disrespectful to the proud tradition of extremely cheap, falsely advertised amusements: traveling dinosaur shows with one rusty animatronic, parking lot fairs, THE THING?, roadside theme parks that are just a bunch of empty buildings that's either based on a unlicensed fantasy novel, Jesus, or both, that one dark ride with nothing but a track in it...an enviable history
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So no one was going to tell me my cultists buy their robes from spirit halloween
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