Prompt: Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Komarov, Gherman Titov and Valery Bykovsky as tired Swedish tech startup entrepreneurs drinking beer in a pub in Lund, Sweden.
Pictures via Aitubo.
arionvulgaris reblogged
Reblog/like this if you’re LGBTQ+ and run an active blog in 2024.
Trying to find new blogs to follow. 🫶🏻
Gay transguy posting old tech, dirty jokes and odd stuff about Sweden here!
arionvulgaris reblogged
Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:
- Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.
- You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.
- When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.
- A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)
- Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)
- The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.
- Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.
- Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.
As someone who spent over a decade catering luxury events, let me add some back of house info:
- These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.
- If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.
- There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.
- A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.
- Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.
- A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.
- Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.
- Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.
- Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.
- These are very long and physically demanding nights for anyone working them. The staff all get to know each other, and will absolutely notice someone trying to sneak in wearing a borrowed uniform. They are not being paid enough to care.
arionvulgaris reblogged
A Historical Space Fuckup
Geostationary satellites. You know the ones, right? Hanging out 5.6 Earth radii above the Equator and sending us cat videos and premium TV channels? Let me tell you about their worst few years.
Background: GEO satellites are just big fat bent pipes. They take a weak signal from the ground, amplify the fuck out of it, and send it back. The amount of dollars you can make doing this is related to the total power of the amplifiers, so everyone making money like this wants more power. How do you get more power in space? Bigger solar arrays. What's the catch? Bigger solar arrays are more expensive: your 15kW solar array might cost you ten million dollars. Bigger solar arrays also mean a satellite that costs more fuel to control, and running out of fuel is the primary way these satellites die (and stop making you money). So everyone's looking for cheat codes here.
1999. Hughes Satellite Systems (just before it's bought by B̷̧͛o̶̹̕ẻ̴̙i̴̩̓n̴͎͆g̵͉̈) develops a really mass-/cost-efficient way to make the solar arrays bigger: trough concentrators. Instead of adding more solar panels, instead they'll add cheap, lightweight, super-reflective panels that redirect more sunlight onto the existing solar panels! This increases the amount of light hitting the solar panels (++power), while also increasing their temperature (-power), but they did the math, it's positive, let's launch some concentrators.
Let us digress for a second. Space is a vacuum (citation needed). In our Earthbound experience, a lot of matter stays where you put it because atmospheric pressure is keeping it there. In space, some materials start to escape much faster, but other materials stay in place. Spacecraft solar arrays are made of semiconductor (stable), glass (stable), copper (stable), aluminum (stable), and glue (INCREDIBLY VOLATILE). Oh also, the glue is selected to be really clear, but it stays that way only because it's usually hidden behind something. When direct sunlight hits it, it turns SUPER BROWN. Brown doesn't let sunlight through it.
What happens to a molecule when it starts to fly free? It picks a direction to go and flies that way until it hits something, where it maybe condenses and stays put. When the solar panels are flat, this is fine, because most directions have nothing to hit:
However, with trough concentrators, a large fraction of the glue hits one of the concentrator panels and stays there... and then some fraction of that glue evaporates, hits the solar panel, and stays there (but browner):
Oh, okay, yeah that's worse. Spacecraft that were supposed to lose 5% of their power over 15 years instead started looking like they were going to lose 20% of their power in that time period, meaning you can't keep the TV channels running, meaning you can't make any goddamn money! Very embarrassing for Hughes (/Boeing). They launched 6 satellites with this issue before they noticed the problem and started freaking out. "Freaking out" in this case means almost bankrupting the people they'd sold satellites to, and nearly exploding themselves.
My aunt started working at Hughes during this timeframe and was given a commemorative pin for the satellite she was working on. Six months later, they asked everyone to please give back the commemorative pins; the company urgently needed to fix a design issue with the satellite that would change how the pin looked. My aunt kept her old pin, which... still had the concentrators in place :)
Anyway, right around this same time, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, whose existence was classified at the time), had exactly the same issue on some of its satellites, as far as I can tell. NRO also freaked out about it, and because they're the government, they started an annual conference with all of the country's high-clearance solar power experts to help them figure out what the fuck was going on. That conference slowly got less and less classified over the years, and my wife was invited to speak at it this year! There were a couple of graphs presented by government speakers that lampshaded the Late Nineties Concentrator Fuckup, but absolutely nobody mentioned it directly. (another win for "getting a bee in your bonnet at exactly the right time and then making your spouse listen to everything you've learned about the bee")
arionvulgaris reblogged
Let's make the worst possible "designer dog"!
fuck it, why not. The top 3 winning choices will be our 'breed'. Am I able to draw it? No. But it will haunt my imagination forever.
We are currently at a mix of Afghan Hound, Exotic Bully and Dachshund... (all images yoinked from google purely to illustrate typical examples of the breeds)
That is... uh... definitely An Entity, that's for sure...
arionvulgaris reblogged
This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.
They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.
And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.
If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.
Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.
A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.
Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.
Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"
So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.
No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.
Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up
The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it...
Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen
This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic
OH JESUS CHRIST I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED
IF CRT MONITORS GET TOO MUCH POWER THEY SHOOT OUT FUCKING X-RAYS
IT WASN'T ELECTRO-MAGNETIC Y'ALL WERE SHOOTING YOURSELF WITH CANCER BEAMS
Not as bad as CRTs but here's a story I was told when asking about radio interference from computer equipment at a radio observatory:
Some guy, years ago, brought in a new flatscreen to the observatory. It was much needed so they tried to set it up and plug it in and BIG MISTAKE.
This thing spat out so much EM radiation the radio telescope ON THE ROOF OF A DIFFERENT BUILDING was completely unusable because all they saw was radio interference from that fucking monitor
It literally drowned out everything else
The observer called in because he couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on and they figured it was the monitor and shut it off
They immediately yeeted that thing somewhere far away to go be someone elses problem
Don't buy uncertified electronics
arionvulgaris reblogged
Solitaire - Card Back #10
arionvulgaris reblogged
some of you just cannot accept that “i just don’t like it” is a complete reason to not engage with media or a facet of media
arionvulgaris reblogged
This is breaking containment into the TERF enclosures which I very much expected, but I will happily shout from the rooftops that furry porn artists are more productive and beneficial to society than JKR’s incessant whining on the elon musk dick riding app about how much she hates trans people
1439 votes but 288 reblogs because the TERFs are afraid of the truth so they're just linking it directly to each other lmao
arionvulgaris reblogged
as round 2 heats up, reminder that there is a line between being annoying (honorable, joyous, part of fandom's legacy) and just being an asshole. mobilize your followers, write propaganda meta in defense of your ship, bribe people to vote how you want with drabbles or doodles, make twelve accounts and vote on all of them— but don't send anon hate.
arionvulgaris reblogged
plagues history and global epidemiology as an autistic special interest was already a heavy topic but not a day goes by I dont briefly recall drunkenly telling people at the bar in autumn 2019 “yeah the next pandemic will probably be a coronavirus and we’re due for one”
if they remember that i have to wonder if they think they met the devil at the club that night
arionvulgaris reblogged
He was trying to make sure you could be horny on main and still get paid. The hero we needed not the hero we deserved.
arionvulgaris reblogged
I don't really go in the lost media and lostwave communities but I'm reading about how they found today a song they've been searching for years (Everyone Knows That aka. EKT) and turns out it originated from an 80s porno. The whole deal is so funny help.
arionvulgaris reblogged
it used to be 2007 you know
All the adults should put in the tags how old they were in 2007
arionvulgaris reblogged
i love wikipedia and i think it is good and right to give them money but all their funding drive messages are “well… we’ll be killing ourselves tonight. we asked so little of you and yet it seems that simply nobody cares about lil ol wikipedia anymore….sad…”
I'm cursing my followers with this one, bestie
arionvulgaris reblogged
Sometimes we here at local airport like to make you think deep, feel emotions and have your imagination pushed to its very limit.
Other times we acknowlege that wanting to fuck an airplane is a lot more common then airport security care to admit.
arionvulgaris reblogged
The major's body, able to endure 9 G:s, felt warm and smooth to my touch.