An Cat Dubh

WET BEAST WEDNESDAY

it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that

Other favorites from history:

(a) Supply lines. Supply lines. LOGISTICS. Never take your eye off the logistics.

(b) The best battle is the one that doesn't happen. The night before, meet up with the other side's quartermasters and buy up their mercenaries' contracts. (And don't try to get cheap about it. Odds are the other guys know within 10-20% how much cash you're carrying. Get pissy about the terms of the buy-out, and they may decide it makes more sense just to go ahead with the battle and take it all off you for disrespecting them.)

(c) Don't be tempted onto bad terrain. (And [c1]: All terrain is bad in at least one way. Maybe more.)

(d) Maslow is a better guide to the responsible management of armed forces than Kubler-Ross.

(e) LOGISTICS.

Be Seen

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

@lurkinglurkerwholurks look it’s Cherryh of the Cuckoo’s Egg!

god this tickles me

(OP's tiktok here)

Well someone displeased the sky gods didn’t they

My first thought was someone pleased the sky gods, because this is a SHOW. 

That’s the problem with gods; their pleasure and their wrath often look the same.

why is this fire quote from a tumblr post

Because tumblr is the real world equivalent of infinite monkeys using typewriters eventually producing Shakespeare.

World Heritage Post

Just unmute. :')

@evergreen-lyricist

All hail Hera Boopis.

Good evening to my short kings

Good evening to my tall queens

do you boop your paw at us, sir?

i do boop my paw, sir

do you boop your paw at us, sir?

is the law of our side if i say aye?

no.

(standing back in the shadows watching this unfold in silent admiration)

i have not booped half of you as well as i would have liked, and i have booped half of you half as well as you deserve.

(pauses briefly to work it out)

I made this late one night after my roommate asked me what a muppet good omens crossover would look like. It still makes me laugh.

it’s funny because yes, you CAN disable right click save, but it takes like an extra two seconds to get around it because of how images are displayed on websites. (technically you could also just screenshot but this gets you a real jpg)

for example, instagram has disabled right click save. here I am trying to save a picture of this girl with a pumpkin sweater, but I am thwarted by the lack of right click save!

to get around it, right click and go to “inspect” or “inspect element” (it’s called different things depending on what computer you’re using)

shimmy around the webpage code until you find the “src” bit. It will helpfully tell you when you’ve found it because the image, and only the image, will light up as if you selected it.

that source is the link to where the image is hosted on the website. click the link.

find the actual hosted image. right click on that.

check and mate.

reblogging this version so people can piss off the NFT bros better

This is basically how to save videos from tumblr too

ok!!

Does he mean anything to you

.

I'm pretty sure open portals are against OSHA regulations

God forbid men do anything

Honestly, it took me more than a moment to realise they were inside looking outside, not outside, looking inside.

(Because I've heard of hangars large enough to cause rainfall soemtimes, but not lightning!)

I’ve started to say “I need time to process this.”

Not only do we take longer to process things, we can take a lot longer to *act* on things that we have processed, too.

We buy games we know we'll enjoy, try them out, then put them down for a month, 2 months, 3, 4, a year, etc, until we finally pick it back up and *actually* get into it.

We say we're starting a project we won't actually start or finish for months.

Our brains take a lot of time to *do* things, as well as understand them.

This often leads to situations where people will poke us about a project we said we were starting 2 weeks ago that we haven't actually started, and won't start for another 2 weeks, and just

Being ashamed

Because we couldn't start when we said we would.

Executive dysfunction and processing delays, both terrible. Bleh.