mellow ♡

Michi boda

VilRei (👑☃️) with swapped hairstyles >:33

Underrated Percabeth moment. A reminder that Annabeth doesn't just tolerate Percy's humor, she loves him for it. At their most desperate, when they're close to death, when everything seems hopeless, he can still make her laugh.

slowly learning how to be your brother again

I know a lot of people picture Thalia Grace as tall because she’s the daughter of Zeus, but her being short is far too much funnier to me.

Give me Thalia being a tiny, electric ball of rage.

Give me Thalia wearing 4 inch platform boots… just to be 5’5.

Give me Thalia doing a quadruple take at how big Annabeth had gotten after she came out of the tree.

Give me Percy using her head as an armrest one day, and getting zapped all the way across camp.

Give me Thalia being a whole foot shorter than her little brother Jason. (He wouldn’t say anything about it, he’s a sweetheart)

It’s in my head now, and I’m spreading it as much as I can.

Tagging @florenceisstrange, @starlightshadowsworld, and @ishouldsleepbut, I want to hear your thoughts on this.

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!

Father Son duo

welp, this is bittersweet

Pounce on you even.

the seven are not-so-battle ready…

thinking about that scene in mark of athena where they're woken up on the argo II and are all ready to fight in their pajamas and wanted to do my own take on their pjs lol

Man the jury is unhinged on those culinary crucible event

I genuinely thought for a few seconds that Ortho would idk casually nuke the food

Genshin hurt me with Furina's lore...

annabeth chase i hate that people forget you’re funny as fuck

Study sessions 😺🦐

Very special ladle