The final episode, and one of the best, of simply the best podcast.

The fact that Shakespeare implied an entire fraught backstory to Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship with only five words - I know you of old - is so genius. This play is so genius. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the cleverness and subtly of writing in Much Ado.

You can train your grip strength at home!

Try building up to the double towel hang. It's an uncommon exercise that builds strength (and muscle!) in our palms and forearms.

The "type" of grip strength this uses seems to be different than the ones we use to do pullups or lift barbells. It's not uncommon to struggle at first. Rope climbing uses the same grip!

Training grip AFTER your pull sets for a 2-3 sets is a great way to incorporate grip training.

Simply build up to around 3 sets of 60 seconds on each exercise before moving on!

Hope this can help! Have a wonderful day.

Rendering beef fat into tallow

Ten years ago, I came across a comment on a soap making forum where a woman explained how she gets her tallow pure enough to make into her soaps and it has worked really really well when I've made large batches of tallow. Since the internet is an ever-shifting labyrinth of lost advice, I thought I would help preserve her advice here as well.

By lionprincess00 from soapmakingforum.com:

"I take it and cut off all meat bits I can. Then I cut it into small inch sized pieces or so. Someone here mentioned baking soda to help the render smell, and another mentioned salt for helping get impurities out.

I put it into a pot of water that's filled halfway up the fat. I pour a good half cup or so of salt into it. I mix oh about 3 tablespoons of baking soda into water and pour it on as well. It creates a reaction and releases carbon dioxide, so beware as it heats of spilling over. I did an experiment not using baking soda in the render, and by the third it still smelled extremely meaty. Whatever the reason, it helps a ton reduce the overall finished product's odor. BEWARE OF EVAPORATION, and fill with fresh water as needed.

NO YOU CANT DO THAT

Play us a tune Jazz Man

theres a snake in my flute

SHIT

A bit of a video showcase for the gorgeous, gorgeous binding of Written by the Victors!!! @daemonluna typeset it and @rhipidurafan made this copy for me!! Things to notice--the absolutely gorgeous endpapers! The dyed blue edges! The different fonts--type for bibliography, and then, even more excitingly, later, different fonts for the poetry, the songs, the early and late Atlantian dialects segments. Absolutely beautiful. This sort of hand-made art just floors me; it's everything wonderful about fandom IMO!

btw I’m talking about what you sort by, not what you use to find fics (tags, pairings, fandoms, etc)

ok so people are making fun of this but adding this with other anti-global warming tactics will work

This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.

It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.

So yes, this is a good idea. It simply isn’t the only thing we should do because we still have gross pollution.

For the love of god do it . anything just do it. Give us hope.

Here’s the thing: Most environmental catastrophes humans have ever or are currently creating can be fixed. It’s not just a matter of “oh no, things are ruined, and maybe we can stop the degradation so that things don’t get any worse, but we’re stuck with how things are.” There are some things we can’t do, like bringing back extinct species. But there are a lot of other things we can definitely do, many of which are being done right now. The problem is that most of our willpower and effort is spent on bullshit tiny things that won’t solve the problem (individual recycling, etc.) and not on the large-scale things that can and will make a large-scale difference.

Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.

Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.

Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.

Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.

Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.

So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.

On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.

In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it can happen.

This is a solvable problem.

I *needed* this. Climate change has had me feeling SO helpless, having a list of things that can actually potentially be done is beautiful

a little obsessed with the story of how giacomo casanova was sharing a gondola with this random guy who suddenly started having a seizure, and casanova had some medical training so he stabilized the guy until the guy’s physician could be called. and then the physician bled the guy and put mercury ointment on him, which caused everything to get worse to the point that a priest was called to administer the guy’s last rites, but then casanova stepped in and washed off the mercury ointment despite the doctor yelling at him not to. and the guy recovered and turned out to be super rich and powerful and in gratitude bankrolled casanova’s debauchery for years until casanova got himself sentenced to five years in jail for blasphemy. also at one point he got shot through the hand in a duel and doctors wanted to amputate it but he said no it’ll be fine and it Was

so what i’m saying is a medical procedural show where the main character is giacomo casanova and he doesn’t want to be solving these medical mysteries but goddamn if he isn’t the only fucker in this room who knows how to not kill the patient. so i guess my date with this prussian chick will just have to wait

this pitch would have absolutely killed at the bbc between 1991 and 2005 btw

antis when a post is about them: there's no way this post is about me right

So tonight I joined my parents, and the neighbours, at the local pub quiz. We won, and won the bonus round, much to the annoyance of the other teams. Apparently my parents and their friends win every other week. Nerds. So to prank them the landlord had a special “Super Hard Pub Question” for us for double or nothing on our prize (vouchers for a gallon of beer) to let the rest of the pub feel better because we were “guaranteed to lose” since there was “no way we could know the answer.” I got picked to answer it because I’m the youngest and have less General Knowledge.

The question?

“What is the word for beer in Ancient Egyptian?”

Pub: *loud raucous laughter and cheering*

Landlord: *looks smug*

Me: Do you want that in English or in the original Hieroglyphs?

Landlord: The hieroglyphs of course!

Pub: *more laughter*

Me: *scribbles quickly in the 10 seconds I had to answer*

Landlord: Fuck. Me. 

Pub: *utter silence broken only by someone at the back exclaiming WTF* 

Landlord: How did you even know that?

Me: You picked the one person here who can read them?

Landlord: Oh shit it’s you isn’t it?

Dad yelling from the back: SURPRISEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

It’s safe to say we’re simultaneously fucking legends/not very popular at the local right now.

This is my new favorite post.

happy smallpox eradication day to all who celebrate, which is everyone!

“On December 9, 1979, the disease was confirmed to have been eradicated, with the World Health Assembly making the declaration official five months later.”

“On May 8, 1980, more than two years after the last known case, the World Health Assembly formally declared the world free of smallpox.”

celebrate twice!

being aromantic and into whump is like. shoutout to whump for being a great opportunity to engage with stories about intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. what would i do without you.

i truly love seeing both aro and non-aro people reblogging and agreeing with this sentiment. join me, let's appreciate intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. i love you whump genre.

Accurate

Send me a Ship and a Number and I will Write a Kiss