Homoqueer Jewhobbit

based on this

Girl, I am outta here. There’s a DVR at home full of unwatched TV waiting to remind me how ridiculously single I really am.

If you're having a bad day, just remember that it's going to be winter soon and imagine what will happen to all the Cybertrucks ❤️

Salt-rusted unprotected steel panels... Meltwater getting into poorly constructed and poorly isolated electronics... Stuck in snowdrifts that a real truck would have been able to deal with... Oh, those are indeed happy images. Yes indeed...

It's winter in the US is anything happening to all the cybertrucks

No snow here yet. Lots of Cybertrucks in my area, so I’ll keep an eye out.

Keep us updated I am so curious to see how they handle Normal Weather

There should be Cybertruck Winter, like Fat Bear Week. Where we see which cybertrucks fall first and which ones make it to the end in usable condition.

Dispatch from the far northern hemisphere and have witnessed a Cybertruck in the winter wilds.

We're early enough into the snow season in that the damage isn't obvious. My guess is that exposure to road salts are really going to destroy these ambulatory dumpsters, but we won't start to see that until spring. Road salt is difficult to impossible to get off in a regular car wash, and we know that Cybertruck can't handle even that.

On the one I saw, any metallic shine that the Cybertruck had was completely lost in a combination of cold winter temps, light street grunge, and lower ambient sunlight. It was the same color as my friend's early 2000s silver pickup truck. One of the big draws, imo, is that stainless steel panelling and to see it turn into the same shade of grey as one of the most popular truck colors twenty years ago would be disappointing to me. It's not special anymore.

Local Cybertruck enthusiasts who are salty dogs at winter driving have started vinyl wrapping their automotive basket cases. The trend seems to be to go from the door windows down, which gives them a beach cooler vibe that is similarly underwhelming.

They’re already having issues! The head lights are sunken in for some reason. This means there is a shelf to hold snow in front of the lights and block them.

Now, every car has to have the snow cleared off the headlights before you drive, but this is way worse. That shelf collects snow as you drive. People have to pull over and clear the snow off mid-drive because they lose their headlights.

WHY ARE THEY BUILT THAT WAY

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

starting a collection. please add on

Today, i found out one of my best friends doesn't know what an OTP is.

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

now THIS is a hardcover

what does this mean

i can explain in more detail with pictures when i get home from work, but executive summary:

both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)

typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:

(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.

the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)

uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)

anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)

and also usually on recently manufactured books the entire case (the "hard cover" of a case-bound hardcover) is covered in paper, including the hinges, which is a terrible decision because the hinges are the part of the book that MOST needs the durability, being The Primary Moving Part. at least fucking cover the spine and hinges in bookcloth i beg. please. for me

sorry loser you lost me at this

get a real programming language dork.

thats why im using it as a clamp and not as a book :p

@just-evo-now i am back home! where my books live!! so i can take pictures of the bindings :D

a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:

the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)

a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):

i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)

the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:

as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.

and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):

the cover is nonfunctional and the stabilizing paper on the spine has gotten so crumbly as to be useless (i got about halfway through peeling it off), but the textblock itself is in pretty good condition, because the signatures are sewn securely to each other -- if you squint you can kinda tell they used kettle stitches on the ends and chain stitches in the middle and i thiiink the chain stitches are where the loose loops on the top came from. anyway, i can pretty much finish peeling off the old crumbly paper stuff and glue on some new kozo paper (and ensure the loose loops are tucked safely away/glued down) and this bad bitch will be ready for a new cover!

I am really going to have to start paying attention to book binding going forward.

(via @trans-cuchulainn )

Red-billed Oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus) on a rhino, sound asleep.

In South Africa by Zaheer Ali: Zali_Photo

"Oh Rhino, we are really in it now..."

i gotta remember this

Ok, to prove to my husband that this is more a European device than a U.S. device I am going to need more non-US people to reblog this.

Do not reblog for science. No science will be happening. Reblog to help me prove a point!

(If I am right I will show him this poll. If I am wrong he will never know this happened)

tell me something nice

if you grow mushrooms over a toxic waste site, chemical spill, or other polluted growing medium, they will suck up the toxins into their fruiting bodies with such effectiveness that they are being studied for their ability to clean up tainted industrial sites. it’s called mycoremediation.

if you do this with edible mushrooms, they are no longer technically edible, but on the other hand they make a great way to poison your enemies. this is called murder and it’s usually frowned upon, but they won’t see it coming and you get bragging rights afterwards about your ability to kill people with a pizza topping.

Sorry this was not precisely most people’s idea of “nice.” Let me add that you are a glow of comforting absurdity in an ever-more-fucked-up world.

I love everything about mycoremediation, but also

Slightly on the topic of removing toxic waste:

A hairdresser noticed that with oil spills, one of the biggest issues was the impact on wildlife because oil loves clinging to fur and feathers.

They used felting methods to create like a mat of hair & used it on a small scale test & it worked really well, the hair mainly stayed on top of the water like the oil & absorbed it like a sponge while leaving creatures & plants alone.

NASA is now working on large scale uses with the help of donated clippings from hair dressers and pet groomers.

And the hair can then be composted with the help of mushrooms.