I’ve been reading worm discourse for what, 5 years? 6? 7? and anyway I’ve only just figured out that Taylor and Skitter are supposed to be the same person
recently learned about a horticultural technique called Espalier, it’s the funniest goddamn thing i’ve ever seen.
Espalier allows trees to be trained into 2-dimensions, by tying the branches to a flat surface as the tree grows. They literally flatten the tree. They make the tree flat. Flat tree!!!
Look at this. This is objectively hilarious:
And people get fancy about it. Look at this nonsense:
(the first one’s called a Belgian Fence, and can be used as an actual fence)
Espalier is actually a very useful technique for
increasing fruit yield
gardening is small spaces
maximizing or minimizing sunlight (since the branches all face the same direction) and therefore extending the growing season
Like. this is a legitimately practical gardening method. but it looks like they squished a tree between the pages of a book. just squashed it flat like a sad little dried flower! i could use these trees as a bookmark!!!
But yes, it is also a healthy and clever way to grow lots of fruit in small spaces, in climates they might not otherwise be suited for. I’m still going to make fun of it, but it honestly looks delightful and delicious.
every few months I forget about this and then see it again and it is always one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
So this time I looked it up, I wondered how to get one and how much it cost. Turns out it was a bit hard to find, actually, and that’s because it’s no longer called the Ogo, it’s called the Omeo.
They are pretty advanced as a product now, in terms of accessories, color options, etc (they have an off road conversion kit and stuff!). They are kind of expensive, tho not necessarily when compared to other wheel chairs, which cost anywhere from a couple hundred bucks for a shitty one, to like 4k for a high end electric one. An Omeo will cost you just under 2k.
#the nosepieces on both of my masks are starting to wear out #a couple weeks ago I started taping them shut with bandaids on this post’s advice #it’s working great and I want everyone to know about this method #illness tw? #covid19 #allergies #the more you know #(I’ve already shared this tip with one receptive-looking customer and she called it ”brilliant”) #(I hope she makes good use of it)
Do you ever know you should go to sleep, but you can’t, because you can’t stop thinking of 1982’s bizarre Steve Gutenberg vehicle, No Soap, Radio?
Oh, okay, I’m sorry, it’s just me? I’m the only one here up at night thinking about No Soap, Radio? Y’all are going to pretend you don’t find it completely mystifying?
I’m not even kidding, I spent like an hour thinking about it last night before I could fall asleep.
Okay, see, in 1982, not long after the runaway success of their movie Airplane! the comedy writing trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker brought their signature brand of sight gags and slapstick humor to Television.
Their show Police Squad brought back Airplane! co-star Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebbin, in a series that parodied the police procedurals of the 70s. Later on the show would be the inspiration for the successful Naked Gun series of films in which Nielsen played the same character he did in Police Squad!
Bet some of you never knew The Naked Gun wasbased on a TV show, huh? I certainly didn’t when I was a kid.
That’s because Police Squad! bombed and bombed hard. ABC cancelled it after four episodes, and only six episodes were ever produced. One of the creators, I forget which, said that the network’s reasoning was that you had to watch it to get it, meaning that since much of the humor was sight gags contrasting with the deadpan delivery of cop drama cliches. If you just listen to it while you do the dishes or fold your laundry, you miss a lot of the humor.
Anyway, with Police Squad out, the network needed a mid-season replacement. Thus, No Soap, Radio.
No Soap, Radio is a bizarre attempt to take Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers and sort of squish them together into one American show starring Steve Gutenberg.
Really, the Fawlty Towers comparison is mostly because the show takes place in a run-down hotel run by a hapless guy who has to deal with all sorts of weird guests and eccentric employees. Gutenberg plays the owner of the hotel, and they don’t really try to make him much like Basil Fawlty, since he’s not John Cleese, he’s Steve Gutenberg, so the character is more of a put upon but genial everyman than the kind of dickish Basil Fawlty.
But my gosh does No Soap, Radio want to be Monty Python with every fiber of its being.
Actually that’s one kind of interesting thing about No Soap, Radio, itbelongs to a sparsely populated offshoot of the sketch comedy evolutionary tree, it’s one of those shows where it’s definitely a sketch comedy show, but there’s also a group of main characters and ongoing plots. The premise isn’t so much a framing story as it is that, for a while the camera will follow the story of Steve Gutenberg’s hotel for a while, but then the camera will slowly lose track of them, deciding instead to focus on, say, a TV show in the background or something happening in a hotel room. The only other show I can think of off the top of my head that is structured like that is Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher’s show Snuff Box.
Anyway, as for the Monty Python connection, No Soap, Radio desperately wants to be Monty Python. The most obvious similarity is the transitions between sketches, where the end of one sketch will turn out to be a television advertisement that the characters in the next sketch are watching, but there’s also a more indefinable vibe. For example,
I really like the premise of that couple of sketches, but also, there’s something about the way the doctor delivers his speech before jumping out the window that just seems like the kind of gag that the Pythons would have done, and staged, shot and delivered pretty similarly to how they would have approached it. I don’t know it’s hard to put it into words.
It kind of reminds me of The Orville, inthat it’s a show that really really wants to be a different show, but not in a cynical rip-off way, more in a “The creators love that other show a whole lot and since they weren’t able to work on it they did the next best thing.”
Anyway, if Police Squad is a cult classic, No Soap, Radio is whatever the step beneath a cult classic is. The people who remember it remember it fondly, but boy there aren’t many people who remember it.
It’s kind of understandable, from what I’ve watched I’d call it an okay show, but it’s let down a little bit by the delivery. A lot of the comedy is delivered in a kind of broad, cheesey, over the top 70s style that hasn’t aged as well as the performances of the Pythons, and I think most of the premises are good, but sometimes it feels like they don’t build up that much, but instead kind of peter out, like this sketch about a job applicant trying to dance around the fact that the guy interviewing him is just a disembodied head:
It’s a good premise, but it feels like there should be more laugh lines, or that it should build to some kind of big twist, but it never quite gets there.
So, the big question for me is:
How in God’s name did this happen?
Going into the IMDb rabbit hole, I was expecting to find people who eventually went on to create some better known cult classic. There has to have been an auteur or a group of people with a vision behind this, no American television executive in 1982 was going, “You know what’s popular with the kids today? Monty Python! I want a Monty Python for my network!” They can’t possibly have been saying that, can they?
So someone or a few someones on staff just had to be huge fucking dorks who just really, really loved Monty Python and somehow convinced some exec to greenlight their baby, but I’m really not sure who. The crew seems to have been composed mostly of TV journeymen, people who toiled in the mines writing for late night talk shows, producing Bob Hope specials and directing made for tv movies you’ve never heard of.
The credits don’t really have a “created by” section, there’s just the writers, directors and producers.
The second question is, how on earth did this get chosen as the mid-season replacement for Police Squad! after they cancelled it for not being accessible enough to the average viewer?
That’s like saying, “Hmm, I’ve been booking Frank Zappa every night in my club, but the customers say he’s too weird, I better replace him with someone more accessible, like Captain Beefheart.”
How did this end up replacing Police Squad! when it’s probably the only network show in 1982 that was less accessable to the average viewer? It’s literally named after the punchline to a deliberately obtuse joke designed to confuse people and make them uncomfortable! And how did it replace Police Squad! when the audience overlap was 100%? Every single person who would like No Soap, Radio would also love Police Squad!
What was happening?
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about last night.
I’ve read in the past that there was once a Phoebus light bulb cartel that intentionally made light bulbs burn out faster than they needed to, and that LED bulbs have been rated for less and less time in a repeat of the old days.
This article dives into that claim. The answer seems to be that LED bulbs are rated for less time nowadays at least partially because LED themselves lose brightness over time and should be replaced at 8000ish hours anyway, so there’s less point in making the other components last much longer than that.
I wrote a blog post a few years ago explaining how molecules get to the right place at the right time. The short answer is that cells are nothing like the nice, peaceful animations. Cells are extremely crowded and things move extremely fast. Glucose molecules, for instance, move around cells at 250 miles per hour and collides with something billions of times a second. An enzyme might collide with a reactant 500,000 times a second. And proteins can spin a million times per second. So as you suspect, by random chance molecules are in the right spot very frequently.
Fortunately, Arduino’s pretty easy to pick up, even if you don’t know how to code. There’s a lot of learn to code kits with Arduino, and a massive DIY community with lots of forums.
If you’re itching for something cheap and small that can connect to the internet (say, for lots of little wirelessly controlled toys talking to a local device your private internet), there are wifi enabled Arduino boards like the WeMos D1 Mini and Adafruit Featherwing HUZZAH ESP32 boards. The esp32 is a little computer chip that does wifi, so as long as it’s on board or can be added on, you’ve got wireless connectivity. There’s lots of sample sketches for communicating with local devices.
There’s a lot of potential for Arduino and raspberry pis in this category. You can make tasers, locks, pistons, pumps, eye trackers, muscle sensors, screens, twitter api based controls, local wired and wireless controls, screens, and maybe more. Actually, if you search for DIY Arduino electronic sex toy stuff, you can find a lot of interesting boards and existing projects to copy.
I know that one of the relatively easy to make projects is a buttplug that measures orgasm intensity but I believe it uses a 3D printed casing and this is your reminder that 3D printed materials are nearly impossible to properly sanitize so mold a hollow core plug out of silicone or make sure to use a condom (which, because of the composition and texture of 3d print plastic you’d probably want to do anyway).
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”i have the gumption‚ at least. like icarus‚ when he did that thing”) #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #the more you know
Oh sweet I was hoping someone would do literally exactly this
Tags:
#I haven’t actually read Homestuck and I don’t particularly plan to but I’m glad to hear there are preservation efforts #not sure I’ll go so far as to download it myself #(though I *did* take copies of those abandonware-rescue-operation fan-made Animorphs ebooks a while back) #(which I also have not read) #Homestuck #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #the more you know
Okay everyone, how long have you had your AO3 account, and how many pages do you have in your History???
Tags:
#huh #I didn’t know the History section was a thing #the more you know #(maybe I should go through and see if anything stands out as ”oh yeah‚ I haven’t saved a copy of that one yet‚ I’m gonna go do that”) #anyway I joined on 2016-05-02 and I have 27 pages of history #(some of which are still to-be-read) #(but OTOH when I get logged out it often takes me a while to notice so there’s also *under*counting) #AO3 #surveys
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 