My fiancee and I were discussing the worst metal to use to make armor, and the obvious answers are lead and gold, but she cunningly suggested mercury. Which is a fair point, but then I wondered if solid mercury is any good. Googling told me that the melting point of mercury is -38° c (-37° f), so first you get it really fucking cold. At that point, it turns out that mercury has a tensile strength of 1900 mpa, compared to lead’s 18 and steel’s ~500-940 (depending upon the kind of steel).
Now, I know that tensile strength is not necessarily the best measure of a material’s ability to function as armor, but I’m a liberal arts major and didn’t care to actually do that much more research before going straight to, “EVIL ICE DEMONS IN MERCURY ARMOR. THE PCS CAN’T LOOT IT BECAUSE WHEN THEY PUT IT ON IT MELTS AND KILLS THEM.”
Ice Demons wielding weapons made of frozen mercury. Spearheads that break off & melt inside the target. Swords that leave tiny bits of melted mercury inside the wound (the swords re-freeze to razor sharpness while in the ice demon’s claws).
Item: blades, spears, and/or arrowheads made of mercury frozen by Ice Magic; can only be used by one with Ice Magic, but deliver whatever damage the weapon type would normally make plus equal amounts of Cold and 1d8 Poison. Once the wound has been delivered, it continues to deliver 1d8 Poison until the mercury has been removed by healing magic, Wish, &c.
Apparently I’ve seen this before? But this EXACTLY matches the description of the Morgul blade in LOTR? It felt like “a dart of poisoned ice” (or something like that), it left a piece in Frodo’s shoulder that slowly poisoned him, and the blade melted away when Aragorn looked at it. And Glorfindel warned them all to handle it as little as possible, too!
The term “beta” in this context is short for “beta reader” - a person who reads a fic while it’s still in the editing stage and helps the writer get it ready to post. Some betas check grammar. Some check canon compliance. Some are sensitivity readers. There are lots of things that betas can do.
So functionally, saying “no beta” means that the writer didn’t get this checked by a second person before they posted it. It’s a warning that there might be errors or typos etc. It’s mostly used when an author has written something quickly and is posting without doing a lot of (or any) edits first.
As for where it comes from? It all started with a bumper sticker.
ALT
This image was an internet meme at one point, and it got meme’d on in the form of “no ___ we ___ like men”
Here on tumblr, one of the versions that got really popular was from now-deleted user @grec1a who created this version:
ALT
From there, it migrated to AO3 as the “no beta we die like men” tag, and very often the word men is replaced by the name of a character who dies in canon.
Don’t get me wrong veths backstory reveal was horrifying but in hindsight there’s something deeply comical about a woman with 5 charisma trying to convince her friends that she’s totally always been a goblin. They asked her age and she was like “uuuhhh yknow like adult goblin age….. maybe like 9 or something??” and they’re all like “oh my god you dont know your birthday??? :(” She was incapable of leaving her husband out of her fake backstory so they just think hes some random prisoner she got really overly attached to. One time she accidently used her real name instead of coming up with a fake one. Her fake name was a fucking pun.
watching a video about this cargo ship that blew up in texas in the 40’s and it’s like . i know that with a lot of incidents especially older ones like this the reason that the safety standards were so shitty was because they literally did not know that these kinds of disasters COULD happen (and in many cases these disasters are what MADE the safety standards better) but sometimes you just learn about this shit and you think. how could all these people be so stupid
- cargo of the ship consisted of twine (flammable) peanuts (flammable, oily) and cotton (FLAMMABLE) from houston and POST WAR AMMUNITION (OH MY GOD) FROM CUBA
- additional cargo they were picking up in texas city was LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE that the dock workers described as being ANOMALOUSLY WARM UPON BEING LOADED INTO THE SHIP ??????
- small fire breaks out in cargo hold, instead of putting it out with water that could damage the cargo the captain decides to close all the hatches to try to make the cargo hold airtight and smother the fire (stupid but you can kind of understand how they got there)
- the heat of the trapped smoke in the cargo hold instead causes the aforementioned LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE to undergo a chemical reaction and turn into nitrous oxide, massively increasing the pressure inside of the airtight hold
- one of the hatch covers fails
- mfw all the pressure in the cargo hold is released at once causing an explosion that fucking levels everything in the port within 2000 feet
- mfw the shockwave shatters windows up to a hundred miles away
- mfw on-fire twine and peanuts and fucking grenades are raining down over texas city
- mfw some of the pieces of the ship got launched into the sky faster than the speed of sound
- mfw they found the ship’s anchor inside of a ten foot wide crater over a mile and a half away
- mfw this was one of the largest and most devastating non-nuclear explosions in world history
- mfw this could have been avoided if they’d just taken the L and put the fire out with water
also worth a mention: the SECOND boat that exploded in a very similar manner the next day which was an even more violent explosion, but less devastating because most of the port was. you know. already leveled and evacuated
someone running rescue and recovery after the FIRST boat exploded noticed that the second boat’s cargo was on fire and reported it….and this just went. ignored. for several hours. until someone was like “oh shit better get this under control” and tried to move the boat to no avail and they just gave up and evacuated
next day it started raining glowing-hot metal boat chunks all over the city. AGAIN.
Today’s problematic ships are the Grandcamp (first explosion) and High Flyer (second explosion).
Parenting hack via my father: He was a single father and very stressed all the time. We were pretty crazy kids and getting us to do anything was a hassle. He made up a game to get us to eat veggies/try new things, where my siblings and I were bunnies and he was a farmer protecting his crops.
We would have to sneak into the kitchen and ‘steal’ his crops (cut up veggies that he put out for us), while he wasn’t looking (ie: making dinner/getting work done)
If he saw us, he would get really theatrical and ‘chase’ us with a broom, hollerin’ about pesky rabbits and all that, while we would run away and scarf down the veggies in hiding. Then the game would start again.
A carrot has never tasted so good.
(As an aside, I don’t know how he got any work done in the end, but I don’t know if he actually cared so long as we ate lol)
When I return a library book, I make sure to walk there holding it in my hands instead of in my bag. This is enrichment before it gets returned to the cold limbo of the stacks
omg I didn’t realize that
Thank you to all the librarians and library workers chiming in:
🐦⬛Nov. 15th is HAPPY BIRD DAY! 🐦In honor of Saint Cody’s Birthday, your job is to spoil any and all birds to the best of your ability! Do something to make a bird happy today in honor of #DEMCHEEKS. 💖 #happybirdday
ALT
ALT
