wigglytuffitout

wigglytuffitout, 2 months ago

@Faintdreams it's the same glow-in-the-dark stuff that works for things like glow-in-the-dark plastic - if you've ever handled the stuff, it's very obviously plasticky.

from that it seems likely it's just the regular phosphors as per https://www.eia.gov/kids/for-teachers/lesson-plans/pdfs/GlowInTheDarkSecondary.pdf , https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/question388.htm from what i know both zinc sulfide and strontium aluminate are actually fairly benign, especially locked away in that plastic. here's a materials sheet for it https://www.coregravel.ca/site/assets/files/1018/chemistry_of_glow_-_englishfrench.pdf especially when it is enhanced with europium it is considered exceedingly benign, only really thing to look out for is dipping it in acid - otherwise, it's non-toxic, non-reactive, stable, and doesn't decompose into anything nasty; it is specifically studied and certified as harmless by the powers that be. that last link has the info about the exact crystaline structure, as well as exactly what electrons are going where if you're excited to pin down what the electron orbitals are doing to absorb the energy from light and then fluoresce.

tbh with its one note of "don't do this", i feel like not dipping your embroidery in acid is a good idea anyway lol? that's pretty much Oops Embroidery Very Over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_aluminate here is the wikipedia article for the substance as well - they don't even really mention "don't put it in acid" because i assume they don't know why the fuck you would put something in acid and expect it to go well lmao, but the only health hazard is when you're working with the powder directly and then it can irritate your mucous membranes. which, well, that's just powders really. you can do that to yourself with powdered sugar, cocoa or salt as well lol, through pure mechanical irritation means, so it's not anything that will cause toxicity.

(though really - when i say that - you must understand the adage of "the dose makes the poison". obviously there's levels of sugar, salt, and cocoa that can become toxic. but those are what you get in very large doses lol. generally microtoxicity is a thing where it's a substance obviously kicking in the door and wrecking the place enough to be caught on that micro level. and even then, if i am being honest, you would be downright amazed at what human bodies are just fine with dealing with, and they just keep on truckin', especially if we're talking about one-off exposure. problems tend to come about when it's an everyday constant thing, like the radium girls licking their paintbrushes every single day at work. and that's, y'know, fuckin' radium. and even then it's not so much that it was toxic - it's the fact that the body fumbled the radium and used it like calcium when it doesn't actually make a good substitute whoops. radium is known to be Pretty Darn Biologically Reactive because of the radioactivity. meanwhile the glow in the dark substances are just playing catch with electrons coming in from light, and are known to be not biologically reactive at all.)

tldr: don't do lines of it like cocaine 'cos you'll sneeze a lot, and don't dip it in acid to melt it, and you'll be fine. this is the nice safe friendly form of fluorescence where it's just electrons going OMG SUNLIGHT YAAAY LET'S WIGGLE and then being like toddlers hopped up on sugar in the backseat of a car on the drive home until the rest of the atom can make them go to bed.

wigglytuffitout, 5 months ago

the only downside is it turns out fresh homemade ricotta severely slaps so it's going to be hard to go back to store bought now. what have i done to myself

wigglytuffitout, 5 months ago

@kkarhan okay, against my better judgement, if you want to do this then we can do this i guess.

1. hey mate, i didn't dogpile on you. i said that this is not for me. i even untagged your spouse in order to not spam her mentions up with this. i replied to your reply of my post of how this was not something that i enjoy being done to my posts. do i have a kind of a personal thing about how i am here to have a smaller social media experience which does not depend on brand-driven and capitalism-driven advertising measures, which drives things like an overabundance of hashtags in posts? yeah. i do. which i explained to you. if we have fundamentally incompatible ways to use social media, that's fine. but that then means a block and exiting each other's orbit firmly is a very sensible thing to do, and not something i should get cussed out and called out for.
2. hi, welcome to the fediverse, i'm afraid at the moment there is no way in the current fork elekk runs on to do a post that shows up on local timelines only while also showing up for all of my friends following me on other servers. if you are irritated by posts on the federated timeline, here is some advice: the federated timeline is drinking from a fire hose and unlikely to actually generate any meaningful discussion. this is not me "vomiting into your timeline like some spoiled brat", this is a limitation of the medium and how the federated timeline works. to complain that people's posts are on the federated timeline is somewhat like you got wet when you decided to swim in the ocean. ...similarly, if you are angry at me "vomiting onto your timeline" because i replied to a reply you made to one of my posts, that's... how conversations work...? i... don't really know how to explain this part better, sorry.
3. deciding to cuss me out for being uncomfortable with your reply to me just kinda shows that i had the right idea to block you before you could do that to me directly. more the fool am i for unblocking you for this, i suppose, but here we are. if we're gonna do the damn thing we'll do it i suppose.
4. it's pretty hard to ignore someone when they are replying to your post. since that's, y'know, where this started. i'm a real human person and you wrote a post directly in reply to me, of course i am going to read it, that is how this function is meant to be used. i am not sure why the impetus is on me to simply tolerate you replying in ways that make me uncomfortable.
5. if you reacted this badly to a block, why on earth should people feel like "just mute me" is the solution? you've just demonstrated it's a way to get you to cuss them out and be angry, right? at that point, a block is the same as a mute in terms of effect when it comes to me seeing your posts. the only difference is that you still get access to my posts if you are merely muted. so why would i preserve your access to what i post when you're going to react badly and are being unreasonable?
6. to circle back to the accusations of dogpiling... again, this is one of the reasons i did not want my post underneath those hashtags. sometimes the conversation is a bit smaller on purpose. instead sometimes there are hashtags where someone popping them in a reply is indeed a mechanism of dogpiling. 'food' isn't one of those, sure, but i'm also not keen on getting heat for "why are you talking about making ricotta in the espresso hashtag", and it doesn't really make the fact that some hashtags are used as "everybody come look at this idiot and block them for being a bad person" (and how sometimes those hashtags get weaponized against innocents).
7. again speaking of dogpiling... hey, i'm not the one who made a separate callout post on public post settings so that it can be easily reblogged and shared, with the person tagged in directly so everyone has a quick and easy target to direct the harassment. i'm not the one who decided to at mention a user who just told them that they were blocked lol.
8. this all leads to you having a lot of emotional attachment to being able to see my posts, demonstrated by your anger when you get blocked, and then anger over how you don't seem to realize how the federated timeline works... as well as the hashtags thing which, again, i still do not understand the meaning and motive behind the move, much less why my request (that maybe i don't want a thread with my post in it about making ricotta to be tagged in the espresso hashtag) was seemingly so beyond the pale. ...why are you so angry about this?
9. and why, when i decided to draw a boundary and say "hey this is skeeving me out, here's why, i'm just gonna block you ok", did you decide that i needed to be punished for this by being cussed out and given a callout post (for, ironically, "dogpiling" which is a thing that i didn't do but instead a callout post does)?

if you have some answers for this, i would love to hear them. let me be clear: i am being above and beyond gracious to you in this moment by asking you about them after you cussed me out and then did what you accused me of doing. if there is some rosetta stone that illuminates this behavior, i'm open to hearing it. but, to again put my cards on the table, i have the feeling that what you are actually going to do is continue cussing me out, at which point i can say "i have exhausted all good faith attempts to solve this and it's time to alert admins all around".

so, to quote your own words: if you want your criticism to be taken as serious, then perhaps act like you mean it. i am giving you the chance to act like you mean it which you have until now turned down. so, let's see where this goes, i guess.

all because i don't want my post about making ricotta to be threaded into the hashtag for talking about espresso, lol...

image/png

wigglytuffitout, 5 months ago

i will also say here's a transcription and subtitles thing that really does need to stop happening, and it grinds my gears despite the fact that i am in no way hoh/deaf:

hey if you let the computer auto-transcribe or auto-subtitles

for the love of all things good on god's green earth

just

fucking

make a real human being

look at the results

with real human eyeballs

and fucking edit it.

special shoutout here goes to the slate.com transcripts for their advice column transcripts. they're so proud of how accessible things are because they made the computer transcribe it! and then, i shit you not, the computer immediately gets the name of one of the podcast hosts wrong, usually in the introduction, and will proceed to get it wrong in new and interesting ways for the rest of the transcription. along with things like the computer being very bad at distinguishing voices conclusively and deciding to err on the side of "too many speakers" than "combining speakers". so you get the podcast hosts as speakers numbers one through fucking nineteen.

it would take a fucking intern maybe all of thirty minutes to simply edit this, and that's being extremely generous in the time limit. for a lot of it they wouldn't even have to listen to the podcast. you just literally need a human brain and human intelligence going "wait a second, the host of this show is named Jenee, not Jenny, not Genie, not Jeanie..." and fucking caring about it.

anyway slate doesn't put comment sections on those podcast episodes probably to keep me from doing exactly fucking this in them because although i do not wish to do free work for the company, their transcript is worse than useless as an accessibility feature. it is the equivalent of saying "of course we have a wheelchair ramp!" and then the wheelchair ramp is rotten wood that will plunge you down into the sewers when it breaks, but the company wants to stand there with their accessibility rewards and be proud of it anyway.

wigglytuffitout, 6 months ago

@cstross LINK NO WHERE ARE YOUR GOGGLES THINK OF YOUR SAFETY

wigglytuffitout, 6 months ago

@cstross please someone eject him from the biology lab before he notices that the preserved specimens are in jars,

wigglytuffitout, 7 months ago

@futurebird now this is a modern take on the cottingley fairies hoax i can get behind,

wigglytuffitout, 8 months ago

@noelle i was just about to post this because it's a new way to celebrate the anniversary of 9/11, and they were a touch early, but i'll allow it

wigglytuffitout, 10 months ago

@sarae also to be totally frank, there's a vast difference between "oh i can read cursive :)" when you're working with nice modern cursive fonts and ballpoint pens writing cursive

and "i can read cursive in the style that it was written some decades if not centuries ago, with dip pens and fountain pens where you are literally doing a different technique". plus when you get far back there's always the fact that spelling gets a little bit loose and fancy-free, which is a whole other complication.

a shitty transcription can sometimes be worse than no transcription at all, if you're going to straight-up transcribe the wrong thing.

or, to put it another way in another language: everybody gangsta until russian cursive comes in

(edit: the image having negative two pixels only enhances my point i feel)

wigglytuffitout, 10 months ago

@sarae i mean we can't even get clear OCR on things like perfectly regular computer-printed fonts and newspapers with adequate accuracy that it can be faithfully relied upon without double-checked by a person. relying on computers to do that is going to make some CPUs just start crying.

and it's just a whole different ball game for older texts. especially if you have less than ideal scans (INCREDIBLY COMMON), less than ideal texts with people smashing words together and writing in the margins and at silly angles (AGAIN... COMMON), or text that's straight up missing! smudged! eaten by moths! covered by a stain! who knows! it happens!

and that's before you get to things like "to save on postage they'd write part of the letter one way and then just straight-up write the next part on top of the first but horizontally instead of vertically". as pictured below lol

i appreciate that people are wanting to help, i really do - i admire a lot that people are desperate to do altruism and support a good thing of 'library sciences' because hey, knowledge is important!

but you hit things like a cross letter and idk about you, but as a person who's never taken a class on how to read these, my brain just throws up. it just throws up. and then leaves the building like it's elvis lol. it's just GONE.

...and good lord this is even before you get into issues about how filling in blanks means making educated guesses, and you have to know the subject at least vaguely to make the best guess for something that's unclear due to context! a computer working from a corpus of modern writing, filling in that what-is-most-likely-here probability, is likely to fall flat on its face and eat shit. ditto, honestly, a layperson who also has a corpus in their brainmeats of modern writing. there's straight-up longstanding arguments among the professionals for some texts lol.

the idea that someone can just freestyle do this flawlessly isn't setting them up to help, it's setting them up to fail in a pretty unkind way imho!

wigglytuffitout, 11 months ago

@ry i'm pretty sure that i may have just faced my own non-physical-fitness and love of gadgets in the face here because i must report, with deep regret, that my first thought was

oh some reviews for good water bottles and proper walking insoles would be nice, really,