A Young Writer

Burns are pretty horrible, if you ask me, and also very interesting. I'm going to explain the classifications of burns and how to write them.

General Info

The first 48 hours after the burn is the most critical point, and has the most impact on patient outcome

You can use the "rule of nines" to determine the extent or total body surface area (TBSA) of the burn. This is important to assess damage and risks

Burns covering more than 20% of TBSA are pretty fucking bad, and you're gonna probably need some intensive support

This amazing inflammation system we have can lead to shock and the coagulation of the blood = very bad, possible death

A day or so later, the patient may develop acute respiratory syndrome due to inhalation of hot air (depending on the mechanism of injury)

theme: the reoccurring idea or subject in a work of art. Death, life, rebirth, change, love, what it means to be human, the definition of family, the effects of war, etc.

cliché: an element of an artistic work that has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even becoming annoying or irritating. (Most clichés are tropes but not all tropes are clichés.)

motif: a distinctive repeating feature or idea, such as the green light in The Great Gatsby. May overlap with tropes and is often used to further explore the theme.

• what do i love about my life?

• what do i feel like my life is missing, how can i get more of what i need?

• where do i want to be in 5 years?

• who r the people in my life that make me the happiest?

• when am i happiest?

• what do i love doing?

• what am i afraid to do?

• can i improve on any of my daily habits?

• what steps am i taking to reach my goals?

• what makes me upset?

• how can i be happier?

• am i doing all i can to reach my goals?

• 5 things i love about myself:

• 3 negative mindsets i should let go of:

• what will i accomplish next year?

• how can i improve my daily routines?

• what is one piece of advice i would give to my future self?

• how can i love myself more, daily?

• what can i do to practice more self care throughout the week?

• 5 things that make me smile:

• steps i can take to b the most confident version of myself:

• how can i show others more love each day?

• who makes me the happiest?

• what is my number one goal for next year?

• if i could relive one moment it would be:

• if i could time travel i would go:

• i describe a perfect day as..

• if i could be anything in the world, i would be..

• if i could travel anywhere in the world i would..

• what makes me unique?

• what does self love look like?

• what r my top three personality traits?

• what do i miss about my childhood?

• my ideal life looks like..

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

by David Baker

We wade into a blackened pond to save the dying water. The water isn’t dying —we know, we know—it’s the fish and frogs starving, pushed out by subsurface growth.

Still, that’s how they put it to us, our new neighbors who’ve come to watch their new neighbors cope with a stagnant, weedy, quarter-acre runoff swamp.

They say, let it go, by which they mean (this from Scott, cut like a side of beef, six-pack belted like a holster to his pants) it’s God’s will, or nature’s, and besides it’s too much work,

to which his father John, bigger, beer- gutted, bald scorch of a face, plops on our dock and says You got that right. At first we tried sprinkling chemicals around the darkening perimeter—to wit,

copper sulfate penta- hydrate (CuSo4—5H2O), used variously as a micronized fungicide in pellets, a crystalline pesticide “noted for acute toxicity in bees,”

and here, a powdery “powerhouse algaecide"— or in other words (this from John), fancy sun-block for the water. For weeks the bottom- black surface glowed eerily aquamarine,

yet all that died were two fat grass carp, lazy from the slime they ate, who floated up like scaly logs to petrify. That’s why I’m waist-deep where my neighbors watch, rowing

with a rake through a sludge of leaves, stirring algae in a cooking pot, dragging it through the muddy pool. Each time I pull a gob of slime and glop, dark as organs, toward shore,

John yells out, encouraging, that’s a good one, and I shove it on to Ann to rake up the bank where we’ll haul it off some day. Don’t just sit there in the willow shade,

I ought to shout. Come on. Help us out. Or (this from Virgil, via Corydon), why not at least go about some needful task? But there’s so much trouble in the world these days

I’ve been content to work in peace beside my wife, my life’s surprising love, to keep the cardinals throbbing in our close cattails and frogs at home in a splash of breathable water.

Each step stirs a slick of spreading ooze that follows orbital in my wake, a little nebula of oil and algae stars. And look, overhead the first real star

has answered back: There’s darkness on the way. We drag one more sloppy mass up the bank and see its dimming possibilities— tadpoles and minnows, shiny as coins, egg-

clusters of sun perch, bluegill roe— throbbing in the grass, twisting to be loose, aglow against the color of the coming night. And there go John and Scott, down on their knees in the grass,