im here, im queer, i want to take a nap

YOU need to adjust your PUNK ASS chakra!

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Reach Deep

I finally went and disabled all my mods and booted up the game to get screenshots so now I can pass judgement on the vanilla saddles. hooray.

The Saddle:

Aesthetics: it's kinda giving roadkill. I cannot fathom the mind of whoever designed this. I guess it kind of evokes the fantasy ice age element of the game's visual design, if you squint, but I'm not sure why they went with that over just. anything else. I'm the dragonborn of legend and my horse deserves better than this. 3/10

Practicality: it's probably fine to sit on, if whatever animal it's made of had thick enough fur to counteract the baffling mess that is the saddle tree. despite the total lack of any logic behind the overall design, it looks like someone did think about how the girth is attached and I think those two awkward leather bits are actually meant to be poking through the hide to connect with it. there's enough padding that it would probably be reasonably comfortable for the horse as long as the saddle tree isn't actually made of animal spines. I'm not happy about it, but I could probably ride in it fine if it's got more structural integrity than it looks like. 7/10

Realism: for some reason, despite the massive wealth of historical examples to choose from, the skyrim dev team decided to completely re-invent the concept of a saddle. nobody's ever made one like that. especially not the vikings. why does it have handlebars. like I know the archeological evidence of viking saddles is really sparse but there's enough of it to know they didn't look like that. I can't figure out what the saddle tree is made of but it's not metal or wood which, if I couldn't see what looks like unidentifiable bits of something's skeleton sticking out, would have been my only two guesses. the lack of stirrups also isn't period accurate for the regions/cultures skyrim is based on but again, that gets a pass due to presumed game engine limitations. sadly, that sliver of grace can't save it. 1/10

Psychological Damage: why is saddle tree bones. 7/10

The Bridle:

Aesthetics: no getting around it, that thing is ugly as hell. the design is clunky. the texture is bad (the fact that the bridle is clearly leather but it's color-matched to the fur saddle instead of any of the other leather in the game annoys me so much). the weight painting and rigging choices for the horse make the mesh look worse than it is but it didn't look great in the first place (the weight painting is also the reason the bit pokes through the face instead of sitting in the mouth, but as I covered in the elven armor set, I had no issue avoiding that problem when making my own bridle so they get no grace for it). the reins look even worse in motion because there are no actual bones for them, they're weighted to the head/neck/shoulder bones and it shows. I just know this bridle was made on a friday afternoon. it's recognizably a bridle though. 2/10

Practicality: aside from the bit poking through the face, it's not the worst bridle I've ever seen but it's not a very good one either. there's no throatlatch, which means there's a risk that that thing's just gonna slip right off over the ears if you pull back hard on the reins, which is likely because you're riding this horse into battle and shit happens. the risk is somewhat mitigated by the noseband but that presents its own problems, because it's directly attached to the cheek strap and could interfere with the bit. weight painting issues aside though, I know from messing around in blender that the bit is actually placed correctly in the mouth and it's a perfectly functional snaffle. we love a snaffle that's attached to the right things. 4/10

Realism: there have been all kinds of bridle configurations throughout history. but for all the reasons mentioned above, "noseband directly attached to cheek strap with no throatlatch and a snaffle bit" was not a popular one. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen it in the course of my research. I'm also, much like with the saddle, very unsure what aesthetic the decorative elements are even trying to evoke. but it is at least a recognizable attempt at a sensible bridle which is more than I can say for certain previously-covered glorified mods. 3/10

endless beauty in the land of tamriel

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.

Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots. I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.

I get not knowing this if you didn’t grow up around them but the Amish are not a charming curiosity, they are a cult who have been allowed to flourish unchecked in the US for hundreds of years and are pretty terrible in multiple ways.

Those puppy mills you hear about getting raided in Pennsylvania where dozens of dogs are rescued from abusive conditions? The news never covers this part for some reason but - Amish. The Amish actually don’t believe that animals have souls and think god gave them to people to be worked to death. I’ve seen how they treat their horses and it will haunt you.

The way they treat women and girls is also abhorrent and would be reportable as abuse and child abuse if the Amish weren’t able to get out of ever facing social or legal consequences in the name of freedom of religion. They’ll say they “don’t participate in government” but showed up in droves to vote for Trump in the 2016 and 2024 elections because “God doesn’t want a woman to be president”. They’re hypocrites about the technology thing too. Do you know most Amish people have cell phones? They keep them in a shed on the edge of the property and only turn them on for business reasons, but they definitely have them because money overrules faith every time. Oh did I mention lots of them are filthy rich from selling tobacco and just sit on the money without giving back to the community at all or being properly taxed on it because “freedom of religion”?

HAPPY 8TH ANNIVERSARY FOR THE ANNOUNCMENT OF TES VI!

fun fact: It's been 15 years since the release of Skyrim.

fun fact: There's now been more time between Skyrim and TESVI than between Daggerfall and Skyrim.