Fly away pretty bird

light goes green and your dog goes sprinting off

A royal penguin (Eudyptes schlegeli) and its chick in Macquarie Island, Tasmania, Australia

If you get a reject on reports like this: APPEAL.

A lot of academics are afraid to appeal or think that a rebuttal will just get sent back to the same reviewers, but any publisher worth their salt would send this to an advisory board member to adjudicate. It's shit that it needs to be done, because it creates work for authors AND editors and it slows everything down, but it is worth doing if you have a case! Do not let lazy fucks win and ruin your chances!

Do NOT be afraid to say:

- This comment is beyond the scope of the work presented, this work focuses on [x,y,z]

- These additional experiments are not relevant because [insert reason]

- I disagree with this point because [reason]

It's impossible for editors to be exact experts in every manuscript they handle, so rely on reviewers and authors. If there is a fundamental disagreement between author and reviewer, a good publishing house will ensure it is policy that board members are consulted for their expertise (this is what they are for!).

Peer review is a million miles from a perfect system, but good publishers do actually care about trying their best for authors and scientific integrity. I'm not going to pretend that there aren't a lot of dodgy publishing houses out there because there absolutely are, but it's worth pushing back if you get a bullshit report, because a good one WILL get an adjudicator.

Oh - and publishers do blacklist bad reviewers. They just need to know who the bad reviewers are.

Honey Garlic Pork Chops These honey garlic pork chops are my 25 minute Chinese restaurant style version. It is so easy to make using thin pounded pork cut into bite size pieces, shallow fried until crispy, then tossed in a garlicky honey soy sauce that reduces to a glossy syrup.

gluing the tips of your string and then cutting them at an angle to make threading the beads easier (the string is stiffened by the glue)

general length of hanging rod

what the hell crimping beads are and where to put them

Further sleuthing for types of knots and other info as needed.

First, I copied nexus' pixel art into a pattern on libre office calc (excel alternative). I actually started with google sheets, but the conditional formatting was sloooooow and libre office is free, so. Once I actually stop making notes and tweaks I'll throw the file up somewhere so I can share it. Here are some screenshots though.

Making the pattern in Calc took about a week. Then I ordered some beads and string, which arrived last weekend, and started doing some experiments with painting the beads.

Most painful part? Counting all the beads first to separate them for each color. I do it a bit at a time while watching tv. Niche skill of estimating how many beads I should grab at a time is increasing really fast, I can reliably take 20 or 30 almost exactly now.

Painted them following nexus' advice, once again. I clean my container with paper towels between uses before washing it out to reduce microplastic waste down the sink. Also it means I can reuse the container.

Interestingly enough, the cheapo craft paint (turquoise) I bought coated much better than the acrylic I already had lying around (primary blue) which... is also cheap to be fair... Anyway, it seems like the amount of water you add is much more important than amount of paint as long as there is a reasonable amount of paint. Adding too much water means there's too much color and the beads get all globby and stick together a lot.

You can see below that I had to do multiple layers for the darker blue paint mix. Left is after 3 coatings (where I finally found the right amount of paint/water ratio to use). Right is after 2 coatings, with patchy color.