…look at all those pockets for storing remote controllers, phones, and snacks!..

…awww, man, i thought that was a pop swatch from the thumbnail!..

…our kerrygold comes in slabs, not sticks…

…looks more like i’m you, gonna right, stop there…

YYYY.MM.DD HH.MM.SS, as eru ilúvatar intended

…i adore this depiction of moria from the one ring, plan and section both set against surrounding terrain to give a sense of scale…

…a little bit ferrous, yes i really do think…

…anyone with a housemaid is a red flag…

…roll back before fascism and take a look at feudalism to see how ugly things can get in a steady-state oligarch civilisation…

…because western economies are built upon larger young generations paying smaller old generations for the privilege of participation; take away its buttressing and that “stable” economic pyramid becomes a rickety tower…

…you can prop up the generational productivity deficit with industrial automation to some extent, but only if the benefits of automation are democratised rather than hegemonised, otherwise a smaller-and-smaller oligarchy instead dominates an increasingly-marginalised peasantry until the whole thing comes crashing down…

…when life becomes cheap, it will be spent cheaply…

…that’s okay; in star citizen the vapid simulator download service is called electronic access…

…i’ve only done urban installations, but recently i’ve been giving a lot of thought to the localised effect of high-albedo reflective roofs (and other materials) and transpirative tree canopies (and other vegetation) being replaced by low-albedo solar photovoltaic arrays: it measurably increases heat load on the local environment, reduces radiative cooling at night, and drives up overall cooling demand, which presents a deep rabbit-hole of cost-benefit analyses in the tradeoff between reduced grid use during the day versus increased grid use at night, the potential net reduction in carbon emissions therefrom, the added carbon emissions from manufacturing and maintaining solar photovoltaic infrastructure, and the loss of ecosystem carbon capture and biodiversity services from decreased solar exposure and increased heat island effect…

…it’s a poorly-understood subject of ongoing academic study in both urban and natural environments, with the largest arrays i’ve read subjected to that sort of rigorous analysis measuring on the order of 1/300,000 the scale of this proposed project…still, apples-to-apples, that larger study was performed in desert scrubland and measured about 4°C increased local temperatures, which is significant but not a good proxy for the weather effects one would see generated by a 750 square-mile convection cell over truly barren desert…

…back to your original question, most solar photovoltaic panels loose somewhere on the order of ¼ to ½ percent efficiency per °C incease in panel temperature, but like most things in the real world it’s actually much more complicated than a simple multiplier…the short version is that investors wouldn’t be building desert arrays if they didn’t present a short-term economic gain, and they certainly do provide plenty of power despite the increased heat, but the long-term environmental impact of radically altering surface albedo at such a large scale isn’t well-understood relative to the implied let alone actual changes in carbon-intensive energy generation…

…ye gads, just imagine the heat island generated by 750 square miles of black glass: that’s a weather-creating convective air mass…

…international coastlines; shores with ports-of-entry…

…that’s pretty much my improvisational style, everything eyeballed, nothing measured: sometimes things turn out amazing but of course the cost of those happy surprises is that i’ll never make it the same way again; couldn’t if i tried…

…i dated a girl who dogmatically followed published recipes, considered any deviations anathema to the authors’ labor developing them, and she was horrified to watch me cook…

…let me introduce you to single cask-strength malts: one drop, drawn delicately through your lips, let diffuse across your palate by capillary action, that’s how i learned to appreciate alcohol for the first time after four decades of not getting it…

…the great thing about cask-strength sipping whiskies is that one bottle can last years if kept properly sealed between pours…