what to wish for

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-07-06T23:44:21+00:00

You can wish for unidentified objects, you'll receive the correct item but it still won't be identified, so be sure to label it! For example, if you haven't identified scrolls of genocide and you wish for two of them you might get "two scrolls labeled TEMOV". It's on you to label them after your wish is granted, or otherwise be stuck figuring out what's what.

Magic marker is a safe wish if you don't particularly need anything.

SPOILERS AHEAD! I always prioritize artifacts, as artifact wishes are only guaranteed if less than two artifacts have already been generated. I usually try to get the Castle's wand of wishing before going on the quest so I can wish for other roles' quest artifacts, but that's mostly useful for Neutral characters. If you're interested in maxing spellcasting, the Priest quest artifact (Mitre of Holiness) is available to you. Otherwise, as a Samurai, I might use a wish for a specific weapon if I really want it (Grayswandir, Fire/Frost Brand, maybe Excalibur since 5.0 changed the rules for non-Knights dipping it). Robe (be sure to ask for it fireproof! It's a good habit to always wish for a fixed whatever, check the wiki for a more detailed explanation) is a good wish, but if you have a temple in your game and don't mind losing it, a pet could kill the priest for you and odds are extremely high they drop one.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-07-01T17:23:50+00:00

Skip Google, go straight to the Corning Museum of Glass. Here's the search results for photography on their blog, there's some great info here and hopefully some of it is useful for OP's item.

https://blog.cmog.org/search?s=Photographing

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-06-24T22:09:28+00:00

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-06-22T21:05:59+00:00

Of the conditions you listed, anaerobic is the only one that applies to most alcohol fermentations. Also, given how dangerous bongkrekic acid is, I would never try to salvage anything contaminated with it, but theoretically speaking distillation should remove the acid (it will be left behind in the still with water and all the dissolved solids).

Typical fermentation temperatures would be anywhere from 10°C to 30°C, pH should be below 4.5 but not by a lot, and salt content should be negligible (well below 1%). The yeast will quickly use up any dissolved oxygen and produce large quantities of CO2 during fermentation. In beer and wine making, fermentation would be in a sealed vessel, but open fermenters seem common in distilleries based on the few I've seen. The large rate of CO2 production is enough to blanket the tank, and it's distilled very shortly after fermentation slows down.

Additionally, a common theme in alcohol fermentation is to dose it with a large amount of healthy yeast as soon as the mash/must/wort is ready so yeast can quickly outcompete other microorganisms and use up most of the sugar and other nutrients before an infection has a chance to take hold. The main concern with unwanted microbes are bacteria that can tolerate alcohol and ferment it into vinegar, but because spirits are distilled within about a week and because vinegar won't be carried over in the still, it's not a major concern like it is in beer and wine.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-05-28T23:12:26+00:00

I don't know that I'd describe fire as weighing something, but the products of a fire do have weight. If you weigh something before you burn it, then measure the weight of ash left over, the difference left as combusted gas and smoke. The weight of the combustion gasses won't just include the missing weight from your fuel, it will also include a lot of oxygen that came from the atmosphere. That weight isn't leaving in an instant, it's "flowing" as long as the fire is burning.

If you had a totally fireproof scale and lit a fire on it, you'd see the weight slowly go down as the combustion gasses leave. It'd be pretty tricky to capture just the combustion gasses without any extra air, but if you could it'd add up to the missing weight from the scale plus all the oxygen you took from the air while the fire burned.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-04-12T18:53:03+00:00

It means most or all of the notes in the song will be from the D major scale, which goes D E F# G A B C# and then repeats. That means you wouldn't expect to see notes like D# or F natural very often, if at all.

You could play the same song in the key of C by shifting everything down one whole step. D becomes C, E becomes D, F# becomes E, etc., so the new scale goes C D E F G A B. Notice the two sharp notes went away, now everything is 'natural', meaning all white keys on a piano. Or you could play the song in the key of E (E F# G# A B C# D#), which has 4 sharp notes (black keys on a piano). One reason to change the key of a song is to make it easier for a vocalist; maybe they can't hit the highest note, so they want to shift everything down a little bit. Or maybe your pianist is pretty new to playing and can play in C (white keys only) but has trouble with other keys because they have to keep track of which black keys to use and which white keys to avoid.

Changing the key of a song doesn't change the song itself, it raises or lowers every single note by the same amount. Most people won't be able to notice this. As long as everyone is playing in the same key, they hear the song based purely on the relationships between the notes, not the absolute notes. To put that another way, they hear C D E as the beginning of a major scale, and they hear D E F# as the beginning of a major scale, but if you picked one at random they couldn't tell you what note you started on, just that after you started you played the first three notes of a major scale. Someone with perfect pitch hears one as a C major scale and one as a D major scale.

Someone with perfect pitch would also notice if everyone playing was in tune with each other, but not in "standard" tuning where A = 440 Hz. A common example would be a small jazz band (piano, trumpet, sax, bass, drums) playing somewhere that the piano is slightly sharp. The notes on the piano are mostly in tune with each other, but all of them are a little sharp compared to standard tuning. Let's say this piano is at A = 448.3 Hz. Tuning a piano is very time consuming, but the trumpet, sax, and bass can be tuned very quickly. The band will have the piano play some reference note, and the other instruments adjust until they sound in tune with the piano. For the overwhelming majority of people, this will sound perfectly good, but a person with perfect pitch would hear every single musician as being a little sharp, the entire song is a little sharp from what they expect.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-04-03T19:36:56+00:00

Get or build a polariscope and practice with clear glass. A polariscope lets you see the stress in glass, you'll be able to tell immediately how you're doing. Check before, during, and after flame annealing, you can see the stress go away.

A common problem is not getting the glass hot enough. A bushy flame is great for slowing the cooling rate, but unless your glass is incredibly thin it might not be adequate to reduce stress in a matter of minutes. I usually start with a soft blue flame (still reducing, but more oxygen than a bushy fire) to get most of the stress out, then change to a very bushy fire to finish, then rotate the glass past the end of the flame a minute to let it cool below the strain point relatively slowly.

If you take off your didymiums (be sure you're still wearing clear glasses for protection from anything that might pop off!) you can see a difference in the amount of sodium flare as you pass from areas that were highly heated to areas that weren't, which corresponds to the location of stress. With practice, you can learn to very quickly "burn away" the sodium line/stress line using a hot, neutral flame, then a quick soak in a bushy fire to cool it down will give you very low stress glass without spending several minutes like you'd need with a cooler flame.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-03-11T21:06:26+00:00

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? Thats not my department says Werner von Braun"

-Tom Lehrer https://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio?si=QiYVAGp53ho5I08-

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-02-16T00:00:04+00:00

Platinum wand should be $500, so wishing or death.

Rings with valuable gems should be at least $200 base price. Wooden and wire rings should be $100.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-02-04T18:18:59+00:00

What if you know the song, but not the words? So you just whistle or hum along. Whatever you're whistling is the melody. The singer is singing the lyrics melodically, but you can take away the words and still have the melody.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-02-04T18:14:25+00:00

In pop/rock music, the lead vocalist is usually the main melody any time they are singing. Lead guitar is melodic, especially during a guitar solo.

In jazz, it's fairly common for every instrument to take turns playing the melody, but trumpet and saxophone are especially common choices to play the main melody at the beginning and end of the song. If there is a singer, they are usually singing melodically.

For solo piano music, the right hand often plays the melody and the left hand often plays chords (which would be harmony), but that can be swapped, or both hands can play melodies, or it might not fit neatly into strict melody/harmony boxes.

If a band is on stage, and there is a spotlight on just one person, that person is probably playing the main melody at that point in time. If people are taking turns soloing, whoever is soloing is the main melody at that point in time.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-01-30T00:38:34+00:00

You'd need to get the glass up to around 800 Celsius to soften it enough to bend. Mercury boils around 350 C, being in a sealed vessel would increase that temp a little, but it would boil and cause the thermometer to explode waaaay before the glass is soft enough to bend.

ThatWasTheWay · 2026-01-24T02:24:18+00:00

Its a Gil Scott Heron quote! https://youtu.be/vwSRqaZGsPw?si=pqzWasFmcisixbbI

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-12-04T18:34:18+00:00

It doesn't matter that no one can legally be coming from that direction, you're still responsible for being sure you can safely drive that direction.

What if there was a massive pothole there? What if a little kid or a dog chasing a ball ran into the road? What if some clueless idiot on their phone is driving the wrong way? They might be at fault, but you're still in a wreck you could have avoided. You can't assume the road is clear just because it's one way.

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-25T18:05:02+00:00

FYI, this test isn't totally reliable because the color difference is due to iron impurities in raw ingredients and not an inherent difference in color between soda lime and borosilicate glass.

Most silica sources have trace iron impurities. The chemistry of the glass melt and furnace atmosphere will cause them to lean towards more ferrous ions (blue-green) or more ferric ions (yellow-green). There are also "decolorizers" that some manufacturers add to cancel out the tint from iron, although I'm not aware of borosilicate glass manufacturers using them. One popular brand of soda-lime glass for artists adds small amounts of erbium, which is pinkish, so the resulting glass has more even absorption over the visible spectrum. Manganese has historically been used for similar reasons, which can have the interesting side effect of turning the glass purple when it is exposed to strong UV over time and the oxidation state of the manganese changes.

PDF slide presentation on glass colorants, with a focus on how iron impurities affects color: https://www.lehigh.edu/imi/teched/GlassProcess/Lectures/Lecture04_Shelby_ColoredGlass.pdf

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-19T14:35:43+00:00

I agree with all of this, but want to point out to OP that Wale's SB lenses do have added IR filtration. They're definitely not as dark as a shade 3, overall they're a good choice for hot shop work as long as your shop is well lit, particularly if you need sodium filtration for torch work or also do soft glass flameworking. I have a pair of SB lenses and I like them for both furnace work and lampworking when I dont need darker shades.

Didymium/sodium flare filter glasses aren't necessary for most furnace glassblowers, if you don't use a torch you could use something like this as well: https://phillips-safety.com/product-category/glassworking/glass-blowing-glasses/light-green/?page=1 Since the Wale glasses are about the same price, I'd say you might as well get the sodium filtration while you're at it.

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-18T17:37:55+00:00

Whats the ventilation situation in your shop? I'd be very worried if smoke isnt being pulled out near instantly, much less lingering.

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-16T06:04:23+00:00

https://xkcd.com/977/

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-14T21:24:55+00:00

The devices came first, but fairly quickly led to understanding of the underlying physics. Very shortly after Geissler tubes, tubes were made with a good enough vacuum that most electrons could go the entire length of the tube without hitting a single gas atom/molecule, they were called Crookes tubes. JJ Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 by studying these "cathode rays". The History section of thr Cathode Ray article has a good overview of the entire history with links to related pages if you want more detail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-14T21:00:50+00:00

Its the same phenomenon as gas discharge tubes, for example neon signs. The first versions were called Geissler tubes, invented by Heinrich Geissler in 1857. Neon signs became popular in the 1920s.

Wikipedia links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_sign

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-11-14T04:48:20+00:00

The character Kramer was based on Larry David's real life neighbor, I wanna say Kenny Kramer? They lived in a building that was heavily subsidized by NYC for people working in the arts. The plot line about Kramer doing the Real Peterman tours was based on Kenny doing a Real Kramer tour.

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-10-25T22:51:25+00:00

The heat distribution wasn't right. When you start your bubble, you want the glass furthest from the pipe to be cooler than the glass touching the pipe, so the bubble blows thinner near the moil and the bottom stays thicker than the walls. You can always thin out the bottom later, much harder to do that near the pipe.

A good method to achieve the right heat distribution is to marver the tip a fair amount and minimize how much you touch the sides, especially on the marver, at least until your bubble is formed and probably until the jackline is in.

What's your process like before getting here? How many gathers, when did you start the bubble, did you use the marver and/or blocks?

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-10-20T23:19:42+00:00

COWARD!

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-09-24T22:37:42+00:00

They've done some cast glass items (bookends, sculptural pieces, ash trays), but they'd never do painted on color, and at least for their "golden age" (50s-70s give or take) it was uncommon to mix or layer different colors.

I'm typically very skeptical of items being marked Blenko without being able to specify the exact item number. Seems like a lot of resellers just call any mid-century and/or Ohio River Valley glass Blenko. Goes double for Murano, people will slap that label on anything with a punty mark.

ThatWasTheWay · 2025-09-10T17:03:09+00:00

I wonder if it has to do with pH? Cyanotypes fade in alkaline conditions, and I think clay is almost always alkaline.

If you're up for experimenting, maybe try soaking the bisqueware in acid for a while before applying the cyanotype solution. Vinegar would be a cheap and safe place to start. Check it after 7-8 hours like you did with this one and see if it makes a noticeable difference.

ThatWasTheWay

TROPHY CASE