I just found this photo of me as a camp counselor for a wildlife and outdoors camp where they let me teach map & compass & orienteering and the thing is these kids were all from the city and they applied for this fully-funded program and it was the first time a lot of them had ever gone hiking and they were really nervous and I can’t help but think I probably didn’t inspire their confidence when I showed up
“hey kids I’ll be leading us all deep, deep into the woods today and probably we will all come back let’s roll”
this photo is of me teaching them how to count paces and obviously I cut all the kids out of the picture but in the original there are just a bunch of nervous looking youths following me
the most important thing about teaching orienteering at camp is there is usually and indoor portion when the kids learn the basics of looking at a map & compass and then an outdoor portion where we start applying the skills and I usually split that up with the other counselors so we weren’t always just doing the same thing and i LOVED it when I got the outdoor portion bc I’d lead the kids real deep into the woods and I’d be like
“okay, we’re definitely lost. y’all are gonna have to find our way back out of here, so who was paying attention inside earlier?”
and they’d be like “can’t you help”
and I’d say very seriously “I don’t know how to read a map.”
And they Always. Believed me.
wait let me make a correction. The High schoolers always believed me. The middle schoolers were less prone to immediate panic and I think that’s just part of the chaotic nature of being in middle school.
The Leatherdos is a hair clip that doubles as a multi-tool that combines 5 different tools in a tiny hair clip: screw-drivers, a wrench, a trolley coin, a ruler, and a cutting edge.
Fun story: I have one of these, and wore it every day while working as a vet assistant at a pet clinic. One day a kitten comes in with a cord knotted around her neck, and everyone’s trying to get it unknotted before she heads in for her spay.
I just whip off the hair clip, grab the cord, and slice through it in one go. Everyone stood there, surprised, and stared at the cord in my hand that I just sawed through with a hair clip.
This would be AMAZING if you got kidnapped, or, in this case, a pet gets tangled in something. It’s very light and flexible, but the insides of the teeth are sharp enough to get the job done.
Y’all are close, but not quite there. This isn’t James Bond, this isn’t Kingsman; this is some Totally Spies shit we’re looking at, and it’s glorious
I can feel…the serotonin and dopamine dropping…i need to make…Crafts
i must make…
b e a d l i z a r d
B…
B e a d l i z a r d
I have seen these things for years but never knew how to make them so I must thank op for this new knowledge
op has given me the best gift possible
ive been making them for four days
Am… am I back in the 90’s?
Bead animals were my JAM in the 90’s!! And you don’t have to limit your creativity to lizards, either! With a few adjustments, you can make anything!
AND with a little practice, you can even make them 3D shaped (especially with the smaller beads and wire, though you can make them with the bigger beads and string, to an extent)
The mystery of the glorious fireball emitted by microwaved grapes (featured in my novel Little Brother) has been resolved, thanks to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in which Trent University researchers Hamza Khattak and Aaron Slepkov
explain how they destroyed a dozen microwaves before figuring out that
the grapes were just the right size and had enough humidity to set up
standing waves that amplify the microwaves – and anything roughly
grape-sized will do the same.
The paper is offline at both PNAS and Sci-Hub, which is weird, but there’s good coverage of it at Ars and Wired.
The weirdest instance of “getting my wires crossed” I’ve ever experienced: I had a piece of candy at my desk. My intention was to simultaneously eat the candy and start a brief work task. I put the candy in my mouth and felt a surge of alarm as I was convinced, for a fraction of a second, that I had somehow eaten the task I was about to start.
