Time passes and things with it
Sep. 20th, 2024 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMy wrist appears to be healed today, which is very nice.
Today I was looking around the internet for more things for project
what if I got transported to another planet.
I went looking for handkerchiefs because if you're on another planet you are not going to be able to order more tissues, and I found fewer places selling them than I would have thought. Marks and Spencers has plenty, very reliable, but I'm wondering if that means only your gran actually uses them any more. A lot of the ones I searched up seem to be silk pocket squares, which I wouldn't imagine were quite the sort of functional I had in mind. There's lovely embroidered ones on etsy but they seem to be listed as wedding supplies, with little blue flowers or blue lettering for 'something blue'. The ones I think of when I think hanky are all turning up as vintage.
Many, many, things I have in a drawer somewhere and think of as normal are only turning up as vintage.
Then I started thinking about kitchen scales, because I'd had lunch and am not a very linear person, but I reckoned digital will wear out or run out of battery, and anything with a spring will be increasingly in error, so I looked for balance scales. Big metal things with a flat platform on one side for the weights and a scoop on the other. Things I grew up using, though more convenient things were already available.
You can still buy a balance from Lakeland or Dunelm, but they're both selling the same one.
And the weights are in metric now, which I only realised felt weird once I saw it.
Big metal things dont feel metric, apparently.
I did find one website that sold the same balance scales in 8 different colors (including red) and sold round imperial weights and square metric ones. That seems handier than round everything.
If you want the dangling sort of scales with a basket on both sides you're looking for apothecary scales for small weights, don't know about large ones, and I only found them in the endless maze of amazon plus websites I never heard of before.
There are entire websites dedicated to selling scales. There are more and more precise sorts than I had ever imagined. But they don't much resemble the ones in my head, and the ones in my head seem to only be out there for the aesthetic.
It isn't that I'm surprised that things go away as a concept, it's that I don't think about it and then oh, hey, there's so many things changed.
But, internet, so you can generally find them somewhere, even if that somewhere has a business name that looks like a keysmash.
If you want a proper pirate looking spyglass there's many, but if you want ones that tell you things like magnification and come with a guarantee there's a different, non overlapping, many.
Stuff changing everywhere.
Which I guess is why everything expects you to swap it when it wears out. Finding the most durable solutions doesn't make sense when the next thing works better so many times in a row.
... I don't know, I'm heavily empathising with the things that did not in fact work better...
I realise I am not about to be transported to another planet so I could obviously direct my attention to more productive things
but it's one of those focusing the mind questions.
I've asked it at conventions and got some interesting answers, what would you take to a space colony, what goes with you to another planet, what would you not leave behind.
If you were moving to Atlantis on a one way trip, how do you pack a civilisation small enough?
If you were going full adventurer and needed to live out of a backpack for the next couple of years, which things are a must have?
If you got to bring with you anything you could acquire up to a spending limit (say the local purchasing power of your characters starting wealth https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/ , which is in gold in Pathfinder so Not Small, even if you roll bare minimums)
what would you need, even in a world where there is literal actual magic?
... literal actual magic in DnD alikes only seems to deal with the exciting bits, mostly combat based, so you end up needing kind of a lot of mundane stuff.
I don't know, sometimes it's exciting to look up say camping equipment and titanium forks and different strengths of rope and realise how much everything has changed, and in those cases got lighter and functionally better.
But other times, usually for things that I actually use sometimes, it's just weird. Sometimes they didnt even get better, they just went away, or got fast fashioned, or disposable.
Finding the right thing for the right purpose is turning up some weird.
Today I was looking around the internet for more things for project
what if I got transported to another planet.
I went looking for handkerchiefs because if you're on another planet you are not going to be able to order more tissues, and I found fewer places selling them than I would have thought. Marks and Spencers has plenty, very reliable, but I'm wondering if that means only your gran actually uses them any more. A lot of the ones I searched up seem to be silk pocket squares, which I wouldn't imagine were quite the sort of functional I had in mind. There's lovely embroidered ones on etsy but they seem to be listed as wedding supplies, with little blue flowers or blue lettering for 'something blue'. The ones I think of when I think hanky are all turning up as vintage.
Many, many, things I have in a drawer somewhere and think of as normal are only turning up as vintage.
Then I started thinking about kitchen scales, because I'd had lunch and am not a very linear person, but I reckoned digital will wear out or run out of battery, and anything with a spring will be increasingly in error, so I looked for balance scales. Big metal things with a flat platform on one side for the weights and a scoop on the other. Things I grew up using, though more convenient things were already available.
You can still buy a balance from Lakeland or Dunelm, but they're both selling the same one.
And the weights are in metric now, which I only realised felt weird once I saw it.
Big metal things dont feel metric, apparently.
I did find one website that sold the same balance scales in 8 different colors (including red) and sold round imperial weights and square metric ones. That seems handier than round everything.
If you want the dangling sort of scales with a basket on both sides you're looking for apothecary scales for small weights, don't know about large ones, and I only found them in the endless maze of amazon plus websites I never heard of before.
There are entire websites dedicated to selling scales. There are more and more precise sorts than I had ever imagined. But they don't much resemble the ones in my head, and the ones in my head seem to only be out there for the aesthetic.
It isn't that I'm surprised that things go away as a concept, it's that I don't think about it and then oh, hey, there's so many things changed.
But, internet, so you can generally find them somewhere, even if that somewhere has a business name that looks like a keysmash.
If you want a proper pirate looking spyglass there's many, but if you want ones that tell you things like magnification and come with a guarantee there's a different, non overlapping, many.
Stuff changing everywhere.
Which I guess is why everything expects you to swap it when it wears out. Finding the most durable solutions doesn't make sense when the next thing works better so many times in a row.
... I don't know, I'm heavily empathising with the things that did not in fact work better...
I realise I am not about to be transported to another planet so I could obviously direct my attention to more productive things
but it's one of those focusing the mind questions.
I've asked it at conventions and got some interesting answers, what would you take to a space colony, what goes with you to another planet, what would you not leave behind.
If you were moving to Atlantis on a one way trip, how do you pack a civilisation small enough?
If you were going full adventurer and needed to live out of a backpack for the next couple of years, which things are a must have?
If you got to bring with you anything you could acquire up to a spending limit (say the local purchasing power of your characters starting wealth https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/ , which is in gold in Pathfinder so Not Small, even if you roll bare minimums)
what would you need, even in a world where there is literal actual magic?
... literal actual magic in DnD alikes only seems to deal with the exciting bits, mostly combat based, so you end up needing kind of a lot of mundane stuff.
I don't know, sometimes it's exciting to look up say camping equipment and titanium forks and different strengths of rope and realise how much everything has changed, and in those cases got lighter and functionally better.
But other times, usually for things that I actually use sometimes, it's just weird. Sometimes they didnt even get better, they just went away, or got fast fashioned, or disposable.
Finding the right thing for the right purpose is turning up some weird.