Today I found out my dead grandpa was a massive shoplifter and every ice cream sandwich, Little Debbie roll and candy he gave me was more than likely stolen. He always had little gifts for me. Gifts he had stolen. Apparently Walmart was his favorite spot to steal from. I thought I couldn’t love and respect my grandfather any more than I already did but I do now. Poppy, you were a real one.
I will literally joke about how I'm a hater then remember people literally have whole blogs dedicated to hating people and media and actually maybe I'm a lover who happens to occasionally dabble on criticising the things i don't like.
this one's for "stupid" mentally disabled people. people who can't do basic math. people who are gullible to no fault of their own. people who can't understand nuance in some situations. people with cognitive issues. intellectually disabled people.
hey, you're doin' just fine. doing a great job, even! don't put yourself down or feel like your worth as a person rests on how smart you are. we'll be ok
Can I get a sidebar holler for the folks who "used to be smart", who have lost skills, lost memory, lost independence. You're still valuable and loveable, and you're worth more than what you can do
i think there’s divinity in gross and ugly things. i think the radical love and acceptance of what is weird and nasty is angelic and i think there is something holy about indulging in the neglected/looked down on/outcast/unacceptable parts of this world. you should let yourself be weird
I don't have a picture, but our area is flooded with a dude holding a comedically large hammer and looking to sue the shit out of any truckers that have injured you.
Alexander Shunnarah is such a big meme in Alabama that people got this man to attend anime conventions multiple years in a row as a special guest that furries and cosplayers can take pictures with and get autographs from. He's on nearly Every billboard in the state.
The one that says "get the gorilla" was from my hometown, and he advertised everywhere. There was a giant gorilla statue on top of his firm and at the university football games he would advertise and throw gorilla plushes into the audience. He was prolific.
I kind of wish that the polarities of violence and sex in popular culture were reversed. Like, I wish that writers and filmmakers needed to justify up the wazoo their decisions to show a murder on screen when "they could have just done it tastefully in shadow or something," but no one even batted an eye at a sex scene. I kind of wish that erotic video games were the norm but FPSs were a considered a weird and loser-ish thing to play.
I mean, I really wish that you didn't have to justify either, but it bugs me that, of the two, killing is the one that you can use in wholesome family friendly entertainment but fucking is the one that you forever need to shield your children from even knowing about.
I don't think that this difference is innocent, either. Like, I think that sexual repression is a good means of control whereas the state always needs an army of young men who are willing to kill people.
listen. I understand if you dont want to see sex in a movie. But im begging you to think about how the prevalence of murder and acts of harm being portrayed in media vs. the censorship and hush-hush nature behind sex affects our relationships with it.
think about what this post is saying about the normalization of violence and demonization of eroticism. How sexual repression and the indulgence of violence lets a society be guided in a certain direction.
If you dont want to see a sex scene in a movie, thats fine. But this isnt about personal preferences. This is about how culture is shaped by what we choose to show. For the love of god.
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
Manslaughter sounds like it should be a way worse crime than murder. You didn’t just kill that guy you slaughtered him like the hog. It’s like if there was a even less-punished version of jaywalking called traffic massacre
When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...
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