space case city

one rotation leads to another. they/them & xe/xyr. 29 y.o.

[redstonedust]

the worst part about grief is that it feels like the world should be horrendously earth shatteringly changed, and to an extent it IS but its also the same. to everyone else it's just another tuesday. the world moves on. you have to go grocery shopping.

[gael-garcia]

Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

[chaparralghost]

I really miss my mom

[b1rd1e]

not even kidding be SO earnest. Be so honest and forthcoming about your life, your feelings in the pursuit of connection with others, and know being as earnest as possible in your experience is what quells loneliness in those who feel the same way as you do. Is what helps us feel seen. And builds community and resolve within the fact it doesn't have to feel so lonely and insurmountable. we need community and connection. You really are not as alone as you think, we're all scared. we need to hold each others hands

[hiveswap]

Not now, kitten, m- da- m- your parental figure is in the middle of a gender crisis

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[queer-reader-07]

[cadaverconsumer-deactivated2025]

odysseus tying himself to the mast but he's doing some proto shibari type shit to make his tits look really good and his crew isn't saying anything but it's kind of hard not to notice

[cetitanhasmoved]

[seabassapologist]

[sequids-remade]

[chaparralghost]

As I reread, I'm struck by a theory - is it possible that Allen, specifically as someone holding a Noah's memory (and, in particular, Nea's) was implanted with innocence by Apocryphos in order to awaken the heart? We've had elements in recent chapters about memory and experiences passed down (the life's helix) being important and powerful. Could the innocence require experiencing a Noah's memory to wake up the heart?

[reasonsforhope]

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

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.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

[alder-knight]

as of January 2026 they're still seeing positive outcomes from these design changes

Los Angeles rethinks how to capture and store rainwater

As climate change brings stronger storms and longer dry spells, Los Angeles is rethinking how it handles water, working to slow it down, soa

[once-a-polecat]

Some cool things about this:

The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.

There have also been some pilot projects to make flood-prone neighborhoods more spongy on a small scale by distributing water barrels (to hold more water out of the storm drain system) and regrading the edges of roads in areas without sidewalks to allow for greater ground infiltration. I've been studying this for a while because we had to deal with a grading problem that caused a lot of water to build up against our foundation (thankfully poured concrete rather than a raised foundation, but it's still not great). There's a lot of small scale ways to reduce runoff that contribute to the overall sponginess while improving quality of life in other ways.

[leebrontide]

I actually got a grant to make my yard spongier! Check out what’s going on near you!

[annabellecrump]

Making the average yard (at least in the Midwest) more capable of holding water is so easy that it's nuts that more people don't do it. Every bit you put back into the soil instead of letting run off mitigates flooding and stores water in the ground for dry periods. The mantra for rainwater management is slow it down, spread it out, soak it in. Water soaks into the ground more easily when it moves slowly, so plant every bit of soil you can. You can force water to move over stones or other obstacles to slow it down as well. If you can spread the water over a larger area, it will naturally move more slowly, also soaking in more easily.

Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots. I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.

[itsybitsyjoltik]

we can’t keep letting him get away with this

[keibay]

Piece by Piece ....

[commissions]

[treasuredplanet]

🫵 embarrassment is improvement's biggest enemy!!!

[marimocaptain-deactivated202404]

Oh, my magnum opus should also be on tumblr.

Naked Brushbug.

[gumy-shark]

playing stupid games but im really bad at them so im not even winning the stupid prizes

[chaparralghost]

Rereading dgrayman and. I knew it would hurt bc so much of the story is about love and grief. And it does hurt. And it /is/ beautiful.

I used to have a collection of the books, but when I left the room I had been so horribly depressed in and moved out, I left everything in that bedroom behind. My mom had everything cleared out and cleaned. But then I was sad at the loss of my collection

And my mom found the whole series used on ebay and replaced them for me. They weren't the same but it meant a lot

Means a lot now, now that she's dead

I also remember so desperately needing help at the time and getting it from neither parent. And there is always so much wrapped together. Love and sorrow

It does feel like I'm able to experience dgrayman with fresh eyes. I knew grief would change it

[kneworder]

like lenalee lee is such a good character. kidnapped and forced into fighting a war at the age of 6. canonically depressed with fits of catatonia. beloved little sister and mascot to the entire science team at the child soldier factory. passive aggressive. cries all the time except when she’s flat eyed and dissociating during a fight. so cute and polite and brave that it’s easy to not notice the constant simmering undercurrent of trauma she radiates until you go on one mission with her and it instantly becomes obvious. sustains mortal injuries and a dramatic symbolic pixie cut during a solo battle. believes in vampires. gets genuinely furious with her friends over their self sacrificing behavior because she thinks it’s selfish and condescending to not let her die fighting next to them. would die in a heartbeat to save anyone she even remotely cares about. totally killed her coworker offscreen when they got possessed body-horror style while allen was screaming crying throwing up about how to save his. kickass boots. no formal education no real childhood one overprotective brother and a dream of maybe living to adulthood with her friends. definition of smiling through it all. lenalee lee you are everything.