Tiktok user thehypegoblin faces the camera wearing a dark elf cleric cosplay. A robotic voice reads the text on the screen: "If your tits had a headphone jack what would they play?" She shoves an aux cord into her cleavage. From under the corset comes the audio "Suffocation! No breathing!" from Last Resort. She shrugs, nods, and makes a yep, that seems right face.
Cut to user casespotleson facing the camera looking inquisitive. He shoves an aux cord under his shirt collar. From under the shirt comes the audio "But you didn't have to cut me off" from Somebody That I Used to Know. He retorts, "Yes I did. Stop whining."
Getting plowed is for the country folk. Here in the city we call it being taken to pound town. And if it's a place with decent public transit, getting railed.
As relentless rains pounded LA, the cityâs âspongeâ infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of waterâenough to sustain over 100,000
As relentless rains pounded LA, the cityâs âspongeâ infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of waterâenough 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 daysâover half of what the city typically gets in a year. Itâs the kind of extreme rainfall thatâll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The cityâs water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a âsponge city,â replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out âspreading grounds,â 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. âThere'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,â says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. âDams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.â
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 isnât working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. âThe problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,â says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. âNo 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.â
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 aquifersâporous subterranean materials that can hold waterâwhich a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water thatâd 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. âAfter the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, youâll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,â says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where itâs exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where itâs 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. Itâs 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 âsweat,â cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effectâthe tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. âThe more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,â says Castro. âSometimes when itâs 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.â
LAâs far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surfaceâsidewalks, parking lots, etc.âtheyâre 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 isnât just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intenseâit stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world thereâs a better way.
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.
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.
It's interesting to think about the intersection of these two facts:
Films reflect the time period in which they were made.
Our most popular films right now are all reboots, sequels, and reused IPs.
On one hand, you could make the case that our generation is being deprived of its place on cultural timeline, because (as far as the mainstream goes) all we're being given is rehashed ideas from other time periods. Seems rather boring to analyze.
But on the other hand, I think future film historians will find that this era is culturally fascinating. Not because of the "nostalgia bait" itself, but because it represents the emergence of independent cinema and streaming.
When TV was invented, people could watch filmed media at home. You no longer had to go to a theatre just to watch cartoons or comedies.
So the studios responded with a wave of epics in the 1950s. They said "Okay, you can get Dick Van Dyke at home, but you can't get Ben-Hur." Television couldn't compete with the budget, big name stars, or visual tech that film studios could offer. They were financially incentivized to blow your socks off with visuals and big name stars.
But with the emergence of streaming and independent film, that's no longer the case. A-listers are happy to take TV roles, and TV offers Hollywood-level visuals. You don't need to mess with the theatre system at all. It's easier than ever to make good-looking movies and share them with the masses with no major studio backing.
So what's the one thing that studios still have going for them? What's the one thing that Disney can give you that an independent filmmaker can't? Yoda. The Little Mermaid. Iron Man. Fucking brands. That's all they have, so that's all they sell.
We aren't being sold reboot after reboot because it's what the people want to see, or because our current culture is somehow more boring and lifeless than ever before. It's because it's the last stranglehold that these soulless studios have over the industry. They will shove your own childhood down your throat because their domination over previous generations is the one thing they have left to sell to this one.
we are being sold reboot after reboot primarily because we were being sold plain old sequel after plain old sequel from like the 70s through to the 2000s, with a smattering of reboots in there occasionally.
also kinda odd you neglected to mention the whole 'prestige tv' era of the late 90s to early 2010s? substantially higher production budgets and abilities phasing into direct hd versions was also considered a major pull away from movie aura and actors in that timeframe. like sure you can call that just a teeing off point for the streamers but it set up the whole thing and ran it for a good bit before streamers had the capability to transfer it off the dying conventional tv audience (today the US conventional tv viewerbase is around the size it was in the early 1950s, no joke! outside of very specific events like the super bowl and live sports programming)
while I don't disagree with the broad thesis that large studios are being very conservative (in both risk and message) right now, I do nevertheless want to point out that this is not really new. american cinema has always followed cycles and trends like this, has always chased whatever they feel the sure bet is. in 1950, hollywood released no less than one hundred and thirty-four Westerns in a single year.
It's the same sort of cycle that is seen in pop music, captured pretty well in Three Chords And The Truth:
This is a Cyclic Trope. Pop music goes through periods (generally at two-decade intervals) where it becomes too pretentious, too slick to be taken seriously or formulaic corporate bubblegum. In response, bands turn to Three Chords and the Truth to "get back to where we once belonged." But with time, the limits of the trope mean that everything begins to sound the same and the simpler songs can even become as slick and corporately produced as the complex ones (or perceived as even more formulaic), and music returns to more elaborate songs feeling that more talent=more heart.
it's a little harder with cinema since the production barriers are considerably higher than picking up a guitar and microphone, but the overall pattern is very similar. Big studios chase trends and rehash safe ground; indie producers rebel and produce new content with their own stamp; old and tired trends eventually die out; new ideas produced by indie studios get picked up by big studios.
How to have second-hand embarrassment for your corn snake:
Watch a first-year breeder male immediately begin flirting with his female and line up and catch her perfectly.
Look at the next bin and watch an experienced breeder male very confidently go the wrong direction down his female and then proceed to try to mate with her head.
Sir.
I do not make ANY promises about the intelligence of his babies.
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