Greetings! Given the eclectic nature of this blog, I wanted to take some time to make a proper pinned post so that visitors can have an easier time navigating.
I’m Dumpsterfire - 26, she/her. I’m a biologist by trade with a focus on freshwater fish ecology, but you won’t find me posting about that here. I’m also an artist, and this blog is mostly a mishmash of my art, my friends’ art, and just stuff I found cool, interspersed with the occasional ramble (although I try to keep those to a minimum).
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you send me a DM just stating “hi” or something to that effect, I will assume you are a bot and block you!!!
You’ll mostly find me reblogging Mega Man Zero/ZX, Metroid, and Subnautica stuff here. I’m responsible for a silly, incomplete MMZX/Twilight fanfic called It’s That Damn Fluorescence, which you can find on AO3. Otherwise, I’m not especially active in fandom spaces.
I don’t have a consistent tagging system, but my personal art tag is #Dumpsterfire Doodles. What I draw and how I draw it occupies a WIDE range, as you can see:
This is my main blog, but I also use (and occasionally reblog from) the following side blogs:
@gremlin-arson: My OC art blog. This blog is 🔞 - nothing explicit or raunchy, but there are sexual references and characters half-clothed or in embrace. I reblog a good bit of the fully SFW art here.
@dumpsterfire-draaaaagons: My Flight Rising blog.
If I ever post something that you feel is inappropriate or requires further tagging or filtering, please do not hesitate to let me know. I want my blogs to be a safe place for anyone to scroll through without discomfort.
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.
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.
you just need a few tweaks to turn it from fantasy to sci fi… Dema station orbits the planet Trench, escapees only have a few ways to leave the station and make it to the surface, Clancy is a clone, HDS involves Clancy stealing one of the Bishop’s small personal crafts but it catches fire in Trench’s atmosphere and starts to break apart so Clancy has to jump in a flight suit, Banditos live on the surface with Trench aliens (neds and dragons and such) and their Torchbearer leader (no one is sure if Torchbearer is a human or an alien), Trench’s atmosphere is technically breathable but will do fucked up things to your mind and body if you breathe it in for too long unless you eat a few yellow petals a day, yippee….
Dema station civilians don’t have access to windows, so many don’t even know that Trench exists despite spending their wholes lives tethered to its orbit. to make an escape attempt is to thrust yourself out into what you know is an unforgiving endless expanse of space in the hopes of landing somewhere you’ve only heard whispers about. failed escapees sometimes come back shell shocked because they’ve finally seen the true extent of space’s emptiness. horrifying when you’ve lived your whole life in a gray claustrophobic station. other failed escapees struggle to explain what they saw, these tiny glowing pinpricks scattered in the black, countless tiny lights hanging from nothing. some escapees never make it to Trench or back to Dema, instead burning up in atmosphere and becoming one of those lights, a shooting star a Bandito may see if they watch the sky long enough
okay probably last addition I’ll make to this particular post but I think because Dema Station has been isolated for so long, it must be a closed system. they grow a few vegetables and raise some rabbits for food, but that mostly just supplements the diet of the elite. for Dema station to survive, all organic matter must eventually be recycled. The Vial is a large machine at the center of Dema that can break down and rearrange molecules into something new and produces the people’s main food source. the product is gray and greasy and often served as a grainy mash, a soft slab, a thick drink, or a dehydrated bar. it’s not pleasant to eat, but it’s nutritionally adequate and they don’t know anything else. because it’s what keeps their society sustained, The Vial and the system it sustains is sacred. attempted escapees are incredibly ostracized in Dema because Bishops stress that they have essentially tried to steal and waste sustenance. the glorious gone are praised and rewarded in the afterlife because they willingly give themselves up to The Vial to be remade for the betterment of all. what the Bishops don’t tell people is 1) the science of it doesn’t work out. there is so much lost to metabolism that cannot be reclaimed, so they make secret trips to Trench’s surface for organic matter that can be added into the system. and 2) the biggest stress on this delicate balancing act is not escapees, but actually the Bishop’s own cloning experiments. the most concentrated form of The Vial’s ichor slurry is a thick black liquid that can be used in their secret machinery to essentially print new bodies for themselves. although the actual biological structure of these bodies appear perfect, they start rotting almost immediately, which is pretty inconvenient for the immortality thing. to try and fix this issue, they have tested various fixes by printing out Dema citizens, past and present, using the centuries of DNA data they have on file. after years of testing, the only DNA file that will create a body that does not rot is Clancy’s and the Bishops have no idea why. so they just keep printing out Clancys. some only live long enough to be test subjects in the Bishop’s lab, but many others are sent to live as a typical Dema citizen. they are often left unaware that they are clones being secretly studied. Clancys almost always want to escape, and sometimes Bishops will “let” them escape to Trench, just to run more tests
OP this is so damn good in every way and has been living in my head rent-free ever since you first posted it. Can I raise you classic astronaut Snoopy cap Clancy mask.
Like the kinda baggy look, the little stripe in the middle…it’s a bit of a reach I know but do we see the potential
Apparently, according to studies done, when it comes to cloning multiple generations of the same being, there's a strong deterioration that occurs the further on ( akin to copying a document based off its prior copy, theres deterioration ) . It gave me 2 ideas ; one which is more a general idea of Reploid DNA, and the second, the development of X6 and Gate's Reploids.
But then it evolved into the idea of deterioration. This is half - ramble, half just headcanon, all just personal world building.
This is going to get long and complicated, but I think this is neat.
I wonder if such a thing could apply to reploids ; models based off X's schematics more closely mirror him in early 21XX, than say, updated ones working off the updated base over and over again — so maybe that's why new generations, while physically stronger, have a more intense level of instability ( as seen in Lumine ) . I mean, copying a tape over and over causes it to eventually be unsable.
But still, it's a lose - lose scenario. Attempts to repair older reploids with modern technology cause incompatibility or further existing deterioration ( combined with instability of data preservation ) . And on the other side of that coin, physical abilities improve, but tweaking made over generations and generations of reploids trying to recrate that same level of limitless abilities fail to do so, leading to an internal collapse.
But this comes with another idea : approaching it through the scope of Zero, someone who has been cloned and had his DNA used without consent.
Zero has died a few times, and suffered extensive damage more than once, as the long running gag has gone. Yet, this does make me think of the implications of the X series, death, and the impact it has on the DNA data — though this is assuming it's comparable to a human's DNA, not in its helix structure, but rather how it deteriorates ( as an aside from it being comparable to some futuristic take on Python, C++, Compute Unified Device Architecture, but frankly my coding skills are limited and this is based off what I can gather from LLMs as an equivalent ) .
Really, I think reploid DNA is probably on par with existing code structures, and visual, like this, for example. But this is just to show differences between helix DNA and Reploid's code.
Visual codes with a combinations of ever evolving booleans expressions, conditional statements ( if, else if, else, switch ) , so on in an ever evolving learning structure that builds off lived experience. But that aside — it's just to give the idea that human DNA and reploid DNA are incomparable in a physical sense, but comparisons can be made in how it works in a reploid's biology.
But back to my main point : Zero's death and the various forms of decay that influence it.
The death of the body leads to the decay of DNA in organic creatures, but, the same applies to technology. Corrosion through moisture in the air can cause rusting and inrernal damage, fluids deteriorate and become unstable ( oil, fuel, hydraulic fluid, etc. ) , batteries die due to a lack of charge and can become dead / damaged beyond saving, and so on. Yet, that's not the only concequences of a increasingly unstable enviroment : bit rot exists.
In short : Reploids fall apart due to time. But why is this relevant ?
With the damage of the internal components responsible in memory, bits like 1s and 0s can flip, critical data can errode to the point of crashes and lost information, and overall, the DNA structure of a reploid begins to collapse as these errors build up — just as how a human body breaks down due to genetic limitations.
Back to that first study I mentioned about cloned generations, the mistakes in the DNA of the clone are carried on, over and over until the clone can't survive past a few days. But it's easier to tweak a machine than it is DNA, so there are changes made to avoid things like incompatibilities in updates, but nobody had the abilities of Dr. Light.
And with those adjustments made, and Gate being a far later reploid, combined with instability from the Sigma virus . . . You can see why things get damaged quickly.
Anyways, Zero dies. Gets rebuilt in X2, along with the first clone. He gets heavily damaged in X3 and gets repaired by Cain, who's the closest Light equivalent existing. Dies yet again in X5, and has to repair himself. That is a lot of constant deterioration, paired with him not being a reploid ( so his DNA Code is absolutely different to X ) .
Gate investigates the Eurasia Colony crash site and only finds fragments of Zero ; given Zero is in hiding due to damage, his full DNA structure can't be studied, yet, there are means of working with existing fragments ( as seen in, say, de - extinction efforts ) . This is far into the X series by now, efforts are created to pursue immunity ( as in X8 ) , changes to DNA are constant, and now, we have an incomplete genome combining with X's structures. There is so much potential for instability, and Alia absolutely recognizes it. With the failures of Iris and Colonel prior ( given they were one reploid split in 2 ) , jealousy on top of fear of the unknowable suddenly being known can cause so much destruction — and so, Gate's reploids were eliminated.
Even if Gate managed to figure things out, is it a case of the Ship of Theseus ? Every repair, update, change, and so on with Zero impacts how he works, so is the same reploid ? Or is it different, despite it being Zero still ? What about Gate's reploids ? Their memories made them traumatized, guilt ridden, paranoid, fearful wrecks.
Even then, Zero's DNA causes Gate to lose his mind through exposure, I wouldn't be surprised if these haphazard studies just ultimately destroy a lot of aspects that made Gate, well, Gate.
That doesn't even touch the Nightmare Virus' transformations, Zero to Sigma Virus shift, etc., but, I wonder : Newer Gens, with their ability to transform, all these changed in software / DNA, and no ethics testing ? Things felt doomed to fail.
There's more I could say, but it'd feel long and convoluted.
Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!
Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨
A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming,
structured filtering, and curated reference images.
Saw More Than We Ever Imagined today - SUCH a good theater experience. People were singing and dancing and clapping after every song. I have never been one to get super invested in bands or their members but goodness have I been absolutely bursting with how much I love Twenty One Pilots. I don’t think a single artist has ever felt so meaningful to me on such a personal level. I don’t think I’ve ever loved EVERY album by an artist so much. I’ve been listening to these guys since I was thirteen, and to hear them now - how they’ve matured and found hope and peace, but also how they still struggle with so many of the same weights I carry - is so comforting in a way I can’t describe. The way they vocalize such vulnerable things in a manner so genuine it might seem cringey or dramatic, but through that sincerity just becomes all that much more powerful…the way they’ve woven a fictional epic and real experiences together so smoothly that you’d rarely be certain when a song is lore or not…
If I could pick a night of my life to relive whenever I wanted, Breach tour night would be a strong contender.
anyways may delete later but I just had to release these thoughts somewhere detached from my face. They’re Twenty One Pilots and so are we |-/
