Sock Mittens

She/her | been on here for more than a decade

[theodoradove]

Bata Shoe Museum: T. E. Lawrence's gay sandals

Me: If anything will do numbers on Tumblr

[mooncustafer]

[hasufin]

The layers of racism and sexism.

I am in awe.

[samiholloway]

...actually that does answer my long unanswered question "why the hell did the Brits keep wearing so many layers and fucking wool everywhere they went??"

[fairnor]

@solo-by-choice

[terramythos]

My mom got phished in an EXTREMELY refined scam that pretty much anyone could fall for-- basically her account was already pre-hacked and they spoofed the bank's number exactly, called her pretending there was fraud, and read back legitimate and fake transactions and personal info so she wouldn't suspect they weren't the bank. Then discouraged her from logging in claiming the account was locked so they could investigate the fraud-- all so she wouldnt catch them making massive purchases using her stolen info.

We have the same boss and when she told him what happened he recommended she call the bank directly, so she did and they managed to catch it in time before $20k of transactions went through. Very scary

I guess the lesson here is never ever answer your phone, I love that fraud is so rampant an entire form of mass communication is now useless

ANYONE can fall for phishing scams- my mom is extremely smart and we discuss common scams that target her age demographic and she still fell for this. If it happened to me I may have fallen for it too. Always be careful!

[unionizedwizard]

that's EXACTLY what happened to me last spring. it's dire out there....

[the-haiku-bot]

that’s EXACTLY what

happened to me last spring.

it’s dire out there….

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[three--rings]

If you EVER get ANY call from ANYONE claiming to be a bank or other important group asking you for anything, tell them you will call them back and call them yourself. Do not call a number they give you, look it up yourself.

Banks don't call people, IME. They send emails and texts and put notices on your online account. Credit cards sometimes do I believe, but in that case, just call the number on your card back.

Never take a call from anyone and assume they are who they say. Period. These people are skilled at social manipulation. They will always tell you there is a crisis.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

And don't just google the number, use your bank's official site! A lot of search engines are now providing phone numbers of scams instead of legit ones. Also make sure the url of the site matches the one available on cards and other papers you've been given by your bank because fake sites can look VERY convincing.

[shofarsogood]

FYI: the U.S. government will not call you. Is someone calls and says they're the IRS? They're lying. They say they're the sheriff? Lying. ICE? Lying.

The United States will mail you information. If the government needs to reach you, check your mailbox.

The IRS are generally pretty forgiving and will accept that humans make errors. They will never demand immediate payment for back taxes, ever. They know that's not feasible for most people, so they'll usually make a payment plan and help you out. (This is, of course, assuming you're an individual who fucked up their taxes, not someone running a massive tax fraud scheme.)

[prof-grace-aspen]

There’s also a scam going around right now for folks in the USA who use toll roads. NONE of the texts are real, the EZPass website has a huge banner on the site saying they’re all scams.

[thetrashiestoftrash]

I think I've reblogged this a few times because I work in bank fraud. And the thing is, sometimes the bank does call! I have personally called tons of customers. And while it makes my job harder, I would STILL prefer if every one of them told me, "I can't prove you're really my bank," hung up, and called the number on their card. Don't worry about being rude by accusing a real bank agent of being a scammer. It's fine. Hang up, and call back.

The only way to know who you're talking to is if you make the call. And before sending a lot of money somewhere, run it by someone you trust--no one is immune to a good scam, but a friend will be in a different headspace, and more likely to recognize emotional manipulation.

[airitree]

Stigmata — Hasta'akala

"Oh, no. I believed that God was with me... Do you believe that? Was God with me?"

—The Sparrow, 1996

(I'm like going into space jesuit genre relapse so I decided to feed the fans of a novel that came out 28 yrs ago.... I'm making my mark before they make that damn live action show, which I am terrified of, so I can proclaim my vision)

[peekay9]

Piranesi fan art

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

The artist is Seth Hahne. This is his etsy store if you want to buy a print (I do but I shouldn't)

[orpheuslament]

thinking of this legend tonight

[a-state-of-bliss]

Vanity Fair Sept 1985 - Anjelica Huston by Annie Leibovitz

[albertvictoria-art]

𝔖𝔲𝔠𝔠𝔲𝔪𝔟 𝔱𝔬 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔇𝔞𝔯𝔨𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔰

Illustration inspired by Robert Eggers' upcoming film "Nosferatu".

[dailyflicks]

NOSFERATU (2024) dir. Robert Eggers

[slavhew]

GRAAAAHHH I WANNA REWATCH IT

[cryptotheism]

Fox news parents think every city is an active battleground at all times

[maxknightley]

I’ve said it before but it’s genuinely so insane to me, living in Chicago, that reactionaries are convinced this place is Mad Max or some shit. regardless of what neighborhood you’re in, even. I think if you sat one of them down and tried to explain that downtown Chicago is just office buildings and fancy bars, either their head would explode or they would accuse you of lying

[pissvortex]

[kaijutegu]

I've lived in Chicago for over a decade now and my aunt and uncle are convinced that I am going to die in a riot. Before I blocked both of them on social media they'd constantly send me news articles about anything bad that happened "in Chicago."

Places that were "Chicago" included:

Gary (Indiana)

Milwaukee (Wisconsin)

Madison (also Wisconsin)

The Twin Cities (Minnesota)

Fort Wayne (where they both live) ("STAY SAFE" "Aunt Tiffany what the hell are you talking about that's where YOU LIVE")

South Bend (Indiana)

East Chicago (that's in Indiana btw)

Hammond (also Indiana)

Waukesha (Wisconsin)

Racine (the city in Wisconsin, not the blue line stop)

Inglewood (California) (Not Englewood, the neighborhood in Chicago)

Still images from various tv shows

Still images from the movie Chi-Raq (no, they did not see it, and explaining what the Lysistrata is to these people would have been pointless)

South Central LA in 1992 (during the George Floyd protests, my aunt texted me a youtube video she assumed was in Chicago) (it was the Rodney King riots)

And once, absolutely amazingly, Chicago

[aprillikesthings]

On Facebook I follow a guy who takes really beautiful photos of Portland, Oregon.

Every. Single. Post. Gets swarms of right-wing nutjobs who insist Portland is basically a barren, burned-out wasteland. On photos where it visibly is not.

The poor guy has started making posts just making fun of them, but they won’t give up. Even if he blocks them, he gets new ones.

None of the fuckers commenting that shit live here, of course.

[taraljc]

My mother who lives in a retirement community in Central Florida keeps telling me and anyone she meets about how I am going to be murdered in the street and needs to sell my condo in Chicago and move down to Florida. Bear in mind, I grew up in Uptown in the '70s for fuck sake. It's like any common sense she had went out the fucking window long ago and any random day in Chicago from her point of view is like a musical number from West Side Story without the music. seriously. she is convinced that The Wire is happening on every corner in every neighborhood in the entire city 24/7. do we have gun violence and is it a problem? fuck yeah. because they were peeled the motherfucking handgun ban.

But to hear her tell it, you would think that walking out my door is like playing a first person shooter game from the wrong POV.

[bitchwhoyoukiddin]

According to our local fucking news, I am currently living in the middle of a gang war.

Note: I watched the full segment and it's three white guys freaking out because they heard what they thought was someone emptying a magazine of bullets into something - no deaths were reported or found - and... decided to tell the news? And CBS decided to run it? Like. Y'all. I felt so bad for the black reporter they sent to investigate that nonsense, I can't even talk about it. I need those guys to sell their homes and move to Highland Park or Naperville like they so clearly want to.

Note 2: I am not living in a gang war. Unless you count fucking idiots texting while driving and hitting cyclists and pedestrians with their stupid fucking SUV's.

[taraljc]

My cousin visited her daughter who's doing a semester abroad at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and my mother was like why do you want your cousins dead?

Hyde Fucking Park.

Seriously.

[fairnor]

I moved out to Iowa for a few years and people would ask me if it was safe to visit downtown Chicago. When I was planning my move back to Chicago a few years ago, my parents (now in Iowa) were trying to convince me not to because of the crime. They lived in Chicago in the 80’s so I found that argument pretty ridiculous.

[notchieuwu]

yeah so my friend and i have realised that neither of us actually know the tumblr convention for how this works

how do you use the like and reblog buttons

i like posts that i enjoy, and use reblog as a super like to share it

my default action is to reblog something i enjoy, like is used as a save button

something else (tell me in the notes)

Voting ended onNov 1, 2024

[alexseanchai]

I just realized I should have voted 'something else', not 'reblog what I enjoy', because reblogging stuff about leftist antisemitism and US politics is not what I would call enjoyable

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[apolladay]

have you ever eaten a fleshmeat which was NOT one of the following: beef, pork, chicken, turkey, mutton/lamb, or rabbit?

yes

no

unsure

Voting ended onNov 1, 2024

[butchlinkle]

apparently "fleshmeat" is a catholic term for meat that excludes fish and invertebrates, for clarity's sake

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Big question. I need your opinion on something. If Mipha was never saved, and Vah Ruta was never calmed, what effect would it have on Hyrule. We know that it will flood, however I doubt the Shiekah would have the ability to create water from nothing (like to gods) so I just assume they are teleporting so the ocean won't rise. With this in mind, none of the major settlements would really be affected. Gerudo Town is far enough out of the path that the river would take through lake Hylia, Riti Village is also out of the way, and not only does it have a natural moat (if you could call it that) but also a canyon in the way. Korok Forest has magic and a moat and is also out of the way, Goron City is also to high up and out of the way, Tarrey Town is really highup and out of tge way, Zoras domain has pretty good drainage and it will probably go through the several other exits to not cause that muc damage, Kakariko Village is safe in the mountains, Hateno Town is safe and out of the way, and Lurelin Village is also out of the way and won't be damaged unless the ocean floods.

WOO LET’S FLOOD A CIVILIZATION AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!

**Zelda meter is the meter system of objmap.zeldamods.org, but in accordance with previous posts I'm gonna convert it later to "actual" meters that I think is more realistic. You’ll see why later.

ALRIGHTY, SO LET’S START WITH MEASURING TIME!

So, East Reservoir Lake is 545 zelda meters long (light blue) and 340 zelda meters wide (blue)

Or if we want to see it as more of a circle, it has a radius of 239 zelda meters

Rutala Dam itself is 30 zelda meters wide and 140 zelda meters across. (see purple)

Taking a picture and using an online ruler, I found that the damn is roughly 123 zelda meters tall. (1 cm equal to 17.5 zelda meters by using the 140zm measurement)

Technically speaking, the dam's depth is infinite in the game, so we'll just use this damn's height as the depth.

And before you tell me that I should count the height of the rocks that the damn sits on top of as part of the depth, I'm gonna say not because dams typically block preexisting waterfalls, and given the rounded erosion of the rocks here, I would say that is also the case. Therefore, this was a waterfall that fed into the Rutala River and is not counted for the reservoir's depth.

So, in summary:

Reservoir Length: 545zm

Reservoir Width: 340zm

LW Reservoir Surface Area: 185,300zm (That is only 0.1 zelda kilometer. For comparison, the 45th largest reservoir in the world, Capivera Dam [last place on Wikipedia list] is still 515 square kilometers. The largest ones being in the 60k areas. I’ll come back to this point later.)

Reservoir Radius: 239zm

(pi)r^2 Reservoir Surface Area: 179,451zm2 (179zkm2) [Just got these numbers of surface areas to demonstrate they're practically the same whether you see it as circular or rectangular. I think the circle will be more accurate so going forward I will be using it as my basis for calculations]

Dam Length: 140zm

Dam Height: 123zm

Dam Width: 30zm

The Total Water Rutala Dam Holds Back: 22,072,473zm3 [Instead of just using the sphere volume formula or the LWH formula, I used my more accurate surface area made with the the radius and multiplied by the dam height(is that the,,,cylinder formula? I think so)]

Rutala Dam is supposed to be the largest reservoir in Hyrule, shown very prominently on the map. The largest reservoir(by surface area) in our world is Lake Winnipeg, with a surface area of 24,514 km2, (but only has a depth of 12 meters.)

But here it is on a map of Canada:

To reiterate, Lake Winnipeg has an area of 24,514km, and with zelda meters, East Reservoir Lake has an area of 179.

“BUT KIP! MAYBE EAST RESEVOIR LAKE IS JUST REALLY REALLY SMALL, HYRULE IS PRETTY SMALL ISN’T IT?”

Ok, so comparing the reservoir to one of the the largest, if not THE largest, settlements in the game, Zora’s Domain, we can see that the reservoir is several times it’s size.

But you’ll also note that Zora’s Domain has a diameter of 234zm. That, the entire city, the entire DOMAIN of Zora. 234 zelda meters. Manhattan is 21,100 meters long. Manhattan, by the way, is a fifth fraction of the New York County, which is the smallest county in the United States of America.

234 zelda meters, that’s an area of 43,005zm2. Do you know what else is aobut 40k meters squared in real life? Your nearest Walmart. Just a bit bigger than your local Tesco. Supposedly the entire Zora population, that has been untouched by the 100 year apocalypse and arguably had room to GROW over this time, is living in a Trader Joes.

So I hope this illustrates why I’m converting the zelda meters used on the website to something that I think would be more realistic in the realm of Hyrule. You can find my very loud and kinda embarrassing but factual! and old post about the conversion here, same link as at the top, but essentially just trust me on the conversation that 1zm is equal to 30 real-life meters.

New Realistic Measurements:

Reservoir Length: 16,350m or 16.35km

Reservoir Width: 10,200m or 10.2km

LW Reservoir Surface Area: 166,770km2

Reservoir Radius: 7170m or 7.17km

(pi)r^2 Reservoir Surface Area: 5,383,530m2 or 5382.53km2

Dam Length: 4200m

Dam Height: 3690m

Dam Width: 900m

The Total Water Rutala Dam Holds Back: 19,865,225,700m3 or 19.8 million cubic kilometers of water AKA 19.8 billion kiloliters AKA 5.2 trillion gallons o’ agua

Now THAT sounds more like the biggest dam in all of Hyrule. In fact, it adds up with the stats of the largest dam in our world(by gallons held), that is, the Three Gorges Dam.

The Three Gorges Dam, located in China, ALSO holds back 5 trillion gallons of water/19 billion cubic meters. Although it is a lot shorter than Rutala’s measurements--I think the amount of water that it holds back will be a perfect guide to see the devastation that Rutala’s potential breakage could cause on Hyrule.

There actually is a simulation online about what would happen if the Three Gorges Dam collapsed but I’m not gonna link it cause it might be a bit too distressing, but just know that I based this on that simulation.

Firstly, the biggest sigh of relief comes from the Samasa Plain.

The plain is very very low and slopes down into the Lanayru Bay, so a lot of the water would empty into there. However, the plain would then be totally submerged, so RIP to the shrines and ruins around there. Areas in red as submerged and areas in green would become islands or marshes.

And with that, the water level of Lanayru Bay would rise drastically. Blue is the new water level, dark green are islands, and light green are potential wetlandish areas that would form as time passed.

But basically, Rutala river would have a new branch that spills directly into the Lanayru Bay.

So now you may be thinking,

“HEY KIP THAT’S NOT SO BAD! MOST OF IT SPILLS OUT INTO THE BAY SO IT’S NOT A LOT OS DESTRUCTION! YAY!”

And you’d be half right.

Yes, a lot of the water is going to spill out over Samasa Plain and yes, Lanayru Bay will house a lot of it. But here’s the kicker.

It’s a bay.

Not an ocean.

It would take 1.25zkm or 30km for the water to make it’s way to the ocean, and the water will be traveling SUPER fast--about 100 kilometers per hour.

And that water wants to move, it wants to flow, and Lanayru Bay cannot help all that water flower because:  It’s shallow as fuck.

This chest shows the deepest point in all of Lanayru Bay.

I dropped a windcleaver down in the water: and using a generous GENEROUS estimate of 2 feet per second given the conditions of the still water in the bay--It took 5 seconds for it to float to the bottom. 10 feet. 3 meters. That’s just barely deeper than the deep end of a backyard swimming pool.

But even being extra EXTRA generous and using a real world estimate: Bays would be around 14 feet deep, roughly 4 meter. And we can be even more generous and say the sounding mountains can accommodate 30 feet of height. 9 meters. 9 + 4 = 14 meter height times 30km by 10km(width) = That’s 4.2 cubic kilometers, or 4.2 billion kiloliters of the 19.8 billion kiloliters in total.

uh oh. wheres the other 15.6 billion kiloliters of water gonna go?

It’s like taking a firehose, and filling up a bathtub. Yeah, the tub’s gonna catch a lot of that water, but that firehose has way, way, way, more water than that tub can hold, and when the tub can have a leak or hole on it, but the rate that that hose is going is astronomically faster than the rate the tub can expel water, so it’s just gonna overflow and water will still spill everywhere

[And this isn’t even taking into the account that Rutala Dam is SIGNIFICANTLY higher that it’s surrounding landscape, and would pour into the river with such a force that it could cause a giant tidal wave and break through the rocky boundaries of the pre-existing Rutala River causing even more water to flow into the bay]

Lanayru Bay would be occupied with a lot of water, and since the other 15.6 billion kiloliters of water can’t immediately flow into it, it’s gonna take the scenic route through Rutala River. It’s high mountains on either side basically just make it a death funnel.

Here’s how that would look:

This is the new water level for the Lanayru Wetlands. MAn they weren’t lying, those lands do be wet.

so yeah everything is submerged in between 10 to 20 meters of water and you might be thinking

“WELL KIP, I THINK THAT’S NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL! AT LEAST NO MAJOR LANDMARKS WERE DESTROYED AND NO ONE WAS HURT!”

Well, bestie, here’s the thing. This length of land is 3 zelda kilometers long. AKA 90 kilometers long. And you might recall, I said, that this, 3000 meter tall  wall of water was traveler at 100km per hour. Well the good news is, my calculations are a lot easier for this as this large stretch of flat Lanayru Wetlands land lines up perfectly with the flat areas of Yichange, (which was actually traveling at twice the speed compared to Rutala because it didn’t have Lanayru Bay to open up into)  

But the bad news is, the video is five minutes long, and this is just the first 50 seconds. This water is destined to travel 400 kilometers. That’s about half of the country of Wales, by the way. The entire length of the state of Virginia.

Here’s the rough path of the total flooding that other 16 billion kiloliters from Rutala Dam

Oh, and what’s worse is that the rivers in central Hyrule? Yeah they’re like HALF the depth of Lanayru Bay so the flooding will be even WORSE :D

So here’s the new waterlevel map!

Overtime, a lot of the water is gonna spill onto the paths through Central Hyrule, new swamplands, creeks, etc. etc. The path to the Gerudo Desert will be fin initially, as the water as slowed to the point where it won’t put immediate damage since the bridge is so high. But that new water level plus the influx of water from the River of the Dead is definetly gonna erode that over time and maybe possibly will just collapse and prevent anyone from leaving or entering the desert.

Hyrule Castle will be even more of an island, as the two islands to the left and right of it will be moslty submerged. Also the entire path through Eldin is just fucking done. Everyone in Akkala and Eldin? You’re trapped there. It’s basically a new Lake Hylia but no bridge. Sorry Robbie.

Oh, and also these rapid waters are carrying the debris of it’s destruction, whether the corpses of travelers or giant rocks that it broke off from the side of mountains. So everything is a mess, and depending on the amount of debris, it could completly alter water paths to go even more in land. The rivers are shallow enough, so just pilling in more rocks and dam metal and dirt just makes things shallower

Lake Hylia will be fine, the mini islands are gone, but as a whole, the bridge and the height of the surrounding ridges will keep the water in there. Although a lot of Necluda is basically a goner, and the bridge on either end of Dueling Peaks is totally decimated.

So what did we learn?

All of Hyrule’s economy is fucked. Every major trading path--gone. It’s basically gonna breed even more ethnocentricism, and a bunch of wildlife and sources for food are gone. And not to mention the climate, that’s gonna be fucked too as years pass. Rito and Zora will probably be the most fine? Hylians are fucked though, we destroyed like five stables and basically every river setllement there is. Oh and that influx of water is gonna fuck with the fishes so Hateno and Lurelin aren’t totally out of it either!

Gerudo? Well good thing they’re all lesbians because they sure aren’t going out to woe anybody once those stone pillars holding the bridge give way to the new water levels. Gorons will actually not even know anything’s wrong if I’m being honest. Sheikah? Well that point by Eagus Bridge and Sarhasra slope is gonna connect into a river at some point so I guess they can be a fishing village now.

Oh an RAIN I didn’t even think about that, yeah people are totally gonna die. And if Ruta CONTINUES to pump water into Hyrule (because again, this is only from an INITIAL burst of the damn. Well...

Zora’s Domain will be gone within the year. Water levels will just continue to rise, probably take on Central Hyrule first, but then after that the Gerudo Canyon. Also if flooding in Zora’s Domain REALLY continue it would probably spill over and destroy Tarrey Town. So not good all around!

But I think the main takeaway that we can all settle with is that the Flower Lady and her garden are absolutely, positively, dead.

[botwstoriesandsuch]

[ink-feathers-and-paper]

The one and only good news of this tragedy: goodbye, Flower Lady!

[hummingbird-hunter]

Your gender is now the first randomized wikipedia article you get. No rerolls.

What is your gender now/what did you get?

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A plant/fungus/otherwise alive non-animal

A non-living natural thing (e.g. a rock) or a natural phenomenon (e.g. tornado)

A place

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A concept

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A work of art or a piece of media

A field of study or a specific research

Something else? Put in tags

Voting ended onNov 4, 2024

[jellogram]

Johnny Eck was a performer from the 1930s who was born without any legs:

He's primarily known for appearing in the 1932 cult classic Freaks directed by Tod Browning.

However what I'm mostly obsessed with is this account of a magic trick he did with his non-disabled twin brother (text under the cut)

Like this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine

Wikipedia screenshot:

"In 1937, Eck and Robert were recruited by the illusionist and hypnotist Rajah Raboid, for his "Miracles of 1937" show. In it they performed a magic feat that amazed audiences. Raboid performed the traditional sawing-a-man-in-half illusion, except with an unexpected twist. At first Robert would pretend to be a member of the audience and heckle the illusionist during his routine, resulting in Robert being called on stage to be sawed in half himself. During the illusion, Robert would then be switched with his twin brother Eck, who played the top half of his body, and a dwarf who played the bottom half, concealed in specially-built pant legs. After seeming to have been sawn off, the legs would suddenly get up and start running away, prompting Eck to jump off the table and start chasing them around the stage, screaming, "Come back!" "I want my legs back!" Sometimes he even chased the legs into the audience. The subsequent reaction was amazing – people would scream and sometimes even flee the theater in terror. As Eck described it, "The men were more frightened than the women – the women couldn't move because the men were walking across their laps, headed for the exit." The act provided the perfect jolt by frightening people at first but then caused just as much laughter and applause. The illusion would end with stage hands plucking up Eck and setting him atop "his" legs and then twirling him off-stage to be replaced by his twin Robert, who would then loudly threaten to sue Raboid and storm out of the theater. Their act was so popular that they played to packed audiences up and down the East Coast."

[teaboot]

Easily one of the top 5 funniest things you can do as an identical twin

[hacash]

I really wish more schools would teach that elections are, fundamentally, a mathematics problem. and I understand why we don't like to look at it like that because that's a horrible, horrible way to look at the world - far easier to look at voting as a hero's journey, grabbing your sword and standing up against the system, than doing an equation with peoples' lives - but unfortunately that's what democracy is. picking the least shit option not for your own edification, but because if you don’t the more shit option will get in.

like, I can't blame anyone for being mad at a particular party for treating a certain group of people awfully, that just means you have moral standards, but it's a basic fact that before every election you have to do a little maths problem in your head. and for this election cycle that problem looks a little like 'X party causes 100 units worth of harm vs Y party causes 5000 units amount of harm; oh, and either X or Y will win the election regardless of my abstention; sacrificing my vote with abstention or a third party is, sadly, a fantasy for kids; so what am I prepared to do that will result in the least harm done.’

like. that's how it works. it sucks. I get it. I don't know a single country with a voting system that works perfectly. I don’t know of a single example in human history where they got a perfect voting system. there's a reason why democracy is known as being the least bad option out there. it's still the option you need to preserve and engage in.

[hauntologicalargument]

That is categorically not a maths problem, sorry. It's a normative claim expressed using some numbers that have been pulled out of the air. The normative claim might be right or it might be wrong - that's a separate question - but it has nothing to do with "maths".

[hacash]

If you’ve missed the point of this post clap your hands