call me genie | she/her, thon/thons | HERE THERE BE UNTAGGED SPOILERS | loz | ttrpgs | good omens | icon by @floaty-space-cat | if a seagull stole ur food: sorry i got hungry
#the fact that 'can prove access to an online account at least 12 years old' or even 'account to be verified is itself fully 18 years old'#AREN'T accepted methods of age verification is such a telling sign of what the real purpose of age-gating laws is:#data harvesting and deanonymization and the buildout of state-controllable ways to restrict both content and internet access itself en masse (via @shinelikethunder )
Hello old friend, I sent you out there years ago and you went and spread a lot of good karma, I just need your favour again, help me find some work đ§Ą
iâve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.
as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. itâs just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. weâre small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, âiâm not here to hurt you. hereâs something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know weâre on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. iâm being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.â
small talk isnât to get to know a person. itâs just a greeting to affirm youâre buddies in the universe.
i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.
digital circus is a cool show about the experience of existing in the child friendly panopticon of online spaces and forming very real relationships with people who don't necessarily have names and faces to you
The crazy thing is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you asked me on any given day "Would like to see a picture of some genitals?" my answer would be "đ° No, that's... No, thank you. I'm okay, actually." I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who do engage with the penis side of the internet, but personally, I've spent the better part of two decades doing all I can NOT to have pictures of dick and balls or sexy bikini babe buttcheeks blasted onto my retinas constantly. And yet... to be denied the penis? To have a jumped up pile of javascript tell me, a grown adult with an air fryer and an outstanding council tax bill, that I cannot be trusted to withstand the sight of a bare nipple unless I let it scan my drivers' license? I will move heaven and earth to see that fucking nipple, friend. I will walk a thousand miles barefoot on hot coals before I give you big brother bitches my passport number. A thousand miles through the desert with five VPNs just to press my face up against the glass and see the last uncensored picture of two My Little Pony Characters sixty-nining each other, and I don't even want! to look at it! But I will! I must! for the sake of our fucking democracy!
i genuinely encourage non black people to engage with this, who might be worried they can't because of the word "nigga" because they feel like it's overstepping. the only way it would be overstepping is saying it to me when ur not black, but please don't be afraid to engage with black art.
i kinda get annoyed when non black people police other non blacks on how to engage with black culture because it creates a problem where non black people avoid us all together which can be extremely isolating and create even MORE tension and overall being uneducated.
okay now that weâve a had couple lesbian blockbusters and milfs are having a romance moment, we need to bring back the manic pixie dream girl. she was never fuckin suited to fixing all the problems of some boring twenty year old everyman, but you know who could actually benefit from a quirky free-spirited blue haired girl with pronouns (she/they)? a newly divorced forty-something mom whoâs trying to learn how to be herself for the first time in her life
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.
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
