comedy concept: “the hangover” with werewolves, a whole pack breaks out of the bunker they use for the full moon and are now lost throughout the city the morning after
the pov character is the pack’s youngest member, whose wolf form spent most of last night chewing through drywall to get into his boyfriend’s dorm room. he’s the only one who has any idea where the fuck he is.
[tag from @aurora-bore-aura reading #is the boyfriend aware??? or is it just the shining scene]
Oh it’s 100% the shining. Hell of a way to find out that a, werewolves are real, b, your boyfriend is a werewolf, and c, your roommate could LITERALLY sleep through an animal attack (though admittedly an affectionate one)
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.
Oh my god I have so many complicated THOUGHTS over how much in English we equate "Literacy" and "Access to language" as the same thing.
As in, simultaneously it is absolutely a life skill to be able to read and write - All the aforesaid form-filling and understanding of legal and technical language (Where the specificity of the difference between phrasing that's hard to remember in spoken words, is absolutely critical- Did they apologise, or give condolences? Was it 13av4692 or 314a6v92? Etc) BUT I'd argue that you don't need to have literacy to be able to regulate your emotions and express yourself if you have access to a strong tradition of verbal (ie, voiced, signed) storytelling and language use.
And specifically that linking illiteracy to poor emotional regulation or poor emotional understanding, is a thing that has been used to cast traditionally non-literate cultures, who prioritise live storytelling and oration as ways of transmitting our cultures and skills, as primitive or lacking in something - "savage", "feral".
I'm only partially joking when I talk about reading as necromancy - Here is a way for you to listen to dead elders, without needing their ideas to be interpreted through another speaker (who may consciously or accidentally miss out or add details to make it appeal more to the listener). Here's a way to eavesdrop on someone who would never have wanted to talk to you, for good or bad reasons (Once something is written down, anyone can read it - As opposed to a story, which needs to be told anew every time). Here's a way to share knowledge without understanding it at all yourself ("Hey I have only read the first three pages, but you'll love this...") and without really having to think about who you tell it to, or how (as in, the language I use to tell the same story will change depending on my understanding of the listener).
I am convinced that the reason illiteracy correlates to poor emotional regulation in so many stats, is because they don't make any effort to control for the intense marginalisation of illiterate people, the mockery of our cultures, etc.
"autistic people need instructions for every simple task" okay how about we talk about the neurotypicals not following clear instructions. what do you mean it didn't work the way you wanted, i gave you the instructions. oh you didn't follow them? you didn't see where i clearly indicated the directions you were supposed to follow for this task? and you're shocked it didn't turn out right? you decided to pull a Jared I'm 19 and go rogue? you're surprised the road less travelled isn't fucking paved because no one travels it? do you get off on this
Anybody who has spent any time working in retail, hospitality or IT can tell you that a not-inconsiderable number of NT people cannot follow a fucking instruction if you wrote it down on a piece of paper and stapled it to their forehead
I have to say something about how to approach fiction, because while I think I've always done it automatically, judging by online discourse this is not universal: when engaging with fiction you should just accept the premise and in-universe rules.
For example, you reading a story set in the past and the main couple are 17 and 25. Does everyone in the story treat this as a totally normal age gap? Okay, then for now, put your 21st century morality in a little box and label it "real world morals" and then put this couple's age gap being normal in a box called "in-universe/historical morals" and accept that you can store both boxes in your mind without exploding because you are are thinking, rational human being. Because it's driving me straight up a wall that people can't seem to do this!
"He kills people, what a red flag!"
"Ma'am, that is a magical warlord and if he stopped killing people they would kill him. He doesn't have an office job."
"That was very dubious consent. I can't support this ship."
"Sir, she grew up in literal hell, I doubt they had comprehensive sex ed there. Also, she might learn and grow?"
"She's only sixteen, he's a pedo!"
"If society at that time says that sixteen is the marriageable age, then no, he's not. That is not how any of this works."
"They grew up together and their parents want them to marry? Gross."
"Yeah, it would be weird today, but everyone is treating this as normal. I guess it was A Thing."
Sure, in a modern, non-fantasy story set in your country, judge by your moral code all you want, but if you want to actually enjoy a story that isn't written with your exact morals, you need to accept the premise. Step back later and do some analysis, think about how society has changed (hopefully for the better), but keep in the mind the intent of the author in that time, culture, genre, or universe.
Yeah, Marianne Dashwood & John Willoughby are a creepy age gap today, but Jane Austen thought it was normal so while you read Sense & Sensibility, you can do that too. I promise it will make your reading experience 1000% better and you won't go straight to hell or anything. If you can't handle that, I banish you to the non-fiction section of the library.
Incredible book alert for you all, since I know how many of my friends and followers are also neurodivergent. I've been requesting that our local library buy more ADHD and autism-friendly cookbooks aimed at adults, in an effort to find one that might help me with fixing my extremely broken relationship with food. And for a while it was a bit demoralizing because a lot of them are more recipe-focused, so I'd read them and go "Wow, this book is aimed at people like me and I can't eat any of this stuff, I must be even more broken than I thought"
Enter "How to Eat Well for Adults With ADHD" by Rebecca King.
I am about to sound like a sponsored ad, but this book is absolutely incredible. It's written by a nutritionist with ADHD, and does include some recipes, but they only make up a part of the third section of the book. The rest of it is focused on practical, broadly applicable advice for neurodivergent folks (and frankly, other disabled people) on unlearning internalized ableism around food, how to best organize your kitchen and meal plan (and what to do when meal plans fail), the connections between food and dopamine and how best to use food for stimulation in a healthy way, how hyperfocus and time blindness can get in the way of eating well, how to make sure you're eating enough while on stimulants, the fact that many ADHD people also have ARFID (and the book even emphasizes that ARFID is an eating disorder, not just "picky eating"!!), and takes the strong stance that we should do away with the idea of "picky eaters" altogether in favor of a more compassionate stance on people's complicated relationships with food and eating.
It is strongly anti-diet culture while still emphasizing that good nutrition is important. It has extremely specific tips that make my ADHD heart sing a little, like how best to store specific vegetables so they last the maximum amount of time in your fridge (since we are all very good at forgetting they are there) and what tools can make doing the dishes more manageable. And perhaps most importantly, as someone with severe sensory sensitivities and some very real trauma from having them ignored as a kid and being shamed for them, it made me cry a little bit with how understanding and compassionate it is.
Anyway. I am going to buy a copy of my own immediately, and I cannot recommend it enough. If you, like me, are trying to unfuck your eating habits and neat someone to hold your hand a little in the process -- while still making you feel like an adult, and still offering actionable tips along the way -- this book could be a lifesaver.
(And for those of you who use Instagram, the author has an account that's equally helpful and affirming over there, too, that I followed immediately, @/adhd.nutritionist)
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