Untitled

[katlovesshrimps]

I feel like it used to be feminism 101 that misogyny affects everyone and it’s still just a form of misogyny to treat men and women like two different species with unchangeable differences even if you’re doing it in a “all men are evil monsters and all women are victims” type way… this was common knowledge at some point, right?

EXACTLY!

[all-pacas]

do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny

[all-pacas]

in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

[all-pacas]

this is somehow starting to make the rounds so because i am a pedant i am going to take this time to talk a little more in depth about air canada 143, the GIMLI GLIDER

so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!

up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."

however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.

also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.

neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.

let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?

...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:

the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)

so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.

pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.

all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.

but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.

the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.

this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.

this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.

enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.

they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.

the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.

as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN

here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.

another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.

by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.

all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.

meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.

the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.

and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.

all 69 of them 😎

[athelind]

I had read the story of the Gimli Glider before, and I had seen the video with "Deja Vu" playing, but I never understood where the song came from or why it was supposed to be funny before.

This is "The Most Tumblr Punchline" in action, only I didn't realize there was something to look up.

Now that I do?

Okay, that's funny.

[anik]

i love this guy

[shytreeking]

Actual marketing tactic that DOES exist btw. I can't remember the term, but all major businesses have special roles specifically for people who understand how to manipulate human behaviors & emotions. Why are snacks at the checkout area? Temptation. Why is candy so low to the ground? Children. Types of store lighting can affect peoples mood. Cheaper products are low or very high so people won't look for them. Branding companies have this as well for packaging & logos that hide products lack of quality & manipulate people to impulse buy.

I know damn well I watched a documentary on this in high school, but that was quiet awhile ago. Everything is designed to subtly manipulate your perceptions & tastes. Once you see it, it's everywhere & you can work against it out of pure spite.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I don't know if this is still a thing but they used to go so far as to make the flooring material in big stores in shopping centres slightly softer than the floors outside the store, so that customers would stay inside a bit longer since people have (largely subconscious) preferences about floor textures based on how easy they are to walk on and how much they hurt tired feet. The amount of research that goes into choosing the lighting in makeup and clothing stores is bonkers. Bakeries often smell a lot more like fresh bread or donuts than their actual baking activities would create -- they pipe the smell out front on purpose. Grocery stores are deliberately laid out to be very slightly confusing -- not confusing enough to impede buying, but confusing enough to send people down a few wrong aisles to look at products that they wouldn't otherwise see. Signs are often placed in aisles so that you have to go into the aisle a bit to read them clearly, or at least take a good look down it.

[thecadaver]

There are a few different terms for this sort of stuff, but like all marketing it falls under a big umbrella which my partner calls "evil psychology"

A fun example is that humans really like going counter clockwise, to the point where a person lost in the desert will end up walking in circles accidentally. It's a whole weird thing.

So stores do their best to make you enter on the right and exit on the left, because that makes whatever monkey brain part of you that wants to go left happy. My local supermarkets actually rearranged their entrances a few years ago to force people to enter from the right

The unfortunate part about pointing this out is that it does kind of make you sound like a conspiracy theorist, much like the ikea windows redditor. But there is indeed millions of dollars spent investigating stuff like which particular type of light makes people buy furniture

[icarusesdickarus]

curious if which direction youre prone to walking in is affected by if you culturally read right to left or left to right… hmm

also yes, the people trying to sell you stuff are the same people who use psychology to design slot machines to be addictive

[thecadaver]

It doesn't appear to be! The big study you can find the most information on was done in Japan and Spain, and the results were consistent between them. It also doesn't appear to have any correlation to left or right handedness, which is the other main assumption

We do it alone in the desert but also in a crowd in a moshpit, and in countries with entirely different cultures. I'm excited for the day we find out why

And yeah, there's a very strong link between how we sell gambling and shopping, from the timeless voids of casinos and big box stores to the flashing LIMITED TIME OFFER!!! of free spins and online shopping

[babanasaur]

Headshot SevenTri4ls

A headshot completed for SevenTri4ls! thank you!

[roookspirit]

[rabbitkinglune777]

my experience with being transgender

[rabbitkinglune777]

a lil midnight comic sharing my vulnerability with my gender...

[rabbitkinglune777]

I talk strongly about my gender but I do struggle with a lot of aspects related to it, even stuff I don't wanna share publicly

[lhoandbehold]

The full saga of Margie and the Nuns (so far). Realised I never compiled these in one place.! Also, bonus Margies!

[covermeinflexseal]

i totally get people who broadly prefer flat null but idk something really appealing about nulges like come on. it's the cute orb. my orb #myorb

[pocket-deer-belly]

ah ok gooseworx's tumblr account got banned

[pocket-deer-belly]

extract celebrated culture from transfem and then drop them like a brick

[pocket-deer-belly]

exactlyyyy! you get it! i've seen this cycle like 5 different times minimum

[dama624]

sorryyyy I've been so busyyyyy but I've been doing some small doodles now and then so I'll probably be uploading these whenever I remember to lol

[averythebitchfrommercury]

The deliberate systematic purge of transfems by the staff has gotten so bad that not even Gooseworx was safe. Fucking Gooseworx.

Wishing the current Tumblr owners nothing but swift bankruptcy and eventual sale of the hellsite to someone else

[strangerconnection]

you know, i don't remember

[dittography-direwolf]

Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.

[thedustyleaves]

Not related to art at all, but my cloaks for my Hyper Light Drifter cosplay are done 🥰🥰

[ljesak]

[ljesak]

[footlongdingledong]

idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms

[footlongdingledong]

"ah but all of this is important and true and if i dont reblog all of this important stuff waga baga THE WORMS! THATS WORMS! THE BRAIN WORMS!

[footlongdingledong]

i do not think you are doing activism chief i think what you are doing is sitting in your room flagellating yourself expecting something to happen