Cherry Blossom Monster - Silent Hill: The Short Message (Masahiro Ito)
Cherry Blossom Monster - Silent Hill: The Short Message (Masahiro Ito)
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE ‘WHAT’ ZONE
happy episode 11!
(via i-normally-dont)
I get two keyblades and an EKG that says green fine, so that means I can’t take any damage.
(via shoeboxgoblin)
This year Pi Day meant Greek Spinach Pies 😋
Spanikopita!
Could Calvin and Hobbes solve the Kira murders?
Could catch Kira, would survive
Could not catch Kira, would survive
Could catch Kira, would not survive
Could not catch Kira, would not survive
Under the narrative of their comic, they would absolutely survive, and put a stop to the murders. I think it’s more likely that they (prolly by accident) just separate Kira from the Death Note, which… I don’t think we’ve come to a consensus here on whether “stopping the murders, without dealing with the killer” counts as “catching Kira” or not. I think Calvin would acquire the Note, use it as a source of infinite paper airplanes, decide he needed to bury such a precious treasure, and then forget which of the drillion identical trees he’d buried it under (and then get bored before he’s dug up more than a handful of them).
Under the narrative of Death Note… well, Hobbes at least literally cannot be killed, whether because he’s a stuffed animal or because he’s Something Else, and Calvin is just a kid; Kira hasn’t descended THAT far into his god-complex that he’d be willing to murder a kid who’s known to have an overactive imagination (and thus won’t necessarily be believed). So they survive either way. As to catching Kira or stopping the murders… under this half’s narrative, I don’t think they’d be able to.
Well. There’s ONE possibility I can trace; and that’s “Calvin is incredibly annoying, Light asks his name and receives an obviously false one, that gives him the time needed to process that he was about to murder a child just for being annoying, which leads to him doing some much-needed introspection and/or having a mental breakdown, which leads to him deciding to stop using the Note”.
So, on balance, that's…they survive either way. They’re not specifically bringing Kira to justice. They might or might not directly or indirectly lead to stopping the Kira murders; for me that equals out to “could not catch, would survive”.
Hobbes, ten seconds after Calvin has given the fake name of Tommy Chestnutt, “We are certainly going to heck for this one.”
the only me is me. are you sure the only you is you?
(via stillneedy)
An interesting thing about the Monarch is that while obviously the entire gag is that he’s enmeshed in this postmodern weirdly formalized etiquette-and-code-of-conduct-based form of super-villainy, this notably does not translate to him being a Megamind-style functionally-benign-showman kind of villain-in-name-only. He kills innocent people constantly. There’s a running gag where he kills cabbies to get out of paying fare. This doesn’t really seem to be a salient factor in the other character’s assessment of him as a threat or moral agent-his ability, or lack thereof, to tow the Guild line and keep pace with the inside baseball is what actually makes waves, draws scrutiny. There’s the comedy of that Season 1 episode where they basically call a time-out mid-death trap in compliance with Guild Law, but this doesn’t translate to anyone outside the game receiving similar protections or considerations. He lets Dr. Venture leave midway through an arch to see his shrink and then murders the shrink so that those interruptions will stop happening.
And to me this feels like it’s gesturing at a very real thing that can happen in cape comics, where even the nominally harmless bit-villains aren’t actually harmless even if they fail to kill the hero specifically, where even the really overtly silly ones have in fact likely whacked at least a few unnamed characters over the course of their 60-year publication history- only for this to sort of get sanded away as a morally salient feature of the character unless they become specifically known as One Of The Ones Who Constantly Kills People (Joker, Bullseye, Carnage, etc.) because security guards and people trapped in collapsing buildings aren’t really real. The show is also attentive to the analogous thing that happens with superheroes with the weird moral myopias they suffer from, in the way that basically every hero has some insane instance of superdickery rattling around in their closet that’s still technically canon but hardly relevant. The show is very very clear that as long as you correctly couch your behavior within the idiom, color within the lines, you’re entitled to a certain level of carnage and collateral. Which is demonstrated in the second episode with the Revenge Society, where Phantom Limb and company are genuinely freaked out when a nameless slasher shows up to the try-outs. Phantom Limb constantly brutally kills people, but this guy in a bear costume with a kitchen knife? He’s killing them in an off-genre way.
ARCANE Season 2 - coming November 2024
(Source: twitter.com)
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.
-via Wired, February 19, 2024
(via elf-kid2)