“There was a Pikachu at the grave of my little brother who loved Pikachu.”
I’ve seen this go around many times and this happend in the Netherlands. Here is the story that came with it (Roughly translated)
‘Micheal’s brother Robin was playing Pokemon last Saturday when the game released in the Netherlands. He said that he caught 2 Pokemon and then decided to visit his brother when his phone started to vibrate. To his suprise he found Pikachu on his brother’s Pokemon-style grave.
The screenshot shows the wooden grave stone (made by the family) being accompanied by the real Pikachu. The image went viral. Micheal and Robin’s father had this to say ‘We are so so happy that people are talking about our son, who sadly passed away’. The father also said that he knows for a fact that Micheal, who passed away 13 years ago, is playing Pokemon Go ‘up there’.
It becomes even more special: Pikachu is an rare encounter.
Robin said that Micheal always played Pokemon on his gameboy colour. Pikachu was his favorite Pokemon. ‘
OKAY STRAP IN because this is one of the WILDEST stories in aviation history.
In 1990, a British Airways BAC One-Eleven, captained by Tim Lancaster and co-piloted by Alastair Atchison, was cruising at 17,000 feet.
Around 15 minutes after take-off, flight attendant Nigel Ogden entered the cockpit to bring the pilots something to drink. One second everything was fine. The next second, the pilot’s side window blew out from the force of the pressurized cockpit. Even though he was strapped in, the force of the explosive decompression ripped the captain out of his chair and pulled him though the window.
The flight attendant immediately leapt forward and grasped the captain’s belt. The force was so strong - due to the plane’s speed - the captain slipped and was pulled almost entirely out of the plane, but the flight attendant caught his leg. The captain laid on the roof, then the side of the fuselage (the above image is an inaccurate recreation - the side window was smashed) and the flight attendant’s entire arm was soon outside of the plane, gripping him.
(Recreation from the show Mayday at the point of decompression)
At the same time, the event caused the autopilot to disengage, and the captain’s body hitting the flight controls caused the plane to enter into a deep dive. The throttle was set to full power and could not be accessed due to debris, meaning the plane was descending rapidly. The co-pilot, experiencing hypoxia, fought to control the plane’s dive while allowing it to continue descending to a level the passengers/crew could breathe at. He attempted to contact air traffic control, but the wind made communication impossible, so he broadcast a mayday signal. Finally, he was able to re-engage the autopilot and level the plane out at a breathable altitude.
Soon, the flight attendant’s entire arm was burned from wind shear and frostbite, and his grip began to slip. The other attendants entered the cabin to see what was wrong and took over holding the captain’s body. Seeing the blood covering the windows from the captain’s severe wind sheer burns and frostbite, the attendants and co-pilot knew he was dead. However, they could not let his body go because it could smash into the wing, horz stabilizer, or engine, and bring the plane down.
For 30+ minutes the co-pilot flew a jet plane with an OPEN WINDOW and his co-worker’s body hanging along the side of the plane. Finally, clearance to land from ATC came across over the sound of the wind and the flight attendants were able to dislodge the captain’s ankles from the flight controls without letting him go. The co-pilot successfully landed the plane.
(tw below for blood)
(Taken same day as the incident)
BUT HERE’S THE KICKER: when they reached the ground and evacuated, they realized THE CAPTAIN WAS NOT DEAD.
He SURVIVED being outside the fuselage of a jet airplane traveling 550mph at 17,000 feet. His only injuries were extensive - but mostly superficial - frostbite and windshear burns, bruising, fractures in his hand, and shock. He has since stated that he remembers the event and was conscious for much of the time he was outside of the fuselage. The only other injury was the flight attendant’s frostbitten/windshorn arm. Captain Tim Lancaster returned to flying five months later.
(Captain Tim Lancaster in bed several weeks after the incident, with flight attendant Ogden (+ Ogden’s wife) above him and co-pilot Alastair Atchison to the far left, along with the two other flight attendants)
Why did this occur? Because the plane had received maintenance the day before, and the maintenance supervisor did not check he was using the correct screws in re-installing the windscreen.
(Recreation)
So yeah: you can apparently survive clinging to the side of a jet airliner traveling 500+mph at 17,000 feet.
Wow! Didn’t expect this many likes for an aviation post.
Just a note that I was wrong - it was the front pilot’s windscreen, not the side-window! I’m used to looking at Boeing windows with different positions :)
If y'all want the full story & more analysis of what exactly went wrong, Mayday: Air Investigations did a pretty decent special on the incident. It’s free on YouTube here (and here on dailymotion if you’re outside the US).
@argumate
you really couldn’t film a scene like this for a movie without it looking too fake to be believable.
This whole Palestine thing with the US being completely supportive of it hit me in the face.
It’s like the US is a guy you know and you’re fairly certain he’s part of a gang or sells drugs or something but then you walk in on him raping his dead baby sister and not even stopping once he knows you’re there
i don’t know who needs to hear this, but i needed to hear it today, so here goes: you should write that fic. you should write what makes you happy.
it doesn’t matter if the concept has been done before, you are still allowed to write your coffee shop/flower shop/college/western AU. you should write that fic that is wildly self-indulgent. you should process something dark and hideous through your fic. you should share something beautiful through your fic. those two things are not mutually exclusive, either. you don’t have to be dealing with something traumatic to write something considered taboo. and yeah, even if that might be a little out of character for that old man, you’re still allowed to write it.
and if someone gets so upset about it they’re in your inbox being an asshole, you have my permission to delete that message and move on with your day. you also have my permission to tell them to go fuck themselves. you do not owe an explanation to anyone.
tag appropriately, and write whatever the fuck you want.
Black Friday is such a joke nowadays. “Don’t miss out on 30% off” don’t piss me the fuck off. People used to hit each other over the head for a microwave that’s how low the prices were. People literally died. We used to be a country
If there’s a black Friday deal that’s not even 50% off or more I don’t give a fuck man
“There is no epidemic of trans teens being rushed through medical transition by overly permissive doctors; trans people struggle to access healthcare at every age, and it has never been easy, let alone too easy, to be a trans child in the U.S. The articles claiming otherwise are recycling talking points that recognizably and overtly originate from anti-trans groups.”
Why do I boil myself like a lobster in the shower, but I hate the heat and overheat easily out of the shower
ah I have done Much Autistic Thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that it is because when you are boiling yourself like a lobster in the shower, you are in control of how boiled you get. but when it is a HOT DAY and you are In Your Clothes and Such, you are Not in control of how lobster-fied you become.
the feeling of lack of control during your warming-uppiness makes it negative. the fact that you are wearing Clobes that you want to stay Not Damp from your boiled state makes you go “No!!!!!!! I do Not wish to be Boiled right now!!!!” and u get Not Joyous.
however when you are blissfully aware of the fact that you are In the Waters and you can Control the Heats of the Waters to make you just the right amount of As Hot As The Sun, it is perfectly fine and pleasant.
it may also have something to do with your circulation idk
I’ve been trying to work out a new
system for speculative fiction genres because the sci-fi/fantasy binary we have
is so incredibly uninformative and I’m concluding that there IS no good way to
categorize books without the system becoming so overly complex that you’ll end
up shorthanding it in unhelpful ways anyway.
My
dislike of the sci-fi/fantasy binary, on a practical/functional level, stems
from several things.
the
binary seemingly excludes the VERY large category of stories that have a clear
deviation from our reality but it’s something that can’t easily be shunted to
sci-fi or fantasy. For example: stories that deal with life after death.
Stories that focus around a fairly localized “unrealistic” thing happening
e.g. a character is born with the memories of a dead pop star or something, or
twin sisters share a telepathic connection. Any story where it’s kept ambiguous
to what extent the “fantastical” thing is “real” or in the narrator’s
mind, such as A Monster Calls or We are the Ants. Really any story that deals
with something “unproven” but that doesn’t really “alter” our
reality: e.g. if a character meets Bigfoot but everything else in the world is
the same. Shit like the movie Groundhog Day.
the
fact that many technologies in sci-fi are no more plausible than the things
magic can do, and very little of what’s considered “sci-fi” actually is
informed heavily by science. teleportation, FTL travel, time travel, etc. are
usually supported by absolute bullshit technobabble. In practice there is no
difference from fantasy except the commonly associated tropes. They are very
rarely fundamentally different. Not that this is a problem with sci-fi, not all sci-fi has to be hard sci-fi. But it’s a serious problem when you try to separate sci-fi from fantasy in an
honest way.
the
fact that any degree of honesty about the above two things makes
the “fantasy” category so vast that it’s basically useless because easily
80% of all stories that are popular, especially in the area of movies are
fantasy.
Alt-history
being such a glorious hot mess of a category with stuff ranging from standard “alternate
timeline where x happened instead of y” to “wwI but there are genetically engineered
flying whales and star-wars-esque steampunk walkers” and dinosaurs and dragons
and shit. (This is not a complaint. Alt-history writers need to proceed just as they have been doing.)
the
absurd fact that dystopia is lumped under sci-fi when dystopia does not, by
definition, have to be sci-fi at all, and other weird bullshit in the
categorization system
But
actually coming up with an alternative is incredibly difficult because there
are simply so many possible variations on what speculative fiction can be that
getting anywhere close to accuracy involves getting so complex your system
isn’t functional.
I
do really strongly feel that these genres need to be done away with though,
because
1)
they
actually say almost nothing about a story by definition
2)
the
only reason why knowing a story is “fantasy” tells you anything about it is
that our perception of “fantasy” is super limited for no good reason.
There
isn’t anything literally, actually, functionally different between fantasy in general
and sci-fi in general outside of a pile of tropes that are tied to the genres for
no good reason and that have become identifying marks of the genres for no good
reason. The actual dividing line is 99% just what we’ve become conditioned to
accept in terms of tropes.
There’s
an absurd amount of tropes and world-building concepts that have absolutely no
practical reason why they couldn’t work together, but are just not ever
combined in stories because they’re associated with different genres or subgenres
within sci-fi and fantasy.
I’m
going to make a list of what I feel are glaring examples of this:
the
fact that monarchies are incredibly rare in dystopian novels, and democracies,
pseudo-democracies, or even elections are incredibly rare in fantasy
the
fact that no book I can think of has the concept of FTL travel via magic, and
time travel via magic is basically just something writers throw in to keep a tv
show going in the 4th or 5th season instead of having
been a thoughtfully done piece of worldbuilding. Very little fantasy bothers
messing with interplanetary travel. Which is sad.
similarly magic systems are rarely designed with more modern scientific knowledge e.g. DNA in mind. plenty of magic systems that are based on “four elements” or “alchemy” but relatively few that borrow from ideas, disproved or not, about the way the world works that are more recent than like aristotle
no
elves, dwarves, orcs, werewolves, vampires, or any “mythological” creature in sci-fi
or space operas ever, when there is no better reason for them to be in a
world with no contact with or relation to Earth than on another planet. There are incredibly legitimate reasons vampires or dwarves might be found on an alien planet. Please
no gods in sci-fi like there are in many, many fantasy novels because I guess high tech and gods are mutually exclusive somehow.
Sci-fi putting actual effort into speculative biology and cool alien designs while fantasy just rips shamelessly off decontextualized mythology and medieval bestiaries
Dragons
and zombies have bucked this to a limited degree and I have no idea why. I
think with dragons it might be because of Dragonriders of Pern
The
fact that dystopias HAVE to be a future Earth and can’t be in an alternate
world like in fantasy
This
is getting much better, but up until recently: fantasy is almost always
pre-industrial revolution and most of the time pre-gunpowder weapons
“Paranormal”
stories where the “fantastical” is focused around ghosts, witchcraft and stuff
are basically always based on Earth
There
are basically no non-earth literary worlds (that are unconnected to earth by space
travel) that I can think of with “future” or speculative technology and magic
and/or common fantasy tropes. I can’t think of one atomic age fantasy world
Post-apocalyptic
fairy tale retellings do not exist as far as I know and I want them to.
Also,
just the expectations of level of “seriousness”/darkness for each genre are sometimes
annoyingly prohibitive. e.g. post-apocalyptic stories are virtually always incredibly
dark and gritty and the reasons are understandable but also it would be nice to
see a lighthearted, adventurous romp through the irradiated wasteland, killing
mutated monsters and stuff
Corollary
to the above: the commonality of “epic” scale fantasy relative to smaller
scale, more “slice-of-life” stuff. There’s literally no reason why you can’t
write a cute series about a halfling running a magical bake shop
Corollary to the corollary: steampunk and urban fantasy skewing “less serious” for some reason
if there is any good reason for gigantic ensemble casts in fantasy, which I don’t know if there is, but if there is one you could have them in any speculative genre right
shapeshifters being largely a fantasy-romance trope when they’re really cool and should be used in all types of fantasy
Cryptids, vampires and werewolves, and elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. occupying totally different niches within fantasy for no reason. Bigfoot is a fantasy race now. You’re welcome. There’s also no reason why you can’t have vampires instead of elves.
look, fantasy races are often a devastating kitchen sink of different cultures anyway so you might as WELL have elves AND bigfoot
hey. good luck with everything, okay? [cutting the rope connecting your boat to the dock] just good luck. [starts pushing your boat further towards the stream] just have a good luck out there
My cats have this meow that means “please come with me to fix this” after which they’ll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or ‘empty’) food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem’, they look back at me, clear message.
What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.’ I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me… the rain. “Please fix this” they say. “Please get rid of the wet”
“Silly kitty,” I say, “I can’t control the rain.” I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.
hey. do whatever you want btw. it’s your identity. kiss people for fun. enjoy sex. nobody’s stopping you. being aro and/or ace doesn’t mean you have to be repulsed by romantic or sexual activities if you don’t want to.
and also! things only mean what you meant them to mean. you can have platonic sex and platonically make out with your friends. it’s true. just be sure to communicate so that everyone involved understands and you’re good.
“But why do you let your disability stop you?” Because that’s…. what disabilities… do. That’s… literally the basic definition… of being disabled… A disability impairs your ability to function. That’s what the term means. That’s the main thing
If you are asexual, or fall somewhere on the asexual spectrum (or think you might), tell me some of your thoughts on your experience being ace and what it means for you - like how you came to realize it, some specific things you feel define your experience, etc.
I find myself still coming to terms with my own identity, and hearing more from the community might help me put some of the pieces together.
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