#and there are like shit tons of keys on there

[thatdisasterauthor]

I do indeed have much I can say on all of this! I don’t have time for a full breakdown, but let’s hit some key points.

🌪The Milton evacuation and changing the direction highways.

This is called “contraflow” and it is indeed a thing that is frequently used in evacuations. However, from what I understand, Florida might have laws against this? At least that’s what I’ve heard, or maybe just laws that do indeed make it very difficult. I haven’t had a chance to look into it too closely. And it is a tricky thing to do safely just off the cuff without a known procedure in place, which you wouldn’t have if it’s against the law in your area. You’ve gotta shut down all the exits/entrances accordingly so you don’t have issues with head-on traffic, you’ve gotta make sure you have effective alternate routes for emergency traffic, you’ve gotta have a space to reintegrate traffic into the proper lanes once the contraflow segment has ended, etc. etc.

You’re right that this isn’t a police problem, it’s a LAW problem. Maybe also a police problem in the sense of what trainings are available to them, what procedures they have in these situations, etc., but not an ACAB style police problem. Plenty of places DO use it, like I said. (Also, sometimes you’ll get spontaneous contraflow, where people just start doing on their own, but that’s a whole different can of worms.)

🚗 Over dependence on cars.

America is indeed super car dependent, but that’s not exactly the issue here, at least not in the way you’d think. First off, evacuations are just HARD. That’s a lot of people to move. Even if you took every large transport vehicle in a given area (so all the buses of any sort, any trains, any planes), you’re not going to get the entire population moved out in a timely manner, even if every seat is taken. It just isn’t feasible for so many reasons. People DO need to be able to evacuate via car. It’s also very dependent on the disaster in question. An evacuation for a hurricane is very different than most other evacuations due to the amount of time you, usually, have.

Now, one thing that happens and causes problems during evacuations is that people take ALL their cars instead of just one. Mom takes one car with the kids and as much stuff as possible stuffed in the back, and Dad takes his truck with the dogs and the bed piled high. A lot of evacuation planning doesn’t account for this. They see a four person family and think, “ah yes, the family sedan has six seats, they’ll just take that and go, we don’t need to plan for them to put both their cars on the road and at all the gas stations along the way.” But then they do take both cars, and so does every other family on the road, and suddenly you’ve got a shit ton more cars doing something that you expected a lot less cars to be doing. I have a lot more thoughts on this I can share later, if people are interested, but for now we shall move on.

(There’s also definitely an element of poor city planning and infrastructure in some places, but that’s very much a case by case thing.)

👩🏻‍🚒 We need a better emergency management system.

Yes! Though, actually, we already have a pretty good one as compared to other countries. Not great, by any means, but something like FEMA is pretty rare. Most countries just kind of ad hoc disaster response on a case by case basis, which is also what we did until we created FEMA in the 70s.

I have A LOT of thoughts about how we could improve the system as it currently stands, which is a big part of why I want to do a PhD in emergency management.

🔥 When to evacuate.

You mentioned this in relation to the Camp Fire, and that one is…yeah, that one was so bad. There’s a lot that goes into making evacuation decisions, and unfortunately studies have shown that a lot of emergency officials still believe the myth that people will panic if you give them too much information about a disaster. This leads to delays in evacuations, among other things. Also, evacuations are expensive, and that makes officials hold back. Plus, there’s the “cried wolf” effect where if it turns out the evacuation WASN’T needed, the next time it IS needed, people will be less likely to go, which again makes officials hold back.

With the Camp Fire, though, I don’t know if any of that specifically was what was at play. That thing just moved FAST. Also, this was a small mountain town. There were not a lot of ways out, just thin mountain roads. I guarantee those officials who made the evacuation call hesitated because they knew people WOULD get stuck on the few potential roads to safety. They weren’t making a choice about evacuation, they were making a choice on where they wanted people to be when the fire DID hit. Because it was going to hit. So do they concentrate people all in one spot, on a road that itself won’t burn but will be completely surrounded, or do they keep people spaced out all over town hoping that pockets of it might be safe? And they had to make that decision at the drop of a hat, knowing people were likely to die either way.

Fires are, in my opinion, the most terrifying thing to have to manage an evacuation for. They are both incredibly quick, but also potentially long lasting. They can shift direction at a moment’s notice. They can do things you never knew they could do. They can consume absolutely massive areas. They can die down and pop back up when you least expect it. And to be the person making the decision on how to handle that must be a very, very heavy weight.

👋🏻 People in positions of power just waving their hands.

Some do, some don’t. There are so, so many amazing people out there who care about this stuff and are doing their best to address these issues. But they need support. Taking over the department of transportation isn’t the answer, your local emergency management department is. Check out what their emergency plans look like, they should be on your county and state websites. Read through them, find the holes, go to meetings, contact your representatives. Be a nuisance to Congress RIGHT NOW.

🎓 Disaster education

Lastly, to @kyraneko’s point about needing better disaster education, yes! Yes we do! I think one of FEMA’s weakest points is its lack of addressing and helping individuals directly prior to a disaster, rather than in large groups. I’m working on it. Got a big project in the works that will, hopefully, start addressing this issue. And that’s not including the PhD.

Sooooooo….yeah! :D That ended up a lot longer than I thought, lol. Hope some of it was interesting to those of you who have made it to the end.

So I have a friend from high school who is a cop. (Yes, I KNOW.) I shared a photo on Facebook of a packed highway of people attempting to evacuate from Hurricane Milton, all while the lanes going in the opposite direction were open and empty. And my Facebook post was basically me screaming, “Open the other side of the highway and reverse it so that people can GET OUT.”

His response was essentially, “Yeah, that is *really* difficult for us to do.” Not in a condescending way, because he genuinely isn’t a huge asshole. (Yes, I KNOW.)

And then I may have vented in my response, in which I tried not to imply that the police were a problem. Because to be honest, I don’t see this as a police problem. I see this as how we have fucked ourselves as a nation by making ourselves so dependent on cars.

There is that poll on this site – or multiple polls, at this point – asking how long people can tolerate being in their cars. And the thing is, Americans (and Canadians as well, I am imagining) have almost no other options. We have to be used to spending a good 12 hours in a car without breaking a sweat. Everything in this country is built around being in a car. There’s a reason when you ask us how far away a place is from somewhere else, we normally give that distance in hours and not miles.

Air travel sucks. It sucks for a multitude of reasons – cost, the hassle of dealing with security, the time suck, etc. – and in an emergency, only a select few are going to be able to use it to get away from a hurricane. And that’s one of the few disasters where air travel is an optional escape.

Train travel sucks. Amtrak is not something you’re gonna be complaining about if you’re trying to get away from whatever disaster you need to evacuate from. But next to so many other countries, Amtrak looks like we’ve been receiving other countries’s leftover railway systems from the 70s. It also doesn’t go everywhere. I live in northeastern Pennsylvania near Scranton, which prides itself on its history in the train industry. We have a museum and everything. We have multiple things named after that museum, including the Steamtown marathon which is happening tomorrow.

Can you get on a passenger train in Scranton? Nope.

(The main argument against this always seems to be that people will come here from New York City and commit crimes, which is hilarious considering if somebody wanted to come here from New York City and commit crimes it’s only a 2.5-hour drive.)

Anyway, disasters.

If the only option you’re gonna give most people to get out of areas of Florida that are being targeted by hurricanes or areas of California that suffer from wildfires or places in the Midwest that face flooding are cars, then we need a better fucking emergency management system regarding transportation in this country. You can’t just sit there and mock people for not evacuating because they can’t or won’t when getting away from Milton meant sitting on highway for hours with absolutely no gas stations whatsoever nearby having any gas at all. (It just makes me think of those photos of people stranded on the highway in their cars in blizzards where people are like, “Now imagine imagine how bad it would be if all of those cars were electric!“ Well, all of those cars in that photo in that blizzard run on gas and they’re fucking stranded, sooooooo.)

Look, we can change the transportation system in this country. we did it before and we can do it again. We used to have more train options, fewer highways. My small hometown had a fucking trolley in the 40s. Now, if you don’t have a car here, you’re stuck. You can’t even get Uber here. if a wildfire started here and surrounded the town, it would be a clusterfuck.

Regardless of how you feel about the police, if police and fire departments in this country cannot organize an evacuation on a highway in a way that will reduce the backup so that tens of thousands of people aren’t sitting in their cars when a hurricane hits, that’s a problem – not just for those people, but for the police, and the fire department, and emergency management in general.

The people in charge of emergency management are just people, just human. I’m researching the Camp Fire in 2018 right now, and you had a bunch of people calling 911 saying, “I can see a huge fire off to the east. Are we safe? Should we evacuate?” The 911 operators could only work off the information they had. They could have told people to evacuate earlier, but Cal Fire didn’t anticipate the strength of the fire. Which is understandable. Nobody could anticipate the strength of that fire. But the 911 operators were sitting in an office with no windows, and they had no idea what was going on the east. They couldn’t look out and see exactly what was happening. If they could have, they probably would have told people to leave as soon as possible much sooner than they were told to. Instead, they waited for official confirmation, and when they did start telling people to evacuate, traffic managed to back up in a small town of 25,000 people until many of them were trapped in an unimaginable hellscape.

When people need to evacuate from a disaster, and they stay instead, far too many people - including those in positions of power – just kind of wave their hands and say, “Well, we tried.” No, we didn’t. This country made not trying its watchword, and now we’re at a point where unless you own a car, which is a luxury a lot of people cannot afford in this economy, escaping from disaster is impossible. So you can get in your car or somebody else’s car and go sit on a highway and hope your gas doesn’t run out, since none of the gas stations for 100 miles have any gas to give you, or you can stay in your house and hope you don’t die.

Sometimes, I really wish somebody would make me the head of the department of transportation. I would demand an absurd amount of money to build a better train system, to provide better transportation options for smaller towns, to provide extensive training for rescue personnel in managing evacuations like the clusterfuck in Florida this week. I would become an absolute fucking nuisance to Congress. I would be asking for money left and right to make it so that our only options as Americans weren’t to get into cars we can barely afford these days and attempt to organize our own evacuations from the growing number of natural disasters in this country.

Y’all keep posting these polls about how long you can tolerate being in a car at the same time that tens of thousands of Floridians were sitting on highways trying to get away from Tampa so they wouldn’t die in a hurricane.

We can tolerate being in a car all goddamn day. It’s because we don’t have a fucking choice, even when it’s life or death.

[mushroom-kin]

The Oboe section - Xianyun, Nahida, Tighnari

This is part of a very complicated Orchestra AU cooked up by my friends @h4msanta and @kanonavi, I will leave the explaining to them when ever they feel like telling the world about it. The document of this is currently 9 pages long.

They are the oboe section of an University Orchestra group. Xianyun is a professor that just ended up joining, Nahida is a genius prodigy who is a student at this university when everyone else thinks she is the daughter of some professor, Tighnari is wind section lead who is very helpful but can be strict at times.

This is also to celebrate both Nahida and Xianyun on banner! I hope everyone gets who they want. And I am going to try my best pulling for a Xianyun while she is still on banner.

[bucket-puns]

Old limbus women but one of them is my OC LMAOOOO

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Truly sorry people have forgotten the whole "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything" adage. But also that others are sending you the not so nice things that are being said. Like, that definitely kinda sucks too. Best to you and focusing on things that make you happy!

Oh god everyone's being so nice now I'm so embarrassed.

You're very kind dear. Well the people sending me stuff are only sending me nice things! At least on the main post! But then there will be comments or replies that complain about it - oh I don't like them anymore because they wrote BT, etc.

(Side note - BT stands for BuckTaylor so people using it for BuckTommy - dear GOD please stop. The ship names are confusing enough with y'all picking like ten of them. Please. I am smol and confuséd.)

So the people sending this stuff are well-intentioned. I only meant to explain why (among many other reasons) I won't listen to the (again, well-intentioned) people who say oh my gosh you're missing out on all the kind things people are saying on these other sites! I appreciate all that kindness, really I do and I'm so very lucky to have such enthusiasm and such love for my writing. But I would honestly rather miss out on some of it if it means that I'm protected from seeing the more spoiled or bad faith actors. I have seen very very little 'discourse' over this whole ship war that's sprung up and I'm glad for that, but part of how I've avoided it is by purposefully staying very much in my lane, not go looking through tags, and honestly even deeply limiting who I follow.

Honestly I don't let it usually bother me. 90% of people are so kind and lovely, and I know that the people being angry are not the majority. And I doubt that most of the people complaining even view it as all that deep, they're just venting because they're annoyed and being overly dramatic as we tend to be in fandom because acting overly dramatic is how we do everything around here (hell knows I do it too). I'm just really struggling in my 'real life' and having a bad day so it just kind of got to me, especially since my next three fics are BuddieTommy and I won't be publishing any Buddie until Halloween, and I was feeling kinda low like great, I'm gonna publish these and people will talk shit I guess. Not fun! I gotta say!

But I am and will be okay. I honestly did not expect my inbox to explode the way it just did when I vented in those tags. I, uh, don't expect people to care? that much? which sounds bad but I just mean that I don't expect people to pay all that much attention to me. So it's very sweet that people are sending me love and support.

Thank you for your kindness and thank you to everyone else. I really don't want this to be a Thing so I'm answering all other asks privately. Thank you dears.

[ghostbeam]

Cool. So I guess this really was my hero academia or whatever the fuck ever

[murdererofthumbs]

Listen, although I do find it pretty exciting to see Kendall entering his Evil Era and actually becoming a killer, I can’t stop thinking about the consequences of him leaking all the shitty mud information they have on Logan. Like yeah, PR-wise that might be a great idea, it might actually solidify his position as a CEO (and he is obviously going to try and fuck up Matsson deal and take over the Waystar - I don’t know why he would want to captain the fucking sinking Titanic, but okay). But on the other hand, all the dirt coming out about Logan will be potentially catastrophic for Roman. Apart from the fact that Kendall is very clearly betraying his brother, literally like 5 seconds after he preached about them being a team; Roman will very likely suffer the most if stuff about Logan being an abusive father comes out.

First, it will flip his whole viewpoint upside down - he is so deep in denial and so trauma-bonded to Logan that he doesn’t even acknowledge his abuse, not even when in happens in real time. He doesn’t want to see his father as a monster and as his abuser, because that would actually require him to accept that he was a victim, that he was this beaten dog that everyone already sees him as (to one degree or another). Not to mention all the lies he tells himself about Logan and him being a good dad will go straight down the drain, and can you imagine what happens when something you believed for 40-or-so years cracks down in front of you? Kendall is about to break his reality.

Another aspect is that exposing Roman’s abuse to the whole world will likely destroy any and all opportunities that Roman ever had when it comes to rising to power (even if I’m unsure how much he actually cares about becoming a CEO). He might get some sympathy points, although I very much doubt that he will ever accept that form of pity from anyone. His image will be forever tainted and solidified as “the abused one” or the “one that was hit by his dad”. Can you imagine Roman’s reaction when that whole shitshow leaks? He does say at some point in the preview that he is finished, and although it might allude to Gerri putting out the whole dick pic situation, it might also very well be that his public image will forever now revolve around how his dad hit and abused him (his dad who was essentially his god in more than one way, who he was, and is trauma bonded to, who he came back to time and time again).

Kendall has a tendency of using his siblings trauma to forward his own position (even when he wanted to one up Logan in episode 2 by bringing up Roman’s and Connor’s trauma) and this is no different. But it’s a very easy way for him to blow up whatever alliance was ever between sibs. So yeah, I think Kendall as a killer is a great thing to watch, but also… well, Roman girl in me is already screaming in the void from the possible pain we might come to watch unravel in real time.

[magentagalaxies]

also speaking of (date post + kithfluencer post) on my coffee-date today i of course got on the topic of kids in the hall (in my defense they asked about the doc i'm making lmao) and they hadn't heard of scott thompson before so they were asking me to explain what his work was like and long story less long that's how i ended up essentially reciting the "faggos" sketch to my crush this morning

[joanofexys]

i need to shut the fuck up about my name before i just start to annoy y'all i'm sorry i haven't stopped complaining abt it i don't even know why it's causing such a problem for me

[moe-broey]

Miitopia.........

[dontmindme2600]

I had no idea Vashwood was so popular when I first watched Trigun, I find it funny that I just saw the first episode they were in together and was like “Yep. These bitches are gay” with like no context beforehand that they were shipped together so often, or that Trigun even had a fandom

[muminous]

txt AND their fans' desire for them to literally be shinee/"pick up where they left off" is so strange

[mxdotpng]

castle in the sky posts on my dash. making me think about my castle in the sky zestiria au

[specterpants]

well my laptop keyboard is broken. that might be the end of me for artfight sadly depending on how long it takes to get fixed

[fidenciocryptidcreechur]

Wow haha

Life really is so much better when you block stuff you don't like and don't need to worry about

Coming across fandom interpretations and au's that give me the ick and with a simple press of a button i don't have to see it

No worries

It's great

You're allowed your opinion, it can be as wrong and terrible or just off cuff as you want, I'm just gonna block it because I don't like it

I don't even gotta say shit to them either and they won't ever really know

I go back to having fun and forget about it

YAHOO

[pa-pa-plasma]

super funny how you can beg & beg & beg & beg & plead & beg with a doctor for help with a debilitating illness & they're like "here's a prescription for a cream that will help" & you go to the pharmacy to get it & they're like "ooh sorry, this one costs $500. but the brand name version is $600 so really it's a deal!" & so you have to pay for it with the $501 in your bank account & then you get home & put it on & the next day your skin is on fire despite washing the cream off asap & you go back to the doctor & they're like. "huh. weird. idk then man maybe go see a specialist?" & send you on your way & you go home with this stupid worse than useless $500 cream & a few months later you finally get to go see the specialist & they glance at you & say "idk man maybe just stop being dramatic?? lol" & so you go home (again) after being berated & you're sitting there & go fuck it & look it up & you see some random guy like "oh yeah witch hazel works" & so you put witch hazel on & within ten minutes it does, in fact, work. *through gritted teeth* doctors are so fun

[aspeckof-stardust]

.