#literally nothing else I avoided that show like the plague because I knew I'd watch it someday and didn't want any spoilers

[siryyeet]

The worst part about fmab so far to me has been listening to ed's voice and thinking "he sounds so young for someone that looks like 30" and then finding out he is not some 30 year old hot man with a cool ass design BUT A FUCKING 15 YEAR OLD. This is my personal hell

[spockandawe]

So, when I was in college, I used to intern at the navy yard in DC, and left a few months before my building had a shooter. I was pretty morbidly transfixed by... all of it, because I'd interned there for years, it all started right at my old desk, and some of my direct coworkers were showing up in news articles, and I read everything I could find about the situation. But what stuck with me, more viscerally than anything else, was security camera footage taken of people leaving the building. I've got no idea of population numbers, or density, but the place wasn't that spread out or tall (five stories), there were cubes but also two generous atriums, and there were two many-doored main entrances, plus four emergency exits I knew of, possibly two more in corners I didn't explore, and possibly another attached to the auditorium. This adds up to 6-9 exits.

I was in the middle of a doctorate about safety, human factors, etc., and there's a kind of... fallacy that a lot of people go into when attempting to model human behavior. They assume that people are 1) capable of behaving in optimal ways, and 2) will behave in optimal ways. No. Humans are stupid, and I will die on this hill. Literally, possibly! And it's not possible to achieve idealized flow, no matter how many people are trying (modeling shockwave traffic jams is a good example). Now, this was a pretty decent group to work with, it was on a military base, with a logical building layout (converted factory iirc), all adults, high concentration of military and ex-military personnel with at least some training in reacting to crises. Hiding in place was a viable option, which reduced the flow of people out of the building. An adult trained with a gun was actively shooting at people and there was real urgency to the evacuation.

Watching people hurry out down the halls to the emergency exits as fast as they could, and still moving barely faster than a walk was agonizing. It's been what, eight years? I still remember sitting in bed watching that. I heard all kinds of safety horror stories in grad school, but nothing drove it home as much as that. I saw the story about this dorm, and I'm still kind of in disbelief, because my first reaction was that people are going to die. College kids are going to die, because that's who's going to be crammed in here. It probably won't happen right away, or even soon, because it's usually long odds that a building burns down or something in the first year, but especially if they build more of these... I'm horrified wondering if one single ethical safety professional gave them a single piece of fucking feedback on this whole mess.

I don't know anything about building codes, and can only speak about mental health as an amateur (physical health would be its own nightmare, especially in light of a super transmissible plague, but yeah right, like we'll ever see one of THOSE these days ahahahaaaa), but this place is a horror story waiting to happen. If there's a fire, oh my god. I hadn't even processed the part where why yes, california is on fire an awful lot these days, because I still can't believe this is real. I'm screaming at my screen right now demanding to know who the fuck has run ANY kind of model on crowd flow. We have data! We have models! We have records of, for example, music concerts where shit went flammable and so many people died. And that's before you get into how surprisingly easy it is for a panicked crowd to trample or suffocate someone by accident. Or before you get into what happens if one of their two (TWO!!!!!!) exits is blocked.

So this is a bona fide nightmare! Evacuation speed for fewer people at lower density with three to four times as many fucking exits was genuinely horrifying to watch. I avoid safety engineering work in part because I don't think I'm careful or meticulous enough to be entrusted with people's lives. So now, either I'm appalled that the college cleared this building without ever once considering safety, or I'm incredibly fucking appalled that any person who claims to value safety or human lives could have possibly signed off on this building.

Every time I hear about something from California it's always the worst thing I've ever heard