#virtual water

[aguilarmia]

LITERATURE FOR ENGLISH

1. Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet's Most Precious Resource", essay by Tony Allan (England)

The essay "Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet's Most Precious Resource" by Tony Allan (England) is an important work in relation to water conservation because this academic essay presents a new vision on water consumption. Allan considers water as a global resource, and analyzes the impact of trade in goods and services on water consumption.

The essay addresses the topic of water conservation in several ways. First, Allan introduces the concept of "virtual water." Virtual water is water that is used to produce goods and services.

Secondly, Allan analyzes the impact of trade in goods and services on water consumption. Allan argues that trade in goods and services can lead to increased water consumption in already water-scarce regions as mentioned in the following passage: "Trade in goods and services can lead to increased water consumption." of water in regions that already have water scarcity. For example, if we import food from a region that is water scarce, we are increasing water consumption in our own region."

The author's message about water conservation is clear and concise: we must act now to protect this vital resource. Water scarcity is a global challenge that requires a collective effort. By taking steps to reduce water consumption, we can help ensure a sustainable future for our planet.

Furthermore, Allan argues that the concept of virtual water is an important tool for understanding water scarcity. By tracking the flow of virtual water through the global economy, we can identify the sources of water scarcity and develop strategies to address it.

The essay offers several tips on water conservation. Some of these tips are:

• Support companies that use sustainable water management practices. Sustainable companies transform how they capture, manage and analyze water data at every stage of their operations.

• Improve the efficiency of water use in agriculture. This can be done by adopting more sustainable agricultural practices, such as drip irrigation.

• Reduce water waste. This can be done by repairing leaks in pipes and reducing the amount of water used in industry.

In summary, the essay shows us the impact of trade in goods and services on water consumption, and invites us to take measures to reduce virtual water consumption. This work is a call to action for all of us to take steps to conserve water.

Water is a vital resource that we must protect for future generations.

[beetleandfox]

I love how unsanitized The Terror feels. Like there’s grime everywhere. You can tell those men smell bad. When they do surgery you can hear the bone being cut, when they get sick they look genuinely ill. The main character’s actor even has pockmarks, he LOOKS like he could be from the 1800s! And idk, I think it’s cool that we’re so aware of the characters’ carnal desires. They’re hungry, thirsty, freezing, etc, and it is so obvious that they have a body with needs!!

I think this also accounts for how horny the show feels, even though everyone is bundled up 90% of the time and there are no real romantic subplots. Besides the fact that it’s a very carnal show, it just has the intimacy and grime of true horniness. Is this thing on

[liquial]

Sonic Adventures 2 for the GameCube (2001)

[visionsofpandora]

So'lek smiles and I caught it!! 😍

[day0fnight]

fatal frame: maiden of black water - loneliness of the misty night

( scenery )

developer: koei tecmo

[lucilassie]

Love is brightest in the dark. 🌊

[coffeelovingdragon]

✨️Eywa Ngahu✨️

May Eywa Be With You

[ghostoffuturespast]

For the @fright-night-city event.

Prompt: something in the water

I hadn't planned to take VP for this event since I can't really set up shots on console. However, the lake in the Outlands called to me last night... And I followed.

[dalekinapaintedparadise]

[glitchphotography]

Scenes from "The Liquid Halls of Modernity" The Offshore Firm, Volume II (2023) --

// 1 min 50 sec video piece made for "Patchwork Glitch" an exhibition of narrative-based glitch arts at the ImnotArt Gallery in Chicago. September 1-14, 2023. //   Retrodystopic hyper-corporate spaces created with “Life Stage: Virtual House” (1993) for 3DO and composited with corrupted "Super Battleship" ROMs and the intro to "H2O: Just Add Water"

[itsdragonnnn]

Pandora holds many dangers.

[mewvore]

I just want to say that your blog makes me giggle and also that I’m glad tumblr hasn’t nuked you.

they've tried but I'm built different (like a tardigrade)

[oddygaul]

Avatar: The Way of Water

You know, not that I have any particular faith that this series will make anything of it, but The Way of Water actually raises some interesting questions about the way consciousness and the transfer of self work in the Avatar universe.

My first watch, I treated Recom Quaritch as just an excuse to bring back the most charismatic antagonist the series had – that he was more or less the same one-dimensional character as before, with a quick handwave for how his return was possible. But they’re honestly doing more than that with his writing. This isn’t Quaritch back from the dead with a new lease on life; his “I am not that man” speech to Spider is not a shirking of responsibility, and his iconic skull crushing scene is not an uncaring show of stoicism. 

Recom Quaritch is terrified. 

When he sees Neytiri’s arrows, he is experiencing primal fear. When he sees Spider, left behind alone on an alien world, he regrets the callousness of his former self. He sees where Quaritch’s bravado led him, sees what the end result of his mistakes was, and decides to firmly reject that he’s the same person as the original. He has Quaritch’s memories in his mind, but he doesn’t feel they belong to him. When he crushes Quaritch’s skull, it represents a refusal to honor the man the RDA assumes him to be: Recom Quaritch is his own man, and he will make his own choices about his future.

I always appreciate it when sci-fi takes this approach towards ‘revival’ via a backed-up consciousness. A lot of my favorites explore its implications – the Culture books, for example, dive deep into the drawbacks of a backup-based system – but all too often, they’re glossed over and treated as a magical solution to death and danger.

I don’t care how thorough and precise your backup is, unless there’s some instantaneous, streaming consciousness-transferring device, if you die and your backup is placed in a new body, that is NOT you. Sure, to everyone else, it might as well be: as far as they can tell, you look and act the same as you always have. But YOU, your stream of consciousness, your awareness, the ongoing perception of the world that defines your life – that has ended, and no amount of backups can bring that back. It only makes sense that the revived’s sense of personhood might be drastically different.

It’s an interesting pivot, because the original Avatar sorta takes for granted the functionally seamless transfer of consciousness used in the Avatar system. Via the link unit, one’s mind can be ping-ponged back and forth between a human and Na’vi body as much as you want, in real-time, with only the sensation of waking up from a nap to show anything changed. Jake’s permanent transfer into his Na’vi body at the end works the same way, just using a big tree instead of the science tube: he simply closes his eyes as a human, and wakes up in his new body like nothing ever happened. The societal implications of this technology are staggering – people could functionally live forever by growing new bodies and instantly transferring over, for example – but it's used only as a plot contrivance.

That is to say, the first Avatar is fully disinterested in exploring the potential nuance of these ideas, and much more focused on really hammering home its comparisons between technology and the natural world; they want you to be thinking about the contrast between the Na’vi queues and the human link units, not some fiddly philosophical quandary. Still, now that The Way of Water has raised these questions, it would be cool if the future sequels – maybe the one set on Earth? – dig a little more into the horror inherent in recreating the minds of the dead.

Being in this headspace for this watch also made me realize how fucked it is to have an Avatar after the human it’s based on has died. In The Way of Water, we see Grace’s Avatar body, and it’s… well, it’s still there. It’s alive, submerged, and kicking… just with no mind inside, empty, a bespoke vessel made for one soul that just doesn’t exist anymore. Brutal.

—

Other thoughts:

The first Avatar relies on its adventure setpieces – Jake’s first bond with the ikran, the montages of running through Pandora by night – more than its action setpieces, which themselves are like, aight. Way of Water’s action, by contrast, legit kicks fucking ass start to finish. Consider:

-the slow-mo train derailing -the Metkayina ducking in and out of the water to avoid gunfire then leaping out to spear RDA chumps -the speedboats, crab mechs, and assault subs, all of which are infinitely more fun than Avatar’s clunky mechs, and the spectacular flips they do as they bounce across the surface of the ocean to explode on nearby rocks -the big whale doing straight-up Action Hero shit -Neytiri shooting a guy through another guy

Seriously, it’s killer. As someone that considers themselves fairly weary of fight scenes these days – so much of it is just noise with no art – I remain impressed after a rewatch.

[liquial]

Pokemon Snap ✦ 1999

[visionsofpandora]

Feeling a little worn out this week so I'm mostly going to post older shots I didn't clean up (hopefully not double posting, oops!) Petrified forest thanator

[the-labyrinth-of-me]

Valhalla Nursing Home + Overlap