I tend to forget about it and then when I remember it again I’m like “Oh yeah! There’s like an entire country sized stretch of land that’s just fucking GONE.
well…. “gone”….
Things I have learned since making this post;
The running theory (I can’t remember if it was definitive proof or not but I try not to make concrete statements on history any more) is that what caused the sinking of Doggerland was not the slow heating up of the Earth leading to a gradual melting of ice and snow causing the rise of the ocean….
What flooded Doggerland was a massive fucking CHUNK of Norway FELL INTO THE OCEAN and it caused the largest tsunami we have physical evidence for on earth and it fucking flooded Doggerland IN ONE SINGULAR DAY with a rush of water so strong, large and powerful it literally had the force to rip people to shreds when it hit them
I do think about Doggerland, fairly frequently! And I feel it’s important to point out that its disappearance absolutely was because of “the slow heating up of the Earth leading to a gradual melting of ice and snow causing the rise of the ocean”. By the time of the tsunami, the land area would already have been reduced to a handful of small islands.
In general, a true tsunami (caused by displaced water) is never going to permanently submerge an area of land, because the water displacement is temporary and it will return to where it came from (causing huge damage on the way, of course). However, with islands that were already barely above sea-level, it’s definitely possible that such a huge inundation just obliterated their topsoil and left them below water level.
It’s hard to say, though, because the end of the last Ice Age was a wild time for water moving around and getting into places it shouldn’t. In particular, as the glaciers melted you’d often get huge meltwater lakes forming behind dams of ice and rubble which might then burst, suddenly dumping nearly inconceivable amounts of water all over the downstream terrain. One of these bodies of water, Lake Agassiz in North America, was so huge that it covered multiple states, and it’s thought that it drained very suddenly into the Atlantic ocean about 8000 years ago (i.e. contemporary with the flooding of Doggerland), dumping so much water into the ocean that global sea levels rose 1-2m over the course of a couple of years.
And if you’re wondering - yes, it’s theorised that this event, or the combination of the others like it, was responsible for the flood myths that exist in so many cultures. Coastal and lowland settlements around the world would have found themselves in a period of time where the sea just kept rising - not overnight, but inexorably and seemingly without any end in sight. Many, many cultures would have retreated to higher ground, only to find a few months later that the water was once more lapping at their doors. In some ways I find that even more profoundly terrifying than the idea of a wall of water sweeping everything away.
It’s ok to admit that you are in fact JRR Tolkien, OP.
[id; a tweet by nathan bernhardt @jonberhardt: “why do marvel movies do so much stuff in CGI surely they could have just had wardrobe-” makeup and wardrobe is a union crew. the CGI animation sweatshop is not. it really is that simple. end id/]
This is probably why Cats was a CGI nightmare. Rather than higher a costume designer to re-imagine the leggings and fur hats for a modern audience. Which would have required hiring union work people to make the hundreds of costumes they’d have needed they just CGI ed some cat fur onto their actors.
Did the CGI team do their best and give it their all, probably. But they shouldn’t have been hired. They shouldn’t have been put in a position of making costumes and worlds and extras, and, and, and. They should have been hired for what CGI is best at, special effects when physical special effects aren’t possible and the rest should’ve been left to physical craftspeople.
There’s nothing wrong with CGI when used sparingly and married with physical effects and costumes to enhance the realness of the world but when you plop some actors in morph suits on a green screen set and just replace everything with CGI your movie sucks.
Compare the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and you’ll understand what I mean.
CGI people deserve a union, deserve respect, and deserve not to be treated as an isnta movie factory. They deserve to be allowed to hone their craft and dedicate time and energy to creating the kind of world-building effects we all know and love.
wow I didn’t know fuckin chocolate eggs were gendered
OKAY LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT THE FUCKING PINK EGGS.
I work at a concession stand in an ice rink. We sell a bunch of chocolate bars and snacks and shit including Kinder Surprise eggs.
So one day this woman comes up to the counter with her two little kids, a girl who’s probably about 6 or 7 and a little boy, maybe 3 or 4. The mom asks what they want, the little girl points at the Kinder eggs and says “One of those!”. I asked if she wanted the white or the pink egg. She said pink. The little boy pointed to the Kinder eggs and says “One of those!”. I asked if he wanted the white or the pink egg. He said pink. HOLY SHIT IT WAS LIKE I OPENED THE GATES OF HELL. The mom absolutely FLIPPED and was like “YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE PINK EGG IT’S ONLY FOR GIRLS. YOU CAN GET THE WHITE ONE OR NOTHING AT ALL”. The little boy looked at his mom and said “But I want the same as ______ (whatever the sister’s name was)”. The mom completely ignored him and turned to me and gave me a death glare. “He can have the white egg.”
I had to give a little boy a white egg when he wanted the pink so that he could be the same as his big sister and he started crying. The mom just reiterated that the pink egg was for girls and told him that boys don’t cry.
And this is why we shouldn’t gender fucking chocolate eggs.
This is actually a relatively new thing, originally Kinder Eggs were all white like the ones on the left. I don’t know at what point they decided to make ‘girl’s’ Kinder Eggs, but I do not like it.
Holy shit do not even get me started on how moms constantly police their sons’ masculinity. I’ve seen mothers do it WAY more often than fathers.
I used to work at a bakery that specialized in creating custom cakes. We had this feature where we could print out any image off the computer and put it on a cake (with rice paper). One day this lady comes in and asks for an image we had of the baby Sesame Street characters. They’re all together with cake and confetti, and she asks, “Oh, well since it’s a boy, can you please change all of the little pink confettis into blue confetti? I mean, he’s a boy, you know.”
Confetti.
The fucking confetti.
It barely covered 5% of the image.
Another instance was when a lady asked me for an image of four superheroes to put on her son’s cake because her son was turning four. She admitted to not knowing any superheroes, so I offered the most obvious choice—The Fantastic Four. I pulled up a picture of them and she goes, “Oh no no, we can’t have that. Let’s do another one.” Confused, I pulled up a Justice League one with Batman, Superman, The Flash, and Wonder Woman. Again, she said no. I asked her if she needed anything specific (she didn’t know superheroes, why was she so picky?), and she just said, “Oh, it’s just that he’s a boy, you know? We can’t have a girl superhero on his cake.”
I nearly lost my shit. I did temporarily lose my customer service face and ask why, women have been superheroes all the time, Wonder Woman is iconic, etc etc and she was like, “It’s just that my son has been playing with Barbie dolls lately and I really don’t want him to end up… well, you know.”
This shit has got to stop. When you teach boys that certain things are only for girls, you’re limiting them and you’re teaching them that girls or “girly things” are bad. If you want gender equality as an adult, you better make DAMN sure that you’re teaching the same thing to your kids.
So this woman did not want her son to turn out ‘you know’ and her plan for that was to get him a cake with spandex-clad manly men AND ONLY MEN on it? I don’t think she thought that one through too well…
in sociology class we were talking about gender being assigned to objects and one of the male students started saying how forward thinking he is because he buys his daughter sports equipment and “boy toys”. I asked if he’d do the same if he had a son and he said “Of course I’d buy my son sports equipment”. I clarified “No, would you buy him dolls and other toys that are thought of as being for girls”. He turned around and didn’t answer.
Parents will pat themselves on the back for letting their little girls play baseball but a little boy with a Barbie is still considered an affront to society
Fuck everything.
My father was one of these parents (along with several other harmful issues!), and even though I know, for an absolute fact, that his world views and ways are entirely wrong, this shit he tried to ingrain into me still effects me to this day.
Parents, don’t ruin your fucking kids by treating them like this.
When my youngest was maybe 4 or 5, I was sewing a little bag out of pink cupcake fabric. He saw it and asked who it was for, and I said I didn’t know yet, and he asked if it could be for him.
So it became his “hambag” (it was actually like a zippy pouch with no strap but I wasn’t going to correct hambag I’m not made of STONE) which was used to store the most essential items (toy cars)
I was at a friend’s engagement party and I was telling him about this because cuuuuute, right?
And his uncle or some shit interrupted our conversation to tell me to be careful lest my kid turn out “you know.”
Like full on burst into a conversation to tell me I was turning my son into some kind of deviant by letting him transport his toy cars in a little sewing experiment.
Alright, weird sister stuff aside, this is kinda awesome. I love when writers aren’t afraid to show that characters have friends that can help and don’t try to always have the ‘macho man solves every problem by himself’ thing going.
Also, 100% the only reason why Wally wasn’t already there is because he’s time traveling rn, I will not except any other alternative thanks
A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now
