A Bug’s Life, 1998

@official-boob-posts have you been here yet?

slowburn to see why I was tagge

shout out to I will follow you into the dark for being the song of all time. death cab for cutie just nailed it. there's never been a song as much as I will follow you into the dark. it's so song. like?? hello?? if heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied, illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs, if there's no one beside you when your soul embarks, I will follow you into the dark. that's all there is to it.

I think about British Airways Flight 5390 a lot

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.

"I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case.  He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials. Like every other defendant, he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But unfortunately the way this has been handled so far his rights are being violated. And as you know, Your Honor, there’s a wealth of case law guaranteeing his rights to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place yet here — in fact it’s just the opposite of what’s been happening. 

He’s a young man, and he is being treated like a human pingpong ball between two warring jurisdictions here.

These federal and state prosecutors are coordinating with one another at the expense of him. They have conflicting theories in their indictment, and they are literally treating him like he is some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle. 

He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career. It was absolutely unnecessary. He’s been cooperative with law enforcement. He’d been in custody for over a week. He waived extradition. He was cooperative at all accounts. There was no reason for the NYPD and everybody to have these big assault rifles — that frankly I had no idea it was in their arsenal — and to have all the press there the media there. It was perfectly choreographed. 

And what was the New York City Mayor doing at this press conference, Your Honor? That just made it utterly political. And as your honor knows under Loro v. Charles, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has held it to be clearly established that these staged perp walks to the media unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement objective is unconstitutional. And I submit that there was zero law enforcement objective to do that sort of perp walk. There’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever. 

And frankly, Your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone about the presumption of innocence that he, too, is afforded dealing with his own issues. And, frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione. 

And there are consequences to this. 

He has a right to a fair trial. And I just want to put on the record statements that the mayor made publicly about my client. Nothing saying “alleged” for example. And he said “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we’re leading from the front. I’m not just going to allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city of New York that I love.’” And he wanted to show symbolism. 

Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty. And the mayor was talking to jurors — future potential jurors that elected him. Those are the people that elected him that he is talking to and calling this man a terrorist.

So, Your Honor, I just want to make a record of this and put everyone on notice that this has to stop, and my client is entitled to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence."

the menswear guy added mr beast to his kill count

There's a phenomenon in left-wing circles where initially reasonable statements and concepts get repeated ad nauseum until they not only lose their meaning but transform into deeply bigoted ideas.

The idea "there is no single white culture," is true because white is a concept created to describe the powerful position in Western societies. There are many different cultures, who's members are often white. But this idea became "white people have no culture" which is just not true, deeply dehumanizing, and harmful, especially to people who look white but experience marginalization because of their culture.

Another example might be cultural appropriation, which perhaps should be understood as a misrepresentation or exploitation of the cultural practices of another, especially where the person exploiting does so for personal gain, without acknowledgment. But now, people have basically transformed this into "when somebody does something from a culture they weren't raised in" or "when a particular race or ethnicity behaves in a way that's different from how they normally do" which promotes racial and cultural stereotypes and attempts to control the behaviors of people based on their race, ethnicity, and culture.

Adding to this, the sentiment that white people "have no culture" is based in the idea that culture is a deviation from whiteness. "Cultural" food, "cultural" dress, etc., is all shorthand for "things done by people who aren't white". To say that white people have no culture is to further other non-white people, making them the deviation from the "norm".

White people do have culture. Rich white people, poor white people, white people from Canada and the U.S. and Great Britain all have cultures that are different from one another. Claiming that they don't is a tool in the furthering of white supremacy and we (leftists) gotta knock it the fuck off.

what happens when people learn the buzzwords without unpacking the underlying ideology is that they take words designed to challenge the status quo that they don't understand & reinterpret them in the context of the white supremacist values they do understand.

Like they did with the term 'woke'. It's just become another buzzword.

assorted Crowley commentary

Jordan Studdard infringed upon and adapted my work.

My Instagram:www.instagram.com/woshibaii

My Tiktok:www.tiktok.com/@woshibai_art

"Uhh AFAB transfem people could be intersex-"

Without looking it up, tell me what types of intersex people would be assigned female at birth and simultaneously need to transition to being female. I don't think you know, because most of you were just using intersex people as a rhetorical shield for your real audience - cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women.

I'm intersex, so I'll tell you.

Essentially: Afab doesn't mean "fully recognized and viewed by society as female" nor does it mean someone with a typical female body/experience. It describes an event that happened at the beginning of a person's life. This event can have an effect on the experiences of people later in life but for intersex people specifically this event is often either traumatic or just plain inaccurate and doesn't describe how we actually live.

Many intersex people, regardless of agab, feel as though they have to transition (both socially and medically) into their gender. Sometimes this takes the form of people who were assigned female and have transitioned into being women.

And before anyone says it: No. Often times afab intersex people are not seen as women or even remotely female. There's a lot of people who believe that ALL intersex people, regardless of agab, are "males with DSDs". I myself have been told that I'm not female and there's nothing I could do to be female.

And since you all clearly want our trauma rather than "because our identities matter even if you don't get it" as a response, here are some examples of intersex people being forcibly feminized later in life than most of you all pretend happens to us:

As for "cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women" - just say you don't see hormone disorders as intersex. Fun fact - for most of my life, I was diagnosed with PCOS. For all of my life, I had parents and doctors neglecting heart issues. Parents who got angry when I wanted to see a doctor.

Then I found out I had CAH this entire fucking time. Which looks like PCOS in certain aspects, but isn't. CAH comes with critical heart issues and is often met with cosmetic surgery on infant genitalia to reduce clitoral size, despite this not impacting the heart.

I didn't know I had that fucking surgery until this year despite being sexually active for nearly 20 years and always having complications and weird looking labia! :) My lifelong heart issues never even got medicated until I was 28!! My parents intentionally medically neglected me to avoid me finding out I was intersex!!

I'm saying this, not because I consider myself a trans woman (I don't), but because intersex people with hormone disorders are OFTEN who you bigots are referring to when you're talking about "cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women" or "cis women fetishizing intersex people" or anything else in that fucking horrible, obnoxious, intersexist realm. Hormone disorders are called hormone disorders because doctors want intersex traits to be a fucking disorder. Not because of the heart issues or other actually treatable issues that ARE DISORDERED! And y'all aligning with this mentality is so fucking horribly bioessentialist and nasty.

Your limited understanding of natural human sex diversity does not give you the right to define transness for other perisex trans people, much less intersex trans people. Your inability to understand that intersex children and teens are ALSO reassigned and mutilated is YOUR ignorance, and demanding OUR trauma to educate your ignorant fucking ass is some nasty, pathetic bullshit. The fucking backbone on people like this who pretend to give a shit about marginalized people while directly harming us being made of pure fucking goop. Cowardice.

every time a ship does or doesn't become canon destiel gets brought up as queerbait, over and over. destiel 👏 is 👏 fucking 👏 canon 👏 we 👏 didn't 👏 get 👏 queerbaited 👏 but they certainly did pull a bury your gays for both dean and cas.

I would like to address something that has come up several times since I relaunched my computer recommendation blog two weeks ago. Part of the reason that I started @okay-computer and that I continue to host my computer-buying-guide is that it is part of my job to buy computers every day.

I am extremely conversant with pricing trends and specification norms for computers, because literally I quoted seven different laptops with different specs at different price-points *today* and I will do more of the same on Monday.

Now, I am holding your face in my hands. I am breathing in sync with you. We are communicating. We are on the same page. Listen.

Computer manufacturers don't expect users to store things locally so it is no longer standard to get a terabyte of storage in a regular desktop or laptop. You're lucky if you can find one with a 512gb ssd that doesn't have an obnoxious markup because of it.

If you think that the norm is for computers to come with 1tb of storage as a matter of course, you are seeing things from a narrow perspective that is out of step with most of the hardware out there.

I went from a standard expectation of a 1tb hdd five years ago to expecting to get a computer with a 1tb hdd that we would pull and replace with a 1tb ssd to expecting to get a computer that came with a 256gb ssd that we would pull and replace with a 1tb ssd, to just having the 256gb ssd come standard and and only seeking out more storage if the customer specifically requested it because otherwise they don't want to pay for more storage.

Computer manufacturers consider any storage above 256gb to be a premium feature these days.

Look, here's a search for Lenovo Laptops with 16GB RAM (what I would consider the minimum in today's market) and a Win11 home license (not because I prefer that, but to exclude chromebooks and business machines). Here are the storage options that come up for those specs:

You will see that the majority of the options come with less than a terabyte of storage. You CAN get plenty of options with 1tb, but the point of Okay-Computer is to get computers with reasonable specs in an affordable price range. These days, that mostly means half a terabyte of storage (because I can't bring myself to *recommend* less than that but since most people carry stuff in their personal cloud these days, it's overkill for a lot of people)

All things being equal, 500gb more increases the price of this laptop by $150:

It brings this one up by $130:

This one costs $80 more to go from 256 to 512 and there isn't an option for 1TB.

For the last three decades storage has been getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, to the point that storage was basically a negligible cost when HDDs were still the standard. With the change to SSDs that cost increased significantly and, while it has come down, we have not reached the cheap, large storage as-a-standard on laptops stage; this is partially because storage is now SO cheap that people want to entice you into paying a few dollars a month to use huge amounts of THEIR storage instead of carrying everything you own in your laptop.

You will note that 1tb ssds cost you a lot less than the markup to pay for a 1tb ssd instead of a 500gb ssd

In fact it can be LESS EXPENSIVE to get a 1tb ssd than a 500gb ssd.

This is because computer manufacturers are, generally speaking, kind of shitty and do not care about you.

I stridently recommend getting as much storage as you can on your computer. If you can't get the storage you want up front, I recommend upgrading your storage.

But also: in the current market (December 2024), you should not expect to find desktops or laptops in the low-mid range pricing tier with more than 512gb of storage. Sometimes you'll get lucky, but you shouldn't be expecting it - if you need more storage and you need an inexpensive computer, you need to expect to upgrade that component yourself.

So, if you're looking at a computer I linked and saying "32GB of RAM and an i7 processor but only 500GB of storage? What kind of nonsense is that?" Then I would like to present you with one of the computers I had to quote today:

A three thousand dollar macbook with the most recent apple silicon (the m4 released like three weeks ago) and 48 FUCKING GIGABYTES OF RAM with a 512gb ssd.

You can't even upgrade that SSD! That's an apple that drive isn't going fucking anywhere! (don't buy apple, apple is shit)

The norms have shifted! It sucks, but you have to be aware of these kinds of things if you want to pay a decent price for a computer and know what you're getting into.

I think this is a prime example of how manufacturers are pushing, rather than responding to, the market.

There is no consumer who regularly wants to store their information on the cloud. As a backup, yes, but not for daily use. There are consumers who don't care (and don't know the difference), and consumers who do not want it. But there is no one who actually desires it as a normal thing for regular use.

But, since you can charge a regular fee for cloud storage, and you can mark up computer prices for more storage, they are not providing consumers with the storage they WANT, and making software progressively *less* usable to push us to the option they want us to take.

UK petition: An independent evaluation of the Cass review on child gender services

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Deadline: 12 June 2025

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