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Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Maximum Sexy Pigeon posted:

A Cyclone is the same as a Hurricane, with only two differences.
One is the name, which seems purely regional, a Typhoon is also the same thing.

A cyclone in meteorological terms is just a general term for an air mass that's rotating around a low pressure center. A big tropical cyclone in the Atlantic is called a hurricane, in the northwest Pacific it's called a typhoon, down in the south Pacific the general term is used for the specific. A tornado is also a cyclone, as are polar lows and big Kansas-style mesocyclones.

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big trivia FAIL
May 9, 2003

"Jorge wants to be hardcore,
but his mom won't let him"

Come down to Mississippi, where hurricane and tornado season intersect

Centripetal Horse
Nov 22, 2009

Fuck money, get GBS

This could have bought you a half a tank of gas, lmfao -
Love, gromdul

-S- posted:

Come down to Mississippi, where hurricane and tornado season intersect

Like that's the worst thing about Mississippi.

Maximum Sexy Pigeon
Jun 5, 2008

We must never speak of this!

nockturne posted:

One of my mum's friends had survived Tracy. She didn't like to talk about it, and she also could never go back.

Resisting the urge to post too much about it so as not to spoil MSP's excellent retelling, but yeah, it was bad.

Oh man have it ready! I spent some time on the train today going over a book I have. It may be good or bad news for people to hear that I have a LOT of stuff to put up. I am even continuing the second chapter because of it.

Atreiden
May 4, 2008

Thought I would share this very well written and interesting article about a school trip that turned to disaster and was used as nazi propaganda in an attempt to strengthen the bond between Britain and Germany.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/06/fatal-hike-became-nazi-propaganda-coup?CMP=fb_gu

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer
Here's one about a young socialite in late 1800s Paris whose mother and brother ended up locking her in a room in her house for 25 years for daring to try and marry a lawyer they disproved of.

Slightly :nms: for the picture of her when they found her, naked and starved
http://www.mandatory.com/2015/02/06/the-miserable-imprisonment-of-blanche-monnier/

GOTTA STAY FAI
Mar 24, 2005

~no glitter in the gutter~
~no twilight galaxy~
College Slice

Hollismason posted:

If you want insane imagine you have responded to the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina and you are now the on site Ambulance crew for 10,000 or more people. You end up locking yourself in the med room because a angry crowd believes you are withholding medicine from people suffering delirium tremens and narcotic withdrawal. You are now trapped inside a small room for several days with no access to the outside and no one who knows where exactly you are because your batteries ran out on your radio. Meanwhile through out the ordeal people continually scream in pain/ terror /anger at you from beyond the door and you know if they break through they'll probably murder you. I know the guys this happened to.

Until now, I hadn't thought about how people experiencing withdrawal symptoms might behave during a disaster situation. So, thanks for that :smith:

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.

Centripetal Horse posted:

Like that's the worst thing about Mississippi.

I don't know about that. Have you ever tried a Chuck Wagon from a Mississippi gas station at 3am? That's the worst thing about Mississippi in my mind.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.
I've been outside during a couple of earthquakes and it's a strange experience, quite different from being inside. Sounds just starts coming from everywhere at once.

That Damn Satyr
Nov 4, 2008

A connoisseur of fine junk

Aesop Poprock posted:

Here's one about a young socialite in late 1800s Paris whose mother and brother ended up locking her in a room in her house for 25 years for daring to try and marry a lawyer they disproved of.

Slightly :nms: for the picture of her when they found her, naked and starved
http://www.mandatory.com/2015/02/06/the-miserable-imprisonment-of-blanche-monnier/

There is nothing quite as unsettling as that look that people who have been through horrible, unspeakable things, get in their eyes.

Your Gay Uncle
Feb 16, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I really hope Blackie is ok

Jose
Jul 24, 2007

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer

verbal enema posted:

I am very grateful I have never had to experience a natural disaster

i haven't etiher but i think a non-major earthquaek might be fun

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer

Jose posted:

i haven't etiher but i think a non-major earthquaek might be fun

I've been through a handful and most of them just sound like something in the house suddenly broke really loudly. Most of the time I didn't even feel anything, once or twice it was a very slight vibration

lilbeefer
Oct 4, 2004

Ive been in one and I just thought it was a passing tram until I remembered I had had moved 3 months earlier and there were no trams nearby anymore.

MikeCrotch
Nov 5, 2011

I AM UNJUSTIFIABLY PROUD OF MY SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE RECIPE

YES, IT IS AN INCREDIBLY SIMPLE DISH

NO, IT IS NOT NORMAL TO USE A PEPPERAMI INSTEAD OF MINCED MEAT

YES, THERE IS TOO MUCH SALT IN MY RECIPE

NO, I WON'T STOP SHARING IT

more like BOLLOCKnese

fickle poofterist posted:

Ive been in one and I just thought it was a passing tram until I remembered I had had moved 3 months earlier and there were no trams nearby anymore.

Suspicious! Maybe you murdered a tram in the past and its ghost is coming back to haunt you, bent on revenge in the form of mildly annoying you by shaking your house gently :tinfoil:

Maximum Sexy Pigeon
Jun 5, 2008

We must never speak of this!
Cyclone Tracy Part 1-iii

Having found my book on this event, I will now reiterate select passages for your interest.

----
Tropical Cyclone Tracy did not follow a straight line when she made landfall. As had been her pattern for the previous four days, she moved in a general direction but rotated around a centre line of that direction track. This trochoidal motion continued when the storm hit the coast and the eye passed to the north of the CBD, then spun over towards Stuart Park then up through the coastal and northern suburbs.
The eye was 13-14 kilometres across and, due to the storm's trochoidal motion, it could be in one part of a suburb but not the other. Those part of the city that the eye missed experienced maximum winds for around 5 hours.
The path of the cyclone was difficult to determine, but appears to have followed one similar in shape to the Greek letter omega. When the cyclone passed over the western extremities of the suburbs, it headed off down the Stuart Highway towards Howard Springs and Humpty Dooand eventually petered out as a severe rain depression well south towards Katherine.

---

Captain Peter Kerntke remembered that he and his wife Diane had been asked to look after their neighbours' dogs, so he jumped into a Landrover and went to collect the frightened animals. While he was hopping around trying to gather up the dogs, the plaster on his broken leg get so wet and soggy it eventually fell off.
Back in the ops room of the Larrakeyah Army Barracks, the men on duty waiting for the storm to hit and then tried to get things ready so that they would be up and running again as soon as it passed. At one stage during the win, Peter looked across at the ops room's Besser-brick* all which faced west

(*A large concrete brick, like a cinder block or breeze block)

Peter Kerntke posted:

It was moving in the wind, and that howling wind went for a long time.
I really thought that the wall would collapse. It had to we waving 30 centimetres at the top.
I seemed to be always going to the toilet - lots of nervous pees, I guess.
The water level in the toilets was low.
I went out to checked the emergency generator that had kicked in, the water in the generator room was 30 centimetres deep.
There was big iron doors on that generator room and they had blown off - Disappeared...

About a kilometre away, Julie Tammo was awake, but her fire fighter husband Heikki was sleeping like a log despite the maelstrom.
Heikki had gone to bed early, as he was rostered on duty on Christmas Day. Julie ran around the house trying to soak up the water being pushed in through the closed louvres.
Like many people in Darwin that night, she thought she was the only one whose house was being inundated with water or whose roof was being peeled off.

There as much cursing of builders, plumbers and carpenters among the besieged residents, who had no idea of the extent of the devastation Tracy was causing.

The Tammos had lost power quite early and Julie was working by torchlight during the first wind. Finally, she hauled her husband out of bed when the noise level had become a roar, and that was when the roof started to go. Julie, who who still thought the damage was isolated, asked Heikki to ring the police to get help with the roof, but the phone was dead.

---

Grant and Sandy Tambling's house started taking numerous hits from flying debris, but thankfully most of it was small stuff by this point. Grant was amazed by how far glass could bend before it would break. They had large windows in aluminium frames, and the glass was bending and extraordinary amount and almost falling out of the frames. The wind pressure was so great that the frames opened and the curtains were sucked out of the gap.

The second wind hit the Tambling's house with more ferocity than the first and was now coming from the south-east.

Grant Tambing posted:

We suffered more structural damage this time, but compared to most other people in Darwin it was minimal. There was lots of penetration to the roof and the fibro walls were punctured and fractured. We had a fair bit of water damage, but we still had our house.
I believe we were among the 10 percent of the population to retain their house...

Peter and Jenny Coombe had had thirty people around for a Christmas Eve party. At around 9pm trees started falling on the house and a little later the power went off.
It was a little difficult to have a party in the dark so they decided to drive down to East Point (about 5kms away) as a convoy to view the cyclone, but halfway there a tree came down over the road and just hit the leading car, so they returned home.

For a brief time the party continued upstairs, but people soon dispersed back to their own homes. Their house as partially protected by a hill that deflected the wind, but more exposed houses across the road were slowly being destroyed.
The wind was screaming and heavy rain was pelting against the windows, so Peter and Jenny were 'not really asleep'.
Elsewhere in the house, peter could hear windows smashing. When they shattered, he said, "The noise as incredible".
What happened next was bizarre. Peter told the story as if this sort of thing happened every day...

Peter Coombe posted:

Three people and a baby, who were strangers, came into our bedroom...
It may have been around 1:30am, they had broken down our front door and were hysterical. One of the women had gashed her arm quite severely when she opened the door through the broken glass.
We were laying in bed, and then lightning flashed and we saw them.
There were panicky, so I put them in our bathroom, I then took the injured woman to the hospital.

Driving along the roads where it was extremely difficult to see probably wasn't a good idea, but the woman was bleeding profusely, Peter explained, and needed urgent medical attention. her husband was totally incapable of handing an emergency. So Peter (Wearing just his underwear) and a hysterical bleeding woman climbed into his Peugeot sedan and headed off into town.
It was raining so heavily that Peter had to drive at a crawl and follow the white line in the middle of the road, it was the only reference point he had to keep him on the road.
"The rain was horizontal and it was pitch black" he said. When he was near the Motor Registry building, about 2km from home, something startling happened...

Peter Coombe posted:

I was driving along and all of a sudden, I hit a house.
It was right in the middle of the road. I knew that it was, because I was following the white line.
It was a complete house still, with it's roof on and still fairly intact. It still had banks of louvres in place. I wasn't going too fast, so it wasn't much of an impact.
I backed up and carefully drove around the house and continued to the hospital.

He dropped the woman off and heading back home to Ludmilla, another 5km drive in raging winds and rain. His car was being buffeted severely, but Peter admitted he was lucky he wasn't hit by anything. When he came to the spot on Goyder Rd where he ran into the house, the house was gone..
The only damage he suffered during his journey was when a coconut went through the window of the car. If it had hit him, it would have killed him instantly.

---

Carl Allridge, the harbour master, was with his wife Joan and their two daughters at their house in Fannie Bay. They sheltered in the lounge room with their backs to the storm.
After the first wind really got wound up, a neighbour with her four children and menagerie of cats joined them.
Cal recalled that "trees were going over, the power was off and there was water everywhere inside the house." The house survived the storm, although it was badly damaged. Carl when downstairs during the eye to see what condition the underside of the house was in, but when the noise of the approaching second wind started he dashed back upstairs.
In the lounge, the glass in the windows was bending dangerously towards them, so they sought refuge under a kitchen table. The roof had been stripped and the ceiling collapsed.
Freezing rain drove in on the group and Carl felt that things had taken a turn for the worse.

The second wind was coming from the south-east quadrant.
Carl said "The second wind was strongest. I now felt most at peril, because it was when the roof went and the glass blew in. The noise was much, much worse this time around.".
The rode out the storm under the table, except for Carl as he couldn't fit under with the rest. who sought shelter just to the side and was very, very wet and shivering uncontrollably.

---

Milton Drew was alone in his company house and thinking how glad he was that his wife and family weren't having to go through the storm. It was a pre-WWII, high set house and it was badly feeling the effects of the winds, especially the gusts that slammed into the house every minute or so. Milton recalled, "It was really blowing by 10pm, I opened up all the windows on the lee side. I was in the main bedroom attending to the windows when I could feel the pressure drop inside the house."
He sat it out in the end bedroom until about 11pm. During the first wind, the house suffered no significant damage and none of the windows had broken. he couldn't see outside because it was pitch dark.
When the second wind hit, he said "It was more powerful, at least ten times stronger, it blew all the windows in. I said to myself "I'm outta here" and I went to the kitchen"
There were metal louvres in the kitchen and he thought he would be safe with them.
Within thirty minutes all the louvres went, and glass showered over him and the floor.
He moved again to the hallway and realised he had very few options left. He was forced out of the hallway when some of the walls disappeared, so he moved next to the back of the house.
He sat there on the floor all alone when his gas lamp went out. He was relatively safe in the room where he was, but then the remainder of the house started to disappear in bits around him.

Just over the crest of a nearby hill, a house behind Milton's lost it's entire roof. It flew over the top of his house and landed on the street in front.
Describing the noise of the impact, he said "It was like a jet going in. The house was shaking so much I couldn't lean against the wall. I started to wonder if I could survive."
The noise was starting to get to him. The roaring and the screaming seemed never-ending. He had now lost about a third of his roof and rainwater was teeming in on top of him.

Milton Drew posted:

It was endless; this incredible noise just went on and on. It was very scary, but I was grateful the kids weren't there. I didn't want to go into the bathroom, because the wall had been pierced by a 10x5cm piece of lumber, which had penetrated about a metre into the bathroom.
The scary part about being alone was the effect on yourself. I was no longer in control.
I just wanted to look outside, and I was dying for the sun to come up.
I wanted it to be just a bad dream, it affects you mentally.

The dangers of taking shelter in a car under the house were demonstrated most dramatically across the road from Milton.
His neighbour had climbed into his car when he had run out of options for shelter.
He was crushed when the end of the building collapsed, trapping him inside...

---

Chris Collins and his wife Trisha were sheltering in their lounge-room with their cat and dog.
They had changed into storm gear - jeans, work boots and jackets - and were probably among the very few who were dressed adequately for the storm.
They had no breakages during the first wind although they had heard things bounding off of the roof, and had experienced stronger winds closer to the eye.
With the strongest gusts, the power lines were ripped from the steel poles on the street and the power went off, though well before the eye.
"The lightning was more like static discharges. There was so much wind noise I don't think we could hear the thunder." Chris recalled.

The eye passed over and lasted about twenty minutes.
Chris is a commercial pilot who conducts aerial surveys and has seen the atmospheric phenomenon known as St Elmo's Fire. He described the sky as having "An eerie green glow, rather than crashing lightning."
Then came the second wind, It was like a thousand express trains coming for us. I have never heard a noise like that. It was far more destructive and had incredible strength."
Chris and Trisha quickly went into the bathroom, they noticed more light coming into the house than before.
They ceiling and the roof structure were lifting off of the walls in the living room, which was now closest to the second wind. While they were in the bathroom, flying debris punctured the wall and Chris was hit on his head and his back.

Down the hall from the bathroom, the whole side wall of the house collapsed. Chris was trying unsuccessfully to hold the bathroom door shut with his back.
He was hit with bricks flying through the air 'from somewhere' nearby, though he was only bruised and scratched. Chris managed to lock the door shut with the 10mm slide-bolt on the inside, but their time was running out as they could hear their house being demolished.
Chris and Trisha were now huddled together with the cat and the dog in the small shower alcove. They were being blasted with stinging rain, dirt and wind. There was a continuous banding overhead, and eventually the masonite board ceiling collapsed and drooped down, partially sheltering them from the elements.

---

In a low-set concrete-block dwelling in Wagaman, Judith and Gary Watson rode out the storm. They had made shelter in their main bedroom, but only after 20 minutes of the first wind the power went out and their three girls, aged 11, 9 and 7 were immediately petrified.
From their shelter they heard the front door blow in, followed by the noise of their fish tank smashing. They moved to the bathroom, including their two cats and dog, where they sat on a foam mattress.

The bathroom was very small and contained a square, shallow bath. They had to yell at the top of their lungs to hear each other over the noise of debris smashing into their house.
Lightning was flashing brilliantly and constantly through the room, changing it from pitch black to almost daylight and back again.
Then, with an enormous band and without any warning, the house imploded.
All of the remaining windows blew in at once, sounding like an enormous cannon going off. The medicine cabinet above their heads had the door sucked off of it's hinges and the contents fell on everyone below.

---

About 45 kilometers out of the and to the east of The Track is the remote village of Humpty Doo. In 1974 it only contained a dozen or so houses. These hardy soul lived out in the bush with no acreage with no town power or water, just rainwater tanks and septic tanks.
Jenny Lonergan's husband had gotten himself well tanked at his Christmas Eve work party and had fallen asleep. They had a house on 10 acres on Cypress Road. During the gale, a huge 20 metre tall blackbutt tree fell on to their bedroom. They crawled out from under the wreckage and had to bash a hole into the jammed door to get out of the room.
They got dressed and jumped into their lightweight Suzuki 4WD, along with Goldie, their dog, and headed off to find shelter at the pub.

The owner of the pub, Skews, wouldn't let them in and so they found shelter between a couple of road trains that were staying there before moving off to Meningrida the next morning.
The truckies helped them to tie down their car and they then tried to settle in for the night. Because they were worried about the small 4WD being blown over, they were both wearing their motorcycle helmets. Goldie was farting regularly and it wasn't certain which worse, the wind or the dog.
By this time, the wind was ripping trees out of the soggy, waterlogged ground, and Jenny recalled seeing a tree moving upright a meter and a half above the ground with the roots dangling below it. "It was dancing along the road. The noise was deafening, like an evil scream." Jenny admitted she was scared when the wind hit Humpty Doo.
One sight she said she would never forget was "the chook shed from Skews' Pub. A whole on four legs, 5x1 metres, bounced across the road still with the chooks inside. Remarkably, they all survived!"

At around 4am, Jenny saw what she believed was the eye of the cyclone.
"It was a big orange glow in the sky, a sort of yellow light that was moving around - an evil light.

---

The first wind was slowly easing as the center of the cyclone approached. The first wind had done a fair amount of damage, especially to those properties that were exposed or in the northern suburbs where there was nothing to stop of deflect the power of the wind.
The ground was littered with rubble, debris from wrecked houses, and every manner of rubbish, from broken windows and louvres ripped out of wall mounts to pieces of fibro that had blown out of walls. Anything not tied down inside a room, from lounge chairs and cushions, lampshades, pictures, ornaments, records, plants and even floor rugs, were blown or sucked out of holes in walls or broken windows.
There was an enormous amount of roofing iron and timber that had been ripped off of roofing trusses and from other parts of buildings.
Fences were pulled out of the ground.
Children's bicycles, rubbish bins, pot plants, garden tools - anything that could be blown around, had been.
All of the debris lying around now became a factor in what happened when the eye of Tracy passed and the wind changed direction....


Continued soon...

Rondette
Nov 4, 2009

Your friendly neighbourhood Postie.



Grimey Drawer

Maximum Sexy Pigeon posted:

...the remote village of Humpty Doo....

:allears:.... Oh 'Straya.... :allears:



Amazing write-up again. But you must let us know what happened to Blackie. :(

Maximum Sexy Pigeon
Jun 5, 2008

We must never speak of this!

Rondette posted:

Amazing write-up again. But you must let us know what happened to Blackie. :(

I will.

Abugadu
Jul 12, 2004

1st Sgt. Matthews and the men have Procured for me a cummerbund from a traveling gypsy, who screeched Victory shall come at a Terrible price. i am Honored.

Jose posted:

i haven't etiher but i think a non-major earthquaek might be fun

Only after the fact. When one starts, you kind of do this mental hoping that it stays small, and you're not really able to appreciate the gentle rocking because you're worried that it will grow and collapse the 10-storey building you happen to be in.

packetmantis
Feb 26, 2013
What the hell is a chook?

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

packetmantis posted:

What the hell is a chook?

They're like chickens, only deadly venomous.

Helith
Nov 5, 2009

Basket of Adorables


The Lone Badger posted:

They're like chickens, only deadly venomous.

It makes mealtimes so much more interesting.

Maximum Sexy Pigeon, do you know why Skews wouldn't let the Lonergans into the pub? It seems really weird that he wouldn't help neighbours in such a small outback community where stuff like that really matters.

slinkimalinki
Jan 17, 2010

Jose posted:

i haven't etiher but i think a non-major earthquaek might be fun

major earthquakes are not that bad, if you're lucky. Course they're poo poo if you're unlucky.

Vladimir Poutine
Aug 13, 2012
:madmax:
My parents, who have been in many cyclones and earthquakes in the Pacific, were of the opinion that earthquakes were worse psychologically, just because they happen so suddenly, whereas cyclones come on gradually at first. I've been in a couple of earthquakes in Nepal (though nothing too catastrophic) and there's not much in the way of warning. A minute or two before it comes you feel weird and agitated like you've had too much coffee or something (and if you're asleep you wake up), then you hear the rumbling about 15 seconds before it hits and then everything starts shaking. For me at least, running outside of a shaking building onto shaking ground and feeling that move too, is a slightly unpleasant moment because that's when you really grasp the scale of it. But on the other hand, earthquakes are usually over in under a minute but cyclones just keep loving going.

Maximum Sexy Pigeon
Jun 5, 2008

We must never speak of this!

Helith posted:

Maximum Sexy Pigeon, do you know why Skews wouldn't let the Lonergans into the pub? It seems really weird that he wouldn't help neighbours in such a small outback community where stuff like that really matters.

No idea, never speculated.

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer
Are Australian cats unusually calm or something cause I can't imagine even trying to hold a single cat while your house is being ripped apart by a hurricane, let alone several like was listed in some cases

Funky See Funky Do
Aug 20, 2013
STILL TRYING HARD
Yeah, they're alright I guess. Probably just think the vacuum's on.

Maximum Sexy Pigeon
Jun 5, 2008

We must never speak of this!

Aesop Poprock posted:

Are Australian cats unusually calm or something cause I can't imagine even trying to hold a single cat while your house is being ripped apart by a hurricane, let alone several like was listed in some cases

I live with two and I can tell you they are not.

Varkk
Apr 17, 2004

Compared to normal Australian wildlife a scared angry cat is pretty tame and cuddly.

JibbaJabberwocky
Aug 14, 2010

I was two and a half when Hurricane Andrew hit and I still remember that night. My parents and I had just moved to central Florida about 2 weeks prior and it was my first experience with a hurricane. We weren't even directly in the path of the thing but boy was it loud. I don't think any of us slept the whole night. Woke up to find trees down everywhere and the door pulled off our patio. That was us not even being in the path of Andrew.

That being said tornadoes scare me shitless and I would rather do another hurricane than experience one of those.

Lady Demelza
Dec 29, 2009



Lipstick Apathy

Aesop Poprock posted:

I've been through a handful and most of them just sound like something in the house suddenly broke really loudly. Most of the time I didn't even feel anything, once or twice it was a very slight vibration

The one and only minor earthquake I've experienced happened at night. The noise of the coathangers in my wardrobe clanging and rattling woke me, and my overriding reaction was mild annoyance at being woken up.

At no point did I feel the shaking or give any thought as to why my furniture was jigging around in the middle of the night, or if I should get up and check if anything was wrong. Sometimes I wonder about my instinct for self-preservation. :downs:

quote:

Like many people in Darwin that night, she thought she was the only one whose house was being inundated with water or whose roof was being peeled off.

This attitude seems really common in natural disasters but it always kind of blows my mind. You're in the middle of a crisis but everything outside your field of vision is tickety-boo? In a street of identical houses, yours is the only one to suffer catastrophic failure? :psyduck:

I'm sure most people here know this, but for anyone *not* living in an area where the geography can kill you at any moment, an evacuation zone is not just the area expected to be devastated. It's an area which the emergency services anticipate will be inaccessible. The danger to life and limb isn't from the disaster as such; it's because it might take a day or two for help to arrive if your appendix decides to rupture or you fall and break a leg.

The Mighty Moltres
Dec 21, 2012

Come! We must fly!


Recently I was at my parent's house, and everyone had gone to sleep. I was really high and playing Halo, and found it absolutely fascinating that controller rumble seemed to be shaking the entire room. Then my sister came downstairs and asked if I felt the earthquake. It took me far too long to realize that it was not the video game that was shaking the room.

Scathach
Apr 4, 2011

You know that thing where you sleep on your arm funny and when you wake up it's all numb? Yeah that's my whole world right now.


The Endbringer posted:

Recently I was at my parent's house, and everyone had gone to sleep. I was really high and playing Halo, and found it absolutely fascinating that controller rumble seemed to be shaking the entire room. Then my sister came downstairs and asked if I felt the earthquake. It took me far too long to realize that it was not the video game that was shaking the room.

I did that with an earthquake in AZ like six years ago. I was alone in the apartment and noticed the door blinds swaying. I thought I'd left the screen door open and there was a breeze blowing or something. Definitely took me too long to realize that everything was moving.

Vladimir Poutine
Aug 13, 2012
:madmax:
Another odd thing about minor earthquakes is that you can't feel them when you're driving. There was a mild (5.6) earthquake in my hometown decades ago and there are all these stories of people driving around and being really confused as to why all the streetlights were rhythmically switching off and on.

Ellie Crabcakes
Feb 1, 2008

Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

Having lived my whole life in California, the best part of an earthquake is watching transplants freak out.

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.

John Big Booty posted:

Having lived my whole life in California, the best part of an earthquake is watching transplants freak out.

This but with IL and tornadoes.

ChickenOfTomorrow
Nov 11, 2012

god damn it, you've got to be kind

:toot:

ChickenOfTomorrow has a new favorite as of 22:32 on Jan 21, 2017

Dewgy
Nov 10, 2005

~🚚special delivery~📦

The Endbringer posted:

Recently I was at my parent's house, and everyone had gone to sleep. I was really high and playing Halo, and found it absolutely fascinating that controller rumble seemed to be shaking the entire room. Then my sister came downstairs and asked if I felt the earthquake. It took me far too long to realize that it was not the video game that was shaking the room.

I was mostly asleep on the couch during the only earthquake I've ever been in and I just thought it was my fat-rear end cat nudging the furniture with his head.

cptn_dr
Sep 7, 2011

Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies


I assumed that the last earthquake I felt was just my cat getting inside the couch again. It was only when I saw the news the next morning that I realised it had been an earthquake. The time before that, I assumed it was a big-rear end truck driving somewhere nearby.

Basically, my mind never jumps to "Earthquake", which is probably going to end in disaster for me one day.

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bean_shadow
Sep 27, 2005

If men had uteruses they'd be called duderuses.
I grew up in Las Vegas and the only earthquake I remember was the 1994 Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles. It was so strong that it could be felt in Vegas (about 220 miles from the epicenter). I woke up seeing my lamp shaking and I figured I was just tossing and turning in bed and went back to sleep. The next morning my dad asked if I had felt the earthquake; I hadn't realized I was in one.

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