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Judakel posted:You fellas have any nice links to abandoned ruins and the stories behind them? They can be abandoned modern towns, pre-colonial structures, or old world structures. Throw in some cool Chernobyl links if you have something besides what wikipedia has... The Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory was a cold war era facility that quote:was the site of Lockheed's lab for investigating the feasibility of nuclear aircraft. The site was used for irradiating military equipment, as well as the forest to determine the effect of nuclear war, and its effects on wildlife. The area was closed in 1971 and acquired by the city of Atlanta for a second airport, but its topography was determined to be ill-suited for an airport. Documents explaining what went on at the site remain highly classified, and the entrance to the underground portion of the facility has been buried. The only objects left above ground were the concrete foundations on which the buildings and reactors were placed. The heart of the GNAL was a 10MW unshielded reactor that was normally stored submerged in a cooling pond, but was hoisted up into the air to irradiate materials during experiments. Before construction, the intent had been to irradiate aircraft systems to see how well they held up to radiation with the end-goal of developing a nuclear-powered bomber that could remain in flight for weeks to months at a time. By the time the facility was finished, this had been all but dismissed as ridiculously impractical and the facility took on a new purpose: to study the effects of radiation levels that would be present in the aftermath of nuclear war. A typical test would consist of several steps: The material to be irradiated would be brought into the reactor building on rail cars. Next, everyone on site inside of the "lethal fence," the area in which humans could receive fatal doses of radiation (look for the circle in the woods on this map) would get into the underground safety bunkers (more on these later.) Once the site was clear, the reactor would be brought up to its operating power of 10 megawatts and hoisted out of the pit into the air for the duration of the test, then lowered back into the pit. Once the all-clear was sounded, the rail cars would be moved to an outdoor cool-down area (one of the fenced-off areas still off-limits to this day because of contamination) where they would sit for days or weeks until they were safe to bring into the hot cell (more on this later) and be manipulated, repaired, etc. by robotic tools because they were still too radioactive for people to get near them. Sometimes, early on, they tested aircraft parts. Other times, they tested various materials, including pine wood that was dubbed "Lockwood" (Lockheed was running the site) which became quite hard and durable, and was used in various applications including flooring at the IAEA headquarters. There were also "biological materials" tested, which is a nice way of saying they exposed live animals and the surrounding forest. Doses of radiation were measured in rads; Wikipedia sources say that a whole body dose of 400 rads will kill the average person, and off the top of my head I think 1000 will kill most animals. Several ten hour tests were conducted, with rodents and birds exposed to a mean whole-body dose of 6000-8000 rads and a peak measured dose of nearly 30,000. Nearby trees lost all of their foliage within a week of the first test. Then came the big one, a test to simulate the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The reactor was raised and left in the elevated position for a full three weeks. Trees 1000 feet from the reactor absorbed as much as 100,000 rads. Levels at the lethal fence perimeter 3000 feet away were between 500 and 1000 rads, enough to kill a person. The site was shut down in spring of 1971 and cleanup took just over a year. Most buildings were razed and only the concrete pads left behind, but there are a few still standing. The hot cell and several surrounding structures are still dangerously radioactive due to high levels of cobalt-60 and cesium-137 and won't be safe for demolition for another 30-50 years. The pump house building that supplied cooling water for the reactor is still standing, just a small concrete shack. Some explorers with a very poor sense of self-preservation have cut the double fence and entered the Hot Cell building with a Geiger counter confirming the official story that it's not safe to be there. Trees inside the hot cell area still show signs of radiation damage and mutations. The underground bunkers were gutted but left intact and the entrances buried. Every few years, the exploration bug bites someone and they dig it out. The lower levels are flooded, but there's apparently plenty to see.
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# ¿ May 5, 2014 05:00 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:51 |
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Erghh posted:Probably stems from Operation LAC; "Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage), was a U.S. Army Chemical Corps operation which dispersed microscopic zinc cadmium sulfide (ZnCdS) particles over much of the United States. The purpose was to determine the dispersion and geographic range of biological or chemical agents." They did use allegedly harmless bacteria in addition to chemical agents. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/ darkwasthenight posted:He's nuts with an occasional sideline into Protocols of Zion quoting and some early dabbling in holocaust denial but there's so much going on with him it's hard to sort through all the crap. It's a toss-up as to whether he's just using 'lizard overlords' as a codeword for 'jews' or he actually believes shapeshifting lizards (and a few dozen other alien species) are ruling the earth. 4 year later edit: holy poo poo was I wrong, he's definitely ultra antisemitic GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 21:23 on Jan 1, 2019 |
# ¿ May 25, 2014 01:46 |
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Hummingbirds posted:I live in Tampa, right next to the scientologist capital of the world (Clearwater/Ybor). It's really fun to go to Ybor and see 30 scientologist drones literally forcing dianetics pamphlets on people. They really don't come off as being normal people. I should engage one in conversation next time and see if they say anything crazy.
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# ¿ May 29, 2014 16:38 |
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Free zone Scientology weirds me out. It's a movement of people who want to practice Scientology outside of the official Church of Scientology and asserts that they have a right to use the same documents and materials as a matter of religious freedom. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Zone_(Scientology)
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# ¿ May 30, 2014 02:28 |
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Minarchist posted:The Golden Age of Tech II
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# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 03:30 |
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Dick Trauma posted:You know your investigation is in trouble when one of your primary suspects is Hans Assmann.
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# ¿ Sep 20, 2015 02:05 |
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I'm going to do a quick writeup of this because I've always liked writeups in this thread rather than links and quick summaries. This is a story of a disaster that never happened. In 1905, St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church moved to their new home at the corner of 54th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. As real estate values in Manhattan grew over time, the land below the church appreciated in value and in the early 1970s, the plot of land that the church sat on was slated for development; the condition imposed on the developer was that a new church would be built in the footprint of the old building, and a skyscraper built over the church with no part of it touching the church and no structure passing through it. William LeMessurier took on the design, and engineered a tower footed on four footings and cantilevered 72 feet over the new church without touching it. The heart of the design was a structure of 6 V-shaped structural members on each side of the tower that would bear the weight and transfer the loads to the footings. The ambitious design was approved by the city, put out to bid, and construction began in 1974. The builders worked with what they were given, and calculated that they could save a significant amount of money by simply bolting the V-shaped structures together instead of welding them, a change that was approved by the city. In 1977, the building was completed and CitiGroup moved in. The building has remained an iconic piece of the New York Skyline ever since. It sat over the church as the conditions of the development demanded, neither touching nor passing through it. Early in 1978, an engineering student a Princeton University contacted LeMessurier after she made an alarming discovery regarding the building's capability to tolerate wind loading and her amateur calculations. Lemessurier was receptive to her question and was horrified by what he was shown -- he had calculated wind loading stresses as he would with any other typical building in New York City, from cardinal directions. The CitiGroup building's unusual layout rotated it 45 degrees from the usual position. Faced with quartering winds (winds from NW, NE, SW, SE,) the building would suffer from loads much more severe than average, and a power failure could intensify the loading by rendering the building's tuned mass damper inoperative. The joints that had been bolted rather than welded were insufficient to survive a 15 year storm, nevermind the 50 year storm the original welded joints could sustain. LeMessurier set aside concerns about damage to his reputation and contacted both the building's architect and Citicorp, urging them to secretly repair the building. Understanding the gravity of the situation with the upcoming hurricane season, repairs began almost immediately. Beginning in mid July, the construction crews worked in secrecy, moving in to weld braces over the 200 bolted joints in the building's structure after the building's office workers left in the evening. The repairs would take around 12 weeks to complete. The city conducted an emergency census of certain neighborhoods in anticipation of hurricane season; the census was not to determine how many people might need to evacuate, it was to estimate how many bodies they might need to search for if the CitiGroup building collapsed. The most severe estimates were upwards of ten thousand dead. Six weeks into the repair, the worst case scenario loomed over New York. Hurricane Ella was was strengthening off of the coast of North Carolina and was on track to make landfall in New York City. The city was on the verge of ordering evacuation and the CitiGroup building could not sustain the wind loads of what would be a category 4 hurricane by the time it made landfall. With less than 24 hours until the seemingly inevitable evacuation of New York City, Ella turned out to sea and strengthened to Category 4 and never made landfall. Repairs to the CitiGroup building were completed late in 1978, and the everything remained secret until The New Yorker published The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis in 1995.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2015 04:29 |
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A Pinball Wizard posted:lol "he didn't act sad enough" is the worst possible argument for someone's guilt.
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 17:50 |
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Aesop Poprock posted:Does anyone actually have the followup on this with proof that he cleaned up his act? Whenever anyone mentions this as a success story I always wonder how much of it was actually proven and how much was just some guy claiming things on the internet to save face OP has links to a few pictures of the cleaned-up house. I'm making an SAclopedia entry for this because nobody ever seems to have a link to the follow up http://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2593 GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 20:09 on Mar 19, 2016 |
# ¿ Mar 19, 2016 19:51 |
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Even though I've studied enough history that the idea of trying to place individual acts on a hierarchy of worse to worst becomes meaningless, it still gets to me that there's always something else that's horrific in a new and unique way. The first time I realized it was reading Charlie Wilson's War. There was an anecdote about Soviet soldiers, captured by Mujahideen who decided to send a message and kill them by cutting skin deep around their waists, peeling their skin up over their heads, tie it off, and leaving them to either suffocate or bleed to death and be found by their comrades.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 04:40 |
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packetmantis posted:I followed some links from the Jahi McMath article and found this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_sign
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2016 01:35 |
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Subjunctive posted:Maybe they should make Medicalert bracelets for "amenable to witness tampering".
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2016 06:11 |
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doodlebugs posted:last statements of the Heavens Gate cult.
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# ¿ Apr 15, 2016 14:53 |
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The Worst Bear posted:I love nuclear mishaps and the like, so I'm completely shocked I've never heard of Santa Susana. I'm really hoping there's a good documentary on the place out there. The Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory was a cold war era facility that quote:was the site of Lockheed's lab for investigating the feasibility of nuclear aircraft. The site was used for irradiating military equipment, as well as the forest to determine the effect of nuclear war, and its effects on wildlife. The area was closed in 1971 and acquired by the city of Atlanta for a second airport, but its topography was determined to be ill-suited for an airport. Documents explaining what went on at the site remain highly classified, and the entrance to the underground portion of the facility has been buried. The only objects left above ground were the concrete foundations on which the buildings and reactors were placed. The heart of the GNAL was a 10MW unshielded reactor that was normally stored submerged in a cooling pond, but was hoisted up into the air to irradiate materials during experiments. Before construction, the intent had been to irradiate aircraft systems to see how well they held up to radiation with the end-goal of developing a nuclear-powered bomber that could remain in flight for weeks to months at a time. By the time the facility was finished, this had been all but dismissed as ridiculously impractical and the facility took on a new purpose: to study the effects of radiation levels that would be present in the aftermath of nuclear war. A typical test would consist of several steps: The material to be irradiated would be brought into the reactor building on rail cars. Next, everyone on site inside of the "lethal fence," the area in which humans could receive fatal doses of radiation (look for the circle in the woods on this map) would get into the underground safety bunkers (more on these later.) Once the site was clear, the reactor would be brought up to its operating power of 10 megawatts and hoisted out of the pit into the air for the duration of the test, then lowered back into the pit. Once the all-clear was sounded, the rail cars would be moved to an outdoor cool-down area (one of the fenced-off areas still off-limits to this day because of contamination) where they would sit for days or weeks until they were safe to bring into the hot cell (more on this later) and be manipulated, repaired, etc. by robotic tools because they were still too radioactive for people to get near them. Sometimes, early on, they tested aircraft parts. Other times, they tested various materials, including pine wood that was dubbed "Lockwood" (Lockheed was running the site) which became quite hard and durable, and was used in various applications including flooring at the IAEA headquarters. There were also "biological materials" tested, which is a nice way of saying they exposed live animals and the surrounding forest. Doses of radiation were measured in rads; Wikipedia sources say that a whole body dose of 400 rads will kill the average person, and off the top of my head I think 1000 will kill most animals. Several ten hour tests were conducted, with rodents and birds exposed to a mean whole-body dose of 6000-8000 rads and a peak measured dose of nearly 30,000. Nearby trees lost all of their foliage within a week of the first test. Then came the big one, a test to simulate the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The reactor was raised and left in the elevated position for a full three weeks. Trees 1000 feet from the reactor absorbed as much as 100,000 rads. Levels at the lethal fence perimeter 3000 feet away were between 500 and 1000 rads, enough to kill a person. The site was shut down in spring of 1971 and cleanup took just over a year. Most buildings were razed and only the concrete pads left behind, but there are a few still standing. The hot cell and several surrounding structures are still dangerously radioactive due to high levels of cobalt-60 and cesium-137 and won't be safe for demolition for another 30-50 years. The pump house building that supplied cooling water for the reactor is still standing, just a small concrete shack. Some explorers with a very poor sense of self-preservation have cut the double fence and entered the Hot Cell building with a Geiger counter confirming the official story that it's not safe to be there. Trees inside the hot cell area still show signs of radiation damage and mutations. The underground bunkers were gutted but left intact and the entrances buried. Every few years, the exploration bug bites someone and they dig it out. The lower levels are flooded, but there's apparently plenty to see.
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# ¿ May 9, 2016 01:54 |
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crowoutofcontext posted:Same. I like to think the same, but last week I smelled smoke at work and my coworkers and I spent 20 minutes debating whether the smell was getting stronger and trying to find where it was coming from rather than getting out. By the time we decided to leave, the fire department was already there.
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# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 01:57 |
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Imagined posted:After reading what this girl went through to get this fucker convicted I'm not surprised that many women don't press charges since it effectively victimizes them again.
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# ¿ Jun 7, 2016 02:59 |
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queserasera posted:I was at work when that happened! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake You'd've thought the entire state fell down. Nope, just some masonry.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 18:29 |
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Lime Tonics posted:This has been one of my fears. I have seen sinkholes form when I lived in florida, but what happens if your house is on one? Oh, and you don't know there is a mine shaft that goes "about 60 meters (196 ft) deep, but now they're expecting it to be 100 meters (328 ft) deep. "
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# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 01:19 |
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pookel posted:Video of the 2004 "big one" here (warning, graphic content): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjtKRRPhWPA
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# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 03:32 |
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KozmoNaut posted:He did fool a lot of impressionable teenagers, mostly.
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# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 15:50 |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crashquote:In 2013, information released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed a single switch out of four (not six) prevented detonation.[11][]
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# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 23:20 |
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Sorry, moonsour, that's really awful.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2016 04:51 |
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djssniper posted:Forget the transcript, there was a clip somewhere (I recommend NOT looking for it) where someone just had to leave, the doors of the court opened mid tape and you could hear a small bit of it, absolutely haunting
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# ¿ Dec 28, 2016 04:05 |
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I have to wonder if the coyotes in the park had gotten used to being around people from scavenging. Pets in my neighborhood have been killed, people have been approached by aggressive coyotes, and at least one person was attacked. According to our mailman, there's an elderly couple in the area who think they're just cute wild dogs and are feeding them, so they're not afraid of people.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 01:55 |
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Sarcopenia posted:My family in Tanzania owned a sow. I would always stick my hand in the pen to feed the sow and her piglets despite my dad (a former farmer) cursing me out every time I did so. That is until I dropped my dad's swiss army knife in the pen and saw what little was left of it. I do not understand why I still have hands or a full set of digits. After that I've heeded my dad's advice of "Do not gently caress with animals, no matter how small, cute or docile they seem". Also saw my dad almost get killed by the same escaped cow twice. Pretty bad rear end to see your dad full on wrestle with a Cow. HelloIAmYourHeart posted:I did a couple minutes' Googling on whether a cat can directly kill a human and found this article that says "maybe one time a cat suffocated a baby for real" and that's about it.
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# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 05:39 |
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:Methyl groups are bad news no matter where they pop up. Does it have methyl on it? Yeah, you're hosed. Doesn't even matter how you're hosed, you're just hosed.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2017 19:56 |
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Pick posted:I need some advice on the actual good eps of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unsolved_Mysteries_episodes
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# ¿ Jan 27, 2017 23:30 |
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Here's a NIST recreation of the conditions of the Station Nightclub fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pnl5bgd21E And here's an identical stage setup with a sprinkler system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EWVR1iP8 Here's the two side by side in Youtube Doubler for comparison http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?vide...ame=aphrocarlin If you can cross your eyes and watch the two like a stereogram, do it until the sprinklers go off and ask yourself why it's acceptable for old venues to be grandfathered into ancient fire codes. Aesop Poprock posted:In regards to the Station bouncer, it's actually even worse than that if everything she writes about it actually happened:
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# ¿ Mar 20, 2017 03:07 |
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Crash_N_Burn posted:Here's another antiquated method of execution, popular in the 16th-18th century. It was usually done using cannons:
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 01:54 |
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Thwomp posted:And now for something different.
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# ¿ Apr 30, 2018 18:39 |
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chitoryu12 posted:Does anyone have any good articles or local legends that I could use for tabletop RPG ideas? It's a Supernatural-style ghost and monster hunting campaign across America, but I'm tired of just using ghosts and vampires. Some other ones I've got are Count Carl Von Cosel surviving as a necromancer in Key West and creating a platoon of patchwork zombies and an MRA warlock using stolen black magic to try and redirect the fire underneath Centralia to destroy a building in Philadelphia through human sacrifices of the entire remaining population (made more complicated by the megalomaniacal warlock he stole the tomes from coming after him). https://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/ha...7RoCVjgQAvD_BwE Includes a piece on my local legend, the White Lady of Union Cemetery and a lot of others. You can browse the book and find things that you can find more about online.
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# ¿ May 3, 2018 01:11 |
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My dad died slowly of colon cancer, on a hospital bed in our living room so he could be at home, slipping in and out of consciousness, and gradually spending more time out than in until he finally stopped breathing. Now my mom finished her first round of chemo for pancreatic cancer just over year after being diagnosed and it's probably completely unsurprising to anyone reading these run-on sentences that I spent last Monday in the ER with severe chest pain doing the "anxiety attacks in men can present with the same symptoms as a heart attack" thing.
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# ¿ May 5, 2018 00:15 |
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PetraCore posted:Yeah it fucks me up that I accidentally watched someone's last moments, I didn't even notice the laser dot. Part of me feels like that's a selfish response to have because it's not like it's any more horrible than it already was just because I saw right before it happened, but that's not how the brain works I guess.
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# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 01:35 |
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Azathoth posted:Maybe someone here knows the answer to this. Why for situations like this do we not have a cross-referenced database of people who were issued social security numbers, but who never filed taxes or otherwise hit the government radar or were reported dead/missing? jobson groeth posted:It could just be a sex thing. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) edit: this was an appallingly terrible post and the worst possible way to make the point I was trying to make. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 23:41 on Sep 1, 2018 |
# ¿ Aug 31, 2018 02:20 |
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Moving on from my previous, terrible, inexcusable post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/16/it-is-taking-people-out-more-than-70-people-overdose-on-k2-in-a-single-day-in-new-haven/?utm_term=.36c6f44fc93 A couple of weeks ago, around 100 people overdosed on K2 on the town green in New Haven, CT. The green is known as a place where homeless people gather. The numbers are plus/minus 20 (I think the official count is 84) because the heat index was so high that heat exhaustion and heatstroke were also factors. Initial tests indicated that it was contaminated with fentanyl, but later tests ruled that out and field tests for drugs administered by police are designed to err on the side of false positives.0 Further tests found no evidence of opiates and suggested that the overdoses were entirely due to synthetic cannabinoids. More local rumors that I can't substantiate but am inclined to believe suggest that local police used undercover officers and informants to distribute high potency versions of K2 to the local homeless and drug user populations to clear downtown in preparation for Yale orientation.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2018 23:53 |
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xtal posted:If they were going to do that why not just use fentanyl? Then nobody would care because it would be one blip on the radar. Or, they could just beat people until they leave or die. Then nobody would care because it would also be one blip on the radar lighthugger posted:gently caress. That’s like my third time reading that article, and each time I get so furious at the hubris and ego of those loving “fire investigators”. chitoryu12 posted:At what point does raiding the building become a moral imperative? StrixNebulosa posted:Tumblr, with no source,
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# ¿ Sep 13, 2018 01:54 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:
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# ¿ Sep 13, 2018 04:02 |
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If you were born before 1994, the Canadian government was was actively committing genocide within your lifetime. Not that they match us in the US who have pretty much continuously done it in one way or another for hundreds of years, but keep that image of the friendly Canadian in its place.jobson groeth posted:For some unnerving weather check out this Twitter thread of what's happening in Hong Kong. Chillbro Baggins posted:(White) Dallas cop got home from work, saw a black guy standing in her apartment, and shot him. Small problem: she "accidentally" went one floor up from her place, it was his apartment. Neighbors reported hearing her banging on the door and yelling "Let me in!" Strange for a person who lives alone to do such a thing when their key doesn't work. fruit on the bottom posted:Not to say that any kind of torture/murder isn’t grotesque, but imo there’s something especially ghastly about people who kill and torture animals for fun.
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# ¿ Sep 22, 2018 04:34 |
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jobson groeth posted:Let's get back on track by reading about the worst day in a paramedics career
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# ¿ May 13, 2019 19:35 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:51 |
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When I was in high school and my first year of college, a friend's grandmother with Alzheimer's was living with them. She was mostly OK to walk around and take care of herself; she knew the family but remembered them 10-15 years prior. She had a memory span of a few minutes, so she could manage to get up and get something to eat or drink, go to the bathroom and clean herself up, generally go about life functionally. Then she made a sharp term for the worse. Her short term memory was enough that she could stand up and take a few steps before forgetting why she stood up, so she would wander the house at all hours. One day, and now I'm wondering if this was a dementia plus UTI thing that everyone has mentioned, she got aggressive but they were able to calm her down and get her into bed for the night. A couple of hours later, my friend was awakened by a loud bang on his door, then another, then another, and he called his parents in the other room (this was back in 2003-2004, but his family got cell phones to keep in touch because of grandma's condition). She had wandered to the kitchen, taken the butcher's knife from the knife block, and was stabbing my friend's door, which spurred a bunch of jokes about The Shining as he recapped the story. She was put in assisted living care and died a couple of months later.
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 21:20 |