[ SECRET POST #2650 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2650 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 062 secrets from Secret Submission Post #379.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

For some questions, there's just never a good time to ask them. It seems insensitive when they are on topic, and weird when they are not.

I have two questions that I hope someone here has an answer to and I'm super curious what unanswered questions others have!

1) That Boston marathon bombing a while ago. The news here mentioned almost exclusively leg and foot wounds. I wondered (and still wonder) were the bombs build in such a way as to explode low and wound mostly legs and feet, or did the news focus on the leg wounds because it was a marathon and runners, so leg wounds were more dramatic? I saw only two mentions of other wounds, burns and a gut wound, I think.

2) Fires. Whenever there's big fires that apparently burn down whole swathes of land and houses and stuff, I wonder... if these regions experience fires so often (like, yearly, or nearly), why aren't there better countermeasures in place? Obviously I can't ask that while the fires are being reported, since that would sound like victim blaming, which isn't what I mean at all. I'm just surprised. My region used to flood badly all the time hundreds of years ago, so I grew up with info about how people handled that (first they built houses on hills, then they made more hills themselves, then they built dams the whole length of the river and sea, then improved those and so on, so now we haven't had a bad flooding in over 40 years). Which makes me wonder why there seems nothing similar for fires.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

1) I think the bombs were near the ground but I don't know for sure.

2) Fire is more powerful than water.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Shit, I know I have a ton of inappropriate questions I'm dying to know the answers to, but I can't think of any offhand right now.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[dreemyweird]

Re: 2. I have some experience with regions where big fires tend to happen on a regular basis, and sometimes it just isn't possible to take efficient countermeasures. Like when you have thousands of square miles of forests that tend to burn in random places and have pretty much no people in them.

Swamps are a bitch, too. They dry out and the peat in them starts to smoulder. If that happens, God help you, because this fire is not going to be put out, ever. It's going to burn for ages. And it's underground, which makes it 1000 times harder to do anything.

Other than that, some of these places don't have enough funds&have sucky administration that doesn't give a flying fuck about the fires.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

This is more about avoiding religious arguments than anything else, but... why doesn't Christians seem to a, acknowledge the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible as much (when I went to Church, very few sermons dealt with it), and b, that Jesus was Jewish? I especially wonder this at the time of the crusaders. I know some of this is that while Christianity has its roots in Judaism, it's ultimately a Greco-Roman based religion (so they ousted the Jewish traditions and beliefs and replaced them with ones they could better relate to), but there are beliefs so many Christians do still keep, so it doesn't make sense to me - like no sex before marriage, homophobia, etc.

I'm... kind of a Christian, btw. It's complicated, largely because of the reasons I just listed actually.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[kaijinscendre]

1) Pretty sure the bombs were made out of rice cookers, which are low the ground.

2) They do actually have countermeasures. In many places, firefighters/park rangers do controlled burns. This allows for built underbrush to be destroyed and helps prevent forest fires. They do this every couple of years where I live.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Mine's very personal, so none of you can answer it, but regardless: one of my friends came out as trans last January. At the time, he had a girlfriend (they broke up a few months ago), and they'd been dating since at least October. My question is, did she know before the rest of us did? She didn't react like it, so I don't think so, but on some level I'd like to know for sure.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Why is adultery considered a sin in some religions, but marriage after someone died isn't? I always wondered this. I have no problem with someone remarrying obviously, I think the deceased would want that person to be happy, but if the faith believes you meet your husband again in the afterlife... aren't you technically still married to them?

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm impressed with your region. Most places I know which flood regularly just keep building levees, so they just have even more drastic floods when the floods inevitably get bad enough to overcome them.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

1. Not positive but I believe the bombs were a shrapnel type of bomb that exploded low to the ground sending out debris which hit people mostly in the legs and feet.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

2) I know fires in the US spread wide and fast and occur naturally, not just due to humans or something. There are countermeasures in place but of course you rarely hear about the fires that were brought under control. Also there are some regions that will do a controlled burn. Also, fire is way more unpredictable and harder to contain than water (for the most part. obvs there are exceptions).

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

I have so many questions about FtM trans bodies but can never find a good source and it always seems rude to ask about people's privates. And it's not like I'm asking for voyeuristic purposes, but it still feels really invasive and like there's never a good time or place to ask about it...other than a therapist or doctor or something and I don't have access to those.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

why is incest between two consenting siblings considered amoral?

i'm not asking because i ship anything, it's just something that has always confused me. i understand the issue when there's power dynamics involved like with parents or whatever.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

2) - Places do take some countermeasures, and there are controlled burns and things like that, and as other people have said, fire is hard to deal with.

But I think in a lot of the more built up areas, the pressure to develop new land and build more houses to sell and the growth of developments - the pressure for all of that is such that people just kind of build without really giving a shit about planning for fires. So people could do that, but the profit motive and the population pressure and the demand for housing all lead to people building stuff in the moment and then getting screwed when there's a fire.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Do other people's eyes squint upwards when they smile? My family calls it a "cat's eye" smile, but the only other people I've seen whose eyes do that are of Asian decent, and my family isn't.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Are the United States really the nightmarish place described by Tumblr? (aka 30 millions trans people get killed a day, if you walk in a dark alley you'll surely get sexually assaulted, etc etc)

Do English people eat what's left of the wedding cake at the christening of the married couple's first baby? I saw that on a TV show but this sounds crazy. Like what are your wedding cakes made of, English people?

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[herpymcderp]

There are countermeasures taken in areas where fires are known to happen yearly.

It's called a controlled burn, and many parts of many countries do in fact do them during the early or late spring, before it gets too dry. It's exactly like it sounds: it involves setting fire to a predetermined area of grass or pitch and then making sure it stays contained. The burned area can then act as a barrier if there's a fire storm that year.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Somewhat related to your fire question: when I read about people rebuilding their town that was just destroyed a third time by the third hundred-year flood in a decade, on the exact same spot where it was the last two times times, I wonder what they are thinking. And this does happen.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[leikomgwtfbbq]

I can answer something about the fires.

I used to be part of a crew that thinned down the trees in order to try to reduce the speed of fires spreading, and a lot of my friends are wildfire fighters.

Part of it in the southwestern US (dunno about other places, but around AZ and UT) is that the trees and brush are clustered so close together, there's much more fuel and it spreads more quickly. They have countermeasures and preventative measures, but only so much time that they can mobilize in, and sometimes the fire spreads quicker than that. Plus the personnel can be spread kind of thin.

And sometimes there's not much you can do because some dope decided to ignore the "NO CAMPFIRES, NO SMOKING" sign and decided to flick his lit cigarette away and drive off, or because lightning struck a dead tree and started things going.

But they do have a number of personnel whose entire job it is to watch for smoke or fire from atop a mountain and alert the park/forest services or the local fire department, depending on where it's coming from.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

2. Where I live, the population is thinly spread in an ecosystem which has been fire-based for millenia. The trees, huge forests of them, exude inflammable oils. When a high wind blows off the desert, at temperatures of 40 degrees plus, any fire, even if caused by dried grass rubbing together, is likely to spread out of control. Heat, fuel, oxygen: a terrifying combination.

The farmland is good agricultural land in a country which doesn't have too much of it, and for nine months of the year it's a great place to live. For the other three months, everyone's slightly on edge. Each householder has a fire plan (or should have) and controlled burns are done, but short of burning the entire state each year, it isn't enough... There are volunteer fire crews in each community, brave as lions, all of them. There are helicopters and planes. If a really big fire takes hold, we have crews coming in from other countries, and we do the same for them, which is wonderful.

Still: thank god it's autumn.

Fires

[(Anonymous)]

Well, because you are dealing with a huge amount of land (generally, fires often happen in the Southwestern states and those states have a lot of area). There's a thing that happens based on rainfall, if it is uneven (a lot of rain one year and much less the next or a lot of rain during the growth season and then very little later) then you get a lot of built up growth that then dries out and it takes very little to start a fire. But a fire can happen in any of the thousands of acres of growth and fires are unpredictable - they can go in any direction, they can hop roads. They do controlled burns, sometimes, but they have to be very careful about those too.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[ryttu3k]

Australian perspective for part two: Australia is really big. We do backburning (controlled burns) every single year, but it's nigh impossible to get every single area. The Blue Mountains, which had bad fires late last year, gets regular backburning, but it's a very very large area of dense forest (dense EUCALYPTUS forest, which is highly flammable!) and it's hard to control. The Black Saturday fires in Victoria a few years ago were also in an area that hadn't seen backburning in quite a few years.

There's also the fact that it's impossible to predict WHERE the fires will be. Lightning can strike anywhere. Arsonists regularly start fires - one of the Black Saturday fires was arson (I personally think that the arsonist should be charged with murder, incidentally - eleven people died in that complex, and the fucker was only charged with one count of arson causing death!).

We do take as many precautions as we can - fire safety is drilled into Australian kids from a young age, there are building material restrictions (we couldn't use wood on our back porch because we were in the 'flame zone', for instance), we're taught what to do when the fire approaches - but when it's that huge, and when it's in areas that may not be brand new and DO have flammable materials, there's pretty much nothing you can do but get out as soon as humanely possible.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

Re. 2), what I tend to wonder (particularly with respect to RECENT arrivals, as opposed to families who've been in a place for generations) is why the hell they built in a place so prone to fires or floods to start with. I can give someone a pass if great-great-great-grandpa settled down there hundreds of years before climate was well understood (or before it changed,) but these days if it's well-known that a place is going to get hammered every few years or in the near future, it's irresponsible to put a house there.

Also, I'm not sure whether victim blaming is a thing when it comes to natural disasters. You can't really blame nature for hurting people, it just does what it does and is completely blind to human laws or concepts of fairness or justice, and there is absolutely nothing we can ever do to change that. So the onus is on us humans to take whatever steps are possible and necessary to protect ourselves. If we don't, then yeah, that's really our own fault.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[pantasma]

2) There are some things we can do to decrease the likelihood of severe damage, but there's only so much one can do when the fires are fuelled so much by weather. Where I grew up, Fire Season is a thing -- and it's not in high summer. Since we recently had two major firestorms only 3 years apart, everyone start getting really antsy when fire season rolls around, and we jump quietly from foot to foot wringing our hands waiting for the first rains.

Some neighborhoods have started hiring goats herds to come eat the "excess" undergrowth. But they keep cutting away all the ice plant, and other super-high-water-content plants in favor of houses made of wood and plaster, which burns. I think they recently imposed a stipulation that you're building a new roof/reroofing, you have to make it with slake, which are those asphalt-looking tiles. It means you're less likely to go up if ash lands ON the house, but if it flies up under the eaves, you're still screwed.

For history, at least in my area there weren't fires worth mentioning until about a decade ago. There's been one every few years, since. That first one is even still "immortalized" in the local natural history museum, with articles written during those couple weeks, maps showing the spread and control, burn rates, damage done, etc. They're taking water restrictions more seriously, too, but I don't know how much that affects the outcome...

Other than that, there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do but continue fining people who flick cigarettes out their windows, fail to properly put out camp fires, etc.

tl;dr
It's a lot harder to adapt to the land, or adapt the land, to prevent fires than it is for floods. It's more like avoiding an earthquake: you can take steps to prepare yourself and try to limit the damage done. It's an inevitable eventuality that you learn to live with.

Re: Questions there's never a good time to ask.

[(Anonymous)]

1.) Unsure of why you want to know? But okay. They were pressure cookers filled with shrapnel and nails and whatnot. No, not all the wounds were leg wounds but most of the serious ones were, since that was the closest body part to the explosions.