proud kaeya stan

1. There exists a club, started by Captain Moody, called the Gallunggung Gliders Club.

Everyone on the plane is a member. They are still in contact.

2. This flight held the record for the longest ever unpowered glide in a commercial air liner for just short of 13 months. The Gimli Glider beat it on 23 July 1983 (Air Canada flight 143, which famously ran out of fuel due to a metric/imperial conversation error).

3. A lot of the height lost in the glide was actually done on purpose. The first officer's oxygen mask wasn't functional, and Captain Moody decided he would rather have his entire flight crew available to problem solve, so they did an emergency descent to breathable air rather than sacrifice the FO to hypoxia and retain height.

They knew this was problematic, because of the mountains - if they couldn't get at least 2 engines lit, they had no chance of making a landing (hence the preparation for ditching). But it was very likely the right call as the FO worked diligently with the flight engineer to get the engines running.

4. The electro-magnetic interference caused by the volcanic dust messed with their radios, and it took them a long time, and help from another plane, to get Air Traffic Control to understand what was happening. ATC thought it was just a single engine failure for a long time, and wondered what all the fuss was about.

5. When they managed to get power back, and turned around, they flew back into the dust cloud. They had engine failures again, radio issues, static effects on the windshield... They quickly decided "fuck that" and descended to clear air. They had to fly almost dangerously low the whole way back to Jakarta. And then put the thing down while blind.

6. Even though it was the first time the dangers of volcanic ash clouds came into the awareness of the international flying community, LOADS of pilots and engineers in Jakarta took one look at the sandblasted plane and correctly identified what had happened.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

What critters are common in your neighborhood, but really exciting to visitors?

When you push a stick all the way to the edge, it will lock into one of these corners. This helps with stuff like walking in a perfectly straight line or steering all the way to one side, which is great for people who struggle with fine motor skills.

I've gotta help out here, since Wendigoon sucks and you deserve better

Night Mind is good at covering various ARGs and Youtube horror series. Been a fan of Nick Nocturne for a long time now, and definitely recommend his stuff

Lately I've been checking out Nightmare Movies, who tends to cover obscure horror/exploitation movies including a lot of foreign stuff. I've got a couple minor gripes with his presentation (I may post a clip thats accidentally really funny later), but definitely good for branching out and finding something new and creepy