The Sea does not like to be restrained

Percy and Nico trade her off in the McDonald’s parking lot every Friday like all split up parents do (I know this from experience I was the kid). This weekly meet up often spurs arguments about how Mrs. O’Leary is raised. They try to keep these arguments hushed and quiet so Mrs. O’Leary won’t get stressed out. She hears them anyway because hell hounds have supper hearing. She hears every word. But she appreciates that they are being calm and mature with these arguments.

Annabeths the cool stepmom. Wills the responsible stepdad. Chiron and Daedalus and Sally and Paul and Hades and Persephone are the grandparents. Grover’s the sweet wholesome uncle. Hedge is the playful scrappy uncle. Percy and Nico are her parents.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!

And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.

There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.

percy vs. jason

“I could have killed you.”

“Or I could have killed you,” Percy said.

Jason shrugged. “If there’d been an ocean in Kansas, maybe.”

I’ve personally read a few phenomenal OC-centric stories (one of which vanished much to my regret). I know there’s stigma’s related to OCs, but there’s just such potential for OCs and world exploration in the universe.