Madeline

The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. If you were to look at this, you would die instantly. 

The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.

Yeah, this is a selfie. The guy set the timer on the camera and went and stood by it, and it produced this horrifying image that now haunts my dreams. The reason all the photos from Chernobyl are grainy and poor-quality, by the way, is due to radiation. The cameras were fine; radiation just… does that.

Anyway, that guy’s name is Artur Korneyev- and I use ‘is’ because he’s still alive! He helped to build the original sarcophagus which encased reactor 4 after the meltdown, and kept going back inside with reporters to be like ‘look how fuckin weird this is’. He helped plan the New Safe Confinement which now surrounds the sarcophagus, and would probably have helped build it too if they didn’t full-on ban him.

A quote:

‘Korneyev’s sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life’s work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”‘

Possibly the coolest guy alive? I’m tempted to think so.

Honestly, I feel like Chernobyl has been shunted into this category of like, ‘a lot of innocent and naive people died horribly’, when in reality a lot of tough as fuck people saved everybody else. The oft-told story of the ‘suicide mission’ to dive into the reactor and open the valves of the pool? Yeah, all three of the men who dove lived. One died in 2005 of heart failure; the other two are still alive.

A total of 31 direct and 15 indirect deaths are thought to have occurred from the Chernobyl disaster. Long-term deaths are… difficult to measure. Oh, and there’s a few hundred people still living in the exclusion zone.

If you’re at all interested, I really recommend reading up about Chernobyl- and, in particular, what was done to contain it and deal with the radiation. This is a beautiful write-up, and the wiki page is also worth checking out.  A lot of people did absolutely incredible work and it goes unrecognised most of the time.

Freddie Oversteegen, Dutch resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92

The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a man’s effort in a man’s war. If women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.

Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.

In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and “liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.

Rest in peace, Stan Lee (December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018)