Monsters' Queen

Round One, Bracket 2

Propaganda below the cut:

Is she allowed to be cool sometimes like so many (male) minor antagonists are ? Is she allowed to have motivation that are explored ? Or is she flattened and dismissed when shoud be one of the, if not the, main antagonist of the story and be allowed the internal complexity that goes with that position.

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!

Edit: my notes are full of murder. I love you all

Edit: to clarify about the poison, you can use poison if you actually know how to identify it, I'm saying you can't just go "Poison!" with no knowledge about poison. Buying it probably means they know that poison and you're caught. Your personal knowledge when you read this post is all you have.

Another point of clarity: You went through all that trouble to have a baby without modern medicine so you could get the sweet house after your husband died. That's why you can't be caught. No disappearing.

Edit again: Air embolisms are going on a high shelf because the syringe won't be invented for 350 years. Prove to me that you could make one from scratch, lol

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.

Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots. I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

Propagande Fred :

quand j'étais gosse je voulais être lui. (Bonus : il est toujours sur la même ligne éditoriale, droit dans ses bottes et il continue à faire marcher l'Esprit Sorcier)

il nous aide à apprendre, à poser des questions, élargir nos horizons. La culture et la connaissance c'est important mais c'est encore mieux quand c'est abordable et ludique. L'esprit de C'est pas sorcier en somme.

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

And he was like "we don't need to go to [town], we'll just go to the one in your town. And I said my town doesn't have a McDonald's. And he was like "okay, we'll go to the closest one". And I was like right, the one in [town]. And he said "that's twenty minutes away from your house, you really don't have one closer?" And when I confirmed that he said "well, it doesn't have to be McDonald's. It can be whatever fast food place is in your town." And I was like there is no fast food in my town. There is no food in my town period unless you want to stop for gas station hot dogs. And he was like "that doesn't make any sense. Then what do you do when you need food?" And I said I drive to [town]. And he said "every single time you need food or groceries?" And I said yeah, that's sort of how the fixed nature of buildings work. And then we drove in silence for ten minutes while this man tried to wrap his head around the fact that I had to drive twenty minutes to town to go grocery shopping.

Yeah, same.

I flatly refuse to believe such a place is possible. You're all making this up.

Propagande Papyrus :

il a la classe et il fut l,introduction à l,Égypte Antique de nombre d,entre nous <3

Il y avait que lui qui osait combattre les dieux égyptiens et se mettre sur leurs chemins

en attendant que je vous retrouve des planches avec Papyrus héroïque, au moins Papyrus en détresse :

Propagande Haddock :

Le gars, un minet journaliste avec son chien surdoué lui est tombé dessus, il a dit "Personne n'en veut ?" tout en ayant déjà rempli les papiers pour les garder, et a accepté oklm le professeur perché qui allait avec, déjà karma fois huit mille. Ne recule devant pas grand chose et surtout pas faire une confiance aveugle à son ami même quand celui-ci se met à parler au soleil.

Argument qui suffirait à lui tout seul : le bougre a une page wikipédia dédiée à son vocabulaire tant celui-ci est d'une richesse incommensurable en terme d'insulte, vraiment, un fleuron du sel et de la verve francophone.

Une fois qu,il a sauvé la fille de Pharaon, est devenu son meilleur ami garde du corps fiancé et qu,il affronte pour elle et pour défendre quel opprimé des bandits des pretres des dieux armé de son astuce et de son sabre toujours à la mesure de son courage,

ben face à un vieil alcoolique qui dépend toujours d,un jeune journaliste pour rattraper ses conneries

No offense Archibald mais le choix est vite fait

La jeune Cécile subit des abus terribles dans sa famille et le personnel de l,unité de Médecine de la Femme l,aide comme elles peuvent

The Ocean at Dusk -  Kate Jarvik Birch 

American , b. 1977 -

Propagande Papyrus :

il a la classe et il fut l,introduction à l,Égypte Antique de nombre d,entre nous <3

Il y avait que lui qui osait combattre les dieux égyptiens et se mettre sur leurs chemins

en attendant que je vous retrouve des planches avec Papyrus héroïque, au moins Papyrus en détresse :

Propagande Haddock :

Le gars, un minet journaliste avec son chien surdoué lui est tombé dessus, il a dit "Personne n'en veut ?" tout en ayant déjà rempli les papiers pour les garder, et a accepté oklm le professeur perché qui allait avec, déjà karma fois huit mille. Ne recule devant pas grand chose et surtout pas faire une confiance aveugle à son ami même quand celui-ci se met à parler au soleil.

Argument qui suffirait à lui tout seul : le bougre a une page wikipédia dédiée à son vocabulaire tant celui-ci est d'une richesse incommensurable en terme d'insulte, vraiment, un fleuron du sel et de la verve francophone.