A Simple Gay™

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot to death in Houston, Texas, USA, by ICE agents earlier this week, on July 7th. Araujo was 52, and was in the process of completing his citizenship authorization in the United States. He was family man who was deeply dedicated to his wife and three children, and supported his coworkers at their construction company without fail. He was assaulted by ICE during a traffic stop and, according to ICE, fled while using his car as a deadly weapon, justifying his murder. As there is currently little to no civilian footage of the murder and ICE has complete control of the narrative, holding ICE to the fire will be exponentially harder than the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

most big herbivores are, frankly. if you have a pretty steady supply of food and don’t have to worry about missing a hunt and starving to death, you can afford to throw your weight around more and generally be more aggressive!

that’s why the most dangerous big animals in the world are almost all herbivores.

This is Camarasaurus lentus, around 15 ish meters and over 16 tonnes, for reference sake, the largest african elephant bull EVER recorded was 11 tonnes. pretty decent difference right?  Well, except one thing. This is a SMALL sauropod. Want to see a large one?

Yeah, you’re reading that right, 53 tonnes. Almost five times heavier than the largest recorded african elephant ever. And they get even larger.

This bastard was last estimated at 73 tonnes, the largest animal ever to walk the earth. And they didn’t just get big, they got l o n g, too

That right there, is BYU 9024, it (among with a few undescribed remains) shows an animal in the size range of 40+ meters, this one here clocks in at around 40, and the funny thing is? this is the *conservative* estimate, larger specimens are not unreasonable in the slightest. It’s not quite as heavy as the big south american bastard above it, but at 67 tonnes, its close.

Secondly, speed. We’ve all seen it, lumbering behemoths that were dumb as rocks and probably about as fast, with a tailwind, going downhill. Well…. Not really, the latest studies done as of Asier larramedi’s sauropod facts and figures book gives some… Horrifying estimates.

I’ll spare you the complete explanations, there will be a paper out soon that goes into greater depth, but I’d like to draw your attention to the speeds, specifically fo the animal called Giraffatitan. Most people are familiar with it in some way, shape or form, but to clear up what exactly Giraffatitan is. 

They’re not the small ones in the foreground, they’re the big ones in the back. 33 tonnes of pure muscle, moving at 25 kp/h. Again, to provide further reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUE304bqwQc  THIS is how fast that is. It’s a house running at you, forget a hippo charging you, this would be a tidal wave of flesh and hatred bearing down on you.

And finally, weapons.

Like someone earlier pointed out,  Apatosaurus should have absolutely trounced the indominus, because quite frankly at such a size anything you do will hurt. Kicks with the front or hind limbs will be utterly devastating to anything except another of their kind, but Apatosaurus had another thing going in its favour.

One thicc-ass neck. Pictured here with speculative keratin spikes on the bottom, whilst the spikes are speculation, the neck itself would have essentially functioned like a fleshy battering ram, capable of pulping ribcages and smashing anything that could have “preyed” upon them. But that’s not even the most terrifying thing, though this is not specific to Apatosaurus itself, but to all diplodocoids (Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Diplodocus, etc.) Specifically, the tail. 

This is Diplodocus, as you can see, this animal is half tail, as you might also be able to see, the latter half of that tail tapers down to what can, in all essence be described as- a whip. A serrated whip, powered by some of the largest muscles in the largest animals that would have walked on earth. But it gets even MORE horrifying.

You see, there have been studies that have come to a conclusion, and though there are those that have doubted them, I personally have looked at the papers and found merit to the theories.

Well, I’ll not hold you in suspense any longer.

The tips of these tails, could have, and would have broken the sound barrier. Yup, you heard that right, and as soon as that fact begins to seep in, you’ll realize the horrifying implications. A diplodocoid whipping its tail, would blow out the eardrums of any animal close by and unfortunate enough to draw its ire, the sauropod itself would possibly not come out unscathed, but when you can literally give a would-be predator internal hemmorages by, what to them would be essentially like snapping a finger, the benefits begin to outweigh the risks involved. And that’s not even mentioning what would happen if it HIT anything, an impact at such velocity, with such mass driving it would be- quite frankly? Devastating beyond words. Flesh wouldn’t just tear, it wouldn’t just break skin or bones, flesh would MELT, bones would shatter, if not simply cease to be. And this is on a sufficiently sized animal such as Allosaurus or Torvosaurus. On a human? They would be ripped in half. So yeah, Sauropods get shafted in popular media to an extent that isn’t even possible, if you think hippo’s are scary, imagine something fourty times its size, faster than you, and able to kill you without even touching you. Sauropod are kaiju, plain and simple.

The babies were really cute though. This is andrew, and he’s a baby… the size of a horse. If you want to know just how tiny they began, this is probably a good reference.

you might not be a threat to an adult sauropod, but they may very well still decide to smear you and any other small maybe-predator in the area just in case you might get any ideas about snacking on their eggs or babies now or in the future.

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.