LOL, Garsh

This is missing the important context it was exclusive to GameStop Italy

and I think about my apartment, a duplex from 1912, surely built for a middle- or working-class family. spartan, really; quite basic and no-frills. not much to look at from the outside. just like a thousand buildings of similar provenance in the Boston area.

there are flowers molded in the chunky, cast-iron radiators

there’s a design of concentric circles in the carved door-lintels

many buildings of this type have a little stained-glass window somewhere

 I think about ornate door hinges in the staff wing of a country estate from 1878.  think of patterned wallpaper in a mansion’s kitchen, from 1797. I think about purely functional spaces someone looked at and said, “this needs beauty”

Gonna put my firefighting hat on and lecture for a minute here. Engineered Lumber is that shit made of wood chips that have been laminated together with glues and epoxies to make new boards out of waste material. That’s a good thing, right?

No. It really is not.

See, there’s other things that “waste material” could go to make or be used as, that do NOT include filling them with toxic chemicals that reduce the burn time of a piece of wood. Also, those pre 70’s boards were real, full, complete boards. So not only do they not off-gas massive quantities of toxic fumes when burning, it takes a lot longer than 2-4 minutes to burn through one. More like 15-20 minutes to burn through one. Also, yeah, there was waste in the way they built those old houses. It was called OVER-ENGINEERING. So when ONE of those boards burned through, you weren’t at risk of losing the entire roofing or flooring or ceiling SYSTEM because the materials to construct a structure have been pared down to the absolute minimum and even less in places.

Roof trusses were nailed together with NAILS, not “gusset plates”. Nails penetrate INCHES into the wood. Gusset plates? ¼ of an inch usually. Know how quick ¼ of an inch can char and cease holding onto the teeth of those gusset plates? I’ll give you a hint: it’s measured in a couple hundred seconds, rather than the tens of minutes a nailed truss gets.

TL;DR? Yeah, there was waste. They used thicker wood and a lot more of it, not even taking into account all the beautiful little embellishments like molded plaster reliefs and tin ceiling panels… But that thicker wood saved lives. It didn’t burn toxic, and it burned for a LOT LONGER before it became unsafe to be in.

Modern house like your typical McMansion? By the time we arrive on a typical structure fire, it’s already too dangerous to enter, because too many of the engineered lumber pieces will have been compromised, thus endangering entire building systems. We’re talking if it’s been burning for 5 minutes or so, 10 at the outside, we KNOW it’s not safe to enter. (If there’s someone in there, we will anyway - risk a lot to save a lot - but we also know to be a thousand times more careful about putting weight anywhere). That 1900 farmhouse that’s been burning for 30 minutes? It’s still plenty strong enough to go in and do what we gotta do. And we don’t have to be paranoid about breathing the smoke in outside, either.

When the only futuristic gadget I want that doesn't exist yet when it SHOULD are those cup noodles from Cowboy bebop where you just pull the tag at the bottom of it and the noodles are instantly warmed.

Night on Earth (1991)

Director: Jim Jarmusch