Household Hazardous Waste - Jackson, MS

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My ultra hardcore recycling guide for our house

Hi all,
I've been putting together info for how to recycle in Tucson while leveraging all the recycling options that are open to me: curbside, the city's upcoming glass drop-off, local and mail-in corporate-sponsored, and TerraCycle (a paid option). I aim to reuse or recycle every last bit of waste coming out of our house, no matter how crazy it may seem. Partly I just want to see how difficult it is; I recognize that my process isn't practical for most people.
Anyway, here's what I've gathered so far.

General principles

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  1. COMPOST: If it can be composted, compost it! (More on this below.)
  2. REUSE: If it can't be composted, reuse it! Reuse is always the most environmentally-friendly option.
  3. DONATE: If it can't be reused by you, donate it if it's something worth donating that someone else could use. https://tucsoncleanandbeautiful.org/ has a great directory for places that will accept various materials. Cero is a Tucson store that also accepts lots of stuff for donation and reuse. Donation usually involves transportation and some kind of carbon emissions, but it's still better than recycling. Don't donate junk! Donations aren't a free trash can.
  4. MUNICIPAL RECYCLING: If it can't be donated, recycle it locally using municipal recycling (curbside or drop-off). Recycle Coach has all the info you need on what municipal recycling can or can't recycle. ESGD's page on residential recycling also has some important guidelines. Recycling uses energy and involves carbon-emitting transport, plus not everything in a recycling waste stream actually gets recycled, so try to reuse first.
  5. LOCAL STORE DROP-OFF: If it can't be recycled using municipal recycling, recycle it at a local store for free. Earth911 has a search page that finds these stores and breaks them down by type, and TerraCycle's corporate-sponsored programs page also has some local programs. These programs typically ship their waste to a recycling partner, often TerraCycle in New Jersey, which adds to the environmental footprint of the process, so try to recycle municipally first.
  6. FREE MAIL-IN: If it can't be recycled at a local store, use one of TerraCycle's free corporate-sponsored mail-in programs. These programs end up sending waste TerraCycle, just like the local store drop-offs, but are arguably less efficient than sending a big communal batch of stuff, so try to use the local store drop-offs first.
  7. TERRACYCLE (PAID): If it can't be recycled using a mail-in program, use a paid all-in-one box to have TerraCycle recycle it if it's small and light. This is effectively the same as using one of the mail-in options above except that you have to pay, so try to use a mail-in program first.
  8. REGIONAL DROP-OFF: If it's a big bulky waste that can't be donated, see if it can be recycled outside of Tucson (e.g., save up Styrofoam for the next time I drive to Phoenix, where they do have the appropriate facilities). TerraCycle accepts almost anything, but their all-in-one boxes are pricey, so it may make more sense to save up big hard-to-recycle stuff like packaging for Phoenix or another big city, if you think you'll drive there at some point. Don't make unnecessary trips just to drop off waste!
  9. TRASH: If it can't be composted, reused, donated or recycled, throw it away and make sure that you follow the guidelines for hazardous waste disposal.
  10. GOLDEN RULE #1: Make sure that the material is clean. Clean waste streams are more valuable to recyclers, which helps keep costs down. Don't use too much water cleaning up stuff, but don't feel too guilty about using water, either! Dishwater usage is a tiny sliver of household water consumption, not to mention that industry and agriculture generally use much more water than homes.
  11. GOLDEN RULE #2: The goal of recycling is to break down your waste into "primary materials" (e.g., plastic, metal, paper, glass) that can be used by industry to make new products. The more mixed your materials, the more you need to research how to recycle it. Knowing the basics goes a long way. For example, I know that metal cans get melted down, so a paper or plastic label attached to the can doesn't worry me because I know that it will get burned off. But what about a milk carton, which is paper fused with plastic? Or the circuitry inside the plastic base of a CFL bulb? If you can't intuitively explain how the thing is going to get broken down into its primary materials, that's your cue that you need to do some research.
  12. GOLDEN RULE #3: Knowing the basics of how recycling centers work goes a long way. For example, if you know that you can't recycle plastic grocery bags curbside because they get stuck in the machines, that's a hint that you shouldn't try to recycle your plastic food wrap, either. Or if you know that plastic bottle caps fall through the holes of a separator, that's a hint that you need to research whether your beer bottle caps are recyclable (even though they're metal).
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Reuse and recycling guide for my home

This is not a comprehensive list of every recycling resource in Tucson, this is just for my house my household's needs. I've found that there's no one-size-fits-all solution if you want to reach close to 100% recycling/reuse, you end up having to come up with a list that's customized for your home, which requires research. I'm providing my list as a potential template as well as for inspiration.
Legend:
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How do I sort all this?

Right now, I'm using a makeshift system of lots and lots of bags to keep everything separate. My idea is to do a monthly "recycling day" and drop off everything that needs to be dropped off as well as mail in everything that needs to be mailed in. I haven't had to do this yet since I started this project.
I hope to build a sorting station in my house once I understand my needs a bit better.
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Notes on TerraCycle and partner programs

A lot of the corporate-sponsored/mail-in/drop-off programs are done through TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycler that specializes in recycling hard-to-recycle things (e.g., potato chip bags, toothbrushes). They make lots of their money through large corporations, which essentially pay them to process unprofitable waste in order to burnish their environmental stewardship bona fides. They also offer paid recycling pouches and boxes to the general public. You mail in these pouches/boxes (they come with a shipping label) after filling them up with recyclable waste.
TerraCycle will recycle almost anything and everything. However, anything that gets recycled through them or one of their corporate programs is shipped to New Jersey for processing, so it's preferable to reuse or recycle locally. They're also not as transparent as I wish they would be. I'm not certain, for example, how much of each waste stream actually gets recycled. They have a customer support contact form that's been very good for getting my questions answered, but beware that they take about 2-3 days to get back to you per request.
I bought the large "all-in-one" box from their site and found a coupon code online to bring the cost down to around $350. I read a review elsewhere from someone who got a medium box (about 50% the size) who said that it lasted her six months. My idea is to use this box as "recycling of last resort" and rely on drop-off programs as much as possible to keep costs down. On the other hand, this makes my life more complicated in terms of sorting different waste streams, so you could simplify by putting waste destined for various drop-off points into a single TerraCycle all-in-one box.
You need to register for free on their website to use their mail-in programs. Many of their mail-in programs unfortunately have wait lists. Of the ~15 programs for which I signed up around two weeks ago, about 8 had wait lists, and I got off the wait list for about 5 of them. So they seem to go through the list pretty regularly. Once you're in, you can print off a free UPS label from the "my profile" section of the site after logging in.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would assume that TerraCycle has a higher rate of recycling than municipal programs, but this must be balanced against the financial and environmental cost of shipping waste to their facilities.
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Composting

The Achilles' heel in my recycling and reuse plan is organic matter. The City of Tucson has a composting program but it's only open to businesses.
There are a few volunteer-run programs here and there that accept compostable waste. I managed to sign up for one, UA's Compost Cats, and will be meeting them tomorrow to pick up my sealed composting bucket and go over the program rules. I know that they have limited capacity, so you have to email them. They took about a week to get back to me.
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Am I insane?

Maybe a little 🙃.
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Shout outs

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submitted by Low_Walrus to Tucson [link] [comments]

JoJo's Bizarre OC Tournament #5: Round 3 Match 8 - Funk Odyssey vs Klein Bras-Cheche Heitsugi

The results are in for Match 6.
Seido Shuto was having the time of his life.
Kamen Rider Volt, and that kid who had clearly summoned him there, had proven not just a roadblock, a means to kill time until his target passed by, but truly exceptional opponents, among the rare sorts who would attempt to take him on directly rather than simply avoiding him, and in turn, atop Barrier Bridge, he would answer with everything he’d had, the grin of the trigger-happy hitman hardly having a chance to leave his face.
Taking down worthy targets like this… Yes! This is why I rose from the dead! This is why I came to this city! Show me now, Volt! Show me what sort of man you are!
“Alright partner, I’ve got one last trick up my sleeve.” Volt passed Ani his spare treads, before hopping on the railing.
“I hope y’know what yer doing…” Ani hopped on the rail across from him, and in what was supposed to be totally safe, but was now a last-ditch, desperate effort by the skin of their teeth, they barreled at Seido.
Ani was attempting to continue to play his supporting part and staying close as Volt, in turn, stepped up onto the railings close by Seido, attempting to fire volleys of quarters and other bits of metal at him. They had prepared on the spot, thought that they had cornered the man who they had managed to injure once already and force to retreat.
Sure, they had a lot less ants than they’d expected to work with, and Ani was starting to feel the burn of keeping up, but he wouldn’t hold this back! The two of them had all but won now, surely, and they would be standing by the end!
”KAMEN RIDER ANT!”
”AND KAMEN RIDER VOLT!”
“ELECTRO DOUBLE RIDER-”
Volt had noticed it slightly sooner, an instant more, that it wasn’t just the rush of battle which had put a grin on their opponent’s face. That they hadn’t cornered him at all, but been funneled.
Seido vanished, then, and appeared beneath and behind them, firing a Galaxy Bullet towards Ani in midair. It was too late for him to course correct, and his lightning strikes had hit empty space.
“Wh-” Ani blinked. “He just-”
“Ani…” Volt answered, solemn through his dinged-up helmet. “Live. When you walk the path of a dead man… You lose so, so much.”
He was confused, but before he could get an explanation, Ani found himself feeling a force surging through him, all that Volt could do in the moment to shove him far and away as fast as possible, force his momentum towards the side of the bridge where, while hurting, he wouldn’t be getting what Seido had quietly called ‘Singularity.’
Where before, two riders had been in the air, now one was pelted from all sides, all angles, by all number of projectiles, which began to thin and thin, concentrate and concentrate more around him with shot after shot. His suit had begun to crumble, and a final blow sent him careening off the bridge, Ani able to do little but watch, reach out, and dare not to call and waste this effort to risk his life to save his own.
N… No… No way… Volt, I brought you here! You’re not the one who should be…
Seido Shuto sat back, then, nursing his wounds with a content look on his face as he awaited the sound of a worthy opponent hitting the water. Before he could truly confirm this kill, however, he looked out to the traffic of the Barrier Bridge, where a small fleet of armored unmarked vans were steering through traffic.
“Never a break in Los Fortuna, I suppose… Thank you, both of you, for the best fight I’ve had since that day in those mountains.” He stood, then, preparing to fire off another Wormhole bullet. Sure, neither foe was close enough to hear them, if they were alive, but it was the thought that counted, right? “Time to do my job.”
The winner is Seido Shuto, with a score of 74 to Players’ 67!
Category Winner Point Totals Comments
Popularity Tie 15-15 Though it seemed that things would close on a four point lead for Seido with a last minute vote, an even more last minute vote evened things out to a 4.4-4.4 votes overall (Solely for this gag, a single tie vote counts for .2 less collectively this once).
Quality Seido Shuto 25-21 Reasoning
JoJolity Seido Shuto 24-21 Reasoning
Conduct Tie 10-10
Rushen Smith’s luck was just the worst.
He’d already been on the bridge by the time that shots fired on its far end was heard, and of course, traffic going West across the bridge was congested as hell enough that it was literally probably going to be safer to risk it and push through, to not allow civilians to get mixed up in this.
Of course, ‘safer’ being the bitterly relative term it presently was, it wasn’t enough to stop his driver from being struck, from several other members of the vehicular fleet that was supposed to bring this lot to justice suddenly finding their cars struck just right and veering into one another in crashes.
Elle Mortis was shielding the bullet-struck company head and trying her damnedest to dole out first aid, stammeringly commanding those VALKYRIE agents not among the four dead and many other injured en masse to try and take even a semblance of control over the situation. Rushen would live, recover fully even, but he’d taken a bizarre sort of bullet for her and spared her the same fate as she crawled out of the wreckage of her own vehicle.
Toby Fox, the man they had just apprehended, was escorted out of Rushen’s van by a manic-looking sniper, who had been sweating and breathing heavily as though he’d just had a hell of a fight to get there, and chatted him up like nothing was the matter. A small number of other wealthy ED staples had also managed to escape their confinement, though a majority, it seemed, had been dazed by the crashes.
“I take it Tigran sent for you…” Fox smiled, rubbing at his own neck. “I don’t know where I would be without him… Thank you, Seido, dearly.” He looked around, then. “Quite a destructive rescue, if I might comment…”
“He didn’t say anything about the rest,” Seido answered, grabbing onto his arm quickly, “anyway, we don’t have time to linger and help them all… We’re in the middle of a pincer attack from McBaise and his guys now. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was Mr. Sins’ contact…”
“That… Sounds like him, yes,” Fox answered, casually tossing up chunks of road to block Elle’s attempt to fire her weapon at him until the chamber clicked uselessly. “We don’t have time for this. Those of you conscious who don’t want to be dead or rotting in Red Clay, be quiet and grab on. With this little distraction passed… We can finally get back to what we’re best at.”
As two moderate-sized squads of men in dark armor closed in, Seido, Fox, and half a dozen highrollers vanished with a final firing of the former-most’s rifle.
Villainy has triumphed over justice and slipped away into the underground of the city, on the day of Los Fortuna’s founding of all times. Elsewhere, meanwhile, a commemoration of the day is now a gamer’s platform to turn a massive information leak into a competitive public spectacle between a jaguar and an artist.
Scenario:
Klein Heitsugi’s apartment, Waterfront District (the small island between North Island and the Slums), 00:23 AM
Klein Heitsugi’s apartment was a modest place. As opposed to the rooms in the Eighth Circle which he spent so much time going through while working there, it wasn’t lavishly decorated, though that didn’t mean it was bad in any way - a bulletin board of pictures, a golden shield given to him by a coworker’s stand, and the usual furnishing one would expect were all that were really needed to make the apartment ‘his’.
Lying on his bed, Klein wondered how much longer the apartment would last. From what he’d heard, it seemed like the city of Los Fortuna was going to be destroyed somehow at some point in the future, alongside everyone within it. It wasn’t exactly a very uplifting thing to think about, but Klein had gone through similar (and worse) situations in the past. Really, he had a slightly hard time believing he’d even managed to live this long, and since he had already done it once, would getting over another death curse be that hard? Well, maybe, but at least he sort of knew what to expect by now, so he’d just have to take it step by step.
The first step, of course, was better understanding the situation. He’d done his due diligence and already gone out of his way to hold discussions with at least one individual of note, Byron Oxbow of the Industrial District, but he’d been meaning to seek out more. Meanwhile… he had one more thing in mind, at least.
“Being So Normal”, the reality show documenting the lives, experiences, and fights of many stands users within Los Fortuna, had already gone live within the city, but was gearing up for a worldwide release very soon - in order to build up hype, they were hosting a livestreamed event documenting a few “matches” held for the show, and were looking for stand users to sign up for and participate in them.
Despite having mixed thoughts on it all, especially surrounding the show’s host, Cairo Satori, it’d be a good opportunity for Klein - at the very least, he’d be able to talk with whoever else came there, and he knew he could probably find Cairo and talk with them a bit - he had conflicted feelings about them, but that was all the more reason to better understand their view on the current situation and see what he could learn from them. Too many of their interactions were wrapped up in different contexts, this would be a solid chance to get to the bottom of things.
Klein had already signed up for the event, though what exactly he’d be doing there still remained a mystery to him.
Well, he’d find out soon enough.
A warehouse-turned-studio by the edge of Agora Row, the next day, 1:52 PM
Funk Odyssey parked her motorcycle in a nearby lot, taking a look at the area around her. This part of Agora Row was just by the A-D, and it definitely showed - the building were just that bit smaller, and it was definitely quieter than the regular hustle and bustle of the district’s shopping malls. Still, she came here for a reason.
Standing in front of the entrance to the warehouse where she was supposed to go, Funk took a deep breath. She had mixed feelings about doing this, but… Peter had asked her to. Apparently he’d been doing some digging into Being So Normal alongside some other stand users in the area, following the time when she, Peter, and two other stand users had to save Cairo from two vengeful maniacs seeking to get revenge on them.
Funk… didn't like thinking about that. At all. She was rash, reckless, and regardless of how angry she was… she ended up killing someone who didn’t even deserve it. On one hand, that whole situation was in part Cairo’s fault - they were reckless, and keep on being reckless to this day, and others end up suffering for it. Then again, Funk knew that at the end of the day, she couldn’t push all of the blame onto someone else.
Since that day, she’d barely gone out of her team’s base, only leaving a few weeks before to go on an expedition to hunt down and capture a dangerous beast in the city’s waterfront district. Other than that… she left every once in a while to keep her bike functioning, and she’s been going out more recently, but she was in somewhat of a funk, one could say.
Whatever. She had to do this, for Peter, at least - he’d given her some sort of “broadcaster” to keep on her person, and apparently her being here in person with it would help with what he had planned, so she had to do this. Funk took a deep breath, and entered the warehouse.
It didn’t take long for Klein to reach the area as well, and soon after, he was assigned an event to participate in “stand fencing” (“Handpicked by our crew to fit your skills best!”, as the clerk made sure to mention), and was ushered into a waiting area set up at the edge of the warehouse, to the side of the main “studio” - cameras and set lights littered the area, but it seemed somewhat barren - all of the cameras that were set up simply pointed towards the center of the warehouse, which had nothing much in it. He could see various crew members running around the area, setting up equipment… were they going to bring more stuff over soon?
Well, whatever - these were professionals, and they probably knew what they were doing. He then turned his attention to the rest of the stand users that had arrived in order to participate in the event - some were looking around the area, figuring out what to do, while some simply sat on some fold-up chairs in the seating area, waiting for… whatever was going to happen, all dressed in various odd and bizarre ways. Of note among them, was a somewhat familiar face, or, more accurately, a familiar suit - though he hadn’t actually seen it for himself, and had only really met its wearer once almost half a year ago, during Los Fortuna’s pride parade, Max had told him about the beetle-themed kamen rider suit Funk Oddysey often wore, and looking at it, Klein could certainly see the appeal.
Before Klein could do much more, a voice came in through the speakers, indicating that it was time for the events to start. “Attention! We’re starting filming on the first event, so any stand users not involved in “Extreme Hot Potato” please go to the seating area and refrain from interfering with filming!”
‘Extreme Hot Potato?’ Well, that sounded… extreme. Klein wasn’t sure what to expect, but he figured that he’d find out very soon. A few stand users shuffled over to the stage, as Klein and the rest of the stand users that weren’t up yet made their way towards the sitting area, Klein went over and sat down near Funk. At the very least, he could probably talk with her a bit. Turning to her, he gave a slight wave, before speaking.
“Hey, you’re Funk Odyssey, right? I’m Klein - saw you during the pride parade a while back, and I think Max should have probably told you a bit about me? I would hope so, heh.” Looking at her, Klein realized that he couldn’t actually see what her expression was past the suit. “Cool suit, by the way.” he quickly added, waiting for a response.
“Oh, yeah - Klein, I remember you! Max mentioned you a couple times too, so you’ve got nothing to worry about there.” Funk responded, turning to face him. “So, you’re here to participate too? What event did you get?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t the case, you know. I’m here for “stand fencing” apparently, whatever that is. Don’t do much proper fencing, but I think I’ll be able to handle myself.”
“Oh, hey - same here! Guess we’re up against each other, then? Maybe there’s someone else involved, but I haven’t ever heard of fencing with more than two people, so...”
Before Klein could respond, the lights dimmed, and the familiar voice of Cairo Satori rang through the warehouse. In an instant, the dingy set seemed to have transformed entirely, the warehouse becoming pristine, various props suddenly appearing around the set, and at the center of it all… was a bomb. A fake one, Klein had hoped, but a bomb nonetheless. Probably the “hot potato” being passed around, then.
Klein furrowed his brows, trying to figure out what kind of stand ability did all of this, before Funk stepped in to explain. “They’ve got a person on crew that handles illusions. Most of the filming too, apparently. This is probably because of her.” Klein gave a slight nod, opening his mouth to speak before seeing a large light turn on, focused on a figure on the other end of the warehouse - Cairo Satori.
Being So Normal’s host walked over to the center of the room, giving their usual spiel about stand users and the show, before explaining the basics of the game, introducing the contestants, and opening the game. Neither Klein nor Funk didn’t paid much attention to it, as the two made some small talk about this and that, but as the game of extreme hot potato went on, they did find themselves getting drawn to it somewhat - in a matter of minutes, a game of tossing around a fake bomb turned into pure chaos, with the amount of participants and bombs having somehow multiplied many times over due to clones, stands beating the shit out of each other, and all of it being followed live by Cairo’s narration praising the tactical quick thinking and finesse on display. By the time the “bomb” did inevitably explode and end the game, Klein and Funk found themselves unconsciously leaning forwards in their seats, getting as close to the action as possible.
“Alright, and that’s that for Extreme Hot Potato! We’ll come right back to you with the next game, “Stand Fencing”, after a quick 10 minute break - in the meantime, stay tuned for a word from our sponsors!”
And with that, the first game was over, and Klein and Funk knew they were up next.
Ten minutes later, and the arena was properly cleaned from the mess of the previous “match”, meaning that the next match was set to start very soon. Klein was already at the arena, having been given a fake sword to use for the bout. Funk, meanwhile, wasn’t there. The lights dimmed, turning the warehouse pitch-black, if only for a moment before Cairo Satori made their entrance again.
“Welcome back to our second match for this live event! This time…. stand fencing! Our first contestant for the day is Klein Heitsugi! Some of you might have seen him already around Los Fortuna, but if you haven’t, you’re sure as hell not going to forget him after you see what he can do!”
A round of fake applause played over the loudspeakers as light shone down on Klein, and Cairo made their way over, continuing.
”Going up against him… like jousting matches from ages ago, we’ve got a knight in shining armor on an equally shining steed - Funk Odyssey!”
The noise of a bike engine roared through the warehouse, crew members and stand users alike looking around nervously before Funk blasted into the room, speeding towards Klein and Cairo before skidding to a halt and taking her position as the fake applause roared.
”Now that we’ve got our contestants introduced… let’s go over the rules! First, let’s turn on the lights!”
As Cairo shouted that out, the lights seemed to flicker back on, and the boring warehouse seemed to shift once more, though this time far more drastically - in fact, to the viewers, Funk, and Klein, it seemed as if they had been teleported somewhere else entirely! No hint of stage crew, any audience, or anything else! Instead, they were situated on some kind of circular platform, standing on a marble floor, high in the air! Neither of them was close enough to the edge to see what was underneath it, and small stone walls seemed to close it off, but the illusion was shockingly real.
”Cool, right? And the rules here are simple! First, like actual fencing, you’ll be trying to stab your opponents with that sword we've given you - any hit counts, so long as you hit with the edge of the blade specifically! However, getting a hit in doesn’t mean you win it all - this match goes to whoever can win five rounds in total! Each round is decided by who gets a hit in, and between every round, you’re getting 20 seconds to rest and return to your starting positions!”
”Other than that… well, you’ve got your stands to keep things interesting! Really go all out with it! Everything’s allowed, aside from hurting your opponents or messing with either of the swords! Other than that? Go wild, and make the most of what you’ve got! Got it?”
Funk and Klein nodded. It seemed simple enough to them...
Below the rising musical cues meant to time out each part of the explanation and as the focus was on the stage as a whole, the host took a moment to turn and make sure their contestants were really alright and ready for this. A softer and more genuine smile in response to that confirmation ended as suddenly as the aside began, and attention snapped back to the loud and bombastic lead-in.
“Alright, then...” Cairo’s voice started ramping up, just as they started vanishing into a puff of smoke, hidden by another illusion…
”OPEN THE GAME!”
(Credit to CaptainSpooky27 for yet more awesome match art!)
Location: A warehouse that is the current venue for the live event being hosted for Being So Normal. Here is a visualization of the area here.
The purple circle is the stage platform about 1.5 meters off the ground and the ground itself is a smooth concrete floor. The full area for this exhibition is 48 by 48 meters, each tile is 4 by 4 meters, and the players start 32 meters away from each other with Funk on the left and Klein on the right.
Each player has been given a fencing foil, a thin flexible sword used for standard fencing. Despite their thin and flexible nature, these swords are surprisingly durable and highly resistant to breaking or snapping.
The players have also been given full fencing gear such as helmets and protective clothing they are to wear at all times in this match. These should not negatively impact the players in any way and only serve to help them not get accidentally hurt while fencing.
There is an off-screen referee that keeps track of all points and will call any fouls/restarts as needed.
Funk starts the match on her bike. And Cairo will provide a new one to replace the current one between rounds if Funk asks.
Both players have a Fencing 2 skill for the purposes of this match on top of their normal skills.
Goal: Beat your opponent in a first to 5 fencing match!
Additional Information:
General Rules of Cairo’s Fencing
To score a point in this match, you must land a hit on your opponent with the tip of your sword, hitting with the middle of the blade does not count. But glancing hits with the tip of the sword do count. A hit on the opponent’s stand body can count, but not stand constructs.
After a point is scored, the players will reset to their original position they had at the start of the match. After 20 seconds, the referee will finish counting down and the next round of the match will start.
During the downtime between rounds of fencing, anything destroyed or created during the round will stay, however players are not allowed to use their stand abilities in the time between rounds.
In the event that a person’s starting position is compromised, both player positions will be shifted clockwise around the stage until both new positions seem suitable while still maintaining the 32 meter starting distance. Follow the dotted guideline on the map basically.
In the event that the stage is totally compromised, players will have their starting locations moved outward to the ground, upping the distance between the players to 40-so meters.
Damaging and/or using abilities on your opponent’s sword or gear is strictly forbidden. This includes Funk’s bike, but indirectly damaging this is allowed with, such as by using stand-made hazards.
Harming or using your stand on the opponent is also forbidden.
Bodily contact between people or stand bodies and intentional contact with your opponent’s sword with your body is a foul (say trying to grab the opponent’s sword in your hand or blocking with an arm).
A foul causes a restart of the round, and after the second and subsequent fouls a point is awarded to the victim party if the other was clearly at fault.
In the event that swords or gear gets damaged, they will be replaced at the start of the next round.
Team Combatant JoJolity
Baker Street Rat Pack Funk Odyssey “The gun is mightier than the sword. Man, talk about a memorable quote.” Riding around on this simple flat arena is fine, but it’s not as fun as it could be, and you’re here to (among other things) put on a show! Make the most of both of your acts to terraform and reshape the arena as the match goes on in ways that benefit you!
Judecca Highrollers Klein Bras-Cheche Heitsugi “I can do more than just pass through them! I can cut the pillars themselves in half too!” Cairo told you to make the most of what you’ve got, and with all that your KOAN Sound can do, you can surely spruce this arena up quite a bit! Make the most of both of your acts to terraform and reshape the arena as the match goes on in ways that benefit you!
Link to the Official Player Spreadsheet
Link to Match Schedule
As always, if you would like to interact with the tournament community and be among the first to get updates for the tournament, please feel free to PM a member of our Judge staff for an invite to our Official Discord Server!
submitted by boredCommentator to StardustCrusaders [link] [comments]

The Racist Origins and Painful Legacy of Atlanta's Zoning

I'm going to start this post off with a few disclaimers:
  1. A good amount of my information comes from The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. I tried to find as many direct sources for the relevant topics brought up in the book as I could, but they weren't always readily availible. I highly encourage you to read the book itself if you want more details and his sources.
  2. While I am going to try to use Atlanta-specific information as much as possible, there are some things that I can only provide evidence for in general, not to mention that I have to discuss this with the wider national historical context as well since Atlanta was but one part of a massive racist horror show.
  3. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this material. It's just what I have the most supporting information already at had for. Again, if you want to read more details from someone who spent much more time researching than I have, pick up a copy of The Color of Law.
  4. I am by no means claiming that fixing zoning will be the end-all-be-all of segregation legacy, nor that it will singularly solve disparities for minority populations compared to white populations within the city. Undoing the sheer scale of bullshit put in place to codify segregation and racial suppression as it manifests today is an undertaking requiring effort on par with something like the Green New Deal (coincidentally, there can be quite a lot of overlap in with a GND, and that's why climate and social justice are so often packaged with various versions of a GND). Fixing the legacy of racist zoning's impacts is just one part to an incredibly complex system, but it's still one worthy of doing. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Alright, on to the main content... Buckle up kiddos, we're going for a fuckin ride!

Why the Fuck are you Talking About Zoning Right Now‽

The country is, to use an incredible amount of understatement, in a bit of a pickle right now. We're in the midst of a global pandemic that's surging, and resurging within our borders. We're reeling at a seemingly never ending parade of tragedy and failure of composure from the very police forces sworn to protect us. We're dealing with an ever escalating push back and response from a federal government that is attempting to label protesters as terrorists. We've had impeachments, assassinations of foreign political operatives, the emboldenment of out-and-loud racists, foreign bounties on our military, historic Supreme Court decisions, and record stock market crashes. We're staring down the barrel of a depression, and there's a looming climate catastrophe that's been burning in the background of all of this.
So why, in the middle of all of this, am I bringing up zoning of all things? How could that possibly be relevant to any of this?
Well... as it turns out... quite a bit. See, zoning is one of those core functions of government, generally on the local level but not always, that just kinda exists. It's a long, boring, complicated mess of legal code that just doesn't come up all that often in our every day discussions (unless you're a nerd like me who keeps trying to shove it into every conversation... ahem...).
No matter how innocuous or intangible or boring zoning may feel, though, it actually has massive ramifications for how our build environment is shaped. That is literally its job, after all: codifying what is and isn't allowed to be built, where, and how. That build environment then has massive ramifications on a whole pile of social, economic, and environmental issues.
A good zoning code balances public desires for safety, health, and environmental protections, while also helping to ensure various amenities are provided, ideally outweighing any downsides of development with benefits to the community at large. Unfortunately, most zoning systems fail at this balance, often focusing on the wrong components as perceived negatives when they're actually benefits, while codifying build requirements that actively make things worse for the communities around them. A bad zoning code can make housing more expensive, make it harder to meet climate and environmental goals, make the general population more sickly, impede the ability of persons to generate generational wealth, and horrendously damage the tax base, making it harder to fund public projects.
As it turns out, most of these issues trace back to a few core ideas of the initial model zoning systems, and were originally put in as features of the codes. The intent at the time was mainly focused on creating a few specific negative outcomes, with many of the others having taken decades to fully manifest and be recognized. Yet, the original structure of the codes remain, bureaucratic momentum and an incomplete understanding of justice keeping them in place, dragging out the problems for years and years and years.
So what were those features, and what specific negative outcomes were they trying to achieve?

Setting the Stage for Segregation

First, we have to step back, and take a bit of a historical run up to provide proper context.
In 1877, Reconstruction ended. Federal troops, who had defeated the Confederacy, packed up and left the south after 12 years of postbellum occupation (14 if you include overlap years of occupation before the war's end). Reconstruction, though certainly not perfect, had been a time of relative empowerment for black Americans. Backed by federal troops, integration and political power was actually in reach. It wasn't 40-acres and a mule, but it was an incredible leap forward as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were enforced in about as blunt a way as possible: at the muzzle of a rifle. That all came to a painful and tragic end with the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had promised southern Democrats the end of occupation in exchange for electoral support.
Almost immediately, black Americans suffered a bloody, violent resurgence of oppression, with segregation becoming standard practice, and enforced both at the hands of local law enforcement and mobs of white Americans. Worse yet, as Jim Crow laws and their efforts anchored themselves across the south, previously diverse and inclusive (relatively speaking) parts of the country began to follow suit. All over, towns and cities undertook the effort of removing, or isolating their black populations, using similar tactics learned from the southern states.
Like a cancer, segregation spread far and wide, becoming more and more recognized and acceptable. By 1913, freshly elected president Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in federal offices, marking about as drastic a change in federal priority as you could take over the course of three and a half decades.
It is in this atmosphere of invigorated racist bullshit that zoning rises within the policy consciousness.

The Original Sin of Zoning

As a concept, zoning ordinances within the U.S. were rather new, with the 1908 Los Angeles municipal zoning ordinances being the first of their kind. The LA laws were a formalizing of existing nuisance laws, meant to create separations of land use and buffers between the harmful effects of industries and residences. Though specific business classifications (such as unnecessary prohibition of laundries, which were predominantly owned by Chinese immigrants at the time, in certain areas) did come with racial issues, they were quite tame by the standards of the time, as we're about to see.
Prior to the rise of zoning as a popular government effort, it was fairly rare to see actual legal code dedicated towards segregation, instead focusing efforts on government-endorsed vigilantism and governments not enforcing equality laws already in place. This began to change, however. In 1910, a few years before the federal government would make official its office segregation, and two years after the LA zoning system was established, Baltimore became the first city in the nation, (as stated by the New York Times), to create an explicit law mandating the segregation of city areas. The city ordinance dictated that blacks could not buy homes on blocks where whites were the majority, and vice versa. The law was... horribly broken, and judges had to grapple with the complex, integrated reality of the city, trying to adjudicate who could and couldn't live where, or buy property where, creating an incredible mess of legal issues across the city.
The practical problems with the law did not stop other cities from copying the effort, though. Invigorated by Baltimore's example, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others all made their own version of racial segregaition mandates within landuse. Amungst this list was, in fact, the City of Atlanta, whose ordinance virtually copied the Baltimore law, with the added provision that a person of one color occupying a house in a mixed block could object to one of another color moving next door.
Unlike the initial LA zoning laws, the systems put in place following Baltimore's example were specifically racially focused, with more familiar zoning laws taking shape in the years to come. These initial racist laws would persist until the 1917 Supreme Court decision that such laws were unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. However... the decision was based around the freedom of individuals to buy and sell property to whomever they wished, rather than a denunciation of segregation within law itself. Many cities simply ignored the Supreme Court ruling, and moved ahead with their segregationist laws, while others claimed that slight variations in the ordinances, such as the difference between block level and larger zoning styles, meant they didn't have to follow the ruling.
The City of Atlanta was, once again, one of these cities. In The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta (1922), written by Robert H. Whitten as a consultant for the the City Planning Commission, explicit residential districts were outlined by racial makeup, with R1 as "white residence district", R2 as "colored residence district", and R3 as "undetermined race district". It was nice enough to allow servants' quarters remain open to either race. The plan justifies this by saying:
the above race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.
Additionally, Whitten defended his zoning plan in professional publications by saying that "[e]stablishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict." This, he added, was "a sufficient justification for race zoning.... A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable."
Here is a map of the proposed zoning system within the then city limits. You can get an idea of just how limited housing areas for blacks were, just how much of the city was to be dedicated to single family housing compared to apartments, and how relegated commercial uses would be. Incidentally enough, this is where the City of Atlanta begins to see a zoning code similar to modern codes. We'll get to that in a moment. For now, note how closely this map matches some of the racial demographics of the city today, oh, and (just coincidentally I'm sure) how the largest 'Colored District' in the city was to be essentially bordered on three sides by industrial areas. Other zoning maps from the same time would go further with encroaching industrial zones, limiting colored areas, and limiting apartment areas.
Can I just take a moment to say how much I fucking love the Atlanta History Center and its archives? Okay, moving on.
At the same time that Atlanta was ignoring its constitutional duty to not segregate its people, the federal government was stepping into the zoning game. In 1921, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance, with an eventual goal of developing model legislation that could be easily adopted. This committee had such members as Frederick Law Olmsted, who argued in 1918 that not only were certain housing types "coincident with racial divisions", and, since it was undesirable to "force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle", great care should be take not to mix housing types, and Irving B. Hiett, who was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, an organization who would produce a code of realtor ethics stating that "A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... members of any race or nationality... detrimental to property values" just a few years later. By 1922, the committee had developed A Zoning Primer, which argued that zoning was required to preserve property values, and which was widely distributed across the country. The policies would push out wide and far across the nation, following the federal government's example.

Pretending as if Racist Plans Aren't

In 1924, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the City of Atlanta zoning code due to its racial components. Despite this, the underlying plan and map developed with segregation in mind, would act as the basis for future plans. Indeed, there are many overlaps with the 1922 plan, and even zoning designations today.
Keep Whitten's and the Zoning Commission's mentalities concerning the importance of racial segregation when looking back through the rest of the initial Atlanta zoning proposal. It provides leading anecdotes (without apparent supporting evidence beyond some photographs that don't really seem to match the narrative) of the dangers of mixing small stores, and low-rise multi-family housing with lower densities, primarily focusing on the perceived loss of value of adjacent properties, while framing the persons who make such developments as greedy speculators only out for a quick buck (rather than look at the economic benefit to the store owner, the new access to the store that surrounding areas get, and the housing relief the apartment dwellers experience).
Still without apparent evidence, the proposal makes sweeping, generalized statements about the need to preserve neighborhoods' character, and preserve property values. It proposes to do this by dividing the city into use, height, area, and race categories, with each mixing with the others to dictate specific allowances. The racial categories were removed, yet the remainder of the plan's suggestions would persist.
Even in 1917 it was understood that density was a major component of affordability. Special City Plan Adviser for the City Plan Commission of Cleveland Ohio Robert H. Whitten's essay The Zoning of Residence Sections, where Olmsted argued the merits of preventing the mixing of people and their racially pre-dis-positioned housing preferences, outright states:
We want to distribute the population as much as practicable, but at the same time we do not wish to force people who for business or other reasons need to live close to the central business sections either to pay very high rents or to go to much less convenient locations. As a city reaches metropolitan size, the demand for housing space near the central area becomes so great that the only way to make that location available to any but the wealthy is to permit a more intensive utilization of the land. Were it not for the ability to pile one dwelling on top of another, rents would be prohibitive in these central locations for the great mass of the people.
Even while expounding on the virtues of low-density housing, Whitten takes effort to acknowledge the economic need for multi-family housing to maintain affordability. Yeah, it's done in a condescending way where he can only imagine a case where being adjacent to the central business district is a legitimate reason for housing density, but he at least still accepts it as reality.
Yet, dwelling house districts, from which apartment houses would be excluded, were to include the larger portion of the area of Atlanta, and were to primarily be made up of the largest area class, requiring at least 5000 sqft per family of lot area. The code outright targets 2-3 story buildings with families living over a store (generally which they would operate) as being undesirable, and thus is explicitly designed to prevent such outcomes. All of these things drove up the per-house price, requiring a family to pay for a significant amount of land, as well as an individual house, in the majority of the city's residential area. In the maps I linked above, you can see just how few areas were allowed to have apartments compared to the wider single-family zones.
The federal zoning primer includes similar sentiments, telling an anecdote of how an apartment house built next to a home would destroy values by becoming 'a giant airless hive, housing human beings like crowded bees', as well as lumping 'sporadic stores' in with 'factories or junk yards' as a contributing factor of blight within a residential neighborhood.
It's important to note that none of these codes tried to make improvements to living conditions through legislation like building codes, which could have helped prevent the squalor conditions that were so readily associated with apartments, and which had been present in the U.S. since at least 1859, in Baltimore, choosing instead to essentially quarantine apartments to prevent their spread into single family areas.
As I laid out above, these are all value judgements made by people who viewed the mixing of races as something to avoid, as something that itself would contribute to a loss of property values (rather than recognize that self-fulfilling white panic, was the actual source of value drop, and that the constrained black populations were willing to pay higher prices because there were so few homes they could even get into, actually raising prices), and even made racial connections to types of housing to keep separated. But, because of the insistence of the courts, their policies were forced to take on an air of race neutrality. Thus, explicit race-based zoning was stripped from the codes, and the far more familiar forms of space and use based zoning were established. Those forms just so happen to harshly restrict the kinds of housing openly accepted as being affordable to the masses, and, in particular, the demographics of people who were least economically able to choose elsewhere.
As the federal zoning primer said: Zoning Is Legal
This is not to say that exclusionary zoning was not without its legal challenges, of course. In the 1926 Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, the court upheld the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, using as part of its opinion the argument that "very often the apartment house is a mere parasite", and that, if allowed to mix with single-family houses, "come very near to being nuisances". The case was brought to the Supreme Court as an appeal to a U.S. District Court of Ohio ruling against the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, stating that "the blighting of property values and the congesting of the population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance." Essentially, while the Supreme Court decided that exclusionary zoning was based on inherit issues with mixing building types (even though 1) the issues aren't inherit, and 2) the exclusion argument is based on a slippery slope fallacy), the District Court had (correctly) identified an underlying racial motivation for preventing mixing.

When the Pretending Becomes More Overt

Were all else equal, we might be able to ignore the initial racial components of exclusionary zoning, and merely call the resulting codes classist (the reality is that racism and classism were/are tightly intertwined, with each giving perceived justification to the other), but things weren't equal. The median household income for a black family in 1947 (the earliest year I could actually find data) was just 51% of a white household (it was only up to ~63% in 2018). Even though modern discussion around apartments tends to bemoan the 'luxury' branding, and how accurate it may or may not be, the hard reality is that living in an apartment is cheaper than buying a house, at least in the immediate. For lower income people, it's pretty much the only option. For poor, and thus disproportionately black, people, the primary need for housing affordability was in the form of apartment buildings and residential density, even if that was only desired as a stepping stone. But that's not what the zoning system provided.
Overwhelmingly, the city's land was designated for single family homes. Large lots, and individual homes drive up the per-unit costs of housing, locking poorer people out of being able to buy into neighborhoods. Worse yet would be the zoning systems of suburban and smaller towns, which would eliminate the ability to build apartments all together, essentially locking lower income, and thus disproportionately black, persons from being able to relocate there at all. This lead to crowding in the limited apartments, and, since the building codes hadn't been adequately updated to actually prevent it, the very slum conditions used as a justification for preventing apartments in the first place became self-fulfilling.
Of course, not all black people were so poor that they couldn't afford to buy a single-family home, and quite a few did look to leave the limited availability of apartments. They were not met well, and indeed, in the years following the installation of exclusionary zoning systems, the federal government would essentially codify black exclusion from single-family neighborhoods, with cities clinging to the federal policies as justification for blocking black and integrated housing.
Property (particularly home) mortgages used to be very, very different than how we think of them today, which locked many people out of the ability to get them. High-interest rates, huge down-payments, interest-only payments, and short (5-7 year) payback periods. These terms kept middle and low class persons (of all races) from being able to afford to buy property. As part of the New Deal, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation was established. The loan system was restructured to be closer to the lower rates, lower down-payments, overall payment, and long-term periods we're more familiar with today. Additionally, many existing mortgages were bought and restructured to save property owners from foreclosure.
In the process of this, though, HOLC wanted an inventory of risk across the nation, so it could manage these new loan terms without crippling itself financially. This is where the kinda okay policy stopped. The risk inventory was carried out by local real estate agencies, who had national ethics codes and local policies for their agents to explicitly consider race when evaluating risk. So much so that they were actually under direction to maintain community segregation when otherwise selling properties. The inventory took the form of color-coded maps, where red sections on the map represented high-risk (don't loan people money / bail them out here). Many, many of these red areas were based on racial prejudice, with even wealthy / middle class integrated or black communities being rated far worse than equivalent income white areas.
Here is a database of maps across the U.S., overlaid against modern areas. Here's a fun game: compare the Redlining Map for Atlanta to the initial racial zoning map! No it's not a 1-1 match, but it gets awfully close, particularly if you start to include initially designated areas for apartment buildings.
This entire mess was made even worse with the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority, which was intended to insure private bank loans to first-time home buyers. Even though the FHA had its own auditing system separate from the HOLC, it still had direct segregation and whites-only policies. Additionally the FHA very specifically did not insure mortgages within urban centers. This meant that both HOLC and FHA services were denied to nearly the same areas: black or integrated neighborhoods, most often in urban centers.
The FHA justified its racial rules by claiming that black people ruined property values. This was actually backwards, as the limited options available to black people meant that black and integrated properties were in high demand, and thus could be sold at a much higher price. What did happen, though, was 'block-busting'. So, because the FHA (and other organizations) continuously sold the idea that black people ruined property values, as well as the base-level racism, this left white neighborhoods vulnerable to manipulation. Speculators would buy up properties in blocks on the border of black / integrated and white areas, and then rent / sell them to black people. These speculators would also hire black people to walk around white neighborhoods asking about home sales, and looking like they lived there. Then the speculators would go around warning white property owners that their housing values would tank with all the black people moving in, and make stupidly low offers, buying out white properties well below the actual value (this is where the FHA was getting its data). Then the speculators would turn around and, because there were so few other options, sell the same properties above their actual value to black people at bad rates. This drove up costs for black people who otherwise just wanted a home, and the high prices contributed to perpetuating poverty and again creating self-fulfilling slum conditions.
Many cities, private lenders, and other government agencies (like Veterans Affairs) anchored their lending and development approval processes on the FHA backing of home loans, which meant that blacks were barred from even the opportunity to really leave parts of the city within which they lived.
It's worth reiterating that the HOLC and FHA policies were targeted directly at owning private homes, working off of a national policy that private homes were less communist than apartments. No, I'm not kidding. The U.S. Department of Labor distributed pamphlets entitled We Own Our Own Home to schoolchildren stating that it was a "patriotic duty" to cease renting, and to buy a house. Millions of posters were printed, and hung in factories and other businesses, while newspaper ads were run throughout the country. This national housing direction propped up single-family residences, and the infrastructure to support them, while leaving pretty much everything else to languish.
Then there were the racial covenants, where individual properties were made unavailable to black people by deed restrictions, and which were often implimented on neighborhood scales.
Then there was the New-Deal, where the Civilian Conservation Corps abided by local segregation policies for its camps and worker housing, further entrenching local segregation.
Then there was the issue of cities targeting black and low-income areas overwhelmingly with zoning variances for industry and toxic waste disposal sites, exposing those persons to much higher quantities of toxins and pollutants.
Then there was public housing which eliminated mixed-income tenants, was often explicitly segregated, often resisted adding housing for black people, and, when they did add housing open to blacks, located overwhelmingly in already black and poor neighborhoods, effectively concentrating poverty and increasing segregation.
Then there were Interstate Highways, which were explicitly used for 'slum clearing' in many cities (including defining slum based on racial makeup rather than socioeconomic status of the persons living there), which were massive transportation subsidies to the very same segregated low-density suburbs already built with federal loan backing while public transportation languished, and which were actually used as physical barriers between parts of the city.
Frankly, the list kinda just keeps going, and so I'm not going to try and fit it all. Seriously, go read the Color of Law for more explicit details. My main point with all of these is that, when you combine the initial versions of the zoning codes, the opinions of the people who made them, and the wider reactions and policies that came after the codes proved not to 100% segregate black people from white people, it becomes clear that a major component of the zoning system was established not actually to prevent health or value issues, but rather to maintain the separation of races.

That was a lot of words...

Right, so here's the summary:
  1. After a decade of relative progress, the federal government abandons Reconstruction
  2. Almost immediately, communities, including previously inclusive ones, begin to force their black populations out in a renewed effort of segregation
  3. At first this is done outside of the law, but eventually cities get the idea to literally codify segregation through ordinances
  4. That codified segregation was struck down in the Supreme Court, so cities are forced to find a proxy method of enforcing segregation
  5. Cities used the separating of mixed-use developments and multi-family apartment buildings to create racial segregation through the proxy of economic segregation
  6. When this doesn't work 100%, the federal government established home mortgage support systems that directly excluded black people, preventing them from buying into single-family neighborhoods even if they could afford it
  7. There was a lot of other shit that happened to basically show that zoning was not the unbiased system it was pretending to be

Persistence of bad policy

Even though many of the explicitly racist policies have been removed or overturned, and what progress there has been in raising the wealth of black persons has helped with some racial mixing, it's clear that the proxy methods for discrimination persist to this day, with visible segregaition outcomes. Even when we do see integration, it is often in the form of wealthy white people moving into the limited new developments allowed in previously majority black areas (AKA 'Gentrification').
Today, Atlanta is still overwhelmingly zoned for low-density, single-family residential, even if some of those zones allow up to Accessory Dwelling Units (such density, much urban). Lot sizes in much of the city are still mandated to be quite large, and height planes still overly limit the number of stories buildings can be. What apartment buildings are allowed are constrained by cumbersome parking requirements (both codified and required by private lenders), and property setbacks. Mixed uses are often restrained on individual properties, requiring a specific zoning designation to be allowed. Even the city's plan for handling future growth still relegates nearly 75% of the area to relatively low-density housing as 'conservation' areas.
Metro-wide, not nearly as many homes are being built as were pre-recession. While home prices are increasing back to pre-recessionary levels, housing inventory in metro Atlanta is constrained – partially due to a lag in residential construction. Prior to the recession, it was not uncommon for residential building permits to exceed 5,000 per month (in some cases, reaching over 7,000). After May 2007, the region experienced a steep decline in residential building permits, which persisted into early 2012, when the region began seeing modest increases. Though residential permits have trended upward since 2012, they have yet to reach pre-recessional levels, hovering instead between 2,000 and 3,000 permits per month. Because of this, all counties in metro Atlanta are experiencing the a decline in housing inventory. One of the main summary points of that report was: "Home prices rising significantly – faster than wages – due in large part to dwindling supply" ARC Regional Snapshot: Affordable Housing While the metro itself has been pretty easy to build new housing within (atleast from 2000 to 2015) compared to other metros, the parts of the city and close-in suburbs tend to be the hardest within which to add new supplly (of the 10 hardest zipcodes to build, the top 3 were partially in the city, and another three were in or partly in the city).
Indeed, inflation-adjusted housing prices are rising quite quickly in the Atlanta Metro, even including months during this pandemic. Prices are looking to pass pre-2008 peak in 2023ish. Only, this time, vacancy rates for both renters and homeowners have been nearly at all-time lows for the metro (Source: Census Bureau). Many of the most intense price increases happening within the core city.
At the same time, affordable housing initiatives are proving to be far too few to handle the rising costs, with recent 'Inclusionary Zoning' rules, as well as the wider public housing program failing to close the need. We're talking programs considering themselves successful at a few thousand units, when the demand for affordable housing (let alone total housing) is in the hundreds of thousands.
The simple reality is that the racism of our past is leading to an over-all affordability crisis today. While, as usual, the hardest hit are African Americans, this affordability crisis has far reaching impacts across the demographic spectrum, including poor whites, and, particularly, poor Latino populations as well, locking out a wide variety of people who would otherwise want to live in the kinds of dense, walkable, urban areas the City of Atlanta uniquely offers within the metro.
Not only that, but the very types of low-density developments so widely codified across the city and nation do not generate enough economic activity to actually pay for the infrastructure needed to support them, propped up by piles of hidden subsidies, all resulting in cities being effectively bankrupt. (Here's another real-world example) Even some of the most 'wealthy' of towns are having to seriously reconsider their historic development patterns to close out financial gaps. In Atlanta, this leads to things like a massive backlog of maintenance issues that even recent bonds and tax increases can't fully handle. Again, policies of a racist past are hurting everyone today. Undoing those policies, and transitioning back to tried-and-true development styles would greatly help fix financial issues.
Additionally, as we work to overcome challenges with climate as a whole, we need to be seriously looking at our build environments, and just how much low-density development contributes to emissions compared to higher-density parts of the metro, and even the city itself. At the same time, moving away from cars would help reduce respiratory issues for poor and minority persons who are disproportionately affected by road-pollution, and generally moving to cleaner industries while cleaning up legacy pollution sites can help undo the years of inequality through industrial exposure..

Okay, so what do we do?

We need to have a hard discussion about zoning policies: their origins, their purposes, and their effects. We need to be prepared to recognize when policies were built on hate, and where they have lead to harm, just as much as we need to be ready to recognize that not every aspect of the zoning system is bad. We need to be willing to change, and be proactive about fixing the failings of previous generations. Ideally for the net benefit of all of us.
As part of this discussion, though, we are going to have to really, truly consider what 'character' of this city are valuable. What are tangible goals, what are the potential negative outcomes, and what can be done to mitigate those outcomes, ideally while actually adding to the 'character' of the city. Again, we needs to be willing to change here. Not everything wrapped under the broad umbrella of 'character' is actually worth keeping, particularly given how I could probably copy and paste some of the 'neighborhood character' arguments from the initial racial zoning codes into places like NextDoor or Facebook or even here on Reddit without anyone suspecting they are nearly 100 years old.

The End!

Holy shit! You made it to the end! Thanks for putting up with so, so many words... Here's a video of a little girl way too excited to get on a train as a reward.
submitted by killroy200 to Atlanta [link] [comments]

The Future That Never Was: KITTY KITTY - #3 THE INELUCTABLE DUEL

RR link
Previous chapter (#2 - THE TWISTED HEIST)
#3 - THE INELUCTABLE DUEL
Observers of the Middle System had named it Rosetta. This comet was a newcomer. It had started its long dance within Solaris beyond the dwarf planet of Eris. Its veil of ice had amazed many despite the disastrous consequences. For Rosetta had crossed the highway linking Mars to the main belt, wreaking havoc throughout the area. Its marbles, sometimes the size of a basketball, hit several ships at a prodigious speed.
And guess who was in the middle of it all? Me, the Kitty and to get lost in the details: Ali.
“We’re gonna die!” she shouted as the sound alerts from our radar were tearing my eardrums apart. “Look at the screens! We’re gonna fucking die!”
The control computer calculated the best trajectory, but was unable to find a path safe enough to lead us to safety through the tail of the comet.
“Full steam ahead, Kitty!” I roared as the first impacts could be heard on the armor.
Already, the cockpit windows cracked under the shocks. We had to fold up the metal flaps and continue blind. At the speed we were flying, it didn’t make much difference anyway. It was then a long quarter of an hour like a winter night; listening to the rain falling on the roof. Except that we weren’t warm under the quilt. It wasn’t rainfall! And, yes, we were most certainly going to perish pulverized!
A more violent impact suddenly shaked the cockpit. The dashboard abruptly turned off. A few sparks came out of the control panel and the life support systems. Shortly afterwards, a slight hissing sound of depressurization escaped from the cargo bay behind us.
“Hold on, Kitty! I trust you, darling!”
Then everything stopped. The Swallow had passed through Rosetta’s trail. Miraculously, we were still breathing.
“Are we alive?” Ali asked, patting my lower back.
“For the moment, we are. But not for very long.”
Indeed, on the central polychrome monitor of the dashboard, the control computer was listing the damages by order of seriousness. Without emergency intervention on the drive, now shut down, or the air filters of the LSS, we were doomed.
“What is the nearest station?” I asked.
Her harness unstrapped, my human opened the system map on the side CRT while I was trying to restart the Baltimore reactor despite the numerous leaks of Blue. A column of azure bubbles escaped from the hold then floated across the cabin. The liquid was penetrating through the electronic instruments.
Cleaning the cooler off her blond hair, Ali answered me between two very distinguished swearwords:
“Yggdrasil! A few hours away from here… fairly isolated from the celestial highway.”
Yggdrasil? This name hadn’t been heard for a long time. Once, it was a simple M-type asteroid that escaped from the main belt. It had been used as a base of exploration before setting up colonies on Ceres, Vesta and Pallas then quickly abandoned. It was many of them’s fate when the new generations of post-nuclear engines, developed by Lucie Baltimore and her engineers, flooded the market.
At the peak of its glory, however, Yggdrasil had transformed itself into a station in its own right, where even real earth had been brought back from the original Blue Planet. The first settler families had grown a wonderful tree in the heart of the gardens. This tree had quickly become gigantic thanks to the reduced gravity.
“Do you think it’s still inhabited? It’s no longer a listed port,” Ali pointed out.
“That’s because it doesn’t belong to any corporation…”
But Yggdrasil was more than busy. Once in range, a couple of days later, we could guess an asteroid teeming with life. The station had been dug into the pure ore which was now only an indestructible shell. Numerous cylindrical windows dotted its surface. On the other side, lush gardens mottled the rock walls. It was like a gigantic celestial terrarium of nickel and glass.
But the most impressive was indeed this titanic tree that occupied the entire planetoid in its height. Its trunk and leaves were perfectly white which gave a wonderful contrast with the emerald forest that covered its roots.
“I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Ali said.
Yet it was just a simple tree, dirt and tons of mutagenic green moss. Humans were so melancholy about our home planet that I couldn’t understand why they had ravaged it in this way.
But the station was more impressive once inside. People lived all over the inner surface, in burrows and anchored nests covered by round vegetation. There were no taxicabs, nor any traffic for that matter. One could only take comfort from the birds’ singing and the wind turbines’ whirling, ensuring the good circulation of air. This piece of cosmic heaven had nothing to do with the shipyard of yesteryear.
We clamped the Kitty in one of the only two pods of Yggdrasil, run by a Lilliputian with shoulders so broad that one would have thought she was a dwarf from ancient tales if her beard had been bushier. Alas, just like the children of Vala Aulë, she announced a huge bill for the realization of her art. But it was unfortunately justified. Rosetta had absolutely ravaged our only means of transport.
My beautiful Swallow…
“All we have to do now is find a small job!” Ali had confessed to me while I was verifying one by one the expenses on the receipt in recycled bark.
“Alas! I doubt that there is an interesting contract under this thick foliage.”
I was right. The following days were nothing but disillusionment. There was work on Yggdrasil, but no one wanted to entrust it to two marauding bounty hunters. To be perfectly honest, this was the case in most stations and towns in the system. The Alliance wasn’t a respected institution. Auxiliaries were more hated than the F musical note or We Built This City song.
“Scratch again, I spotted something in the green spot!” Ali guided me.
She had refused to dive to the bottom of the dumpster herself. I had to submit to the search for nutrigel residues floating in the hazardous gravity.
“There is nothing! All we have to do is eat moss!”
I had come up to the surface to find her crouched in the grass, a winged caterpillar in hand. The bryophyte and its fauna were once again going to be our evening meal when a young boy landed barefoot in our organic banquet.
“Can I ask what ye, scummy bounty hunters, are doin’?” he questioned us as he snapped one of the multicolored slap bracelets on his arms.
He then introduced himself under the name of Benàn. He was the son of Yggdrasil’s main gardener whom we met shortly afterwards when the teenager invited us to his house for a real dinner. His family lived in a gigantic sclerotic tinder mushroom against the metal wall of the ancient asteroid.
“May ye forgive the folks here. Isolation has made them bitter. And abundance stingy,” his father, Alàn, apologized with the same nordic accent as his son.
He was a little man with a wide neck and sparkling yet tired eyes. Very jovial, he didn’t care that we were auxiliaries. His mustache and braided coppery beard jumped at every word. Despite his wife’s efforts to wash him, his face was constantly stained with brown mud.
“Hold op, Diligua! Would ye want to stop?” he cried.
Diligua scolded him, unhappy with her husband’s marshy appearance in front of her guests. She was his exact opposite, tall, fine and elegant. And without clods of dirt in her blond hair. She was wearing them twisted and braided in a bun on the back of her head, as expected to be in a micro-g environment.
Alàn was at first reluctant, but soon entrusted us with the simplest work in exchange for a roof and a good daily meal. We finally had enough to survive in this Smurf Village.
As for our invoice, Diligua had gone to negotiate with the dwarf of the hangar to obtain an amendment. She was the engineer in charge of the wind turbines and often had spare parts to trade for services.
“Decent people here”, Ali said to me once in our own private room at the top of the giant family mushroom, after our first day of work.
“For a change…”
The following days on Yggdrasil were pleasant. The company of this family proved to be very much appreciated. Benàn, for example, was an energetic teenager. He kept talking about his dreams of escape and space conquest. He was fed up with living in that aquarium, but his father had always resisted a premature departure.
“He promised to buy me a roun’ trip to Ceres-by when I was twelve years old then a secon’ one when I was sixteen. And finally, let me leave for the Marine Academy once I will reach my majority,” he told us once we were chilling under the shade of a giant dandelion. “But he had always refrained from keepin’ his word so far! He thinks I’m not ready!”
In a rage, he closed his record player and threw away the last can of Pepper Coke soda from our picnic as it slowly swirled near a rotten log.
I was surprised when he mentioned the Academy.
“I thought you wanted to be a pirate. Why would you join the Marine Corps?”
“To learn how to handle weapons! My pa refuses to let me use his and the armor he hides under his workbench. I don’t even know how to wield a revolver!”
Ali then passed him her gun, barrel in hand, without a word. I didn’t even realize she was listening. It was a habit of hers; following a conversation while sleeping.
The boy feigned hesitation, but the sparks in his eyes betrayed his excitement. My human didn’t need to insist any further, because seconds later he already had the gun between his fingers.
“It’s so frackin’ heavy," he said. "It’s different with my virtual reality console.”
“Try it out,” Ali proposed as she put the needle back on the first track after reopening the portable turntable.
From her chin, she then pointed to the can Benàn had thrown a few minutes earlier. Together, they practiced in music all afternoon. The yardman’s son had almost exhausted Ali’s ammunition when Diligua picked us up on her sail Solex for dinner.
This was our daily routine for the next two weeks: working in the morn, hanging out in the evening. We had been so productive that Alàn no longer needed us to maintain the station. To be fair, I suspected that he had dismissed us because of the meager gardening skills of my sapiens. That girl had two left hands but no green thumb. And it wasn’t the funniest part.
“What’s happening to me?” Ali asked one night, feverish.
“Unbelievable!” Diligua answered, staring incredulously at the thermometer going up. “You are allergic to real vegetables! Nobody’s allergic to real vegetables! What kind of human being are you?”
“Gimme pizzas...” muttered my dying nutrigel-raised partner, white as the giant tree’s leaves.
The next morning, Benàn finally introduced us to his spaceship. He had begun to assemble it by repairing the worn parts of the hangar with his mother’s tools. Its name testified to his ambitions: The Arcadia.
I had to reckon. This taciturn rascal was a mechanical genius. However, he needed my skills to set up the control computer and program the out-of-gravity draining of the post-nuclear engine. My sapiens, meanwhile, was improving the prototype of a jet-pack, a slice of pizza between the teeth. The young boy had stolen it from a pirate who stopped by a couple of months ago.
In the following evenings, Ali and Benàn often exchanged stories of buccaneers and adventurers. He was fascinated by the freebooters from the Golden Age of Jupiter’s colonies: King Xiao and the Lost Triad, Amadeus the Traveler, Osborn the Freak or Marcellàn Iron Fists and his famous hand-to-hand fights. The latter was the boy’s favorite and he would talk about him for hours.
What they had in common was that they showed Goldsun, the privateer, the respect he deserved. And this even though he sided with the Marine on the recent conquest of Pluto.
“It is said that the Sun King, Goldsun’s vessel, shines like a star. Forstår du? And that is how he camouflages himself in the celestial firmament!” Benàn exclaimed. “His fleet is so frackin’ fast that even the Marine’s Interceptors can't compete in pure speed!”
Our amateur raconteur wasn’t holding back his ardor. He knew hundreds of stories about pirates. Like everybody in Solaris, we already knew some. In fact, there were so many of them that we didn’t distinguish the truth from the myth. Indeed, the majority of these criminals and adventurers had never existed.
But the vacations were shortly ending. It was only missing a few coats of paint on the Kitty and Alàn boasted every night that he would soon have one last job for us. However, I suspected him of monopolizing the floor so that his son would no longer broach the subject of his emancipation. And this was confirmed in the following twilight:
“Wait! Both of you. I gotta talk to ye.”
He took a look at Benàn, who had grabbed his virtual reality console before going outside.
“Amalrik, the station storekeeper, told me that ye’ve emptied his entire soda supply…” he began, clearing the remains of his nattmal.
But that wasn’t the most important thing.
“...and .50 AE ammunition. The kind of bullets we used to hunt hvaler... whales or Soviet cosmodons!’
“We shouldn’t have hidden this from you, Alàn, we’re sorry,” Ali apologized. “We just wanted to teach the kid how to shoot.”
We saw Alàn smiling shyly through his beard.
“There’s no harm, rest assured,” he said after a short silence. “I just yearn this pirate story would get outta his head…”
“He’s a descendant of the first settlers… of course he has a taste for adventure,” I reported.
“Ja! I know. ‘was like him…”
Our host’s eyes were full of nostalgia.
“You wish…” corrected his wife, who was fixing a modulator in a corner of the room. “This child has more potential than the whole clan put together. He has passed the age to play with his Spirograph.”
“Again, I know. ‘saw the boy handling the absurd handgonne Ali uses as a gun,” admitted Alàn. “And for sure, he’s also undoubtedly smarter than me.”
“So why not let him go?” Ali asked.
The gardener then showed us his right leg by putting it on the table. His calf was studded with scars and burns. The same wounds slept under the dry earth that permanently covered his hands.
“There was an age when I craved to see what was happenin’ in the solar mines of Mercury and the colonies of the Outer Worlds. T’was a beautiful time of freedom that was already comin’ to an end,” he said as he readjusted his pants to hide his pink topographic map of Mars. “What will he find now? The ruthless Marine and this durn Technocratic corruption? Cyber-psychos on the run? Irradiated moons? Nej. There’s nothin’ for him in the deep space.”
“The armor was from when you had served?” I asked, alluding to Benàn’s words about the assisted exoskeleton.
“Served? I’ve never served anyone but the giant plants of Yggdrasil,” he said.
He scratched his beard; his gaze was lost in time. Then, when he addressed us again, he made us promise to stop encouraging his son’s sweet utopias. After that, he floated off to his workbench on the second floor.
“How can we tell him that he’s living in his own illusion?” Diligua asked rhetorically.
Diligua had finished repairing the modulator, but she threw it in the garbage anyway. Tomorrow, Benàn would secretly retrieve it to improve his radar system. She ultimately left the room after wishing us a good evening. The sadness could be seen on her face.
She was right, though. When their child celebrates his eighteenth Martian spring, Benàn will leave for Ceres or the Red Planet… if not before. Yggdrasil and his burrows were far too small for a boy like him.
“My father was like that too,” Ali concluded.
The final days were quieter. Diligua and the station’s technicians had activated the wind turbines. This ingenious system dispensed a fine mist inside Yggdrasil. The fog had invaded the large windows separating the pastoral town from the vacuum. A curious surrealist vibe reigned from then on.
With the humidity, Ali’s haircut had doubled in volume, giving her a Bob Ross vibe. Benàn and I both enjoyed seeing her like this before she threw her iron cup at us. Despite the lack of gravity, it almost tore off my right ear.
“The mist will only last a few days. It’s good for the skin. Just like the mud and…” Alàn preached.
“Alàn—” his wife started.
Diligua’s commentary was interrupted by a knock on the giant mushroom’s door. It was strange because since the beginning of our stay, nobody had come to visit Benàn and his family. From the yardman’s opinion, this didn’t bode well.
“Enter!” he shouted as he slid off the table to face this unexpected intruder.
The door opened slowly before a man in a beige raincoat rushed inside. Water was dripping from the edges of his round hat and long pointed nose. He wiped his mustache from the back of his sleeve then plunged his gold circled gray eyes into each of ours. When he met Alàn’s gaze, he gasped.
“What a shock! What they say is true!” he shouted with a thick english accent, hands on his hips. “Marcellàn Iron Fists lives on this moldy stone!”
Marcellàn? Was he mentioning the pirate? Marcellàn Iron Fists who pulverized his opponents with the strength of his fist? That Marcellàn would be Alàn?
Ali didn’t seem to make the connection. She was for the moment too busy finishing her meaty dagmal, the bottom of the bowl almost stuck to her forehead.
“I don’t know what ye’re talkin’ ‘bout,” replied our host coldly.
“Cut the crap, old man!” the visitor laughed. “I am responsible for some of the scars on your back.”
He then opened his coat, revealing an AAJ’s badge and the stock of a rifle with a scope hanging from his shoulder.
I recognized him. We were looking at Nigel Hemingwest, a second-generation bounty hunter. Obnoxiously famous for his gross blunders from which he had always come out as white as snow.
“Marcellàn, who fought bare hands in his shiny red titanium armor, relegated to the simple rank of a gardener! This is beyond prodigious!” Hemingwest continued, taking a step towards the table.
He was stopped by Diligua, a sharp knife ready:
“If you’re not here for any Yggdrasil-related business, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out!”
Hemingwest stumbled backward, hands up, but visibly amused by the situation. His smile faded as he looked at Ali who had now put his bowl back on the table. His eyes lingered for a moment on her own badge.
“Lovely wife. Anyway, I see that the bounty is already coveted…”
My partner wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, also revealing her .50 caliber before granting her unexpected opinion on the matter:
“We ain’t give a shit about the dollar credits. Alàn has offered us shelter and food. No harm will come to him.”
Hemingwest opened his eyes wide. It must have been a long time since he had been so dissed, but unfortunately that was Ali’s trademark.
Nevertheless, my associate had just indicated that she wouldn’t fulfill a contract, which wasn’t common for an auxiliary. Unusual and punished by a severe reprimand if the high authority got wind of it.
“Whatever,” Hemingwest squeaked. “But I’m no fool, Alàn the florist. I’ll be waiting for Marcellàn and his armor at the foot of the Big Tree for a duel tonight. A legend like him can’t refuse, even if he had pissed calcium for twenty years by living in low G. Because, otherwise, the whole system will learn where his family is hiding… rightly or wrongly!”
And he left by slamming the door.
“Well, that explains all the praise for Marcellàn coming from Benàn!” I said to Ali, breaking the awkward silence.
“There’s no way I’m goin’ to accept this cursed challenge,” Alàn grumbled, back at his seat.
Benàn had risen, red with anger:
“Ye’re goin’ to let yerself be humiliated like that?”
“Can’t you see that your father has moved on?” his mother spoke in the same tone.
We didn’t say a word. Ali grabbed me by the paw before leaving the table. She had judged that the rest of the conversation had nothing to do with us. But when we arrived at the front door, Benàn passed us and withdrew first, visibly furious at Diligua’s answer.
“This Hemingwest klaphat hasn’t turned over a new leaf and I know him, he won’t let go,” Alàn grunted with his hands on his eyes.
“We ignore if he has any hard evidence. But if he does, I’ll bet he has nothing solid and is attempting to bluff us…” tried to reassure his wife before we closed the door.
Outside, against his mother’s flying Solex, Benàn was tearing off the pieces of moss covering the ramp to their fungal home. His anger had subsided and his eyes filled with tears when he saw us:
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who my pa was… but you were bounty hunters…”
“All fathers have secrets,” I replied. “Yours is worth a lot of dollar credits. And this Hemingwest is no joke…”
“My pa hasn’t wrestled for decades,” Benàn explained. “And yet, even with porous bones, he could crush this rat’s skull if he wasn’t such a coward!”
I noticed he had lost his nordic accent.
“Your father is anything but a coward, you know…” Ali intervened, sitting next to him.
“Is he? Then why does he refuse to fight? Why did he stop his life as a pirate and adventurer? Why does he prevent me from leaving?” Benàn shouted as he stood up. “Because he’s a fraud!”
He then swam in the void before disappearing into the fog.
“What an ingrate!” grumbled my human.
“Don’t blame the boy,” said his father, who had now joined us. “He also inherited the worst of his parents’ nature… especially his mother.”
A cast-iron cup from the house brushed against his head before getting lost in the mist.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“This afternoon? Dig out the contours of the water recycler. And if ye’re not ashamed to help an old pirate, I can employ you for that last job,” he says. “As for tonight? Absolutely nothin’. Hemingwest could wait for the Ragnarök that I wouldn’t give him satisfaction.”
Then we worked. But not without concern. Because we had no news from Benàn for the rest of the day. By dinner time, he was still missing, which worried his mother. And rightly so.
“Alàn! Alàn!”
The voice came from outside. The station storekeeper, Amalrik, stood below.
“Alàn! You’re not gonna believe your ears!” he continued after we had joined him. “The pirate Marcellàn is on Yggdrasil… and he’s struggling with Nigel Hemingwest!”
The real Marcellàn jumped and grabbed the flying Solex before his wife took control of it. The machine unfolded its wings and made its turbine roar then took off, forming a tunnel in the fog. After storming out of the house, Ali and I chased them to the foot of the Big Tree. It was there, in the center of the station, that Hemingwest had set its cruel rendezvous.
Unfortunately, just like our hosts, we arrived too late. The fight was over.
“By the 79 moons of Jupiter… no…” I meowed.
Hemingwest, who had disappeared, had mercilessly crucified his victim with huge cactus thorns on the gigantic white trunk.
“It can’t be…”
Thanks to the clan, Alàn and his wife were able to quickly take down the exoskeleton of the tree. As I thought, inside lay Benàn, shot from behind with a bullet in the back of the neck.
“Alàn? I recognize these colors and this symbol! Is this the armor of Iron Fists?” asked a technician in a brown work suit.
“Is this ye boy, Alàn? What is he doin’ in the exoskeleton of a pirate!” wondered the Nelwyn of the garage.
“Enough!” Diligua bellowed as Alàn was frantically removing the last metal plates.
Silent and livid, the gardener then took the body of his son in his arms. On his knees, he cried. His tears mingled with the droplets from the haze.
We subsequently left on foot to the tinder house after Diligua had collected the pieces of armor. But we ran into another surprise. Hemingwest was waiting for us at the foot of the access ramp, leaning against the trunk of a butterfly tree. He was polishing his rifle threatened by humidity.
“Ye!” shouted Alàn, putting his son in the arms of his wife.
“What? You can only blame yourself, Alàn the florist,” Hemingwest said. “You’re the one who should have been in armor under that tree. Not your foolish child. As far as I’m concerned, I was just doing my job! And giving you a chance on top of that!”
Alàn wanted to punch the murderer but Diligua stopped him immediately:
“Marcellàn! Not here. Not now.”
He understood. They had a child to bury.
Diligua transported Benàn’s body a few meters further, at the foot of the wall against which their house was fixed. Alàn moved silently towards it without adding anything more. Unlike his wife:
“He will meet you under the tree. Tomorrow. At dusk.”
Hemingwest withdrew, a smile up to his ears.
The funeral service was brief. Contrary to galactic custom, Benàn was buried in the soft earth of Yggdrasil. For his final journey, he was dressed in his father’s armor. There were no stones nor grave; just a rhodiola with yellow petals that the mist could never hide.
“We should have done something earlier,” my partner said as she was folding our luggage, the next day. “Did we fuck this up?”
“It's not like Marcellàn was a saint. It was nothing but a truce,” I answered. “Staying out of this was our choice.”
She sighed. I could see anger in her eyes.
“That’s just another way to say we fucked up...”
“These kinds of things sometimes just happen, Ali...”
But it wasn’t the end of it.
“Hemingwest made its last mistake there!” she exploded. “Leave him to us, Alàn!”
The former pirate, who until now had been listening to us from afar, entered the room.
“Definitely not. I’ll take care of this,” he declared. “My mistakes. My boy.”
He grinned. His eyes were still red with pain, but he was smiling. It was also the first time we saw him without a trace of dirt on his face or hands.
“But how are you going to do without your armor?” I asked.
We had the answer in the evening. Alàn, the father and not Marcellàn the pirate, was waiting for his opponent at the foot of the Big Tree. All around the improvised arena, the community of Yggdrasil watched anxiously.
Hemingwest was late and the crowd began to express their dissatisfaction. Only Alàn remained calm as a monk, searching for his foe in the fog that was finally dissipating.
A spark ignited the white foliage where Hemingwest had hidden for his ambush. A gunshot followed. The deceiver must have used the same strategy the day before.
The gardener was hit in the shoulder and fell to his knees. Then, a second bullet struck him in the middle of the thigh, knocking him against the ground.
“Alàn!” cried Diligua as she tried to reach him.
Hemingwest, delighted with his ploy, let himself slide down to the roots not without tearing a whole chunk of bark with his reinforced gravity-boots. With the rifle now stowed in his holster, he exalted as he prepared a fatal stab.
“Is that all Marcellàn can do without his armor? A miserable snail out of its shell, that’s what you are now! I wasted my time!”
He laughed at his joke and was the only one.
But that was short-lived. Alàn had recovered as if nothing had happened. Left shoulder and leg backwards, fists clenched in front of his jaw, his body moved into a fighting position.
Hemingwest swore and threw his knife, which slithered into his opponent’s forearm. The latter withdrew it immediately before tossing it into the peat slightly further. With a quick gesture, the bounty hunter then grabbed his rifle and leaped about ten meters back. His reflex was too slow because the pirate was already on top of him. His rain of punches met with little resistance.
Hemingwest was knocked to the ground with a sweeper, but not without giving back a few blows. When he tried to get up, Alàn gave him an uppercut and then a hook that pushed his right cheekbone trough the nasal walls. Hemingwest spat out teeth and crushed flesh before escaping inaudible gurgling noises. The murderer was being reduced to a bloody mush by Alan’s long trained gardener hands.
One never truly knew if the stories were authentic or if the exploits of these yesteryear’s legends were pure fabrication. But on that day, the gardener reminded Yggdrasil what a freebooter’s fury was. Alàn was a real brute even without his armor.
“Have you had enough?” asked Alàn, grabbing the murderer’s throat. “Because I want ye in yer ship and far from here in the next half-Martian hour.”
Hemingway nodded slowly in approval, risking losing what was left of his cervical vertebrae. But when Alàn turned away from him, the bounty hunter had his rifle in his hand again.
“Watch out!” I yelled.
Fortunately, Ali was even faster. She had fired instantly and her projectile had hit Hemingwest’s fingers, tearing off his index and thumb. He wanted to scream in pain, yet Diligua silenced him with a last kick to the gut.
She then ran to her husband and they just went home.
Shortly after that, the onlookers had abandoned the scene. None of them will ever talk about this fight or acknowledge the presence of a certain Marcellàn on their station. All that remained was Nigel Hemingwest, still breathing the filtered air from this haven of paradise.
With the surviving fingers stuck in the dirt, the bounty hunter had started crawling to the hangar where our respective ships were parked when we fell on him. Actually, it wasn’t difficult to follow his tracks because of the bubbles of blood and the urine’s smell that he had sown in his path.
“What the hell do you want from me?” he stammered as he replaced his incisors at each syllable. “You’re finished too, once the Alliance is informed.”
As my human sat on his back, with a heel against his neck, I climbed on his hand while he tried to grab his rifle under his coat.
“The Alliance is far too tolerant nowadays,” I said. “Because of sleazeballs like you, we have a tainted reputation.”
“Even worse than criminals,” my partner added. “And we don’t have stories singing about our deeds. Something I’d surely like to.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” screamed Hemingwest.
“Ali. Stay focused, please.”
She then continued:
“I don’t know what doggone protection you got, but let’s make a deal, dick-nose. You don’t tell anyone about this story and we’ll forget your new little blunder that cost our friend Benàn his life and dreams.”
An agreement like this one was yet a gut-wrenching affair.
“Screw you, punks! My brothers are going to…”
My sapiens smashed his skull with her foot before placing the still hot barrel of her gun at the base of his neck. She then concluded:
“Who cares about your brothers, may they be Vito Corleone or cousin Vinny. Am I right, Lee?”
“Indeed, partner.”
Without further hesitation, yet a few punches in the nose, Hemingwest finally accepted the arrangement. A minute later, he was gone.
The next day, it was Diligua who came to say goodbye once the Kitty was completely repaired and ready for flight. She entrusted us with some equipment from her son’s ship as spare parts, his virtual reality console and the jet-pack my associate had worked on.
“Where are you going? If it’s not indiscreet,” she asked us while finishing to screw a last rivet badly tightened under the wing of our beautiful Swallow.
“Towards the belt… Ceres,” I replied. “Hunt down real gnarly guys, sleep under the gaze of the nebulae and, why not, pursue the majestic Wes Goldsun on Pluto.”
Diligua smiled.
“All the same! Why do you have to run after chimeras?”
“What else do we have left?” concluded my sapiens.
The ramp closed, the control computer greeted us. As for the engine, it hummed as its first day.
Back to business…
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[Humans are Hiveminds] Pt 12: Conclusion

As this is a language of tastes and strands of DNA analog names cannot be written phonetically and are instead replaced with a human name or Earth analog in [brackets].
Span: The diameter of an average [Gaian] = 0.94mm, Kilospan = 0.94m.
Beat: The amount of time takes an average [Gaian] to move their cilia = 0.064s, kilobeat = 1min 4s
Work Cycle: 10 kilobeats. Equivalent to around 15 hours on their time scale
Day: Day length on [Gaia] = 28h 16min. Equivalent to around 3 months on their time scale.
Year: Year length on [Gaia] = 224.4 days = 264.3 Earth days.
[First] [Previous]
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[Faythe] was positively sick with excitement. She had hit a wall on the rescue mission front, [Alice] had been adamant about not revealing themselves further by sending a rescue team, and launching a mission in secret would have required sabotaging half of the station. Even if she thought she could get all the comms and scanners down she wasn’t crazy enough to actually try it. Widespread sabotage or ship hijacking was a dangerous proposition, and she doubted [Walter] and the others would want her to put the station in jeopardy for them.
After 3 solid tenth days of appeals, requests, and contemplating sneaking off while scouting, she had to admit a rescue mission wasn’t going to happen.
But that doesn’t matter now! She thought giddily as she rushed to the docks. They are still alive, and making contact!. Her hope was warring with caution and hope was currently winning. Like most of the station she had followed the messages from the Humans with rapt attention. She recognized [Eve]’s signaling right away and found it a bit funny she had been the main speaker, [Faythe] had always pegged her as the [quiet] sort. [Faythe] had attempted to remain cautiously optimistic as she read the debate, wary of the creatures playing some terrible trick, but frankly she was past caring. Her hope that her friend was still alive had been fading by the cycle, and now they were supposedly about to be picked up. There was no way in hell she was going to miss that.
Thank the depths [Grace] let us be the ones to go get them. I would be gnawing on the walls if I had to wait around and let some other team be the first to greet them again. She thought amusedly, wondering how the reunion was going to go. The “painful testing” [Eve] had briefly mentioned was concerning. She began wondering what kinds of terrible things someone might do while experimenting on supposedly subsentient drones and winced. Sometimes an active imagination is a bit of a curse. She thought as her mind was filled with scenes of detached and methodical disembowelment.
She was so caught up in her thoughts in fact that she didn’t notice the harpoon that flashed out behind her.
——————————————————————
[Sybil] [grinned] as she boarded the hastily readying recovery ship. She always like being a [Hephaestus]., being able to effortlessly push through crowds never got old, though annoyingly enough it seemed she would have to keep that to a minimum if she wanted to avoid notice, apparently it was out of character for her to be that rude.
How boring.
She managed to get abord the ship with no questions raised and made some small talk with a few of the ship crew she knew while she waited impatiently for that blasted representative to arrive. I hope she doesn’t pull the translators off into to a private meeting the moment we pick them up. She thought worriedly. She hoped to get at least one of them alone first, and had a somewhat believable reason to do so. She had been openly expressing concerned for her dear missing friend for tenthdays after all.
A few beats later and representative [Grace] finally arrived. The ship silently slipped free from its birth and flicked up and out of hanger into the lunar surface above. It hung there for a moment before the lunar dust below the ship briefly rippled as the stations great grav units bent the space around it, and in an instant they were elsewhere.
Flicking back into existence 28 thousand kilometers above Earth, the ship did not bother making orbit, it simply fell towards the night shrouded continent below, heading towards the outskirts of a vibrant patch of light. As the ship sped downwards [Sybil] settled in for a few cycles of waiting, running over her plans. The basics of [Mallory]’s plan is somewhat sound, but there are some holes that need patching She grumbled. They were tortured and the humans attempted to mindhack them into being saboteurs and they pretend it worked on them so they can escape. Simple enough. People might ask why they didn’t try and say any of this in their message though. This could be explained by the Humans having a better grasp of Standard Gaian then they let on. I could say they learned enough Gaian and Solarian that they planned out most of the things in those messages, including the supposedly stealthily side comments that [Eve] had added in Solarian, all to make it seem like the crew were being genuine and not just reading off a script, but really the Humans were following every word they said and would quickly notice if they went off script or tried to slip something behind their backs by sending in an language they didn’t know.
The crew didn’t bother risking that since they were trying to play along and pretend they had been fully brainwashed, since they knew the humans were planning on letting them go back to the fleet if they thought their program was working. Thus, they played along, following their script, not letting anything slip until they get safely back onto this ship and out of the humans clutches. Only then do they tell everyone what really happened. If I don’t manage to edit the memories on all of them, that could be explained as the brainwashing being successful on some of them. A suboptimal result, as it would place significant scrutiny on the psyche of the supposedly mindhacked crew, and I would have to justify the humans having somewhat effective mindhacking techniques. However it might still sow enough confusion and outrage to be effective, and by the time they are studied close enough that the story might unravel we will hopefully be long gone…. Yes, that could work.
——————————————————————
[Walter] strained his eyes peering skyward as the beats crawled by. He had asked the humans when the ship was arriving but they had said he would know more about that then they would. He grumbled at that and spent some time calculating the fastest time he expected a ship could be scrambled to collect them. If they jumped in right overhead and had a powered decent downwards it would probably take around 80 kilobeats for them to get here. The trip out to this field took around a quarter of that so they should be arriving in another 60 kilobeats or so. He thought tiredly. He sighed and settled in for 6 cycles of waiting.
The break did give him time to finish up some more of his signal pathway repairs and other projects but that was a minor consolation. The comms were mostly silent, as eventually the mix of tension and boredom sapped most of the energy of the group. The lull was broken near the end of the sixth cycle when [Eve] spotted a faint point of light in the sky that was rapidly growing brighter.
“Look! That’s them!” The group staggered to their feet and twisted their heads to point their eyes skyward. [Frank] [laughed] when he spotted it “Yeah that seems to be them all right, they must be coming in hot. I guess they aren’t bothering with stealth for this.” The point of light grew to become a bright red star in the sky above them, before suddenly not being in the sky at all.
With a thunderous crack a 300 span tall ship appeared before them, going from hypersonic flight to a dead stop in moments. Its hull still glowed a dull cherry red from the heat of its reentry.
“Going with shock and awe I guess.” [Walter] sent wryly. Normally seeing a skyscraper sized structure floating in midair was awe inspiring enough, however he imagined it’s scale was less effective on their current audience. The ship was barely larger than one of the creatures’ heads. Speed on the other hand…well, to the humans it must have looked like the ship appeared from nowhere.
“Ha yeah, that must have looked even more crazy to them…not that they saw it though, they are still looking at the sky. Oh! They are beginning to flinch now. Geez. That pilot is wasted on this crowd.” [Frank] sent mirthfully as the giants around them reacted with comical slowness.
“Oh wow, look at that one, it launched itself into the air! It’s going higher than the ship!” [Eve] [laughed] as one of the white robed figures belatedly hurled itself away from the loud noise. The human guards appeared significantly less amused, as several of them trained weapons on the ship.
“Hmm, maybe that was a bit to provocative.” [Walter] said the humor draining from his signal. The team watched anxiously as the giants continued to stare daggers at the slowly cooling ship hovering above the grass a few kilospan in front of them.
“Sorry that surprised you, that was just a sonic boom from a rapid decent.” [Walter] slowly spoke, trying to calm the situation. “That was a standard landing for this type of mission.” He added, lying through his gills. One of the guards glanced at the radio his voice came from, and then over at him.
“Well you should have warned us then.” It slowly groaned out.
“Sorry, didn’t think to mention it. Could you stop pointing your weapons at the ship though? I don’t think anyone is going to come out while you’re doing that.”
The guard made a wordless grunt which [Walter] figured wasn’t a happy sound.
“If it can move that fast then our guns are useless if we aren’t already pointing at it.”
“Their useless even if they are pointed at it. You can’t even see it move, much less activate your weapon in time.” [Eve] interjected.
“Then there is no harm in us continuing to point our guns at it then.” The guard ground out even slower and louder than normal, before pausing as it listened to something over its comm. “…yes sir.” It said at last before lowering its weapon slightly.
“I guess that’s as much as we can hope for.” [Walter] muttered to the rest of the team as they watched the rest of the guards begrudgingly point their weapons just far enough downwards as to not technically be pointing at the ship.
[Walter] was going to continue but paused as signal came from the ship.
“Team 9, this is representative [Grace] sending. Good job on diffusing the situation. I had figured a small demonstration of our capabilities was in order, but I did not expect it to startle them so thoroughly. With that in mind please inform the humans that this ship is unarmed and we will be opening a hanger door soon.”
[Walter] glanced up with relief. “Yes ser, we’ll begin translating immediately.”
——————————————————————
Director Townsend was not having a great day. Well, that was too harsh. So far it had been a truly remarkable day, he just wished he wasn’t the one in charge of organizing it.
This morning the main thing on his mind had been tightening the budget in preparation for next month’s funding review, now he was standing in the middle of a field while a tiny alien spaceship flaunted gravity and the sound barrier a few meters from his head. It was an interesting change of pace to say the least. He glanced around at the several technicians and researchers from the physics department that he had hastily assembled.
“Please tell me one of our cameras caught that.” He half whispered to one of the technicians.
“Umm, yes, I think camera 4 and 5 got good shots of the deceleration event.” the man said as he began pulling up clips on a nearby laptop. The field behind the lab was currently filled with a rough semicircle of high-speed cameras, range finders, microwave scanners and whatever other equipment the physicists had been able to carry outside, all pointing at the landing site. Townsend was currently standing a few meters back, next to a pair of folding tables where the snarl of cables from all the equipment was being fed to several laptops and a small server bank. He glanced over the mess and was glad there was no chance of rain tonight.
The aid confirmed they had several clear shots of the deceleration and Townsend turned his attention back to the ship now silently floating in the field before them. It was hovering in midair a few centimeters above the ground with no sign of effort, no sound or flames or gusts of wind. The grass below it was completely untouched.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.” He thought wryly, as the pain of having to give up the grav drive they were studying was freshly renewed.
Aside from the hovering the ship itself wasn’t that interesting to look at, though he did admit there was a certain elegant simplicity to it. It was a perfect ovoid, 30 or so centimeters tall and 15 wide. Its outer hull was smooth and unadorned. On the high-speed camera shot he had seen it arrive shinning like a mirror, but after coming to a halt its color had shifted, rapidly darkening into a pitch-black shade to better radiated heat. Some sort of color shifting meta material perhaps? I wonder how they managed to make something that complex reentry proof.
He tore his eyes away from the strange sight as he heard an argument breaking out by the wasp enclosure. He suddenly noticed how on edge the guard detail was. “Oh for…” He leaned over to one of the NSA agents that were hovering around him like buzzards and hissed “Tell your goons to stop pointing their guns at the ship! Do you want to start a diplomatic incident?”
The man opened his mouth to reply but appeared to think better of it. He sighed and spoke a few words into his earpiece. Townsend relaxed slightly as the guards lowered their weapons again. Stupid. Why did the NSA insist on bringing armed security for this? If shit hits the fan we’re screwed regardless of how many guns we have…
One of the crackling voices from the wasp cage briefly rose in volume, calling out “Attention, the ship is unarmed. A hatch will open on its side in 87 seconds. It is a door to a hangar. Don’t shoot it.” before falling back into inaudibility as it started talking to a technician next to its cage.
“I guess that’s my cue.” Townsend muttered as he began walking apprehensively over to the front of the crowd where the ship and captives were. He hoped the creatures were just going to leave quickly and not bother with ceremony, he really wasn’t looking forward to giving the apology speech he had hastily written on behalf of the lab.
Waving off the two guards that started shadowing him he made his way over to wasp tank and watched a touch nervously as a technician opened it. The creatures paused for a bit, eying the door like they were worried of some trick, before suddenly flinging themselves out and beginning to buzz around the grass and the tray of returned equipment.
“Uh, I hope everything is in order?” Townsend asked cautiously.
“No, quite disordered.” The radio hissed.
That’s not what I mea- His thought was cut off as the ship a couple of meters in front of them moved. A seam appeared on its smooth surface and pair of doors appeared, quickly sliding apart to reveal an opening around the size of a post-it note. He crouched down slightly to get a better look inside and saw the ‘hangar’ went back a handful of centimeters, with platforms and wasp sized indentations set into the floor and walls at regular intervals. The off-white material of the floor and walls was dotted with faintly glowing lights, seemly marking out paths or landing spots. He couldn’t make out much detail about them from where he was standing though. I doubt pressing my face up against their hull to get a closer look would go over well.
His eye was eventually drawn to faint bit of movement near the front of the opening, if he hadn’t already been peering closely at the spot he doubted he would have noticed. A speck around the size of a mite was on the floor by the entrance and was shifting slightly.
The radio behind him spoke up “That is the council representative.”
Townsend started slightly and saw that one of the wasps was hovering near his head, keeping an eye on him while the others were gathering their equipment. The radio continued “They wish to convey gratitude/relief that you are upholding your end of the agreement. They hope this interaction will improve trust and improve future interaction.”
Townsend relaxed slightly. “That is good to hear. We hope that this is the beginning of more open communication with your people. I and the rest of the facility apologize for the…trying nature of your capture. We hope we can put that period of secrecy and misunderstanding behind us.”
“The representative expresses agreement.”
Townsend nodded stiffly, noting that the creature didn’t mention if itself agreed. He wondered how much resentment they might be holding. He was painfully aware of the many cameras were trained on him right now and figured this might not be the best time for such delicate questions. Instead he stepped back a pace and spent a few awkward moments watching the wasps shuttling the grav drive and the dissected ‘drones’ into the ship. Thankfully they were quick and it seemed the politician was satisfied with his short exchange as it remained silent. Townsend noticed with interest that the wasps were having to tie down the equipment in the hanger as it was apparently in zero g. After a few seconds of fiddling the creatures seemed to be satisfied that all was in order and one of them turned to look out the door at Townsend and the rest of the lab crew behind him. “The ship will leave now. Thank you for releasing us.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Of course. Safe travels.” He replied, stepping back a few paces in case their departure was going to be as dramatic as their arrival. The doors of the ship snapped shut and hull rippled to a mirror shine once again. For a moment Townsend saw a distorted reflection of himself in the shimmering ovoid, but then with a flick of motion and hiss of wind it was gone. He whipped his head skyward and for an instant saw a faint glint of silver against the darkening sky, and a breath later everyone in the field heard the crack of a distant sonic boom.
He paused like that for a few moments, just looking upwards, before turning his gaze back to Earth and walking back to the lab, sagging with relief.
——————————————————————
When the door closed and the captain informed them that the ship was underway and that it seemed like nothing was being fired at them [Walter] finally let his last doubts melt away. “They did it. They actually let us go. We really are heading back.” He sent with his signal choked with relief.
“You’re just now accepting that?” [Eve] asked bemusedly as the rest of the team let out a ragged cheer and began disembarking from their crafts.
[Walter] [shrugged] “I didn’t want to get my hopes up to high.” He replied as he parked his craft in its familiar perch and disconnected. After scurrying down one of his crafts legs he felt his way blindly along the rungs of one of the paths set in the floor, the familiar routine of disembarking and the feeling of the solid pseudopodholds under his limbs provided a surprising amount of comfort.
After [Walter] and the rest of the team cycled through the hanger’s waterlock and took off their environmental suits they could finally smell again and were immediately hit with the jubilant greeting signals of a dozen or so of their old crewmates gathered in the tunnel outside. A very familiar signal reached him, followed swiftly after by a rush of water and a thud of impact.
“[Walter]!” [Faythe] sent jubilantly as she gripped him in a membrane stretching hug. “I’ve been worried sick about you guys! I tried to get [Alice] or a captain to rescue you sooner but nobody listened. I came really close to doing something stupid a few times. But you’re back now!”
[Walter] [laughed] and hugged her back. “I missed you too. Can you let up a bit though? You’re crushing my gills.”
The pressure dropped immediately and [Walter] stopped resembling a squeezed water balloon.
“Sorry. It’s just…how have you been?” She asked, her signal fading into a much more worried tone.
“…it was terrifying, painful, fascinating and boring. Often multiple at the same time. Being studied and experimented on by something that it can kill you with a twitch of its smallest limbs is…uniquely horrifying. Things got a bit better later, and I got kind of numb to the scale eventually, but let’s just say I’m glad to be back.”
“Experimented on? [Eve] mentioned they did some painful things to you guys at first, what happened?” [Faythe] asked worriedly.
[Walter] [shrugged] “I’d rather not relive it, at least not right now. I’m still in a wonderful mood at finally being back, I’ll process the trauma later, right now I just want to bask in the sense of normalcy of being on a familiar ship again.”
[Faythe] [smiled] “Want to go to the break room and play some [Fleets] to keep your mind off things then?”
“Yeah, that sounds nice.”
The rest of the group was similarly breaking up, most heading to the cafeteria to get the first bit of flavorful food they had in half a day. [Walter] and [Faythe] meanwhile headed over to one of the ship’s small lounge rooms. The ship was operating with minimal crew, [Faythe] bashfully admitted [Alice] probably only let her go on this trip to prevent anymore nagging, so the room was pleasantly empty.
“Nice, I think the game set is in the [scent designation] cabinet.” [Faythe] said as she entered.
[Walter] drifted over to the compartment in question and fished around inside. “Hmm, I’m not feeling it, are you sure it’s…AGH!”
——————————————————————
[Sybil] relaxed slightly as the little [Gaian] stopped twitching as the dart did its work. She would have to work fast, the lack of private quarters made time consuming modifications like this quite a risk. Keeping half her focus on checking the currents and scents coming through the doorway she deployed a few silencer filters to mop up the alarm scent her target had briefly given off. Clumsy she snarled to herself. She had hoped he would be more distractible.
She swam over to the body now drifting limply against the far wall and began the delicate task of deploying her editing equipment. Parting the tough but annoyingly stiff cell wall that covered her current body [Sybil] formed a tube of cell membrane and stabbed it into her target. Keeping a watch on the door she split off part of her attention to focus on the data stream from the equipment she began tunneling inside.
Feeling around the entrance site with a few sensor arrays she felt and tasted nothing alarming, there wasn’t any stray glue strands or chunks of mangled thought center drifting about, so the dart hadn’t failed catastrophically. She began quickly widening the hole and sending in the rest of her equipment; snipping proteins, grasping limbs and memory reading equipment were carried along a rapidly unfolding scaffolding network. The tips of this network forked and twisted deeper inside like thirsting roots, touching and tasting every structure they bumped into, following the scent left behind by the dart.
After a few moments she found the signal line which the dart had first latched onto, and she sent her editing equipment along the line after it, following the trail of sent markers the little machine had laid down as it rushed along the cable. Following the pathways that walker proteins use to carry sensory data back to a target’s main thought center was a trivially simple task, after all it had to be straight forward enough for a mindless molecule to follow. The pathway grew steadily as she made her way further inwards, different lines merging together to form a major signaling trunk. Just as the diameter of the cable started to indicate she was nearly upon her target however, several of the motor proteins dragging her editing equipment along suddenly reported that they had lost grip.
She felt around wildly and realized the pathway in front of her was gone. The sensory cable was sheared through, most likely via a hasty misuse of the pilot’s drone linking equipment. The fool had begun ripping his own mind apart, he would be a near vegetable at this point, assuming he hadn’t killed himself entirely in his thrashing. Damn it all. I don’t have time for this.
It was at this moment the data cables near her tunnel into the target reported a strong current heading towards them. She had brief moment of shock before her mind was suddenly jerked back outwards as her connection to her hacking equipment was severed.
Reeling from the violent sensory shift and the realization she had be tricked, she hastily tried to regain control. Turning her focus to the ragged remains of the data cables that had connected her to her equipment she felt through a few remaining sensing hairs that something large was rushing towards her. Something that smelled rather familiar.
Her dart.
Fuck
——————————————————————
[Walter] was mad.
No. That [word] was inadequate.
He was absolutely furious.
When he had felt something rushing towards him he had been confused. When he had felt it stab him he had been shocked. When he had felt it begin moving inside him, heading towards his mind, he had the icy realization that his friend was gone. That a nightmare from the brightest corners of the overworld was aboard this ship, a mind hacker.
He was suddenly deeply deeply glad for the redundances he had been adding to his sensory network. Most would consider what he had been doing to himself in his limited rest time over the last 3 tenthdays highly paranoid, but after his cycles long purgatory trapped in self-inflicted sensory deprivation he had decided that he wanted a few more sensory lines and better control of his mind weaving equipment. He didn’t want a repeat of that hell to be possible.
So when he felt the vile machine begin clawing its way deeper inside him he hastily powered on his weaving equipment and went to work. He rushed his nearest array towards where he felt the thing racing along, the dumb machine rapidly working its way along a major sensory pathway, its rapidly spinning corkscrew motor burrowing through the water briefly leaving a noticeable wake. A spindly limb protruded from the main body of the missile, loosely gripping the signal pathway it was swimming besides, feeling its way along as its swift passage tore walker proteins from their mountings.
The moment it felt the currents from the mass of scaffolding, sensors and snipping proteins [Walter] was hurling at it the machine reacted. It released its grip on [Walter]’s signal pathway and he lost touch of it, though a few sensor hairs felt its wake. It narrowly dodged a slice from a diamoniod cutting blade which tore the cable it was just swimming along in two. [Walter] winced but he had a spare. He reached out toward the wake he could feel as it hurled itself farther away. He tried to grab the craft, splaying his mind weaving array outwards, scaffolding and motor rods cast wide like a net, but the dart was far too quick and rapidly outpaced the now drag choked limb.
Fortunately, he had more than one weaving array, and by now 2 others had closed in, one of them dragging a food vacuole. He did not want to feel what kind of self-destruct poisons this thing might spit out. He forced himself to bring those limbs in slightly slower, giving time for their wakes to rapidly still in the viscous water.
The dart was quiet now, but he had a vague idea of where it was lurking. If it was moving at all it must be moving slowly as he felt no hint of movement from where he had last felt it. He carefully unfurled all three arrays, feeding them more scaffolding by cannibalizing nearby sections of his cytoskeleton, englobing the region where he was sure it could have gone.
At last he felt a twitch of movement. It seemed the next phase of the dart’s programming was to stealthily continue in the direction it had been heading before it was caught, as it had bumped into a section of net while slowly swimming in roughly the direction of the severed signal line. The moment it contacted the net it tried to swim way again, but [Walter] cut that section of netting free and whipped it forwards using a branch of scaffolding, and the flexible strands of motor protein in the net grabbed at the dart greedily. More lines and scaffolding piled on as he brought more sections of the net to bare, and he began hastily shuttling over the vacuole to contain it in case it might release poison in its death throws.
It did, sort of. As soon as its motor and cilia were completely jammed the missile ceased struggling. [Walter] was almost hoping it was over just before the nest of cables and struts enclosing the thing was wracked by an explosion. The missile had violently split itself apart to release its payload, a cloud of particles and tangling cables tailor made to jam mental machinery. [Walter] was exceeding glad that none of his thought centers had been breached, but the cloud would still be a problem out in his main body. They jammed signaling and motor proteins just as well, and he could feel the shredded remains of the net covering the dart go numb as messages from them ground to a halt.
He hastily ripping open the vacuole he had brought over and tried to englobe as much of the mess as possible. It cost him half of the remaining arrays in the area, but he managed to get most of it inside. There was still a few wisps of jamming particles floating about but he would just have to avoid them for now.
With the immediate threat taken care of he turned his focus outwards to what was wearing his friend. It was still by the door, waiting for him to succumb to the glue he supposed. Shit. [Faythe] is 3 times my mass and covered in armor, she could crush me like a [bug]. I’m faster than her but she is 4 span closer to the door then me. The only thing I can hope for is surprise.
With that in mind he gradually stilled the violent twitching his internal battle had caused and went limp. He felt currents close in as the thing swam over to him, and had to fight off the urge to move as it cornered him. Well. This is the exact opposite place you want to be in when fighting a mind hacker. He thought nervously as he prepared to run or wage an internal battle. He had no illusions of his repurposed civilian equipment being any match for black-market gear in a fair fight. Though, he did have some black market equipment at his disposal now.
He carefully began prepping the glue and debris filled vacuole for offense, hastily gathering vacuoles of a few volatile chemicals, digestive acids and respiration byproducts and merging them with the glue one or lashing them together so they wouldn’t mix just yet. He felt some ripples as the thing fiddled next to him and he knew he didn’t have much time, he hoped this would be enough of a distraction to dart away.
He began moving the whole mess with a remaining weaving array, trying to move just fast enough that he wasn’t noticeably twitching his outer membrane as the complex swam/crawled its was through his cytoskeleton, spiderlike limbs extending to grab at the web of struts and signal lines darting out like tentacles, disconnecting and reconnecting it to his signaling network as it moved. He wasn’t fast enough however, as he felt himself get stabbed a second time, and this time the hole was held open.
A nest of filaments and wires squirmed their way inside him. At first it was only faint movements that nearby sensors could barely feel, and then larger motions as other things were forced through the wound. [Walter] slowed the weaving array’s movements to a crawl. It is sending stuff over, so it opened up a chink in her cell wall, that’s the only place I can get a good hit in. he thought nervously, as he cautiously dragged his bulky payload closer.
Soon he felt the bulk of the machinery crawl deeper in and begin moving along where he knew the severed signal line was still drifting. He [smiled] Good, follow that dead end, nothing out of the ordinary happening over here. He continued along a fast as he dared, aware he had a time limit until the thing found the cut and realized something was up. That time limit ran out when he felt the hacker’s train of equipment stop with a lurch.
With the game up he abandoned stealth and closed the last few millispan to the wound site with several cutting tools thrust out on a pillar scaffolding, aiming for the data cables he knew must be trailing there. The cables were thick, it seemed they were actually tubes with the protein walkways and vibration transmission rods within their armored walls. They were still no match for the four diamoniod cutting clamps that slammed into them though. After a quarter beat of twisting and hacking the bundle of lines came apart entirely and he yanked that strut back with the data cables still caught in its grasp to delay any reconnection. He then shoved the mess of vacuoles into the breach.
The hacker for its part recovered quickly, lurching [Faythe]’s body backwards and severing the tunnel of membrane in an instant. But cell wall was not as malleable. [Walter] abandoned his finer scale controls and moved his body normally, pushing out a pseudopod with the mind weaving gear and vacuole bundle inside it and stabbed the limb into the slowly closing hole in [Faythe]’s cell wall. The last signal he sent the equipment before severing the pseudopod was to merge the little two explosive vacuoles he had stuck on the main one’s surface.
He didn’t pause to admire his handywork though as he had to immediately squirm out of the way of 5 armored limbs rushing at him. He got the impression that this second hug wouldn’t end if he asked politely. He managed to weave between three of them but the last two partly encircled him and began to squeeze.
He stretched his body out 3 times its normal length, trying to narrow himself down fast enough that he could slip out of its grip but it was fruitless. Another limb smacked him down and the three arms pinned him against the wall. He shoved off the wall and the thing had to dart a few limbs out to grip the ‘floor’ as it drifted backwards a touch. That was enough for him to flatten his body and slide under one of the limbs pinning him.
A current warned him of another incoming blow and he narrowly dodged a serrated limb, lightly scraping his membrane. The thing had gotten enough time to fashion something more than crude clubs, and now it no longer needed to play a futile game of punching an amorphous blob. Popping one was much easier. Fortunately, it seemed the glue was beginning to have an effect, as its movements were becoming decidedly more erratic.
He made a mad dash to the exit, and sprayed a series of data packets out in front of him towards the comm unit by the door. “Mind Hacker!“ He managed to [scream] before he was cut off by the thing launching itself off the back wall and barreling into him. They collided in midwater and [Walter] felt a massive gash in his side appear as its claw tore him open.
He crumpled inwards around the wound, doing his best to stanch the flood of cytoplasm and internal organs. His mind began to go hazy as the amount of [ATP analog] with in him dropped precipitously. He noticed the thing wasn’t doing much better though, it was struggling to use nearly half of its body, flailing awkwardly as it tried to keep him from drifting away.
Guess that glue trick wasn’t for nothing. He thought sleepily, as he felt a few weak blows and slashes rain down on him, doing little more than pushing him away from it. I hope they got the warning… was his last thought before his mind faded to scentlessness.
——————————————————————
He awoke again in a medical ward with a nurse and several guards in armored environmental suits.
“What happened?” He sent, feeling around wildly.
A guard caught his signal packet and fed it into a large comm unit floating beside them. They paused for a moment while the machine gargled softly, and when they finally replied it was a through the same isolated comm. In the dry and formal tone of someone reciting a recording the guard responded
“The crew of the [Stalking Sea Predator] received a signal from the body of [Walter] about a mind hacker attack taking place in the ship’s third lounge room. When they arrived they found the body of [Walter] unconscious from a grievous rupture and the body of [Faythe] in the process of attacking it. Initially the body of [Faythe] claimed to be run by the mind of [Faythe] and that the body of [Walter] contained the attacker, but upon requests that it submit to a medical exam it became hostile. It presently revealed that the mind of [Faythe] was not in control, but the attacker did claim it still had her in storage and could irreparably damage her at anytime. As we cannot currently rule out this claim, we are treating it as a hostage situation.”
“The attacker eventually submitted to being moved to the ship’s brig to begin negotiations for a reduced sentence and the body of [Walter] was stabilized for the remainder of the 8-cycle trip back to [Luna Station]. Upon arrival a medical team and a mental hazard team were dispatched to the ship to assess the situation and to awaken the mind inside the body of [Walter]. It is currently unknown how thoroughly the mind of [Walter] was modified while in the presence of the attacker. Does this entity claim to still be the mind of [Walter]?”
Oh light. Here we go. [Walter] thought worriedly as he prepared for several kilobeats of interrogation and medical scans. He didn’t feel any different and didn’t remember being modified, but the truly horrifying thing about mind hackers is that meant nothing.
Eventually the interrogators were reasonably satisfied that he had the same memories as the original [Walter], and that if his personality had been replaced or significantly altered he was doing a decent job of hiding it. Like always they couldn’t rule out subtle changes or hidden triggers though, so he would be under close watch and placed on a tenthdaily schedule of mandatory psych evaluations for the foreseeable future. They removed every mind weaving tool from his body, including the gear from the hacker (boy had that raised some concerns) before finally deeming him safe enough to leave the room while under armed supervision.
(Continues in comments)
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The Missouri Ghost Town Poisoned By Toxic Waste - YouTube MRWMD: The MRF 2.0 Single Stream Video - YouTube - YouTube MHC Clinic Network Locator (ver 3.0.3) 10 DUMBEST Things Billionaires Own - YouTube How a Landfill Works - YouTube How Do Wastewater Treatment Plants Work? - YouTube Household Hazardous Waste Event, Customer Service Care Center I Talking Trash Talking Trash 14 Waste Management and Recycling - YouTube

Waste and environmental impact Find a local hazardous waste disposal service Certain household products may pose a risk to human health or the environment if not disposed of correctly. What is Household Hazardous Waste? Household products that are no longer useful or expired that should not be put in household garbage or down the drain, is considered household hazardous waste (HHW). Most of these items are labeled caution, poisonous, toxic, corrosive, or flammable.. HHW threatens and pollutes our environment, make our waterways unsafe for fishing and recreation, harm marine ... Graffiti & Waste Collection. ... The Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) ... For more information (including mobile drop off events), please contact the Call Center at 311 or (210) 207-6000. 311 is available seven days a week from 7am-7pm and 8am-5pm on holidays. You may also be interested in. Civic Center open 8 am to 5:30 pm M-Th and 8-4:30 alternate Fridays. Limited Services Online. City of Vista, CA ... used batteries, or other toxic products that are not suitable for donation to the Vista Household Hazardous Waste collection facility. These items should not be placed in regular residential trash. Household Hazardous Waste Collection Center Address : 2750 Patterson Street, Greensboro, NC 27407 Hours: Monday through Friday from 10 am to 6 pm; Saturday from 8 am to 2 pm. Closed Sunday. Household Hazardous Waste Collection Program. Wayne County's Department of Public Services hosts four Household Hazardous Waste Collections per year for County residents. The collections are designed to accept unwanted household chemicals for proper disposal and electronics for recycling from residents. Household Hazardous Waste and the Environment. Keeping our storm drains clean has never been so easy. With these simple steps listed in the video below, we can keep Fontana and all of San Bernardino County beautiful. 2. Our hazardous waste vendor unloads your car 3. You're on your way. Delaware County sponsors four (4) Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) Collection Events each year. If you’ve ever participated in an event, you leave with a good feeling knowing you’ve disposed of your hazardous items in a responsible fashion. To back up a bit… Household Hazardous Waste drop off makes it very easy to get all that waste out of your garage or home responsibly. Keep a tub with items that qualify as household hazardous waste, make sure it is out of reach of any small children, then take it to the next Household hazardous waste drop off near you. Hazardous Waste Drop Off Near Me Household Hazardous Waste Collection Programs. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, new guidance has been issued regarding the application process for new household hazardous waste (HHW) and/or electronics one-day collection events. Applicants must submit documentation outlining a plan to meet the following criteria:

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The Missouri Ghost Town Poisoned By Toxic Waste - YouTube

Monterey Regional Waste Management District: The Materials Recycling Facility 2.0 Single Stream VideoThe Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) is the centerpiece... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Go to http://curiositystream.com/austinmcconnell and use the promo code austinmcconnell when prompted to get your first 30 days of CuriosityStream FREE.The R... Household Hazardous Waste Event, Customer Service Care Center I Talking Trash Talking Trash 14 ... Daly City's Household Hazardous Waste Collection Event - Duration: 3:01. City of Daly ... This clip shows how household trash are recycled and processed. More info can be found @ www.wm.comPlease subscribe to http://www.youtube.com/user/ScienceCh... MHC Clinic Network App is a mobile application for MHC clients to search for nearby clinics, retrieve member eCard, submit eClaims and much more! 10 DUMBEST Things Billionaires OwnSubscribe to never miss a Top 5 here:http://bit.ly/250D2N9Follow us on Twitter to be informed when we post:https://www.twit... SUPPORT CR on PATREON: http://bit.ly/2qBHcvfIt's a topic we'd rather not think about, where does last nights dinner go when we flush it down the drain? While... This animated video takes you on a tour of a modern landfill and how it’s constructed and managed.

hazardous waste collection center near me

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