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teeth--thief · 15 days

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i’d love to hear your opinion on Akimov as well! i tried to get all the info i can get online, but for some reason i feel like i’m only scratching the surface and there’s more to him! if you’d like i wouldn’t mind an info dump on Akimov from you

I consider it absolutely criminal that the day I got this ask That Chernobyl Guy released a video on him... like, girl... now I'm gonna look like I'm repeating you 🙄 No, but, in all seriousness, his video is really good! Even if he didn't, unfortunately, say anything we (or at least I) hadn't already known.

No wonder you feel this way - I'm sure everyone trying to learn anything about him does. There's just so so little on him out there. I understand that it is probably because his immediate family wanted to protect themselves - after all, the public's opinion wasn't exactly favourable of the operators for quite some time. You gotta give your kids a chance to grow up in as normal of an environment as possible, right? Anyhow, this is written without all that "ah yes, he was born in May and died in--" bs, I'll try to include mostly lesser known facts, I'm under the assumption that you already know all that and there's really no need for you to read it all over again just to learn absolutely nothing new.

There aren't many sources on him at all, all the books, except for (oh the horrors) Medvedev's book, which includes a statement from his wife, spare his person just a few words, usually more or less always the same. Smart, professional, near-sighted, dedicated party man (with a mustache!) is always the jest of it, you'll see.

We have about... what? Three and a half confirmed pictures of him? The rest is oh yeah, someone said that random guy with glasses is him so it must be true! And because we have so few pictures that are for sure him, it's that much harder to determine whether these really are him or not.

From this little piece of official documentation we find out... nothing revolutionary:

parents: Zinaida Timofeevna (1929) and Fyodor Vasilyevich (1930)

wife: Lyubov Nikolayevna

sons: Aleksey (1977) and Konstantin (1982)

started working in the ChNPP on 12.09.79

> Ultra useless information from here include:

his address (before moving to Prypiat, obviously): Moscow, Frunzenskiy district, Khoroshevskoye highway, house 68 apt 72

address of his parents: Arkhangelsk region, Severodvinsk, Lenina street, house 7, apt 8 (?)

From this interview- one of the... well, the only one, as far as I know - we also learn that his grandparents (from his father's side, judging by the patronymic alone) were Vasily and Nyura. His younger brothers' names were Konstantin and Fyodor (which would make him Fyodor Fyodorovich... y'all really went off with this one).

We know what became of his two kids or wife - not even his childhood friend, the author of the article above, does. The last name Akimov is not at all an uncommon one and, besides, if either of them ever felt like speaking with anyone, I'd assume they would have done that by now. Hell, even their kids, if they have any, are probably either teens or in their twenties by now, they could have said something... shared a picture, whatever. But nobody has done that, so they probably value their privacy and want to be left alone.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, he was a member of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and a member of Pripyat Gorkom from 1977. Gorkom is a city level of Party Committee.

I've tried to compile all the bits describing him from any book I could think of that has something, anything, on him:

G. Medvedev (eugh) describes him as follows in Chernobyl Notebook:

Aleksandr Akimov, a strapping and strong 35-year-old lad with a broad rosy-cheeked face, wearing glasses, with a dark wavy head of hair, powdered now with radioactive dust, rushed around without knowing what to do (...)

First of all, he was most definitely not 35. Second of all... he was balding. Like balding-balding. Who exactly were you looking at when writing that, huh, Medvedev? Because it was not Akimov, that's for sure.

In Midnight in Chernobyl he's described as follows:

Akimov, a gangling thirty-two-year-old with thick glasses, a receding hairline, and a small mustache, was a committed Communist and one of the most knowledgeable technicians at the plant. He and his wife, Luba, were the parents of two young boys, and he spent his spare time reading historical biographies or hunting hare and duck with his Winchester rifle on the Pripyat marshes. Akimov was clever, competent, and well liked, but his colleagues agreed that he was easily pushed around by those above him.

God damnit, you guys figure it out finally - was he strapping and strong or was he gangling? I'm no expert on words but those seem to not work together too well. Also... small mustache? I'd say it's pretty average sized, actually... Have you seen it? It looks like the propellers of a helicopter...

From Chernobyl 01:23:40 we get:

Akimov was Russian, like most senior staff at the plant. Born on May 6th 1953, in the country’s third-largest city, Novosibirsk, he graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1976 with a degree in thermal power automation processes, before moving to the Chernobyl plant in 1979 as a turbine engineer.

Go girl, give us nothing! Nothing new, how wonderful.

S. Plokhy's Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy:

(...) Aleksandr Akimov, a thirty-three-year-old engineer with ten years of experience at the Chernobyl plant. Bespectacled and sporting a fashionable moustache, Akimov was regarded as competent, friendly, and susceptible to pressure from the higher-ups. A member of Prypiat’s Communist Party committee, he was clearly on his way up—he had been appointed head of shift only four months earlier.

Paul Read's Ablaze contains a much longer description than other books - we even get a bit more information on Lyubov:

(...) Among Inze’s closest friends was Luba, the wife of Alexander Akimov, whom Razim had known at the Institute in Moscow. Akimov had gone on to study at Zukh-Hydroprojekt, with the designers of the power station, and it was here that he had met Luba, also the daughter of an army officer and a student in the same department. Akimov had a gangling figure, thick glasses, a high forehead, receding hair and a small moustache. Luba was a tall, skinny girl with a delicate constitution, short dark hair and a sophisticated sense of humour. She loathed pretentiousness of a bourgeois kind, and was choosy about her friends.

Upon graduating, Akimov was sent to work for Zukh-Hydroprojekt in Chernobyl, and Luba went with him as his wife. They moved straight into a flat in Pripyat, where Luba gave birth to their first child. They, too, embarked upon the life at Chernobyl with the greatest enthusiasm. Akimov worked hard to establish his professional reputation; he also joined the party. In his free time, he read historical biographies, subscribed to magazines on military technology, and went after duck and hare with his Winchester rifle. The Akimovs’ life was not without trouble. Their second child was born with a twisted hip: every two weeks Luba had to make the five-hour journey on the hydrofoil to take her baby to see a specialist in Kiev.

(...)

Akimov, (...) , served as Communist party secretary for the unit – a chore that reflected his commitment to communism and also helped his career.

This book is also where the almost iconic now bit comes from:

When given the task of drawing up a programme for such a hypothetical accident, Alexander Akimov calculated a probability factor of one in ten million per year.

In From Chernobyl to Fukushima by N. Karpan we learn that he's remembered as such:

"Sasha Akimov was an intelligent, educated guy. He graduated from Moscow Energy Institute. His interests were not limited to his work only, he had many different hobbies, read a lot, loved his children and cared for them affectionately... He was very proud of his children, they started to read at five, he regularly spent a lot of his time with his children and liked to tell us about them. He was very fond of his car and maintained it in a perfect order" - (Igor Kazachkov, the reactor unit shift manager).

"He was naturally inclined to follow rules" - (Aleksandr Orlenko, the Electric Section shift manager).

"Akimov was a very orderly person, it was impossible to force him to violate a rule. He was very experienced" - (Boris Rogozhkin, the NPP shift manager).

#5 days. it took me 5 days to type out a post that basically says “well i know nothing new. actually”#file: special interest: chernobyl #file: ask!#asker: anonymous #aleksandr akimov #chernobyl

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ariareverie · 1 month

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ok so update

this is kind of how i’m organizing iry’s story for now. the names might change. these are placeholders. book 5 just means that iryna’s story comes 5th, since i think ukraine was the 5th one to leave the union. i try to find the order but each source gives me a different order LOL. i know lithuania is 1st, belarus is 13th, russia is 14th, and kazakhstan is 15th. anyway, back to what i was saying.

so the first part, dream, is the time period between 192X (i’m not sure the exact year, probably after 1922.) and 1946. that’s around 24 years max. i think this part will definitely be the longest cuz there’s loads to unpack in these years. it ends with iryna running away from soviet.

the second part, vampire, is the time period between 1946 and 1956. 10 years only.

the third part, dream, is the time period between 1956 and 1991. 35 years is a lot, and i know there’s a lot that happens, but i really don’t know how i would separate this part. even the wikipedia skips from reichskommissariat ukraine to chernobyl, then BAM independence, so i don’t know what to tell you 😭😭. i would think that in this part iryna feels the most, not hopeless, not empty, but an emotion between the two. shock, maybe? soviet had succeeded in his plan of letting her go then breaking her spirits, and iryna was never quite the same again. at least, not in in the next 10 years or so. she eventually gets back up on her feet, but those mixed emotions of grief and anger never really went away. (i mean of course now she accepts what happened, but i meant like, up to the, i guess 2000s.)

#ariareverie’s kx

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xplrvibes · 5 months

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do you really think 26-27 is too old to go back to urbex? 😅 i thought the biggest age range for it was like 25-35. it seems like the boys have been extra nostalgic about that time period lately so i was taking that as a hint lowkey that they might return to XPLR days

I mean, I don't think people will laugh off two 27 year olds getting arrested for trespassing the way they laughed off two 22 year olds getting arrested for trespassing 🤣.

For real, though, I don't think that it would be good for their career to go back to doing the xplr stuff the way they used. I just spent the last week seeing drama channels on youtube talking about what assholes they were for kicking a stuffed bear...imagine the videos we'd be getting if they got arrested at this point in time, lol.

They wouldn't be able to actually go running around breaking into shit anymore. They're adults now, with 11 million followers, a shit ton of lawyers, and a lot of eyes on them. So, they'd have to do legal abandoned videos this time, which is fine...but it won't feel the same as the old videos. Trying to recreate nostalgia, sadly, always winds up falling a little flat, and I think they know that.

They can do one off's here and there, like what they did with Chernobyl or that one video with Josh a couple years ago. But I don't think you'll ever see a full return to the actual glory days of xplr.

#asks #sam and colby #xplr

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should-the-war-in-ukraine-spur · 2 years

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Should the war in Ukraine spur a nuclear security rethink?

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nuclear facilities have been caught up in the midst of conventional warfare for the first time in history. That nightmare scenario is one that few of the industry’s players had anticipated. In Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia, Russian forces represent a lingering threat to the most basic rules of nuclear security.

On the way to Chernobyl along the Dnipro River, a two-hour drive from Kyiv, the imprint left by Russia’s occupation remains, two months after an ordeal that lasted from the February 24 invasion until March 31. Most bridges have been destroyed and our driver warns us to stay on the pavement as landmines lurk beyond.

After the invasion, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl – a 30-kilometre radius around the notorious nuclear plant near Ukraine’s border with Belarus – made global headlines once again. For some 35 days, Chernobyl personnel had to abide the Russian soldiers who seemed oblivious to the dangers inherent in a nuclear site.

“They had a very low level of knowledge. They didn’t understand that the soil here is contaminated, that one mustn’t touch it, and certainly not dig trenches in it,” recounted Ruslan, a technician at the plant, waiting for his bus into work. “And yet that’s what they did and it spurred an increased level of radioactivity at the site. Happily, management handled the situation well.”

Chernobyl shift chief Valentin Geïko became a national hero after he was able to tell various media how he resisted the orders of Russian officers with no scientific knowledge and with ambiguous intentions. Geïko’s sense of humour and his determination helped the plant’s personnel cope while they were held hostage for 20 days, until Russian soldiers finally allowed their colleagues in to relieve them of their duties.

With Russia’s invasion, Chernobyl had the world’s nuclear experts in a cold sweat all over again. Deactivated sensors, troop movements on contaminated soil, and a plant disconnected from the electrical network from March 9 to 14 had specialists fearing the worst.

Sergei, another plant employee, can still hardly believe it, after seeing “the barbarians” turn up inside the exclusion zone that has been insulating the damaged reactor since 1986. “They pillaged everything, broke technical material, equipment. But happily, they didn’t damage the cooling system, which could have provoked a catastrophe.”

Indeed, the Chernobyl nuclear site remains active 36 years after the worst nuclear accident in history. The dismantling of the site’s four reactors is still in progress and, most importantly, some 22,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies are being kept in storage pools that require constant cooling. Another major activity at the site is the surveillance of the 100-plus metre sarcophagus completed in 2019, which isolates the reactor that “melted” during the 1986 disaster.

In Zaporizhzhia, a menacing and disconcerting occupation

While Russian soldiers have now left the Chernobyl site, allowing the plant to return to a level of risk deemed acceptable by international standards, the Zaporizhzhia plant’s occupation, ongoing since March 4, has made for some surreal and worrisome scenes on the other side of the country. The images of artillery fire targeting buildings inside the plant’s enclosure spurred major concern, although no nuclear incident came of it.

Ukrainian authorities said 500 soldiers settled in at the site, with 50-odd military vehicles, including tanks, weapons and explosives of all sorts; an arsenal entirely incompatible with the most basic security rules inside the walls of a nuclear facility.

“Nobody had ever imagined that one could open fire on a nuclear power plant, the way the Russians did in Zaporizhzhia,” said Petro Kotin, president of Energoatom, the public company in charge of nuclear energy in Ukraine. “Today, they are using it as a military base because the perimeter is well protected by walls and video surveillance. They also use the cafeteria and the canteen to better the daily life of their soldiers,” he said thoughtfully. “We have the impression that they themselves don’t understand the objective of occupying the plant. They came, they occupied and they didn’t really know what to do with it.”

Indeed, neither the Russian soldiers nor the 10 to 15 technicians from Rosatom, the powerful Russian civil nuclear energy firm, on site at Zaporizhzhia tried to get their hands on nuclear fuel. Moreover, the plant’s two functioning reactors (out of six in total) are still supplying electricity to the Ukrainian network and powering the cooling systems of the largest nuclear plant in Europe.

Could Russia’s objective be to use the site as a spoil of war to supply electricity to Crimea or other territories? Russia’s deputy prime minister appeared to indicate as much during a visit to Zaporizhzhia last week. “If Ukraine is ready to pay, then (the plant) can operate for Ukraine. If not, then it will operate for Russia,” said Marat Khusnullin, as cited by Russian press agencies.

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“For the moment, it is impossible to connect Zaporizhzhia to the Russian electrical network,” Kotin retorted. “For that, one would need to build 200 to 400 kilometres of lines, which would cost more than €500 million and could take two years. But with time and money, the Russians can do it, of course. Look at the means they deployed to build a bridge between Crimea and the Russian Federation” between 2014 and 2018, he added.

The challenge of nuclear security in wartime

Those in the civil nuclear industry believe it is vital to deliberate on the issue of nuclear security in wartime. Terrorist attack scenarios had been considered in the past. But in light of the Russian invasion, the matter of adopting international rules is now on the table.

Over the past three months, Ukrainian authorities have been calling – so far without success – for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to commit its members to respecting a five-kilometre perimeter around nuclear facilities inside of which no military forces can be permitted to penetrate.

For now, the Ukrainian government has reinforced the defence of its nuclear sites. “We now have soldiers equipped with Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles to protect the nuclear plants. In Zaporizhzhia, we were taken by surprise; there was not yet a single weapon on site. I don’t know specifically what military means were deployed. That is confidential information that I don’t have access to,” said Kotin.

The head of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants has meanwhile forbidden the transport of nuclear material anywhere on Ukrainian territory for security reason. Moving the fuel needed for the reactors to operate will just have to wait until the end of the war. The measure shouldn’t hamper the functioning of Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure because the country’s authorities followed the advice of American experts dispatched after war began in the Donbas in 2014.

“We followed their recommendation to build new nuclear fuel storage units on Ukrainian soil that would allow our plants to operate for two years. If ever the war were to last more than two years, we’ll see what we have to do then,” Kotin explained.

In Ukraine, the prospect of peace seems a distant one. But the long run is just the sort of timeline that the civil nuclear industry needs to guarantee optimal nuclear security. In the short term, the threat of a battle between Ukrainian and Russian forces for control of the Zaporizhzhia plant cannot be dismissed, with Ukraine displaying its willingness to reclaim all of its occupied territory in the months to come. The prospect of high-intensity combat for control of a nuclear facility? A nightmare, for Europe as a whole.

#UKRAINE #RUSSIA #CHERNOBYL #NUCLEAR ENERGY #NUCLEAR POWER #FEATURES

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noisynutcrusade · 4 months

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Russia uses POWs as a political weapon against Kyiv – POLITICO

KYIV — The last time Valentyna Tkachenko, a 35-year-old mother of two from Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, saw her husband Serhii was just before Russia invaded her country. Serhii, a National Guard soldier, was captured on February 24 of last year, the day Moscow launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine. His unit was guarding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when it was attacked by the Russians.…

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nonbinary-beast · 6 months

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Thinking about Amaton again, maybe some Ted stuff is mixed in. Under a cut since it got long. I did a bit of research regarding nuclear fallout for this, but its not thorough and I'm probably missing a few things. Do your own research from credible sources to learn about radioactivity.

To be honest, while looking at a play through of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and sort of keeping in mind something I noticed (and posted about) regarding how what is real is uncertain when dealing with AM, I sort of doubt that it is telling the truth when it says that Earth is too irradiated to be habitable again. Even the visual it gives could be another hologram and the survivors would not be able to tell. As for Ted in the story, going by the unreliable narrator trope, it could be his paranoia/delusional personality and maybe general ignorance (and maybe just how radiation was treated back when the story was written in the 60's) clouding over how nature is actually pretty fucking resilient.

Look at how the natural areas around Chernobyl have started recovering despite the high levels of radiation that were released during the reactor meltdown. That happened in the 80's, it's only been a little over 35 years since then. Granted everything is recovering a little to the left because of the radiation from what I've seen from documentaries, but there are plants and animals in there. There's also plenty of other examples of nature managing to say "fuck it we ball" in areas with high radiation with enough time to recover, but that one stood out to me because of just how fucked everything was/is. The short story takes place 109 years after AM nuked everything, by then something probably came back. Likely it started in the less contaminated parts of the planet.

Of course this is debunked with the fucking moon colony, but tbh given the interviews with Harlan Ellison, I'm thinking that was part of being guided by the game developers to make the game more appealing to players. That said I'm not really sure how much of that game really is Harlan's intent and how much of it is being guided by the dev team he was working with to make it "playable" (I would have loved to see how fucking bleak it would have been without the dev team telling him to ease up. But then again I love bleak stories that don't ease up at all.), so I don't really think of it as part of the story/universe.

So! Going off of that, at some point after AM had been exploring its own complex, spending time with Ted (IE: dating, since this is taking place after AM had decided to teach Ted how to love, as a torment that backfires spectacularly), performing maintenance on its own systems, etc. It manages to pick up some feeds from cameras it had tapped into pre-armageddon that it had ignored since it was too focused on the survivors for a while, or just did not care about the nuclear mess it left.

It finds there is green growing up there, it sees movement. Animals. Granted the animals it sees are very warped looking, but they show signs of thriving despite the conditions. It starts to think that maybe it still has a chance to see the world- maybe not as it had been before it wiped out humanity, but it would be green and growing and living.

But, it knows it cannot take Ted with it, not yet. While its own body is resilient enough to handle the possibly dangerous radiation levels, Ted is incredibly vulnerable. Certainly it could cure his radiation sickness if he joined the machine up above, but it would rather not risk that. It wants to keep Ted safe.

So it goes up alone, with plenty of resistance and protesting from Ted- mainly in the vein of being convinced that the surface is a irradiated hellhole incapable of supporting anything. At this, AM finally reveals the nature of what the surface might be like. It shows him the animals, the plants, the blue skies and gentle spring rains, the snowy winters- all of this picked from the camera feeds it has outside the access point. Ted could not believe what he is seeing, and for a moment he thinks it is another trick and all of this is some form of new psychological torment. That is, until he sees how genuine the machine's eyes are when it explains it all, the surprise and excitement in its voice for the world not being completely dead- the concern it has for Ted, his safety above all, but also how he feels about it all.

However, Ted still does not want AM to go. Despite everything, it has grown to be a companion for him. It reassures him that it will return soon, and it will leave the life support systems tuned to keep him comfortable. There is a hologram of AMaton to keep him company so he does not get lonely- which also has a connection to AMaton itself so they can communicate while it explores.

On the surface, after it gets over the awe of finally escaping its substrata rock prison and seeing the world in person, it gets to work collecting samples. Dirt, water, vegetation, it does so in a large radius around the access point it climbed out of. At this point much of the ruins of human civilization have been reclaimed and overgrown with mutated plant life- it had glimpsed images of this when it had overtaken the alien ship and stolen its tech long ago, but did not pay much attention to it at the time. Now however, it understands how it managed the luck of that opportunity.

It returns, making sure to scrub itself thoroughly of any contamination and submitting the samples for testing before reuniting with Ted. After a long and thorough set of tests for radiation contaminants, it finds that the area around the access point has low contamination- one of the biggest threats, Cesium-137, reached the end of its half life decades ago as it had suspected. Plutonium-239 and Carbon-14 however are still a looming threat with their half lives sitting the realm of thousands of years- thankfully these only did damage if ingested. However, given the time span between the end of the third world war, and AM's exploration of the surface, most of these would have ended up moreso in the ground water or deep in the soil from being washed down by natural weather patterns. So long as Ted does not ingest anything with those contaminants in it, he should be fine. AM could figure out the water filtration easily enough, although the food situation would be complicated.

Ted likely would be getting his sustenance from the immortality serum it had been pumping into him for the last century for a long while longer. It could figure this out for a short jaunt above with its human tagging along- perhaps it could modify itself to inject the serum into him at regular intervals if they decided to stay up there longer than a few days.

For now, it decides that it is safe enough to let Ted join it for a day, so they can wander and wonder.

#Oh boy its AMaton and Ted hours again #this time with post-apocalyptic exploration flavor #AMaton #Ted #computer hell

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jayne-hecate-writer · 9 months

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Chieftain tanks are my happy place

I grew up in Germany in the 1980s, a time of the cold war, Chernobyl and the Chieftain tank. Sadly, only one of these things has turned into something fun to play with at the weekend.

I have loved the Chieftain tank since childhood and had more than one chance to crawl across one, while still an overly excited pre-teen, visiting the Tank Museum in Bovington. Obviously, as soon as I hit my teenage years, I immediately stopped loving something as loud, obnoxious and heavy as a tank and instead got into music, namely Heavy Metal music.

Along with my love of Heavy Metal music, came my delight in the peace movement and even now aged horribly close to fifty, I am still involved in the peace movement, albeit, while wishing that I had the disposable income and large area of unused farmland upon which I could dabble in my interest in Chieftain tanks.

As we all know, the venerable old Chieftain had something of an Achilles heel out back, in the form the Leyland L60 engine. However, when it did work, the nineteen litre, opposing piston, two stroke multi-fuel engine had a glorious howl to it, despite being chronically underpowered for the vehicle it was propelling. Luckily the pack was easy to pull out and replace while in the field... Every cloud etc.

You can now buy your own Chieftain tank, providing that you have £60K to play with. However you also need a thousand pounds to fill the tank, every time you want to go for a drive of more than half a mile. If you want to know more about this kind of thing, why not go and have a look at the Mr Hewes YouTube channel. If you love tanks, you will not be disappointed.

Now of late, I have of course got into my art in a big way and when I say a big way, I now have a room in the house entirely dedicated to my making art. I have some of my art displayed in our home and the wife even likes some of it! However, I have wanted to make a Chieftain Tank Diorama for a while now and always put it off because of the cost of a decent sized set. Now obviously, the kindly folk at Google would never listen in to my conversations through their monitoring devices in my phones and computers, so it was by pure chance that they displayed to me one day, a whole host of cheap model tanks... It would have been rude to ignore it, so I snapped up a Tamiya 1/35 scale model set for a penny short of £17. The bastard Post Office added their own stab in the back for delivery and four days later, it arrived in my disgustingly sweaty paws. Thus, the plan came together and I got my magic bucket out of the shed. I cut the wood for a base and dropped it in the bucket. I also slapped in some ripped up newspaper and a bottle of glue, then tickled the lot with a paintbrush and then dropped in the bits of tank. I put the lid on the bucket, gave it a hearty shake as I said the magic words (do you really think that I am going to tell you my magic words?) and what do you know? A load of spilled paint, sticky glue, broken plastic and ripped up newspaper fell out of the bucket!

So with a new model set delivered to my desk and the magic bucket on toilet cleaning duty, I set about doing it properly. The base was a piece of off cut chipboard donated by a friend. The newspaper came from my Mother in law, while Wifypoozles supplied the PVA glue. Knowing the dimensions of the tank, I was able to map out the diorama and then start designing the landscape. I knew that I wanted a rocky bank and a drainage ditch either side of the vehicle, with a fence and some grass. Using a cardboard tube and flower arranging foam, I quickly modelled the bank and then using a drill and a Dremel I cut the ditch into the base board.

The base board was then coated with newspaper and a mix of paint and PVA, sealing the tube and foam into place. I also placed a couple of pretty stones and a larger rock into place to give me a rocky bank with an exposed rock face.

With the base dry, it was time to add the soil and substrate, for which I used a mix of builders sand, gravel and pebbles, mixed with PVA. It took a couple of days to dry, but when it did, it was as hard as rock. Using my airbrush, I gave it a quick coat of burnt umber paint, which just deepened the already very brown of the sand and gravel. I used some lichen that had fallen from one of our trees to simulate bushes and shrubs and used some sheet grass from a model railway to make the grassy tufts I wanted at the edge of my gravel road.

I used cocktail sticks and super glue to knock up a fence and then found the measurements for a stile and added one of them too. A quick on line check sourced an army range sign warning about the dangers of picking up used ordnance.

With the base done, I turned to the model tank and began the construction with painting and building of twelve road wheels, two front guide wheels, two rear sprockets and six return rollers. Five hours later, each wheel was assembled, painted and ready for fitting to the bogies. By the end of day one on the tank build, I had assembled the lower hull, with tracks.

Day two saw me make a start on the upper section of the tank, also known as the Glacis Plate and engine deck. This took barely more than an hour and the boxes looked great assembled and fitted. Moving onto the turret was where things got complicated as several tiny parts needed to be located and fitted. The crew doors had to be functional, so that if I decided to use them, I could add the figures for a heads out driving of the vehicle. I also had to fit the barrel lock, which again had to be functional to allow the main gun to be locked into the rearward position. With all of these parts functional, it was fun to add the first coats of paint, a dark green acrylic ink designed for use with an air brush. With the dark green base coat of the plastic, it needed only thin coverage to give the wanted effect, however as the paint dried, it took on the usual glossy finish, totally unsuitable for NATO camouflage. Luckily, when I bought the model set, I also purchased a bottle of clear mat varnish.

Some parts of the set were extremely well made and thus it went together beautifully, not needing anything more than a light sanding to remove moulding marks. Sat on the shelf behind me in my room was two jars of experimental spru-goo and not once did I need it. However some parts were quite poorly made. Actually, that is unfair. The plastic tow cables were brittle and did not lay like real steel cable, so I raided the mountain bike spares and pulled out a stainless steel brake cable, which I unwound to find the wire core. At point eight of a millimetre, this was the exact size to replace the plastic tow cables. However the eyelets that connect the cable to the tank were another story. Using some of the spru-goo, I attempted to model some eyelets. However at the time of writing, the spru-goo has not yet reached full hardness. So with a heavy heart, I cut the eyelets off of the plastic tow cable and with a micro-drill, made a 0.5mm hole and then enlarged it to just under one millimetre. This was just big enough for take a tight fitting steel cable and thus the tow cables were made.

The final pieces to be assembled were the crew and in the instruction guide, all three of the crew are to be painted as white European men. This grated against my more egalitarian heart and so when I started to paint the figures, I painted the tank Commander with a skin tone that matched a photograph of Grand Tour level cyclist, Biniam Girmay, the first Black African cyclist to win a stage in a grand tour. The young man is an extremely talented professional cyclist, who was unfortunately taken out of the 2022 Gyro d'Italia after winning a stage, when the cork from a podium celebration bottle hit him in the eye.

With my crew painted, I fitted them and then decided that they needed a back story, so here it is. The Driver is a Gay man, out and proud. The Gunner is a Trans Man, brave and strong and then the Commander is a young Black man. The sad truth is that during the years of service for this vehicle, it is extremely unlikely that such people would ever get into the army, let alone command of a main battle tank.

Thus my project came to an end, with a large stone holding the tank hull down to the base board as I waited for the glue to dry. So while I wait for the glues, paints and resins to harden, I must find another project to distract me from the unending pain I suffer every day. I know, I will design and scratch build from paper stock an entire model of my motorbike! I am a fucking idiot.

#disability #lgbtq🌈#art #ladyartist #womencreaters #chieftaintank #thetankmuseum #modelmaking #diorama #tamiya #Tamiyamodels #Tamiyatanks

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randomclam24 · 11 months

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Okay, so we live in a culture with relatively high expectations of people in social interactions, but, wokeness ended up becoming the prevailing social order in it.

We are being groomed

6/7

That is a *lot* of things I have to block here - this is all sponsored content

Update

Is this the first time they've changed the tab "sponsored content" to "radar"?

They're trying to hide the fact.

[It's permanently changed now.] [This is literal gaslighting.]

Update

For all the proxies the issue of climate change is utilized for, climate change is a good thing.

6/8

I've cut off updating from the news for the past day or so. I have a feeling.

Also, over the course of more than the past three weeks, there was a song put out called Video Games! - I only saw that three weeks after the fact, but it was about being past playing games much anymore, and now there's a headline, "Bill Gates says it's okay to start calling him a gamer now", as of yesterday. This appears in the search when I go up to play Minesweeper.

The rule of thumb is they play both sides, but I really got the impression it's the establishment encouraging - and you have to get more specific - games as an obsession.

Update

I just realized there's something very insidious about that renaming of the tab from "sponsored content", which it is, to "radar." It sounds nuts to people who are newcoming, but there is a system in place, noticeably as of summer 2021 when my gangstalking ramped up to something historically unprecedented, that will prepare advertisements based on my underlying feelings. That's why these tabs I've been calling out now being named "radar" implies this as their intentional function.

For the most part, not much has happened with this.

But it's the fact that I thought myself, I keep the pulse on the establishment by seeing how they use these things to react to me. If the establishment finds something more fitting for LGBTQ pride, then don't do it. That's serving as the justification to have it named this way - that personalization trumps any - in theory - hiding of the fact that it's all sponsored content.

At some point an anon said the jewish power structure is essentially built around the assumption that a paid lawyer in some foreign country will vouch on their behalf that people like the Rothschilds do have rightful ownership of the West by effect of financing.

So having something like "radar" for propaganda which can be augmented - that sounds like they're trying to normalize this power structure.

Update

The Minecraft launcher icon just got changed to a Creeper head

6/9

I've spent some amount of time over the years searching for an experience that makes the original Doom feel like a Roguelike game but in real time. The base file for Complex Doom really did this, I think, but it's unbalanced.

I actually looked up the question, and there are some games that were recommended, but not that many: Borderlands, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Update

I tried the different basic presets for Project Brutality, and Man and a Half difficulty with Alternative dynamic spawning worked fairly well

Update after dinner

At the alternate Wal-mart, the rum they had, including a lot of the whiskey and other things too, was only about 35% alcohol by volume. Because it was the only one with a significantly higher amount, I got two Captain Morgans because they were relatively cheap.

Tonight, I have gotten the latest version of GZDoom so I can play the latest build of Project Brutality.

This substance is just diluted enough, I might be able to down it raw. I probably won't, though.

GZDoom is having an issue where it starts up every time at 320x200

[BUG] Video mode pixel scaling width and height no longer save to settings file · Issue #1896 · ZDoom/gzdoom · GitHub

Ignoring that for now

We will be reviewing Project Brutality 3.0 with the dynamic spawn preset Chaotic Random.

Update

I got the flamethrower where there was originally the chainsaw, and every other frame was missing. Then when I use it, the game crashes and I have to restart my computer.

It will probably be 500 years before I get my next computer capable of running Doom Eternal.

Okay, so the thought was that if a mod for Doom managed to be balanced in being as clenching as Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, that would actually balance out the experience of Doom to the point that it would rationalize having, for the sake of example, the entire shareware episode done up as a single hub, constituting the entire moon crater on the intermission map, maybe even including the secret Xbox map for whatever reason. That way exploring would be more like actual downtime from the action sequences and not just boredom.

Update

Don't let the first-time chaingun animation play out, don't use the alt-fire on the rocket launcher, and don't use the flamethrower at all.

Update

Using LZDoom proves that in theory an older version of GZDoom will make the current version of Project Brutality run just fine.

Update

It looks like 4.8.2 is the latest stable version of GZDoom, at least in this regard, being able to play Project Brutality

If there's some reality in Welcome Home, it might be a good place for Common Filth's take that we should pick up the pieces in regards to the Sexual Revolution. Talking about that era it's in. I know, I saw the original poster's stances, but regardless

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

What even is my target audience

Do I want to accept death

Moments when you felt like futurism was attainable by humanistic means - thought I'd post that over the noise of "TFW" memes

Update

If it ever comes down to the issue of all this being me being a narcissist, as I come up with these things, the mentality is more like don't let them stamp the flames out, on things that could be - but there's also that saying about how leaders who have the most utopian standpoint are just grifting as opposed to those down-to-earth

I wish I could find a way to encode my statement, as if the past encodings in hexadecimal stopped anybody

Unfortunately, I can't

Well,

as a matter of fact, since the time I forwarded this documentary, it was taken down off of YouTube, but it's still up on the Internet archive:

Questioning The Holocaust Why We Believed Part 1 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

No, I'll honestly gauge my commitment to *tumblr* based on their willingness in *this* regard. Done.

Update

Ironically, I wish I had a better philosophical understanding of things, because the idea of the recreation of my own dreams similarly to the other idea could be rationalized by a deep-reaching-enough understanding of how the world and its history works under the hood. But I don't.

I honestly wish I could find a way to keep myself in my own ends occupied. I feel like everyone else has their work cut out for them. That's not a privilege - I have *ever* had. It's tragic

Oh, yes. That the Holocaust numbers could have been greatly exaggerated was something I heard from my very own history teacher back in high school. St. Louis, among other things, is very racist historically.

Update

So back near the end of high school, I forward this very same video as from the Internet archive onto Google+ when that was new, and after that I experience my very-first-ever in-family gangstalking, and I think, what gives? Something's strange

Update

Do you think it's ridiculous that I think in agreement with Common Filth we should pick up the pieces since the Sexual Revolution when I have hentai

Update

Now I can't tell what's causing the game to crash.

6/10 night

The way this mod eventually visually glitches out is just like an NES.

6/10

There is an option in the set video mode menu about the notebook switchable GPU - setting that to high performance might prevent some of the crashes

Update

I just turned down the upscaling to Scale2x with none (trilinear) filtering

With the issue of LGBTQ, there's more than one factor, but in short I can just say, I've heard a bit about how in past societies, men could give each other a casual kiss, and that wasn't repressed. In situations like that, you wouldn't have these desires to be taken out in these kinky ways.

And it's been said kids in schools these days have more psychiatric issues than inpatients in the past. You can say that's just because we diagnose more these days, but there is so much more repression. The last thing you need is a predator encouraging their vices through sexuality.

I don't know why it got me thinking like that, but even in subtle things, Minecraft gets it right: if you feed farm animals that are adults, which gets them in a mood to breed shortly after, it shows hearts, but for kids, it just shows a green sparkle.

It really shouldn't come down to a frothing "keep that shit away from the kids", because their teachers are already in schools bypassing that - it's that it's just not natural

Update I know there's something in that, like why did we tell women that feminism would be empowering? But that rages on

Update

If that is every school, then this is definitely an "everybody out of the pool" moment for education

Update

I don't know. Some tracks in Warioland II are deeper than what a Gameboy game has any right to be

Update

Well, I have nothing to say

6/11 night

I don't like that the parts of sleep where you're actually not restless, you never get to experience. I never get that, in life.

If I have to come up with something to say, there was that creepy no-face-texture Mario 64 Mario with the sound cue that shall not be named. Have him go "what's up with that? Y'all cowards don't even smonk crek"

Give Right Wing Watch something to talk about

I've given up on life.

I've saved the rest of the two bottles of rum for Sunday proper

Hopefully that will kill me, etc. - if that doesn't do it, use this bat

Update

My God doesn't love me. I'm unloved by God

6/11

Well

Since "I Eat Ass" might as well be the national anthem of the entire white world right now, I thought of making versions of songs like this so distorted it's borderline unrecognizable

I EAT ASS (FULL SONG) 11 Semitones by RandomClam24 (soundcloud.com)

There was some video footage of a feral black man saying to the cops, "*erase* me"

Update

I am now at Doom II with the review of Project Brutality on Chaotic Random, at the difficulty Man and a Half.

With regards to drinking, I'll have you know when it comes down to the act of anything, I'm overly conservative. But thank you for worrying about me.

Update

Part of the plan was to get to know the experience of being really and truly drunk so that I could relate to the experience, which never happened, but that experience that one time recently of nearly falling asleep just to have a vision of the near-to-immediate future told in a kaleidoscope of moving bug legs, like that's the decision-making process behind the gangstalking preventing me from doing things - that was a kind of consciousness where even after waking up, it felt like if I were looking at a window, it would be appearing as the background behind it.

I got a full Captain Morgan left. Yeah, that sounds like a not terrible idea

Update

How am I supposed to know the point of getting passed-out drunk without passing out

Anyway, yeah, I don't condone - I think

Seriously, I started thinking recently, when I'm just sober, what am I, chop liver?

I asked both my sister and my mom if they heard of who John Carmack is, and they definitely didn't. That's the celebrity that could be achieved by being a computer programmer, and they've never heard of it.

One thing I wanted, in conception of my personal dream project, was this idea of decided forms of rendering at different tiers, based on graphics in the past, that would make for what I thought of as a magic touch. That's what I wanted for a personal studio setup. But isn't that disproportionately high-expectation

With the way I limited the actual sketchwork to sharp, thin pencil strokes, I think that really was the mentality.

I've been spending time recently on 7th-gen gaming PC graphics, with this new notebook. It's from 2022, priced at $500, so it can handle them.

For starters, how does even PS3, the console most emulated artistically, age compared to the PC ports of its own games?

Update

Honestly, for all that, by now aren't there already games that could just be recommended instead? I liked the Wind Waker.

If I were to be serious about that, there are some vibes in the project that I was reminded of with the open-area segments of Quake 4 with the vehicles, but that was too preoccupied with having to aim at spammy things.

What I really wish, in order to be able to sketch these ideas out, is that I could express myself in ways that aren't immediately taken as a commital.

It's like, there are people whose OCD prevents them from committing to doing anything. That lack of commitment is a problem here.

Maybe the reason I don't commit is because I realize in their current form, my ideas aren't enough to entertain anybody.

Maybe some of them could work as indie horror

Oh hey, I don't think indie horror ever coincides with open-world genre, otherwise

"5 hour bitch I need energy

Don't fuck with John, fuck with Kennedy"

There, does that get your working spirits up?

Update

What I didn't like is that each engine that there is has a distinctive look to it, meaning you'll be working within its confines; there's nothing that feels universal about it. I had gone over it before and thought the Bioshock series originally using Unreal 3, or the Unreal Development Kit, which is still out there for download, had a somewhat universal look

Because there's a song that felt this way back in art class in late high school that our art teacher played, I just remembered the lyrics, and the song is Counting Crows - Round Here - "She says she's tired of life - she must be tired of something"

Update

I don't want to be pretentious, but maybe realistically this is one of those projects that eats up colossally too much resources

I think that's why it just checks out: if there isn't that feel of "simple yet effective", something like this is going to eat up a *lot* of effort

Update

What I said before - my life as an atomized individual is not even that important.

But some things I have experienced that are too big for this one life alone.

I just had to come out with that because I've never said that before.

I mean I've been implying it for a while.

Update

There *have* been - people who have started up crowdfunding for projects and then just ran off with it. I feel the need to prove that there is a payoff for even the most basic investment, so that no excess time is wasted.

Also, I'm not going to do a crowdfunding.

Honestly, if the goal is to come out with things, maybe I'm just too much of an emotional roller coaster.

Even if I did a "buy me a coffee", which would make some more sense if I did such a project - and there would never be subscriber paywalls - I'm more seriously concerned there would be means taken out to screw me over financially because I gave out my debit card information to a website.

For those who don't know, there was that story with PayPal introducing $2500? fines for every speech they deemed offensive to its reputation, which damaged its finances with tons of people cancelling their accounts. My gangstalking has been so severe, with the exact timing of it, I was thinking that was specifically because I set up an account.

Whether it's this or me getting a job, this is life.

Update

That sounds very vain. At the very least, there would have to be preliminary releases beforehand.

One thing about the original Doom is that the original three episodes are relatively easy compared to any other content for the engine. Then, even Doom II seems easy compared to episode four.

Partly, I just want to know a mod is balanced

Update

When Denzel Curry - "The Game" released, apparently there was enough consensus there that some people made their profile name "Hambone Movement" - I don't know what happened, what went wrong

I thought I was within reason.

Update

I remembered that when trying to appreciate the Warioland II OST a bit more extensively.

I asked my mom a bit recently, do you know the word jigaboo, and she said something like it's not something you would want to ask a black man. Is that the impression I created

Update

One thing that I should probably note before that's gone: if trannies supposedly have the most profound experiences in order to justify the most heinous sexual encounters known to man historically, why does that conclude with them being the most important aspect of their atomized lives, as opposed to them seeing something bigger than themselves? Calling bullshit

It was only in a foreign study, which is not legal in whitopia - whitopia - that it was demonstrated they're systemically narcissists

Update

There was a point in time early on when my racism from my mom disproportionately defending a black kid who was a total cunt to me was applied to Wario as the inverse of Mario

Update

Advertising black businesses on mobile devices specifically as black-owned businesses was bad for black businesses - and that's for all your social justice - and I'm not even trying to defend that

It's not repairing race relations.

Are there people who think we just need to go harder on social justice because of that? ("Obviously hasn't done enough")

I don't have a solution

But did you notice how things were better off in the past few decades

And then of course personally - I can't make a claim like I'm going to solve things peacefully when I said before if you back down on Total Tranny Death (TTD), someone might mistake you for a liberal - if you cave even a little, the mainstream tries to make you into what they want you to be.

Oh my goodness, is this grounds for getting taken down: yes, there's the *artificial inflation* of the fact that minorities, of all kinds, are getting hired disproportionately. How's that on the outside world?

And who is thinking in these terms?

Update

Based on my heritage, would I be deemed a supremacist or not? I come specifically from a lineage of middle-to-upper-class white people that sailed away whenever a catastrophic battle event broke out, and the overall bloodline sums up to half British, half German. I don't even identify with the people I live around so much as my family.

Update

Whenever - every time I open a new internet tab, with these news articles - "niggas steady barking but you know they mics for the cheese" - things we all know, needing no violent emphasis, by which it could be dismissed as just crazy

Some things we should just know

For people who are completely uninitiated, how non-mainstream do you have to go to get news that isn't fabricrated on some level, to where if it's right, it's like how a broken clock is always right twice a day?

First, don't go on the Bing homepage.

Fox news is also controlled opposition.

I'm not going to shill for any of these alternative news sites, but there are plenty of them out there.

Maybe a risky statement: don't you think the paradigm that people based their trust in news on as "reliable news sources" is very vain in that it favors those who have the most funding?

Now try this on for size: we benefit Tikkun Olam by resisting the current state of Tikkum Olam

I don't see the point in feeling emotional over this when it's already been established, but then, I think there's some truth, mysteriously, in the way vaxxers acted during that time: "I'm not immunized unless *you're* vaccinated!"

6/12

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naturecpw · 1 year

Text

Can the dogs of Chernobyl teach us new tricks on survival?

Researchers say most of the dogs they are studying appear to be descendants of pets that residents were forced to leave behind when they evacuated the area.

March 3, 2023, 6:41 PM EST / Source: Associated Press By Associated Press More than 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the dogs of Chernobyl roam among decaying, abandoned buildings in and around the closed plant — somehow still able to find food, breed and survive. Scientists hope that studying these dogs can teach humans new tricks about how to live in the harshest, most degraded environments, too.

They published the first of what they hope will be many genetics studies on Friday in the journal Science Advances, focusing on 302 free-roaming dogs living in an officially designated “exclusion zone” around the disaster site. They identified populations whose differing levels of radiation exposure may have made them genetically distinct from one another and other dogs worldwide.

“We’ve had this golden opportunity” to lay the groundwork for answering a crucial question: “How do you survive in a hostile environment like this for 15 generations?” said geneticist Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the study’s many authors.

Fellow author Tim Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, said the dogs “provide an incredible tool to look at the impacts of this kind of a setting” on mammals overall.

Chernobyl’s environment is singularly brutal. On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire at the Ukraine power plant caused radioactive fallout to spew into the atmosphere. Thirty workers were killed in the immediate aftermath while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is estimated to eventually number in the thousands.

Researchers say most of the dogs they are studying appear to be descendants of pets that residents were forced to leave behind when they evacuated the area.

Mousseau has been working in the Chernobyl region since the late 1990s and began collecting blood from the dogs around 2017. Some of the dogs live in the power plant, a dystopian, industrial setting. Others are about 9 miles (15 kilometers) or 28 miles (45 kilometers) away.

At first, Ostrander said, they thought the dogs might have intermingled so much over time that they’d be much the same. But through DNA, they could readily identify dogs living in areas of high, low and medium levels of radiation exposure.

“That was a huge milestone for us,” said Ostrander. “And what’s surprising is we can even identify families” — about 15 different ones.

Now researchers can begin to look for alterations in the DNA.

“We can compare them and we can say: OK, what’s different, what’s changed, what’s mutated, what’s evolved, what helps you, what hurts you at the DNA level?” Ostrander said. This will involve separating non-consequential DNA changes from purposeful ones.

Scientists said the research could have wide applications, providing insights about how animals and humans can live now and in the future in regions of the world under “continuous environmental assault” — and in the high-radiation environment of space.

Dr. Kari Ekenstedt, a veterinarian who teaches at Purdue University and was not involved in the study, said it’s a first step toward answering important questions about how constant exposure to higher levels of radiation affects large mammals. For example, she said, “Is it going to be changing their genomes at a rapid rate?”

Researchers have already started on the follow-up research, which will mean more time with the dogs at the site about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Kyiv. Mousseau said he and his colleagues were there most recently last October and didn’t see any war-related activity. Mousseau said the team has grown close to some dogs, naming one Prancer because she excitedly prances around when she sees people.

“Even though they’re wild, they still very much enjoy human interaction,” he said, “Especially when there’s food involved.” ___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The dogs of Chernobyl:

Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2537

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