Sometimes I’ve heard gunfire as fireworks.
'Murkah
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A former housemate of mine is a Marine vet of two tours of Afghanistan, and July 4th is not a good time to be a service vet with severe PTSD, I’ve learned. He’d basically put in earplugs and hide in the dark when the “heavy shelling” was going on.
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I met a woman a few years ago who hated Guy Fawkes night because she grew up in London during the Blitz. The fear hadn’t gone away after 65 years.
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My ex-MIL lived in Liverpool during the Blitz and was the same. Thunderstorms, fireworks, and bonfires were all excuses to hang out in the basement lounge with the TV and a cup of tea. Just goes to show how PTSD and other trauma effects work, because she was the most fearless person I’d ever met.
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To a degree this was because religious affiliation was necessary to keep a job at a university; in fact at Oxford and Cambridge you had to be in holy orders, and it wasn’t till that godless institution University College London was set up that things really started to change.
Cambridge when I went there was still almost medieval (or Scholastic) in parts of its mindset.
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I’m kind of the same way. I will go to fireworks shows, because the wife and kids love them, but do not slap me on the back or surprise me during or after, and don’t expect much free and casual conversation.
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I remember having it explained to me, on the 4th of July when I was a kid, that we all went over to [grandfathers] house on the 4th to play pool in his basement after the parade, and he didn’t go to the parade part because he didn’t like the fireworks. I had my throw-snappy things confiscated. Over the course of time I came to understand that man had seen some sh**, been injured, come back and built Liberty Ships. I just remember learning how to play pool and throw darts on the 4th. I still have a set of his darts around here somewhere.
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I am not surprised.
Paradoxes of wartime: while my father was minesweeping in the Bristol Channel, not exactly a luxury cruise but a very gentle introduction to war, my mother was putting out incendiaries in North London.
After a successful haul of mines, the crews would get together with rifles and shoot them. The object wasn’t to set them off (though this did happen) but to sink them so the mechanisms would fail. The worst part of the job, apparently, was coaling (in which the officers had to join).
As a result, I’m quite supportive of the idea that PTSD is caused or worsened by brain damage due to pressure waves etc., and is probably worse with modern munitions. Despite the big bangs in the Bristol Channel, and the even bigger bangs during the invasion of France and attack on Japan, neither my father nor his friends got PTSD or any particular fear of fireworks.
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PTSD seems to be highly individual in its effects.
My mother was also in Liverpool when it was being subjected to nightly bombing raids. A bomb in their street damaged her family’s house badly enough that they had to move (they were in a bomb shelter in the backyard when it hit). This past Saturday we were watching the Canada Day fireworks, from a distance but there were plenty of bangs and flashes. She enjoyed the show greatly.
FWIW, if ever there was a poster person for “Keep calm and carry on”, it’s Mom.
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The testing of old ideas is absolutely necessary to good science, and it usually falls to the lowest-paid, unsung heroes of science, and the first to be laid off when budgets are short.
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It is. It can also be very context-driven. Someone may be fine with a municipal fireworks show, for example, but not be fine with some kids randomly letting off fireworks in the neighbourhood.
Hats off to your mum.
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There was a thunderstorm with lightning where I was so I was grateful that some people with more dollars than sense set off $1000 worth of fireworks in the park directly across the street from us. The sparks arced toward the trees in our yard and I could see lightning as well. Beat staying up until 12:20am to watch fireworks live on Parliament Hill.
(This should be in ‘joy’: it was a glorious occasion)
But I stayed up to watch The Air Farce, 22 Minutes, Rick Mercer, and our PM follow Gordon Lightfoot (didn’t GL sound creaky?) on the stage.
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Totally petty and irrelevant to any real world problems:
It irks the hell out of me that the fashion game I play (don’t judge me!) finally updated their interface to include a more diverse range of female body types, but the coding was so badly done that the new ‘models’ all look horribly distorted and disproportionate to my eye.
Not to mention the girl in the middle is still the darkest skin tone they offer (out of a whopping 6 choices:)
This was the original body archetype:
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Agreed – it looks like they kept the same resource and just distorted it mathematically, rather than find someone who knows how to do life drawing and could adjust the proportions realistically.
Do you mind saying which game it is?
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Thank you!
As a barely ‘tech savvy’ artist, I didn’t know how to sufficiently express the problem that I see visually.
I don’t mind saying what game; it’s called Covet Fashion; I use it to compensate for all the designer shopping I want to do, but can never afford.
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Ooh, thank you! I always did like dressing dolls. I used to make togas for my Barbie out of handkerchiefs.
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No worries.
#^_^
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They all look like taller or shorter, wider or narrower versions of the same person?
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Is there a game where you can type in measurements and then design for that doll/model? That would be cool
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Yeah, it would.
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