There are now more than 90 people dead. You can bitch and whine that’s it’s hotter where you are, but you have to understand that it’s the elderly, homeless and small children who don’t have air conditioning and are susceptible to health problems. How fucking despicable can you be to just laugh at people dying because temperatures are hotter where you are. Our infrastructure was built to withstand -30 C°, not the heat. It’s not about how Canadians are “weak”, it’s literally just shitty circumstances.
Not to mention that people who are accustomed to cold climates have a physically more difficult time coping with temperatures that their bodies aren’t used to. Also a lot of people who have never had to cope with hotter temperatures aren’t as familiar with heat exhaustion or heat stroke, don’t know how to manage the heat safely , etc!
That last point.
Denmark is currently in its hottest summer ever recorded, and the number of people I’ve talked to who have only now discovered what a heat stroke is amazes me, because I grew up in the South of France where summers are hot as fuck every year – my brother-in-law went out for a bike ride without a hat and with a half a liter of water for three hours and came back and was sick because of it.
The idea that he’d get sick because of the sun didn’t even OCCUR to him, because in his 30+ years on this green ball swirling through space, it’s never been an issue for him.
In the South of France, most cafés have mist sprayers and all shops / malls are air-conditioned. In Denmark, most cafés do NOT have mist sprayers (but heat lights!) and the shops are not always air-conditioned.
Most of the warehouses have been out of portable air-conditioners and fans on an off since May because people are hot and have no air-condition installed. The buildings are built to keep heat IN. Not out.
No air con, buildings designed to keep heat in, not even ceiling fans, no drinking fountains, windows that don’t open in buildings, and we expect people to work in those buildings, in their full uniform which has no ‘hot weather’ option – I mean what employer is going to provide short sleeves and shorts for that one week every three years where it gets above 25/80 degrees? – windows that don’t open on public transport, and often no shade while waiting for said public transport, we have heaters and insulation and draft excluders, we buy black cars and dark clothes, we buy sunscreen for our holidays in Spain, then forget where we put it, when we find it and apply it we sweat it off again because we’re not used to the heat, we walk places rather than drive and even if we drove, our cars don’t have proper air con and we don’t have covered parking, school playgrounds and public parks have no shade, people don’t have pools so kids play out all summer in the heat. We don’t have ‘American style’ large fridges or freezers with ice makers and they break down when competing with hotter than usual ambient temperature, most of us don’t even own cool boxes – or if we do it’s at the back of the shed full of spiders.
So yes, we have to be told it’s going to be hot. And we have to be warned to check our elderly neighbours and to help them take the blankets off their bed or to swap to a summer duvet, to suggest they have a cold drink instead of a pot of tea and take off their cardigan.
Because we only know people who got sunstroke on their holidays abroad.
And we have never in our lives known anyone who died from the heat.
To anybody who thinks it’s funny when people die, you can go fuck off a tall bridge.
I live in Phoenix. It’s going to be 115F/46C degrees today. This is nothing unusual for this time of year. And yet every year we lose people to the heat. I can’t imagine what super temps must be like when you are not used to it. England, Quebec, and most of Europe’s home were designed to keep heat in. Not let it out. So instead of giggling like evil children over someone else’s horror, try being a little more understanding at the very least of what they are going through.
Standard Finnish summer is usually around 20Celsius. 25C is considered hot weather! This summer has been over 30Celsius.
We’ve had rain maybe three times in two months where I’m at and I’ve had my first sunstroke, the whole country is under forest fire warnings, fish are dying in the lakes and many lakes grow poisonous algae that makes it dangerous to swim in. Oh and pretty much every store has far long ago ran out of fans so we’re stuck in boiling apartments that’re built to keep heat in. (If the immediate effects aren’t bad enough, as a gardner I’m super worried for long term. The wells are drying, water table is being drained faster than it can recover, and if the winters don’t match up, we’re going to see pests we’ve never dealt with before. A good portion of agriculture relies on cold winters to kill most pests, but now they’ve been creeping north fast. If things aren’t dealt with in time we’ll be facing a pretty steep drop in food by next year when we get shitty crop and south is burning so bad we can’t even import food.)
This is a global problem that needs to be addressed fast, not giggled and sneered at.
The same thing is happening in Sweden atm- we’ve had to get help from Germany; they’ve been sending firemen over to help the Swedish firebrigade with the wildfires because we’re not used to our wildlife randomly catching on fire. At most, we’re prepared for blizzards, not heatwaves.
We’ve been alerted to a possible Watercrisis, so people have been stocking up on bottled water since temperatures hit 27c+, we are not allowed to use water on anything other then hydrating/hygiene, so most plants/grass is bone dry, which just makes it more likely to catch fire, so the cycle just repeats itself. There has been almost no rain in weeks.
no AC’s only fans- which only really just spreads the warm air around in a room. Especially from my PC, which is overheating a lot RIP
As someone who lives in a hot, dry place, I want to step in and say humidity makes a big difference too. Because with our low humidity (usually around 30%), the 100+ temperatures drop significantly overnight, giving us respite from the heat. The shade is a viable place to escape the heat because it actually makes a difference. In high humidity areas, the muggy sure distributes the heat evenly. Shade doesn’t change the temperature much. Nighttime temperatures barely waver. Being stuck with that heat and no way to cope (no AC, no acclimation, etc.) is deadly.
every time i fuck up plugging in the USB to charge my iphone and scratch it against the underside of the phone i think about that scene at the start of sherlock where sherlock assumes that john watson’s sister is an alcoholic because of the scratches around the charging port of the iphone she gave to him as a gift and i think to myself “man sherlock is a fucking idiot”
I hate in the MCU or anything when the aliens or whatever are attacking and everyone’s just ‘oh yeah we be chilling just cowering over here’ as if seventy percent of humanity isn’t really angry all the time like catch these hands motherfucker I’ve bitten people for trying to steal my chips you think you can just steal my whole fucking planet YEET HERE COME MY TEETH film people be using responses to natural disasters but I promise if human sized things came to throw down humanity would be ready to fuck them up like yeah you got laser guns I got this dope ass stick I just found let’s go you ugly fuck
silentwalrus1: #yeah bicht!!!!!!#gimme the battle of new york with fuckin chitauri comin down and the shift manager of the times sq H&M has finally had Enough#Tracie bout to kill this alien with a traffic cone#’ JUST PRETEND THEY’RE TOURISTS’ she screams choking out goddamn Lizard Lite with her lanyard#10 feet away a park slope mom is beating an alien to death with her four year old’s knockoff eco friendly razr scooter#every single retail employee gets ten years’ worth of therapy in one day#captain america’s kill count: 83 aliens#kathleen from accounting: 94 and also her boss
Humans are biolent, angry little creatures who live under a constant state of stress and have very little sense of self preservation. #whatsmykillcount would be trending in Twitter while people posted videos on every available platform. Like honestly Earth is not the one.
You never know you’re from a Death World until somebody tries to conquer it.
A few weeks ago, we exhibited at Emerald City Comicon. Typically when we attend conventions, we try to create some spectacle that captures people’s attention and sells games. Like the time we brought a marching band to PAX Australia.
At ECCC, we set up a “Pay What You Want” booth and encouraged people to give us any amount of money in exchange for our games. We put games on a table, set up some signs, stood off to the side, and waited to see what would happen.
We brought 2000 games. Before the convention began, we took bets on what would happen:
Tom thought we’d sell out in a few hours.
Alex thought we’d run out on the of the second day of the con.
Trin thought that we would not run out of games because we are no longer cool or relevant.
Jenn got a fever and didn’t know what was happening.
We were all wrong.
The doors opened, and attendees swarmed the booth. Within five minutes attendees realized they could just take games and walk away. A small group grabbed armfuls of free games and left, but most people paid something. Within an hour, the booth looked like this:
We ran out of games in 51 minutes.and made $8042.48, or 18.7% of the games’ retail value. In other words, we lost $685.44 per minute.
Attendees put lots of other stuff in the payment box too.
Artisan Scribbles 