Skip to Navigation | Skip to Content

And Then it Came to the End

6 years ago

evolandiscourse asked: I dunno what part of making the poor urban working class live in grotesque concrete boxes is socialist. socialism is William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, aesthetic quality isn't a luxury. Brutalism is modernism and modernism is capitalism.

cocainesocialist:

it’s not that deep fam

Nothing is too good for ordinary people
Berthold Lubetkin

7 years ago

dracofidus:

England, and from what I hear, Europe, is undergoing a heatwave.

Temperatures in the UK are around 30°C. Where I am it’s gonna hit 32°C in the next couple of hours.

To you Americans, you Australians, that’s nothing. It’s a mild day, we’re weak, whatever, I’ve heard it all, the thing is, WE AREN’T EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH THIS.

The average temperature in the UK in July is 17°C. It is in the 30’s today. We simply are not used to it. We are used to rain and sleet and hail and wind, not heat. And our heat is a damp heat. A humid heat.

Because of all the sea around us we have an extremely humid climate if it gets warm. The air literally feels heavy right now. I am struggling to cool down because the humidity is fucking with my sweat, and as a trans man, the high amounts of water in the air, combined with my binder make it difficult to breathe, and I assume a lot of asthmatic people have a similar problem.

When temperatures in the UK are like this, people die. Don’t laugh about it. It is serious. It may not seem like much to you, it may not seem warm to you, but in a similar heatwave in 2013, 760 people died.

Our infrastructure is not built to cope with this. The house I live in, for instance, was built when the Thames still used to freeze over. It was built to be warm. The walls are thick, the windows are small, some rooms don’t even have windows that open, it was built with no though to air circulation, and this is one of the most common types of home in the UK. The UK government subsidises insulation. People fill every gap in their home with stuff that will keep the heat in. And nobody - literally nobody - has aircon. A lot of businesses don’t even have it. We have no use for it 99.9% of the time. Hell, I don’t even own a desk fan or even a hand held fan.

It is very different here to where you are. And we are used to and equipped for very different things. Instead of laughing, teach us how to stay cool. Instead of making jokes or quips, make info posts, and things that will help us.

Remember, this may be an average day to you, but to us it’s a heatwave. We cannot cope. And for some, particularly children and the elderly, it’s literally a matter of life and death.

A few points from someone from the UK who has moved to the US. 1. The big lesson I’ve learnt since I lived here is that you have to adopt very different behaviours when it gets this hot. Often the things I was used to doing are the opposite of what I needed to be doing. It seemed counter-inutuitve at first to close windows, when I was used to opening them, but it was an important lesson to learn: it might seem a little cooler at first, but thats largely an illusion, the air circulation increases at first makes you feel cooler, but when its hotter outside than in, all you are doing is letting in hot air, and you can’t get rid of it once it’s in. When its hot outside you need to shut the house up as much as possible: close all the windows and draw the curtains, ideally covering windows from the outside (its fairly common here to see cheap bamboo blinds on the outside of windows exposed to the sun to cut down on solar gain). The routine goes like this: get up as early as possible and open things up to get as much air circulation as possible and get cool air into the house. Then as the temperatures start to rise, turn off any you aren’t using (computers especially) add close everything up, doors, windows, curtains and keep them that way. Then as night falls and temperatures drop open things back up again to get the cooler air into the house. You need to be doing this, especially in older houses. You will need to pay close attention to how air circulates: you want to turn your house into a chimney, basically¸ so you can get as much air thorugh as possible. One opening at the top of the house, as high as you can go, and another at the bottom, on the opposite side, can be the best strategy, rather than opening all the windows. Once things have cooled down a little you can adjust it to get more of a cross breeze in the rooms you need it. How this works is going to vary with temperature, time of day, wind conditions etc, so you will need to pay close attention, trying to dial it in and adjusting to suit the conditions. It’s worth making the effort, small adjustments can make a big difference. Particularly in poorly insulated houses you will find some rooms get hotter than others, or will just have poor air circulation. When it gets really hot you might consider shutting them off, if you can afford the loss of space. Above a certain point we close off my daughters bedroom and move her into to sleep with us as her room gets the afternoon sun and has the worst air flow. Talking of insulation, it’s silly to complain about your houses having insulation, you want as much as possible when its really hot. It’s as good as keeping the heat out as it is at keeping it in. I live in whats considered a very old house for the area and it used to be poorly insulated. We often reach these kind temperatures in the summer (and more, though luckily its mostly dry heat) and our house used to get pretty unbearable, and we would run the aircon throughout the summer, though to little effect. Since we’ve gotten decent insulation we have been living through days where the temperature has topped 100°F/38°C without having to use any aircon, just relying on natural ventilation (we do have to be on top of the routine though). 2. SIP don’t GULP. This is especially true of someone starting to really suffer the effect of heat. Drinking cold liquids too rapidly when you are hot can cause you to throw up, and vommiting causes rapid dehydration, which will make a bad situation much worse (and dehydration can kill the vulnerable, it neartly killed me as a baby). 3. Tea won’t make you dehydrated. The evidence base is still a little unclear, but modern studies have tended to show no difference between hydrating with tea and water (the study most often cited to show it does comes from the 1920’s and involved three people). What matters most is that you are getting enough liquid (and at a steady pace) not what you are drinking. I drink a lot of tea, especially in hot weather, and quite deliberately. If I have a tea in front of me I will drink it and then make some more, no matter how absorbed I am in what I’m doing, but if I have a glass of water, it won’t get drunk unless I’m actaully starting to feel quite thirsty. But if that’s happening it’s a sign of dehydration, and the point is to avoid that. It’s going to suck, whatever, when its humid, other things being equal I’d rather be somewhere hotter in dry heat than somewhere humid. But dealing with these kind of temperatures, fairly regularly, has taught me there are things you can do, without falling back on aircon (which can be very power hungry).

(via dracofidus-deactivated20200523)

7 years ago

paxamericana: “every anecdote about cannes audiences makes them sound like children ” There’s something deeply hilarious about the whole notion of ‘walking out’. It’s never just a case of “time’s not been kind to these guys, lets wait for our...

paxamericana:

every anecdote about cannes audiences makes them sound like children

There’s something deeply hilarious about the whole notion of ‘walking out’. It’s never just a case of “time’s not been kind to these guys, lets wait for our opportunity then make a break for the bar”, or the like. It’s not like that never happens, I’ve certainly been there, but when it does, you are mostly trying not to be noticed, there’s a basic respect that says “its not for me, but I don’t want to spoil others enjoyment”. When people “walk out” it’s a Performance, they are performing just as much as the people on stange. There’s a demand that people pay attention to them: “I’m outraged and everyone must know it”. I once saw Evan Parker do a small gig at the Whitechapel Gallery. To be clear this was Evan Parker, notoriously challenging Free Jazz improvising saxophonist, playing a one off gig with with a DJ who would be only playing recording of bird songs, at a gallery known for its support of the avant-garde. There was a clear set of expectations here, and it was publicised as such (though barely publicised at all, IIRC, I’d happened to stumble across a poster the day of, when I was visting Freedom, the anarchist bookshop opposite in the alley beside the gallery and thought “Evan Parker, notoriously challenging Free Jazz improvising saxophonist, and a guy playing records of bird songs, fuck yeah”). Still ten minutes into the gig this couple did the whole number, huffing and puffing there way between the performers an audience (which was about 3 chairs deep) like they were Mary Whitehouse at a Sex Pistols gig. It was all I could do to check my watch to make sure we had not been time warped back to the 1950’s, and suppress the urge to greet them with thunderous applause, astonished to be a witness to the kind of self-conjured performative outrage and indignation that I naively thought had sunk into the mists of history along side Romans In Britain and Elvises gyrating pelvis. To this day, 20 years later, I ask myself, “what were they expecting?” and still draw a blank.

Page 1 of 9

Previously