Location Taken: Agewa Bay, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010
I’ve caught a nasty stomach bug of some sort and have pretty much slept the day away. I’ll spare you the icky details. I aim to get this post up at some point during each day so the little calendar on the side is nicely full, even if it’s at five minutes to midnight, which it currently is.
So I shall just put up a pretty picture of some islands in Lake Superior, and call it good.
Aren’t they pretty? And island-y?
Time Drawn: February 2013
Every so often my parents take advantage of my art skills and ask me to make some art for them.
This one also added in my geography skills.
You see, my mom runs a role-playing game on Tuesday nights, set in an Oriental-themed world (Rokugan, from the Legends of the Five Rings system). Think Chinese geography plus Japanese culture plus magic with an extra large dose of political intrigue and you’ll be pretty close. I’m part of it, playing a warrior of a tribe that guards an obscure border pass.
This is said obscure border pass.
Mom has an invading army coming in through the pass, and she needed a map for a battle between the invaders and the small army group we players are part of. So, since I knew about the area and am good about not exploiting opportunities like this for my own benefit, she asked me to design the layout.
For reference, the orange lines are paths. If it’s dotted, it’s a path on the cliffs surrounding the area. I’m using contour lines to mark height differences. The blue is a river, the black things crossing the valley are barricades, and that’s 50 tents in the center.
If you’re still having trouble visualizing, well, that’s why I made this image too.
Contour maps are great things, but they require a lot of imagination to figure out what everything actually looks like. Now, if you’re the one designing the map, you’ve got a much easier job because you know what those lines actually mean.
Oh, and the second image has its point of view from the bottom left corner looking to the top right. The valley on the top right is the one that the invaders came from, the one on the left heads to the small town where the local people who guard this place live, and our troop came up from the one on the bottom right.
We, of course, won the battle through superior tactics. The magicians (and my character, acting as local guide and guard) went up that small path along the right side to provide a distraction and artillery support while the bulk of the army forced their way through the barricade on the bottom (fairly easy, since it was set up to be a defense against the invaders) and slaughtered the enemy. We did sustain some fairly heavy casualties (the enemies EXPLODED when they died!!), but only amongst the completely nameless non-player characters that made up the bulk of our army.
So over all, I did a good job designing the map for the battle. Our side had some advantages (like a path that let the magicians have a safe spot to do their thing) and some disadvantages (the barricade in the way), and it made for an interesting battle.
And I got to have fun making a map, so all is good.
Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2010
Look, a pretty flower! Isn’t it pretty?! And flowery?!
Yay pretty flowers!
It’s a lovely dogwood flower, one of several fantastic dogwoods dotting the town.
You know, until I wrote that sentence, I hadn’t realized just how many dogwoods there were. Our neighbor has one, the neighbor down the road has one (this one), there’s a few more scattered in other yards, and they just planted a whole bunch down by the river a year or so ago.
There’s also a bunch of magnolia trees, and other less-easily-identifiable flowering trees. Come spring, this place is full of flowers in the air.
…Which must be awful for people with pollen allergies, now that I think of it…
Location Taken: Somewhere in Alberta, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
I drove past the old mall in the town just south of where I lived to find that it was no longer there.
It was a failing mall, brought down by a combination of society shifting away from malls towards modern big box stores and the internet and from a new, much better designed mall built less than ten miles away that stole half of what business remained. It’s been half empty at best for years, or at least it was when I last visited it, what, three years ago?
So I suppose it made sense for them to tear it down. I don’t know what they’re going to put in its place, but having a half-empty mall at the center of your business area was probably blighting the local area some.
Still, it is a little startling to drive past a place where a massive building had been and see the wreckage left by the deconstruction process.
Especially since it eerily reminded me of a disaster I had heard about years ago, the Sampoong Department Store collapse, in Seoul, South Korea, back in 1995.
It’s a classic tale of corruption and the reason building codes exist, rather than a bombing or accident or earthquake or any of the usual list of reasons buildings collapse.
The trouble started early. The owner, Lee Joon, switched plans mid-construction from apartments to a department store. These have very different layouts, of course, so changes were done to what had already been built to convert it. Just little things, like adding escalators and opening up more space by removing a few support beams here and there.
When the construction company complained, Lee Joon decided to fire them and just make his own company to carry out his plans. He did a similar thing a few years later when he wanted to add a fifth floor to the building, without adding any additional support like the first building company he hired wanted.
And about that fifth floor, well, it ended up heavier than the other four floors. They put restaurants up there, with all the heavy kitchens and a heated concrete slab for traditional Korean dining (which, like many Asian countries, involves sitting on the floor).
They did have some concessions to safety, like the fire shielding they installed to prevent fires from going from floor to floor. If they hadn’t cut into the already insufficient support beams to install the shields, it might have actually been a beneficial change.
The last element was the large air conditioning units that were put, where else, on the roof. After all, if you’ve got a building with weak support beams, you really need massively heavy machines that vibrate all day long on top of them. And then you need to roll them across the roof when the shop below complains about the vibrations, ignoring the cracks that moving something that massive causes.
It’s actually somewhat impressive that the building managed to last for five years, when you add it all up.
Large cracks started showing up in the ceiling of the fifth floor in April 1995. The only response was closing up those areas so the customers wouldn’t get alarmed.
It was an early morning at the end of June when the air conditioners got fired up for yet another day of business. A couple hours later, the cracks started growing at a noticeable rate. Lee Joon and the rest of the executives did take action: they called in a few inspectors, ignored the inspector’s advice to fully evacuate the building (it was a busy shopping day, after all! Don’t want to lose out on the money!), and then evacuated only themselves.
Around one in the afternoon, loud banging sounds started up, as the cracks were growing fast enough to make noise.
Five in the afternoon, the top floor ceiling was visibly sinking. They decided to close the fifth floor, but kept the other four open.
And then, just before six, the support beams had had enough and the entire building came down, each floor pancaking into the one below, collapsing each in turn. It took less than twenty seconds.
Over 1,500 people, shoppers and employees alike, were trapped in the rubble. 502 of those never made it out alive. They were pulling people out more than two weeks later, the last survivor found after 19 whole days of being trapped.
Of course, this caused nationwide mourning and anger and fear (Seoul is worryingly close to North Korea, which as you may know does not like South Korea, to put it mildly). It didn’t take long for the investigation to turn towards the executives, though. Lee Joon ended up with seven years in jail for negligence (which, since he died of health issues a few days after being released, actually turned to be effectively a life sentence), and a few of the other people in charge were charged and sentenced as well.
The primary impact, however, was the South Koreans all of a sudden paying attention to how much corruption was in the government, especially in those who approve and inspect buildings. These days, South Korea has much more stringent building codes, with much less room for bribery and deceit to happen, a change for the better. But it should not have taken 502 lives to reach that change.
If you want to know more, I recommend the video I learned about it from, an hour-long episode on the subject from a series called Seconds From Disaster. It’s a little hyped up (but then, what TV documentary series isn’t hyped up these days?), but still a fascinating look at the things that go into disasters like this. If you don’t have an hour, here’s a 3-minute video showing some of the footage.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why I have a photo of clouds up top when I’m talking about malls and disasters, well, it turns out I don’t really have any photos of any malls, and well, I do have lots of fantastic cloud photos that are hard to talk about. And “Gathering Storm Clouds” seemed at least obliquely appropriate…
Location Taken: Near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010
It seems like such a good photo idea, doesn’t it? Devil’s Tower, silhouetted against the bright sky, the iconic volcanic neck showing its classic shape.
Yeah, silhouettes aren’t fool-proof. They may get a high amount of contrast, which usually makes a picture more dynamic, but sometimes the light areas just get washed out too much and hurt the eye too much just from the apparent brightness.
The composition needs to be good, too. Since silhouettes are so dependent on the basic shape of the object, it needs to be positioned in a way to emphasize those shapes. Just snapping a photo in the general region of right doesn’t always work.
Oh, and when you have large areas of black or near-black, glare shows up better. There’s just a touch of reflection along the bottom edge. I was in a moving car when I took this and something a little bright (looks like the edge of a road map) caught enough light to reflect in the window. If it wasn’t against a black background, it wouldn’t show at all.
And finally, perhaps the most important and most difficult thing to note. If you’re going to take a photo with the sky being a prominent feature, make sure the clouds are something besides boring clumps scattered in awkward places. It makes all the difference.
