what the actual fuck is happening

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
zoya-nabris
zoya-nabris

Something about how Joel needs to know a specific purpose to work towards for him to go on... Not that others don't, of course they do, it's the most human thing, but how its just a lot more specific with Joel...

When Sarah was alive, she was his purpose. To raise her, to give her a life, to keep her safe... and after she passed, he didn't have that purpose anymore, so he tried to do what he did the very next day...

We see this with Tess too, and I think another post already pointed this out, how she is very much the leader between the two of them. Tess guided him, she gave him goals to carry through, she gave him purpose. Even when they meet Ellie, he only takes her along because Tess decided to. Hell, he was ready to abandon Ellie after finding out she was infected but didn't because Tess said not to.

We have seen the kind of tunnel vision of greif and rage he goes through when he loses his purpose, we have seen it with Sarah, we have seen it with Ellie, but we do not see it with Tess. This was one of the most important relationships in his life through 20 years of the apocalypse, and sure he mourns her but he's never blinded by it. Why?

Because just before her death, Tess gives him a new purpose, to keep Ellie safe. And that's exactly what he does. Only that, over the course of the episodes, the purpose that came out of obligation turns into genuine parental love.

That's also one of the reasons Joel's search for Ellie this episode is so interestingly shot. I mean, in the last episode when Joel was torturing those two men, everything was loud and crystal clear, every scream, every breath, every movement of the knife. Because Joel woke up and his kid is missing, all her things are missing, and at this point he has no idea where she is or if she's even alive. And so that scene is neither from Joel's pov nor of those two men. The audience is literally a third observer watching this guy torture the fuck out of two others. The scene from the last episode is the complete opposite. Especially for what is one of the most violent scenes in the show, I mean Joel kills a building full of people in cold blood. But we hear no sound, everything is muted, most of the camera's attention is either on Joel or his boots, not the bloodshed in front of him. This is the one scene we get to see that is completely from Joel's point of view, from the moment he takes the gun in the staircase till he reaches the operating room, we see that blinded tunnel vision that Joel has. He has one purpose - to find Ellie. Anything else doesn't matter, and so he doesn't even register all the things he's doing, all the people he's killing.

And then he sees Ellie, and the audio returns to normal, the camera pans out. When he shoots the surgeon, it is loud, it is clear. It is personal. And he could have killed the nurses, dragged Ellie away from the bed himself and be done with it. But no, he asks the nurses to remove all the wires off of her, and to bandage up her arm, and he puts her in the car before he kills Marlene, not after. Because he completed his purpose of finding Ellie. His new purpose now is to keep her safe from anything that could hurt her, whether its seeing someone die or a single drop of blood on her arm.

Joel's arc, from the first episode till the last, is having his purpose as a father break apart and then having it glued back together, piece by piece, all by the drive he has to protect his little girl

And god help any motherfucker who stands in his way

crispnebula
theweirdwideweb

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astronicht

Unless you were a tech at NASA back in the day, when one time some hydrogen a) escaped in a particular building, and b) caught on fire. This was extremely difficult because hydrogen does NOT burn on the visible spectrum humans evolved to see (and flee). Rather, it technically does, but it’s so pale that in practice, no one could see it. Additionally, pure hydrogen burns without smoke and with so little ambient heat that you can’t really sense it till you walk into it. So, per the lore, for a few days all the techs in that building just walked around brandishing brooms in front of them like lances. If your broom lit on fire, congrats! You have located more burning hydrogen! Do not proceed!

mias-back-from-the-dead

oh my god it's real and it was LITERALLY called "the broom method" holy shit

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randomencounters

Place: building with pockets of invisible fire

randomitemdrop

Spell: Conjure Invisible Fire

telnaga
animentality

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headspace-hotel

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

kijilinn

@headspace-hotel thank you for your many posts about conservation. It’s because of following you that I’ve started to look at gardening, land management and resource preservation differently. When someone says “buy this and we’ll plant a tree!” I say “what kind of tree? Where are you planting it? Is it being supported after planting or are you just leaving it there?”

headspace-hotel

^usually the "we plant trees when you Buy Product" is just, like, a description of how the paper industry works.

Wood pulp used for paper is grown in huge monoculture tree farms that are harvested to be turned into pulp with the trees are like, 15-20 years old.

A company that claims to plant a new tree for every tree cut down isn't doing shit.

ace-disgrace-on-the-case

Someday, there will be old growth again. Old Growth, with creaking bones and wizened bark. Old, in the way so many of our myths begin long ago. I’m sure of it. We can have that world again.

We will never live to see it. Nor will our children. But this planet, these forests, are seeds worth planting.

This is what I mean when I say conservation. To preserve, and to heal, what we have damaged. It is difficult. But we must. So that one day trees thicker than you are tall can tower over native plant life, gracefully watching over wetland, meadow, plain—anything and everything—

And be Old again.

headspace-hotel

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AND THERE WAS A CRACK IN THE WALLS OF MY PRISON 👏 AND 👏THROUGH 👏 IT 👏 I 👏 SAW 👏 A 👏 TREE 👏

rebeccathenaturalist

So. I volunteer a lot with the Friends of Willapa NWR in southwest Washington. The entire Refuge is full of amazing habitats, but possibly the crown jewel is the old growth western red cedar grove on Long Island. It's less than 300 acres, but it's a hint at what the entire area used to be covered in before we clearcut everything.

Last time I was over there was this past September; Refuge staff took a few dozen people over on a barge and I was one of the nature guides. On the way back I was chatting with one of the longtime Refuge staff. We were looking at the Willapa Hills along highway 101, and he pointed at one long section "Yeah, I remember when that got logged in the 1980s. Before then, that whole area looked like Long Island."

That hit me like a ton of bricks. Like, I missed seeing thousands of acres--instead of a scant several dozen--of this majesty by just a few decades. Those forests were still standing when I was born. This isn't just stuff that happened in the 1800s. It's still happening now. Environmental groups in the PNW are fighting to save the last scraps of what used to be. We need to save what's left, not just to preserve what we still have, but so we know better how to help foster the return of what once was and could be again. They're the last remaining records of what we lost.

fishiest-fish
str0kethebigtree-deactivated202

theory 1: baseball curses are real bc look what happened to the cubs and the red sox

theory 2: baseball curses are fake bc no one has ever cursed the yankees

theory 3 (synthesis): no one has successfully cursed the yankees bc they employ a cadre of dark wizards

sillymedoingsillythings

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Too many curses, that's why. It's like fighting thru a giant crowd to get your curse in, and it'll be overwritten in seconds anyway.

a-wild-haggis

screenshot showing that OP deactivated their accountALT

the dark wizards got 'em