Household Hazardous Waste - El Paso County DEV

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My ultra hardcore recycling guide for our house

Hi all,
I've been putting together info for how to recycle in Tucson while leveraging all the recycling options that are open to me: curbside, the city's upcoming glass drop-off, local and mail-in corporate-sponsored, and TerraCycle (a paid option). I aim to reuse or recycle every last bit of waste coming out of our house, no matter how crazy it may seem. Partly I just want to see how difficult it is; I recognize that my process isn't practical for most people.
Anyway, here's what I've gathered so far.

General principles

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  1. COMPOST: If it can be composted, compost it! (More on this below.)
  2. REUSE: If it can't be composted, reuse it! Reuse is always the most environmentally-friendly option.
  3. DONATE: If it can't be reused by you, donate it if it's something worth donating that someone else could use. https://tucsoncleanandbeautiful.org/ has a great directory for places that will accept various materials. Cero is a Tucson store that also accepts lots of stuff for donation and reuse. Donation usually involves transportation and some kind of carbon emissions, but it's still better than recycling. Don't donate junk! Donations aren't a free trash can.
  4. MUNICIPAL RECYCLING: If it can't be donated, recycle it locally using municipal recycling (curbside or drop-off). Recycle Coach has all the info you need on what municipal recycling can or can't recycle. ESGD's page on residential recycling also has some important guidelines. Recycling uses energy and involves carbon-emitting transport, plus not everything in a recycling waste stream actually gets recycled, so try to reuse first.
  5. LOCAL STORE DROP-OFF: If it can't be recycled using municipal recycling, recycle it at a local store for free. Earth911 has a search page that finds these stores and breaks them down by type, and TerraCycle's corporate-sponsored programs page also has some local programs. These programs typically ship their waste to a recycling partner, often TerraCycle in New Jersey, which adds to the environmental footprint of the process, so try to recycle municipally first.
  6. FREE MAIL-IN: If it can't be recycled at a local store, use one of TerraCycle's free corporate-sponsored mail-in programs. These programs end up sending waste TerraCycle, just like the local store drop-offs, but are arguably less efficient than sending a big communal batch of stuff, so try to use the local store drop-offs first.
  7. TERRACYCLE (PAID): If it can't be recycled using a mail-in program, use a paid all-in-one box to have TerraCycle recycle it if it's small and light. This is effectively the same as using one of the mail-in options above except that you have to pay, so try to use a mail-in program first.
  8. REGIONAL DROP-OFF: If it's a big bulky waste that can't be donated, see if it can be recycled outside of Tucson (e.g., save up Styrofoam for the next time I drive to Phoenix, where they do have the appropriate facilities). TerraCycle accepts almost anything, but their all-in-one boxes are pricey, so it may make more sense to save up big hard-to-recycle stuff like packaging for Phoenix or another big city, if you think you'll drive there at some point. Don't make unnecessary trips just to drop off waste!
  9. TRASH: If it can't be composted, reused, donated or recycled, throw it away and make sure that you follow the guidelines for hazardous waste disposal.
  10. GOLDEN RULE #1: Make sure that the material is clean. Clean waste streams are more valuable to recyclers, which helps keep costs down. Don't use too much water cleaning up stuff, but don't feel too guilty about using water, either! Dishwater usage is a tiny sliver of household water consumption, not to mention that industry and agriculture generally use much more water than homes.
  11. GOLDEN RULE #2: The goal of recycling is to break down your waste into "primary materials" (e.g., plastic, metal, paper, glass) that can be used by industry to make new products. The more mixed your materials, the more you need to research how to recycle it. Knowing the basics goes a long way. For example, I know that metal cans get melted down, so a paper or plastic label attached to the can doesn't worry me because I know that it will get burned off. But what about a milk carton, which is paper fused with plastic? Or the circuitry inside the plastic base of a CFL bulb? If you can't intuitively explain how the thing is going to get broken down into its primary materials, that's your cue that you need to do some research.
  12. GOLDEN RULE #3: Knowing the basics of how recycling centers work goes a long way. For example, if you know that you can't recycle plastic grocery bags curbside because they get stuck in the machines, that's a hint that you shouldn't try to recycle your plastic food wrap, either. Or if you know that plastic bottle caps fall through the holes of a separator, that's a hint that you need to research whether your beer bottle caps are recyclable (even though they're metal).
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Reuse and recycling guide for my home

This is not a comprehensive list of every recycling resource in Tucson, this is just for my house my household's needs. I've found that there's no one-size-fits-all solution if you want to reach close to 100% recycling/reuse, you end up having to come up with a list that's customized for your home, which requires research. I'm providing my list as a potential template as well as for inspiration.
Legend:
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How do I sort all this?

Right now, I'm using a makeshift system of lots and lots of bags to keep everything separate. My idea is to do a monthly "recycling day" and drop off everything that needs to be dropped off as well as mail in everything that needs to be mailed in. I haven't had to do this yet since I started this project.
I hope to build a sorting station in my house once I understand my needs a bit better.
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Notes on TerraCycle and partner programs

A lot of the corporate-sponsored/mail-in/drop-off programs are done through TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycler that specializes in recycling hard-to-recycle things (e.g., potato chip bags, toothbrushes). They make lots of their money through large corporations, which essentially pay them to process unprofitable waste in order to burnish their environmental stewardship bona fides. They also offer paid recycling pouches and boxes to the general public. You mail in these pouches/boxes (they come with a shipping label) after filling them up with recyclable waste.
TerraCycle will recycle almost anything and everything. However, anything that gets recycled through them or one of their corporate programs is shipped to New Jersey for processing, so it's preferable to reuse or recycle locally. They're also not as transparent as I wish they would be. I'm not certain, for example, how much of each waste stream actually gets recycled. They have a customer support contact form that's been very good for getting my questions answered, but beware that they take about 2-3 days to get back to you per request.
I bought the large "all-in-one" box from their site and found a coupon code online to bring the cost down to around $350. I read a review elsewhere from someone who got a medium box (about 50% the size) who said that it lasted her six months. My idea is to use this box as "recycling of last resort" and rely on drop-off programs as much as possible to keep costs down. On the other hand, this makes my life more complicated in terms of sorting different waste streams, so you could simplify by putting waste destined for various drop-off points into a single TerraCycle all-in-one box.
You need to register for free on their website to use their mail-in programs. Many of their mail-in programs unfortunately have wait lists. Of the ~15 programs for which I signed up around two weeks ago, about 8 had wait lists, and I got off the wait list for about 5 of them. So they seem to go through the list pretty regularly. Once you're in, you can print off a free UPS label from the "my profile" section of the site after logging in.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would assume that TerraCycle has a higher rate of recycling than municipal programs, but this must be balanced against the financial and environmental cost of shipping waste to their facilities.
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Composting

The Achilles' heel in my recycling and reuse plan is organic matter. The City of Tucson has a composting program but it's only open to businesses.
There are a few volunteer-run programs here and there that accept compostable waste. I managed to sign up for one, UA's Compost Cats, and will be meeting them tomorrow to pick up my sealed composting bucket and go over the program rules. I know that they have limited capacity, so you have to email them. They took about a week to get back to me.
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Am I insane?

Maybe a little 🙃.
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Shout outs

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submitted by Low_Walrus to Tucson [link] [comments]

Nuclear power is often the subject of disinformation, spreading of FUD, and dismissed. This post addresses many of these points. Questions are welcome but civility required.

Nuclear power is often the subject of disinformation, spreading of FUD, and dismissed. This post addresses many of these points. Questions are welcome but civility required.
This post is about nuclear power. It is long. If you want to debate, that is welcome but please read this post first. It's likely I will have addressed your concern in it. There will be no tl;dr.
I've seen a fair few posts on here, and other "green" sites doing their best to discredit and undermine the science of nuclear power in lieu of glorified pipe dreams. That the world can go 100% "renewable" (with plenty of caveats tacked on the end of course, half of them unfeasible).
There are 4 main "arguments" against nuclear power. Danger, waste + storage, cost, and fuel availability. This post is to hopefully illustrate why all are red herrings designed to sew FUD and in actual fact keep us tied to a hydrocarbon-based grid.

Danger

This is a three-prong argument. The first usually invokes events such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, TMI, and other lesser incidents; the second invokes radiation safety; and the third mentions terrorism.
Starting with nuclear events, of these three I mentioned---only one is actually at all relevant and that's TMI. But mentioning it in terms of safety is the equivalent of comparing a ford model-T to a modern family saloon. Additionally, it led to the raft of safety measures we now have thus preventing it from ever happening again.
Chernobyl is a total red herring. While it wasn't a good event, it's pretty much the only event in nuclear power history that has led to any "significant" casualties, with the official death toll being 60 and numbers in the region of 6-20k cited from extended exposure. Whilst high for a single event, this makes up the vast majority of all nuclear incidents and in terms of death/TWh produced, still results in nuclear being the safest of all power sources. Plus, the RMBK reactor used on site wasn't designed for producing power, but for plutonium for nuclear bombs. As such, it was made deliberately unsafe so they could pop it open quickly to get the Pu out. It was this deliberate design choice that caused the failure. Obviously, this is not present in power-based reactors. It's also likely that the deaths are overestimated in this event due to the employment of the linear no-threshold model, which has repeatedly been shown to be flawed, and a hormetic model should instead be employed. This even gets ramped up to 11 in some countries that have radiation "spas" where you sit in a radon-filled basement in a bath-robe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24298226/
And Fukushima? Yes it wasn't ideal, but literally nothing has come of it. No increased cancers. No deaths. No change in the background radiation level. Those maps bandied about showing the "flow into the ocean"? Garbage designed to spread FUD. The site fundamentally failed because a tsunami was higher than the seawall and drowned the diesel generators that were below sea-level. If the reactor hadn't shut down, it's likely it wouldn't have failed at all. Fukushima is less anti-nuclear and more anti-diesel generator.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident.aspx
The clean-up will cost money yes, but see the section later about why that's actually a good thing. Other events such as the Windscale fire were also caused by plutonium production.
Now lets compare those deaths with another singular event: a damn bursting in China. 230k dead. More than 10x all the nuclear incidents ever yet I don't hear many here complaining about hydro-power.
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/230000-died-in-a-dam-collapse-that-china-kept-secret-for-years/91699/
In fact, comparing all the methods of power generation as deaths/terawatt-hour produced, nuclear is safest by about an order of magnitude (in other words, 10x more power can be produced for each person killed by that method of generation). How many people do you want to die to keep your lights on?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
The second of these prongs is fear of radiation. While I briefly touched on it when discussing Chernobyl, the fear runs much deeper. The main problem here is lack of scientific education, and an overzealous media. The thing about radiation is we are very good at detecting it, even at very low levels, and some units need to use very large numbers, such as atomic decays/second (Bq). Thing is, there are a lot of atoms in a small volume of anything. Avogadro's constant tells us that there are 6.022x1023 atoms in one mole of the substance. And one mole is the atomic number of the element in grams. So 92g of Uranium has 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms (approx). And with the density of U being ~19.1g/cm3, that's 5 cubic centimetres of uranium. Or a double shot in a bar.
This sort of numbering has led to the tongue in cheek unit "banana equivalent dose".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Yes, that is the radiation dose you will get from eating a banana. In continuation, people will talk about waste being so hazardous, but without really understanding the numbers. So what are those numbers? Well, the granite worktop in your kitchen would be classed as nuclear waste under current legislation, thanks to radon in it.
Terrorism is another danger often cited. And this may even be a valid one, if there had ever been a terrorist attack on any nuclear plant across the world in the history of the human race. They're also designed to withstand a direct impact from a train or a 747, so a 9/11 attack isn't a concern. On a related vein, many conflate nuclear power with nuclear weaponry. These two implementations are about as different as can be, with the only commonality is that they both use a radioactive source. It would be like decrying a coal plant because C4 explodes as both are carbon based. Nuclear weaponry and nuclear power are fundamentally different technologies and cannot be conflated.

Waste/Storage

People don't think of granite worktops or gloves or aprons being "nuclear waste" though, they think of leaking soft steel barrels full of green liquid seeping out into waterways and turning us all into three-armed monstrosities with cancers out the wazoo. Except, none of that is true. Including the fact it's waste at all. So from now on I will call them used fuel rods, as that is what they are, The way fuel rods are disposed of is in a water bath for heat control of any short-lived elements to decay away, and then they are stored in "dry cask storage", or large concrete barrels on the reactor site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage
"But these barrels are dangerous right? You will die if you get near them?"
Well, yes. But only because the armed guards on site will shoot you as you run towards them. If you had proper clearance, you could sit and have lunch leaning up against one with negligible radiation dose.
"But these drums are piling up with nowhere to store them, It's a catastrophe".
Well... also no. As you may remember the numbers from the previous section, volumes are small. If you were to take the entire US stockpile of used fuel rods and group them together, you'd have a mass of 70k metric tonnes. Sounds a lot right? But remember the density of uranium, that gives a volume of about 3665 m3. For comparison, single football stadium (I've pulled up Samara Arena in Russia for convenience), it has a volume of 503,480 m3. So the entire volume of used nuclear fuel in the US wouldn't even fill a football stadium, and in fact wouldn't even come close. I'd say we've got room to breathe there.
"But it lives for billions of years right and is super radioactive right?"
Well, again, not quite. Think of anything, the hotter it burns, the shorter it lives. Same with nuclear fuel. The high-activity nuclides in the used fuel rods decay in days-weeks. What's left is inert filler with fresh uranium mixed through. In fact, after it's removed from the reactor, it's still about 95% fresh uranium. Which has a half life of billions of years, but consequently is also low activity. You could hold reactor rods in your hand and be fine. And in fact this is how they are installed into a reactor in the first place. Notice no lead aprons, no serious PPE. Just gloves and goggles.
Fuel Rod Assembly: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy
And yet in the US that's buried underground. Why? Blame President Carter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
In fact, that is the only main problem with storage of used fuel rods. The US gets a disproportionate amount of air-time across the world, and it also cannot reprocess its used fuel. It'd be like a car in which most of the petrol you put in trickled out the exhaust again. You'd either improve the design, or put it through again. And that's the purpose of either recycling the fuel rods, or using what is known as a breeder reactor. And in fact these breeder reactors are grid-proven and it's literally just lack of political will preventing them being rolled out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
If the US was the recycle all the fuel it had in storage, it wouldn't need to mine any more for the next century or so. Yes, century.

Fuel Availability

"But it'll all run out eventually? In fact, a lot of estimates put it at only ~200 years availability? Why bother when the sun and wind are essentially limitless?"
Again, not quite. This figure comes from single-pass fuel use then storage. As I've just shown, that's incredibly inefficient and frankly a stupid way to handle it. In fact, if you combine breeder reactors, and fuel reprocessing, we have enough fissile fuel to keep our reactors happy for the next few hundred thousand years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/

Cost

"But it's really expensive to build nuclear plants and takes too long."
It is expensive to build the nuclear plants yes, but the time taken to build them is largely based in legislation which itself is based in flawed science (as I mentioned earlier with the LNT statements). But when investigate it as a levelised cost of energy (LCOE), nuclear is pretty much front of the queue.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
Plus, I'm going to take a little detour out of science here and start talking about economics. Things being expensive for a government is not the same as things being expensive for a person/business. The fundamental difference is that the latter is a user of currency, whilst the former is the issuer of currency. A common way of thinking is the out-dated gold standard, in which currency is finite and tied to gold/tax receipts/stocks/bonds. This, and consequential statements such as "we are generating debt our children must pay" hasn't been true since 1971. The government, being able to issue its own currency can never go bankrupt as it can always pay its debts. This also does not lead to inflation as it used to. If this has you scratching your head in disbelief, that's understandable. I suggest the book "The Deficit Myth" by Prof. Stephanie Kelton. Additionally, she does a really good seminar on it here and is definitely worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y
So fundamentally, if the government wish to build nuclear, they have both means and motive to do so, with no detriment to the economy (unless you count people in work being a detriment).
A few conspicuous sites are also mentioned in nuclear costs. These are typically Hanford in the US, and Sellafield in the UK. Both of these sites are scheduled to take decades to clean up, and cost hundreds of billions of $/£ to do so. This sounds ominous, but it isn't. Both of these sites were built in the 40s/50s as research sites and plutonium production facilities. Neither of these are actually relevant to modern power production and are simply a legacy from a time we didn't understand nuclear materials. When discussing US decommissioning costs, Hanford makes up 80% of this budget in the US, and Sellafield making up 75% in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/cost-taxpayers-clean-nuclear-waste-jumps-100-billion-year-n963586
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy

Discussion

So why am I so bothered? Why bother making this post at all? I am a scientist and it bothers me to see disinformation and anti-science get spread so freely. There is also an extremely bad-faith argument from a lot of people in this regard, as they do not discuss the waste generated in the production of renewables, nor the full LCOE and instead cherry pick good days and state it as an average. This disingenuity has led to some of the most expensive power in the US for Californians, and Germany needing to fire its coal stations back up as well as import power from nuclear powered France. Furthermore, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) performed an interesting study, in which it collates the opinions of those educated in science versus the general public. It can be seen that when formally trained in science, the approval rating nuclear is much higher. Surely we want our path to saving the planet rooted in science instead of hubris?
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/07/23/an-elaboration-of-aaas-scientists-views/
Also as I showed with the burst-dam, there are statements made about nuclear that are not made about renewables. So if I repeat the process, the waste produced for solar and wind is not discussed often enough. Both wind and solar produce huge volumes of toxic and radioactive waste. But as they are not as similarly constrained as the nuclear industry, this is both unaccounted, and just drained to the environment.
https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste-problem/
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
https://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks
Neither can the panels or blades be recycled so they go to landfill, to leech out toxic elements into the soil and groundwater.
https://stopthesethings.com/2020/10/10/lingering-legacy-millions-of-toxic-solar-panels-that-cant-be-recycled-destined-for-landfills/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-waste-the-dark-side-of-clean-energy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
And if nuclear fuel availability is mentioned, then so should availability of the minerals required to produce renewables. Many of the minerals used have available supplies of less than a year, and as is in the name, they are rare to begin with.
https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/10/chinas-monopoly-on-rare-earth-elements-and-why-we-should-care/
And to address a few points unique to renewables, the first is that by their method of operation, they harness a diffuse source. As such, they need to be big. Really big. Hundreds to thousands of hectares big. To produce an amount of power that could be generated by a reactor a fraction of the size. Now some people may find vast fields of solar panels or turbines beautiful, but I'd rather see vast woodlands, prairies, swamplands. I'd rather see our land returned to nature to actually capture some of the carbon that's ready to drive our extinction. It would also have the additional benefit that it would actually give back to the environment, and allow the bugs, birds, reptiles, critters, grazers, and hunters to thrive again. They don't thrive under windmills or solar panels.
https://www.strata.org/footprints/
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18270734.14m-trees-cut-scotland-make-way-wind-farms/
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-built-on-carbon-rich-peat-bogs-lose-their-ability-to-fight-climate-change-143551
"But it's cheap!"
Exactly, and that's why renewables still have a place as is shown by the "energy pyramid" attached. Every rooftop should be lined with solar panels. Domestic windmills should be used to feed back into the grid. The land is already used, so make the most of it. But don't destroy nature to build renewables, as this is often exactly what happens.
The Energy Pyramid [Eric G. Meyer, Generation Atomic]
There are further issues faced by renewables but not faced by nuclear. These are called "capacity factor" and "insertion factor", and neither permit for exponential power demands that we as a race face. The former is a simple one, wind doesn't blow all the time. Sun doesn't shine all the time. There needs to be a backup, that right now is natural gas. Super batteries will not fix this issue, and are actually more likely to render renewables obsolete as our demands will grow with our capacity. The second, insertion factor, relates to how once the "good spots" are taken, we must use less good spots, and as such need larger installations to make up for the shortfall in production. With nuclear, both of these do not apply.
But why nuclear at all? Well, fundamentally, there is just so much uranium, and it is so energy dense, that it is silly to not use it. But when I talk about energy density compared to other fuels, it is hard to envision, so this wonderful presentation gives us more of a clue.
https://youtu.be/tpUtrDvya1w
So what does that energy density look like? Well, in a nuclear fuel assembly (shown earlier), there are hundreds of fuel pellets such as shown below. Each single one of those pellets are 7g of the ceramic uranium oxide, and can power a typical household for ~4 months.
Fuel pellets in a fuel rod [nuclear.duke-energy.com]
So why would you not want to use the cleanest, safest, arguably cheapest power source on earth?

Conclusion

This post hopefully illustrates some of the common and unfortunately pervasive myths around nuclear power. And if for a moment we assume the problems are all real and genuine, we have less than 10 years to fix our planet before it starts trying, and likely succeeding, to kill us. This is not the time to be advocating anti-science or wanting to look like you care whilst doing nothing. If the waste issue was true, that gives us hundreds to thousands of years to find a problem. If the terrorism issue was true, we'd have high employment in the military to keep the sites safe. If the fuel availability issue was true, we could use it until we perfect fusion. But fundamentally, if you are about to be hit by an out-of-control bus, you do not worry about the grazed knee you get by jumping out the way.
Edit 1: S/P
Edit 2: Included the AAAS survey in the "Discussion" section.
Edit 3: Added Hanford and Sellafield to the "Costs" section.
Edit 4: Added additional references to "Discussion" section.
Edit 5: Updated data on Chernobyl death toll.
Edit 6: Added fuel rod assembly image.
submitted by Vaudane to ExtinctionRebellion [link] [comments]

The Racist Origins and Painful Legacy of Atlanta's Zoning

I'm going to start this post off with a few disclaimers:
  1. A good amount of my information comes from The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. I tried to find as many direct sources for the relevant topics brought up in the book as I could, but they weren't always readily availible. I highly encourage you to read the book itself if you want more details and his sources.
  2. While I am going to try to use Atlanta-specific information as much as possible, there are some things that I can only provide evidence for in general, not to mention that I have to discuss this with the wider national historical context as well since Atlanta was but one part of a massive racist horror show.
  3. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this material. It's just what I have the most supporting information already at had for. Again, if you want to read more details from someone who spent much more time researching than I have, pick up a copy of The Color of Law.
  4. I am by no means claiming that fixing zoning will be the end-all-be-all of segregation legacy, nor that it will singularly solve disparities for minority populations compared to white populations within the city. Undoing the sheer scale of bullshit put in place to codify segregation and racial suppression as it manifests today is an undertaking requiring effort on par with something like the Green New Deal (coincidentally, there can be quite a lot of overlap in with a GND, and that's why climate and social justice are so often packaged with various versions of a GND). Fixing the legacy of racist zoning's impacts is just one part to an incredibly complex system, but it's still one worthy of doing. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Alright, on to the main content... Buckle up kiddos, we're going for a fuckin ride!

Why the Fuck are you Talking About Zoning Right Now‽

The country is, to use an incredible amount of understatement, in a bit of a pickle right now. We're in the midst of a global pandemic that's surging, and resurging within our borders. We're reeling at a seemingly never ending parade of tragedy and failure of composure from the very police forces sworn to protect us. We're dealing with an ever escalating push back and response from a federal government that is attempting to label protesters as terrorists. We've had impeachments, assassinations of foreign political operatives, the emboldenment of out-and-loud racists, foreign bounties on our military, historic Supreme Court decisions, and record stock market crashes. We're staring down the barrel of a depression, and there's a looming climate catastrophe that's been burning in the background of all of this.
So why, in the middle of all of this, am I bringing up zoning of all things? How could that possibly be relevant to any of this?
Well... as it turns out... quite a bit. See, zoning is one of those core functions of government, generally on the local level but not always, that just kinda exists. It's a long, boring, complicated mess of legal code that just doesn't come up all that often in our every day discussions (unless you're a nerd like me who keeps trying to shove it into every conversation... ahem...).
No matter how innocuous or intangible or boring zoning may feel, though, it actually has massive ramifications for how our build environment is shaped. That is literally its job, after all: codifying what is and isn't allowed to be built, where, and how. That build environment then has massive ramifications on a whole pile of social, economic, and environmental issues.
A good zoning code balances public desires for safety, health, and environmental protections, while also helping to ensure various amenities are provided, ideally outweighing any downsides of development with benefits to the community at large. Unfortunately, most zoning systems fail at this balance, often focusing on the wrong components as perceived negatives when they're actually benefits, while codifying build requirements that actively make things worse for the communities around them. A bad zoning code can make housing more expensive, make it harder to meet climate and environmental goals, make the general population more sickly, impede the ability of persons to generate generational wealth, and horrendously damage the tax base, making it harder to fund public projects.
As it turns out, most of these issues trace back to a few core ideas of the initial model zoning systems, and were originally put in as features of the codes. The intent at the time was mainly focused on creating a few specific negative outcomes, with many of the others having taken decades to fully manifest and be recognized. Yet, the original structure of the codes remain, bureaucratic momentum and an incomplete understanding of justice keeping them in place, dragging out the problems for years and years and years.
So what were those features, and what specific negative outcomes were they trying to achieve?

Setting the Stage for Segregation

First, we have to step back, and take a bit of a historical run up to provide proper context.
In 1877, Reconstruction ended. Federal troops, who had defeated the Confederacy, packed up and left the south after 12 years of postbellum occupation (14 if you include overlap years of occupation before the war's end). Reconstruction, though certainly not perfect, had been a time of relative empowerment for black Americans. Backed by federal troops, integration and political power was actually in reach. It wasn't 40-acres and a mule, but it was an incredible leap forward as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were enforced in about as blunt a way as possible: at the muzzle of a rifle. That all came to a painful and tragic end with the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had promised southern Democrats the end of occupation in exchange for electoral support.
Almost immediately, black Americans suffered a bloody, violent resurgence of oppression, with segregation becoming standard practice, and enforced both at the hands of local law enforcement and mobs of white Americans. Worse yet, as Jim Crow laws and their efforts anchored themselves across the south, previously diverse and inclusive (relatively speaking) parts of the country began to follow suit. All over, towns and cities undertook the effort of removing, or isolating their black populations, using similar tactics learned from the southern states.
Like a cancer, segregation spread far and wide, becoming more and more recognized and acceptable. By 1913, freshly elected president Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in federal offices, marking about as drastic a change in federal priority as you could take over the course of three and a half decades.
It is in this atmosphere of invigorated racist bullshit that zoning rises within the policy consciousness.

The Original Sin of Zoning

As a concept, zoning ordinances within the U.S. were rather new, with the 1908 Los Angeles municipal zoning ordinances being the first of their kind. The LA laws were a formalizing of existing nuisance laws, meant to create separations of land use and buffers between the harmful effects of industries and residences. Though specific business classifications (such as unnecessary prohibition of laundries, which were predominantly owned by Chinese immigrants at the time, in certain areas) did come with racial issues, they were quite tame by the standards of the time, as we're about to see.
Prior to the rise of zoning as a popular government effort, it was fairly rare to see actual legal code dedicated towards segregation, instead focusing efforts on government-endorsed vigilantism and governments not enforcing equality laws already in place. This began to change, however. In 1910, a few years before the federal government would make official its office segregation, and two years after the LA zoning system was established, Baltimore became the first city in the nation, (as stated by the New York Times), to create an explicit law mandating the segregation of city areas. The city ordinance dictated that blacks could not buy homes on blocks where whites were the majority, and vice versa. The law was... horribly broken, and judges had to grapple with the complex, integrated reality of the city, trying to adjudicate who could and couldn't live where, or buy property where, creating an incredible mess of legal issues across the city.
The practical problems with the law did not stop other cities from copying the effort, though. Invigorated by Baltimore's example, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others all made their own version of racial segregaition mandates within landuse. Amungst this list was, in fact, the City of Atlanta, whose ordinance virtually copied the Baltimore law, with the added provision that a person of one color occupying a house in a mixed block could object to one of another color moving next door.
Unlike the initial LA zoning laws, the systems put in place following Baltimore's example were specifically racially focused, with more familiar zoning laws taking shape in the years to come. These initial racist laws would persist until the 1917 Supreme Court decision that such laws were unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. However... the decision was based around the freedom of individuals to buy and sell property to whomever they wished, rather than a denunciation of segregation within law itself. Many cities simply ignored the Supreme Court ruling, and moved ahead with their segregationist laws, while others claimed that slight variations in the ordinances, such as the difference between block level and larger zoning styles, meant they didn't have to follow the ruling.
The City of Atlanta was, once again, one of these cities. In The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta (1922), written by Robert H. Whitten as a consultant for the the City Planning Commission, explicit residential districts were outlined by racial makeup, with R1 as "white residence district", R2 as "colored residence district", and R3 as "undetermined race district". It was nice enough to allow servants' quarters remain open to either race. The plan justifies this by saying:
the above race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.
Additionally, Whitten defended his zoning plan in professional publications by saying that "[e]stablishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict." This, he added, was "a sufficient justification for race zoning.... A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable."
Here is a map of the proposed zoning system within the then city limits. You can get an idea of just how limited housing areas for blacks were, just how much of the city was to be dedicated to single family housing compared to apartments, and how relegated commercial uses would be. Incidentally enough, this is where the City of Atlanta begins to see a zoning code similar to modern codes. We'll get to that in a moment. For now, note how closely this map matches some of the racial demographics of the city today, oh, and (just coincidentally I'm sure) how the largest 'Colored District' in the city was to be essentially bordered on three sides by industrial areas. Other zoning maps from the same time would go further with encroaching industrial zones, limiting colored areas, and limiting apartment areas.
Can I just take a moment to say how much I fucking love the Atlanta History Center and its archives? Okay, moving on.
At the same time that Atlanta was ignoring its constitutional duty to not segregate its people, the federal government was stepping into the zoning game. In 1921, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance, with an eventual goal of developing model legislation that could be easily adopted. This committee had such members as Frederick Law Olmsted, who argued in 1918 that not only were certain housing types "coincident with racial divisions", and, since it was undesirable to "force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle", great care should be take not to mix housing types, and Irving B. Hiett, who was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, an organization who would produce a code of realtor ethics stating that "A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... members of any race or nationality... detrimental to property values" just a few years later. By 1922, the committee had developed A Zoning Primer, which argued that zoning was required to preserve property values, and which was widely distributed across the country. The policies would push out wide and far across the nation, following the federal government's example.

Pretending as if Racist Plans Aren't

In 1924, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the City of Atlanta zoning code due to its racial components. Despite this, the underlying plan and map developed with segregation in mind, would act as the basis for future plans. Indeed, there are many overlaps with the 1922 plan, and even zoning designations today.
Keep Whitten's and the Zoning Commission's mentalities concerning the importance of racial segregation when looking back through the rest of the initial Atlanta zoning proposal. It provides leading anecdotes (without apparent supporting evidence beyond some photographs that don't really seem to match the narrative) of the dangers of mixing small stores, and low-rise multi-family housing with lower densities, primarily focusing on the perceived loss of value of adjacent properties, while framing the persons who make such developments as greedy speculators only out for a quick buck (rather than look at the economic benefit to the store owner, the new access to the store that surrounding areas get, and the housing relief the apartment dwellers experience).
Still without apparent evidence, the proposal makes sweeping, generalized statements about the need to preserve neighborhoods' character, and preserve property values. It proposes to do this by dividing the city into use, height, area, and race categories, with each mixing with the others to dictate specific allowances. The racial categories were removed, yet the remainder of the plan's suggestions would persist.
Even in 1917 it was understood that density was a major component of affordability. Special City Plan Adviser for the City Plan Commission of Cleveland Ohio Robert H. Whitten's essay The Zoning of Residence Sections, where Olmsted argued the merits of preventing the mixing of people and their racially pre-dis-positioned housing preferences, outright states:
We want to distribute the population as much as practicable, but at the same time we do not wish to force people who for business or other reasons need to live close to the central business sections either to pay very high rents or to go to much less convenient locations. As a city reaches metropolitan size, the demand for housing space near the central area becomes so great that the only way to make that location available to any but the wealthy is to permit a more intensive utilization of the land. Were it not for the ability to pile one dwelling on top of another, rents would be prohibitive in these central locations for the great mass of the people.
Even while expounding on the virtues of low-density housing, Whitten takes effort to acknowledge the economic need for multi-family housing to maintain affordability. Yeah, it's done in a condescending way where he can only imagine a case where being adjacent to the central business district is a legitimate reason for housing density, but he at least still accepts it as reality.
Yet, dwelling house districts, from which apartment houses would be excluded, were to include the larger portion of the area of Atlanta, and were to primarily be made up of the largest area class, requiring at least 5000 sqft per family of lot area. The code outright targets 2-3 story buildings with families living over a store (generally which they would operate) as being undesirable, and thus is explicitly designed to prevent such outcomes. All of these things drove up the per-house price, requiring a family to pay for a significant amount of land, as well as an individual house, in the majority of the city's residential area. In the maps I linked above, you can see just how few areas were allowed to have apartments compared to the wider single-family zones.
The federal zoning primer includes similar sentiments, telling an anecdote of how an apartment house built next to a home would destroy values by becoming 'a giant airless hive, housing human beings like crowded bees', as well as lumping 'sporadic stores' in with 'factories or junk yards' as a contributing factor of blight within a residential neighborhood.
It's important to note that none of these codes tried to make improvements to living conditions through legislation like building codes, which could have helped prevent the squalor conditions that were so readily associated with apartments, and which had been present in the U.S. since at least 1859, in Baltimore, choosing instead to essentially quarantine apartments to prevent their spread into single family areas.
As I laid out above, these are all value judgements made by people who viewed the mixing of races as something to avoid, as something that itself would contribute to a loss of property values (rather than recognize that self-fulfilling white panic, was the actual source of value drop, and that the constrained black populations were willing to pay higher prices because there were so few homes they could even get into, actually raising prices), and even made racial connections to types of housing to keep separated. But, because of the insistence of the courts, their policies were forced to take on an air of race neutrality. Thus, explicit race-based zoning was stripped from the codes, and the far more familiar forms of space and use based zoning were established. Those forms just so happen to harshly restrict the kinds of housing openly accepted as being affordable to the masses, and, in particular, the demographics of people who were least economically able to choose elsewhere.
As the federal zoning primer said: Zoning Is Legal
This is not to say that exclusionary zoning was not without its legal challenges, of course. In the 1926 Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, the court upheld the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, using as part of its opinion the argument that "very often the apartment house is a mere parasite", and that, if allowed to mix with single-family houses, "come very near to being nuisances". The case was brought to the Supreme Court as an appeal to a U.S. District Court of Ohio ruling against the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, stating that "the blighting of property values and the congesting of the population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance." Essentially, while the Supreme Court decided that exclusionary zoning was based on inherit issues with mixing building types (even though 1) the issues aren't inherit, and 2) the exclusion argument is based on a slippery slope fallacy), the District Court had (correctly) identified an underlying racial motivation for preventing mixing.

When the Pretending Becomes More Overt

Were all else equal, we might be able to ignore the initial racial components of exclusionary zoning, and merely call the resulting codes classist (the reality is that racism and classism were/are tightly intertwined, with each giving perceived justification to the other), but things weren't equal. The median household income for a black family in 1947 (the earliest year I could actually find data) was just 51% of a white household (it was only up to ~63% in 2018). Even though modern discussion around apartments tends to bemoan the 'luxury' branding, and how accurate it may or may not be, the hard reality is that living in an apartment is cheaper than buying a house, at least in the immediate. For lower income people, it's pretty much the only option. For poor, and thus disproportionately black, people, the primary need for housing affordability was in the form of apartment buildings and residential density, even if that was only desired as a stepping stone. But that's not what the zoning system provided.
Overwhelmingly, the city's land was designated for single family homes. Large lots, and individual homes drive up the per-unit costs of housing, locking poorer people out of being able to buy into neighborhoods. Worse yet would be the zoning systems of suburban and smaller towns, which would eliminate the ability to build apartments all together, essentially locking lower income, and thus disproportionately black, persons from being able to relocate there at all. This lead to crowding in the limited apartments, and, since the building codes hadn't been adequately updated to actually prevent it, the very slum conditions used as a justification for preventing apartments in the first place became self-fulfilling.
Of course, not all black people were so poor that they couldn't afford to buy a single-family home, and quite a few did look to leave the limited availability of apartments. They were not met well, and indeed, in the years following the installation of exclusionary zoning systems, the federal government would essentially codify black exclusion from single-family neighborhoods, with cities clinging to the federal policies as justification for blocking black and integrated housing.
Property (particularly home) mortgages used to be very, very different than how we think of them today, which locked many people out of the ability to get them. High-interest rates, huge down-payments, interest-only payments, and short (5-7 year) payback periods. These terms kept middle and low class persons (of all races) from being able to afford to buy property. As part of the New Deal, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation was established. The loan system was restructured to be closer to the lower rates, lower down-payments, overall payment, and long-term periods we're more familiar with today. Additionally, many existing mortgages were bought and restructured to save property owners from foreclosure.
In the process of this, though, HOLC wanted an inventory of risk across the nation, so it could manage these new loan terms without crippling itself financially. This is where the kinda okay policy stopped. The risk inventory was carried out by local real estate agencies, who had national ethics codes and local policies for their agents to explicitly consider race when evaluating risk. So much so that they were actually under direction to maintain community segregation when otherwise selling properties. The inventory took the form of color-coded maps, where red sections on the map represented high-risk (don't loan people money / bail them out here). Many, many of these red areas were based on racial prejudice, with even wealthy / middle class integrated or black communities being rated far worse than equivalent income white areas.
Here is a database of maps across the U.S., overlaid against modern areas. Here's a fun game: compare the Redlining Map for Atlanta to the initial racial zoning map! No it's not a 1-1 match, but it gets awfully close, particularly if you start to include initially designated areas for apartment buildings.
This entire mess was made even worse with the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority, which was intended to insure private bank loans to first-time home buyers. Even though the FHA had its own auditing system separate from the HOLC, it still had direct segregation and whites-only policies. Additionally the FHA very specifically did not insure mortgages within urban centers. This meant that both HOLC and FHA services were denied to nearly the same areas: black or integrated neighborhoods, most often in urban centers.
The FHA justified its racial rules by claiming that black people ruined property values. This was actually backwards, as the limited options available to black people meant that black and integrated properties were in high demand, and thus could be sold at a much higher price. What did happen, though, was 'block-busting'. So, because the FHA (and other organizations) continuously sold the idea that black people ruined property values, as well as the base-level racism, this left white neighborhoods vulnerable to manipulation. Speculators would buy up properties in blocks on the border of black / integrated and white areas, and then rent / sell them to black people. These speculators would also hire black people to walk around white neighborhoods asking about home sales, and looking like they lived there. Then the speculators would go around warning white property owners that their housing values would tank with all the black people moving in, and make stupidly low offers, buying out white properties well below the actual value (this is where the FHA was getting its data). Then the speculators would turn around and, because there were so few other options, sell the same properties above their actual value to black people at bad rates. This drove up costs for black people who otherwise just wanted a home, and the high prices contributed to perpetuating poverty and again creating self-fulfilling slum conditions.
Many cities, private lenders, and other government agencies (like Veterans Affairs) anchored their lending and development approval processes on the FHA backing of home loans, which meant that blacks were barred from even the opportunity to really leave parts of the city within which they lived.
It's worth reiterating that the HOLC and FHA policies were targeted directly at owning private homes, working off of a national policy that private homes were less communist than apartments. No, I'm not kidding. The U.S. Department of Labor distributed pamphlets entitled We Own Our Own Home to schoolchildren stating that it was a "patriotic duty" to cease renting, and to buy a house. Millions of posters were printed, and hung in factories and other businesses, while newspaper ads were run throughout the country. This national housing direction propped up single-family residences, and the infrastructure to support them, while leaving pretty much everything else to languish.
Then there were the racial covenants, where individual properties were made unavailable to black people by deed restrictions, and which were often implimented on neighborhood scales.
Then there was the New-Deal, where the Civilian Conservation Corps abided by local segregation policies for its camps and worker housing, further entrenching local segregation.
Then there was the issue of cities targeting black and low-income areas overwhelmingly with zoning variances for industry and toxic waste disposal sites, exposing those persons to much higher quantities of toxins and pollutants.
Then there was public housing which eliminated mixed-income tenants, was often explicitly segregated, often resisted adding housing for black people, and, when they did add housing open to blacks, located overwhelmingly in already black and poor neighborhoods, effectively concentrating poverty and increasing segregation.
Then there were Interstate Highways, which were explicitly used for 'slum clearing' in many cities (including defining slum based on racial makeup rather than socioeconomic status of the persons living there), which were massive transportation subsidies to the very same segregated low-density suburbs already built with federal loan backing while public transportation languished, and which were actually used as physical barriers between parts of the city.
Frankly, the list kinda just keeps going, and so I'm not going to try and fit it all. Seriously, go read the Color of Law for more explicit details. My main point with all of these is that, when you combine the initial versions of the zoning codes, the opinions of the people who made them, and the wider reactions and policies that came after the codes proved not to 100% segregate black people from white people, it becomes clear that a major component of the zoning system was established not actually to prevent health or value issues, but rather to maintain the separation of races.

That was a lot of words...

Right, so here's the summary:
  1. After a decade of relative progress, the federal government abandons Reconstruction
  2. Almost immediately, communities, including previously inclusive ones, begin to force their black populations out in a renewed effort of segregation
  3. At first this is done outside of the law, but eventually cities get the idea to literally codify segregation through ordinances
  4. That codified segregation was struck down in the Supreme Court, so cities are forced to find a proxy method of enforcing segregation
  5. Cities used the separating of mixed-use developments and multi-family apartment buildings to create racial segregation through the proxy of economic segregation
  6. When this doesn't work 100%, the federal government established home mortgage support systems that directly excluded black people, preventing them from buying into single-family neighborhoods even if they could afford it
  7. There was a lot of other shit that happened to basically show that zoning was not the unbiased system it was pretending to be

Persistence of bad policy

Even though many of the explicitly racist policies have been removed or overturned, and what progress there has been in raising the wealth of black persons has helped with some racial mixing, it's clear that the proxy methods for discrimination persist to this day, with visible segregaition outcomes. Even when we do see integration, it is often in the form of wealthy white people moving into the limited new developments allowed in previously majority black areas (AKA 'Gentrification').
Today, Atlanta is still overwhelmingly zoned for low-density, single-family residential, even if some of those zones allow up to Accessory Dwelling Units (such density, much urban). Lot sizes in much of the city are still mandated to be quite large, and height planes still overly limit the number of stories buildings can be. What apartment buildings are allowed are constrained by cumbersome parking requirements (both codified and required by private lenders), and property setbacks. Mixed uses are often restrained on individual properties, requiring a specific zoning designation to be allowed. Even the city's plan for handling future growth still relegates nearly 75% of the area to relatively low-density housing as 'conservation' areas.
Metro-wide, not nearly as many homes are being built as were pre-recession. While home prices are increasing back to pre-recessionary levels, housing inventory in metro Atlanta is constrained – partially due to a lag in residential construction. Prior to the recession, it was not uncommon for residential building permits to exceed 5,000 per month (in some cases, reaching over 7,000). After May 2007, the region experienced a steep decline in residential building permits, which persisted into early 2012, when the region began seeing modest increases. Though residential permits have trended upward since 2012, they have yet to reach pre-recessional levels, hovering instead between 2,000 and 3,000 permits per month. Because of this, all counties in metro Atlanta are experiencing the a decline in housing inventory. One of the main summary points of that report was: "Home prices rising significantly – faster than wages – due in large part to dwindling supply" ARC Regional Snapshot: Affordable Housing While the metro itself has been pretty easy to build new housing within (atleast from 2000 to 2015) compared to other metros, the parts of the city and close-in suburbs tend to be the hardest within which to add new supplly (of the 10 hardest zipcodes to build, the top 3 were partially in the city, and another three were in or partly in the city).
Indeed, inflation-adjusted housing prices are rising quite quickly in the Atlanta Metro, even including months during this pandemic. Prices are looking to pass pre-2008 peak in 2023ish. Only, this time, vacancy rates for both renters and homeowners have been nearly at all-time lows for the metro (Source: Census Bureau). Many of the most intense price increases happening within the core city.
At the same time, affordable housing initiatives are proving to be far too few to handle the rising costs, with recent 'Inclusionary Zoning' rules, as well as the wider public housing program failing to close the need. We're talking programs considering themselves successful at a few thousand units, when the demand for affordable housing (let alone total housing) is in the hundreds of thousands.
The simple reality is that the racism of our past is leading to an over-all affordability crisis today. While, as usual, the hardest hit are African Americans, this affordability crisis has far reaching impacts across the demographic spectrum, including poor whites, and, particularly, poor Latino populations as well, locking out a wide variety of people who would otherwise want to live in the kinds of dense, walkable, urban areas the City of Atlanta uniquely offers within the metro.
Not only that, but the very types of low-density developments so widely codified across the city and nation do not generate enough economic activity to actually pay for the infrastructure needed to support them, propped up by piles of hidden subsidies, all resulting in cities being effectively bankrupt. (Here's another real-world example) Even some of the most 'wealthy' of towns are having to seriously reconsider their historic development patterns to close out financial gaps. In Atlanta, this leads to things like a massive backlog of maintenance issues that even recent bonds and tax increases can't fully handle. Again, policies of a racist past are hurting everyone today. Undoing those policies, and transitioning back to tried-and-true development styles would greatly help fix financial issues.
Additionally, as we work to overcome challenges with climate as a whole, we need to be seriously looking at our build environments, and just how much low-density development contributes to emissions compared to higher-density parts of the metro, and even the city itself. At the same time, moving away from cars would help reduce respiratory issues for poor and minority persons who are disproportionately affected by road-pollution, and generally moving to cleaner industries while cleaning up legacy pollution sites can help undo the years of inequality through industrial exposure..

Okay, so what do we do?

We need to have a hard discussion about zoning policies: their origins, their purposes, and their effects. We need to be prepared to recognize when policies were built on hate, and where they have lead to harm, just as much as we need to be ready to recognize that not every aspect of the zoning system is bad. We need to be willing to change, and be proactive about fixing the failings of previous generations. Ideally for the net benefit of all of us.
As part of this discussion, though, we are going to have to really, truly consider what 'character' of this city are valuable. What are tangible goals, what are the potential negative outcomes, and what can be done to mitigate those outcomes, ideally while actually adding to the 'character' of the city. Again, we needs to be willing to change here. Not everything wrapped under the broad umbrella of 'character' is actually worth keeping, particularly given how I could probably copy and paste some of the 'neighborhood character' arguments from the initial racial zoning codes into places like NextDoor or Facebook or even here on Reddit without anyone suspecting they are nearly 100 years old.

The End!

Holy shit! You made it to the end! Thanks for putting up with so, so many words... Here's a video of a little girl way too excited to get on a train as a reward.
submitted by killroy200 to Atlanta [link] [comments]

[Humans are Hiveminds] Pt 12: Conclusion

As this is a language of tastes and strands of DNA analog names cannot be written phonetically and are instead replaced with a human name or Earth analog in [brackets].
Span: The diameter of an average [Gaian] = 0.94mm, Kilospan = 0.94m.
Beat: The amount of time takes an average [Gaian] to move their cilia = 0.064s, kilobeat = 1min 4s
Work Cycle: 10 kilobeats. Equivalent to around 15 hours on their time scale
Day: Day length on [Gaia] = 28h 16min. Equivalent to around 3 months on their time scale.
Year: Year length on [Gaia] = 224.4 days = 264.3 Earth days.
[First] [Previous]
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[Faythe] was positively sick with excitement. She had hit a wall on the rescue mission front, [Alice] had been adamant about not revealing themselves further by sending a rescue team, and launching a mission in secret would have required sabotaging half of the station. Even if she thought she could get all the comms and scanners down she wasn’t crazy enough to actually try it. Widespread sabotage or ship hijacking was a dangerous proposition, and she doubted [Walter] and the others would want her to put the station in jeopardy for them.
After 3 solid tenth days of appeals, requests, and contemplating sneaking off while scouting, she had to admit a rescue mission wasn’t going to happen.
But that doesn’t matter now! She thought giddily as she rushed to the docks. They are still alive, and making contact!. Her hope was warring with caution and hope was currently winning. Like most of the station she had followed the messages from the Humans with rapt attention. She recognized [Eve]’s signaling right away and found it a bit funny she had been the main speaker, [Faythe] had always pegged her as the [quiet] sort. [Faythe] had attempted to remain cautiously optimistic as she read the debate, wary of the creatures playing some terrible trick, but frankly she was past caring. Her hope that her friend was still alive had been fading by the cycle, and now they were supposedly about to be picked up. There was no way in hell she was going to miss that.
Thank the depths [Grace] let us be the ones to go get them. I would be gnawing on the walls if I had to wait around and let some other team be the first to greet them again. She thought amusedly, wondering how the reunion was going to go. The “painful testing” [Eve] had briefly mentioned was concerning. She began wondering what kinds of terrible things someone might do while experimenting on supposedly subsentient drones and winced. Sometimes an active imagination is a bit of a curse. She thought as her mind was filled with scenes of detached and methodical disembowelment.
She was so caught up in her thoughts in fact that she didn’t notice the harpoon that flashed out behind her.
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[Sybil] [grinned] as she boarded the hastily readying recovery ship. She always like being a [Hephaestus]., being able to effortlessly push through crowds never got old, though annoyingly enough it seemed she would have to keep that to a minimum if she wanted to avoid notice, apparently it was out of character for her to be that rude.
How boring.
She managed to get abord the ship with no questions raised and made some small talk with a few of the ship crew she knew while she waited impatiently for that blasted representative to arrive. I hope she doesn’t pull the translators off into to a private meeting the moment we pick them up. She thought worriedly. She hoped to get at least one of them alone first, and had a somewhat believable reason to do so. She had been openly expressing concerned for her dear missing friend for tenthdays after all.
A few beats later and representative [Grace] finally arrived. The ship silently slipped free from its birth and flicked up and out of hanger into the lunar surface above. It hung there for a moment before the lunar dust below the ship briefly rippled as the stations great grav units bent the space around it, and in an instant they were elsewhere.
Flicking back into existence 28 thousand kilometers above Earth, the ship did not bother making orbit, it simply fell towards the night shrouded continent below, heading towards the outskirts of a vibrant patch of light. As the ship sped downwards [Sybil] settled in for a few cycles of waiting, running over her plans. The basics of [Mallory]’s plan is somewhat sound, but there are some holes that need patching She grumbled. They were tortured and the humans attempted to mindhack them into being saboteurs and they pretend it worked on them so they can escape. Simple enough. People might ask why they didn’t try and say any of this in their message though. This could be explained by the Humans having a better grasp of Standard Gaian then they let on. I could say they learned enough Gaian and Solarian that they planned out most of the things in those messages, including the supposedly stealthily side comments that [Eve] had added in Solarian, all to make it seem like the crew were being genuine and not just reading off a script, but really the Humans were following every word they said and would quickly notice if they went off script or tried to slip something behind their backs by sending in an language they didn’t know.
The crew didn’t bother risking that since they were trying to play along and pretend they had been fully brainwashed, since they knew the humans were planning on letting them go back to the fleet if they thought their program was working. Thus, they played along, following their script, not letting anything slip until they get safely back onto this ship and out of the humans clutches. Only then do they tell everyone what really happened. If I don’t manage to edit the memories on all of them, that could be explained as the brainwashing being successful on some of them. A suboptimal result, as it would place significant scrutiny on the psyche of the supposedly mindhacked crew, and I would have to justify the humans having somewhat effective mindhacking techniques. However it might still sow enough confusion and outrage to be effective, and by the time they are studied close enough that the story might unravel we will hopefully be long gone…. Yes, that could work.
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[Walter] strained his eyes peering skyward as the beats crawled by. He had asked the humans when the ship was arriving but they had said he would know more about that then they would. He grumbled at that and spent some time calculating the fastest time he expected a ship could be scrambled to collect them. If they jumped in right overhead and had a powered decent downwards it would probably take around 80 kilobeats for them to get here. The trip out to this field took around a quarter of that so they should be arriving in another 60 kilobeats or so. He thought tiredly. He sighed and settled in for 6 cycles of waiting.
The break did give him time to finish up some more of his signal pathway repairs and other projects but that was a minor consolation. The comms were mostly silent, as eventually the mix of tension and boredom sapped most of the energy of the group. The lull was broken near the end of the sixth cycle when [Eve] spotted a faint point of light in the sky that was rapidly growing brighter.
“Look! That’s them!” The group staggered to their feet and twisted their heads to point their eyes skyward. [Frank] [laughed] when he spotted it “Yeah that seems to be them all right, they must be coming in hot. I guess they aren’t bothering with stealth for this.” The point of light grew to become a bright red star in the sky above them, before suddenly not being in the sky at all.
With a thunderous crack a 300 span tall ship appeared before them, going from hypersonic flight to a dead stop in moments. Its hull still glowed a dull cherry red from the heat of its reentry.
“Going with shock and awe I guess.” [Walter] sent wryly. Normally seeing a skyscraper sized structure floating in midair was awe inspiring enough, however he imagined it’s scale was less effective on their current audience. The ship was barely larger than one of the creatures’ heads. Speed on the other hand…well, to the humans it must have looked like the ship appeared from nowhere.
“Ha yeah, that must have looked even more crazy to them…not that they saw it though, they are still looking at the sky. Oh! They are beginning to flinch now. Geez. That pilot is wasted on this crowd.” [Frank] sent mirthfully as the giants around them reacted with comical slowness.
“Oh wow, look at that one, it launched itself into the air! It’s going higher than the ship!” [Eve] [laughed] as one of the white robed figures belatedly hurled itself away from the loud noise. The human guards appeared significantly less amused, as several of them trained weapons on the ship.
“Hmm, maybe that was a bit to provocative.” [Walter] said the humor draining from his signal. The team watched anxiously as the giants continued to stare daggers at the slowly cooling ship hovering above the grass a few kilospan in front of them.
“Sorry that surprised you, that was just a sonic boom from a rapid decent.” [Walter] slowly spoke, trying to calm the situation. “That was a standard landing for this type of mission.” He added, lying through his gills. One of the guards glanced at the radio his voice came from, and then over at him.
“Well you should have warned us then.” It slowly groaned out.
“Sorry, didn’t think to mention it. Could you stop pointing your weapons at the ship though? I don’t think anyone is going to come out while you’re doing that.”
The guard made a wordless grunt which [Walter] figured wasn’t a happy sound.
“If it can move that fast then our guns are useless if we aren’t already pointing at it.”
“Their useless even if they are pointed at it. You can’t even see it move, much less activate your weapon in time.” [Eve] interjected.
“Then there is no harm in us continuing to point our guns at it then.” The guard ground out even slower and louder than normal, before pausing as it listened to something over its comm. “…yes sir.” It said at last before lowering its weapon slightly.
“I guess that’s as much as we can hope for.” [Walter] muttered to the rest of the team as they watched the rest of the guards begrudgingly point their weapons just far enough downwards as to not technically be pointing at the ship.
[Walter] was going to continue but paused as signal came from the ship.
“Team 9, this is representative [Grace] sending. Good job on diffusing the situation. I had figured a small demonstration of our capabilities was in order, but I did not expect it to startle them so thoroughly. With that in mind please inform the humans that this ship is unarmed and we will be opening a hanger door soon.”
[Walter] glanced up with relief. “Yes ser, we’ll begin translating immediately.”
——————————————————————
Director Townsend was not having a great day. Well, that was too harsh. So far it had been a truly remarkable day, he just wished he wasn’t the one in charge of organizing it.
This morning the main thing on his mind had been tightening the budget in preparation for next month’s funding review, now he was standing in the middle of a field while a tiny alien spaceship flaunted gravity and the sound barrier a few meters from his head. It was an interesting change of pace to say the least. He glanced around at the several technicians and researchers from the physics department that he had hastily assembled.
“Please tell me one of our cameras caught that.” He half whispered to one of the technicians.
“Umm, yes, I think camera 4 and 5 got good shots of the deceleration event.” the man said as he began pulling up clips on a nearby laptop. The field behind the lab was currently filled with a rough semicircle of high-speed cameras, range finders, microwave scanners and whatever other equipment the physicists had been able to carry outside, all pointing at the landing site. Townsend was currently standing a few meters back, next to a pair of folding tables where the snarl of cables from all the equipment was being fed to several laptops and a small server bank. He glanced over the mess and was glad there was no chance of rain tonight.
The aid confirmed they had several clear shots of the deceleration and Townsend turned his attention back to the ship now silently floating in the field before them. It was hovering in midair a few centimeters above the ground with no sign of effort, no sound or flames or gusts of wind. The grass below it was completely untouched.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.” He thought wryly, as the pain of having to give up the grav drive they were studying was freshly renewed.
Aside from the hovering the ship itself wasn’t that interesting to look at, though he did admit there was a certain elegant simplicity to it. It was a perfect ovoid, 30 or so centimeters tall and 15 wide. Its outer hull was smooth and unadorned. On the high-speed camera shot he had seen it arrive shinning like a mirror, but after coming to a halt its color had shifted, rapidly darkening into a pitch-black shade to better radiated heat. Some sort of color shifting meta material perhaps? I wonder how they managed to make something that complex reentry proof.
He tore his eyes away from the strange sight as he heard an argument breaking out by the wasp enclosure. He suddenly noticed how on edge the guard detail was. “Oh for…” He leaned over to one of the NSA agents that were hovering around him like buzzards and hissed “Tell your goons to stop pointing their guns at the ship! Do you want to start a diplomatic incident?”
The man opened his mouth to reply but appeared to think better of it. He sighed and spoke a few words into his earpiece. Townsend relaxed slightly as the guards lowered their weapons again. Stupid. Why did the NSA insist on bringing armed security for this? If shit hits the fan we’re screwed regardless of how many guns we have…
One of the crackling voices from the wasp cage briefly rose in volume, calling out “Attention, the ship is unarmed. A hatch will open on its side in 87 seconds. It is a door to a hangar. Don’t shoot it.” before falling back into inaudibility as it started talking to a technician next to its cage.
“I guess that’s my cue.” Townsend muttered as he began walking apprehensively over to the front of the crowd where the ship and captives were. He hoped the creatures were just going to leave quickly and not bother with ceremony, he really wasn’t looking forward to giving the apology speech he had hastily written on behalf of the lab.
Waving off the two guards that started shadowing him he made his way over to wasp tank and watched a touch nervously as a technician opened it. The creatures paused for a bit, eying the door like they were worried of some trick, before suddenly flinging themselves out and beginning to buzz around the grass and the tray of returned equipment.
“Uh, I hope everything is in order?” Townsend asked cautiously.
“No, quite disordered.” The radio hissed.
That’s not what I mea- His thought was cut off as the ship a couple of meters in front of them moved. A seam appeared on its smooth surface and pair of doors appeared, quickly sliding apart to reveal an opening around the size of a post-it note. He crouched down slightly to get a better look inside and saw the ‘hangar’ went back a handful of centimeters, with platforms and wasp sized indentations set into the floor and walls at regular intervals. The off-white material of the floor and walls was dotted with faintly glowing lights, seemly marking out paths or landing spots. He couldn’t make out much detail about them from where he was standing though. I doubt pressing my face up against their hull to get a closer look would go over well.
His eye was eventually drawn to faint bit of movement near the front of the opening, if he hadn’t already been peering closely at the spot he doubted he would have noticed. A speck around the size of a mite was on the floor by the entrance and was shifting slightly.
The radio behind him spoke up “That is the council representative.”
Townsend started slightly and saw that one of the wasps was hovering near his head, keeping an eye on him while the others were gathering their equipment. The radio continued “They wish to convey gratitude/relief that you are upholding your end of the agreement. They hope this interaction will improve trust and improve future interaction.”
Townsend relaxed slightly. “That is good to hear. We hope that this is the beginning of more open communication with your people. I and the rest of the facility apologize for the…trying nature of your capture. We hope we can put that period of secrecy and misunderstanding behind us.”
“The representative expresses agreement.”
Townsend nodded stiffly, noting that the creature didn’t mention if itself agreed. He wondered how much resentment they might be holding. He was painfully aware of the many cameras were trained on him right now and figured this might not be the best time for such delicate questions. Instead he stepped back a pace and spent a few awkward moments watching the wasps shuttling the grav drive and the dissected ‘drones’ into the ship. Thankfully they were quick and it seemed the politician was satisfied with his short exchange as it remained silent. Townsend noticed with interest that the wasps were having to tie down the equipment in the hanger as it was apparently in zero g. After a few seconds of fiddling the creatures seemed to be satisfied that all was in order and one of them turned to look out the door at Townsend and the rest of the lab crew behind him. “The ship will leave now. Thank you for releasing us.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Of course. Safe travels.” He replied, stepping back a few paces in case their departure was going to be as dramatic as their arrival. The doors of the ship snapped shut and hull rippled to a mirror shine once again. For a moment Townsend saw a distorted reflection of himself in the shimmering ovoid, but then with a flick of motion and hiss of wind it was gone. He whipped his head skyward and for an instant saw a faint glint of silver against the darkening sky, and a breath later everyone in the field heard the crack of a distant sonic boom.
He paused like that for a few moments, just looking upwards, before turning his gaze back to Earth and walking back to the lab, sagging with relief.
——————————————————————
When the door closed and the captain informed them that the ship was underway and that it seemed like nothing was being fired at them [Walter] finally let his last doubts melt away. “They did it. They actually let us go. We really are heading back.” He sent with his signal choked with relief.
“You’re just now accepting that?” [Eve] asked bemusedly as the rest of the team let out a ragged cheer and began disembarking from their crafts.
[Walter] [shrugged] “I didn’t want to get my hopes up to high.” He replied as he parked his craft in its familiar perch and disconnected. After scurrying down one of his crafts legs he felt his way blindly along the rungs of one of the paths set in the floor, the familiar routine of disembarking and the feeling of the solid pseudopodholds under his limbs provided a surprising amount of comfort.
After [Walter] and the rest of the team cycled through the hanger’s waterlock and took off their environmental suits they could finally smell again and were immediately hit with the jubilant greeting signals of a dozen or so of their old crewmates gathered in the tunnel outside. A very familiar signal reached him, followed swiftly after by a rush of water and a thud of impact.
“[Walter]!” [Faythe] sent jubilantly as she gripped him in a membrane stretching hug. “I’ve been worried sick about you guys! I tried to get [Alice] or a captain to rescue you sooner but nobody listened. I came really close to doing something stupid a few times. But you’re back now!”
[Walter] [laughed] and hugged her back. “I missed you too. Can you let up a bit though? You’re crushing my gills.”
The pressure dropped immediately and [Walter] stopped resembling a squeezed water balloon.
“Sorry. It’s just…how have you been?” She asked, her signal fading into a much more worried tone.
“…it was terrifying, painful, fascinating and boring. Often multiple at the same time. Being studied and experimented on by something that it can kill you with a twitch of its smallest limbs is…uniquely horrifying. Things got a bit better later, and I got kind of numb to the scale eventually, but let’s just say I’m glad to be back.”
“Experimented on? [Eve] mentioned they did some painful things to you guys at first, what happened?” [Faythe] asked worriedly.
[Walter] [shrugged] “I’d rather not relive it, at least not right now. I’m still in a wonderful mood at finally being back, I’ll process the trauma later, right now I just want to bask in the sense of normalcy of being on a familiar ship again.”
[Faythe] [smiled] “Want to go to the break room and play some [Fleets] to keep your mind off things then?”
“Yeah, that sounds nice.”
The rest of the group was similarly breaking up, most heading to the cafeteria to get the first bit of flavorful food they had in half a day. [Walter] and [Faythe] meanwhile headed over to one of the ship’s small lounge rooms. The ship was operating with minimal crew, [Faythe] bashfully admitted [Alice] probably only let her go on this trip to prevent anymore nagging, so the room was pleasantly empty.
“Nice, I think the game set is in the [scent designation] cabinet.” [Faythe] said as she entered.
[Walter] drifted over to the compartment in question and fished around inside. “Hmm, I’m not feeling it, are you sure it’s…AGH!”
——————————————————————
[Sybil] relaxed slightly as the little [Gaian] stopped twitching as the dart did its work. She would have to work fast, the lack of private quarters made time consuming modifications like this quite a risk. Keeping half her focus on checking the currents and scents coming through the doorway she deployed a few silencer filters to mop up the alarm scent her target had briefly given off. Clumsy she snarled to herself. She had hoped he would be more distractible.
She swam over to the body now drifting limply against the far wall and began the delicate task of deploying her editing equipment. Parting the tough but annoyingly stiff cell wall that covered her current body [Sybil] formed a tube of cell membrane and stabbed it into her target. Keeping a watch on the door she split off part of her attention to focus on the data stream from the equipment she began tunneling inside.
Feeling around the entrance site with a few sensor arrays she felt and tasted nothing alarming, there wasn’t any stray glue strands or chunks of mangled thought center drifting about, so the dart hadn’t failed catastrophically. She began quickly widening the hole and sending in the rest of her equipment; snipping proteins, grasping limbs and memory reading equipment were carried along a rapidly unfolding scaffolding network. The tips of this network forked and twisted deeper inside like thirsting roots, touching and tasting every structure they bumped into, following the scent left behind by the dart.
After a few moments she found the signal line which the dart had first latched onto, and she sent her editing equipment along the line after it, following the trail of sent markers the little machine had laid down as it rushed along the cable. Following the pathways that walker proteins use to carry sensory data back to a target’s main thought center was a trivially simple task, after all it had to be straight forward enough for a mindless molecule to follow. The pathway grew steadily as she made her way further inwards, different lines merging together to form a major signaling trunk. Just as the diameter of the cable started to indicate she was nearly upon her target however, several of the motor proteins dragging her editing equipment along suddenly reported that they had lost grip.
She felt around wildly and realized the pathway in front of her was gone. The sensory cable was sheared through, most likely via a hasty misuse of the pilot’s drone linking equipment. The fool had begun ripping his own mind apart, he would be a near vegetable at this point, assuming he hadn’t killed himself entirely in his thrashing. Damn it all. I don’t have time for this.
It was at this moment the data cables near her tunnel into the target reported a strong current heading towards them. She had brief moment of shock before her mind was suddenly jerked back outwards as her connection to her hacking equipment was severed.
Reeling from the violent sensory shift and the realization she had be tricked, she hastily tried to regain control. Turning her focus to the ragged remains of the data cables that had connected her to her equipment she felt through a few remaining sensing hairs that something large was rushing towards her. Something that smelled rather familiar.
Her dart.
Fuck
——————————————————————
[Walter] was mad.
No. That [word] was inadequate.
He was absolutely furious.
When he had felt something rushing towards him he had been confused. When he had felt it stab him he had been shocked. When he had felt it begin moving inside him, heading towards his mind, he had the icy realization that his friend was gone. That a nightmare from the brightest corners of the overworld was aboard this ship, a mind hacker.
He was suddenly deeply deeply glad for the redundances he had been adding to his sensory network. Most would consider what he had been doing to himself in his limited rest time over the last 3 tenthdays highly paranoid, but after his cycles long purgatory trapped in self-inflicted sensory deprivation he had decided that he wanted a few more sensory lines and better control of his mind weaving equipment. He didn’t want a repeat of that hell to be possible.
So when he felt the vile machine begin clawing its way deeper inside him he hastily powered on his weaving equipment and went to work. He rushed his nearest array towards where he felt the thing racing along, the dumb machine rapidly working its way along a major sensory pathway, its rapidly spinning corkscrew motor burrowing through the water briefly leaving a noticeable wake. A spindly limb protruded from the main body of the missile, loosely gripping the signal pathway it was swimming besides, feeling its way along as its swift passage tore walker proteins from their mountings.
The moment it felt the currents from the mass of scaffolding, sensors and snipping proteins [Walter] was hurling at it the machine reacted. It released its grip on [Walter]’s signal pathway and he lost touch of it, though a few sensor hairs felt its wake. It narrowly dodged a slice from a diamoniod cutting blade which tore the cable it was just swimming along in two. [Walter] winced but he had a spare. He reached out toward the wake he could feel as it hurled itself farther away. He tried to grab the craft, splaying his mind weaving array outwards, scaffolding and motor rods cast wide like a net, but the dart was far too quick and rapidly outpaced the now drag choked limb.
Fortunately, he had more than one weaving array, and by now 2 others had closed in, one of them dragging a food vacuole. He did not want to feel what kind of self-destruct poisons this thing might spit out. He forced himself to bring those limbs in slightly slower, giving time for their wakes to rapidly still in the viscous water.
The dart was quiet now, but he had a vague idea of where it was lurking. If it was moving at all it must be moving slowly as he felt no hint of movement from where he had last felt it. He carefully unfurled all three arrays, feeding them more scaffolding by cannibalizing nearby sections of his cytoskeleton, englobing the region where he was sure it could have gone.
At last he felt a twitch of movement. It seemed the next phase of the dart’s programming was to stealthily continue in the direction it had been heading before it was caught, as it had bumped into a section of net while slowly swimming in roughly the direction of the severed signal line. The moment it contacted the net it tried to swim way again, but [Walter] cut that section of netting free and whipped it forwards using a branch of scaffolding, and the flexible strands of motor protein in the net grabbed at the dart greedily. More lines and scaffolding piled on as he brought more sections of the net to bare, and he began hastily shuttling over the vacuole to contain it in case it might release poison in its death throws.
It did, sort of. As soon as its motor and cilia were completely jammed the missile ceased struggling. [Walter] was almost hoping it was over just before the nest of cables and struts enclosing the thing was wracked by an explosion. The missile had violently split itself apart to release its payload, a cloud of particles and tangling cables tailor made to jam mental machinery. [Walter] was exceeding glad that none of his thought centers had been breached, but the cloud would still be a problem out in his main body. They jammed signaling and motor proteins just as well, and he could feel the shredded remains of the net covering the dart go numb as messages from them ground to a halt.
He hastily ripping open the vacuole he had brought over and tried to englobe as much of the mess as possible. It cost him half of the remaining arrays in the area, but he managed to get most of it inside. There was still a few wisps of jamming particles floating about but he would just have to avoid them for now.
With the immediate threat taken care of he turned his focus outwards to what was wearing his friend. It was still by the door, waiting for him to succumb to the glue he supposed. Shit. [Faythe] is 3 times my mass and covered in armor, she could crush me like a [bug]. I’m faster than her but she is 4 span closer to the door then me. The only thing I can hope for is surprise.
With that in mind he gradually stilled the violent twitching his internal battle had caused and went limp. He felt currents close in as the thing swam over to him, and had to fight off the urge to move as it cornered him. Well. This is the exact opposite place you want to be in when fighting a mind hacker. He thought nervously as he prepared to run or wage an internal battle. He had no illusions of his repurposed civilian equipment being any match for black-market gear in a fair fight. Though, he did have some black market equipment at his disposal now.
He carefully began prepping the glue and debris filled vacuole for offense, hastily gathering vacuoles of a few volatile chemicals, digestive acids and respiration byproducts and merging them with the glue one or lashing them together so they wouldn’t mix just yet. He felt some ripples as the thing fiddled next to him and he knew he didn’t have much time, he hoped this would be enough of a distraction to dart away.
He began moving the whole mess with a remaining weaving array, trying to move just fast enough that he wasn’t noticeably twitching his outer membrane as the complex swam/crawled its was through his cytoskeleton, spiderlike limbs extending to grab at the web of struts and signal lines darting out like tentacles, disconnecting and reconnecting it to his signaling network as it moved. He wasn’t fast enough however, as he felt himself get stabbed a second time, and this time the hole was held open.
A nest of filaments and wires squirmed their way inside him. At first it was only faint movements that nearby sensors could barely feel, and then larger motions as other things were forced through the wound. [Walter] slowed the weaving array’s movements to a crawl. It is sending stuff over, so it opened up a chink in her cell wall, that’s the only place I can get a good hit in. he thought nervously, as he cautiously dragged his bulky payload closer.
Soon he felt the bulk of the machinery crawl deeper in and begin moving along where he knew the severed signal line was still drifting. He [smiled] Good, follow that dead end, nothing out of the ordinary happening over here. He continued along a fast as he dared, aware he had a time limit until the thing found the cut and realized something was up. That time limit ran out when he felt the hacker’s train of equipment stop with a lurch.
With the game up he abandoned stealth and closed the last few millispan to the wound site with several cutting tools thrust out on a pillar scaffolding, aiming for the data cables he knew must be trailing there. The cables were thick, it seemed they were actually tubes with the protein walkways and vibration transmission rods within their armored walls. They were still no match for the four diamoniod cutting clamps that slammed into them though. After a quarter beat of twisting and hacking the bundle of lines came apart entirely and he yanked that strut back with the data cables still caught in its grasp to delay any reconnection. He then shoved the mess of vacuoles into the breach.
The hacker for its part recovered quickly, lurching [Faythe]’s body backwards and severing the tunnel of membrane in an instant. But cell wall was not as malleable. [Walter] abandoned his finer scale controls and moved his body normally, pushing out a pseudopod with the mind weaving gear and vacuole bundle inside it and stabbed the limb into the slowly closing hole in [Faythe]’s cell wall. The last signal he sent the equipment before severing the pseudopod was to merge the little two explosive vacuoles he had stuck on the main one’s surface.
He didn’t pause to admire his handywork though as he had to immediately squirm out of the way of 5 armored limbs rushing at him. He got the impression that this second hug wouldn’t end if he asked politely. He managed to weave between three of them but the last two partly encircled him and began to squeeze.
He stretched his body out 3 times its normal length, trying to narrow himself down fast enough that he could slip out of its grip but it was fruitless. Another limb smacked him down and the three arms pinned him against the wall. He shoved off the wall and the thing had to dart a few limbs out to grip the ‘floor’ as it drifted backwards a touch. That was enough for him to flatten his body and slide under one of the limbs pinning him.
A current warned him of another incoming blow and he narrowly dodged a serrated limb, lightly scraping his membrane. The thing had gotten enough time to fashion something more than crude clubs, and now it no longer needed to play a futile game of punching an amorphous blob. Popping one was much easier. Fortunately, it seemed the glue was beginning to have an effect, as its movements were becoming decidedly more erratic.
He made a mad dash to the exit, and sprayed a series of data packets out in front of him towards the comm unit by the door. “Mind Hacker!“ He managed to [scream] before he was cut off by the thing launching itself off the back wall and barreling into him. They collided in midwater and [Walter] felt a massive gash in his side appear as its claw tore him open.
He crumpled inwards around the wound, doing his best to stanch the flood of cytoplasm and internal organs. His mind began to go hazy as the amount of [ATP analog] with in him dropped precipitously. He noticed the thing wasn’t doing much better though, it was struggling to use nearly half of its body, flailing awkwardly as it tried to keep him from drifting away.
Guess that glue trick wasn’t for nothing. He thought sleepily, as he felt a few weak blows and slashes rain down on him, doing little more than pushing him away from it. I hope they got the warning… was his last thought before his mind faded to scentlessness.
——————————————————————
He awoke again in a medical ward with a nurse and several guards in armored environmental suits.
“What happened?” He sent, feeling around wildly.
A guard caught his signal packet and fed it into a large comm unit floating beside them. They paused for a moment while the machine gargled softly, and when they finally replied it was a through the same isolated comm. In the dry and formal tone of someone reciting a recording the guard responded
“The crew of the [Stalking Sea Predator] received a signal from the body of [Walter] about a mind hacker attack taking place in the ship’s third lounge room. When they arrived they found the body of [Walter] unconscious from a grievous rupture and the body of [Faythe] in the process of attacking it. Initially the body of [Faythe] claimed to be run by the mind of [Faythe] and that the body of [Walter] contained the attacker, but upon requests that it submit to a medical exam it became hostile. It presently revealed that the mind of [Faythe] was not in control, but the attacker did claim it still had her in storage and could irreparably damage her at anytime. As we cannot currently rule out this claim, we are treating it as a hostage situation.”
“The attacker eventually submitted to being moved to the ship’s brig to begin negotiations for a reduced sentence and the body of [Walter] was stabilized for the remainder of the 8-cycle trip back to [Luna Station]. Upon arrival a medical team and a mental hazard team were dispatched to the ship to assess the situation and to awaken the mind inside the body of [Walter]. It is currently unknown how thoroughly the mind of [Walter] was modified while in the presence of the attacker. Does this entity claim to still be the mind of [Walter]?”
Oh light. Here we go. [Walter] thought worriedly as he prepared for several kilobeats of interrogation and medical scans. He didn’t feel any different and didn’t remember being modified, but the truly horrifying thing about mind hackers is that meant nothing.
Eventually the interrogators were reasonably satisfied that he had the same memories as the original [Walter], and that if his personality had been replaced or significantly altered he was doing a decent job of hiding it. Like always they couldn’t rule out subtle changes or hidden triggers though, so he would be under close watch and placed on a tenthdaily schedule of mandatory psych evaluations for the foreseeable future. They removed every mind weaving tool from his body, including the gear from the hacker (boy had that raised some concerns) before finally deeming him safe enough to leave the room while under armed supervision.
(Continues in comments)
submitted by Earthfall10 to HFY [link] [comments]

Oniro Kharacter Revamp

Bio: Control-
Shòu Jing was once a respected member of the Lin Kuei, taking the mantle of Grandmaster after achieving victory for the clan during a battle between the Tengu. Because of his superiority, fellow Lin Kuei members stood by Shòu as he initiated his plan to cyberize the clan, with the goal of converting the clan into bionic super soldiers. Before his plans were taken out however, Shòu was assassinated by his own son, Sektor. After arriving in the Netherrealm, Shòu was converted into a Shape-Shifting Wraith thanks to the help of Quan Chi. Breaking free from the sorcerers grasp, Shòu, now known as Oniro, has sought out his clan. While his dear boy bested him in the past, Oniro knows that the odds are all his this time around
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Gear:
Ninja Mask
Arm Klaws/Gauntlets
Chest Plate
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Gear Select Animations:
Ninja Mask- Oniro gets down in a feline-like stance, and suddenly he lunges at the camera, letting out a humanoid cougar sounds as the camera zooms onto his mask
Arm Klaws/Gauntlets- Oniro crosses his arms into an x to which the camera zooms onto his Klaw gauntlets, causing Oniro to activate the Klaws themself
Chest Plate- Oniro activates his Klaws and lets out a booming humanoid howl as the camera zooms onto his chest plate
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Character Select Animation:
Oniro morphs into a dragon and breathes a stream of thick flames towards the opponent before morphing back into his normal form and activating his klaws as he gets into his fighting stance
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Appearance:
Oniro appears as a 5'11 male with slick black/gray hair and olive skin. His eyes glow yellow and resemble that of a cats, and his chin is covered in scrubby hair that originates from his long side burns which drape down the sides of his face. He wields a pair of Arm Klaws on each hand as his signature weapon, and these can be customized to change the appearance of the blades, pattern on the gauntlet, ect. Oniro also wears a Chest plate that covers his whole pectoral region, with these being customizable to change in designs that resemble various animals, such as bears, lions, ect. Oniro has the ability to morph into almost every animal, and each time he does so they appear with white skin/fur and glowing blue eyes
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Skins:
Wild Wraith- Based off of my redesign
Trophy Hunter- A more tribal appearance, Oniro wears the pelt of a white tiger around his neck, along with a open vest that has fur outlining the arm holes
Legendary Grandmaster- An outfit resembling that of the Grandmaster from Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, except the default color is white while Red is a shader option
Untamed Warrior- Oniro is shirtless, wearing a handfull of jewlery around his neck, his back and waste are covered in scratch marks and his hair is undone, not being wrapped in a pony tail
Super Ninja- A Cyberized version of Oniro, his arms appear metallic along with his eyes glowing plain yellow, and he wears a vest-like tank top that has wires outlining it, he also wears a pair of baggy pants with black and silver cheetah dots on them
Klassic- Based off of his defenders of the realm appearance, practically a white UMK3 pallet swap except he has no head wrap, keeping his hair visible
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Gameplay: Oniro is a fast Rushdown fighter who fights great when close with his opponent. With a large variety of quick and hard hitting specials and combos, Oniro is capable of easily mixing up his opponent. Using his Shape-Shifting Oniro is capable of transforming into some animals that can shoot projectiles, allowing him to keep his distance if needed
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Special Moves:
Default-
Panther Pounce- Oniro morphs into a Panther and lunges onto the opponent, bringing them to the ground and clawing at their face before he morphs back into his normal form. Meter Burning adds a second sequence in which Oniro in panther form drags his claws all the way down the opponents body before hopping off of them
Talon Gouge- Oniro morphs into an Eagle and flies at the opponents face, impaling their eyes (Krushing Blow if this counters a projectile) with his talons on impact. Meter Burning adds a second sequence in which Oniro in eagle form stays latched onto the opponent by their eyes and takes them into the air, flying them off screen until we hear their distant screams and see them suddenly fall to the ground with Oniro dropping down close behind in normal form
Klaw Dash- Oniro dashes past the opponent at a very fast speed with his Klaws extended, slashing them and causing them to stumble onto the ground (his klaws are also followed by glowing white scratch marks). Meter Burning has Oniro dash back at the opponent after the first one, scratching them with his Klaws once more
​
Kustom-
Mucus Slam- Oniro morphs into a giant Bull Frog and grabs hold of the opponent with his tongue, pulling them to the ground. Meter Burning has Oniro in Frog form instead pull the opponent into his mouth in which he spits them out shortly after, causing the opponent to be covered in mucus that disables their ability to jump and dash for 3 seconds. 2 slots
Great White-Port- Oniro morphs into a Great White Shark and dives into a puddle of water beneath him, only to re-submerge from another water puddle behind the opponent. Meter Burning has Oniro in Shark form submerge from a puddle directly underneath the opponent in which he grabs hold of them with his mouth, biting down onto them (Krushing Blow if this move missed the previous attempt) and dragging them into the water portal only to spit them out of another one on the other side of the screen. 1 slot
Shock Hazard- Oniro morphs into a Jelly Fish and plants himself onto the ground, serving as a floor hazard that shocks the opponent if they step onto him. No Meter Burn but this move lasts for 5 seconds (if stepped on, Oniro morphs back into his normal form and the opponent is stunned). 1 slot
Viper Lunge- Oniro morphs into a large Viper and lunges onto the opponent, biting down onto their neck before slithering back and morphing into his normal form. Meter Burning has Oniro in snake form inject venom into the opponent (Krushing Blow if This move counters a high) after biting their neck, dealing damage over time. 2 slots
Bear Hug- Oniro morphs into a Grizzly Bear and wraps his large arms around the opponent, lifting them off of the ground and squeezing them until we hear a crack sound come from their spine (Krushing Blow if this move was used to finish the previous round). Meter Burning adds a ending sequence in which Oniro in bear form throws the opponent onto the ground after breaking their back, following up with jumping onto them and mauling their neck region before getting off and morphing back into his normal form. 1 slot
Ape Pound- Oniro morphs into a Silver Back Gorilla and pounds onto the ground, sending a wave of debris towards the opponent. Meter Burning has the pound instead cause a series of small tremors to simultaneously occur through a 8 second span, with these tremors briefly stunning the opponent if they are grounded when they occur. 2 slots
Panda Roll- Oniro morphs into a Panda and curls into a ball, rolling towards the opponent and crushing them if the move connects. Meter Burning has the roll instead launch the opponent into the air, allowing for combo potential. 1 slot
Hump Back Flop- Oniro morphs into a Hump Back Whale that flops down onto the fightline, crushing the opponent if they are under it. Meter Burning has Oniro in Whale form spray water from his air hole afterwards, covering a section of the fightline in water that the opponent can slip on. 1 slot
Dragon Breath- Oniro morphs into a Dragon and spews blue flames from his mouth. Meter Burning has Oniro in dragon form walk forward while spewing the flames. 1 slot
Bucked- Oniro morphs into a Bull and charges at the opponent, launching them into the air with his horns if the move connects. Meter Burning has Oniro in Bull form impale the opponent on his horns, following up with slamming them onto the ground, removing them from the horns. 2 slots
Howler Stance- Oniro lunges forward with his Klaws extended, impaling the opponent on impact. He then morphs his head into that of a wolves, letting out a booming howl before biting out a chunk of the opponents neck. Meter Burning adds an ending sequence in which after the neck bite, Oniro morphs his head back to normal and un-impales the opponent, causing them to fall to the ground in which he then jams one set of Klaws into the opponents face (Krushing Blow if this is performed while Oniro's Fatal Blow is on cool down), twisting them before removing them, ending the move. 1 slot
Gut Clamp- Oniro activates one set of his Klaws, shoving them through one side of the opponents head which puts them to their knees. He then morphs his other arm into a Crab Klaw, following up with clamping down onto the opponents gut area and pulling a chunk of flesh away from it (Krushing Blow if Oniro hasn't blocked for 5 seconds prior to performing this move) before removing his Klaws from their head, letting them go. Meter Burning has Oniro grab hold of the opponents waist with his Crab Klaw, following up by twisting it which turns their torso around in a 3-60. 1 slot
​
Throws:
Eye Of The Tiger (Forward)- Oniro grabs the opponent and sticks one set of his Klaws into their gut. As they moan in pain, Oniro then removes the klaws and kicks the opponent to the ground, following up with morphing into a Tiger and lunging atop the opponent, clawing into their face and chest before hopping off and morphing back into his normal form
Hippo Destruct-amus (Back)- Oniro grabs the opponent and sticks one set of his Klaws into the their waist and one set into the side of their head, following up by slamming them behind his back. Oniro then morphs into a Hippopotamus and stomps onto the opponents crotch (Krushing Blow if the opponent failed to escape during the previous throw) before morphing back into his normal form
​
Tournament Variations:
V1: Beast Mode- Adds Ape Pound and Bear Hug
V2: Wild Side- Adds Howler Stance, Panda Roll and Bucked
V3: Gone Feral- Adds Viper Lunge and Dragon Breath
​
Cinematics:
Intros-
Prey Stalker- Oniro is seen in wolf form standing upon a cliff top, staring down as his eyes glow. He then lets out a booming howl and hops down, causing the camera to cut to the arena in which we see Oniro land down from above, now in his normal form
Hostile Confrontation- Oniro is seen holding up to un-cyberized Lin Kuei members on the blades of his Klaws. The clansmen moan in pain before Oniro releases them from the Klaws, letting their bodies fall to the ground as he walks forward
Large And In Charge- Oniro charges at the camera in the form of a ginormous Rhinoceros. He appears to be coming directly for the camera until he suddenly stops, skidding in his tracks and smoothly morphing back into his human form in which he performs and lands a back flip, landing in a fighting stance
True Form- Oniro's arms are seen covered in fur, with hands being paws. We then see Oniro's face, smiling and chuckling as his arms lose the fur and morph back to normal, in which Oniro activates his arm klaws and walks forward
​
Mid Fight Taunts-
Prowler- Oniro lets out a booming howl
Cleaning Day- Oniro wipes blood from his Klaws
Vicious Nature- Oniro gets down on all fours in a feline-like position
​
End Of Round Taunts-
Alpha Male- Oniro morphs into a Silver Back Gorilla and pounds on his chest before morphing back into his normal form
Moon Watcher- Oniro morphs into a wolf and howls into the air before morphing back into his normal form
Itch To Scratch- Oniro morphs his hand into that of a bears and begins scratching his back with his paw before morphing his hand back to normal
Monkey Business- Oniro morphs into a Chimpanzee and begins eating a banana, throwing the peel towards the opponent after he finishes eating it
Live N Laugh- Oniro morphs into a Hyena and rolls onto his back, bursting out in laughter before morphing back into his normal form
Stampede Ready- Oniro morphs into a Wilda Beast and scrapes his hooves while huffing, before morphing back into his normal form
Eagle Eye- Oniro morphs into an Eagle and glides away from the opponent before morphing back into his normal form
Catch Of The Day- Oniro morphs into a Great White Shark and dives into a pool of water, only to re-submerge from another one further away, now in human form
Snails Pace- Oniro morphs into a ginormous Snail and begins slowly slugging away from the opponent until he suddenly morphs back to normal, stomping away angrily
Octo-Run- Oniro morphs into a large Octopus and begins walking away using his tentacles, morphing back to normal once he reached a good distance
​
Brutality End Poses-
Free For All- Oniro morphs into a Vulture and flies over to the opponents corpse. He then takes part in eating them, picking at their flesh with his beak
After Taste- Oniro activates one set of his Klaws and puts them up to his face. He then morphs his head into that of a Tigers and begins licking blood from the blades
Slithering By- Oniro morphs into a Viper and coils himself up, hissing at the camera
Inner Monster- Oniro morphs one of his arms into that of a Panther's. He then begins examining the now clawed and fur covered arm with a smile on his face
Hunting Season- Oniro morphs into a Grizzly Bear and runs towards the opponent's corpse, grabbing hold of the body with his mouth and carrying it off screen as we hear the sounds of him eating
​
Outros-
Wild Kard- Oniro activates his Arm Klaws and crosses them in front of his chest. Taking a step back, Oniro braces himself before scrapping the Klaws together and flinging them outwards, sending out a spray of glowing sparks (Still Shot)
Untamed Outburst- Oniro lunges back and suddenly morphs into a Dragon. Now in this form, Oniro then steps further back and spreads out his wings. He then braces himself, before suddenly spewing out a stream of flames right at the screen (Still Shot)
Forced Submission- Two Cyber Lin Kuei Members are seen walking behind the opponent. They grab hold of them, and begin dragging them off into the distance. The camera then switches POV to show Oniro with a smile on his face and his arms behind his back, watching as the opponent is cyberized (Still Shot)
Feline Frenzy- Oniro morphs into a Panther and slams his paws onto the ground. Letting his Klaws come out, Oniro drags his paws across the ground, creating scratch marks and sparks. He then lunges towards the camera, letting out a screeching hiss (Still Shot)
​
Dialogue:
Intro Dialogue (Examples)-
Oniro- The Lin Kuei is the master of your fate. Not you
Sub Zero- I refuse to be a slave to your schemes Oniro
Oniro- You convert....or die
​
Oniro- Is it true that you bested Sektor in kombat?
Noob Saibot- I had challenged him for position of Grandmaster
Oniro- My darling boy is even more pathetic then I thought
​
Frost- You were also a Cryomancer?
Oniro- Before death, my skills were unrivaled
Frost- Time to meet your successor "Grandmaster"
​
Kotal Kahn- You are keen to the art of Shape-Shifting?
Oniro- Keen? I have an entire Menagerie at my disposal
Kotal Khan- Perhaps your expertise could be of use
​
Noob Saibot- Quan Chi is responsible for your revival?
Oniro- He made me stronger than I ever was as a Mortal
Noob Saibot- Let us see if Shape-Shifting rivals the strength of darkness
​
Oniro- Your friend Tomas was mine
Sub Zero- What of him Oniro?!
Oniro- Nothing but a head on the shelves of Quan Chi's Fortress
​
Oniro- To think my clan dare make peace with Shirai Ryu scum!
Scorpion- By being broken from your Tyranny, they understand that vengeance is a losing battle
Oniro- Without my leadership the Lin Kuei are as good as dead
​
Shang Tsung- Quan Chi is no longer here to protect you Shòu
Oniro- I would've finished him myself if Hanzo hadn't taken action
Shang Tsung- You are all talk scoundrel
​
Oniro- Care to put those blades to the test Baraka?
Baraka- I'll wear a pelt made from your flesh!
Oniro- You are all teeth. No sense
​
Mid Fight Dialogue-
"You are mine!", "Pathetic", "*Growls*", "Your fate is sealed"
​
End Of Round Dialogue-
"Persistence will be your downfall", "Submit or die", "You face the Grandmaster!", "Your unskilled kombat amuses me", "You disappoint me"
​
End Of Brutality Dialogue-
"This is your end", "My clan lives on", "Defiance led you here", "You're now a waste of parts", "You've been finished", "*Laughs*
​
Johhny Cage Announcer Nick Names-
Wild Thang
Nice Beard!
Mr. Hands
Keep that thing in a cage!
​
Fatal Blow:
Morphing Time-
The Fatal Blow is triggered when Oniro lunges onto the opponent, digging his Arm Klaws into their shoulders. The Fatal Blow begins with Oniro removing the Klaws from the opponents shoulders and placing one set into the opponents gut. As they groan in pain, Oniro stabs the other set underneath the opponents chin, causing them re-submerge from the top of the opponents head (Slow Mo). Removing the Klaws once more, the opponent then stumbles back. As the opponent attempts to recollect themselves, Oniro moprhs into a Panther and tackles the opponent to the ground. He then claws at their face, cutting it a total of 4 times before biting and tearing away a decent amount of flesh from the opponents face (Slow Mo). Oniro in Panther form then hops off of the opponent, morphing back into human form with a back flip transition. Instead of landing on the ground, Oniro morphs into a Dragon mid air. With the opponent still on the ground, Oniro flies right at them, spewing a thick stream of flames that covers the opponent and the screen in fire (Slow Mo). Total Hits: 15
​
Finishers:
Fatalities-
Inside Out (Close)- Oniro activates one set of his Arm Klaws and jumps into the air. He then comes back down at a fast speed, with his Klawed Arm going right down the opponents throat. We hear their internal organ's get skewered, and Oniro slowly pulls his arm out. Once fully submerged, Oniro pulls out his Klaws along with a clump of the opponents guts stuck on the blades. As they cough up blood, Oniro flings the guts to the side and morphs into a Silver Back Gorilla. He then charges at the opponent, grabbing them by the waist and sticking his arm down their throat. Using his Gorilla strength, Oniro this time grabs a hold of bone, and we hear a cracking noise as Oniro in Gorilla form suddenly pulls out the opponents entire skeleton from their mouth (Still Shot)
Raptor Method (Mid)- Oniro performs a Klaw Dash on the opponent that guts them, spilling out entrails. As they groan in pain, Oniro, now behind them, morphs into an Eagle. He then flies full speed towards the opponent, latching onto them with his talons and taking them up into the air. Once at a decently high height, Oniro drops the opponent. As they begin free falling, Oniro quickly lands himself and starts morphing once more. We see from the opponents POV that they are getting closer and closer to the ground, and it seems like they might die from the fall. Just then the camera switches to a side view, and we see the opponent nearly hit the ground until they are completely ran through by Oniro in Rhino form who from the speed breaks the opponent completely in half, spraying blood and internal organs out in both directions (Still Shot)
​
Brutalities-
The Klassic (final hit must come from Down Y)- Oniro uppercuts the opponents head off using his Arm Klaws
See-Through (final hit must come from Forward Throw, must press forward, forward, forward)- Oniro grabs the opponent and jams one set of his Klaws into their gut. As they groan in pain, Oniro removes the Klaw only to stab them in the gut once more. He repeatedly stabs them, gaining speed each time, until his full hand goes through the opponents torso, in which he removes the Klaw, causing the opponent to fall dead in two halves
Under Pressure (final hit must come from Back Throw)- Oniro grabs the opponent and sticks one set of his Klaws into the their waist and one set into the side of their head, following up by slamming them behind his back. Oniro then morphs into a Hippopotamus and stomps onto the opponents stomach, causing them to violently puke up a ball of blood and organs
Up Up And Away (final hit must come from Amplified Talon Gouge, must press up, up, up)- Oniro morphs into an Eagle and flies at the opponents face, impaling their eyes. Once latched onto them, Oniro then flies up, taking the opponent into the sky. Once off screen, we hear the squacking of Oniro and the screams of the opponent before their decapitated corpse falls down, with their eyeless head following soon after
Three's a Charm (final hit must come from Klaw Dash, must press y and x rapidly)- Oniro dashes past the opponent at a very fast speed with his Klaws extended, slashing them and causing them to spin a circle. While seemingly unharmed, the opponent stumbles around for a moment before falling apart into 3 perfectly cut slices
Down Under (final hit must come from Great White-Port, must have Fatal Blow available and must not have lost a round)- Oniro morphs into a Great White Shark and dives into a puddle of water beneath him, only to re-submerge from another water puddle directly underneath the opponent in which he grabs hold of them with his teeth, dragging them down into the puddle. We see the pool of water bubble and foam, and suddenly the water turns blood red as the opponents chewed up body is spit out of it
Breaking Point (final hit must come from Bear Hug, must have performed a Mercy)- Oniro morphs into a Grizzly Bear and wraps his large arms around the opponent, lifting them off of the ground and squeezing them until we hear a crack sound come from their spine. He continues hugging them, squeezing the opponent even more until their upper half suddenly bursts off of their bottom half
Beached (final hit must come from Hump Back Flop, must press back, back, back)- Oniro morphs into a Hump Back Whale that flops down onto the fightline, crushing the opponent in burst of organ matter and blood. After morphing back to his normal form, we see the opponents crushed and flattened body
Stir-Fried (final hit must come from Amplified Dragon Breath)- Oniro morphs into a Dragon and walks forward while spewing a thick stream of blue flames from his mouth. Because of the fire, the opponent is burned alive, being cooked to a crisp. After the burning, Oniro in Dragon form engulfs the opponent into his mouth, chewing on their charred body and moments later burping out their skeleton
Nice Handful (final hit must come from Gut Clamp, must have performed Gut Clamp a total of 3 times during the match)- Oniro activates one set of his Klaws, shoving them through one side of the opponents head which puts them to their knees. He then morphs his other arm into a Crab Klaw, following up with clamping down onto the opponents gut area and pulling out a chunk of internal organs that creates a huge crater within the opponents stomach, causing them to drop dead
​
Friendship-
Transforming Wonder- The camera cuts to show Oniro morphing into a Dolphin and diving into a pool. The camera pans out to show that the pool is in a ginormous stadium occupied by Cyber Lin Kuei members, all of whom are cheering for Oniro. A ball is seen suspended by a cord and while the water's still at first, Oniro in dolphin form suddenly submerges, gliding to the ball and smacking it from the cord with his tail. As the stadium cheers, Oniro continues slapping and tossing the ball around, making Dolphin noises and staying in that form until you press continue
​
Tower Ending:
Kronika stood by, taking Sektor's side as he ruled my clan, knowing very well what he did to me. The titan paid her debt with her life, and Hour Glass. With the power of time at my disposal, I truly become an unrivaled force. Taking back my rightful leadership of the Lin Kuei, my plan of Cyberization took full swing. Using a concoction of my DNA and Bionic Enhancements, I created a breed of Shapeshifting Cyborgs. The Lin Kuei were finally what I had always envisioned. The Red Dragon, Tengu. All trembled in fear at the site of my Clan. We dominated battles, conquered territory. My superiority had finally been regained....and as for my son (laughs). Sektor will serve the rest of his time as a shell of what he used to be. For the rest of eternity he will be forced to bear witness at the clan he betrayed his own father to control. While I wished to rule it together, he will now forever watch as I do it all myself
submitted by videomadnezzyt to MKcharacterConcepts [link] [comments]

Star Citizen UNOFFICIAL Patchnotes Fleetweek Edition

This is part 1 of 2 (Second part regarding Paints/Theatres of War)
UPDATE - IMAGES BY RICEMAIDEN

Fleetweek

Here's some hot information about the event we've waited all month for. Some additional info before we begin... CIG has teased the fact that every ship on Holodisplay is one in active development. Keep that in mind when reading the ships we have listed in Holodisplays.

Convention Halls

Vehicle Hall: RSI, Tumbril, Origin, Anvil

Ship Hall: RSI, Origin

Ship Hall: Aegis Dynamics

Ship Hall: Anvil Aerospace

Ship Hall: Drake DefenseCon

Ship Hall: Support & Logistics

999 Displays

THE WRECKLESS - A poem by former 999th Squadron pilot Lt. Ralph Kinoi
We push boundaries.
To test the limits of what we can do.
To say the impossible can not define us.
To move us all beyond where we thought we could go.
To be the first.
The fastest.
The best.

It is not easy.
Luck is as important as skill.
Failure as important as success.
But we get better.
And we learn.
And we get back up and try again.
And we carry on when others can’t.
We carry on so others can.

Real Testimonials on UEEN Service

Starman, UEES Drago
"To me, it was never really a choice. I know a lot of people grapple with the decision, but honestly, it never crossed my mind. I mean, both my parents got their Citizenship from military service, so maybe that was a factor. There was a moment though when I touched down on the tarmac, I was suddenly seized with this fear that I wasn’t going to be able to be able to make the cut. That was the scariest thing to me; being afraid that I was going to let down my parents and all the people who proudly wore the uniform before me. Thankfully, the Navy isn’t about me. My brothers and sisters built me up and made me the starman that I am today."
Lieutenant JG, UEES Cestus
"Growing up, I never really thought that I would be military. I was a rambunctious kid, to put it mildly. Wasn’t great with authority. To be honest, I was on a bad road and by all accounts probably would’ve stayed on it, until a Judge Advocate set me straight instead of sending me to jail. Once I was in, I managed to find the one thing that had been eluding me all my life: a family."
Leading Starman, UEES Croshaw
“I’m sure you’re talking to a lot of people who joined up wanting to be Aria Reilly or Cal Mason or something, but me? I wanted to learn. To me, all the wonder of the universe was found in nuts and bolts, in shaving fuel efficiency by three percent. That was my rush. If you want to get your hands on the latest in cutting edge technology and work with some of the greatest minds, the UEE Navy is the place to go.”
Lieutenant JG, 128th Squadron
“I’ll just come right out and say it, the second after I signed up, it felt like I got hit by a ship because it was real now. Was I going to have to fight a Vanduul face-to-face? Hell, was I even going to make it through boot? I mean, I struggled to do a pull-up when I was a kid. What the hell was I thinking? Maybe I could try to get out of it. All these thoughts just ambushed me from that moment up to my Invictus. There was this Lieutenant monitoring all the recruits who must’ve seen how terrified I was. I was fumbling with the seat belt when suddenly the Lieutenant was right in front of me. All he said was “Calm down.” I don’t know. It was part consolation, mostly order, but whatever magic he used. It worked. I wasn’t totally calm when I hit my forge, but I found out everybody was freaking out too. That was our first bond.”

Ship Holodisplays

Ship Description
Drake Interplanetary Vulture There’s no denying it - winning can be messy business. When your fleet of Drake ships is done laying waste to the latest batch of outlaws who were foolhardy enough to tangle with you and your people, there’s going to be no shortage of wreckage to wade through. That’s where the Vulture comes in. No need to leave behind a veritable junkyard around your station or homestead for criminals to use as cover next time they attack; the Vulture can help you clean it all up and then some. Forget just clearing the way, salvage pays. What better way to defend yourself than to have the broken ships of your enemies pay for your next round of ammunition? Sounds like a fitting end to us.
RSI Constellation Taurus Invictus Launch Week celebrates the Navy’s best and brightest, but no celebration would be complete without mention of the hardworking crews aboard the UEE Merchant Navy fleet. These civilian-owned vessels are a vital part of the military supply chain and work tirelessly to ensure that those serving along the frontlines have the provisions they need. For years, the Merchant Navy has relied upon the RSI Constellation Taurus to successfully complete those dangerous runs through hostile territory. With a streamlined chassis that can handle more cargo than any other Constellation variant, the Taurus allows each run to be maximized for efficiency. However, it still provides security above many similar freighters thanks to its utilization of defensive technology developed by RSI for its more military focused ships. One Merchant Navy Taurus, the Aliwent, is a particularly welcome sight for the brave starmen serving at listening posts in Kellog, delivering supplies and much needed care packages. It’s no wonder that many captains are eagerly waiting for the 2951 Taurus to be brought into service.
Aegis Dynamics Redeemer There are few ships that are awaiting deployment as eagerly as the Aegis Dynamics Redeemer. After being featured at two previous Invictus Launch Weeks, the Navy is closer than ever to utilizing the full potential of this cutting-edge gunship. The UEEN has worked closely with Aegis to perfect the Redeemer during this time to ensure that it will meet and exceed all the operational needs of such an advanced vessel. From the early reports arriving from various test squadrons, including the famous 999, the Redeemer is going to be worth the wait. Designed to carry significant cargo and troops, the Redeemer will provide support in a variety of combat situations and logistical operations. The state-of-the-art technology employed by Aegis should make the craft one of the easiest to maintain to operational-effective standards. Additionally, the boarding hatch will permit faster transitions in situ while the VectorLock thruster design will allow for optimal maneuvering via its twin nacelles. High Command is eager to see what the Redeemer can do once it finds its way into the hands of enthusiastic pilots across the Naval fleet.
RSI Polaris One of the newest capital ships serving in the fleet, the Polaris-class corvette entered service in 2946 and has already made a big impact on the Empire. Thanks to the vessel's well-balanced mix of power and speed, it has enhanced the Navy’s overall effectiveness in a wide variety of scenarios, from delivering Humanitarian aid to tactical operations. Under the command of Captain Lucia Franco, the UEES Polaris has shown how essential the corvette’s adaptability is to the ongoing war effort. Recently of note, the Polaris and her crew were on extended patrol in Tayac when they successfully halted an attempted incursion by a Vanduul scouting party, potentially deterring further enemy action in that sector for the foreseeable future. Cpt. Franco attributed the vessel’s above-average quality of life standards to the combat effectiveness of her starmen.
Tumbril Nova First utilized in the Second Tevarin War, the Nova tank has made a triumphant return to battle in 2948 thanks to efforts of the recently reformed manufacturer Tumbril. Military Historians still recount the original Nova’s performance at the 2605 Battle of Koren Pass where three Nova tanks held off an entire Tevarin strike team for over sixteen hours. While much credit is due to the brave soldiers who fought so valiantly, it is hard to deny that the Nova’s resilience and ferocity allowed for the UEE to prevail that day. Though they are most commonly found in the Army’s arsenal, you’ll find that Nova tanks are playing a pivotal role in the Navy’s combat operations, protecting tactical encampments across the Vanduul front. Its mobility means that it can quickly and effectively redeploy to provide combat support where needed and its resistance to extreme temperatures mean that the Nova can be posted in any number of environments. Knowing they’re protected by the Nova’s battery of arms allows pilots and starmen to work more effectively and creates a safer Empire.
Aegis Dynamics Nautilus First introduced nearly four centuries ago, Aegis Dynamics’ Nautilus has made an indelible mark upon the Navy’s long and proud history, but it is just as needed today as when it was introduced during the First Tevarin War. The Nautilus has played a crucial role in the ongoing Vanduul War, using its minelaying capabilities to set up perimeter defenses and define the shape of the conflict. One such example is the mission known as the ‘Hellkite Run’ that was part of Operation Mandrake in the Oberon system. Flown by sapper specialists Squadron 761, aka the Alley Vipers, Nautilus minelayers were used to severely limit the Vanduul escape options. Working tirelessly while the main fleet engaged with enemy forces, they were able to deploy pockets of mines and weapon platforms with such precision that an entire Vanduul squadron was eliminated before they could escape the system to cause additional harm.
Crusader Industries Mercury Good intel is the key to victory. That’s why the UEE Navy is seeking to increase the presence of the Crusader Industries Mercury Star Runner in its fleet this year. Already battle proven on several classified missions, the Mercury has delivered key strategic updates to our forces along the front, including Admiral Bishop himself, that have been the key to multiple hard-earned victories. Especially in “red systems” where comm networks may be non-existent, the Mercury’s ability to carry classified encrypted information has been a boon time and again. Additionally, thanks to Crusader’s inclusion of a programmable kill switch and optimized security configurations, there is a significantly reduced chance of highly classified information falling into enemy hands. Pair that with the Mercury’s speed, precision, and cutting-edge countermeasures, it becomes easy to see why Navy Intelligence Officers have come to rely on this star runner for ensuring that information is delivered on time and intact.
Drake Interplanetary Kraken The Kraken has been released and that means one thing, there’s no putting it back. This attack carrier has changed the way militias operate forever and, when it comes to personal defense, there’s one thing you never want to be - falling behind. A protector and a beacon of freedom in an often-cruel universe, Drake Interplanetary has made this capital-class ship available to all those tasked with safekeeping those unable to protect themselves. The Kraken is both a sanctuary and a self-contained war machine ready to take on the most daunting adversaries.
Crusader Industries Hercules The first active-duty starlifter flight was formed in May 2821, when Crusader Industries delivered a dozen Hercules ships during that year’s Invictus Launch Week. Capable of deploying armored vehicles in the midst of heavy enemy fire, the Hercules proved invaluable to battlefield operations. This was apparent on March 2824, when UEE armed forces were called upon to put down a heavily armed group of pirate forces located on a frontier world near the Xi’an border. Two Hercules squadrons, escorted by deep space support fighters, quietly deployed troops and an armored column which defeated the stunned criminal forces in short order. The battle, previously thought to be a particularly hazardous prospect, was won with no losses of UEE personnel and the resulting capture of information would lead directly to the destruction of two pirate outposts and a small capital ship. With the recent reintroduction of the Tumbril Nova Tank, the Navy’s fleet of Hercules Starlifters has become busier than ever. However, delivering ground combat vehicles is far from the Hercules’ only task during the ongoing war against the Vanduul. With roads destroyed during the course of attacks, the Hercules Starlifter was a vital part in rescue operations on Urial, rapidly flying in earthmovers and cranes to assist in saving countless lives that would have otherwise perished in the rubble. Logistic vehicles like the Hercules are crucial in the Navy’s ability to respond to the shifting needs of the Empire.
Origin Jumpworks G12a While larger vehicles like the Tumbril Nova and Anvil Ballista may be better known for their military might, the UEE deploys thousands of smaller tactical vehicles in defense of the Empire. More easily transported to provide greater mission flexibility, these rovers and gravlevs often allow tactical responsiveness to a wider variety of terrain and scenarios. When atmospheric conditions become hostile and can impede flight, having a varied motor pool at your disposal can make all the difference. One of the newest rovers to join the ranks is the G12a from Origin Jumpworks. While it may have the sleek lines the manufacturer is known for, the G12a is reinforced with heavier armor and fortified wheels, and comes armed with a full defensive and offensive suite. When deployed, it will initially serve as a patrol vehicle for landing sites located in active combat areas with severe weather patterns.
Drake Interplanetary Corsair We at Drake Interplanetary know that sometimes defense isn’t just about protecting what’s yours. Sometimes it’s about striking out and facing the unknown head-on. How can you ever be truly safe if you don’t know what threat is waiting beyond the next mountain range, moon, or jump point? Thanks to a large hold capable of stowing a small vehicle and specially designed asymmetric convertible wings, the Corsair adapts gracefully to unfamiliar atmospheres, combat situations, and hot landing zones. Be ready for anything, and you’ll never be caught unprepared.

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How to Dispose of Old Gas by Blake's Garage - YouTube

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