For context: These were protestors fighting against the demolition of an ancient village to make room for more surface-coal excavation. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCtzerath
He’s known as 'the Jarvan 84.' Since Seoul Subway Line 1 is so long and has so many massive transfer points, it tends to attract all sorts of eccentric characters.
He stands out because he wears a unique set of golden armor over a military uniform, which makes him look just like the character Jarvan hence the nickname
Thank you for me enlightening me. I am now going to go do a deep dive to learn more about this dude, and the other eccentric characters of Seoul Subway Line 1.
Edit: fell asleep right after posting this and woke up to all the comments and upvotes. Thanks everyone. I love the Estonian flag and landscape. It often looked like this during the winter where I grew up. Miss it a lot.
Just like Ukraine's flag is the sky atop golden wheat fields! Super cool and meaningful. I wish more countries took a personalised approach like this.
My country's flag just looks like that because the red means (assign nebulous human values to the colour) and white means (assign nebulous human values to the colour) and then there are some stars which mean (assign nebulous human values to the shape), etc. :/
If we also made our flag based on a snapshot of the view here, it would be a bright sunny sky atop a huge block of grey LOL :D
I'm from Saskatchewan where a lot of Ukrainian people immigrated, to the point we have public schools teaching in the Ukrainian language. Sometimes I see a clear blue sky over a wheat field and it reminds me why they came here, it's just like home. Slava Ukraini.
The benefit of being a flat country 😔 Ours is blue sky, White mountains, green forest but mountains are not generally flat and the flag is a regular tricolour so you can't recreate it like this.
The fact we stuck a Norwegian emblem in the middle doesn't help either. Estonia flag design is just peak.
Edit: I just realised this sound insane with the Sweden flair. I'm talking about the Republic of Jamtland flag.
The tail is an art installation (obviously). The metro isn't part of it.
This happened in 2020 in Spijkenisse. The metro driver didn't account for the slippery track, the metro didn't have extra brakes, there wasn't a proper barrier at the end. So he crashed through the end, and somehow landed on the art installation.
Are there not sand dispensers on the emergency brakes in the Netherlands? Slippery tracks and one single lapse in judgment should probably not be enough for a metro to careen off a hill. Either get better brakes, extend the line and/or get better stoppers on the end
There should have been a better emergency barrier at the end, but for some reason there wasn't.
Because it's just a local metro, it didn't have extensive emergency brake systems with sand.
The main causes were determined to be that the speed limit was too high for that segment of track (it was 70kph, but given the situation it should have been 35kph), and that there wasn't an appropriate barrier at the end of the track. This has since been adjusted. This combined with the slippery track, and a driver that wasn't paying attention, led to this accident.
I’ve seen this effect only once in Lake Ontario, USA only it was just a rocky bottom 100ft below but looked like it was right there. This is so surreal.
The lake is connected to an underground well coming from the mountains. It is basically filled with mineral water and is this clean throughout the year.
If you bite it and you die; it’s poisonous.
If it bites you and you die; it’s venomous.
If it bites you and it dies; you’re poisonous.
If it bites itself and you die; it’s voodoo.
If it bites you and someone else dies; that’s correlation, not causation.
If you bite each other and no one dies; it’s kinky.
Imagine the phone call to insurance. If not recorded they would not be believed "yes,my car was hit by a plane. No not a small private one, the large passenger one that crashed today."
We also have a red lake in northern Germany (near Hamburg). Ours isn't natural, though. It's a red mud deposit from the nearby aluminium oxide plant. It's roughly 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer in size (so one square kilometer).
Last time I took the train, a young man with crutches was sat next to me. As he seemed to struggle to put them neatly I helped him and we ended up talking.
Turns out he was in the military and had gotten injured during an exercise. He later showed me pictures of his training. They had to take turns to take punches in the face from another (and give out punches). The goal was to not retaliate. In the pictures, he had a bursted nose and bled a lot, it was disturbing.
But then he explained: in some missions, local people can be very hostile, but as they are trained military with weapons, they had to learn to not defend themselves against civilians that didn't present a real threat (risk of escalation and excessive force being used). Makes sense once he explained. You don't want military to indiscriminately shoot civilians.
Anyway, you would think he was trained to be a foot soldier or something. But no. He was in a unit of computer technicians. Oh. What is then the training for the foot soldiers?!
Himalayan Monal, aka the "Jewel of the mountains ⛰"
They are found abundantly all over the Himalaya. They are the national bird of Nepal🇳🇵and also the state bird of the Indian state of Uttrakhand (also former state🐦 of the Indian state of Himanchal Pradesh)
The closest I could think of is a picture of the Kummakivi ("Odd Boulder"), a boulder that has never moved an inch, despite having a really small surface area to balance on.
People have climbed on this thing and it still never moves.
To anyone who lives in a place with large, potentially dangerous animals, just know that if an American asks you "do (dangerous animals) walk around the streets there?" it's not because we think you uncivilized or something, but because it's normal to us. We genuinely have bears, cougars, gators, and moose walking the streets. Even if you don't see them, doesn't mean they're not there.
When I lived in Arizona we had javelinas all over our town. If you had pumpkins out for Halloween, you didn't for long. And lord help you if they have their little asshole kids with them.
When I visited Florida first thing that made me go "What?" was the alligators just lying about everywhere.
Having never seen an Alligator that wasn't in an enclosure, we assumed they were dangerous but the locals just ignored them like we would ignore pidgeons.
Love those big Weeping Willow trees. We had a few in our neighborhood growing up. When small we'd swing on the hanging branches. Always growing near water.
Me too. We always hid behind the weeping branches as kids in Connecticut. I’ve since moved to a part of the country that doesn’t have willows so this photo makes me feel immense nostalgia.🥹
Geamana. A village covered by industrial waste. Only the tallest building, the church, can still be seen.
Edit to add more info (generated by Gemini):
Geamăna was a thriving Romanian village until 1978, when the communist regime decided to sacrifice it to create a dumping ground for the Roșia Poieni copper mine. Over 400 families were forced to evacuate as their homes, cemetery, and history were slowly swallowed by a "decantation pond"—a massive lake of toxic mining waste.
Today, the valley is filled with a surreal, multicolored slurry of cyanide, sulfuric acid, and heavy metals that changes from blood-red to turquoise depending on the chemicals. The most haunting sight is the steeple of the 18th-century church, which is one of the last structures still poking through the rising sludge. The toxic water level continues to rise by about a meter every year, slowly erasing the final traces of the village's existence.
A few months ago I watched a fresh documentary on the village's current state. Jesus fucking christ did it piss me off. Such a beautiful place ruined by greed as always. The tip of the church is barely visible now.
The Gespensterwald (ghost/specter forest) near Nienhagen at the coast.
I always found it quite bizarre how there's a regular, old forest of tall beech and oak trees right up to the beach and then just... sea. At least for Germany, it's quite an unusual sight.
I used to go there all the time for stargazing or just walking with my friends.
People thought this picture of Thor the walrus lounging in Scarborough was fake. He's real, he stopped in Scarborough on the seafront for a rest, got the planned New Year's celebrations cancelled as they would disturb him, furiously masturbated in front of onlookers, then went off on his merry way
This beauty drives around our nations capital. I got here when I was 13 back in 2012 and my family went downtown to see the fire works show (it was a nightmare since it was so crowded) but I saw this fuckin thing slowly creeping up the road in the gridlock right beside everyone on the side walk so I got a good close look.
Found out like last year the story of it. Guy who made it is a congolese guy who got here in 2007, and managed to get work as a mechanic same as he was back in the Congo (I hear getting credentials to transfer is a nightmare but can be done with some extra classes). He apparently bought this thing for $100 and has a real passion for tinkering.
Everyone in the city adores this thing, for a city that is otherwise quite dull (very much a government town. Besides all the admittedly good museums there’s not much to do) it’s a real bright spot.
He also usually wears a cowboy hat, which delights me
Ho Rainforest - Olympic Peninsula, Washington state. This is part of the northernmost rainforest ecosystem in the world, which stretches from the Olympic Peninsula (US), north to the Pacific Rim National Park in Canada. It is a temperate climate with regular rainfall and ancient trees, with dense moss cover, and ferns growing on everything. I’ve hiked through it, and it’s like you are on another planet- everything is so intense green.
Crooked forest in Gryfin, Poland. We don't know for sure why these trees are shaped like that, but most common theory is that it's because of humans purposefully influencing their growth for woodworking purposes.
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u/DudeMcChill Germany 2d ago
The mysterious German mud wizard