… and the people that were in line behind the ones that died thinking “alright, I’m closer to the top now!”
There are plenty of mountaineers for whom climbing Everest will be one of their great achievements and I have nothing but admiration (and a bit of jealousy) that they’d get to do such a thing. If they’ve put years into developing climbing skills and going ever further, then good luck to them.
For the rest of us, the final approach to the summit is the stuff of nightmares - that drop down to the glacier is anything between 2.5 and 3km - straight down:
Depends on how long the line is really. There’s room at the top for about 6 people. If few people are summiting that day the climbers can linger for a while, with oxygen being the limiter. If the lines are long you may only get a few minutes.
Source: some documentary I can’t remember.
All to get a selfie for instagram. Ridiculous…
Hey, Mark!
Speaking as a retired (and formerly award-winning) daily journalist, I’m gonna second @jorpho’s comment. (And BTW, the last time I made a comment like this, one of the mods took it down, so here goes:)
Too often lately, BB has been relying on photorealistic gen-AI imagery to illustrate otherwise straight news stories in a way that winds up being really misleading.
For doing arch commentary on stories of interest, where the images are more obviously fake - sure, I get it (I guess); It’s easier and more colorful and engaging to gin up a wild illustration that matches BoingBoing’s arch/progressive take on modern events.
AI images atop Trump or MTG’s latest shitsplosion are cool because a) they are usually very obviously AI-generated and b) usually funny enough to drive home the point.
But with photo-real images like this one - which lead one to want to show the image to someone else and say “OMFG, look at what this (factual report of an event) actually looks like!” - it winds up undercutting the value of the story and our faith in BoingBoing as a reliable blog - and, thus, cheapening BoingBoing’s otherwise valuable voice.
Why not use a screenshot from the video that the story is about?
World’s Largest Headstone
Photos: $$
Copyright troll lawsuits: priceless
… not to mention freezing to death
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.