polyaletheia:

kontextmaschine:

You don’t see the imagery of cutting sandbags from a hot air ballon to increase lift anymore

Presumably they emptied the bags rather than let them drop as whole bags? No point wasting a good bag, and also much safer to anything below.

Yeah, well, my sense of it is really from old cartoons that might have been more tropaic, adapted from the imagery of throwing things overboard to save a sinking ship, or gags about theater counterweights or something.

I know those cartoons expected you to recognize the trope of “drowning people will raise their hands above water three times before succumbing”, which has absolutely no basis in reality.