Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

When I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning.

It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion.

It made me think of the John Christopher classic The Tripods.

1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P

View on HN

What used to happen--and I assume still does--is that during periods of slack demand some older rigs will get decommissioned but serviceable rigs that just didn't have work for them at the moment would get "stacked" with some minimal skeleton crew for maintenance. In Texas, Sabine Pass was a common spot to stack rigs.

if you've never seen the refineries on the US Gulf Coast it's worth a road trip. Super surreal, miles and miles of dense piping and machinery. I don't really have words to describe except it's something you'd expect to see in a sci-fi anime and not in real life. Just these massive complexes as big as small cities in a web of pipes of all sizes going in all directions.

edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).

That's a great scene and I would definitely enjoy seeing the Gulf Coast.

I believe Ridley Scott was inspired by the steel works of Sheffield at night to create the landscape of Blade Runner.

Similarly it wouldn't surprise at all if James Cameron used Gulf Coast oil refineries for inspiration.

Heavy industry is a raw old sight.

My father did computer hardware work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico up til I was conceived and he decided to get a less dangerous job at IBM. My entire childhood he had a picture on his desk he took from the evac boat of the oil rig he worked on in flames after some accident a few years before I was born. So yeah, definitely only usually!

Got a specific location I can check out on Google maps?

Right, it's not just offshore oil rigs, it can be processing facilities deep onshore, like in a place appropriately named Commerce City:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/suncor-prepares-to-reop...

And it's the Gulf Coast where there can be a lot this for miles, it's 24/7. Flaring is of course, "normal":

https://www.facebook.com/KRIS6News/videos/live-view-from-our...

For my life's work I needed to become very comfortable working in this environment, especially where the big ships are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW9Frtkqy3Y

Dystopias are us.

I believe you've probably seen these in Cromarty Firth, featured in this Tim Traveller's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8

I think you could be right!

Back in the early 2000s I was debugging obscene memory usage for our GPS navigation application for symbian phones, and that was the exact route I used to debug it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com