camwyn:

americasgreatoutdoors:

A view rarely seen by anyone. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell stands ABOVE the top of the Washington Monument. The Secretary received an update on the repairs needed following the August 2011 earthquake and took a tour up to the top earlier this month.

During the same trip, photographer Tami A. Heilemann was able to snap unique photos of the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial and view of the National Mall and U.S. Capitol Building. 

Photos: Tami A. Heilemann

I’m reblogging this solely for the bottom picture, and for anybody reading this or looking at this who may ever have played Fallout 3. Your Fallout 3 character has lived her or his entire life, all nineteen years that she or he can remember, underground. She has never had to be more than twenty feet away from a wall, and never been more than thirty feet away from a ceiling- usually less, since one doesn’t spend all of one’s time in the Atrium. Her world, her mindset, has been shaped by what amounts to spending nineteen years on a prison submarine. That is her normal.

 And then she has to leave.

She’s driven out into a world where the floor is uneven and the air moves and thelightingmoves and there areno walls anywhere. She’s seeing faces and creatures and textures and colors she’s never in all her days encountered. She’s desperately searching for the only thing in this not-the-prison-submarine world she actually knows: their father.

 And in the course of trying to find him, she encounters a man who says he can help her if she’ll do him one favor, namely finding a satellite dish in an old museum and installing it on the Washington monument.

Your Fallout 3 character had to cross most of that green space down the middle despite it being full of a trench system inhabited by homicidal monsters, get into that building on the right with the reddish roof bits (more or less- the Mall in the game is considerably shorter than in RL, but that’s about where the Museum of Technology is), find the object without getting killed, and then make the run from that building over to the Monument… and despite nineteen years of prison submarine life, hang out a window and conduct electronics repairs. With that view, the burnt post-nuclear death version of the one in the last picture, to contend with the whole time.

 It’s kind of amazing the game didn’t include some kind of panic attack mechanic to reflect just how EEEH HHH EEEH HHH some of the things your nineteen-year-old weirdo is asked to do to get things done.