I dunno. There's that video where the guy pauses his game, looks out the front door, and sees the steppe. Had the chance to take an overnight ferry recently. Standing on the observation deck past midnight, staring out at the darkened islands slipping slowly by, feeling the thrum of the engines and the wind on my face. Mrs. A said she could see my grandfather on me in that moment. He commanded a warship tasked with killing her grandfather. They both made it through, but they're both gone now. See you at Yasukuni. Heritage? No, none thank you. Nor future. Just one of those buds that never flowered, a bump on a bare branch. The way I always wanted it. The planet doesn't have long now, only five billion years or so, but the biosphere is approaching one of those evolutionary bottlenecks, and I think if I really tried, I could make it to the Extinction. Probably not, they keep throwing around numbers like “by the end of this century” and with my current age, genetics, and baked-in health decisions, that's not in the cards. But there's always hope. Hope that things could speed up, that is. See you at Yasukuni.
The darkness is gone, in the light now. Fading. Limbs... Tired, so tired. Wings... Limbs don't connect. We danced, we danced and sang and sucked the sweet nectar, mated, flew through the air, the warm, bright air, after so long burrowing in the darkness, constriction, tightness and the dual emergence, first from the earth onto the Earth, and then emerging Self from self, new sensations, new abilities from a part so old it was there in the before. Will be there again. No more flight, no more nectar. The eggs are buried and the darkness is growing bright, a blinding not-light that beckons to whence cannot tell. We danced and we sang. Remember us. View attachment 23017
The Baby Boom generation is generally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. My generation, Generation X, is defined as people born between the early to mid-1960s to the early 80s. Millenials don't have as sharp of lines, but I've seen 81-96 when I looked around. So let's put that on the back of the envelope. So if we define childbearing age as between, say, 18 and 35 (yes, it is creeping upwards, and yes, creeps have managed to push it downwards since time immemorial, but let's just go with that range, shall we?) an older boomer (my mother, for example) could have spawned a mid-range Gen Xer like me (she was born just after the war, I was born in 1971). A younger boomer, born in 64, could have a child who is outside even the range of the Millennials, having been born in 1964+35=1999. So basically the whole Millennial generation is the spawn of the Boomers and the Gen Xers. You think they gave the participation trophies to themselves? You think participation trophies undermine recognition of real achievement?
This started out as a "Not Happy" thread post that kinda got away from me. I hope @John-Wayne doesn't mind me using his quote as the epigraph, if it's a problem, let me know and I'll remove it. I've been watching a lot of restoration videos lately, where people buy old semi-junked machinery and tools at swap meets and flea markets and restore it to new or better-than-new condition. I find it relaxing. But youtube thinks it's related to trapping mice. Kept suggesting mousetrap, rat trap videos until I finally broke down and watched one. Rats and mice are pests. They can be a health hazard. The idea of live-trapping them and releasing them into the countryside to be owl-food as God intended is impractical. I recognize these facts. But the way the poster had rigged up a stun-gun to a coil of wire inside a cage they could get into and not out of, and the terrified hopping about as they sought to avoid the pain, the desperate squeaking, the twitching and spasming as their bodies finally completed the circuit, the flames that began to spring from one little beasty's paw, none of this horrified me as much as the comments section... ...where the braying crowd, unprompted, denigrated animal rights activists and vegetarians and recommended points of particular agony with lip-smacking glee. When I'm dictator, we'll bring back the gladiatorial games, but there'll be no TV or internet broadcast. Live audience only. And the "performers" will be chosen by lottery from the ticketholders.
Long unhappy rant that makes me feel like a stereotypical junior high school girl so I'm going to wrap it. Spoiler So several years ago, my closest friend at my job got promoted to supervisor. This is why the military doesn't allow fraternization. We kept up our friendship, and he confided in me. Placed his trust in me. Shared confidences with me. Confidences that were mostly things that I wasn't supposed to know, since they related to my coworkers, his supervisees. Confidences about what the boss had and hadn't said. In confidence. But I know how to keep my fucking mouth shut, and we were friends, and the structure of our company didn't leave him with any peers at the supervisory level that he could bitch with when he needed to blow off steam. It started to weigh on me, but in for a dime, in for a dollar, right? Then towards the New Year, some extremely complicated politicking started going on at the lower levels of our work. My level. And he put pressure on me to reveal what my peers were saying, to me and each other, in confidence. Pressure via text message. I was raised, so to speak, in a very secure environment, and I don't put things "on paper" that can come back to bite me in the ass. This message excepted , and if you're reading this, I've got the settings wrapped up pretty tight. The pressure made me feel really uncomfortable, and I thought that it could be damaging to our employer, so I told our boss about it. I knew that would cause problems, but if you'll trust me without knowing all the details, I was really between a rock and a hard place. That was a couple months ago, haven't had any contact from my friend since. We'll be back at work together soon, and today he called me to tell me basically that, since I'd betrayed the trust he placed in me whilst he was betraying everyone else's trust, we couldn't be friends anymore. So that's that.
I was trying to find the most current version of The Arc of a Rainbow (Chasing the Rainbow from the story contest), but I found the very first day's writing on it instead, with the prompt at the start: View attachment 23011
Eight years since the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. It was my day off, vacation time, I was sitting at my computer doing something, gaming, whatever, when the world started to sway gently back and forth. I looked up at the light cord, because that's where you look, dizzy spells and trucks going by don't cause penduluming, but there it was, swinging gently. Earthquake, but not a bad one. But... It just kept going on. Usually these things last a few seconds, but this one just kept going and going. Six minutes, I found out later, although I don't think I felt all of that. I was over 700 kilometers from the epicenter. But still, it rumbled and rocked for a while, and I went back to my game. Earthquakes happen here, there's that pause when you decide if you need to be worried or not, and then you go on. It was nearly three in the afternoon, I didn't check the news. Why bother? Met Mrs. A for dinner at a local izakaya pub, and looked up at the TV. There were burning houses being swept inland through the rice paddies, and the numbers at the bottom of the screen were talking about dead and injured. I picked up my phone and emailed my family back home while Mrs. A checked on hers. Everyone was okay, but whatever plot armor you think you have in your life is useless when the sea comes calling. The video below isn't mine, and it's definitely not for younger or more sensitive viewers. It's safe to assume that almost anyone you see who isn't within arm's length of the camera didn't survive. Per Wikipedia, that's 15,896 of them. And 2,537 still listed as missing. Watch as much as you can stand, or don't. You won't be a better or worse person either way. And no, I don't like the title, but it's accurate.
Got around to watching Netflix's "Bird Box" last night. It felt like the sort of thing Stephen King pops out on a Saturday afternoon when Tabitha is on his ass about cleaning the gutters. "Honey, they say it's supposed to rain this week, could you-" "Tabby, I told you, I've got a great idea going, don't want to lose my train of thought. Call that neighbor kid, what's his name, Dusty? Cody?" "It's Dakota, hon, but his mom says-" His hip was aching again. What the fuck am I doing sitting on half a billion dollars, give or take, and she still wants me to handle the yardwork. Whatever, birds, little bit of "Cell," unexplained monster from "The Mist", it'll practically write itself, mentally scarred mother, yeah. "I told you, I've got a book due next month, my agent's been up my ass since New Years," hmm, maybe some crazies, don't forget a dash of diversity, "I've gotta get cracking on this thing, if Donny can't do it, just call that guy Garcia from the lawn care company." "His name's Gonzales, and I don't think they handle-" Of course, this wasn't written by Stephen King. Guess he helped with the gutters after all.
Io, on Netflix. Painful painful painful awful fucking shitty horrible piece of crap, the writer(s) should have their everything revoked. I'm not going to spoiler-wrap this because I want to save you from the movie, dammit. First ten seconds or whatever, "Some people say it was the pollution, I call it human nature." "sending ships to other planets to harvest their geothermal energy." You what?!? No, I don't care about the terminology, but Earth isn't short on geothermal energy last I checked, and just how the fuck do you "harvest" geothermal energy? What's the transmission or storage medium you're planning on using? Wait, they've just "harvested" half of Io's geothermal energy. Anybody in the back know where that energy comes from? Anyone? And they're gonna use it to colonize Proxima Centauri b. You think Beijing smog is bad, try living in a triple system practically inside of a red dwarf star with aurora borealis that you could microwave popcorn to. Oh, wait, she's gonna make bees evolve to deal with the shitty air pollution. Let's take a sterile worker bee that has evolved to and grown up in decent air and put it in a fish tank filled with an atmosphere so polluted and oxygen-starved it won't sustain open flame. Shit, the bee didn't evolve in time because that's not how fucking evolution works!!!!!! If the writer grew up near the beach, but never learned to swim, do you think they'd evolve some fucking gills if I held their head underwater long enough? I'm turning this piece of shit off. I spend hours poring over aerial photos of LA, consult with my person on the ground @Shenanigator to see what the real feel of neighborhoods are, research care packages for the homeless, dig through Dante, ask my dad about the physics of micro black holes, create memberships on hobbyist forums to ask questions about my characters' potential hobbies all in the name of getting it as right as I can, and find that someone has chucked several million dollars (yes, I looked, and no, there are no budget figures available. Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, cost $5 million though, so that's a decent rule of thumb comparison, IMO) at this piece of shit?
We'll never reach the stars. People have no concept of distance. Longest I ever walked in a day was around twenty miles, traveling at my own pace on paved sidewalks, with frequent opportunities to refresh myself. Teddy Roosevelt issued the first formal physical fitness test for US servicemen after seeing some fat officers. You had to do fifty miles on foot, or a hundred on horseback, with a three day time limit. A group of Marines set out and completed the test in a day, but they're like that. Fifty miles. It's five thousand times that distance to the Moon, and the US doesn't, at present, have the ability to send a person there. Mars is nine months, not gonna look up the distance, and yeah, we still send rovers there. Opportunity will be declared dead in a few minutes. But how much longer are we going to spend money on the space program, whatever that is these days? Some Canadian with a guitar? The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is going to break loose, one meter sea level rise, massive numbers of IDPs, crop failures, coral will be extinct in ten years, you think anyone is going to want to spend money sending people to Mars? Maybe the oligarchs will. Bolthole and all. And the Chinese are going to put someone on the Moon, by hook or by crook, just to prove they can. Maybe they'll die there. I hold no animosity towards them, but it would be nice if someone managed to put a corpse up there to prove to our successors in evolution that we could do it. But we'll soon be up to our ankles in a red-tide algal bloom that will never recede, fighting over who gets the last bit of dogmeat. The stars. Kepler 452B is a "second Earth" and it's only 1400 light years away. There are only eleven stars within ten light years of the solar system, and only one of those is relatively similar to the sun, but it's a binary, which is where "relatively" goes out the window. Even if we developed that warp drive, somebody would just mount a missile on it and use it to play smashy spike plate with someone else's capital city. It's almost 4 am, time for bed. Miles to go, but not light years.
I saw First Man today, and I'm kind of overwhelmed with thoughts. First, kudos to Ryan Phillipe Reynolds Gosling for successfully playing a block of wood. And that's not a criticism. I've read a bit about Neil Armstrong, and part of NASA's selection process was to find the most boring person they could to take the most important first step in human history. Fuck Columbus, it was already occupied. I love Buzz Aldrin, but NASA didn't want that. Armstrong (would he have had a shot if his family name had been Herpolsheimer or McAnally?) spent the rest of his life unhappy with the fact that people only saw him as the First Man on the Moon. Neil Armstrong was modeled on Keir Dullea, not the other way around. Second, I'm too terrified to click the "Historical Accuracy" button, whenever I get around to finding it. Some things I know are right, some things I know are wrong, but there's an ugly middle zone... Good thing Armstrong is dead. Finally, kudos to the director producer screenwriters for A) having humanized the first human being to set foot on an extraterrestrial body and B) made it fucking boring. Bedtime for Chop Chop Chang.
Marijuana definitely isn't legal in my present jurisdiction. Not sure about back home, doubt it. Wait, no, an old friend of mine who used to be quite the recreational enthusiast now has a prescription for it. "My partying days are over, Iain, I actually need this stuff now to cope with the nerve damage." He shows me the scars. So, what are the medicinal properties? This is something that needs to be looked into. Some of my (former) facebook friends were of the tribe that believes that it cures glaucoma, acts as a palliative for chronic pain, can stimulate appetite in chemo patients, helps with eczema, restores hair loss, cures all forms of cancer, Morgellon's, improves orgone energy retention, balances the chakras, and makes your fingers fing more efficiently. Some of these things may be true, and we should let the doctors and Big Pharma have a go at them. And y'know what? I'm not opposed to legalizing it for recreational use as well. I haven't tried it. The early years of my adult life were spent in jobs where it was a definite, ultra-strict no-no, and like I said, where I live now? Not only do I believe in obeying local laws when you're a guest, but there have been celebrities arrested here for possession of hundredths of a gram of the stuff. The residue in the baggie, basically, and it cost them their careers. I can almost see Willy Nelson shaking his head through the haze. And I've had friends whose lives were wrecked by illegal drug use, and friends whose lives were wrecked by legal drug use, and friends who pulled out of tailspins, and I know some good, teetotalling, churchgoing folk who got all wobbly nonetheless. It's not something I've done more than a cursory bit of research on, but it seems that the primary danger is that we don't currently have a test to reliably measure the amount of THC affecting your system at the time of arrest. Like, DUI. This needs to be looked into, but I'm sure that Big Pharma and the docs will be more than happy to, once they know there will be customers for the test kits in the form of every damn law enforcement agency in the country. But there's a point here. The legalization folks. Those damn legalization folks make me question whether or not it's the right thing to do. Watch someone talk about wine. Tannins, notes, vintage. Whisk(e)y: Subtle flavors, the effect of ice, mixers, cocktail recipes. The martini maniacs who will spill blood over how much vermouth to add. Winston Churchill would supposedly raise his glass in the direction of France and call it good. Now watch someone advocating for legalized recreational marijuana, giggling and snorting and making jokes about "chronic" and "wake and bake" and how their mother was getting high when she was pregnant so they've basically been high their whole life. Yup, there are drunks. Yup, I'm a drunk, from time to time. Yup, Orson Wells was sloshed while they were making that one commercial, but it didn't air with him slurring and staggering. Fucking stoners, giving their opponents material every time they open their mouths without inserting a bong, and twice when they do.
TMW you're walking home from dinner with your wife and there's a group of young gaijin outside the local market enjoying a few (!) drinks and one of them shouts at you "Oh my god, is that my dad?!?" Well, true, I take my styling cues more from Leonard Cohen and/or Mad Men than from Jay Kay or P. Diddy, but considering that the young man shouting at me looked to be in his early 20s and I'm in my late 40s, I wondered what sort of point he was trying to make. I suppose if he could give me a list of his mother's tattoos and favored coital vocalizations we could tell for sure, but, well, yeah kid, I look old enough to be your dad because I'm old enough to be your dad. Doesn't bother me, does it bother you?
So you've got the grades all ready, but you need to add the results of the final exams. Sign in, pull up the official score page. Transcribe the grades, one by one, into your gradebook. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. Go back to the gradebook, pull up the final exam results one more time, double-check your entries. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. Go back to the gradebook, calculate in the penalties by hand as the software isn't set up for that, calculate the final grades. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. Go through each and every student who is currently calculated as having failed, double-check for errors in marking. Good thing you took copious notes. Check for mitigating circumstances. Check for aggravating factors. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. Check your classes' bell curves. Look at the grades individually in any class that has an improbable shape. Again. Enter the final grades into the school's reporting software. Double check that all the scores you're putting into the school's system match the ones in your gradebook. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. Hit the final "submit" button. Wait for the grade queries to come in, but at least you know that A) You're right, and B) Your school backs its teachers when they are. Start on next year's syllabus.
Nothing to do with this joint or you lot. "I'm so glad I could get that off my chest." "I just needed someone to talk to." "Keep this between you and me, okay?" Yeah, okay, fine. Y'know what the worst thing about being trustworthy is? Everybody knows, everybody knows, everybody knows that you can be trusted. They can tell you about their concerns about Smith from Accounting. They can tell you that Jones from Marketing is fucking Baker from Baking. They can tell you that they've been having trouble with their spouse lately, and are seriously considering suicide/divorce/trial separation, in no particular order. They can tell you that they've got this lump, but they're afraid to see the docs, or that their retirement account isn't, that things are going south and their whole department may be laid off, or that they're going to get promoted but only if Promo from Promotions doesn't find out that they're getting laid by the Laying-Off Division section head or that their wife snores and the bitch is going to wake up sucking down a pillow one of these nights I swear to fuck Iain I am so sick of her shit but thanks for the talk, that really helped get me back on an even keel, don't mention it keep it dark I've only told you half of my half of the story but the rest well shit you shouldn't even know this much and anyway things are looking up dunno why I mentioned it in the first place thanks by the way I don't think it's the right time to consider opening up any new positions over there with the perks and privileges and pay you're so valuable over here and I've got such a rapport with you god knows what I'd do without someone to talk to.... You can trust me, I won't tell anyone. I can keep anything bottled up. Indefinitely.