parttimecosmichorror

[parttimecosmichorror]

theres a phenomenon that happens on here i have been calling "normalize loving parents posting" which is when you spend a lot of time on tumblr and are exposed to a lot of one specific counter-cultural narrative day in and day out until you start to forget what the dominant ideas are for most of the human population and thus feel the need to "defend" things that are widely accepted and popular. it's called this because of the time a bunch of text posts about shitty dads were circulating and then people with good relationships with their dad didn't feel included enough and started making "uhmmm can we normalize loving parents? not everyone has a deadbeat dad, MY dad is great" type posts, seemingly forgetting that good relationship with dad is a cultural norm that is expected and encouraged. i think its good practice, especially when im annoyed, to stop before i hit the post button and ask myself if this is a real issue or if im normalize loving parents posting. because often im about to try to normalize loving parents

[parttimecosmichorror]

Headless in the Moonlight

Acrylic painting on wood

Size 30x20 cm

[parttimecosmichorror]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[parttimecosmichorror]

as my grass-touching expands in scope, I constantly become more horrified at the mangled remains of what is known as "activism" on social media

the ideas about "activism" that seem popular among left-leaning youth on internet, are just the opposite of what is good to do in real life!

People think they should cut everyone with different views than them out of their lives, when in reality we need to form coalitions with anyone with values we can share. They think that quietly working within the system is stupid and a waste of time, when it's vitally necessary for somebody to be always doing that. They think that it's good to be angry and upset all the time and to lash out and argue with people, when it's very important to maintain internal peacefulness and focus on work that is within your ability to handle

It is most important of all to find older activists to listen to and learn from...

...and it could be hard to find them using the device that constantly hemorrhages all your personal information to the government. For obvious reasons.

[parttimecosmichorror]

extremely casual and normal way to relax

[parttimecosmichorror]

honestly between this and “the wall” this man just has terminal New York Real Estate Guy brain

[parttimecosmichorror]

it’s fun that Mormonism is based off pseudo-archeology and Scientology is based off pseudo-psychiatry. By that logic the big American New Religious Movement of the 21st century is gonna be based on… pseudo-computer science?

[parttimecosmichorror]

not to make this about me but i really need you to have an awesome summer with me

[parttimecosmichorror]

not to make this about me but i really need you to have an awesome summer with me

[parttimecosmichorror]

not to make this about me but i really need you to have an awesome summer with me

[parttimecosmichorror]

Bleeding out in the snow doesn't sound nearly as romantic and aesthetic when it's actually happening to you. "Imagine bleeding out here 😍" "songs to listen to while bleeding out in the snow" shut up shut up shut up shut the fuck up. Try being here yourself, insensitive warmie asshole. (Although the draft will get you soon enough, I'm sure. I don't see an end to this war anytime soon. The bodies will keep piling higher and higher and higher, and the terrain will keep turning redder and redder and redder to match that eye in the sky—and for what? For what? For what?)

So, you want to bleed out in the snow to a cool song? You want to breathe your last on a pristine white terrain with cinematic lighting? Then just wait a couple months for the recruiters to come knocking on your door before the Sun's even up, and then wait to be shipped off to the training camps in the Belt, and then wait a few weeks to be jostled into a freezing metal cargo ship along with the rest of your unqualified, incompetent squad of cannon fodder, and then wait to be unceremoniously and carelessly deposited right onto the unforgiving ice of Europa. The first thing that'll hit you when you emerge is the silence, and if you're lucky, the second thing that'll hit you is a grenade. Best to get it over with quickly. No point in staying. No point to any of this. If you're unlucky, you'll have to keep dealing with the silence, that crushing quiet of dead space. Artillery will flash in the distance, and you will see the ice being blasted up by bombs, but you won't hear any of it. You won't hear a thing except the meaningless human noise from the radio in your helmet. Then you'll be sent forward into the trenches, and then the tunnels where you'll crawl and crawl and crawl on your knees like the fucking worthless prey animal you are, and then you'll be back in the trenches, and you won't even be able to tell whether you're in one of the natural pinkish ice valleys of the land or in a deep scar of the bloodstained battlefield. It's all the same in the end. Time will pass, but you won't know how long. Eventually, you'll see a quick and silent blur in your periphery, and you'll turn and see that it was your brother in arms, now reduced to detached arms and a lonesome helmeted head scattered around a splatter of a body. You never even got the chance to know the guy, but he'd smile at you when he saw you in the line for ostensibly edible cafeteria slop, and that stuck with you: the smile. No one smiles around here, and now no one ever will again. If you could feel anything, you'd feel sad. But you can't. No time to linger, no time to mourn. None of you are people when you're out on the ice; you're numbers, you're living fucking weapons, you're fleshy shields, you're statistics reported to the rest of the System, you're dead biowaste contaminating this place that could have once harbored life. You stopped being a person the second they dragged you away from home, and you stopped being alive the second you stepped out onto the ice. You're dead. Come to terms with it, bitchass. You're dead. You're fucking dead.

You want to bleed out in the snow? Well here you are, buddy. Except you should know full well by now that there will be no snow. It's only ice out here, and the ice is harder and sharper than any metal you've ever felt back at home, and even the pulverized bits feel more like shrapnel than anything resembling snow. And you also won't even get the luxury of bleeding out. When the bullet (or grenade, or high-powered laser, or whatever other bullshit weapon they've cooked up) gets you, you'll be knocked backwards and then will hit the ground hard, forced now to gaze upwards at either the roiling red of Jupiter or at those pinprick observers drifting out there in the vast and empty expanse. But the good news is that you don't have long. If your suit is punctured, death will be upon you soon. That sweet release of eternal nothing. All you can hear is your shaking breath, and the slowing pounding in your ears, and the faint radio chatter over comms. The ice will seep in through the jagged hole, and you'll feel it creeping over you and burning through you bit by bit. Something you'll realize now is that the Ice War is absolutely nothing compared to the sinister machinations of Europa herself. The cold is a colonizing force; merciless, brutal, and efficient, it'll conquer every single thing out in its domain. The only end to this war will come around when every human being has frozen and died on this hell of a surface. You're a warmie. You can't help it. Everyone is a warmie. And thermodynamics doesn't play around with warmies. Europa will sink her claws into you undoubtedly—the only question is "When?"

You want to bleed out alone in the snow with an aesthetic slowcore ambient song in the background? Fuck you, man. Fuck you. No one gives a single flying shit about what you want. There will be no snow, there will be no blood, and you won't be alone because you'll be lying among your fallen comrades upon the frozen layers of your predecessors. There will be no music, and no one around to take a pretty picture of you. You'll die in silence, and you'll die in the span of a few minutes. And that's it. That's all that's waiting for you.

If, by some miracle or some unholy act of Jove, you become part of the 0.001% that survive, know that you didn't. You died out here on the ice. This goddamn moon is a morgue, and you're never coming back. Because you're dead. You're dead. You're dead. Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted? Of course it isn't. You're dead. I'm dead. We're all dead. Now shut the fuck up and reload.

[parttimecosmichorror]

Took a shitty screenshot of the image and it seems like Tumblr won't compress it too badly now

Realized I don't post on here enough and especially don't post enough about astronomy, so here's a cool picture of Arp 116 I got for my astronomy imaging lab (roughly true-color composite of 12 images taken in the R, V, and B bands with the McDonald 0.8m telescope because my professor has friends in high places and was able to reserve some telescope time for the class)

Edit: GODDAMMIT WHY DID TUMBLR COMPRESS IT SO MUCH THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE SECOND GALAXY. AUUHGHGH

[parttimecosmichorror]

Realized I don't post on here enough and especially don't post enough about astronomy, so here's a cool picture of Arp 116 I got for my astronomy imaging lab (roughly true-color composite of 12 images taken in the R, V, and B bands with the McDonald 0.8m telescope because my professor has friends in high places and was able to reserve some telescope time for the class)

Edit: GODDAMMIT WHY DID TUMBLR COMPRESS IT SO MUCH THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE SECOND GALAXY. AUUHGHGH

[parttimecosmichorror]

the Europa ice war is a fun spontaneous creative writing project, my problem is im an astronomy nerd and am pissed how people seem to think "in the ice tunnels" and "on the surface" are equally plausible places to be strategically and practically. even if you have sci-fi space shields, you do NOT wanna be on a spacewalk in a combat zone. and being on the surface of Europa is 100% a spacewalk.

[parttimecosmichorror]

The thing the recruiters never mention is the dryness. Oh, they joke about the cold, bring your socks lads, but it’s the thirst that really kills you. The endless itch of your freezing skin shrinking, dried relentlessly out by the psuit. Harvesting moisture you didn’t realise you could lose. No drink to quench your parched throat- all rations through your port, so your mask never has to come off. There are stories of old troopers having to relearn how to eat, to drink- too used to convenience, I guess. The warmies laugh at first, at the Europa rasp, but they stop laughing pretty soon. Hurts too damn bad, especially in those early days where your body remembers comfort. And always, around you, the ice. Glossy blue in the light, the colour of heaven. A chip melting on your tongue- an impossible luxury. You haven’t tasted water in so long. The cold, the melt, the way it would clack against your teeth. You’d give anything to drink it, mask and precious oxygen be damned, but the ice is pretty poison. The things that live here, under Jove, are stronger than any of us. The troops that succumb to temptation die slow, twitching. They say the things in the ice put holes in your brain, sponge like. The worst part is they smile as they die. Smile like that final drink was worth it

[parttimecosmichorror]

Swirls of Jupiter

[parttimecosmichorror]

Yeah, drop pods skid straight off the ice a lot these days.

President of Terra keeps sending up more and more kids with less and less training. Hard enough to stick the landing in a pod, harder on just 3 week boot camps worth of drop sims. seems every rotation at least 2 of em skip straight into a slow orbital decay around Jove. Heard rumors of some squads making bets on how many clicks from the eye they get. If they even survive the Gs from the slingshot...

One of our engineers started talkin' to em, when they skipped. Small stuff. Talking about home. Tellin 'em how to vent the reactor so they at least get to feel warm one last time before they get crushed by Joves embrace. Hell she even made up that fuckin phrase. One of the warmies in a pod last week even said theyd heard about her back on Terra. Say the booties call her the "Angel of Europa". Said even getting to hear her voice made him feel like it was all worth it.

Poor kid...

That one got to 'er I think. She got real quiet after that. In all these rotations I aint ever seen her cry after a skipped pod before.

Just last week one of her greasers snapped. Ice Madness gets to all the long term vets down in the caves eventually. He blew a heat generator, sayin shit about letting the cold take over, saying it was too warm.

She got caught in the blast... Body froze before the smoke even cleared. Lost half the engineering wing too.

Whelp, drop pod skipped again today. Her radio clicked, kids askin where she was. Couldn'ta been more than 14 neither. We all just sat there... None of us really knew what to do. CO finally stood up, picked up the com

"Sorry kid. Nothin but Jove now. Don't worry, You'll see your Angel soon."