spyglassrealms

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I know I joke about hurricanes, because I am a Floridian and that's what we do. But that's because they're Normal, and so all Floridians know the Hurricane Rules. We know how the song and dance goes. West Coasters don't know the Hurricane Rules. You've never needed to know the Hurricane Rules. You guys know the Earthquake Rules, because that's Normal. But because of climate change, Hillary and her cousins are probably going to be a more common occurrence for the southwest. So here are the Hurricane Rules, straight from the Floridian's keyboard.

1: Assume the forecast is going to be wrong, and reality is going to be worse. Get your water jugs and batteries, get your Hurricane Cake, stack the sandbags, board the windows, and put your electronics on a high shelf. And if the NOAA says "category 5" and "landfall" in the same sentence without a "will not" in there, you pack your bags and get the fuck out.

2: Do not fucking go outside. There's surprisingly little lightning in a hurricane, but that's not the problem. It's the wind. The wind will knock you off your feet, either outright or by flinging heavy debris at you. You will not get back up again.

3: If the wind doesn't get you, the water will. Even after the storm has passed, stay the hell away from moving water, both on foot and in a vehicle. When the the flooding has settled down, then you break out the flat bottoms and jet skis and kayaks. Don't fucking swim in it, okay? Don't. The southwest may not have alligators like we do, but all the same you do NOT want to know what's in there. (It's mostly sewage.)

Also, your soil isn't built for inundation, and you've got hills there. Mudslides are going to happen, so be careful of mountain driving in the week or so after the storm comes through.

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I made a quiz about some of my favorite animals :)

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HUH

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as a trail mix connoisseur, that isn't the worst gorp composition I've heard of. the hint of garlic might actually be nice in certain blends (if you're the kind of gorpist who adds jerky, for example); it's really the gasoline that fouls the mix. would be good for keeping mozzies away at least.

I'm scared to ask, but what is mormon gorp?

it's just gorp made my mormons. mormons are semi-religiously mandated doomsday preppers - they're supposed to keep a year's supply of food on hand, which means that they often have like. several barrels of grain and dried fruit or whatever in their garages.

because that's a lot of food to keep around, and mormons are not a particular wealthy bunch, they're almost always trying to use some part of their stash that's about to expire so they can replace it without wasting it. this means that they eat a loooot of gorp.

you can kind of tell mormon gorp apart from normal gorp because the mormons get all their food from the same place, so you start to get really good at recognizing The Mormon dried apples vs. normal ones. more importantly, the ingredients taste funny, both because they're almost always stored somewhere in a garage, which imparts a weak gasoline flavor, and also because the foods seem to transfer flavors over to their neigbors. like, ideally someones dehydrated garlic pellets will be next to their dehyrated potato pellets, and over time the potatoes will taste nice and garlicky but its often their raisins next to the garlic, so you'll have some 4-5 year old garage raisins that are actually brittle they're so dried out, with a weird aftertaste of garlic. then gasoline.

i guess i could just TLDR this as mormon gorp is like normal gorp except that it is Culturally Significant and also Tastes Bad.

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For my final project in my illustration class we had to design a new level for an existing video game. So of COURSE I had to indulge my bug game brainrot. The day I presented these in class was the same day when Silksong showed up in the direct so I think I summoned it.

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yes, things are bad right now. some even say it's irreparable. it's hard to imagine a world that is better with such crushing evil everywhere.

but I need you all to remember that we live in an age of miracles, too.

about three weeks ago, my dad almost died. he had a brain aneurysm rupture at 2 in the morning. if he had not been staying at his girlfriend's home, he very likely would have died. as it was, he ended up at the hospital very quickly. the neurology team diagnosed the problem and placed a drain tube in his head to moderate pressure while they formulated a strategy for the impending surgery. the day after, they placed scaffolding inside the broken blood vessel. they kept him on certain medications for several weeks to ensure he healed properly.

twenty years ago, my dad would have come out of this ordeal with at least minor —more likely moderate to severe— brain damage. he could have lost the ability to walk, or see, or speak, or remember anything for longer than ten minutes.

yesterday we shared some jokes about terrible hospital food and then he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs.

it's going to take more time for him to fully recover. he lost a lot of weight. he's still in some amount of pain. but he is here, whole, with a life expectancy of twenty to thirty more years.

yes, it is probable that a large part of his incredible recovery is due to sheer luck, and his natural physical resilience. but an even larger part is the fact that a team of highly trained, highly skilled people, armed with modern knowledge and technology, saved his life.

we live in an age of miracles, and I don't mean the divine type of miracle. every day, millions of human beings across our planet dedicate their waking hours to beating back the four horsemen their damn selves. and it is working. all of human history is defined by those who chose to look Old Grim himself straight in the eye and say: "I am smarter than you, I am faster than you, I am stronger than you, and I will not stop until you loosen your grip on all of us. Blink, motherfucker."

And by force of will, they make him fucking blink.

yes, things are bad. but don't you dare forget the good we can do.

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My physical health has been not so stellar. I am in a lot of pain right now. I recorded this when I was feeling a little better. Wanted to share what I had. Should stop typing. Thank you very much. ♡

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Fun fact: in Astra Planeta canon, biomaterials are the backbone of interstellar trade for this exact reason! One can find basic materials like water, carbon, and even heavy metals anywhere in the universe, meaning even tungsten is relatively commonplace. But the complex chemistry inherent to life as a whole tends to produce a wide variety of miracle materials with very convenient properties given specific conditions, and that stuff is quite rare! You can get platinum from any telluric world or asteroid, but trading in genuine gravity-grown bamboo? THAT'S where the money is. Better yet, start yourself a spider ranch in Mariner Valley, Mars, because spider silk is one of the most valuable materials in the universe!

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I’m about to have a fun afternoon.

So my trainer’s bf cheated on her. She broke up with him. He’s holding her stuff hostage until she agrees to talk with him. Which she refuses.

She trains; for free mind you; three college linebackers, a college wrestler, two martial artists, a body builder, and… wait for it…. a Navy seal. We’re gonna go get her shit for her.

This should make for an interesting story.

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And I think it's gonna be a long, long time

'Til the Aussie rocket's gonna touch the sky

I'm causing problems at the cosmodrome

Oh, no, no, no

I'm a Rocketoo

Rocketoo

Chewing on this fuse up here alone

A cockatoo broke our rocket. :(

Gonna need a tiny bit more context here bud

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very good update

Dad got his cranial drain removed and the team stepped him down from the ICU to a normal room today. He's had some intermittent spots of confusion the last few weeks but today he was just... completely normal. A bit foggy when it comes to short term memory, which was expected, but apart from that he's got all his marbles and is using them to carry normal conversations. He's lost a lot of weight, much of it muscle mass, but he's fully coordinated. Senses are all fine. He's tired and weak and still in a bit of pain. But he is normal. Or, rather, benchmark eccentricity for himself, really. We're anticipating he'll be coming home Monday, or maybe even earlier.

It's frankly unbelievable how well he's handled this from a physiological standpoint. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that his 40+ years of scuba and freediving had something to do with how well his body handled this. He's been physiologically accustomed to strong changes in bodily pressure and oxygen availability for so long that I'm sure it contributed to his recovery at least somewhat. As a matter of fact I recall him telling me that when he was much younger he would sometimes deliberately modulate his blood pressure to fuck with doctors during physicals, because he had that much control over his respiration.

Cheeky bastard.

I'm glad I've still got him.

I'm not fucking ready for this, man

I don't really want to go into details but my dad's in the hospital. Brain stuff. Prognosis isn't super at the moment. I'm glad he's still hanging in there but... fuck, dudes. Two weeks recovery at BEST. More likely a month. And he'll never be 100% again. No matter what happens next I have no idea how I'm gonna navigate it. I'm not fucking ready for this. I mean I wasn't ready the first time but at least I had Dad to get a handle on things. Fuck, I just hope I still have him at all by the end of this.

If you're the praying sort, now might be a good time for it.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the people I interact with. I have a coworker who I am pretty sure is a MAGA type, and she is also a lovely woman who is dreadfully overworked and so good at connecting to patients when they call. I can see the conflict on her face when she talks to me, a gigantic tranny dork who speaks Spanish and affirms the LGBT community, but can also talk to her about her cows and knows about guns and stuff. I can see the fear in the eyes of my former Young Men’s leader when he misgenders me and realizes that I’m not an ideology but a person he has known for a long time. I can see the way my extended family stop and stutter over political discussions when they realize they are talking about me. And I don’t know why but lately it’s just made me think about my neighbor as a kid.

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

And for the love of god day hello to your neighbor.

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I made an evil mammal quiz. Enjoy

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Ancient Mother Earth, cradle of the human miracle yet half-forgotten by her long-departed children, appears in the 53rd century as an overgrown playground of gods. Vast and awesome constructs, in various stages of disrepair, dot the slowly-healing landscape and the orbits above, evoking an image of toys left scattered on a bedroom floor. The human race once longed to spread its wings and fly to the stars, and Earth now remains the empty nest from whence they fledged.

Yet, she is not all empty, after all. Some could not bear to leave their mother behind, and for millennia now they have toiled in quiet solace to care for the weary Earth after her labors to birth starfaring humanity. And, much as one turns to the halcyon of childhood to comfort the grief of adulthood, so too does humankind their Earthbound infancy: now, slowly, a tide of reverent hiraeth sweeps across the people of the stars, drawing them back to the garden.

Mother is calling her children home.

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Space probe girl who has to gradually shut off more and more of her instruments to conserve her dwindling power supply as the decades pass and she drifts farther and farther from home

the eyes are the ones that go first. they always had a narrow purpose, and it's not like she needs them to see. then her scanning platform, piece by piece. it's a unique experience, to command one's own senses to shut down- not one she'd recommend, but unique. then she loses her magnetometer, a gradual fuzzing suddenly taken out of her control. she can see the expiration date on her heart, held out exactly three metres from the perimeter of her brain, and without input she can't look away. at least she has her antennae- she has to keep listening, just in case.

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Entry level jobs haven't existed since the 2008 crash. 90% of hiring managers won't hire recent graduates. A quarter of job listings are ghost jobs. Companies hire part time so that they don't have to give benefits. Federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009. The True Unemployment Rate is 25%. Master's are the new bachelor's. For most the job search takes over a year. 75% of resumes are never. actually seen by the hiring team.

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I found myself at the museum