You know, Brennan Lee Mulligan talks a lot of shit about the cruelty of Game Changer, but I’m not sure Sam Reich has ever done as much violence to his players as Brennan did when he handed out those irl exam question packets with sand timers, like that was real ptsd in their eyes
forever thinking about how marcille and laios have such a richly weird and funny friendship dynamic that people I see tend to write off as "god she hates his ass" but in reality it's the frustration of one neurodivergent weirdgirl to another neurodivergent weirdboy who has no concept of masking, has never had to mask, and simply doesn't know how to mask making their entire group come across as "the weirdo freaks" despite her best efforts to not be labelled as "weird" probably her entire life
People ask me sometimes how I'm so confident that we can beat climate change.
There are a lot of reasons, but here's a major one: it would take a really, really long time for Earth to genuinely become uninhabitable for humans.
Humans have, throughout history, carved out a living for themselves in some of the most harsh, uninhabitable corners of the world. The Arctic Circle. The Sahara. The peaks of the Himalayas. The densest, most tropical regions of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. etc. etc.
Frankly, if there had been a land bridge to Antarctica, I'm pretty sure we would have been living there for thousands of years, too. And in fact, there are humans living in Antarctica now, albeit not permanently.
And now, we're not even facing down apocalypse, anymore. Here's a 2022 quote from the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, a leader on climate change and the furthest thing from a climate optimist:
"The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”"
-David Wallace-Wells for the New York Times, October 26, 2022
If we can adapt to some of the harshest climates on the planet - if we could adapt to them thousands of years ago, without any hint of modern technology - then I have every faith that we can adjust to the world that is coming.
What matters now is how fast we can change, because there is a wide, wide gap between "climate apocalypse" and "no harm done." We've already passed no harm done; the climate disasters are here, and they've been here. People have died from climate disasters already, especially in the Global South, and that will keep happening.
But as long as we stay alive - as long as we keep each other alive - we will have centuries to fix the effects of climate change, as much as we possibly can.
And looking at how far we've come in the past two decades alone - in the past five years alone - I genuinely think it is inevitable that we will overcome climate change.
So, we're going to survive climate change, as a species.
What matters now is making sure that every possible individual human survives climate change as well.
What matters now is cutting emissions and reinventing the world as quickly as we possibly can.
What matters now is saving every life and livelihood and way of life that we possibly can.