Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

https://www.equestriadaily.com/2020/08/pony-anatomy-revealed-in-new-my-little.html

@spacewastrel@yiff.life I dispute that last part but appreciate it. <3

Oops, I miscalculated because I misread the hours axis of the forecast chart. There's still a distinct chance that we're gonna get as high as a Cat 3.

Back to mild panic!

Yay, today's "spaghetti models" are showing Hurricane Laura is fairly likely to fizzle, at least by NOLA standards. And Marco was already kind of a non-starter.

Or according to one model, maybe Laura hits Texas instead. And I'm kinda fine with that too TBH, though I'd prefer it not hit anybody at all, and I really hope they don't get the Cat 4 the HMNI model is predicting.

Either way maybe I can stop worrying about the friggin' cats and how to get them through a storm, for another week or two...

@LexYeen@snouts.online If I ever get into another tabletop cyberpunk RPG, I know what mods I'm giving my PC now...

@zx3 I really miss DiS and need to start getting my shit together in time to participate each week...

basically shut down today due to anxiety and am probably gonna have to catch up on work all weekend, in the middle of possible hurricane prep

yay

@Austin_Dern I mean, I have the material stuff a lot easier in a whole lot of ways. My job is kinda... America-proof since I work for a German auto consortium. I don't have any non-housecat dependents. I have a partner with incredibly good negotiation skills who makes it a LOT easier to live in close quarters.

But I think this has been usually tough on me on an abstract level, 'cause... I mean... it's like my arch-enemy showed up and after all this, I'm powerless to defeat it.

The big scary gaps in human "sanity" have been a preoccupation for me since I was, like, 11 years old and first read Sagan's Dragons of Eden. And now it feels like those gaps have become HUGE and people who haven't been gazing into them their whole lives just don't see how bad it's gotten. There's some mitigating factor that kept human behavior from going totally off the rails, and it's just... gone missing.

And it's just BIZARRE that nobody's really got any idea what to do about it. This madness should be inspiring one of the biggest spiritual/intellectual movements in history, some attempt to finally engage HOW AND WHY humans get this crazy and do something about it for good. But we can't even get a basic educational system working, let alone get people aware of the *subtle* ways our reality is a big fake.

It feels like we lost so much ground in... everything I thought the counter-culture stood for. Both sides have gone full mob-mentality and nobody's solving our problems on the Meta level. (God, this stuff is so hard to put into words.)

TL;DR: We need a real-world Doom Patrol to fight this battle on the existential and metaphysical level, and we need it real fast.

Our society needs a priestly class real bad. I don't know about you, but I could DESPERATELY use some absolution and a narrative-fueled sense of false hope and purpose right now. :p

I always expected I would be one of the people doing that. I really thought I could serve as a chaplain, but getting booted out of Transliminal totally destroyed that illusion.

I don't think I can ever be the one purporting to offer hope and sanctuary again. I wish to the gods someone could show me the way back.

There are days, and this is one of them, where I feel like nothing describes the war we're in better than the Wrinkle In Time series.

It feels like we just ended up in a part of the universe possessed by something that's not just a criminal or political evil, but a spiritual one.

And there's a very real possibility that the things we value imagination, compassion, community, mystical insight, intellectual pleasure -- could lose their place in our world for a long long time.

@Thaminga Yeah. And it feels like it should be so trivial to fix, but... all the ingredients are tainted. No good venues, our social circle has accumulated so much emotional cruft, the Internet has become more and more about little walled corporate gardens... I'm so tired of feeling like we got OCCUPIED and stopped altogether from doing what we need to do in order to thrive. There's that whole other plane to this culture war, and it scares me...

So... TS Laura and TD Fourteen are both headed our way. And both the weather fans on Reddit and the goddamn news media have obsessively seized onto this thing called the "Fujiwhara Effect" which describes the behavior of storm systems that collide.

ONE of the possible results is that one storm eats the other and becomes a bigger, badder storm. It is apparently NOT that common, but guess which possibility everybody's seized upon?

People are literally responding to people's fears about these storms by just saying "Fujiwhara Effect" and linking to news articles that explain the effect but don't actually bother explaining that IT'S NOT THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME AND ABSOLUTELY *NOBODY* WITH A METEOROLOGY DEGREE IS PREDICTING THIS FOR LAURA AND FOURTEEN.

And god it feels good going through their threads and politely asking them, "Um... is this gonna be the next murder hornets?"

Seriously. The next person I hear talk about "murder hornets" as part of some "2020 is cursed" bullshit -- which is no longer funny and is starting to manifest as a real and dangerous superstition -- is going to find their 2020 coming to a very swift end in the maw of a Murder Tiger.

Whew. OK, there go two of my sources of terror. MIA friend is accounted for, and I have had a thumpin' good time debunking all the idiots on the Tropical Weather subreddit who are certain the two storms bearing down on NOLA will fuse into a "Voltron storm" (actual quote) and destroy us all.

Sitting here headdesking at an Earnest Young Queer Radical on Twitter breathlessly blaming global warming on capitalism.

Honey, I took two 20th-Century Russia courses from an expert on the topic. There were Polish industrial villages under Stalinism that were so polluted that 20% of their children had birth defects. They practically destroyed the Aral Sea with their geoengineering projects. They were every bit as happy to exploit natural resources as the capitalists, maybe happier.

So maybe, just maybe you need to loosen your net a little bit and admit the problem is with ANY large acquisitive industrial society. These are problems that could plague Our Glorious People's Revolutionary Future too.

I miss roleplaying. I miss creative collaboration. I miss deep conversations. I miss any contact whatsoever with my fantasy life, which in retrospect was just something I could not do alone.

I can't even begin to calculate the disproportionate damage this all must be doing to my fellow daydreamer types. I'm so sorry, and I admit I also have a certain amount of survivors' guilt since I know it could be far far worse for me right now.

Oh, and coffee, but I mean... I left that off the list for the same reason I left off "red blood cells" and "adenosine triphosphate."

The main things keeping me going today, in order:

* Anthracite
* your discussion of songs you sing to your cats
* our cats (even if Shadow snubbed me this morning)
* the increasingly remote hope that the friend who's MIA will show up and be fine
* the increasingly remote hope that a certain loud ugly man will die in a cartoonishly grisly fashion mid-speech

@JulieSqveakaroo Nah, we're getting by, I'm just not putting anything at all away right now. We're doing a lot better than most people. :<

Yeah, I'm definitely in a mild failure state. This morning (read: 3 pm) I could barely muster the executive function to feed the cats, and I'm pretty much stuck behind the keyboard all day for the rest of the week if I want to catch up on work.

One of my friends is MIA after an upset and I'm getting worried.

We might have another hurricane on the way soon (and I still have no idea what to do with the cats if we evacuate).

I'm basically in the red and praying for a stimulus check that's STILL probably not coming anytime soon.

Trump's ratings are rebounding and as always I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHY OR HOW.

Parallax is dead in the water and I really don't if the depression blocking it will even go away when COVID and Trump do.

After months without a serious hypochondriac episode, I'm scared shitless something is happening to my retinas. (I think something is, but it's probably a harmless vitreous detachment.)

I just can't do this much more without losing max SAN, max MP, and maybe a little max WIS.

And I'm still in better shape than most people. Just needed to scream a little. I'll be okay.

@hystericempress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ [cw: uhhh it's adult swim but it's a really underrated satire of exactly what you're talking about]