i am at0m.

Imagine having been born in 1905... And all your life it doesn't fucking stop. The Great War, the Spanish Flu, and then you go out of your mind for 7 years. Everyone is traumatised and nothing matters. Then another crash. And then the rise of fascism, and the War to end all Wars didn't and it's 1945 and you're just about still there. You may have fought or ferried the boys from Dunkirk or sabotaged the Nazi occupiers or worked in the factories and put out fires during the Blitz and you're lucky to be alive, because not all your friends made it. But you are and finally, fucking finally, it stops. It stops. You are tough as nails and you can put that strength to work into building something and you do, and people have cars and can buy icecream and you have a pension fund and the kids have money of their own and no nightmares.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

And maybe Gen beta will take it all for granted like the boomers did, but we can give Gen Z and Alpha some peace because we, and Gen Z and Alpha have seen the Dark Times and fuck that noise.

At the start of the Pandemic, my spouse’s grandmother was in an assisted-living home, and of course they were severely locked down, because with no vaccination available and we don’t really know how it spreads and no tests and anyone over 80 is deffo gonna die…. They couldn’t take the risks. So they weren’t even allowed to leave their rooms. Staff brought meals and left them outside the door, and they left dishes outside, and that was just their life for the foreseeable future.

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

And it was just… a really helpful perspective to get. You can survive it, you can become strong enough to live to 103 despite everything, you can become a source of strength and joy for everyone around you.

University really is about looking at the worst pdf known to man huh

the professor uploaded this sideways. I'm sparing you at least that bit

Image from the best pdf I ever saw, [Elliot 2025]:

[Elliot 2050] - The Utterly Unhinged Elamo-Minoan Hypothesis https://www.academia.edu/128559713

fuck i’m trying to catch all these flies but they think my vinegar is stupid. i have honey also but that’s for me i can’t give them any of that

management trying to hire and retain employees

ok well this blew my mind

This is also true with filmmakers. Western filmmakers pan their cameras mostly left to right and Iranian filmmakers do right to left.

Time seems such a universal concept and then I find out the different ways people perceive everything and remember “it’s all appearances to consciousness”

But the coolest part of that time-direction study, was there didn’t seem to be a consistent pattern to how aboriginal Australians arranged the images, until it was realized that the issue was where the participant was sitting, because they were consistently arranging them East to West.

iirc he said he wasn't going to vote for trump and lost like 1/3 of his twitter followers in one evening. This was after many other things that had happened, like failing the ASVAB so severely he is permanently barred from ever becoming a human sandbag in the United States Marine Corps. This is also what the PR guy who was his "handler" during the trial had to say about him.

it was not on wheat...

Keith Haring - Untitled (Man with UFO), 1982

noncon friendship

Coworkers

there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them

I use spicy to describe food

my food is mentally ill and I’m putting my dick in it

Twilight

Do you get it now? Without due process, everyone is at risk. How are you going to prove your citizenship otherwise?

the classic Finnish mix of extreme dutifulness and “we will make actual conversation after a silent interaction trial period of 6 weeks, thank you” can be really funny sometimes. told my coworker that I’d like to save the coffee grounds the workplace generated and take them home “for my mushrooms and worms” and she was just like “okei” and dutifully saved every single grounds-filled filter for weeks and weeks. about five weeks into this whole thing, after I thank her for the coffee grounds and tell her my worms must love them because they’re breeding very enthusiastically, she finally asks “so your worms… do they have a purpose or are they just… worms”. like sure I’ll save you all these coffee grounds every single time I drink coffee, 3+ times a day, but god forbid I inquire about your specific worm habits before propriety allows it. you could be eating them for breakfast for all I know but that’s your business

this post has been up for so long I’m at a new workplace now, and here’s a new one: someone finally getting a close enough look at the jar of homemade nut butter I’d been using to make snacks for days (in a reused jar, still with the pesto label on it), realising the contents were not as advertised, and saying with poorly concealed relief “ai!!! you weren’t spreading pesto on bananas!” like she’d been quietly dying inside the whole time but had grimly committed herself to never ever presuming to ask wtf was going on

#I mentioned to a coworker how my friend had mailed me some goldfish and I was so excited to eat them#and she labored under the misapprehension for days that I was consuming actual real fish mailed all the way from America#before one day I brought some for lunch and she was like ohhh these are crackers!!

congrats, this is so cursed and the best addition someone has made to this post

#i’m not gonna lie i feel like a lot of people online could do with a dose of this type of finnishness #y'know. the ‘i have no idea what you’re doing and it seems really weird but it’s not my business to pry and also you do you’ attitude

I took a decommissioned rackmount 1u server to the hacker meetup because someone last month asked if anyone knew where to get a server cheap and I was like "you get a server cheap from me please take it" but when I brought it to the meetup I didn't realize that she'd be taking the train home so I offered to drive it back to her place between locations at the meeting but she had moved so that wasn't really feasible but then I remembered that I had an Ikea shopping bag in my car and it turns out that a Dell T430 will totally kinda mostly fit in an Ikea shopping bag and can then be carried on a train.

At least it was a Tower format and not a Rack format 430. Although the R430 is probably the smallest of the 13th generation ones. The C4130 is a foot deeper than my fukkin rack and weighs like a hundred pounds.

Should have worried more about his mental condition.

David Lynch's Weather Report 3/6/21, 4/10/21, 2/20/22... among others! It was a very recurring sentiment. He wanted everyone to have good luck and fun with our projects.