Go listen to an obscure concept album. Go read a fic set in an AU of an AU of an AU. Go read Tumblr posts about weird conceptual kinks that the mainstream won't be aware of for 40 more years, and try to understand what people get out of them.
Go make a game so tailored to only your interests that it might not appeal to anyone else in the world, and release it for free on itch.io
Hey tumblr I need the ability to press the like button 100 times immediately
For years I have avoided posting anything that gives away too much personal information. But this. THIS. Okay fuck it
I live in Boulder City, NV. My hometown literally built Hoover Dam (and Hoover Dam built my hometown). I have family that works for the Bureau of Reclamation. In the 80s I went to see the water going over the spill ways from record high levels and have seen periodic water releases to help restore the lower Colorado river. But now Lake Mead water levels have dropped to terrifyingly low levels.
12 of the 17 turbines won't be able to function soon because of low water levels. Of the 5 remaining turbines, 1 is busted and needs to be repaired. So now we go from 17 working turbines to 4. That means electrical generation will drop by about 70 to 80%. This power goes to California, Arizona, and Nevada. Mostly California.
The feds are going to replace 3 of the 12 soon to be non working turbines at the cost of $52,000,000. And it will take years because the turbines have to be custom built after being ordered. Originally $200,000,000 was requested to cover more repairs and replacements but we got a quarter of the funds needed.
So again, the dam's power production will drop to 20 to 30% of its current output then after several years and millions of dollars.... It will still be less than half its current output. The communities that count on cheap, clean power from the dam will now have to buy from other markets which means a giant jump in costs. There will be more rolling black outs. There is a real possibility that water levels will continue to drop to the point none of the turbines will produce electricity.
And that's just the power grid side. I won't even get into the water side of things. Although I should since ai data centers are notorious water hogs.
There were plans to build an AI data center just outside of town but still within city limits. Next to one of the solar energy facilities. Which were built to help lower energy costs and relieve some of the power strain. People found out and raised holy hell about it. A waste of land. A waste of electricity. A HUGE waste of water. Oh but don't worry. They're not going to build the AI center in our small town. They're going to build it on federal land about five miles away.đ€ŹđĄđ€Źđ
WHY ARE WE DEVOTING PRECIOUS LIMITED RESOURCES TO SOMETHING SO NONESSENTIAL?!?#@$_!
We don't need AI for every single task. You don't need AI to tell you what to wear today! You don't need AI to do every piece of homework for you! You don't need AI chatbots to have a conversation with someone!
If you have enough brain power to think up a question then you have enough brain power to find an answer!
Your brain is kinda like a muscle, as in if you don't use it, you lose it. THINK. Ask questions. Look for information. Think some more.
Don't let AI turn you into a drooling zombie that can't decide what to have for lunch without consulting Claude first.
One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of st
One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness
In October 2016 I was in hospital. I had been ill for 11 years with something I called chronic fatigue syndrome, but in the previous six weeks I had been overtaken by a strange, sudden crisis. I was unable to eat â a day when I managed a couple of biscuits was a good day; at times I trembled so violently that my voice shook; at night I was overwhelmed by dread.
In the hospital ward a consultant gastroenterologist appeared.
âHow do you feel?â he asked.
âI feel,â I said, âvery ill.â
This, apparently, was not the concise yet comprehensive answer that I had imagined it to be. He seemed to require something more. âCan you describe it?â he asked.
I couldnât. That anguished, pressurised feeling â a sensation somewhere between burning and falling â that extended through my torso, my limbs, my entire body was by now so familiar to me, I was astonished that it didnât have a name and that I didnât know it. How could this be? I was, after all, a prize-winning novelist.
Frustrated I fell back on anger. Was the doctor stupid? Didnât he know what âfeeling very illâ meant?
In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf says, âlet a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dryâ.
At least I was in good company.
I remember very well what I wanted to say to the doctor: âI feel like I am about to fall off the world.â I had the sense to realise that he would probably not be able to do much with this. What doctors need is a clear description of something physical, but what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical â it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands.
Nowadays, in the pit of my stomach there is a feeling I call anxiety. But when I ask myself what this sensation actually is, I realise that it consists of almost nothing at all â a very slight pressure. Yet, in spite of its nigh-on non-existence, the emotional weight of it drags at my days, pulls them all askew and makes me feel, despite my best efforts, constantly on edge.
Woolf says, âAll day, all night the body intervenes âŠâ And that is true: all day, all night the body is talking to us; but not necessarily in a language we understand.
Illness brings us up against the limitation of words, reminds us that what we experience will always be greater than the words we have to describe it. Dreams, silent meditations, experiences of God, moments of transcendence, moments we are aware of love, all of these evaporate into thin air, unless we scribble them down. At the age of 30, Julian of Norwich had an illness. Believing she was dying, she experienced a series of visions of God. The visions lasted for only one night, but she spent the rest of her life trying to distil them into a form that could be understood by other people. (She wrote two different versions, to be on the safe side.)
There is hardly any sense of struggle in On Being Ill. Struggle is what the healthy are doing, beyond the invalidâs window pane. Ant-like, they are rushing to and fro, being clerks and bus conductors and widows and lawyers. The shadowy figure at the essayâs centre â the figure who might be Woolf or who might be us â seems almost delighted to have fallen ill. They float like a stick on a stream; they are as gratefully irrelevant as a dead leaf being blown across a lawn; they watch the clouds mutate and form pictures above a London entirely unconscious of the beauty above its head.
This was an insight that I too gained in illness, and it is part of what I tried to write about in Piranesi: that there is a whole world endlessly going on, endlessly being beautiful, regardless of whether anyone is there to see it or not. Where Woolf and I part company is in what this means. For her it was evidence of the stark indifference of the universe to human beings: âDivinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless.â
For Piranesi, the central character of the book, and for me, the sheer profligate abundance of beauty is evidence of a universe intensely bound up with its creations. Piranesi walks through his world, cataloguing its contents, describing its wonders. This he considers his chief task in life. âThe Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.â
But perhaps the greatest joy of Woolfâs happy invalid is a sort of intellectual freedom. Cut off from the life of the busy bank-clerks and the bus conductors, widows and lawyers, they are free to read Shakespeare in a new and thrilling way, a way not available to them when they were healthy. Finally they are free from the shackles of other peopleâs opinions; they no longer care what anyone else has said about Shakespeare; they can read him and have their own thoughts.
As an ill person, you have gone down into a sort of underworld, sometimes oppressive, sometimes not; either way, what people say and think in the world above matters less and less. This can be very freeing for a scholar, a saint, a musician or an artist. I remember Kathy Acker saying something similar when talking about her writing process. At least I think it was Kathy Acker; Iâm going back to the 1970s, so I canât be entirely sure. But whoever it was described a nocturnal existence; she wrote at night in order to be free from other peopleâs thoughts.
To return to illness and language. If, in one sense, language âruns dryâ in the face of illness, in another sense it is desperately needed. I remember in a discussion group long, long ago (I think about the importance of story) a young woman saying that she had once been ill and that she couldnât get better until she was able to tell herself a story about what had happened to her. This struck me at the time as an important truth.
To take the simplest of examples: an elderly woman I knew used to suffer from neck aches. Whenever this happened, she would tell herself the same story: âI have this pain because I was silly and I sat in a draught from an open window.â She might have been aware of the draught at the time or she might not. It didnât really matter; the existence of the draught could always be deduced from the existence of the pain, and as long as she was vigilant against draughts in the future, the pain wouldnât be able to return.
A narrative makes illness seem rational â and it gives the sufferer a measure of control â or at any rate the illusion of it. This is particularly true of the sort of chronic illness in the face of which poor doctors are often at a loss. There is no obvious course of treatment for fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, long Covid and all the myriad forms of chronic illness. There is no drug to take that will restore you to who you once were. There is only narrative.
I know very well how grateful you feel to the doctor or therapist who provides a narrative to explain what has happened. And how upset and angry you feel when a different, perfectly well-meaning, doctor says something else or offers a theory that seems to threaten that narrative.
Of course one of the problems with being a writer with a long illness is that one can produce narratives without number. What would you like?
I can do you a revengeful, blame-apportioning narrative.
âShe became ill after months of book tours, during which she crossed and recrossed the Atlantic on numerous occasions, all the result of her wicked publishers spending large sums of money on promoting her first novel â presumably out of sheer vindictiveness.â (A journalist once spent a surprising amount of time and energy trying to get me to say this.)
I can do you a zoological narrative.
âShe was bitten by a blood-feeding tick and caught Lyme disease.â
I can do you a fairytale narrative.
âShe wrote about fairies and now they have exacted their revenge and she lies ill of something mysterious and Lady-of-Shallot-adjacent.â
I can do you a childhood-adversity narrative.
âShe was told as a child that she would never succeed and indeed did not deserve success. Having achieved success, she promptly fell ill in order to comply with her upbringing.â
I pause here. The narrative of being told I did not deserve success pulls at my heart, not only for myself, but for others too. Because, of course, I wasnât the only girl of my generation to be told that. My school â a comprehensive on a run-down Bradford council estate â produced, as far as I know, only one other writer, Andrea Dunbar, a playwright of extraordinary talent. I donât think I ever met her, but she must have been a year or two below me. She died at the age of 29 of a brain haemorrhage, possibly related to alcoholism. My best friend during the same period was a ridiculously talented musician who went on to have a hit record. She died before the age of 40.
You see, from one point of view, I got off lightly.
But if illness can be a story, so perhaps can the cure.
There is a bunch of interrelated therapies, all fairly recent, that share an interest in narrative. They are pain reprocessing, somatic tracking, polyvagal theory and others. The underlying idea is that in some people â and I stress some people â chronic illness might look like this: a very ancient and primitive part of the brain and nervous system believes it has detected danger, possibly a tiger or something like that, and so it produces pain or a whole range of symptoms in an effort to get the sufferer to close down and protect herself. The nervous system does this very effectively and it can carry on doing it for decades. It is really very inventive. I feel that mine ought to be eligible for some sort of prize.
It comes to this. A story you have on some level believed â that the world is fraught with danger â can be countered by a different story. Yes, the world is fraught with danger, but not everywhere, and not always, not here in this place and not now in this moment. You are safe.
So this is my narrative now, the story of how I got ill â and perhaps, if I pay careful attention to it, I will be able to retrace my steps through the labyrinth of my own body and return to safety.
This essay was originally commissioned for Charleston festival.
A narrative makes illness seem rational â and it gives the sufferer a measure of control â or at any rate the illusion of it. This is particularly true of the sort of chronic illness in the face of which poor doctors are often at a loss.
I know that one so well. Iâm oddly overjoyed at the discovery in recent years that Neanderthal is linked to several autoimmune diseases. I wait eagerly for confirmation that the disease I was born with is linked to Neanderthal heritage, that thereâs a reason for everything Iâve been through.
Theres been times drs have asked me for a pain number from 1-10 and I wish I could try write them a poem about it instead. Im not even sure I know how to tell the differrence between pain and discomfort anymore. Sometimes I know theres pain because I start twitching.
I can be at a loss for the type of descriptive words that medical professionals know how to make sense of. Thats not the same as being at a loss for words.
I don't understand how cis people obsessed with gender norms think trans people are the weird ones. they're going around believing that your name has to correlate to your genitals. your fashion has to correlate to your genitals. your behaviours have to correlate to your genitals. your hobbies have to correlate to your genitals. who you date has to correlate to your genitals. whether you can put sparkles on your eyelids or not has to correlate to your genitals. and then people like me go "hmm. I might not do that. maybe I'll just do what feels fun and okay instead" and they LOSE their MINDS
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