so I have this one colleague, right? I don’t know him super well, but we work together on shift sometimes and he’s reliable, got his shit together, efficient and timely.
And he’s polite with the public, too. Says all the right things, smiles when appropriate, patient and helpful, would never step out of line. One hundred percent follows the rules to the letter, hands-off, no abusive language, no violence. Straight and narrow all the way.
And when I first met him, I was put off about how he talks about people. I still am, honestly. It’s private and quiet and discrete, not where anyone could see or overhear, but he says things to me. “That one got hit with the ugly stick”. “He looks fuckin’ handicapped”. “Look at that crackhead”. “Maybe I’d feel bad for them if they got off their asses and got their lives together”.
It started quite a few arguments between us, but it never changed that his ACTIONS were always fair and respectful, so I let it slide as one of those things you can’t change about others and just kind of have to put up with. We work together fine, and I don’t react to it anymore, and he treats people well.
One day he said he saw me buying a coffee for a homeless guy when I was off shift.
The guy in question was someone we both knew from work was a pain in the ass, high or drunk more often than not, criminal record a mile long, with the kind of mental health issues that aren’t as sympathetic because they mostly just make him act like a violent asshole. Too ill to be prosecuted, to aggressive and unpredictable for a care aid and public housing, so he gets by stealing and shooting up and threatening anyone who tries to stop him.
He’s an unhappy soul. There are very few places he’s welcome.
But I was buying myself a drink, and he was outside, and it was cold out, and out of uniform I know it’s an 80% chance he’ll have no idea who I am or that he said he’d cut my head off last week, so I figured I’d grab him a coffee. Double-double, cause sugar helps and I’d seen him eat ice cream before so cream probably wouldn’t hurt.
I handed it to him on my way out. Told him to stay safe. He took it. Didn’t say thank-you, but I wasn’t really expecting him to anyways. I’d never spoken with him outside of an active conflict before, so I don’t even know what he’d have sounded like not-angry and mostly-sober.
But anyway, apparently my colleague saw, and he asked why the hell I’d waste the money.
I didn’t know what to tell him. It was just two dollars. I’d spent more than that on the second-hand bowl that had fallen off my dish rack and shattered the other night. And it was cold out, and the guy was probably banned from anywhere warm in town, and if he wanted something bad enough he’d probably just steal it anyways, and then it’s be someone else’s problem. But mostly, he was just the kind of guy nobody is happy to see, who was welcome nowhere, and had nowhere to go, and maybe when you’re trapped in a life like that something small and decent doesn’t come around very often.
I didn’t know what to tell him. So I just said, “I felt like it.”
He rolled his eyes a bit, but didn’t hassle me about it. I got the feeling he still thought I was being stupid or naive. He seems to think I don’t understand how he world works, or how awful and heartless people can be.
I don’t know why he thinks that. We work the same job, and we’ve shared a lot about where we’ve been. We both know how awful people can be.
But then maybe a month later he shows up for shift change. And when he does, he has this weird energy about him, like a little kid who just found their first rubik’s cube and hasn’t figured out if they like it or not.
“I pulled a you,” he said, like he was making fun of himself.
I asked what he meant, what had happened.
He said he’d seen a guy, a different guy, another person on the street when we both saw all the time. “I went to grab lunch and he was there,” he said. “And you know, he’s got no money, he’s homeless, but he never causes trouble, never steals, doesn’t show up drunk. So I figured, what the hell, and I covered his bill.”
He wasn’t looking at me as he said it, just staring off with an odd energy. If it wasn’t so subtle I’d call it excitement, like little-kid excitement, but it was almost nothing. “I told ‘em not to say it was me. Didn’t wanna have to talk to him. Thought it’d be weird.”
It was totally out of left-field. Completely against the image he projected of polite distance, judgemental side comments.
I asked him, “feels good, huh?”
He shrugged, but it seemed like he was still thinking about it.
He still says unkind and hurtful things about people, though. But the other day he said something about how he didn’t care about people, didn’t care when the news said folks were dying of the flu, didn’t get upset over strangers like that.
I said, “But it’s sad, isn’t it?”, and he shook his head. “You can’t care about everyone. That would be exhausting.” And I think that’s when I figured it out.
We both do the same work. We’ve both come from similar places. And yet the way we feel about others is different.
This is a guess, but I don’t think he’s a cruel or unkind person at heart. A guess, but I suspect that after seeing so much stupid, senseless cruelty… Je cares about people, but caring hurts. Caring means you can be let down, disappointed, fucked over. Caring about everyone means suffering when they suffer, and that’s a lot of pain for one person to handle. And I suspect that maybe when he says cruel things, when he says he doesn’t care, it’s because he’s scared of his own empathy. That if he truly let himself love everyone, he couldn’t survive the hurt of it.
Which is purer, in a way, than my own sort of caring. My caring, I think, is much more selfish.
I’ve been hurt too. I’ve seen bad things, too. And when I closed myself off like that, I became a cold and bitter person, and the colder and more bitter you are, the colder and more bitter others are back, until all you can see is the worst in everything and almost nothing can drag you out of the pit you’ve dug yourself into.
I think he’s cold because he’s afraid of love. I think he knows that loving others makes you vulnerable regardless of your actions, so he does what he can to dislike people before he becomes attached.
I think I love because if I didn’t, I’d hate. I’d hate everybody. I’d hate people I care about.
I think I need to love everybody, care about everybody, at least a little tiny bit, because if any single person was unworthy then anyone could be unworthy, and how on earth would I know?
The man I bought coffee for didn’t bother us that day. Didn’t bother us for a few weeks. I try not to hope the two things are related.
Another guy I knew from the street got clean. Got a house. Was going back to school, before he fell off the wagon.
He’s on the street again, now.
Seeing him back out there hurts.
It probably wouldn’t hurt if I didn’t give a shit, if I wasn’t kind of excited for him, if I wasn’t still kind of hoping he’d get clean again.
He has no idea who I am, though. We only met once, maybe four years ago now.
I’m still hoping I’ll see him around town again soon, standing upright without the black stains on his fingers, smiling like he was when he came by with his social worker.
I think most people have the impulse to care. I think the choices they make don’t reflect their capacity for love so much as they indicate what scares us more- pain and power and how we let it in.
We have shift change again twenty minutes.
I’m not sure what else to say.
Would you rather be stabbed in the back, or buried alive?
Man. You took one for the team. I couldn't get through Harry Potter because for a self proclaimed "feminist" that was apparently "so oppressed" she had to use her initials instead of her very feminine first name Joanne. She's actually very terrible at writing women.
Picture this. Only 4 books are published. The 5th is about to be published. I finally let someone bully me into buying the first four in a box set. I can't even get through the first book because "Isn't this a coed school? Why is Hermione like? The only girl going there?"
Apparently it doesn't get better either. In later books when they fix their "token girl character" problem it seems like ALL OF THE GIRLS in the story cannot exist without being attached to a man, and most of their defining personality traits are their relationship to one of the male leads.
The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.
“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”
“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.
“I did,” he replied. “But someone had to go first.”
That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.
“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”
I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.
“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”
I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.
“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”
I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.
--- --- --- --- ---
Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.
After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.
He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.
The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.
That was an eternity during a siege.
The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.
Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.
A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:
Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.
Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.
The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.
It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.
Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.
“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-
“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.”
He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.
I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.
But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.
I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.
“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”
“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”
I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.
“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.
“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.
We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.
“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.
“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”
“Good,” he said.
I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.
It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.
Something I learned is if you don't step out of your artistic comfort zone a little, you're gonna be even more exhausted with making art. Your mind is a caged tiger and it needs to attack something new from time to time. Your mind is pacing in its enclosure 🐅
If you don't like drawing figures and poses because they're frustrating, draw figures and poses and get frustrated! Draw them! With anger! Swear and curse at them!
If you don't like drawing traditionally because there's too much room to make mistakes, draw traditionally and make mistakes! Scream while doing it! Put on scary music! Make it silly!
This goes for any kind of craft or skill
You stand to lose nothing in the end (Except maybe your own patience and sanity but that's temporary). But you do gain at least a little bit more knowledge and skill to feed your mind tiger
Literally all I want to see is an animated short about the heartwarming story of a dirt bike and a condor finding an abandoned baby and working together to raise him in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Library Dragqueen who wants to keep stories alive. An apocalypse where people are just trying to be good. There are no marauders, just people who havent found the gladlands. There could be beaches, the world is big, we don't know.
There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.
Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.
In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.
Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.
So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.
But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!
It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)
It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?
Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.
Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.
Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:
“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”
This has unlocked a new fear O_O he's been working on Chopin's études for like ten years; he's over 70, so his version of extreme sports is seeing how fast he can play them
well maybe you should blearily wake up at 5:08 in the pre-dawn light and find the sleeping soft tiny mammal body of your cat just inches from your head like a miracle too beautiful for speech, and you should rustle one hand out from your blankets to rub fingertip circles across the warm eggshell dome of her little velvet-wrapped skull and on the bristly patches just where the cups of her ears begin, and as she inclines her head into your fingers and purrs without ever opening her little eyes you should feel a love so tender that you understand how that love could have reached out from the fireside into the inky spangled nights long gone to reach her, and then you'll feel better
cause love's such an old fashioned word and love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves
Yeaaaaaaaah! @catchandelier - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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