You have a superpower that keeps you safe: whenever you are in danger, time freezes.
You could be asleep, or in the middle of a conversation, or watching a movie. Time would stop and give you a chance to leave the area, and as soon as you were out of danger, time would immediately start up again
You walk in front of a bus and time stops until you exit its path. Someone tries to mug you, but suddenly you're gone; down the street and around the corner, so even when he turns around he can't see you, and therefore can't come after you.
One day you're watching tv at home and everything freezes. You look around, but you're alone. You get up and walk out of your apartment - the unnatural quiet, and the immobile dust motes suspended in the shaft of light from the window at the end of the hall tells you the danger still has not passed. You leave the building and the city is motionless. You walk down the street, then you go a few blocks, and before you know it you've traversed several neighborhoods, but nothing changes
After what feels like hours of walking, time still hasn't resumed, which means the danger still hasn't passed
After a very long time (you'd say multiple hours, but you can't estimate it well. There's nothing to estimate it by.) walking in random directions, it finally clicks. This isn't something that happened to you, it was going to destroy the whole city at least. You can't check your phone for news, because that requires a current to be transmitting information, so that's not an option. But you can open doors. And bars in the area are sure to have a tv. If any news about this came before time stopped, the screen is likely to still be stuck on that transmission. You know it's a low chance, but you have nothing else to try.
You go through ten bars before you give up.
Your second, desperate attempt is the news studio. If any information was about to be broadcast, you would fing it there. It takes a while to walk there by foot, but you can't take a car, since combustion is sure as hell not going to work when time doesn't. But after walking for a while you come across a bike. That only requires your movement to work, so you "liberate" it from it's frozen rider, after which you manage to get there before getting bored to death.
After trying the necessary doors and not finding a key, you break in through a window. You get lost a few times, not that it matters much, before you find something. They printed out the text, thank god, so no need for a working computer. You read. And then you lean on the wall for support. And slowly sink to the ground.
An atomic bomb. That's what's happening. That's what would've killed you. What would've killed everyone. You stare at the ceiling. Then you stare at the floor. You stare, for a long time. An unmeasurably slow moment. There is no way to stop this. Your best hope is to take your bike and drive until it won't hurt you. You check the paper to see how far to go. It's doable, everything is when your body can't get tired.
But..
You look at the news reporters around you, their frozen faces of fear, as they rushed through the preparations, to at least warn the people of what's coming. You see it in their faces. They knew they would die for this broadcast. And they were still late.
You can't leave them here.
The info on the paper is essential. You can guess at what distance your powers would proclaim you safe. It saved you from many things which would not have necessarily killed you before, so if you merely dragged people to the point where they would get hurt but wouldn't be likely to die... You could do it. It's doable. It must be done.
You start with the tv studio. At first you're uncoordinated, but after the first few you start a system, sweeping the building from one side to the other, from top to bottom. By the time you're done with the first building, you're sure it would have taken you at least three days, had the planet been turning.
You could've spent a century here, doing this. Your body can't get tired, you don't need to eat, or sleep, or to breathe, as all physiological needs are magically suspended. No time passes, no energy is spent, and yet you move. After a few houses, you draw out the safety line with chalk to keep track of it. You read a book, sometimes, just so you don't go crazy. It's not like you don't have the time for it. One by one the houses get emptied. One after another the streets are deserted. Block after block turn lifeless. City districts, moment ter eternal moment, slowly, torturously slowly, become ghost towns.
And then, after metaphorical, uncountable centuries of work, you are done. You took count, every house and every street adding up to a number somewhere around the official citizen count. There's piles of paper filled with the calculations. You still probably didn't get everyone. But you got a lot. You gave them a chance. You breathe a sigh of relief. You sit down, finish your book and take your bag.
And then you cross the line running.
The sound of the air moving around you reaches your ears for the first time in forever. With it, the sound of many, many confused people.
And as the sound of an explosion reaches you, with merely a gust of wind and slight warmth to tell you what has finally come to pass... You laugh.
We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.
every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).
Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you'll see it later that says "it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024." If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.
Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.
We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.
If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.
To be clear, I don't mean we should forget or take our eyes off the ultimate long-term goals of getting Cool Shit, but to get there, we're gonna have to support things like "half-measures" and "small steps" and "not tearing down people who won't get us all the way there" and "understanding that they are starting from the basement basically because every government institution is being decimated"
Yeah. Don't refuse to vote for someone who isn't going to get you where you want to be as fast as you want to be there - vote for someone who's going to bail just a bit faster then we're sinking, and we'll get there someday.
This is just one surface-level snapshot of what this administration has gleefully set in motion:
A new study looks at lives saved by USAID in the past and what the future without the agency will look like.
It takes longer to rebuild than to destroy, but the hardships of compromise (which can be real, troubling, and scarring for individuals and communities) are still better than the cost in human lives for letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The goal is fewer dead human beings.
sex pollen is an integral part of the fanfiction ecosystem but i just don't think poison ivy would make anything that encourages procreation of even more humans. unless she figures out how to make the sex pollen same-sex specific or fertility-negating she's not making it at all. #philosophical
batman: throw your homosexual phytoaphrodisiac pollen wherever you like, pamela. it won't get past my rebreather. i've made sure of it. i learned my lesson the last time.
There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.
Keep making trouble 'til you find what you love @curls-and-books - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
