to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube
they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!
i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies
where i am, a box fan and the filters run about $20 each, so if $100 is too much of a stretch at the moment, get the fan and one filter. tape the filter to the intake side of the fan, all the way around. this is also good if your space is small and a 20" cube won't fit.
Goodbye Kitty â€ïž You were my buddy for the last 19 years â from college to graduating and moving across the country then moving more states away, you were always there to play and cuddle and make us laugh. â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïž
wait ok this is actually one that has caused some contention before when I've talked to people about it. reblog and tag whether or not you check the weather prediction every day before going out
it's wild that popular discourse around migraines is that there are too many people who claim to have migraines but "just have bad headaches". this is the exact opposite of my experience? i'm still trying to convince several of my friends that their "bad tension headaches" that are unilateral, throbbing, cause light sensitivity, nausea, etc, are migraines lmao. migraine is underdiagnosed and undertreated by every metric i can think of.
this narrative is not harmless! it prevents people from getting treatment that could really benefit them. so i would like it to die. thank you.
As a guy who went to see a neurologist only to "rule out migraines" because I thought I had "tension headaches at worst and also it's not that bad really" only to realize by tracking my headache days that I have very bad chronic migraines just with no aura (most people with migraines don't have them), I co-sign this 100%.
Just starting abortive medications already improved my quality of life so much and now that my doctor started me on preventatives, I might actually be able to have more than a handful of headache-free days each month.
Migraine is frequently misdiagnosed as chronic sinusitis or tension headaches according to research. Mostly because people have a very rigid (inaccurate) idea of what it actually is.
But even if it's not migraine, you still deserve treatment for your headaches. Just because someone else has them worse than you doesn't mean you don't deserve relief.
Learning about the different types of migraine and headache disorders can help you better understand your symptoms and discuss them with you
yeah i found out awhile back that the 'pressure headaches' that i get that 'aren't that bad' (but still leave me feeling sick and dysfunctional all day) were migraines. i now take a low dose of a preventative medication and the number of shitty rain days i have per month has dropped from like ten to two. it's great.
In my experience anyone who has chronic pain of any kind ALWAYS under diagnoses it in part cause people who DON'T have chronic pain always tell them how it's Not That Bad Just Get Over It and it takes a lot of fighting to get anyone (including doctors) to do anything about it. Fucked if I know why. Everyone seems to think we're making it up. I've never met anyone who is making it up.
i've had this garfield panel saved forever and i even marked in my calendar today as "the monday that wouldn't die" so uh. happy(?) monday the 22nd aka the monday that wouldn't die
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
we used to have Big Horse in this country and now we just have Big Data - me giving a campaign speech when I run on a platform thatâs anti ai but pro genetic manipulation to develop a modern equus giganteus
Recently managed to activate the most amazing infodump trap card.
I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."
As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.
Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.
A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.
As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"
Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.
You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.
It was not.
It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where â you must understand â the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.
And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.
This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.
After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis â the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding â hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.
None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.
With these advantages â and being the best dog there â Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.
Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.
"Phyllis," said he.
The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.
"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"
Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch â the dog, not the woman â went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.
Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.
Secondly, Sister Lucy always said when she died she wanted to come back as one of Phyllis's dogs because "mom treated the dogs better than us."
Everyoneâs favorite lethal SecUnit is back in Platform Decay, the latest installment of Martha Wellsâs The Murderbot Diaries series.
Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.
After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn't know.
Including human children. Ugh.
This may well call for...eye contact!
(Emotion check: Oh, for fâ)
Weâve included an excerpt from the first chapter below:
Chapter One
Space was okay to look at but not super fun when you were out in it. And Three and I were definitely in it, clamped on to the outside hull of a small in-system shuttle. It was just as uncomfortable as it sounds.
Obviously, to make this plan work, we had needed a suit. And considering this was the distraction part of the plan that would be taking the brunt of the attention, it was better if it was an armored suit. But it couldnât be Threeâs actual SecUnit armor, it had to look like the kind made for humans.
We had ended up with an armored suit designed to look like one that Wilken and Gerth had used back on Milu. Because someone (ART) thought this part could use some more verisimilitude. (Like someone might have researched that incident, and think Iâd been hauling around one of those shitty sets of armor all this time, or hiding it in my secret rogue SecUnit lair. (Otherwise known as the Port Hotel on Preservation Station, or ARTâs aft module resident cabin, depending on where I was at the time.))
(Iâm not saying using that armor design is not a good idea; I mean, that is some quality paranoid overthinking right there, we all have to agree on that.)
Anyway, even in an armored suit, traveling via clamping on to the outside of a shuttle moving through space was so inherently disturbing it was a relief when the black hull loomed out of the dark. We were coming up on our target/destination, which was a gigantic space dock attached to an even more gigantic planetary torus. There were multiple docks along the torusâs outer hull, but this one was closest to our primary target, which was why we had to go in here. Literally because the thing was so big, and because multiple intel sources suggested it would be difficult to move around in. (Yes, that sounds like the opposite of super fun. There were a lot of other things I would rather be doing.)
A station that encircled an entire planet had to be huge. (And it was huge. From this vantage point you would have no idea there was a whole planet on the other side of this thing, over there somewhere.) It was also very old, not a point in its favor. In the few spotlights along this part of the hull, you could see the metal had scrapes or impact marks that had been repaired over time. But what gave the age away were the engraved numbers stretching across the plates next to the various hatch accesses in the dock area. They had been put there for human pilots, before bot-pilots and the feed were common, as a failsafe for automated approach beacons. The numbers were in three differentânumber systems? Languagesâ What do you call numbers in different languages, characters orâ
Numerals, Three said.
That didnât sound right, but whatever.
Our shuttle started its maneuvers into a parking sync orbit above the dock. The torus feed was just a dull roar even this close, and its Port Authority comm channel was all commands and info, no obtrusive ads. If I hadnât been so angry I would have been really intimidated at this point. Okay, I was still a little intimidated. But mostly angry. Not at Three.
(Emotion check: Angry. Itâs never a good idea to try to do complicated things when youâre angry. Like coding. Coding is complicated. Especially when people are shooting at you. But I do that all the time.)
Three said, Target Null+1 on approach, and included the direction vectors. I didnât need any direction vectors, because Three had a visual on the cargo bot, so I had a visual on it. There were other bots moving on the torus hull some distance away, where big modular transports were connected to larger locks. On our shuttleâs sensor feed I could see the lines of powered cargo modules traveling on their set routes, though that was too far into the dark to pick up with our scan or visual. But Target Null+1 bot was passing nearly beneath us. (At least it looked that way from our position on our shuttle. It could have actually been sideways or up or whatever, because space.)
The cargo bot climbed along a seam between hull plates, shifting in and out of shadow, an inert cargo container clamped under one arm, while the other three limbs guided its body along. It was one of the larger models, maybe seven meters tall from its splayed grippy feet to the flat top of its head/processor. Cargo bots are weirdly graceful in zero gravity, it was kind of cool to watch. (Unlike certain stations I could name (Preservation) which lets them wander around inside the port wherever they want and their giant metal asses are in the fucking way all the time.) (Yes, Iâm mostly talking about JollyBaby.)
Three released the magnetic grips that were keeping us attached to the shuttleâs hull and said, Initiate in 3â2â1.
It pushed off from the shuttle and we fell through the dark, with a little help from a set of removable EVAC suit-maneuvering thrusters. Three was good at following the instructions from the suitâs feed, and we landed lightly on the cargo botâs back, our grips engaging again to keep us in place.
You can just talk, I told Three. I pinged the shuttle to let it know we were in place, then tapped the cargo botâs internal feed and slipped past its wall. Before the bot finished querying me as to what the hell we were doing on its back, I removed its memory of the proximity alert and told it everything was fine, just keep following its schedule. We arenât pretending to be a SecUnit, I added to Three, weâre pretending not to be a SecUnit.
The cargo bot hauled itself toward our next target, an entrance to the main cargo sorting port for this dock. Three hesitated for .02 seconds while it parsed what Iâd said. It likes using logic. Which not that I donât; itâs stupid not to use logic when youâre constructing flow charts and databases, etc. But itâs not particularly helpful for threat and risk assessment. Priorities reorder too fast in high-threat percentage situations, humans exist, and so on.
(Save-for-later: Check wonky risk assessment module for excessive logic statements. That would explain a lot.) Three finally said, We are pretending to be space debris.
It had a point. And what Three was pretending or not pretending to do wouldnât much matter in the next ten-plus minutes.
The problem with the missionâ Okay, the problem with the mission is the mission itself. Missions in general often suck, but extractions that can turn into hostage situations are the worst.
The other worst was that this dock and the section of the torus it serviced was owned by Barish-Estranza and contained one of their second-level headquarters installations. And there was a chance in the high 70s that they knew we were coming.
(Emotion check: Again? Itâs been like two seconds.)
Obviously, I did not want to do this. But Three was shit at pretending to be human. (I know, I should have been working with it more, âmentoring it,â as the humans insist on saying. But we also needed to let Three do what it wanted for a while, and what it wanted was to watch science documentaries and listen to freakishly advanced machine intelligences pretending to be bot-pilots talk at it. (Mostly Holism, but a few of the others had got in on it after discovering that there was a SecUnit around that liked being lectured to.) So there wasnât a lot of pretending-to-be-human training involved in that.) Our cargo bot reached its hatch just as it was cycling open. It climbed inside and Threeâs dark-vision filter activated, so the airlockâs blue and green safety lights lit up more of the interior.
It was a lock designed for bots, so it was pretty utilitarian. There wasnât even any active process to clean off the build-up around the vents. Our suit feed gave us stats
on the flush of station air and the pressure and gravity change, and we started picking up ambient audio. Then the inner hatch slid open.
This was a bad moment. We couldnât risk a peek over our cargo botâs shoulder and Three couldnât deploy drones without setting off the dockâs interior alarms. Three admitted, This is not ideal.
By which it meant it was somewhat terrifying. I acknowledged but didnât reply; I was waiting to grab the interior feed so we didnât get killed.
(It turns out executing a deliberate, convincing distraction is a lot harder than being a distraction accidentally.)
The cargo bot stepped through the inner hatch and we slipped off its back. Its giant body continued on, even as a flotilla of hauler bots swerved to avoid it. Three had frozen into immobility as I pulled in the dockâs feed and started to work. We were in the shelter of the lockâs safety overhang, which was in a visual shadow because of the angle of the wall lights; it was also a tiny motion and audio sensor black-out zone. (Since my penetration-testing report on Preservation Station, they had installed individual sensors on all the hatches where that happens. Mihira and New Tidelandâs stations and space docks were in the process of doing it now.)
(This is why humans shouldnât do their own security, or farm it out to automated sensor sweeps. Sensors canât see what they canât see, right? And while humans are shit at security, mostly because of the overreacting and some being assholes who just like using weapons to hurt each other, they are fantastic at getting into places where they arenât supposed to be.)
(Apparently itâs genetic? Overse recommended a book on human evolution and it was even more fucking weird than anything Iâd read about it before.)
I made it through the first three DockSys feed walls and got a view through the cameras. The dock was arranged in a cylindrical column, with multiple levels of platforms around a central pillar with lifts and ramps. We were on level 20. The walls were just bare metal, scarred by accidents, no decoration or holos or anything. (This was supposed to be a big deal Corporation Rim torus/ whatever, youâd think they could make an effort, even in here. But they never do anything fancy where itâs just indentured workers to see it. The only real color was the Barish-Estranza logos stamped on everything.)
Hauler bots sorted the cargo containers into pallets ready to be transported to modules or ships or for internal dispatch. Large shafts in the floors of the platforms accommodated cargo containers with their own propulsion systems or climbing cargo bots. There should be very few humans in here, since most of the supervision and oversight would be done via the dockâs inventory system. (Which was standard practice because
it was cheaper, obviously, but really, areas like these are dangerous for anybody squishier than a hauler bot to be wandering around in.) (The exception to this is mining cargo docks, which, surprise, have an insanely high casualty rate. Even company executives would leave notations on the mortality reports like What the shit are they doing in there.)
But with a little tweaking, my camera views found plenty of human activity, scattered at different sheltered points around each level. They were all in protective suits that looked bulky enough to hide security armor. Some of them were actually working, but most were just pretending to.
This is great, because it meant our distraction plan would work. Also not so great, because I would like Three to get out of here alive.
I sent Three the schematics highlighted where the potential security personnel were located; it replied with an acknowledgment sigil and an updated map projection. The cargo bot lumbered out of the potential fire zone and we eased forward. Ambient audio was low, just the hum of hauler bots and the clank of maneuvering modules on the level below us. The cameras spotted more human activity on a platform two levels above us, a scramble of workers (probably the real workers) trying to get to a lift tube and a few workers (the security humans pretending to be workers) holding them back. Iâd hoped
weâd have a little more time. Fortunately, I was now in three different Sec and Safety systems and MotilityControl for all the lifts, including the central cargo lift. I already had my files queued up and loaded, I just needed to adjust the code for these individual systems.
There were a lot of things they could have done to slow me down, if they knew I (or something like me) was coming. (They couldnât keep me out, not with what they had available, not without isolating their SecSystems from the feed and each other, and thatâs not possible if you want them to do their jobs.) But they hadnât done those things. Which meant (1) their intel was flawed;
(2) they didnât know I was coming and this security was for something else.
I ran that through risk assessment and it produced the equivalent of a shrug sigil.
(Emotion check: Shrug sigil right back at you, you piece of shit.)
The kind of coding I did didnât leave a lot of what ART liked to call forensic artifacts behind; if Barish-Estranza had good intel they might be familiar with the results of what I could do, but they would assume Iâd just be bashing around in there destroying stuff with viral code, not redirecting process commands.
We couldnât delay any more without making them suspicious. They obviously knew we/somebody was in here, even if they werenât quite sure where/who yet, or the indentured workers they had dragged in as cover wouldnât be panicking. I told Three, Weâre go. Proceed.
Three started across the platform, staying in shadow and using the hauler bots as cover. I could have removed it from the cameras entirely but intel suggested they didnât know I could do that, and I wanted to keep them from knowing it for as long as possible, since it was really important for the rest of the plan.
Three reached the cargo lift and used a magnetic grip to attach itself to the side of a powered cargo module moving upward. We drifted up with the module, so it would look like we were heading for an admin access three levels up. I glitched their security feed at random intervals, to keep their attention on it, while I was setting up on MotilitySys.
Systems like Motility are designed to keep things from running into each other; itâs hard to override that to cause crashes. Itâs much easier to get the system to send things on increasingly chaotic routes that donât crash, causing mass confusion instead. Humans always assume youâre going to kill them, which is one of the reasons they overreact to everything. (Ratthi says thatâs genetic, too, but I think he was being sarcastic.) (Maybe he wasnât.)
We reached our target level and I gave Three another go-ahead. It released its grip from the cargo container and dropped onto the supposedly unoccupied platform. It said, If TorusSecurity does not attack, should I engage them?
That isnât going to be a factor, I told it, and added, feint aggressively toward that inventory kiosk, then drop and roll back toward the lift shaft.
Three charged the inventory kiosk where the armored human security guard was hiding. They overreacted (surprise), jerking up their heavy projectile weapon and firing. By that point Three was on the ground as instructed and the projectile passed over its head toward the lift shaft. I had already nudged the powered cargo module currently floating serenely upward into position. The projectile slammed into its side plating.
A powered module should be able to take a hit like that (they bump into each other all the time) but I had followed up the positioning nudge by cutting power to one of its stabilizers. So the force of the armor-piercing projectile knocked it into a spin and right out of the lift field. The module tumbled across the platform, startled cargo and hauler bots scattered, and every audible and feed proximity/safety alert in the whole dock went off. I kicked its stabilizer back on and MotilitySys engaged a temporary air barrier. The module stopped right in front of a transparent section of wall over an office, where human supervisors had been pretending not to watch us. Well, they had been doing that. Now they were belatedly screaming and flinging themselves away from the window.
Three was already up and sprinting and I engaged code haulerfight.file and cut off all access to the cameras.
So that worked great.
The hauler bots accelerated and charged at each other, then veered off at the last second. The patterns were complex and unpredictable and it was happening on every level of the dock. Iâd put some of it together from code Iâd used before, but changing the variables and adapting it for B-Eâs specific code architecture on the fly was tricky. MotilitySys was helping everything along, obeying what it thought were my authorized instructions to âtestâ its tolerances. It was really going for it, too. It wasnât going to last long, though, which was why Three needed to move fast now.
SafetySys had ordered the cargo bots to climb the walls or head for the nearest hatches, so they were all in the way, too. We were both scanning the updated map data but Three spotted the best route first, including a feint toward a maintenance access and faking a dive into one of the side lift tubes. I made a couple of adjustments and suggestions. Three said, I have it now. You should go. Right, so, I am not actually physically present with
Three.
I was tagging along with it via a new share-architecture code derived partly from ARTâs ability to create iterations of itself and partly from the way we had built Murderbot 2.0. âPartly,â because the me who was with Three was not a full iteration; it was a partial download, but it was the parts I needed.
This wasnât a full independent virus (or software baby, as Amena would say), it was just me going partially dormant while taking a temporary ride on Threeâs hardware. We did have a secure feed link, but it was currently dormant, too, waiting until we needed it. We had to do it this way so B-Eâs SecSystem couldnât detect (or worse, break) our connection.
This was necessary because Three just doesnât process as fast as I do, despite being a newer unit. I knew my processing stats had increased over the course of going to a lot of places and needing to write increasingly complex code at increasingly fast rates in order to get out of those places. Notwithstanding the time I nearly blew my brain out trying to process on a company gunshipâs hardware. Three didnât have that experience and sending it in here alone would have been basically murder.
This way was better. Three would cause a little more chaos, then exit the torus through a lock it had already identified and return to the shuttle. It would even get to ride inside this time.
Acknowledged, I said, and brought my secure feed link forward from backburner. Initiate upload.
