INTO THE SUN!

you've probably already noticed that turn signals ("blinkahs") don't serve their usual function here - a common saying on the server is that using them as intended is just giving information to your enemies. you may be tempted to conclude that these "blinkahs" are useless. not so! they are exclusively used for parrying cars audacious enough to think they can just drive past you. the timing is a five-frame window beginning when you can first see the approaching car in your sideview mirrors. simply engage your blinkah and then immediately jump out in front of your opponent. if you get the timing right, you will build super meter. if you're too early, you've accidentally performed a safe traffic maneuver, resetting your meter to 0. if you're too late, you crash and may have to transition to direct PvP, which is outside the purview of this guide.

yellow lights can also be parried by running them, with the amount of super gained determined by how far you make it through the intersection before the light turns red. the ideal window you're aiming for here is between your front and back wheels crossing the white line

you can use your super meter to cast a variety of spells to hinder your opponents. popular meter-efficient spells include mainstays such as "Summon Double-Parked Uber Eats Driver", "Line-Skipping Merge", and "Greater Unmarked Cop". if you max out your meter, you can cast the legendary "Power Word: Storrow".

the super meter system works differently for bikes. obviously, since they lack blinkahs and run red lights anyways, they can't build super in any of the normal ways. instead, they build it up passively, since their very existence enrages every driver around them. to offset this, the spell list for bikes is a lot lower-power than the spell list for cars, mostly being focused on mobility or utility instead of offense (although there are some notable exceptions like "U-Lock Missile"). the capstone spell for bikes is, of course, "Post Misleadingly Edited GoPro Footage On Reddit".

So I made a list.

Reasons why friend Grace's eyes leaked this Eridian cycle:

One of the students gave him a carving of Earth. It was lopsided and the continents were wrong, but Grace held it to his chest and his eyes started leaking. It looked like the round-soft-thing he gave me when we first said goodbye.

He found out 🎶🎵🎶(he calls them lizards) are often pets here. His voice warbled to a pitch nearly too high for humans to reach.

He told me the rocks here have color. He studies them in his biodome and calls them “beautiful.” He informed me I have color beyond black-brown-medium-smooth-stone. “Blue,” Grace said in that voice he uses when he is feeling sad but not-sad at the same time. “Like the ocean.”

He tried a new recipe with a new version of his recycled tissue meat. Humans are still disgusting when they eat, but he was happy with the taste.

He remembered that 🎶🎵🎶are pets here and asked if they are ever dressed up. I told him that sometimes children will make collars for them out of smooth stones.

I finally finished the xenonite suit and knocked on his door. For the first time, there was no wall separating us. I told him to kneel down (humans are so tall) and I wrapped my limbs around him and squeezed. I could feel his breath catch, his body shake (fragile fragile fragile), and he used his two grabbing limbs to wrap around my carapace and cling.

“Sorry, I’m leaking everywhere,” he said, voice thick. “I know it’s gross.”

“Not gross,” I said, even though it always is. But Grace can leak on me anytime he wants. “This is good?” The concept of hugging is so strange to us. But I could feel his heart fluttering, could see the way his body’s core temperature spiked and then smoothed out, calming.

“Yeah,” he said, sniffling. “Thanks, bud.”

I gave him this list. He can read my language now, can speak it well too with the help of his portable Earth thinking machine and the sing-speak instrument our musicians have given him. I heard him laugh and even the sound was wet. "C'mere," he said, and I was wrapped in his strange arms again. He pressed his face to my xenosuit, and I held him tight. Another hug. I would hug him everyday, just to make him happy. He is so fragile, nothing to protect his soft, strange skin. He almost died on the way here and now I can listen to his heart beating, strong and steady. I feel mine pounding in response. He can't hear them, but they say, Love love love.

inspired by that one reddit post

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!