i apologize in advance

you: wh

me, briskly removing my shoes and shaking fragments of rubble out of them: One Direction is perhaps the first band to exist entirely within the Panopticon, from the very beginning, and yet even that was not enough for us. Can you imagine how difficult it would become to hold onto a “self” when what people want most from you are the moments of your life that specifically are NOT FOR THEM? It wasn’t just what they DID, we wanted to know what they FELT, constantly. We demanded to know but we did not want to be TOLD. The knowledge could only be “authentic” if it was not meant for us

you: why are you in my house

me, climbing into your bed and pulling your blankets up to my chin: The endless “documentaries,” the social media – we had an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly intimate, degree of access to these people, and still what we valued most were secrets and accidents. What we wanted was their interiority, and when we could not have that we invented it. Wouldn’t you resent having to constantly be GRATEFUL for that grasping, rapacious love? I would

you: are you crying?

There’s a reason you hide from them. You belong here with me.

Take me up, // It was forged in a dragon’s breath // In the wrong hands, this sword could do great evil. It must be wielded by Arthur and him alone // The sword was born of the old magic. You have no idea of its power // Take the sword far from here and place it where no mortal man can ever find it // [Excalibur] was made specifically for Arthur // No, I’m going to make you see that Tristan’s wrong; you aren’t just anyone, you are special. You and you alone can draw out that sword // You’re destined to be Albion’s greatest king. Have faith // cast me away.

Are You Looking at My Rump?

“I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you”

This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:

https://www.space.com/41434-mars-rover-opportunity-wakeup-music-playlist.html?fbclid=IwAR3uL6q4tOmLQTIEhiwYegGc99nv4N01HQKItpCLQiQYIptBOevNN6uIyT8

It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“

This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?

So they started calling it her.

They nicknamed her Oppy.

They told her to take a selfie not long ago.

After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.

And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet