#3 Goncharov Fan

It's important context that she had a very hard life into adulthood. Very poor family. Abusive father. Mentally ill mother. She often had to miss school as a teenager because she had to go find her mother, who would wander off for days into the woods. She also made sure her other siblings were fed, clothed, and at school while she herself was missing out on them.

I once asked her why she did so much celebrating.

She told me that people can choose to celebrate the small stuff if they want to, or not, but life was hard enough and the celebrations, no matter how small, made the other hard things easier. "If two people lead hard lives, and one of them celebrates and the other doesn't, which do you think will survive longer? Get more done? Make it farther?"

You don't have to date. You don't have to stop being friends. You can just keep hanging out. Self control and respect exists.

Dressing Gown

c. 1840

step two: in your diffidence, leave many half-drunk glasses of water around your apartment

step three: your cat, who is stupider than any other mammal on earth, living or dead, starts drinking from your many abandoned water cups

step four: the cat now believes these are for her

I mean look at this thing:

Like, every post about them on tumblr going “lmao let’s be real, if I saw this shit I would stop at nothing to explore it” is highlighting the central conceit of the yucca mountain project.

The project is VERY aware of humanity’s tendency to explore, and the people involved are tormented constantly by the fact that ANYTHING they do to indicate “this specific place is extremely deadly and there’s nothing valuable here, GO AWAY” is going to become a fucking MAGNET for treasure hunters, explorers, adventurers, mystery enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists…like, the MOMENT it’s discovered, people will flood that place.

That’s what makes the project so fascinatingly difficult! There’s so much they have to convey, but at the same time, they have to do so without making the site itself interesting in any way, and without making it significant. Many possible warnings don’t incorporate a message at all, focusing instead on simply making the site as ugly, inconvenient, and unimportant-looking as possible so that it’s just never disturbed because nobody is interested in getting close. (It’s why seemingly crazy ideas like the color-changing cat priesthood are actually more viable than the seemingly “practical” example above, which still depends on written warnings guaranteed to be extremely interesting to future humans AND depends on the idea that those future humans will be able to decipher any of our languages. The most viable ideas focus on exploiting superstition and the subconscious, rather than LITERALLY trying to communicate “This place is not a place of honor” etc in as many words. Those are general ideas to be gotten across, not a script.)

The impossible catch-22 of the nuclear waste warning projects is that they absolutely MUST communicate the level of danger and the importance of keeping your distance…while also being acutely aware that warnings on the walls of ancient burial sites about the horrible curses that would afflict anyone who disturbed them did jack-fuck all to dissuade archaeologists.

* This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.