I am definite and real!

I've been unable to cry for at least 14 years now. it dried up somewhere around the 3rd and 4th grade, bullying and trauma leading to me becoming emotionally numb and being physically unable to cry - literally, my body could not process big emotions through crying anymore, it'd just get stuck every time. like a half-cry, or even less, that my body would just shut down before it got anywhere.

I'd pretty much given up on the idea I'd ever be able to cry again, accepted it as something I'd just have to live with.

but one month ago, I started taking estrogen. I don't know if it's the new hormones coming in and changing things up, but... last night, I was watching this film, and it got to a really emotional point, and though I'd been tearing up throughout the film's touching scenes up until then, this time I just *went.* I was bawling my eyes out, and it took me a while to realize that for the first time in over 14 years, my body wasn't stopping me. I was *actually* crying for real!

I must have cried and cried and cried for like 10 minutes and I remember having this flurry of different emotions it was hard to tell one from the other, but one thing I felt so strongly was just how happy I was to finally be able to cry! this was something I thought I'd never get back, not for a long, long time at least but here I was, my body actually doing what it's supposed to do and letting me cry...

I immediately had to take selfies and write about it in my diary to memorialize the moment. I was so elated. I can cry again! I can cry!

This is the control room, and if you look closely, you'll see a dark stripe in the carpet running the perimeter of the room. This was referred to as the "velvet rope," and absolutely NO ONE was allowed to cross it without authorization. It was under constant observation from an adjacent office, and I was told that if someone did set foot inside without permission, things got VERY serious VERY quickly.

This is one of the computer stations, and to me, it's such a gorgeous encapsulation of its period of technology, the sort of aesthetic that shows like Lost will bend over backwards to recreate.

As I was scouting, I noticed the day calendar had last been torn off about when the plant closed for good...

Then we went into the nuclear reactor, and the whole damn thing was just so spooky.

Looking back, I think it came from an overwhelming feeling of utter insignificance in the face of the sheer power this colossus was designed to produce.

The scale was just so out of proportion to every day reality, the sort of place where a weight of "46000 LBS" is just casually noted on the side of a part.

Peering into where the core would've been, all I could think is that I'd never want the job where you have to climb down that ladder on the left while this thing was in operation.

If you're interested in seeing more, you can find my full tour here!

https://nickcarr.com/scouting-a-decommissioned-nuclear-power-plant/

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

I've been wanting to unpack this particular terf argument for a while but I'm not even sure what I wrote that you could be responding to here. yes it's bioessentialist to see trans women as our assigned sex before what we actually are, but that fact alone does not obligate you to sleep with anyone

it would be fatphobic to announce that you don't want to sleep with fat women, and someone simply calling that out alone would not constitute pressuring you to sleep with anyone you didn't want to

Nobody can be exclusively attracted to afab people because YOU DON'T KNOW. You can't, not for sure.

For the first time, China has successfully landed an orbital reusable booster at sea.

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?