Iron Borealis

Quantum witch who has figured out how to store her nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and crippling depression into patterns compatible with human neural impulses and can project them in the form of hexes onto other people, or reverse the process to siphon thoughts.

Guy who had his entire digestive tract cybernetically enhanced so it constitutes over 1/3 of his body mass but he can use all his organs as extra limbs or attack with them like a starfish throws its stomach at its prey.

Retired military robot whose brain is a daisy chain of forty rat brains who is still trying to get its personhood legally recognized and resents not being able to do anything for itself without the aid of a "service human" who legally speaking technically owns it as a pet.

Guy who has had his entire skeleton replaced with a network of low level AI centipedes allowing him to react at incredible speeds and move in ways that shouldn't be possible.

House sized anthill which lives underground and interacts through a series of dozens of drones which can temporarily assemble into a humanoid shape if needed.

Orca who had most of her body destroyed by a depth charge during one of many surface wars and had her head and remaining spine installed into a colossal multiarmed mech suit to be able to collect the disability compensation after she sued, and uses it to maintain a coffee bar and support group focused on civilians injured in military or police actions.

Guy who installed entropic conversion units at key joints of his body which allows him to become super fast, hyper intelligent, super strong, and indestructible for ten minutes, but anything within a ten foot sphere around him at the start gets turned to ash.

Ratbot has a real uphill battle because if it wins personhood the military has to start paying benefits to every functional ratbot and they were created as disposable soldiers with human like intelligence but without any regulations about their rights. As far as the military is concerned they just need to stall until ratbot parts all run out and the one with the lawsuit breaks down permanently. Bad news for ratbots.

The mosquito hybrid is a low income area doctor. Wealthy people can afford nanoplants that run off vat grown synthetic material and have near perfect cell regrowth and life extension. Mosquito hybrid found their nanoplant as a junk discard experimental model and needed a set amount of insect genetic material before it worked.

With a heavy heart, I come to you all with the news announced by close friends of Cat Frazier that she had passed away on Monday, June 29.

She had been running @animatedtext since 2012, with her impact on the internet SHAPING tumblr. If you have a years long history on this site, you’ve seen her art.

She ran a venue in Oakland called Oakland Secret, a punk venue where I’d vend at regularly as an artist. She made a safe space for queer artists, artists of color, and local furs too. I am forever grateful for her work both in the Bay Area creative scene and online, and am forever changed by the totality of her impact.

I’ll be linking some articles from the 2010’s about her impact online: The Fader | Action | Jezebel | ObviouslySocial

I invite you to take a visit through her archive, and if you have a long history with this site like I do, it’s like walking down memory lane. (open link in browser)

of course hopefully you see it since you made yourself anonymous

this is for the colors

R1: 5 sc in MR = (5 sts)

R2: inc in each st around = (10 sts)

R3: {sc 1, inc} 5x = (15 sts)

R4: {sc 2, inc} 5x = (20 sts)

R5: {sc 3, inc} 5x = (25 sts)

R6: {sc 4, inc} 5x = (30 sts)

Straight Rows

R7-15: sc around (9 rows) = (30 sts)

Decrease Rows (invisible decreases Q)

R16: {dec, sc 4} 5x = (25 sts)

R17: {dec, sc 3} 5x = (20 sts)

R18: {dec, sc 2} 5x = (15 sts)

R19: {dec, sc 1} 5x = (10 sts)

R20: dec 5x = (5 sts)

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

Some ancient locals probably DO remember that podrace ("Dad won enough money to buy his freedom AND Mom's off that ONE bet!") -- and are probably constantly suggesting to Owen that Luke is the perfect size to start podracing like his cousin. Luke sneezes and it's clear to them he's got the reflexes, and they know someone with a training pod....

The bookies are probably making late night visits to the Lars homestead telling them that Luke is not allowed on the podracing circuit, all the terrible things the Lars can expect if they dare, and dropping sacks of wuipupi as they leave.

Owen and Beru, being Tatooine locals, quickly start fleecing the bookies -- they were never going to enter Luke into podracing, but the bookies don't know that.

yet another adhd comic

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway. In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.

Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.

This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.

Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.

If this seems harsh: There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour. Over fifty people lost their homes. Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.

The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this

-And there is! It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)

On one hand: FAR fewer fireworks parties this year!

- Only nine to last year's thirteen - three of them had the good sense to be firing their recreational explosives out over the local reservoir - That's far from foolproof - and really bad for the fish - also y'all are RIGHT NEXT to where the Bald Eagles are nesting - but congratulations on at least attempting some risk mitigation!

On the other hand.

Donald Trump gets attacked by an eagle.