wrath, ruin and a red nightfall

henchperson: uh, boss? You know how a couple weeks ago, me and the girls put up that barrier against invaders, extra thick, just like you asked?

boss: yes…

henchperson: weeeel, the good news is no invaders this month.

boss: and the bad news? spit it out, already

henchperson: weeeeeel, we made it out of wet tissue again, boss. so we’re going to have to peel it off and put up a new one before it gets all nasty, you see…

if you live in any city in america, however, there are homeless people. they are the social problem that cannot be disappeared so easily. drive along a freeway outbound from the urban center to the suburbs and look into the trees. you’ll see tents, tarps, evidence of human habitation. walk through a downtown, even in coldest winter, and you’ll see bottles that weren’t there yesterday and clothes inexplicably abandoned. people tend to either not look at these things or to look at them and name them garbage. eyesore. they don’t consider what it would be like to carry everything you own on your back. how little energy you would have for recycling or cleaning up after yourself if you had been kicked out of your shelter at 7am that morning and now had to find a nook to hide out in to escape a -5F windchill. maybe you can go to a local public library, but maybe you can’t because you twitch or smell bad or talk to yourself and people only look at you out of the corner of their eye so they know what description to give the armed security guard at the front desk.

when i’m talking about looking at your unhoused neighbor, i’m talking about looking at them first. i’m talking about smiling and waving and maybe striking up a conversation. i’m talking about offering to grab lunch. i’m talking about indulging them even when they make you uncomfortable.

on memory care floors in hospitals you often encounter the problem of nurses who have been taught how to engage patients with memory issues but who do not give proper patient care because it makes them uncomfortable. they don’t want to lie or play pretend or do anything that takes them out of their very rigidly defined reality. an old man wakes up and tries to get out of bed because it’s time to feed the cows. he wonders where his wife is. it would make his nurse uncomfortable to tell him that his wife knew he needed some rest so she went out to feed the cows, so they tell him that his wife died five years ago and he doesn’t have his farm anymore. they break his heart rather than allow him to live in a better time for a little while longer.

back in december a man sat across from me on the train who was clearly struggling. i started a conversation with him about his art he was holding, which he told me were illustrated children’s books in a language he had always known. it was a syllabary i certainly didn’t recognize, and the illustrations weren’t anything i’ve seen in children’s literature, but we were suddenly both artists on the train. i showed him my journal and he complimented the pasting job on some of my collages. then he started to talk about angels. about his angel specifically, who had died and left him behind on earth. he missed his angel so much that he planned to commit suicide before christmas. i talked to him about his angel, and about love and grief and pain, all of which we could share. he began to call me jesus. i could have told him he was wrong, that i wasn’t even into the abrahamic religions, etc., and it would have broken his heart. instead i walked with him up from the train station—and got him through the armed transit cops who tried to stop him because he didn’t have a ticket—and gave him a picture of a loving savior, and a world that would be better for having him in it. instead of hugging some faggot, he ended up hugging a jesus that loved him. it was an odd situation. it made me a little uncomfortable. it may have been one of the few instances of kindness that he got that day. it may have been the first time in a while that someone who wasn’t unhoused or working the bread line actually started a conversation with him.

imagine if no one ever looked at you. don’t say some cute shit about “oh, i wish no one ever perceived me.” no you don’t. you wish you could control people’s perception of you. but what if people weren’t only not looking at you, but they already thought they knew you. you’re twitching so you’re on something. you’re staring at nothing so you’re dumb. you’re asking for money or food so you’re a leech on society. you’re talking to yourself so you’re dangerous. they don’t look at you but they know you. so they don’t speak to you bc they already know what they’re gonna find.

two and a half weeks ago my mom was found dead on the streets of san antonio. she’d been homeless there for about 12 years. i’d only just gotten stable enough to reach out to her. the woman i contacted at the day home she went to every month to get a haircut, her nails done, and to wash her clothes said she was doing well, that she was clean, that she was very polite, that she was smart. she had two dogs that she’d cared enough about to have microchipped. their names are fin and sophia. having those dogs probably made it so she couldn’t get permanent housing, because most housing programs for the homeless don’t allow them to bring pets. a lot of people choose to keep their pets rather than give them up as a condition of securing housing.

in denver, colorado i once met an unhoused man who had a master’s degree in geophysics. his thesis was on magnetic wells and their affects of satellite orbits. he was a birdwatcher.

when you refuse to look at homeless people, or the things they leave behind (often are forced to leave behind by cops), you are actively participating in the disappearance of a population. do you think you wouldn’t lose part of yourself if safety concerns made you nocturnal? if every time you got enough stuff to set up a good camp some suburbanite called the cops on your tent? would you not talk to yourself if no one else was speaking to you?

a lot of talk goes into the problem how easy it is to become homeless. one medical bill, one missed paycheck and your life is imperiled. well, there are a lot of people who are stepped over every day who already live your worst case scenario, and the simple fact is that the majority of people in the u.s. are too scared of having an uncomfortable or even perhaps scary interaction with an unhoused person to look at them. but i need y’all to know that you are not special. it isn’t just the dirtiest, most addicted, most mentally ill homeless people who are left to die on the streets alone. it is all homeless people. people who won’t leave behind beloved pets, people who couldn’t survive in academia, people who think they’re being gangstalked, people who have jobs, people who have families. if you are one missed paycheck from homelessness, you’re also one catastrophic tragedy, one spark that catches in the apartment on the other side of your building, one chance encounter with the drug that just won’t let you go. not one goddamn person on this earth is better than the unhoused person they step over on the way to get their morning coffee, and i hope to fuck y’all figure that out before you find yourselves disappeared too.

Your ideal environment is:

Hot/Cold

Wet/Dry

Bright/Dark

„you just need to find someone to be brave for“

A4 • liners STABILO point 88, Centropen; Pilot roller gel pen; Koh-i-Noor Polycolor pencils

hearing an old man saying something

Captain’s an asshole

Captain’s awesome (same captain)

first mate sucks

whiskey

the girls out here

the girls back home

ship is terrible

ship is great

Cape Horn

seriously why are we always running around Cape Horn this place sucks ass

want to go home

did NOT want to go home, somehow ended up there anyway

Sally and various sex acts we can do with her

beach party

rolling, heaving, hauling

where we’re bound

sea beasties threatening us and/or assisting us

stormy weather but we’re together

setting out to sea

coming in to harbor/taking shore leave

too much whiskey

punishing naughty crewmen

Let Me Tell You About This Guy

Goodbye!

Hello!

let us bother this fellow

oh man I should marry that one girl if I ever get back home

befriended an animal, call my parents if you don’t believe me!

you ever been to Place?

I have been grievously misled

sailors gotta sail

let’s get this bread, boys

don’t forget your old shipmate

It was kind of a joke between me and a friend ("you wouldn't judge someone for having gone rock climbing with a bunch of different people") but honestly the more I thought about it the more I bought into it unironically because:

It is a physical activity done with one or more partners

You should only go rock climbing with people you trust to not let you fall

You should not go rock climbing with someone who is drunk or currently incapable of rational decision-making

Some people get super super super into rock climbing and do not shut up about all the places they have climbed and how many are left on their bucket list and these people are usually men between the ages of 20 and 35 and like it's fine dude I'm glad you're happy but I don't know what most of those mountains even are

While many consider it a fun activity, pressuring someone into climbing when they don't want to (or ignoring their feelings and just dangling them off a cliff,) could cause both psychological and physical trauma

There is no moral value to it whatsoever. Who you have gone rock climbing with (or whether you have rock climbed at all) has no bearing on who you are as a person. Imagine telling someone "it's not that heights make you nauseous, it's just that you haven't found the right person to belay you!" or "you need to save your first time rock climbing for someone special." That would be absurd.

For some people it is a deep and moving personal experience.

For everything we do here, please be sure to be careful with what you edit, and restart your computer to lock things in. If you don't have access to the Group editor, (likely to happen if you're on base windows) you can do this as well by opening your Registry Editor app, then inputting this after your 'computer' or whatever the initial segment is. (Mine is computer. If I just try and paste the below string it gets SO mad at me)

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

Navigating to your "turnoffwindowscopilot", hit modify, and set the value data to 1.

If done correctly, it'll look like this.

While we're at it, you can also get rid of the integrated search, (or that thing where it searches the web when you search anything, whether or not you want it to) and such through regedit as well.

Integrated search will have you going to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Navigate to your "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" bit, if you don't see it, you can make it by right clicking and creating a new registry D-Word key of that exact name. Edit the key, set it to 1. It'll look like this if you do it right!

To get rid of Windows Spotlight, (The thing where it pulls up ten billion pages on windows start page, shoving ads in your face and cluttering everything) we go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DesktopSpotlight\Settings

And set "Enabled State" To 0. If you do it right, it'll look like this!

Disabling edge on startup will also help a fair deal with processing speed and the like. This you can do in all sorts of ways, the easiest being turning it off entirely on startup through settings in the like.

If you want to kill it *entirely*, though? :)

In regedit, run along to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft

Navigate to your MicrosoftEdge key subcategory. If you don't see it, you can make one! Note, this is a KEY, not a d-word. *inside* that subcategory, we want to either make or find the D-Word key of PreventLaunchEdge and set that to 1 in the same way as all the others. It'll look like this.

Aaaand while we're here, I'd HIGHLY recommend shanking Killer Networking Services. It's just bloatware. (Ostensibly it's supposed to monitor your network bandwidth and even things out, but that really means it's constantly monitoring and pinging things, which eats up the bandwidth you DO get, and also chunks your computer's processing power.) Getting rid of it entirely is borderline impossible, since it's set to redownload on regular updates and intel is very pushy with its updates.

This you can do by opening your Services.msc, which basically shows you all the background stuff that Windows does. Find Anything with Killer in the name, right click it, go to properties, and disable startup. It should look like this, if done successfully. It will probably reenable itself in time/in later updates for windows, but it's a quick fix. I'd also check your TaskScheduler app to make sure that nothing's scheduled to open up there, either.

If you CAN completely kill Killer services through uninstalling and the like, I would warn that at very least for my computer, the only ethernet/lan support applications that are available ARE Killer's. When you download updates, you really do have to do it manually and ONLY download the ethernet services, or just be cool with not having Lan functionality.

One last thing, not a shit application but is a shit service. If your computer's constantly overheating or just warm, you likely have Turboboost enabled. (Default setting that you can't change) If you want to be able to turn it off and drop your temps by like 40 degrees, in Regedit go to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7

(Note- This isn't the string copy paste from the reddit thread, this is mine that does the same thing. If my string doesn't work for you, check the reddit thread string. If that doesn't work either, you can follow the path and find it pretty easily. Probably has like, one letter of difference somewhere. The bits all start the same, though, so it's easy to find.)

and go to "attributes". Set the value from 1 to 2, and now in your advanced Power Plan settings in control panel, you'll be able to *see* turbo boost and turn it off.

It'll look like this, and in power options, a successful disabling of boost should look like this.

Turning off quick startup's also a good call, since that basically stops your restarts from actually shutting things down properly.