Winter turns to Spring

THIS IS WORSE. It’s so much worse.

When you hear “there’s no AC” you probably are thinking like…oh that’s rough, but still I’ve dealt with those temps. My old place didn’t have AC. It can’t be that bad.

NO. The lack of AC trickles down into every facet of dealing with the heat in a way that slowly and quite literally boils you alive. It’s not just “oh my apartment is hot this sucks”, it’s “there is nowhere you can go to cool down and if you overheat there is no help available”

For most there’s no AC anywhere. Anywhere. The coolest place available is maybe your local church, or a shopping center. Both will kick you out around 8pm, the hottest part of the day. In France and Spain in particular, the time zone is wrong (Hitler’s fault—we’re still aligned with Germany instead of the UK) and the sun doesn’t set until 10-11pm. Heat is still being actively pumped into your living spaces at 10pm.

And the temps do not meaningfully drop overnight. (Which you might expect if you’re from the American west. Southerners do understand this.) Many people live in stone walled buildings that just keep heating up. This is very literally the experience of being in a stone oven. And there’s no way to drop the temperature. You can’t escape it.

If your body temp climbs to unmanageable levels and you start experiencing heat exhaustion, you can call the hospital…most of which also do not have AC. I’m not sure how they’re treating people, I guess with ice packs? There’s already been a handful of deaths in my city, and that’s before any kind of post-wave reporting. These are real time reported deaths.

Anyway I want you to really, really internalize the sense of panic that starts to set in when you’re in these circumstances. The animal brain really starts to go wild when there’s no options and no escape. That’s why Europeans are posting about suffering.

Link to British Library Flickr

Link to Album View (shown above)

Selected Links by Subject:

From Open Culture:

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).