Dreadful Monohypergol

Politicians. Architects. Analysts. Owners of engineering firms. McKinsey consultants. Those folks are upper management. When was the last time, in your job, that you believed upper management really knew what was going on? I thought so.

When you get down to the very basic level, the folks who actually know how everything is held together are – to a person – terrified weirdos. They speak strange words to each other, and make jokes that are completely incomprehensible to normal people. Each and every time disaster is narrowly averted, it's because of their tireless actions and neurotic hyperfocus on the subject matter in question.

And this isn't just a blue-collar thing, either. Sure, your friendly neighbourhood mechanic might be absolutely scared stiff to drive in traffic, within striking range of any of the poorly-maintained rot-boxes they see all day. That's obvious. This phenomenon goes further. It affects workers of all stripes: I guarantee you that right now, some woman who collects human skulls as a hobby and talks to squirrels is busy sweating through her business-casual outfit in the bowels of a power plant, trying to figure out what that last strange little error code really means.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

GILLIAN ANDERSON as Dana Scully

GILLIAN ANDERSON as Dana Scully

I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

And then I was having an existential crisis rest of the day.