Disco Inferno

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

this is what catatonia it is like for me, on the inside

feeling your muscles tighten at a slow and constant rate that you could not perform on queue. if i get stuck holding something while catatonic, my fingers will eventually dig into it so deeply that it hurts.

i get stuck in awkward positions. legs tucked underneath my body, most of my weight shifted to one side, head tilted, stuff like that. because of your muscles stiffening as well, this becomes uncomfortable in less than ten minutes, and agonizing in 20.

time passes differently. most of my catatonic episodes at this point last for upwards of 2 hours, even with ativan. but the two hours i spend while catatonic feel comparably faster than if i just decided to sit down and stare at nothing for 2 hours. (the "increased speed" does not make it more pleasant and it's not like dissociation i don't think. it's just like, usually at 1.25x speed)

i'm aware of my surroundings i literally just can do fuck all about them.

i cannot focus on anything more complex than a children's cartoon during it. i have tried putting on longer documentaries, but never get anything to stick in my brain. i still prefer longer things to watch or listen to during cataleptic catatonia tho.

my muscles burn during the whole thing from being so tense or not positioned "squarely" i.e. - shoulders hips and neck at a 90 degree angle.

i will be sore and exhausted the next day, which actually makes it more likely for me to become catatonic again.

i never know how long it will be before i can move again. 3 to 4 hours isn't out of the question (note: i feel lucky that its never gotten longer than 4 hours as catatonia can last for days)

the embarrassment. like, there's no shame in experiencing it, i know that. but it doesn't make me stop feeling like i wish i could crawl into a hole, especially when it happens in public. i hate being stared at on the best of days and being so stiff that people have to frog march you everywhere is just , it's so not fun.

screaming for help inside my head (i can't use AAC when i can't move, unless i was able to feel it coming on beforehand and set my switch up)

or, being so embarrassed that i don't want anyone to find me no matter how long it takes for me to come out of it.

when i am "coming out" of it, i slowly start to be able to move lighter body parts first, like fingers and toes, then hands and feet. the last thing i am able to move is my upper legs and torso.

i am basically dead weight during this time, and my body is hard for other people to move as well because of tension in my muscles.

any needing to go to the bathroom? either you hold it, or someone kinda has to frog march you to the toilet, or, you're gonna have to do laundry

it sucks

it doesn't stop sucking until a few days after the fact, because it's physically and emotionally exhausting

obligatory disclaimers that 1. these are only my experiences, don't use them as your only source of information about catatonia 2. my experiences only apply to cataleptic catatonia. i don't have excited catatonia, so i didn't post about it.

if anyone else wants to add their experiences with what catatonia (not freeze responses or autistic inertia, please) feels like from the inside, i would love to also hear about them.

Friends, followers, and Fellow Workers, the Gainesville IWW's beloved union hall, the Civic Media Center, is in need. The Civic Media Center of Gainesville, Florida, provides countless vital community resources, such as:

The Stetson Kennedy Library, a reading room and leftist library that is home to 15,000 books, journals, newspapers, and magazines.

The Travis Fristoe Zine Library, largest independent zine collection in the southeastern United States.

A meeting space for countless local activism and social justice groups such as the IWW, Food Not Bombs, and Books to Prisoners.

The Gainesville Free Store, which was founded to help local transgender people access affirming clothing and toiletries as well as other important items. The Free Store has seen so much success that they've expanded to serve the entire Gainesville community.

The Gainesville Free Grocery Store, which offers no-questions-asked food to anyone who walks in.

A cool, dry place to rest, with an open bathroom frequently used by our unhoused neighbors.

A venue for local musicians and poets to perform, including during the renowned music festival FEST.

So, so much more. Losing this community hub would be an absolutely devastating blow to our town and our union. We cannot let it die.

Via the Civic Media Center's own social media:

Dear friends, please us survive the Summer Doldrums by renewing your membership or, if you can, making an extra donation in whatever amount you can spare to help us cover rent, bills, and some extra work on our facilities this summer. Here is the direct link to the membership & donation page on our website: https://www.civicmediacenter.org/get-involved If you have Venmo or PayPal you can also just make a contribution using the handle in the graphic below. Thank you for supporting the CMC!

And then I went to the USAmerican Midwest

Rains frequently, but the worst is like standing under a bathroom shower. Genuinely inhospitable rainstorms are uncommon.

Along the coast, it's pretty easy in most areas to walk to at least one store, or else there's usually a bus or shuttle available. There are sidewalks and bike lanes everywhere.

It's a temperate boreal rainforest, so while there are many freshwater lakes and rivers, they're usually pretty cold. The biggest danger is typically getting caught in a strong current, and the most dangerous animals in swimming distance are on land.

Earthquakes happen almost every day, but the vast majority go unnoticed. Buildings are designed to withstand bigger seismic activity, so unless it's a 5 or higher it just kind of feels like having low blood sugar for a second. There are no tornados

Rural Illinois, USA:

One minute it's sunny, then ten minutes later that distant smudge on the horizon has swallowed the entire sky in black clouds and the water is coming down like waterfall and you literally CANNOT SEE. Then there's a crash like cymbals and you need to get indoors because the thunder and lightening are on TOP of you

No sidewalks until you are in the smack dab center of town, which is a three hour walk or twenty minute drive from wherever you are.

There aren't many natural bodies of water other than small ponds and creeks, and because the environment is so much warmer, those are filled with snapping turtles that can grow bigger than a nine year old child and water snakes that are incredibly venomous. These are paired with leeches and mosquitos for that sweet umami flavor.

New adoptable Available on Ko-fi!

TOS

New Adoptable Available on Ko-fi!

TOS

for the set up alone we were quoted 1200

So when I say that, I'm talking about a single small A/C unit for a single room. The goal here is to just make your bedroom cool enough to sleep in.

And right now, in the UK, you'll have a hard time doing it because all of the small A/Cs like that are largely sold out or marked up because of the heat wave. (Do not buy a swamp cooler. The humidity is too high for those to do shit there). You'll have to wait until the late fall to invest in one for next year.

If you're in the US, you'll have better luck.

Midea makes a small portable A/C that will cool a single room for less than $350. These are easy to set up with almost any kind of window. I use an older version of that model that's effectively the same in my office and bedroom. If you can do a traditional window unit you can go even cheaper. Hell, for $400 you can probably buy two small window units that work just as well and cool two bed rooms.