Galaxy Palaxy

Based off this thing I saw where Simon gets pissy, shouts at Grace and throws something and Grace, being the sensitive guy he is, starts crying and Simon, not used to his words having any sort of power like that, instantly is like I'm the worst person ever. Grace has been nothing but kind and patient with him and here he is making him cry. He apologizes over and over again, sent into a baffling state of desperation and hysteria to try to make up for it.

Grace shows him mercy, sinking down and giving him a hug and a kiss to the forehead to talk him off the edge. He then tells Simon he still needs time to get over it and the hurtful words Simon said, but that Simon doesn't deserve to punish himself so severely, just be more controlled next time. The start of Simon learning hes the only one in control of himself, he can't make excuses here and he won't be punished severely which creates even more pressure for him to grow as person.

with my dad being a computer technician and showing me the *magic* of the internet at a very young age, growing up on the internet was inevitable. it is often why i felt like i didn’t belong in my own friend groups when i was a teen, because they grew up watching greek tv series and i grew up watching say, doctor who and supernatural before these shows even aired here. i found community online so easily when i should have been cultivating it irl instead.

i lost out on so much of my country’s culture (things that even to this day i am oblivious to) and it’s often a lighthearted laughing matter within my friend group –how much i don’t know about my own country, about actors, artists, memes, references, series, even greek online culture– but it also comes with a heavy sense of not belonging. bc i dont feel like i 100% belong here and i surely don’t 100% belong in any of the English-speaking countries whose culture i have consumed since i was little.

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.

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.