Practical and Rugged

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

The state of graphics creation in the wildland fire world is, shall we say, abysmal. Which isn't really anyone's fault! Graphics/design training is not a part of wildland fire training at all, and it used to be that outsourcing graphics was a viable if expensive option. But as the pace of the wildland fire world continues to increase exponentially, outsourcing just isn't possible for most graphics. This means a lot of people with zero training are forced to make graphics in house and they're just doing things as best they can.

This has resulted in some...ah...not great stuff. Which is not on the people creating them at all, usually! They're being asked to do things not in their job description that they have no background or training in.

But there needs to be training. If people can learn to run a damn chainsaw, they can figure out font hierarchies and basic color theory.

So, in my never-ending quest to shove better art skills into the wildland fire world, I created this 25 page guide last year! It covers why good graphics matter, the history of art in the wildland fire world, basic design terms, and basic design principles.

Now, I know, I KNOW, some other professional designers/artists are going to look at this and go "Katy, what the fuck? Some of this is not right." I know. But I wasn't going for the Most Technically Perfect and Correct way to do things, I was going for easy to understand and grasp at a basic level when you're just starting out and not aiming to become a full on design pro. Because let me tell you, the bar is in hell. If I have ONE MORE PERSON tell me that PowerPoint is the best and only accessible design program (yes, fucking PowerPoint) I am going to lose my mind. So yes, maybe I didn't explain the full breadth of DPI and print qualities and color spaces. But if it stops at least one brochure being made in PowerPoint then I'm calling it a win.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/

noun

a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.

I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.

29 CFR 1910.178 (l)(2)(ii)

My less generous interpretation is that heated rivalry is so compelling *because* the love story is made more electric with bdsm, but it’s intentionally made more commercially successful through plausible deniability to not alienate/scandalize a wider audience. Dog whistling if you will, while cloaking some of the more misunderstood aspects of kink in scenes like the Vegas bathroom / penthouse with a level of emotional turmoil that gives viewers a way to opt out of (and in some cases, blame) the bdsm of it all.

So there’s one reading of those scenes where Ilya & Shane are roleplaying to artificially mask their true desire to be more emotionally vulnerable with each other. Like playing dress up to make things less intimate / real. It’s hot but it’s keeping their hearts safe. Reid’s Vegas bonus/blog chapter makes reading this scene a bit blurry, and I find it fascinating that she decided to include it/release it after the book was published — did she feel pressure to clarify that Ilya was actually acting out of fear in those scenes? Did that justify his particular flavor of sadism in that moment? I think that’s where the plausible deniability comes in.

Because for people who appreciate the sadism in those scenes, the way Ilya is acting feels more intimate than not. He’s trying to understand Shane and himself and the ways in which they are sparking this hunger thats gnawing gnashing growling inside them; when Ilya makes Shane pout and cry and Ilya hears the quiver in his voice when Shane’s shouting back at him, it’s Ilya’s way of finding the crack in the shields they’ve both been using to keep themselves safe. His sadism is getting them closer, and Shane’s submission to it is accepting that, rewarding that sharpness from Ilya with a softness he shares back. It’s not a crutch to avoid emotional intimacy, it IS their intimacy.

But it’s also tangled up in the emotionally devastating reality of their circumstances, they can barely get to know each other because they’re separated by the homophobia & racism & the injustices of their career, countries, families, and their respective traumas navigating all of that. So they’re bonding through sex without enough of Everything Else — communication, hanging out, casual mutual enjoyment — to fully support each other as much as they each need, and they hurt each other in the process. This is true whether or not sadism is the main driver of the scene, as evidenced by Ilya’s botched tunamelt-his-heart scheme, so it’s a bit of a double standard to say that ilyas sadism is less intimate / mature / loving than his “softer” side. But by giving the Vegas scenes an unhappy ending (Ilya not knowing how to ask for less emotionally charged pillow talk from Shane, Shane not knowing how to ask Ilya for a sweet kiss goodbye), there is an escape hatch for anyone viewing who doesn’t enjoy / want to enjoy their D/s dynamics.

The plausible deniability extends to how ilyas sadism is portrayed throughout his narrative arc as well. His demeanor during Shane’s first time anal is portrayed as gentle and encouraging and then he ghosts Shane for six months and the next time they fuck he’s big bad wolf-ing it, and Shane thumps his head on the elevator door and deletes his we didn’t even kiss text. It’s Good Ilya vs Bad Ilya and the bad Ilya is also kinkier. And then towards the end of the story, the domming and sadism become less stereotypical, which is refreshing for viewers who are enjoying the breadth of that portrayal, but can be more easily ignored by anyone who doesn’t want it. Ilya forcing giving Shane a blowjob while he’s on the phone with Hayden is crackling with sadistic electricity, but there’s giggling and the sun is pouring through the windows and they’re at the cottage they’re endgame they’re about to tell each other I Love You and anyone who isn’t looking for bdsm there doesn’t have to see it.

— youre right, it’s not a neutral act to ignore the kink. I guess what I was getting at is that it DOES feel anti-kink to ignore it and also the entity doing much of the work towards that action feels like the source material itself.

Like don’t get me wrong I love how the book and tv series are both very show-not-tell about the kink but ALSO the story is narratively putting scenes in an order that make it feel like there’s an emotional arc from bad kinky sad sex (vegas) to good nonkinky happy sex (the cottage). Vegas bathroom is my favorite scene of the show followed by Vegas penthouse but im in the minority in large part because it ends on a sour note. And the cottage has my third favorite scene with the phone call blow job. So to ME the arc does not feel like it goes from bad kinky sex to good nonkinky sex but again I think I’m in the minority with that read. At least what I’ve seen with mainstream interpretations of how the overall cottage vibes feel to most folks.

which is that so much of the For Those Who Have Eyes To See reading of this as a D/s love story, and most of why i am like, so genuinely emotionally invested in it is that the journey is not from more kink to less kink. it's a journey from less emotional connectedness to more emotional connectedness, as seen through the lens of crazy hot sex. it's not that there's less D/s as things progress between them, any more than there's less sex! but the D/s becomes emotional rather than exclusively sexual. it's no longer just "i'm gonna order you to beg to be touched in this bathroom," it's also "i'm going to pet you while you crouch at my feet." which is like, crazy! never seen before onscreen kink content! and for those of us who are knowledgeable about and perhaps personally invested in dominance and submission as a lifestyle and a cornerstone of relationships, the second thing is actually arguably kinkier because it's not sexual, because it explicitly shows that dominance and submission are simply part of how they relate to and love each other (everything is hollanov TPE)

but the average person i think has literally no idea that D/s even can be non-sexual and has never thought of waht it could potentially mean to people on an emotional level for someone to dominate and someone to submit. and so as the sex becomes warmer and the whole relationship including and maybe especially the kink becomes as much romantic as it is sexual, it's harder and harder to see it. and people are viscerally uncomfortable with power exchange, so they don't want to see it, and the show makes (and possibly has to make, given the constraints of the media ecosystem) room for a reading of their love story as this hayes-code-esque "and then they fell in love so they had normal sex forever instead of weird kinky sex, which is something only people who don't care about each other would do" as opposed to what i see, which is "and then they fell in love, in large part because ilya's dominance and shane's submission ultimately lead them to feel emotionally comfortable with and deeply connected to one another, and just like everything else about their relationship it no longer has to be sexual for them to allow themselves to have each other"

When they think of doms, for example, they think of Christian Grey and his literary clones. Or the faceless stone tops that many characters get reduced to in the most shameless AO3 porn (not that there's anything wrong with that). They don't necessarily realize that the cold, brooding, humorless, borderline or actual rapist characterization is part of the BDSM fantasy and not a realistic portrayal.

So when they see Ilya Rozanov - who is warm and funny, attentive and loving, with a complicated emotional life, they can't match it up with their idea of what a dom is.

Outside of erotica, the closest most folks come to BDSM is in police procedurals. In those cases, they're usually victims and suspects, and they're always at the most visually extreme end of the experience so the straight-laced detectives can react to it. So you'll get a lot of bondage gear and latex suits and dominatrices with whips and so on.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but it means that when these folks see Shane and Ilya, and their lack of bondage gear or whips or anything like that and they think "oh no, they're totally vanilla." (Logistically speaking, these are characters who get to meet up four times a year. They're not going to waste time on complicated bondage set ups. And anything like whips or toys would be something they'd have to pack which risks discovery in many ways

They don't pick up on "more", or Ilya's penchant for gripping the back of Shane's neck to ground him - which he does even at the dinner table with Shane's PARENTS. Or Ilya spitting in Shane's hand. Or the slamming into the sofa during the montage. They do generally pick up on Vegas, but they look at it like a one-time thing and then equate the unhappy reactions afterward to the "strange" sex as opposed to the lack of aftercare.