Stevi's Habitat

it wont get on Pinterest in

a few days at most

-first ever time was in high school when a friend told a joke from a post or something at marching band practice and I got super aggro and was like how did you find me and found out she did not know it was me. Sorry nic💔

-screenshot of own post sent to me by friends with some variation of ‘lol you would find this funny’ ‘this reminded me of you’ or ‘they write like you talk’ x15-20 times

- go over to this girl’s house to watch a movie in grad school. one of my dumb ass posts abt a book series she liked was printed out and thumbtacked to the bulletin board by the door.

-screenshot of a 15 note flop post I wrote otw to class showed up on a girl I had just met in college’s instagram story

- someone I met from the other side of the country at a networking thing repeated phrase I wrote in stupid joke post the year before

- got told ‘this is kinda dumb lol’ by irl oomf and shown a TikTok of someone repeating something I wrote verbatim but less funny

- told my friend a story abt something funny that had happened to me earlier this week. He was like I know you stole this from Reddit you don’t have to lie. Whipped out his phone showed me a screenshot of my own post.

His parents are staying with us a few months now and I now understand what he means. I was gonna make myself PB&J for lunch last weekend and suddenly there was a pot of soup noodles ready. I didn't really want noodles, I wanted a sandwich, but I ate them anyway.

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.

Little bits of everything got spread out over time and gravity was there.

One of them has to do with quantum physics. Think of all of the atoms in a single room (well, conceptually; there's so many trillions the human brain can't actually comprehend the number). They're all spread out throughout it pretty evenly, and so you'd think it'd be impossible for them to all wind up on one half of our at the same time.

But one of the concepts in quantum physics is that particles aren't constant; they exist on multiple places at once on a statistical basis, most likely to be at their center and infinitesimally less likely to be literally anywhere else. As a result, given enough time, they can spontaneously jump between locations, and given stupidly long enough time, they can jump *really* far.

So, if you had, for instance, several times the age of the universe to wait, all of the atoms in a room could all suddenly jump to one side of it because of this.

Another thing of quantum physics is what are called virtual particles. These are particles and their antiparticles that pop into and out of existence, always in pairs of a standard particles and an exact anti particle. Typically, they exist for such a ridiclously short period of time that they can't even interact with other particles. But because of quantum tunneling, that spontaneous jump, on exceedingly rare occasions one of them will jump away right after coming into existence.

Now, imagine the empty void that would have existed before the Big Bang. There's nothing in existence, just a constant invisible endlessness. Everywhere, there are virtual particles appearing and disappearing, but nothing happens. And because nothing happens, there is no time, for how can you measure time without a chain of cause and effect?

And yet, in that vast infinity, the statistics of quantum tunneling and virtual particles means that, all of the sudden, at the same exact infintesimal moment, a countless number of virtual particles suddenly quantum tunnel to the exact same point. All of those particles in one place explode out, and our universe is born.

This is just one hypothesis, of course. It could be that there was another universe that did the opposite of a Big Bang, a Big Crunch, and then rebounded into the Big Bang. Or maybe we're a bubble universe in a larger multiverse that came into existence because the very fabric of spacetime suddenly changed its properties.