My hat is a raindrop; your argument is invalid

not that you have ever been a good or proper dragon. when you hatched out of your egg, your eggtooth was too smooth. the other dragons were rough with you, put little holes in your wings.

you were not bold. you were odd. you liked rippling water and the shine of chitin when bugs scuttle and of course the movement of the stars. those were all acceptable interests albeit maybe not traditional. perhaps you had inherited these through some great-great-uncle or something. certainly a dragon may be wise, or clever, if they are not bold.

yes, you have been a great deal of a puzzle to the other dragons. your body is smaller and rather more soft than it ought to be. so speed should have been yours, perhaps - your mother said it would be like fighting a shadow. if a dragon is not aggressive, it may instead be cruel, sly; a backstab. but alas your scales - so iridescent that they almost shine like the moon at night, a glow from within - you are not a shadow, you are a beacon like the flash of a knight's blade. your father has said at least you would make a fine egglayer, a nice mate to a good male. a dragon like you may still be a good mother perhaps; and that is a fine thing to be; although of course it would have been better if you'd been a trove-hoarder instead.

what a dragon must not be is kind.

you have watched her now for six moons. what a good and proper dragon would do is to go inside and to snatch her. a very proper dragon would have kidnapped her many times over, but you will be the delight of your brood to princess-snatch even at all. when you catch her in your jaws and bring her home, they will love you, then. they don't think you're capable of it, but you are, because you're a proper dragon. you can show them that. if you go in, now, right now.

you are rather too glossy to hide in the shadows, so instead you have learned how to appear flat and round, a puddle of light. (how your siblings would mock you! a dragon should be matte, to blend with the night). you dapple your flank with mud. you perch in odd angles atop of trees, scuttle like the bugs you love - hither, tither, frantic.

what you must not do is fly with your wings full-out. alight, you will be limned by the moon's corona. you will be a beacon. you must remember this when (not if) you snatch her.

____

you found her because of the lake. this lake in particular was your favorite - nestled deep in the woods, between two mountains. it is very quiet; there is nothing to horde there so no other dragon bothers you. a gentle waterfall spills over into a deep cove, and there are many mossy caves you've spent your afternoons napping in. while it is not proper for a dragon to prefer such things, you like to lay in rolling tenure just under the water. you have become excellent at holding your breath, can do it for hours. it is the easiest way to appear as a patch of sunlight.

she was not sunlight. she was the night's joy. the dark press of water. her face at first concealed by many diaphanous layers. her breathing quick and quiet.

she had pulled them back to drink from her water flask. and there she had been: a princess. your first very-real princess. right there, only the reach of a single talon from you. if you had simply lunged then, you would have been able to take her easily, in one single movement.

but you did not take her.

Omens of Death: From Broken Clocks to Butterflies

On this day in 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died. A few weeks earlier, he reported he'd seen an omen of his own death: his doppelganger, or double. Strangely enough, the double was seen by someone else as well.

People like to know what’s coming, even (especially) if it’s bad. It’s said no one wants to know the hour of their death, but if that were true, we wouldn’t have a whole list of death omens. Traditionally, signs of impending doom are found in two places: the natural and the supernatural. So come have a seat by the fire, and let’s hope we don’t cast headless shadows. (No, really.) 

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some ominous writing prompts, such as:

And then there were none. How about this for a mystery? A family has received death omens, but they don’t know who they’re for. Maybe they’re having a family reunion, so there were about 10 people in the room when they heard the death knocks, eight when a bird flew into the house, and twelve when Grandma Janine dropped the scissors and the blade stuck into the floor. So it’s a process of elimination. And what if Aunt Grizelda with her fortune is one of the possibilities? Might someone want to bump her off and say it was meant to be?

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I've scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, "Um," from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We're just... in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn't even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don't like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she's not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just... dumbfounded. She's not even mad. I'm not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There's a bit of laughter, but it's mostly just... confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she's not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

"What... did you do?"

"I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea."

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn't scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, "I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price."

And that's when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn't take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don't. But I swear to God it happened.

Blackberry & Mouse brooch by Bill Skinner

time-saving processes and devices and factory assembly (both automated and by hand) are not inherently capitalism or bad. they are the means by which humans meet their own needs for shelter, clothing, food, and other work tasks and still have time/energy for social activity and art and leisure beyond pure survival.

we do not want to go back to entirely analog, by-hand, subsistence living. we do not. people who romanticize that have never lived it, and it reads like marie antoinette cosplaying as a peasant. that romantic fantasy of hand-making and hand-farming EVERYTHING is a false picture born from a place of privilege.

if we dismantle capitalism, if we tear it down and start over in some social system that doesn't prioritize profit and inedible wealth, we will still need mass-produced clothing (even things meant to be altered!). we will still need canning factories and tractors with engines, we will still need mass-printed books and science labs and the factories that produce glass and plastic containers. we will need group work where one's skilled labor is exchanged for the products of other skilled labor.

could we survive without those? yes. we have before. but in many ways, it would only be survival. in society, humans have always moved toward ways to share and distribute tasks and the larger a population is the more people it needs in centralized locations doing A Thing together.

if we work to dismantle capitalism and it means we all have to do our laundry by hand because nobody is making washing machines and the people who could make washing machines can't do that because nobody is tooling the parts for washing machines, then we fucked up and i'm going to be mad. all of those steps represent jobs done most efficiently on a mass scale in a factory setting, so we don't all have to do our laundry by hand. that efficiency isn't a profit issue-- it's timesaving to free us up to acquire food and spend time with friends and make things for fun. we just have to pay someone a living wage for a reasonable number of working hours for the task of making rubber gasket seals for a washer.

The capitalism versus socialism argument probablycan't be solved by conventional thinking. We need to stop making the false equivalency that it's one or the other. Look, I am going to be 70 next week. I'm old enough that I've listened to the capitalism vs socialism for decades. Sometimes you have to stop and look at what didn't work before you can find a viable solution.

materialist scumbag -

The Town That Diamonds Couldn't Build

You've heard about the place — the town in the South Australian desert where people live in caves like hobbits to get out of the heat, opal capital of the world, forty-something nationalities scratching in the dirt for pretty rocks. In 1916, and then in a bigger wave after 1918, men started coming back to the field who'd spent the previous few years on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They knew one thing about the ground cold: a hole in it keeps you alive. A dugout holds 23, 24 degrees year round, free, while the heat outside runs past 40°C in January with the flies getting in your mouth — so the arithmetic did itself. You just had to already know how to dig a trench and not die, and a whole generation had just been taught.

So the signature feature of the place, the thing on the postcard, is a technology transfer out of the war. The mine and the house are the same excavation done twice — you dig for opal, you don't find opal, fine, now you live in the disappointment. Some of the dugouts are literally worked-out mines with a bed in them.

Okay so — set the roof aside. The strange part is the men. Why are there individual blokes with picks out there at all in the year of our lord 2026? That's a weird thing for a mineral to produce, and it comes down to the rock.

The rock got found in 1915. A fourteen-year-old named Willie Hutchison, out with a gold-prospecting party that was having no luck with gold, wandered off and came back with opal, February the first, and the story's probably been cleaned up since but the date's solid. The Aboriginal name that stuck, kupa piti — anglicized to Coober Pedy — gets glossed as "white man in a hole," or "white man's burrow," which, you know. They watched what we did there and named it accurately.

Now, opal itself, which is the engine of everything here. You cannot grade it. There's no scale. A diamond gets sorted on the four Cs, and every one of those is a number or close to it — carat is literally a weight, color and clarity run on defined lettered ladders, and the cut is geometry, so a diamond can be assessed by a guy in Antwerp against a rubric and priced before it's ever set, which means it can be traded as a commodity, which means it can be stockpiled, rationed, and cornered. And it was. De Beers spent most of the twentieth century holding the world's diamond supply in a drawer and letting it out a teaspoon at a time. A diamond is boring. That's the compliment. It's boring enough to be money.

Opal is not boring and that ruins it as a business. Every stone is a one-off — the play of color, the pattern, the direction the fire moves when you tilt it, whether it's got that one flaw in the wrong spot — and two experienced dealers will look at the same stone and give you numbers that are 40% apart and both mean it. There's no futures market for opal. There's no central price. There's no opal cartel and there never was one. Plenty of people were greedy enough. But you cannot corner a thing you cannot grade — how do you stockpile a supply when you can't even agree what any given unit of it is worth? The whole apparatus that turns a shiny rock into a financial instrument just won't bolt onto opal. The bolt-holes are the wrong shape.

That commercial failure — opal's refusal to become boring — is where the town comes from.

Because if you can't cartelize it, you can't consolidate the mining of it either. Diamonds get dug by Rio Tinto and De Beers, capital-intensive, open-pit, guys in hi-vis and a company town owned by the company. There's no margin story that justifies a mining major sinking a hundred million into opal ground, because the major can't control the price on the other end, can't smooth the boom and bust, can't do the one thing that makes big mining capital worth deploying, which is guarantee the sell side. So they don't come. And the field stays exactly what it was in 1920 — a poor man's rush, pick and shovel and a bit of explosive, one bloke or two blokes and a claim you can peg for the price of a license. To this day you basically cannot get a corporate lease over that field; it's carved into small individual claims, deliberately, and the noodlers — the people who sift the mullock heaps, the tailings the miners threw out, looking for the color the miner missed — the noodlers work for free on other people's garbage and sometimes it pays.

Ungradeable, so un-cartelizable, so nobody with real money bothers to consolidate it, so it stays 1920 out there with better drills.

Take the forty-five nationalities, the thing the tourism board loves — the Orthodox dugout church, the guys who came from everywhere. Charming multiculturalism, the desert melting pot. Run it materially and it's a labor-supply story with a very specific source. After 1945 Australia had a displaced-persons intake, the "populate or perish" panic, and it brought in a huge wave off the wreckage of Europe — Balkan, Greek, Italian, Baltic, the whole churned-up middle of the continent — and a lot of those men landed into an economy that had a specific vacancy: unglamorous, unsalaried, no-boss, no-English-required work where the only capital you needed was your own back and a license anyone could afford. Which is precisely and only the kind of work a decartelized mineral leaves lying around. A corporate diamond mine wants papers and English and a payroll number. An opal claim wants a man who'll dig. So the field filled up with exactly the people the rest of the settled economy had the least use for, and it filled up that way because nobody had managed to make opal respectable enough to require respectable labor.

(There's a whole separate thing here about how the underground housing let those men skip the mortgage and the building society entirely — you don't need a loan officer to sign off on a hole you dig yourself on a weekend — so the town also quietly routed around the entire postwar consumer-credit apparatus that was busy defining the normal Australian life everywhere else, the Hills Hoist and the brick veneer and the thirty-year note, and I could go four paragraphs on the fact that the most anti-suburban settlement in the country got built by the least-wanted men using a skill they learned killing each other, but I'll leave it.)

The water tells you the same story from another angle. There's no river. For decades water came from a bore and got sold by the gallon, and then off a pipeline, and now off a reverse-osmosis desal plant chewing through brackish groundwater. In a normal town water is a public utility, a thing the state lays on because a town is a thing the state decided should exist. Coober Pedy the state never decided should exist. It's a place people went to dig, and it stayed inhabited past the logic of the digging, so the water stayed a commodity you bought — priced by the physical cost of hauling or pumping or squeezing it out of a bad aquifer. That's what a metered gallon means out here: the wider economy would rather the town weren't there at all.

And the electricity — diesel gensets forever, then a hybrid solar-and-wind-and-diesel setup lately, because trucking diesel in got insane. You pay the real cost of the plumbing out here because nobody's subsidizing your existence. Everywhere else the cul-de-sac gets its power and water because a developer and a council and a bank all agreed in advance that a town belonged there. Out here nobody ever signed that. The place happened; it wasn't planned.

The movies figured this out before the sociologists did. Mad Max, Pitch Black, Priscilla — they keep shooting post-apocalypse and end-of-the-world stuff at Coober Pedy, and everyone says it's the Mars landscape, the mullock heaps like a moonscape, and sure. But what the camera finds is a working human settlement that runs on none of the invisible machinery a settlement is supposed to run on — no municipal water logic, no grid logic, no housing-finance logic, no employer — so it photographs as "after the collapse." To the eye it really is people living well past the point where the normal supports got pulled, a working model of a place the world's institutions never bothered to hold up. The crews think they're shooting the future. They've just found somewhere the props were never installed.

And this pattern isn't a one-off freak of the Australian desert. Every place where a resource can't be cornered stays a poor man's field with a wild social life on top. The California gold rush before the hydraulic companies moved in and consolidated it — individual pans, forty-niners, every nationality on earth in the diggings, exactly this. Klondike, same, until the big dredges came and turned it corporate and the crowd went home. The thing that ends the poor-man's-rush and the melting pot is always the same event: somebody figures out how to grade the product and control the sell side, capital consolidates the field, and the diverse desperate crowd of individual diggers gets replaced by a payroll. Opal just never had its consolidation event. The dredge never came because there's no dredge you can build for a rock you can't price. So Coober Pedy is a gold rush that never got told to go home. It's 1849 with satellite internet, still running, because the one thing that historically shuts these places down — the corner, the cartel, the buyout — bounced off the merchandise.

The monument of the place is a room that doesn't exist. Somewhere in Antwerp there's a room where diamonds got turned into money, sorted and stockpiled and released on a schedule by men in good suits, and every one of those men is the reason a diamond field is a company town with a payroll and a security fence. For opal there's no such room. Nobody ever built one, and nobody could, and forty-five nationalities of men who came off the boat with nothing spent a century in holes in the dirt because the rock they were chasing was too pretty, too particular, too much itself, to ever be turned into something as sensible and boring and grindingly consolidated as money.

Wartime trenches were not deep enough into the ground to provide meaningful temperature regulation or insulation; heatwaves were brutal on the western front in WW1. This was not knowledge that troops brought back.

If it is hot outside, and you dig a big hole in relatively soft ground to mine out something, you would notice just fine, by yourself, that it is cooler in the big hole than outside. That is what happened. The earliest dugouts were exactly co-occurring with the earliest mining, and they were deeper and more structural than trenches were.

Coober Pedy's dugouts are not a 'technology transfer out of war'. It is a normal response to having a hot climate, relatively diggable ground, and pre-existing reason to dig.

They also didn't let people 'skip' traditional housing costs any more or less than standard mining shanty-town construction did. That's not unique to Coober Pedy dugouts in the slightest.

Same thing with water in the town; a total nothingburger. Any mining/tourist town especially one with extensive fringes, manages water carefully, and it might cost more to get it from a centralised grid.

There's nothing 'wild' about the place, either. All the guff about apocalypse conditions and unplanned settlement and a wild social life, etc: shit, complete shit. Sometimes settlements and extensions are planned. Sometimes they are not.

Also, opal grading: it isn't really true that there is no standardised 'grading' for opals (there is, sort of). More egregiously, though, the 'you cannot control what you cannot grade' line is nonsense.

People know what opals are and value them fairly consistently. Large companies control the sale and distribution of the majority. They are valued, and sale of supply is controlled, just like any other gem. There are many rooms where men in good suits make these decisions.

Mining is more fragmented, sure. This is due to it being annoying, as rocks go. Opal is a pain in the ass to mine at scale (spotty deposits, fragile) and small landholders are essentially ablative risk-absorbers for the opal industry at large. Plus there are economic incentives for local governments to sell out small mining leases rather than massive ones.

-----

materialist-scumbag

Right on the dugout, and I'll take the hit clean, because the mechanism does me in. If the hole's cool because it's a hole in soft ground under a desert, then the guy who dug the first one didn't need to have been at Gallipoli to notice the bottom of his own shaft was twenty degrees nicer than the top. The O'Neill brothers cut the first dugout and they came off a claim at Tarcoola, they were miners, and the earliest dwellings sit right on top of the earliest mining because they ARE the earliest mining with a bed dragged in. So the returned-soldier story is a thing the tourism board likes and the sources repeat, and I repeated it because it's a good story, and "technology transfer out of the war" was me dressing an overdetermined convergence up as a lineage. The trench angle is at best decoration on a fact that digs itself. Struck.

It's possible the Coober Pedy Tourism Board is also robots though. Someone should check that out.

Water and power, same, and this one I should've caught myself because it's the softest thing in the piece, all that "the wider economy would rather the town weren't there" is me narrating mood, not mechanism. A council manages the supply, the pipes are old and leak, so it's the priciest water in South Australia. That's every fringe mining town with a bad aquifer and a long haul. Nothing about it says the state withheld a blessing. I wrote a metaphysics where there was a utility bill. Gone.

But the grading thing. Here's where I think you've handed me a better version of my own argument and then told me my argument is confabulation, and I want to keep the good half you gave me.

Because look at what you actually conceded on the way past it. Mining IS fragmented. You cannot get a corporate lease over that field, it's carved into fifty-by-fifty claims by design, the majors don't come. We agree the town exists because the digging stayed atomized. The whole disagreement is upstream of that, on WHY it stayed atomized, and your why is better than mine. Spotty deposits, fragile stone, a rock that's a real pain to mine at scale, small landholders working as ablative risk-absorbers for the industry proper, local government with every incentive to sell a hundred little leases instead of one big one. That's cleaner than my story. It's more materialist than my story. It's a geology-and-lease-structure account and I'll trade up to it without blinking, because it does the actual work, it carries the weight, it explains the fifty-by-fifty claim and the noodler on the mullock heap, which grading never quite did.

Where I dig in: there is still no room. You say there are many rooms where men in good suits control the sale and distribution of the majority, and I don't think that's true in the sense that matters, and the tell is that you can name the room for diamonds and you can't name it for opal. De Beers is a proper noun. The CSO in London was a proper noun, the sight-holders were a list of proper nouns, the stockpile was a real drawer with a real quantity in it that a real person released on a schedule. Point me at the opal equivalent. There isn't one, there never was one, and greed wasn't the missing ingredient. The sell side just never consolidated the way the mining never consolidated, for related reasons. Opal moves through a scatter of dealers and cutters and Hong Kong buyers and the stone-by-stone haggle, and yes it's a large global consistently valuable trade, I'll grant every word of that, a big diffuse market is still a market. But diffuse is the whole point. "Valued fairly consistently" and "cornered from a single room" are different claims, and De Beers is the difference, and opal is on the wrong side of it.

(Or was the difference. This was the case back in 1990. Since then even DeBeers stranglehold has fallen some.)

...you could come back to Heaven, and everything, like the old times. Only, even nicer.

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colostomy bags

Diapers

insulin pumps

Oxygen systems

rollators

hearing aids

compression garments

prosthetics

FREEDOM AIDS

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IT’S DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH YALL

The only person who won’t be surprised by the call is Clark. Which isn’t to say he won’t be surprised at all, just at a different time. Clark will be the one who wakes up in the middle of the night. He won’t know why at first, the way few of us do when roused from a sound sleep by nothing at all.

And it really will be nothing. Clark will stare into the dark, thinking, listening, and realize the world has gone silent. The white noise at the edge of his hearing, his subtle companion for decades, has ceased.