the gruel of the future—today!

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth?

Illegal on Earth

Same with a starshade to cool Venus.

Illegal around Earth

Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations.

Illegal on Earth.

So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”

And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”

"Networking" doesn't have to feel like one big huge façade of manipulation and lies. You just find people you like. The things you talk about don't even have to be related, you just gotta find people who you like working with who you might reach out to for questions or projects later.

You don't need to look professional and respectable or like a "real" adult. I like to just show up and make it clear I'm receptive to jokes and quirks and weird ideas, and the people who vibe with that usually come to me.

Introduce people you like to other people you like. Talk them up. You can tell your boss "This is Mike he kicks ass, he knows everything about this place, if you want to know something talk to him, if he ever quits we're stealing him"

I found can't think of a polite or socially normal way to say something, sometimes you can just say it like "I don't know if this is dumb or not but I don't know anything about this. Can you explain what you mean?", or "I was taught something different. Should I change how I've been doing it?". I've never had a negative reaction to this.

When in doubt, ask a weird question. "What's your favorite dessert food" is a p good one. Sometimes folks think I'm childish but at least they know what they're getting into and they know I'm not judging them.

Sometimes when higher-ups approach me with a stiff upper lip I'll test the waters with a "is your job as insane as it sounds" or something similar to remind them that I, a worker performing a role, and speaking to them, a worker performing a role. If they give a stiff and measured answer I stay distant and professional. If their performance cracks and their tone changes or they smile or laugh or give a funny reply I know I can relax and joke a bit too.