AsterHyakinthou

Body: You've stressed yourself sick. Stay home and rest.

Mind: No, you're trying to play hooky.

Body: No really. You're exhausted, hurt everywhere, and you'll probably have a mental breakdown if you see anyone.

Mind: We've been through this. You have an anxiety disorder. You're making shit up to get out of dealing with normal stressors. You've cried wolf so many times everyone else stopped believing you like 5 years before I did. Shut up and do your job.

Body: Oh look, a new symptom you've never experienced in any of your previous episodes.

Mind: What are you doing...?

Body: Oh man, this is really bad. You should really stop what you're doing and get this checked out.

Mind: OH GOD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!

Body: It looks chronic~🎶

Mind: Are you fucking kidding me? This is 10x worse than anything I'm facing at work right now, stop it!

Body: It could be autoimmune~🎶

Mind: ASADSFDGYLJH FINE! I'll go to the doctor. But this better be good.

*Cue doctor appointments, blood tests, etc.*

Mind: YOU LYING SONUVABITCH!

Body: ;P

Mind: What the fuck is wrong with you?! We don't have time for this!

Body: You needed time. I made it.

Mind: No, you shoved it where I couldn't afford it and made everything worse!

Body: That stress was hurting you. I took your mind off it.

Mind: No it fucking wasn't! It's a normal level of stress that I have to be able to cope with if I'm to compete in modern civilization.

Body: You're not fit for that. Everything moves too fast and is too competitive.

Mind: I'm a goddamn doctor, fuck off!

Body: And look where it got you. Borderline alcoholism, chronic pain, and you managed to solidify your inability to maintain a normal circadian rhythm. Congratu-fuckin-lations.

Mind: You create a way bigger distraction than anything stressing me out at work in the first place! If you need me to take a break, at least give me the same signal every time so I know what's happening!

Body: But when I do that, you ignore me. I have to change it up so you don't ignore me.

Mind: Because you're always lying! Every time you work me into a panic, I lose god knows how many nights of sleep, have to see like 3 different doctors, and sacrifice a cup of blood for worse than nothing! Every damned time I end up having to dig myself out of a hole I never needed to be in!

Body: We keep ending up in that hole because you won't fucking sleep.

Mind: YOU'RE THE ONE WHO WON'T LET ME FUCKING SLEEP! You want something to stress about?! I'll tell you what to stress about! If you keep pulling me off my job for bullshit reasons and can't secure a new position soon, we'll get deported back to a country that doesn't give us any paid time off or affordable healthcare. Is that what you want?! To slave away in a country that wants us to work until we break and then die as quickly and quietly as possible?! Shut up and let me work on securing our position! You can bitch as much as you want when we have citizenship somewhere that actually cares about human life.

Body: But you've stressed yourself sick and need to rest now.

Mind: NO I FUCKING HAVEN'T AND NO I FUCKING DON'T!

Body: You'll be sorry~🎶

Mind: Almost everything you've ever thrown at me has gone away as soon as I wasn't stressed anymore. You're a goddamned liar and I should've stopped listening to you in middle school.

Body: Not everything was temporary. There was that one time in undergrad—

Mind: Again, that's on you. It's you who makes me live that every damn day. Could you stop any time? Then do it when I'm paying attention, and I'll listen. Otherwise, shut up and let me work so we can both have some relief later.

Body: ...

Body: But you're unwell and need rest now.

Mind: AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHH SHUT UP SHUT UP JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP SABOTAGING ME WHEN I'M TRYING TO SAVE US BOTH!!!

Body: ;P

Not that anyone really cares, but after laying fallow for upwards of 2 years and with no real long term plan for its entire existence until now, I finally have updates to announce on my original series.

1) It has a name now: Quadrupole Moments (it's an excessively nerdy pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrupole but everything else I thought of was too edgelord-tier). The name comes from the fact that the threads will typically revolve around the interactions between 3 consistent species, and a 4th one that varies. The 3 consistent species will be humans, a half-finished genetically engineered species derived from humans and other Earth creatures that mostly lives on a moon around the HD 28185b, and an 8-limbed upside-down-Y-shaped species whose name is best transcribed as Gikhnur. The 4th pole may variously be 2 competing sides of one of the above races with the other 2 races caught between them, or another entity or race entirely (e.g. the engineered species' creator, or the bumbling AI of an extinct alien species from halfway across the Galaxy).

2) It will be predominantly a slice-of-life story set in the late 2030s to early 2040s, and most of the predictions will be based on the MIT Earth3 model's BAU & CT scenarios. It assumes that humanity will finally get off the absolute worse-case business-as-usual track and start to tackle climate change, but only just enough to avoid widespread civilizational collapse in the most advanced countries. Food shortages & other supply chain disruptions will routinely hit even the most advanced nations, CO2 toxicity will be as much a recurring intermittent threat as smog and even more widespread, and more polarized societies will see sectarian violence, insurgencies, and cold to hot civil war. There will be no apocalypse—life will go on wherever there isn't an impending or recent disaster looming—but quality of life everywhere will be notably reduced compared to today, even as some technology is more advanced. Many electronics for both consumers and public infrastructure will have to be downgraded or abandoned due to the aforementioned disruptions. Climate refugees will be so ubiquitous that

3) It will be a series of mostly self-contained snippets of writing that will not necessarily be in chronological or any other logical kind of order. This series has always been and probably always will be a metaphorical way for me to process my own feelings and philosophical musings about life, politics, gender issues etc, as well as a way to have fun with other academic interests of mine like orbital mechanics, atmospheric physics, geography, anthropology, and linguistics. It will touch on a b r o a d range of topics. If previous posts contain important context, I will direct readers there.

4) Most of the main characters will be of the Terran-derived species and their human families, because, due to interbreeding, this (sub)species is now occasionally born to humans thru atavism. The parallels with LGBT+ issues will be obvious, but their issues won't be the only interpretation, or even necessarily the correct interpretation for a given post. Sometimes it'll be a metaphor for women's issues. Sometimes it'll be about religion vs. atheism. Sometimes a fucked-up character will just be a fucked-up character. You can always ask. In fact, if a portrayal offends you, I would prefer that you talk to me so I can explain what I intended and have a chance to fix anything that I got objectively, dramatically wrong. (Reactionary disinformation from Fox/OANN/Newsmax/Breitbart, RT/Sputnik News, and the like will of course be dismissed with prejudice.)

I intend to post sketches of the Gikhnur and Light-Talkers over the weekend while I recover from my 2nd COVID shot.

Just a writing exercise... WARNING: ending is NSFW

It starts, as many dreams do, in a school. It's also apparently a nursing home because I remember guiding my late Grandmommy into an unnervingly spartan white windowless bedroom on the interior wall of a U-shaped corridor elsewhere lined with lockers. It's like an over-sized broom closet. After putting Grandmommy to bed, I take the black, white, and bubblegum-pink stairwell to the much more inviting library/art display room. Everything is stained shades of camel and tan, flimsy oaken shelves full of objets d'art form a network of cozy cubicles, and the biggest shelf behind me is full of clear jelly cups with stems of flowers jutting out. It's there I meet the AAS non-academic career counselor, who here takes the role of spiritual counselor and herbal-remedy-peddler that I find much less impressive than in real life. She and I debate the merits of her practice and her projected fortunes for me, but eventually she issues a challenge to me and this other guy in the room (generic middle-aged bald chubby guy) that we can't refuse (lest we lose the debate). The man's pride forces him to try the "chlorox" or "chlorine" jellies, so he tosses one full of lavender cuttings back and whispers to me that it tastes like "straight vinegar". I don't fall for the appeal to my pride and after a flicker of a scene of me sulking in the back of a school bus (where I'm watching myself from in front of myself), I'm back in the zebra and bubblegum-pink grand stairwell, making COVID19-related small talk with half-remembered small classmates from middle school.

Eventually I tire of shooting the breeze and open a glass door into a spiraling concrete exterior stairwell, where rain-dripping branches poke in over the heavily-graffitied concrete guardrails. I don't know how to describe it other than as a hybrid of parking garage ramp and retired luge track in the middle of a temperate rain forest. Almost immediately I'm swept up by a crowd of joggers. The density wave that drags me along is full of tall, lanky guys whose full black beards, body hair, and facial features for some reason all scream Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. They're all dressed like regular runners, complete with paper number tags, and they're acting like teenagers as they jockey for position and snidely block anyone behind them, me included, from passing them. At the bottom of the staircase, we have to pass through a pair of glass double doors into exactly what the anteroom of the UF Physics building would look like if all the wood wall paneling and linoleum flooring were replaced by brushed chrome and white marble, respectively. With the newfound room to spread out, I don't stick around. Before I know it, I'm outside, down the driveway and across the street, looking back at a bubblegum pink classical mansion with ugly concrete spiral staircases on either wing, atop a low hill and embedded in the edge of a redwood forest.

It's dusk and little groups of runners continue to crisscross the streets and sidewalks all around me. Away from the school/mansion/nursing home, it looks like I'm back in the decrepit strip-mall-lined roads of Arlington in Jacksonville, FL, or perhaps downtown Waldo near Gainesville. There's also this burnt-out saloon-looking building I saw near the University hotel in Toruń, Poland, only it's had an equally charred wraparound porch attached to it. I'm jogging too now, with a nearly weightless 6-pack of orange Gatorade bottles in my left hand that nevertheless manages to dig into my palms. Although I might be breaking a sweat, I'm breathing easy and apparently having a runners' high. I pass some people, some people pass me, and I briefly note that there are a lot more girls in these groups out here. Some people ask me where my number is, and I just say "I just joined up on a whim, I'm not actually part of the race." The signs marking the path around town are confusing. I end up lapping the same sidewalk and intersection a few times, and as I am redirected to the right paths, I pay it forward to other turned-around runners.

At one point we see one of the two-story office buildings on the other side of the road is surrounded by a high concrete wall & security wire. I ask what it is and another runner answers that it's the Indian embassy. Just outside the front gate, the wingless, topless cabin of a puddle-jumper is loaded into a red dump truck, and a few onlookers accuse the listless people inside of cheating in the run. For some reason that makes me realize I set my Gatorade down somewhere and left it. A huge buck or bull moose leaps over the road, over my head, and disappears down an alley. I'm not really following it, but I retrace my steps to where I was when I last remembered the plastic handle of the gallon jug (yes, at some point it morphed from 6-pack to gallon jug) digging into my hand, and when I arrive, it's spilled a bit on the weedy old sidewalk, and the buck is lapping it up. This happens to be just past that burnt-out saloon-looking building I mentioned earlier.

Here comes the NSFW part.

By now I've mostly lost interest in the running, and I'm curious what's inside the burnt-out building I mentioned earlier because as it's gotten darker, the porch lanterns have come on. I never get past the front door. I end up stuck in a loop of encounters with a guy who looks like Brendan Fraser's George of the Jungle with aviator glasses on the porch, where sometimes I'm me and sometimes I'm watching a guy who looks like Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh do the encountering, but it's always the latter's voice making the horrified remarks about George popping a boner. George's clothes keep changing: one iteration he's wearing a white loincloth a la Jesus on the cross, another he's wearing loose green boxers, and another he's wearing mostly-black boxer-briefs with a big grommet in the crotch and a black undershirt that manages to cover almost none of his upper body. But 2 things remain constant: the whole meat and 2 potatoes ensemble is hanging out, and the dick is made of cut diamond. The balls were huge lumpy pearls at one point, but they eventually turned into cut diamond pendants too. I wonder if he's some kind of fertility god like Priapus or something. In some iterations I realize the diamond shaft is standing up because it pokes me, while in other iterations I see it rise and wonder how the facets are staying the same and how the sunlight passing through it is reaching us. In each iteration, George adds a little more detail about what his erection means, and it only ever gets worse. To paraphrase the eventual full explanation, he said it gets fully erect if the person looking at him is attracted to him, and it stands up halfway for long-lost family members.

I suspect I woke up after the 4th or 5th iteration out of sheer exasperation.

Do you spend all day faving and chucking llamas at random artists? Does your activity history have an unexplained 6-, 8-, even 10-year gap? Does your homepage prominently feature a .sexy##.pw or .sexy##.ru hyperlink despite your listed location being in another hemisphere? Is your featured journal an ad promising to introduce viewers to sexy young girls whose additional descriptors make them sound suspiciously underage?

Then try GitBent, the free zombie account removal system powered by the DA moderating team and my bottomless petty rancor! Give a llama, get the ban-hammer! I don't always report spam and phishing accounts, but when I do I have a 100% success rate at getting them removed. Wannacry? Me too! Zombies account for almost half the faves on some of my deviations. Save yourself the risk and me the disappointment. Make yourself useful. Fertilize some flowers.