#(im p sure they were satellites)

[kraviolis]

chapter 4 of the hl:a soundtrack coming out got me thinking abt this au i made for hl where the basic gist is “gman learns what the magic of friendship really is” (i wrote a lot abt it in discord and im gonna just c+p it here sjhkdfgksdf)

basically, post-canon au, gman gets his eldritch powers taken away and has to team up with alyx and gordon to find the motherfucker who took em because in the wrong hands they could destroy the universe and gman has to learn how to humble himself. or maybe gman just gets "let go" or takes basically like a forced sabbatical.

i just want gman to get "humbled" by gordon's crowbar and then actually become friends with him and alyx, basically.

also thinking abt like.... the whole situation with "post canon". with 19 year old alyx traveling 5 years into the future and destroying the borealis and eli being alive. just thinking about how interesting it would be if alyx was just suddenly 5 years younger and the last thing she remembered before being put in stasis or whatever was saving eli. and she and gordon can bond over playing catch-up (though her version is far less extreme) and gordon has to build up that friendship again. and she and gordon are still linked thru the vortessence, as it transcends time and space, and thats how gordon was able to get her back, albeit not the alyx he knew.

just really like. imagining an opening that sets up the world building. it's been 4 months since they destroyed the borealis and got alyx back. eli is alive. they're slowly rebuilding the world, starting with opening communications across the world. it's taking a while-- eli, alyx, and kleiner are all working hard to get a bunch of satellites into orbit to be able to contact folks across continents.

they have farms growing and the main base of operations for Black Mesa East have been moved to approx. where austria once was. gordon and alyx are walking the streets that are lively and loud and happy and he's talking about how the world used to be. alyx smells freshly baked bread for the first time in her life and they find themselves in the middle of what used to be a pub and is now... honestly its still a pub. just wasn't in use for a while, but it is now.

dusty bottles have been dragged out and sealed bags of flour and salt and containers of clean water were found in the basement and the woodfire stove is being managed by a vort. they stop for a while and have a drink and talk with other folks. gordon is withdrawn from everyone else bcus he's an introvert and also it's kinda hard to talk to people when everyone keeps staring at you and muttering your name like you're a saint and they're in a church.

barney shows up and gordon smirks as he offers him a beer, making him go "aw man, now i owe you another one." and they chat in their own little world and catch up because barney's been busting his ass trying to set up protections and training for citizens.

but gordon overhears some folks talking about the abandoned lab just outside of the town, untouched by the combine all this time. they also mention hearing strange noises. and gordon meets barney's eyes and barney just. sighs and goes "alright, fine, put those puppy dog eyes away. i'll let eli and isaac know. i assume alyx is comin' with?"

alyx is filled in and the three of them suit up to go check it out.

the entire lab is decrepit and everything is covered in dirt and dust and rust. gordon and alyx go on ahead while barney searches the place more thoroughly, trying to find supplies they might want or search the still-functioning computers.

they keep going into the lab and it just gets deeper and darker and gordon is struggling to chill out because its starting to feel more and more like black mesa down here. alyx hates the dark too and sticks close to him.

but then she finds something, seemingly important, and starts to check it out while gordon walks around and scouts the room. he hears a noise, a clang, and apparently alyx doesnt hear it. he follows the noise into a pitch black hallway offshooting from the room alyx is in.

he hears the noise again, a clanging thud, like a something falling against a metal floor. or something slamming itself against a door.

gordon readies his crowbar. he can see the door it's going to come from, the rusted metal creaking with each thud. it slams again one, twice, and then the door bursts open. gordon immediately sees a humanoid shape in the dark, thinks its a zombie, but realizes it's movements are too calculated to be mindless. its a person, he cant make out any details but that's a person down here-- a person that immediately scrambles back from the door just in time to avoid getting grabbed by a headcrab that lunges out of the room too.

gordon doesn't hesitate to take several steps forward, ready to beat it to death and save them, but he watches the figure quickly stand and slam their heel into the headcrab. he hears the snap of bone and the squish of flesh and sees the headcrab twitch, struggling to move, before they do it again. the greenish yellow blood splatters against the metal floor.

the headcrab doesn't get back up and the figure sniffs, adjusts their clothing in the same mechanical, calculated way that gordon struggles to place. its familiar but not enough for him to recognize just from body language alone.

gordon remembers his flashlight, then, and clicks it on. he sees the mess of a headcrab on the floor, a shoe covered in its blood, and slowly travels up to the figures face. his stomach sinks when he sees the back of his head, his usually perfectly-cut hair out of place and dirty. he adjusts his cuffs, his tie, smooths down his jacket lapels and turns around to look at gordon. his eyes are glowing in the dark of the hallway, pale blue and dreadful.

"ah..." the government man says, his eyes flashing to look gordon up and down. "mr... freeman. you seem to have... caught, me, at a rather... unfortunate, time."

and gordon... is frozen. this is so far out of left field that his isn't entirely sure if it's real.

gordon closes his eyes, shakes his head, and looks back up but the man is still there eyes blank and clinical.

"mr. freeman," he starts again. "you--"

the man is interrupted by another headcrab lunging from the dark. it latches onto the arm he raised and he grunts, wrestling with it for a moment. he slams back against the wall, the thud echoing loudly throughout the hallway. he manages to throw the creature off with a noise of pain, and before it can right itself and lunge again, a gunshot echoes and the headcrab falls limp.

"gordon!" alyx cries, running down the hallway. "why are you just standing-- ...there." she falls quiet when she takes in the other person with them, her brow furrowing and her eyes flickering across him, taking in every inch of detail and every observable weakness-- she does it with every potential threat.

"ah--" the government man winces, leaning heavily against the the wall, holding his arm. he's bleeding, red soaking into his blue suit, and gordon is at a complete loss of words. "ms. vance... what a... pleasure, to see you again."

and both gordon and alyx just stand there, staring, watching the man who has tormented them stand there and bleed red as if.... as if he were nothing but a human being.

"what. the. fuck," alyx hisses.

[tacittherapist]

((HS2 Spoilers under the cut!))

((For all the shit I give the epilogues, it does have its moments. Specifically highlighting this bit of dialogue here: ROXY: you think you choice mattered so much that no one elses could measure up? ROXY: n then what ROXY: did u get what u wanted? ROXY: did your life end and the points got tallied and you came out on top or like what? ROXY: still p much seems like were movin to me ROXY: and you sure dont seem like ur winnin so wheres all this good shit you got that you gotta go around handin out apologies for? ROXY: also damn dude while were at it!! ROXY: u forgot to actually say sorry in that apology! JOHN: no, i didn’t — i just meant... JOHN: i’m sorry for fucking up your life, or making it not— ROXY: i like my life!!! ROXY: i mean it aint perf and i got my share of fuckups n mistakes in there but you dont get to tell me its fucked up ROXY: or that it isnt real or somethin ROXY: its mine!

First: criticism. The writers wield this little section like a crude cudgel. They use it to underscore the weight of ‘canon’. This is the ‘candy’ timeline, so it supposedly ‘weighs less’ than the ‘meat’ timeline, but its characters still have meaningful thoughts and emotions. Here, John supposedly makes a choice that supposedly invalidates a bunch of supposedly important events, and Roxy here blows it all out of the water by claiming she made these choices too and that part of the blame rests with her in the direction her life has taken... which is total dogshit used to justify a bunch of really overt swings in character thematic. Continued here: ROXY: you wished i was one way the whole time we were married ROXY: but i wasnt ROXY: but now that youre all convinced ur the only real boy in a crowd o puppets ROXY: here i am bein me just like you ordered only i did it without your help ROXY: widen ur zoom my man!! ROXY: im not actin like this now because you want me to or bc you dont want me to ROXY: i was bad at standin up for myself then and im learnin to be good at it now ROXY: ive got my own self actualization train ROXY: ur just pullin in to one of my many roxy figures some shit out stations right as i built it JOHN: but... JOHN: you were never like that before i... ROXY: dude ROXY: where tf do u get off trying to decide what is or isnt me being “like me” enuff ROXY: do u think ppl stay the same their whole damn lives or what JOHN: you’ve really never felt like anything about our lives here was... off? ROXY: off from what exactly?? JOHN: the way things should be? ROXY: what does that mean???

Roxy here argues that there is no ‘one right way to be’ as a half-baked wink to the audience that all this gross mischaracterization is intentional and that it diverges so grossly from the established character arcs in order to demonstrate that nothing is set in stone. While technically true, this also makes for some pretty terrible writing.

Roxy was a caring, almost too involved individual before the epilogues. Her ditching Calliope for John and this messy marriage business and just letting Jane warp into a full-blown dictator makes no sense, even couched within the idea that ‘characters change.’ Yes, characters change, but there’s generally a reason for it! And not a shitty deus ex machina reason such as ‘John makes a choice!’ What even fucking happened to Candy Calliope anyway? She just fucked off somewhere? How do you sincerely throw a character away like that and then have the gall to wink at the audience as if what you’ve done makes sense? Changes in character are generally brought on by catalysts in their life! Trauma, joy, death, new settings, new ideas, events! Not... John deciding to eat a plate full of candy. If we had insight into Roxy’s thought process behind ditching Calliope and marrying John and having a kid on a whim, this might be saved. But we don’t even get a glimpse. Instead we’re pawned this shitty excuse for a very glaring departure from what we knew about Roxy. Character development is just that -- development! As in to become more complex or advanced! Roxy has made wrong choices in the past, yes, but her reasoning was laid bare in such a way that those wrong choices made sense for her to make. She then makes different decisions later because she learned from her wrong decisions. This is development! Her character is learning and changing behavior because of the things they’ve been through! Her reasoning for this awful series of bad choices is just... not explained, despite going against a ton of shit Roxy has learned. It’s slipshod. It’s careless. It’s sacrificing the tree to showcase the topper. The audience isn’t vested in this Roxy because she’s seemingly robbed of her agency, and then they’re trying to foist this idea that she somehow still has agency on us as if they didn’t preface the entire timeline with ‘well, all this shit is going to happen because we decided it and no other reason!’

Now: the praise. This bit of dialogue has huge implications for ‘non-canon’ dynamic. No, not ‘non-canon’ in the cheeky way the epilogues and HS2 claim to be ‘non-canon.’ I mean ‘non-canon’ as in this blog that I run and all the blogs that you, the reader, are writing and reading as well. Roxy’s insistence that characters change can swing the other way, too. Characters can develop in bad ways as well! Not bad as in bad writing, but bad as in flawed character reasoning! Suppose what Roxy learned from her time in HS1 was that most things can be solved by unvoiding fix-all solutions into existence? Then we might be able to see her trying to fix the human-troll-population issue by just... making more planets! Or unvoiding some sort of device trolls could wear that inhibits hivemind tendencies! That would be interesting and perhaps morbid to write about!! It would at least track with her past experiences!!! Or better yet: perhaps she actually takes a side against Jane (as she has done in the past) but instead of using their friendship as the moral plating, she went right into sarcastic arguments FOR eugenics to demonstrate how bigoted Jane was being? That’s a very Roxy thing to do!! She could have made the argument that if trolls need eugenics to suppress their violent tendencies, then so should humans! Having read about the Condesce’s eugenic practices during her formative years, this should have been fairly obvious to Roxy that what Jane was suggesting was from the same playbook, at least.

But I digress. What this bit of dialogue really does is give credence to us, the audience, in exploring these stories we’re currently writing for these pre-established characters. YES, canon Rose likely didn’t dabble so thoroughly in game magics, and she likely didn’t have as much anxiety as my Rose. BUT I prefaced my Rose’s current state with a bunch of events that make sense! She missed her rendezvous with the others! She had to float adrift, alone in a broadcast satellite, for nigh on a decade! She’s had a long fucking time to develop all these anxieties and mental illness because that’s what happens when you’re isolated for years! It is a tool I use to express my own anxieties and explore how someone might somehow overcome them! And most importantly: she’s still Rose. She has unprocessed mother issues. She cherishes her friends. She’s more than a bit gay. And she knows when the meta is using her and when it’s not, because she’s had a traumatic experience being used by Doc Scratch as a plot device. And that trauma isn’t going away (well, unless she gets therapy, but given the setting we’re writing... not likely), so she’s going to be overly cautious when it comes to big decisions involving her friends. What she’s not going to do is suddenly abandon everyone she’s departed from because uhhh Jade ate some bread the wrong way or whatever.

tl;dr: What this section of the epilogues/HS2 (well, really just this bit with Harry Andersen, Tavros, and Vrissy that is somehow more interesting than virtually EVERY OTHER PART of HS2) is telling us, the audience, is that it is good to diverge from canon. Non-canon characters will still have very real feelings and face very real consequences for their actions. Just... don’t do it like they did it. All these characters we’re writing for and all these events we’re writing around them... they’re valid! They matter! Just because they’re not canon doesn’t mean others are willing and wanting to read them, and that makes them important! Unfortunately, this also means the epilogues/HS2 are important, but let’s ignore that for now. What I’m trying to say is: be indulgent! Write the things you want to write! As long as they’re well-reasoned, they’re good writing! Characters can be overpowered! They can be cliche! They can have teenage problems as an adult! Just... give them a good reason.))

[vamooseintospace]

Aturdir (Matt Holt x Reader) Pt. 1

Who Said You’re A Hero? - 1,229 words

Not sure if I will continue this, but I’ll seeee :P

“Princess Allura!” Coran’s voice rang out, gaining everyones attention. “A distress signal!”

“From where, Coran?” She asked, stepping up to the podium.

“Aturdir!” He proclaimed. The princess pulled up a hologram and gasped. “Aturdir? I never imagined we would receive a distress from them. Can you tell what is the cause?”

Coran mumbled a little. “It appears that the wilderness of the planet has become so overgrown that the inhabitants villages are being destroyed!”

“Wait—So like a Balmera but with vegetation instead of crystals?” Pidge asked. “Exactly, Pidge.” The princess confirmed. “And we need to hurry! If we don’t retrieve the citizens they could be trapped under the vegetation forever!”

Instantly, the castle was flying towards the planet. Upon closer inspection, Matt realized it looked just like earth. Blue water, green grass… he missed it. He wished they weren’t here on a rescue mission because he’d like to take a vacation. This was one of Matt’s first missions since Pidge had found him and brought him back to the Castle of Lions, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t slightly nervous.

“So, what are the inhabitants like?” Hunk asked, staring out towards the planet in equal awe.

“Well, I have only met with them once. Quite a paradoxical race they are!” She let out a light giggle. “Do not let their tough exterior phase you. The Aturdirie are brave, strong-willed, and fantastic fighters, but are also among the kindest and most selfless race in the universe.”

“So… we’re like… rescuing a bunch of buff pixies?” Lance furrowed his brows. Allura giggled lightly. “No, of course not. I wish we were not meeting them under such circumstances because I believe you all will get along with them quite well! Along with pick up a few new combat tactics.”

“Ah, yes!” Coran agreed sharply. “It’s where I learned to fight with a snake! With a proper whip and snap, they are as sturdy as a tree branch!”

All of the paladins winced. A snake bo-staff didn’t sound all that appealing. And to Lance, neither did the Aturdirie. Rough exterior, good fighters… yet kind. They sounded like a bunch of burly cute faced aliens. Plus, after being to so many planets and meeting so many people, his hopes were running low on finally meeting someone. The lonelier her became, the less hope he retained in finding someone. And he knew for a fact, this place wouldn’t be any better than the rest.

The lions departed from the castle and circled in the air as they scouted for a spot to land to allow passengers on board. When Coran finally landed the ship safely, Allura conducted a bio-scan and found all life sources on the planet. “Hunk, Lance, you two head to the east and tell the survivors to head this way while keeping the vegetation under control. Shiro, Keith, you two take north and east ends of the planet. Pidge and Matt, there is on individual high up on that mountain. Go get them. Everyone is within a three-kilometre radius of the ship so hurry!”

Within seconds, the Paladins were soaring towards their destinations. Pidge was kinda glad she was finally sent on her own mission to find this rogue person who was idiotic enough to climb a mountain in the middle of a crisis.

She circled mountain up and down until she found a large cliff with a landing pad of sorts. It looked like ships had landed there before. Hesitantly, she and Matt made their way outside. Pidge had her bayard at the ready, and Matt his gun. Though this place lived up to its name, overwhelming to the point of fuzzy thought, Matt tried to keep his head straight. The place looked desolate, though. As the pair of siblings explored, they found small little satellites and computers lying around, all wired up in a complex web. The distress signal.

“Hello?” Pidge called out. No response.

In Matt’s peripheral, he caught a flicker of movement and whipped his head around. To his misfortune, to only be met with a tree root careening towards him. Out of no where, an arrow ablaze with a eery purple glow stuck into the root as it hovered above him. It exploded with a loud crack and then an arm was gripping his own, standing him up.

“Shoot it, dumbass!” A voice hollered at him.

But he didn’t move. The figure which was screaming at him wasn’t very big, Y/H, maybe? Four limbs just like someone from earth. But their face was covered by cloth and a pair of large goggles. “Ugh!” They grunted, snatching his gun.

Blue light shot out as the person fired the gun, exploding the angry tree roots to pieces. “Are you gonna get us out of here or no?!” They cried. “Sure. C’mon Pidge!” He shrugged and grabbed their arm, along with his gun in the process. Allura wasn’t kidding about these people being good fighters. The arm he grabbed was small, and felt just like a persons. His hopes began to rise that these aliens were humanoid, and not some creepy looking lizards.

Once in the lion, Pidge powered the ship up and open fired at the roots trying to drag them down. “Go go go!” The new person gripping the back of her chair screamed. Off they went into the sky and went blasting back towards the castle. They were the last to arrive, and once Pidge landed the lion in the hangar, the ship rumbled off into the sky.

“Why was your planet attacking you?” Pidge questioned to the mysterious person trying to find a way out of her lion.

“It has been gaining strength for many millennia. It gains power through the energy we exert on it—like through running and training. Each foot strike is like a jolt of energy. It grew strong enough to sustain itself and well, tried to eat us? I don’t know. I never paid attention when the leaders explained it.” They continued looking around curiously.

“The princess said you guys were pretty tough, but also pretty kind. Is that true?” Matt asked.

“Depends on your definition of kind. We’re more merciful. We fight for what is right and protect life, using our forces for good, not evil.”

“Sooo…” Pidge ambled over to the person curiously, shifting her weight back and forth, hands behind her back. “What do you guys look like?”

The person crossed their arms and grunted. “A hero never reveals their true identity.”

“Well… I’m a hero. You’ve seen my face.” Matt jumped in.

“Who said you’re a hero?” They quipped.

Matt questioned his entire existence. “I freaking saved you from an evil, self-aware tree!” He cried, arms flying in the air.

“And who said I needed saving?”

Matt grumbled, throwing his head in his hands. “I thought they said you were kind?”

“You ask a lot of questions. Do you know the way to my friends?”

Matt straightened up. “Yeah, and I’ll take you there on one condition.”

“What is it?”

“Tell me your name.” He smiled mischievously. “I’m Matt.” With an outreached hand, he offered it to the stranger.

They took it immediately and shook. Good, he thought, they know what a handshake is. “Im Y/N.”

Pidge just snickered at her older brother and his antics.

Read the rest on Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/143309922-aturdir-matt-holt-x-reader

[tired--nb]

tell me about your ocs. al of them

sdjfjhsgd?? really?? i have alot so i hope its ok that i just talk about my two new ones and maybe an old one of mine also its under cut because i have no idea how long im gonna go on oof 

Ok lets start with Lynn Evans ((imma recap what i said in the other post for my own sake sorry jahf)) She is a 15 y/o first year at U.A. She started going there while Mydoria was a second year. Her homeroom teacher is Present Mic (at least for now idk how sure i am on the decision) and like I said her quirk is Singing boost. She can boost anyone with in ear shot so she in battle would have to stay back and help her team from afar and through mic so that villians can hear her, and when dhe is boosting weather it herself or others he loses a lot stimina. Depending on the tone (or sometimes even the words) of a song itll boost different things and the best way she can tell is doing a small test with her brother with each new song she decides to sing. She is a trans girl but no one at U.A. but her homeroom teacher and the principle know. She socially transitioned after middle school and before she went to U.A. Though when she told her parents her mom fliped her fuckin shit and was like ‘I didn’t rase my son to be a pussy and I expected better from you how could you do this to me’ and left Lynn and her dad the next day her dad was completely understanding though he accepted her and said he will do everything in his power to help her. And because hes a tattoo artist they have a little pact that when she overcomes a big obstacle of being trans he puts a small music note on her wrist she right now has 8! This was also out of her suggestion because shes always wanted music note tattoos and this way they have a lot of meaning to her at the same timeOk about 2 years later her dad decides to adopt another kid and that when he goes and adopts Joseph. When they first got him they were told he was quirkless and they were ok with it but turns out he had a quirk he just really hated the foster home he was in so he just never used it out of spite for them. And like i said his quirk is orbit.This means he can make anything (under his 10 lb weight limit) orbit him like a satellite when he touches it with the palm of his hand! And if he wants it to stop orbiting him he can either just grab it or fling it out of orbit but when he flings it he cant control the speed and it can get pretty dangerous. Then when he hits his limit his vision get blurry and its hard for him to hear so he tries his best not to hit it. Also orbiting animals makes he tire quickly.Also his palms have the area that activates his quirk a lot darker than the rest and everyone just thought it was vitiligo but nope just his quirk lol Then he looks up to his sister and Uravity alot His sister because he sees her as like the strongest and best person ever then Uravity because their quirks have alot of similaritiesThen as for Lynn’s Dad and mom i dont have a ton of info on but ill say what i do have!Her dad, Steven, has the quirk boosting touch that he uses while he does tattoos so that they both hurt less and heal faster! Though his quirk only works when he has a fully hand on the person and its only for that limbThen her mother, Sophia had the quirk lullaby which puts one person (the first to hear her) that hears her into a haze like stateOhh then Lynn looks up to the Wild Wild Pussy Cats alot and wants to be on a team like them! Tiger is her favorite because hes a transboy (canonly!!!!) and it makes her feel alot better about herself knowing there are other trans heros. Then personality wise Lynn is the quiet type that keeps to her self only really talking to her friend Micheal, though once you get her talking or rived up about something its alittle hard to get her to shut up lol then she also had bipolar depression and takes meds for it She also has been taking martial arts classes since she was 5 and is shes a purple belt at the moment! Anyways if theres anything else you wanna hear about her or any of her family hmu this was mostly just me info dumping to hell and back lmao 

honestly the rest of my ocs are old and not nearly as developed oof i mean i have a lavender pearl that worked for a high class gem and was very fuckin gay for pink diamond, then i have an old oc that is a fox human hybrid named Renee and was originally a undertale oc that had a huge crush on sans (cringy i know leave me alone i was like 11), and then all of my trolls i made forever ago and just dropped oof, I also have an old creepypasta oc named neono that wore neon colors and was obsessed with fire lmao, then i also have the characters that were gonna become a game/comic but the other person who was working on it with me left ;; Baer had lot of development but id have to explain the entire game to explain it and teddi had some too but he wasnt my character to expand on oof then tom was mine and hes just a murderer. Then i also have an oc thats a demon and she had all her limbs cut off and her eye jabbed out so her demon form has floating limbs and is a cyclops now that i think about it she was p developed too damn i know she also had a glass prosthetic arm from the elbow down and the knee down

Ah anyways i went on for a long time sorry about that also sorry if i pitied you into sending me an ask about it thats a shitty thing to do i was just really annoyed and i apologize for itbut legit thank you so much for sending this is made my day oof??? sorry if it makes no sense 

[jobone123]

My sunrise 85% black neighbors LIKE I WOULDNT WAKE UP KNOWING I HAD FIVE NEW BLACK PEOPLE NEIGHBOR S THIS MORNING

Really changes the one man theory

I PAY THAT BLACK MAN IN BLONDE GEMS to lynch n hate me

Use to be fifty fifty NOW WHEN ONE OF THE CRACKER GIRLS FROM NEXT DOOR S OUTSIDE at least ten black men are too

Really shot yourselves black People ANY DOWNTOWN VS ANY SUNRISE she goes

Like following Jayson around black bae to make sure she’s not sucking his white BROWN EYE CRACKER dick WHILE SHES SUCKING OTHER CRACKERS DICK

It’s becoming a more black men hatred thing for Jayson A BIGGER BETTER BOSS hate from land vs trapp island niggers IF SUCCESS IS AN ACCIDENT I don’t want to be right

Same girls outside everyday same house TOO MANY DIFFERENT BLACK MEN R. I. P. Ginger

Rusha sunrise has turned into YOU DONT DO THAT TO BLACK MEN WHITE LADY moms revenge

If coronavirus COULDNT stop these niggers THEN WE SHOULD DESTROY N REBUILD this White lady is worse for life THEN A BOMBING AIRPLANE

Reminds me of the O. J. STORY SUNRISE FLORIDA HAS FIVE DIFFERENT O. J. SIMPSON STORIES ABOUT TO HAPPEN ON ONE BLOCK let’s say these white ladys are Jayson s moms n blacks hate her more because of it EX WHITE MANS WIFE ISM

Prison downtown maybe better then the house ism FRONT YARD VS APARTMENT THEORY one white girl outside ten different black men I HAVE NEVER SEEN to chase her down Vs one locked apartment door THEORY

Are they too stop me from having sex with my white neighbor girls vs to punish her for being white

You don’t do that to black men white lady

A real we know these niggers are going to kill all these white girls soon STORY

Jayson can’t still tell the difference between a blonde black n a brown eye cracker BLACK MAN SAME NIGGER THEORY

Sunrise Florida immulating A BLACK GUARD PROTECTING A WHITE WOMAN FROM OTHER WHITE MEN accidents mind your own business theory

I don’t go to your house n shit on your black daughter ism NOT YET TIC TOC NIGGERS

You niggers are intentionally having these white women crowd strike my front door n back yard SELF DEFENSE

TO STAND BEHIND THE WHITE GIRL n say hey white man YOU CANT HAVE SEX WITH THAT WHITE GIRL one man vs one woman Theory BETTERISM Lmao

Like being punished because women had IM HER SON theory

Were done

Ima kill every black persons for this in this city NATIONAL SECURITY you animal s technically belong downtown in prison NOT WIFI FOR SOME JOBLESS RACIST WHITE SAT TECH land lock sunrise I DIDNT KILL THESE NIGGERS INTERNATIONAL SATELLITE DID your block isn’t my block theory #boat

We’re done

#report sat bae found me #report Downtown fake pOwEr Get off my dick BLOB BLOB BLACK BLOB BLOB BLACK blob blob black BLAH blob black bllob black black BLAH BLAH BLACK BLAH BLAH BLACK blah blah black blah blah blah black BLAH BLAH BLAH BLACK BLAH BLAH BLACK blah blah blah black blah blah blah black blah blah blah blob blah blah blah black BLAH BLAH BLACK BLAH BLAH BLACK DOWNTOWN BLAH BLAH BLACK

[goodold-captainjack]

all of the space asks

Ooh ambitiousNebula: shuffle your iTunes and give me the first 5 songs that come up- Runaway - Ed Sheeran- Immortals - Fall Out Boy (remnants of the emo phase :') )- Wanted Dead Or Alive - Bon Jovi- Santa Fe - Rent- American Idiot - Green Day (more emo omg)Cosmos: What are you like when you're angry at someone?Obvious about it. I'm loud, I usually make a scene. Shooting star: What are you like when you're sad?Real quiet. It usually freaks people out bc I'm normally so talkative lol.Eclipse: What are you like when you're happy?...like an excited puppy tbhLuna: favorite names?Idk Jack is a pretty good one :PSpace dust: Are you happy? Actually? Yeah. I am. :)Constellation: Have you ever read a book that was worse than the movie?I usually only watch the movies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Black hole: do you have any diagnosis?Yeah, a l o t. I didn't know i had most of this stuff til being placed with Medda, I thought it was just my personality. Ive got anxiety, ptsd, adhd, depression, and recently discovered, mild insomnia 😎😎😎Comet: do you like the person you've become?Depends on the day Galaxy: are you a sun, moon, or stars person? Moon!! I love when it's all big and yellow, it's beautifulMilky way: do you prefer math or humanities? Um...humanities I guess? I'm not 100% sure if you mean social studies or what but I dont like math lolSatellite: when was your first kiss?First? Hmm...i think...I think I was at a party, playing spin the bottle, and I kissed this girl from my class. I...honestly dont remember her name now, is that bad?? In my defense, I kissed a lot of people that nightBetelguise: what's something that calms you down when you're upset?Painting. Especially on myself, depending on...how upset I am. Solar system: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)Sunspot: are you a sensitive person?That's my middle nameAndromeda: describe your first best friend? Dorky boyfriend ♡Saturn: What do you think about before falling asleep?Pfft? Fall asleep? That doesn't happen.Jk (sorta) um...i think too much. Usually about bad stuff. People I'm worried about, fear of getting left behind, etc. You know, the usual.Pulsar: What kind of person do you want to be?A good one. Someone who's brave, who makes people proud. Who's kind. Cassiopeia: What do you like most about yourself? Hmm...im determined.Orion: What do you like least about yourself?You want that worst to most tolerable, alphebetical orded, linear order...?Comet: do you have any favorite historical figure?Not like in particular, but working kids, from the industrial revolution. They took on so much crap! They were kids! Like whoa

[elizabethhgarcia-blog]

Welcome to My Life

My name is Elizabeth Garcia and I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. I am from the barrio of Glassell Park, more specifically, I am from the 3200 block of Drew Street. A place where gang violence, drugs and crime once thrived. Drew Street, a two-block street, is among Los Angeles’ most notorious streets due to the drug trade and gang violence that grew out of there. 

In the late 1960’s the City of Los Angeles built apartment buildings in this isolated neighborhood surrounded by dead ends which would later be a benefit to the gang that ran the street (Pelisek, 2008). In the late 1990’s the small street I grew up on was primarily occupied by Mexican immigrants, most of them from the small town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero, México which was also known for being one of the country’s most violent regions. The one who ran the street was a woman named Maria “Chata” Leon, who was a mother to 13 children and lived up the street from my family. This woman “lived up” to every stereotype one could have on women of color. She had many children, lived off of welfare before she got involved in the drug business, was involved in the drug trade, and was also a criminal. Maria Leon fit the description of the “Welfare mother” as stated in The Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins. Though she did not identify as a black woman, she was a person of color that fit the perception of this image. “Welfare queen is a phrase that describes economic dependency- the lack of job and/or income...” (80).  This controlling image that individuals have of black women, could also relate to Maria Leon. 

Up the street from where I lived, was the “satellite house”. In this place, Maria raised and taught her children how to run the drug business. There was not one person on Drew Street that did not know who she was due to the many fire fights that stung out of here. Some of her children ended up in wars against the other local gangs and therefore ended up losing their lives. There are many negative associations about this neighborhood, therefore many individuals with aspirations left the street and those who remained turned Drew into a hive of drug and gang activity (Quinones, 2008).  This categorization that occurs amongst people of color, is a way of being marginalized and being thought as “no good”.  As we see in the works of Michael Zweig, What is Social Class: What’s Class Got to do With It, he states that “we are of course all individuals, but our individuality and personal life chances are shaped- limited or enhanced- by the economic and social class in. which we have grown up and in which we exist as adults.” (127) In my case, growing up on Drew Street meant that life should have been different than what it is today. For those of us who stayed in Glassell Park, we had no choice but to try our best to make it out and become someone while avoiding these stereotypes that people from the “barrio” are nothing but a statistic. 

   Both my parents, immigrants from the small town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero received no education in the United States. My father received an education in Mexico but did not do anything with his accounting degree here, whereas my mother was never able to afford an education but that does not mean that she was not a wise woman. My father often times at work in order to be able to provide for us and my mother always being with us and making sure we didn’t fall out of line and join those on the street. A quote that stood out from the reading by McNamee and Miller Jr., The Silver Spoon: Inheritance and the Staggered Start, was “Most parents only want the best for their children. As a result, most parents try to do everything they can to secure their children futures.” (132) This quote resonates with my life experiences because growing up, though we didn't have much, my parents always strived to give my siblings and I what we needed to succeed. We might not have had it all in terms of luxury items but there was always love, food, shelter, guidance and support in every aspect of life. 

Growing up, my mother was very strict as to who I was allowed to play with and talk to but I never understood why. Although I did not have it all growing up in terms of material things, I had the love and guidance from my parents and that is the reason why I continue to work on myself today. In the words of McNamee and Miller Jr., “cultural capital includes but is not limited to interpersonal styles, and demeanor, manners and etiquette and vocabulary...” (133). Just because someone does not have it all economically, it does not mean that you cannot succeed with the values and manners you are taught from the beginning. In the words of my mother, “la educación empieza en la casa”.  The household I grew up in, is what I call a “traditional Mexican home” where there are many rules and expectations of the children, family is most important, and future success is always a topic. As a child I never liked being told what to do, how to do it, and being held to the highest expectations. Somehow my parents expected more from me than they did from my older sister and my younger brother. 

As I got older, I came to the realization that I was raised very different than those I grew up with.  For fun, our father would take us to the library on Friday’s if we did good throughout the week, we went on hikes, and had dinner on occasion. I never met a classmate that did things like my family did but one thing we had in common was the idea of what was normal. Our normal included witnessing several gang fights, gun shots almost every night, and constant lock-downs, a protocol that is taught in schools for security purposes. If something of this nature did not happen in two or three consecutive days, we would wonder what was going on. Growing up on Drew Street was rough. Always wondering if we were safe walking to and from school, if anything would happen to us while we were playing outside, and most importantly, wondering if we would be able to make it out of there and become someone. Without the structure that I grew up with, I could have been a teen mom, possibly in the wrong footsteps, and without a desire for pursuing higher education. 

In this graph, we see that Hispanics, like Blacks and Asians, continue to be underrepresented in college enrollements. Though numbers of enrollment have increased over the years, we, POC, continue to be outnumbered by White individuals.

 As a child of a working-class family, you learn the values of hard work and determination. You realize that your parents left everything they once knew so that their children could have the best future possible, so it is only right to pursue a higher education in hopes of being successful one day. For minority individuals like myself, pursuing a higher education is not something that is guaranteed. People like me struggle to secure a spot in a community college, let alone a prestigious university. McNamee and Miller state that for “heirs of large fortunes- their future is financially secure. They will grow up having the best of everything and having every opportunity money can buy.” (132). This quote relates to the recent scandal that broke out in March where over 50 people got charged in the largest college admissions bribery case. All of these people: white, upper-class individuals with the money to buy their way into top universities. This might leave people that belong to this cultura of the struggle feeling like they are not receiving the credit they deserve for rightly securing a spot in these colleges and universities. The problem here is that “in recent years, by all measures, the rich are getting richer, and the gap between the rich and everyone else has appreciably increased” (McNamee and Miller, 2004). This enormous gap between us, working-class individuals and the upper-class families is what is causing the underrepresentation of POC in many aspects of life. A concept that plays an important role in the underrepresentation of people of color in higher education institutions is white privilege. White privilege is all around us and those who are white “are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege as males are taught not tp recognize male privilege.” (McIntosh, P., 2008). These individuals fail to see where and how they are to an advantage. 

Unlike the dominant race in American society, us Latinos and people of color, are taught to “echarle ganas” y “ponernos las pilas” porque tenemos que salir adelante. Those are just a few things I heard from my parents growing up, as im sure many others have. Education is something that is not for everyone, but it should always be an option. Latinos tend to make up a small percentage of the educated population due to financial hardships or lack of resources and mentorships available in underrepresented communities. From experience, lacking mentorship when in this situation makes it difficult to fill out a simple college application and an application for financial aid. Therefore, many students choose not to go to college simply because they cannot find the resources to pay for it or others may end up going but end up dropping out. Since parents of first-generation children often times do not receive an education in the United States, there is no way you can ask a parent for help.

For me, going to college has been a bit of a struggle. My older sister did go to college, but even then, the uncertainty of not knowing if paperwork is being filled out correctly makes you overthink the slightest of tasks. In my extended family there are only two cousins, not counting myself or my sister, who have made it to college. My sister Lizette, being the only one out of all of us who has graduated and is now in the process of obtaining her Master of Arts in Teaching degree at the University of Southern California. 

 I started off at the University of Phoenix, yes, that online school that is advertised on TV.  Over 40k invested in this institution that did not care for my success and that is why I am here, today, living in Albuquerque.

In the beginning, moving out of state sounded like so much fun, but only because no one in my family had done it before. I would be the first “to leave the nest” as my parents like to say and I had to learn some things the hard way and face some not-so-nice individuals along the way. I transferred to the University of New Mexico in Fall 2017 and that summer, as we were driving here, we stopped at a gas station in Arizona and that is where my first conflicting encounter occurred. As I was standing in line to pay for some snacks, a man approached me and went on to say, “You look like the real life Pocahontas” and in that moment I did not know how to react. I did not know if he meant it as a compliment or as an insult but I was just in shock to hear someone say such thing. Whether or not it was a compliment, in the works of Dr. Derald W. Sue, this would be considered a microaggression. This man who said this to me was a person of color and that is why I believe that there was no ill-will behind this comment. After all, “the most detrimental forms of microaggressions are usually delivered by well-intentioned individuals who are unaware that they have engaged in harmful conduct toward a socially developed group. (Sue, Derald W., 2010) 

There have been many other instances where I have received comments from peers including: 

- “How do you afford to pay for college?” 

-”You have a really white name for being Mexican.”

-”You were born in Mexico right?”

-”What do your parents do for a living?” (after telling someone that my parents don’t work, implying that they must be doing something illegal to allow me to receive an education.)

-”Your culture would be Indian culture right?” 

“You have some Black in you huh.”

These are all things I have heard since moving to Albuquerque and I have convinced myself that it is because compared to other Hispanics, Latin@s, Chicanxs, I am of a darker complexion but it is who I am and nothing anyone says will make me question my identity. The road to getting to where I am today has not been easy. Leaving everything and everyone back home, 800 miles away was no easy task but it was been well worth it. Every struggle one faces in life contributes to the person you are destined to become. In a few days, I will be finally graduating with my undergraduate degree and I am so thankful that I get to represent my people, mi cultura, my home, mi familia with this accomplishment. 

Always remember : “It’s not where you come from, it’s what you grow into.” 

Text Sources: 

-Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Routledge, 2009, pp. 80

-McIntosh, Peggy. 2008. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." in The Meaning of Difference : American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexual Orientation, and Disability, edited by Karen Elaine Rosenblum and Toni-Michelle Travis. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, c2008.5thEd.

-McNamee and Robert K. Miller Jr,. 2004. The Silver Spoon: Inheritance and the Staggered Start. Edited by Rosenblum, Karen and Travis, Toni-Michelle. The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexuality, and Disability.New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, c2016. 7th ed. 

-Pelisek, C. (2008, March 5). The Gangsters of Drew Street, Glassell Park. L.A. Weekly.Retrieved from https://www.laweekly.com/news/the-gangsters-of-drew-street-glassell-park-2152296

-Quinones, S. (2008, July 23). A&E Biography Documentary on Drew Street and the Leon-Real Family. Dreamland. Retrieved from http://samquinones.com/reporters-blog/2013/07/23/los-angeles-ae-biography-documentary-on-drew-street-and-the-leon-real-family/

-Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, ©2010.

-Zweig, Michael. 2004. What is Social Class: Whats Class Got to do With It?. Edited by Rosenblum, Karen and Travis, Toni-Michelle. The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexuality, and Disability. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, c2016. 7th ed.

Photo sources: 

-https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/los-angeles-california-plaza/things-to-do/area-attractions/dodger-stadium 

-https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/24/more-hispanics-blacks-enrolling-in-college-but-lag-in-bachelors-degrees/

-http://adobeoasis.com/welcome-new-mexico/

[ageofultron]

it was probably the autokinetic effect! basically ur mind playing tricks on u.... or it COULD be aliens 🤔🤔

i thought about that too, i was like okay am i tripping??? but i swear i was not those things were moving, aliens i’m telling u

[drippeddaily]

Album of the Year #5: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane) - volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Album of the Year #5: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane) - volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)

Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Label: Self-Released

Release Date: January 29, 2017

Listen:

YouTube

Spotify

Bandcamp

Apple Music

Background

Bedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.

After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”

Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:

I keep getting emails from people.

I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.

All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.

what else can i do.

im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.

but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.

polemic yelp review of american heath care system:

"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.

After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.

3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.

I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.

I had been reaching out

Calling.

Emailing.

After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.

I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.

I didn't know what else to do.

What else are you supposed to do.

For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.

Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.

Vomiting children.

Bleeding Fingers.

Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.

Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.

Their broken humilated spouse at their side.

I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.

Surrending my freedom.

Surrender of my routines.

After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.

Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.

Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.

One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.

Not sure what that was about.

Empty though.

A bed and a chair.

Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.

You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.

I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.

I sat and waited in my gown.

Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.

I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.

I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.

I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.

This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.

Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:

"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"

No.

No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.

No.

No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.

wrong answer.

I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.

Back right where I started.

Nobody is gonna help me.

Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.

Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.

By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.

Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .

Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.

On hurting yourself:

This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.

On hurting someone else:

This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.

I've read old yeller.

They dont care. Neither do I.

boo hoo.

Conversely:

lock them in a room and keep them safe.

Is this really that hard?

"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"

How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:

"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"

Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.

It creates that understanding.

In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.

even if that wasn't a real compulsion.

a last resort.

This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more.

"well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".

I'll get better one day.

Not today.

Maybe I'll have fingers.

Maybe I won't."

thanks for the well wishes.

i'm fine.

i'm just angry.

i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.

i hate that you are dealing with this.

Review

I don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.

Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.

The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”

This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”

In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.

While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights” cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.

Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.

This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”

The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.

And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.

volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:

I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.

Favorite Lyrics

Crouched down by the tree at his neighbors

He liked the way the bark ripped off like paper

He pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasers

Every step he took turned earth into craters

Little brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuff

Bowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks

“man wearing a helmet”

Waking up in situations

Feeling like I'm living in suspended animation

Guess I'm still sober on occasion

And that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation

“stoop lights”

I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going in

Just shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friend

I don’t want to stretch you more than you extend

I don’t want to spit in the hand that you lend

I did it to myself, I get what I deserve

Thoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerve

I’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt but

I just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth

“stoop lights”

Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a scream

Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green

Bashful baby boy, so distracted by my toys

Rode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, Illinois

On a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegrates

The only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate

“haze of interference”

You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madness

You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?

“haze of interference”

If I was glass I'd revert back to sand

Scattered through the sea, I could pass through your hands

None of this will happen, nothing will ever

The things that I believe can never ever happen

I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall

Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all

“haze of interference”

Talking Points

How does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?

What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?

What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?

I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?

And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?

Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.Label: Self-ReleasedRelease Date: January 29, 2017Listen:YouTubeSpotifyBandcampApple MusicBackgroundBedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:I keep getting emails from people.I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.what else can i do.im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.polemic yelp review of american heath care system:"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.I had been reaching outCalling.Emailing.After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.I didn't know what else to do.What else are you supposed to do.For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.Vomiting children.Bleeding Fingers.Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.Their broken humilated spouse at their side.I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.Surrending my freedom.Surrender of my routines.After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.Not sure what that was about.Empty though.A bed and a chair.Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.I sat and waited in my gown.Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"No.No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.No.No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.wrong answer.I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.Back right where I started.Nobody is gonna help me.Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.On hurting yourself:This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.On hurting someone else:This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.I've read old yeller.They dont care. Neither do I.boo hoo.Conversely:lock them in a room and keep them safe.Is this really that hard?"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.It creates that understanding.In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.even if that wasn't a real compulsion.a last resort.This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more."well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".I'll get better one day.Not today.Maybe I'll have fingers.Maybe I won't."thanks for the well wishes.i'm fine.i'm just angry.i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.i hate that you are dealing with this.ReviewI don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights” cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.Favorite LyricsCrouched down by the tree at his neighborsHe liked the way the bark ripped off like paperHe pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasersEvery step he took turned earth into cratersLittle brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuffBowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks“man wearing a helmet”Waking up in situationsFeeling like I'm living in suspended animationGuess I'm still sober on occasionAnd that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation“stoop lights”I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going inJust shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friendI don’t want to stretch you more than you extendI don’t want to spit in the hand that you lendI did it to myself, I get what I deserveThoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerveI’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt butI just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth“stoop lights”Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a screamGreener on the other side, how about nothing's greenBashful baby boy, so distracted by my toysRode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, IllinoisOn a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegratesThe only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate“haze of interference”You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madnessYou're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?“haze of interference”If I was glass I'd revert back to sandScattered through the sea, I could pass through your handsNone of this will happen, nothing will everThe things that I believe can never ever happenI'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wallPick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all“haze of interference”Talking PointsHow does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.

[topsolarpanels]

Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, appearing down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to ensure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is gathered up in only the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, nearly four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and quickly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would build the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips barely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this quantity of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for almost a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as climate permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly shifting ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that objective its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launch next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I assured there were specialists who have, over the course of almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same hour, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding airplane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to find what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a climate meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy weather office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its probably why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight day. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight hour is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric condition. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With climate, “were not receiving” is. Whats required is the ability to comprehend constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had stimulated the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the weather session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What builds this real to you? The question had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I frankly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece jacket and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellow ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that question was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What constructs it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gasolines turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US situates the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at its design and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in mind. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa recurs its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish mirth( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what attains this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has made it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media helped them along by interring the narrative under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dogs on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America built a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys most ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland dedicates the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed promptly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere to be found. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our containers still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the pouches hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually simply one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the style, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres merely ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butts. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astonish and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I finally got my purse, I built my style down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was staying. But before I fulfilled the crew, I met the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant odor of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and odor it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any style of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is observing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew talked about their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his telephone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually screamed Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one technologist put it to me, We simply get nervous, frankly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant genuinely talking here that without feeling those emotions again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of the performance of their duties by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of shift workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you assure people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure technologists asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were merrily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or merely flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic humming of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which gave them the looking of boys in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier extends across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photo: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a most varied opinion from that considered by writers in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by barge or, more likely, from a describe. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of death and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old tales terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar puts spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so terrified Melville and Poe, who aims his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earths climate cool; the loss of all this white material entails more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps induces life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flowing, I ensure the same strong hand that deep etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low hills smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice devoted shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the well-being of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear express of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same period that were getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the humor floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to simply rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do maintenance on that, he pointed out.

In another dialogue, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would welcome a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, considering the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: simply stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already immersed in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing respond. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, functional specialists in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a resulting expert in the field. The off-the-record opinion conveyed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal difference between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher laughed a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest topic was only met with silence and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science session, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont appears to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about persons under the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing reply: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped droning, and had constructed spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they collected around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something are moving forward watching these people who had spend the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now spending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon crept into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video presented some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted concrete bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft weapons. Today its only an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, merely a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the ruinings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the day before. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and said: Well anyway, perhaps thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because such an approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Perhaps its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets go. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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