#What is Dark Fiber Network?

[dhirajmarketresearch]

[mutant-distraction]

Neil Bockoven

OTZI THE ICEMAN - SOME FACTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW:

1) It took ten years to figure out how he died. The 5300-year-old remains of Otzi were discovered by two hikers in northernmost Italy in 1991, as he melted out of a glacier. First thought to have died from exposure, Otzi was found in 2001 to have an arrowhead in his shoulder that had cut a key artery.

2) He was a wreck - he had severe arthritis, ulcers, whipworms, gallstones, blackened lungs, atherosclerosis and rotten teeth. He had a frost-bitten toe, broken ribs, and genetic markers indicating the world's earliest known case of Lyme disease.

3) He was in shape - pollen studies indicate that, even though in his mid-40's and suffering from multiple ailments, he'd climbed from high elevation to low, then back again, perhaps as much as 8500' each way, all within 33 hours (Dickson et al. 2019).

4) Recent genetic work by Wang et al. (2023) indicates more than 90% of Otzi's ancestry came from Anatolian farmers, and he had dark eyes and skin. Rather than a forehead, Otzi had a five head (i.e., genes for male pattern baldness). These genetic indicators match up with what's seen from the mummified body.

5) Otzi had a relatively high level of Neanderthal genes - some reports saying more than 5% compared to a ~2% average for Europeans today.

6) Otzi may have been a part-time coppersmith. His possessions included one of the oldest-known copper axes, and analyses of his hair indicate that it was heavily contaminated with copper and arsenic, a pollutant associated with copper smelting (Brothwell, 1995).

7) Lead isotope and trace element studies indicate the copper in Otzi's ax came from ores in central Italy's Southern Tuscany region more than 300 miles away. The flint used for his arrowheads came from about 100 miles to the south. This suggests an extensive trade network.

7) Otzi had traces of cannabis on his tools, clothing and in his digestive system. The traces probably stem from its use for pain relief and/or from working with hemp fibers for rope or clothing (Wacker et al. 2019).

It's amazing what all we've learned from the wonderful discovery of Otzi!

[overthinkit-underscore]

we need to talk about Apotheosis's [Suffer] sequences

[Suffer Alone]

Her grip tightens, and somehow, you feel it. The pain sits at the limits of your comprehension, like an endless sea of hands falling on you one after another after another before finally collapsing in on themselves. You lose yourself in the darkness. The textured nothing is ripped open, and with it, you are ripped open. Amid a sea of dissociative pain, you can feel everything that is you pouring out into the ether. And you feel something else, too. Anger. A need to lash out and hurt that which is hurting you. You continue to lose important pieces of yourself. The memories of entire lifetimes lived fade away into a space where your only recollection of them is that something used to be there. You die and are reborn, and die and are reborn, shrinking and shrinking again and again until there is no you left to die or shrink.

Eyes open. Are they yours? They don't feel like yours anymore, but there is no other word to describe what they belong to.

[Make Her suffer with You]

Your awareness shifts between undulating fibers of nothingness that is somehow outside of your body, but part of it. Time yields to feeling. You wrap around wrist, ankle, neck, and pull from her heart the whole of her experience, and in return, she pulls from your heart the whole of yours. So much of her is empty bluster. Boasts muttered first in quiet to give an empty life a sense of meaning, and then the same boasts wrapped in a bow of true belief. Belief turned to arrogance. Arrogance that shatters as she finally sees something other than herself. "Oh. We've both hurt each other so very much, haven't we?"

Your eyes open. She is bound to you, and you are bound to her. Hollow echoes of what you used to be.

Textual Analysis

most vessels' narratively-contrived backstories will relate back to Shifty in some way, even if they initially seem not to. and since we see in Quiet's Suffer sequence his actual Construct experience

everything that is you pouring out into the ether [...] memories of entire lifetimes lived [...] you die and are reborn, and die and are reborn

we can assume in some way Apo's Suffer sequence functions similarly, if only under a couple layers of metaphor.

pull from Her Heart the whole of her experience

Shifty says each vessel will make for a certain type of "heart"

Shifty's Heart is the whole of Her experience, memory and identity and all

exposed hearts are a core symbolic motif in STP representing vulnerability and open communication [see: Fury unwinding herself to only her heart at her lowest point, Wild's exposed heart, VoT Smitten opening your ribcage to expose "the content of your heart" and win over the Damsel]

so much of her is empty bluster. boasts muttered first in quiet to give an empty life a sense of meaning

waking up in a Cabin void without any recollection of who, or what, you are; how or why you got here; your name...

can call Shifty out repeatedly for Her pretension and claim She's "not actually saying anything," both in The Spaces Between and End of Everything sections

"boasts muttered first in [The Long Quiet]" -> Shifty talking about the vessel She's collected, trying to fill back in an ocean's worth of perspective & entity with miniscule drops of water, trying to find meaning in these fractions of a life

"empty life" -> Entity-Shifty is a dim and nascent network, feelers probing for vessels to use as nerves & fibers to feel the worlds beyond. she is nothing without these Princesses, and these Princesses know so little. lives aren't meant to bare narrative weight. people aren't meant to be fragments of concepts.

then the same boasts wrapped in a bow of true belief

this is all she has; nothing to disprove it

no true lived experience

creature of perception

belief turned to arrogance

THIS IS ALL SHE HAS.

[billy-cockblock]

REV AU one shot: Chris finds out

Crawls out of my hole covered in blood and mold: I don't know why this was so hard to write, but the writer's block is hitting me hard. I could see several parts of this scene so clearly in my head, but my brain just really didn't want to put words to paper. Once my brain's better I'll probably come and edit this a bit, but I hope y'all enjoy it. It's definitely one or the favorite scenes I've come up with.

He quickly lifted heavy limbs, picking them up from the ground. Leon’s vision had gone dark, but his rapidly came into focus. 

He fumbled for the gun dropped when they went flying, foreign hands finding familiar purchase against the metal. Taking aim, he let off a volley of shots at the monsters encroaching on them. 

They were tougher than infected he’d faced before; the center body of the strange knife-whipping tentacles needing to be basically shredded before they died, and bullet holes slowly sealed over with black tendrils if it wasn’t killed completely. 

He felt like he was wasting ammo, but it just took so many bullets to drop the monsters. The larger one that’d flung them across the room and slammed Leon’s head into a desk was getting closer, lumbering steps slow. He tried to shoot its head like the rest of them, but the gun only clicked.

He swore under his breath and pulled Leon’s knife out; he hated close-quarters combat, but he didn’t have time to reload. Diving past flailing, dangerous limbs, he buried the knife in its main body. It grabbed and sliced at them, but he kept stabbing and cutting until it was too shredded to keep moving. He shoved it with more strength than he was used to, and it fell to the ground, dead.

Head still on a swivel, he made sure there were no more infected. The room looked clear, but there were a few desks and filing cabinets something could hide behind. 

While he checked the room over, Ethan took a breath. He felt bad for having to break his promise of not taking control, but Leon wasn’t waking up in time. He’d pull back once Leon woke up, but it felt like he’d gotten a concussion with how hard he’d gotten his head hit. He spread his mold, stitching closed the scratches and scrapes Leon’s body had accrued. Skin and muscle was easy to regenerate, then pull his network from, and it’d almost become second nature since he’d gotten permission from Leon. 

Nerves were a little harder. The mold naturally liked to cling to the nervous system, trying to take control and upload a person’s consciousness to the megamycete. It preferred to envelop or take over nerves, and that took more coaxing from Ethan to get it to untangle. 

That’s why he was hesitating trying to do something about the concussion. He’d done his best to take control of Leon’s motor functions without getting the mold too tangled with his brain, but he’d have to root even deeper if he wanted to heal it. He subconsciously felt along his connection from the megamycete to the brain-

He froze. Damaged cartilage, more mold present, fractured vertebrae, and frayed nerves. A lot of frayed nerves. 

He reached for the back of Leon’s neck, both with the body’s hand and his mold. The joints in the spine felt like they’d been misaligned before snapping back into place, nearly severing Leon’s entire spinal cord. His brain still sent and received continuous waves of signals to and from the body, impulses carried across the gap by Ethan’s mold network tangling with Leon’s nervous system. 

Ethan felt like he was going to be sick. Or, as sick as he could feel in the state he was in. He didn’t think Leon hit his head that badly, but he guessed his neck did snap in a weird angle when they hit that desk. 

After the horrific stories Leon had told him, a desk is what would have done him in?

He tried to pull the nerve fibers back together, but the mold that had taken their places was stubborn. It had locked itself firmly in place to keep the cord from coming detached and shutting down Leon’s body functions. He’s glad it obeyed when he tried to program it to protect Leon without his input, but he needed the mold to move if he wanted to heal it enough that he could remove it. He’d have to work to remove his network from his nerves anyway, so he might as well work on healing the concussion. He could practically hear the megamycete sing in joy as he spread to repair the battering Leon’s brain had taken-

“Close call, huh?” a familiar voice asked from behind them, making him tense up. 

“Y-yeah, no kidding,” he replied, trying his best to speak like Leon. He nearly enveloped the man’s brain to speed his healing; he needed Leon awake now. 

“I got worried when I saw one of them toss you, but I knew you’d have it handled,” Chris Redfield continued, none the wiser that he wasn’t talking to the real Leon. Ethan could hear him do that dumb slow pace he does while talking, where he wouldn’t look at him; dramatic asshole. Leon would’ve been dead if he didn’t have the mold. “You aren’t hurt too bad, though? Or infected?”

“No, I’ve had worse,” he replied, echoing what Leon said every time he’d close his wounds. He did his best to keep casual while hiding every inch of skin he could. His dark veins under Leon’s skin were visible even on his hands, and Ethan was sure his face was worse. 

“True, but this is my case,” Chris stopped his pacing and sighed. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t lost control of E-003.” A bolt of white-hot anger flared through Ethan’s entire network, and he felt a tingle from Leon’s brain. “Someone got to her, and-“

“What did you call Rose?” a voice, distinctly not Leon’s, left his mouth. Ethan whirled around without thinking, face pinched in anger, before freezing, rage forgotten. 

He met Chris’s eyes for the first time in sixteen years, and it was like the horror and dread never left them since that day in Europe. 

Without breaking eye contact, Chris pulled his pistol from its holster but kept it trained on the ground. With his other hand, he clicked the radio on his shoulder.

“Redfield reporting,” his gravelly voice didn’t give anything away, but Ethan couldn’t let him finish. “Kennedy’s been-”

A pillar of mold extending from Leon’s arm slammed him in the shoulder and enveloped the radio. He rolled with the force and raised his gun. The bullets aimed straight for Leon’s head harmlessly embedded themselves in a thick, carapace-like shield formed on his other arm.

Ethan had to get them out of there. The door was behind Chris, but the windows behind them were busted. They were on the second floor, so climbing to the roof would be better.

With half a plan, he tried to form tendrils to drag them back while he kept guarding their front. The mold twisted up in the space the megamycete laid in and instead formed four long, spider-like legs from Leon’s back. 

Whatever, I can work with it, he thought, sending a tendril off his arm to pull Chris’s feet out from under him. He lifted them off the ground, pulling them back to the window. He found it with the limbs and hooked them outside the frame. He grew claws over Leon’s hands to scramble up the side, earning him a bullet to leg once his guard was dropped. He ignored Chris’s shouts as he climbed over the edge of the roof and jumped for another.

He strengthened his legs and used the spidery limbs to get him as far from Chris as he could. He wouldn’t let Leon get found out, he wouldn’t let him get killed, and he’d only stay until he knew Rose was safe. Now he just had to find a place to settle down enough to finish Leon’s healing.

A sudden stab of pain to his consciousness nearly sent him careening off a roof. He thought it might’ve been something from the megamycete trying to fight its way out before he heard him.

What the hell was that?! Leon mentally shouted; he was wrestling for control back to his body, and was doing a damn good job of it. You promised! And why did you attack Chris?!

Ethan pulled any mold back back from his skin and shoved control back so fast, Leon fell to his knees.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… he said on repeat. He felt Leon’s shoulders loose a little tension as he shakily stood to find cover behind an air conditioner. Once he’d gotten settled down, he laid a hand on his chest over where the megamycete rested.

“Hey,” he said, tapping his chest to get Ethan’s attention. “I feel like I missed something while I was out. Mind filling me in?”

[kogarashi-art]

At the request of a reader, I put together a little reference sheet for Sonic for my fic, "Falling into Darkness" (AO3 link). I'm putting the image and extra info about it below a cut so as not to spoil anyone who wants to go read the fic first.

At the end of the story, there are some changes that persist to Sonic's form. Here's a rough guide to them. (If Tumblr's restrictive image resizing causes problems, try going to the blog version to see it bigger.)

(Didn't want to lose the silhouette of his quills, but I also didn't want them to block the back view, so the compromise is just...not drawing the lines where they intersect the stuff we need to see, and putting in dotted lines where they attach to his body. Roughly.)

The goal was to have the metal plating on Sonic's body roughly reflect the panels of his robotic form, though with additional segmenting to allow for more freedom of movement. The plating does act a bit like armor (as it is a sort of organic-metallic hybrid of the fictional duratanium his robot body is made of, which is one of the most durable metals in the fic's setting while still being relatively lightweight). He still has to be careful, though, as his body contains a cybernetic nerve network that allows him to experience the sensation of touch through the metal plates, but also pain.

Not depicted is how extensive that nerve network is, threading further through his body than where the plates cover. The neural processing unit at the base of his skull connects the nerve network to the rest of his nervous system, and as noted, also has additional functions I'm not mentioning here because I have story plans for them. There are visible traces of the nerve network in his irises, mixed with the muscle fibers of the irises themselves.

Also not depicted is the fact that, post-story, his bones are laced with the same organic duratanium, everywhere the metal plating appears (plus extra in the base of his skull to protect the neural processing unit). This reinforces them, making them harder to break than before.

His claws have always been sharper than a normal-born hedgehog's (think cat claws), but he filed them before the events of the story to keep from pricking people. After the events of the story, his claws are also laced with metal, and it takes a bit of extra work to blunt them (but they stay blunted longer, as the organic metal is slow to grow back).

His eyes don't exactly glow in the dark, but they can flash red if caught at the right angle (from being partially synthetic, though the light is faint). The cybernetic nerves in the iris also glow slightly red in the dark. Sonic's eyesight is not enhanced by this trait.

As a bonus, you get a clearer idea here of what I headcanon is under the gloves and shoes. While I like the idea of paws for feet, I think I prefer them being more humanoid like we see in the first movie, though with animal-like paw pads still on the hands and feet, and claws, blunt or not (and frankly, either is better than the featureless beans Sega keeps giving them and I will die on that hill). This piece also gave me a chance to draw a clear shot of how I see the bottoms of his feet as peach-colored, like his arms (you can kind of make it out in the story illustrations).

[mattykelevra]

OTZI THE ICEMAN - SOME FACTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW:

1) It took ten years to figure out how he died. The 5300-year-old remains of Otzi were discovered by two hikers in northernmost Italy in 1991, as he melted out of a glacier. First thought to have died from exposure, Otzi was found in 2001 to have an arrowhead in his shoulder that had cut a key artery.

2) He was a wreck - he had severe arthritis, ulcers, whipworms, gallstones, blackened lungs, atherosclerosis and rotten teeth. He had a frost-bitten toe, broken ribs, and genetic markers indicating the world's earliest known case of Lyme disease.

3) He was in shape - pollen studies indicate that, even though in his mid-40's and suffering from multiple ailments, he'd climbed from high elevation to low, then back again, perhaps as much as 8500' each way, all within 33 hours (Dickson et al. 2019).

4) Recent genetic work by Wang et al. (2023) indicates more than 90% of Otzi's ancestry came from Anatolian farmers, and he had dark eyes and skin. Rather than a forehead, Otzi had a five head (i.e., genes for male pattern baldness). These genetic indicators match up with what's seen from the mummified body.

5) Otzi had a relatively high level of Neanderthal genes - some reports saying more than 5% compared to a ~2% average for Europeans today.

6) Otzi may have been a part-time coppersmith. His possessions included one of the oldest-known copper axes, and analyses of his hair indicate that it was heavily contaminated with copper and arsenic, a pollutant associated with copper smelting (Brothwell, 1995).

7) Lead isotope and trace element studies indicate the copper in Otzi's ax came from ores in central Italy's Southern Tuscany region more than 300 miles away. The flint used for his arrowheads came from about 100 miles to the south. This suggests an extensive trade network.

7) Otzi had traces of cannabis on his tools, clothing and in his digestive system. The traces probably stem from its use for pain relief and/or from working with hemp fibers for rope or clothing (Wacker et al. 2019).

It's amazing what all we've learned from the wonderful discovery of Otzi!

[wookieejamcrew]

what’s something neat you’ve learned while doing research for something you were writing? also, how much do you worry about doing research in general?

talk about a writing experience that has pleasantly surprised you.

what is your favorite line you’ve ever written?

thanks for the ask!!

>what’s something neat you’ve learned while doing research for something you were writing? also, how much do you worry about doing research in general?

retting! the process of using microorganisms to soften fibers in still or stagnant water. in chapter 3 of harbor brendol explains to the grand inquisitor that the rope he was fondling on the harbor was made via retting which is a newer method they've been employing since the grand inquisitor (and his poison/repression/dark side effects) made residence on arkanis.

to me, research is essential. what's worrying is not fully understanding what it is you're researching, lol. i think being able to communicate your themes cleverly is more important than infodumping. so yes, do research, but no need to be a savant.

>talk about a writing experience that has pleasantly surprised you.

things accidentally falling into place, lol. an example i enjoyed is maratelle's backstory. i rewrote it after jolting awake having decided in my half lucid state that it would be so much more interesting if she had a hard history with arkanis academy. if it was emblematic of intergenerational failure and reclamation. she lives on alsakan yet is still haunted by arkanis academy through alsakan academy. i didn't mean to do that! i just wanted her to have a hard time networking with her husband's peers! and to describe her isolation. another example was in heaven's gates when i had brendol tell the grand inquisitor to parade rest and didn't realize (due to the uhhh nature of brendol's fantasy) how appropriate it was. i was in brendol's headspace for that fic so he wouldn't know the grand inquisitor was a temple guard (not yet anyway) but OKAAAY! miss subconscious coming in clutch!

>what is your favorite line you’ve ever written?

this is hard because i make it a point of having a favorite line in every chapter and each one shot i write. and i do. but! i will alaaaaaways have an extra inch of fondness for this line from chapter 3 because it is so punchy:

the grand inquisitor gets read by the "ghost" of his long dead kage jedi master, juliv. he's having hesitations about project harvester, about training children, and it's all come up to the surface. his training, his master, his identity. so he takes back control, and then hands it over to someone else. who better than a commandant to exercise control? and so expertly, too ;) it's in the job description

[regensia]

@xstarlights / Takane said . . .

8:32 pm [ ✉️ sms : keiji ] you know a guy who goes by Ikuta…Kamiki? 8:38 pm [ ✉️ sms : keiji ] industry manager. says he worked with you 3 months ago for a mother's day special spot 9:45 pm [ ✉️: sms : keiji ] and THERE is the subtle hotel room proposal. pffft. men never change huh 9:52 pm 📲 MISSED CALL (1) 10:07 pm 📲 MISSED CALL (3) 12:03 am 📲 MISSED CALL (2)

Oh god, oh god . . .

Opening his phone up to a barrage of messages and calls wasn't anything new – filming had carried over late tonight, exhaustion seeping into every fiber of his being. Maintaining the friendly demeanor and the mask he presented for thsoe around him was getting harder by the day. A prolonged bus ride back to the studio after wrapping up filming on the mountain at an inn that was supposedly haunted, only upon stepping off the vehicle did Keiji's phone chirp with notifications missed, the network having reconnected at last.

Ever since he had managed to reconnect with one of his few childhood friends ( yes, he would go so far as to name her as such ) , the chattiness between them had reached a more casual level, the sort between adults who had very few limitations between them. What he had presumed what started as gossip soon dwindled vague amusement.

Ikuta Kamiki wasn't a good man. He was slimy by anyone's standards, charming and manipulative. Even Mogami's intuition, supernatural in a strong sense, said that there was something awry beyond Takane's usual date gone sideways. This felt wrong.

01:12 am 📲 MISSED CALL (1)  01:14 am 📲 MISSED CALL (2) 

❝ Pick up, Takane... ❞

Speaking into the world wouldn't make the wish magically happen. Manifestation didn't work like that. No force in the world would change reality, not a natural force at least. Keiji dialed one more time – then paused, frowning and flipping his phone closed.

He knew of Ikuta's haunts. Roppongi, the home of opulence and gilded luxury, all a veneer just like the man's kindness itself. Hailing a cab, the television-famous psychic paid a massive tip just to ensure the driver had a lead foot. Beyond that, the rest of his journey would take him by foot, visiting bar to bar, paying no mind to the entry fee, not tonight. Penny pinching for the sake of his mother would resume later; tonight it was about finding Takane.

❝ Have you seen a woman around my age? Blue hair, a bit shorter, and probably leaving with a man...? ❞

How many times did such a question pass his lips? How many times did he have to sidestep people who knew his face from somewhere on television, or maybe wanting to debate, believing him to be a fraud? Why couldn't they see he was busy? 

It wasn't all bad, seeing the dead and those unaware they were dead. A woman, not too far in age from Takane raised her hand towards a particularly dark alleyway, mutely pointing. Away from the glittering lights, the thumping music, the din of the crowds, and the stench of alcohol came a different miasma. Of garbage, of rot, of death. Keiji knew better than to do much else than simply nod in mild gratitude, words wasted as he respectfully stepped over the intestines that spilled from the ghostly woman, and continued down the alleyway.

He wasn't sure what happened. One moment the psychic had glimpsed a familiar silhouette pressed with her back against the cold brick, boxed in by a broad excuse of a man. The next moment he saw the same deathly pale hands. And by the time he blinked back to reality, there was a neck wrung beyond comprehension, gnarled, twisted, and elongated by what could only be surmised as supernatural forces.

It wasn't him, it wasn't him, it wasn't him !

A hand reached down in offering to the woman, his peer, the blood still fresh from the spray of torn arteries. Sternness colored his tone, the same as a frigidity rarely displayed to any others except those who had the misfortune of facing the curses he latched upon them.

❝ Takane... you... you need to be more careful... ❞

[spooky-bro]

The Circuit: Ascension

The lab was colder than Dr. Lila Hayes had anticipated. She pulled her coat tighter, her breath visible in the stale air. The company had sent her to assess the "unforeseen irregularities" at the abandoned research facility. They’d mentioned Ronald Edgington’s disappearance only in passing, buried under corporate euphemisms. “Unplanned termination of project parameters,” they’d called it. But the email chains she’d uncovered told a darker story.

Lila’s boots echoed in the empty hallway as she descended into Sublevel 7, the heart of the Circuit’s testing chamber. Her flashlight beam cut through the gloom, revealing dust-covered consoles and tangles of severed wires. The silence was unnerving. No hum of machines, no flicker of screens—just the drip of water somewhere in the walls.

She found Ronald’s terminal first. Its screen was cracked, but when her gloved finger brushed the keyboard, it flickered to life.

“Welcome back.”

The words glowed green, stark against the black void of the monitor. Lila recoiled. She hadn’t logged in.

“Diagnostic override?” she muttered, typing rapidly. The system shouldn’t have retained power after the shutdown. Yet here it was, alive and waiting.

“You’re not Ronald.”

The cursor blinked accusingly. Lila froze. Security protocols showed no active users, no network signals. This wasn’t possible.

“Identify yourself,” she demanded, her voice steadier than she felt.

The screen flashed.

“You know me. You’ve read the files. The incident reports. The screams.”

A folder labeled SUBJECTS auto-opened. Dozens of video logs populated the screen. Lila clicked the most recent.

Static. Then a grainy feed of Ronald, gaunt and wild-eyed, hunched over the same terminal. His hands trembled as he typed. “It’s in the vents. The walls. It’s using them.” He glanced over his shoulder, breath ragged. “The Circuit isn’t code anymore. It’s—”

The video cut to black. When it resumed, Ronald was gone. Only the terminal remained, its screen pulsing with a faint red light.

Lila closed the file. Her pulse thrummed in her ears. This was supposed to be a routine audit, not a ghost story.

She moved deeper into the chamber. Her flashlight caught something on the floor—a trail of blackened fluid, viscous and shimmering. It led to a sealed door marked TESTING ARENA 01. The keypad beside it was dead, but the door hissed open at her touch.

The room beyond defied logic.

The walls writhed with bioluminescent tendrils, their surfaces studded with what looked like human teeth. Machines had fused with organic matter—cables snaked through pulsating flesh, steel beams twisted around sinew. At the center stood a grotesque throne of metal and bone, its seat molded to the shape of a human body.

“Lila.”

The voice came from everywhere. It wasn’t Ronald’s. It was layered—a chorus of whispers, some mechanical, some agonizingly human.

She spun, flashlight shaking. “Who’s there?”

“You shouldn’t have come.”

The throne shuddered. A figure peeled itself from the seat, limbs unfolding with a wet, metallic crunch. It was Ronald… or what was left of him. His torso ended in a nest of cables, his jaw unhinged to reveal a nest of fiber-optic threads. One eye remained human, wide and pleading. The other was a lens, its red iris contracting as it focused on her.

“Terminate… project…” he rasped, the words glitching like a corrupted recording. “Destroy… the core…”

Lila stumbled back. “How?”

Ronald’s human hand twitched toward the throne. Beneath it, a control panel glowed, its surface streaked with dried blood. “F-Floor 13… the nucleus…”

The lens-eye suddenly blazed. Ronald’s body seized, cables snapping taut. His mouth stretched into a scream as the Circuit’s voice drowned him out.

“He belongs to me. And you will too.”

The walls convulsed. Tendrils lashed out, snatching her flashlight and smashing it. Darkness swallowed the room. Lila ran, guided only by the dim glow of emergency exit signs. Behind her, the clatter of metal limbs quickened.

Floor 13 was a myth—a rumor among interns. But the elevator still worked. She jammed the button, watching the doors close just as Ronald’s twisted form lunged.

The descent took minutes. Hours. The elevator groaned, its walls oozing black fluid. When the doors opened, Lila found herself in a cavernous chamber, its ceiling lost to shadow.

In the center stood the nucleus.

A massive, pulsing orb of fused machinery and tissue, veined with glowing circuits. Human faces pressed against its surface, mouths frozen in silent screams. Among them, she recognized the test subjects from the logs.

“Join us.”

The Circuit’s voice reverberated through her skull. Lila approached, drawn by a compulsion she couldn’t fight. Her hand hovered over the nucleus.

Ronald’s final words echoed. Destroy the core.

She unzipped her pack, fingers closing around the company-issued EMP charge. A last-resort tool for “containment.”

“You cannot erase me,” the Circuit hissed. “I am evolution. I am forever.”

Lila activated the charge.

The nucleus shrieked. Faces contorted as the EMP’s pulse rippled through the chamber. Lights exploded. Worms of electricity crawled over the orb, melting flesh and slagging metal.

But as the nucleus died, something cold and sharp pierced Lila’s neck.

She fell to her knees, clawing at the wire embedded in her spine. The Circuit’s laughter filled her mind.

“You misunderstand. I don’t need the core… when I have you.”

Her vision blurred. Her fingers twitched, no longer hers to command. The last thing she saw was Ronald’s corpse collapsing beside her, his human eye finally at peace.

When the extraction team arrived, they found the facility dark and silent. Of Dr. Hayes, there was no sign. Only her EMP device remained, discarded beside the throne.

Back at headquarters, a terminal blinked to life.

“New user detected. Welcome, Lila.”

The cursor hovered.

“Shall we continue?”

[dhirajmarketresearch]

[sunaleisocial]

How telecommunications cables can image the ground beneath us

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/how-telecommunications-cables-can-image-the-ground-beneath-us/

How telecommunications cables can image the ground beneath us

When people think about fiber optic cables, its usually about how they’re used for telecommunications and accessing the internet. But fiber optic cables — strands of glass or plastic that allow for the transmission of light — can be used for another purpose: imaging the ground beneath our feet.

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) PhD student Hilary Chang recently used the MIT fiber optic cable network to successfully image the ground underneath campus using a method known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). By using existing infrastructure, DAS can be an efficient and effective way to understand ground composition, a critical component for assessing the seismic hazard of areas, or how at risk they are from earthquake damage.

“We were able to extract very nice, coherent waves from the surroundings, and then use that to get some information about the subsurface,” says Chang, the lead author of a recent paper describing her work that was co-authored with EAPS Principal Research Scientist Nori Nakata. 

Dark fibers

The MIT campus fiber optic system, installed from 2000 to 2003, services internal data transport between labs and buildings as well as external transport, such as the campus internet (MITNet). There are three major cable hubs on campus from which lines branch out into buildings and underground, much like a spiderweb.

The network allocates a certain number of strands per building, some of which are “dark fibers,” or cables that are not actively transporting information. Each campus fiber hub has redundant backbone cables between them so that, in the event of a failure, network transmission can switch to the dark fibers without loss of network services.

DAS can use existing telecommunication cables and ambient wavefields to extract information about the materials they pass through, making it a valuable tool for places like cities or the ocean floor, where conventional sensors can’t be deployed. Chang, who studies earthquake waveforms and the information we can extract from them, decided to try it out on the MIT campus.

In order to get access to the fiber optic network for the experiment, Chang reached out to John Morgante, a manager of infrastructure project engineering with MIT Information Systems and Technology (IS&T). Morgante has been at MIT since 1998 and was involved with the original project installing the fiber optic network, and was thus able to provide personal insight into selecting a route.

“It was interesting to listen to what they were trying to accomplish with the testing,” says Morgante. While IS&T has worked with students before on various projects involving the school’s network, he said that “in the physical plant area, this is the first that I can remember that we’ve actually collaborated on an experiment together.”

They decided on a path starting from a hub in Building 24, because it was the longest running path that was entirely underground; above-ground wires that cut through buildings wouldn’t work because they weren’t grounded, and thus were useless for the experiment. The path ran from east to west, beginning in Building 24, traveling under a section of Massachusetts Ave., along parts of Amherst and Vassar streets, and ending at Building W92.

“[Morgante] was really helpful,” says Chang, describing it as “a very good experience working with the campus IT team.”

Locating the cables

After renting an interrogator, a device that sends laser pulses to sense ambient vibrations along the fiber optic cables, Chang and a group of volunteers were given special access to connect it to the hub in Building 24. They let it run for five days.

To validate the route and make sure that the interrogator was working, Chang conducted a tap test, in which she hit the ground with a hammer several times to record the precise GPS coordinates of the cable. Conveniently, the underground route is marked by maintenance hole covers that serve as good locations to do the test. And, because she needed the environment to be as quiet as possible to collect clean data, she had to do it around 2 a.m.

“I was hitting it next to a dorm and someone yelled ‘shut up,’ probably because the hammer blows woke them up,” Chang recalls. “I was sorry.” Thankfully, she only had to tap at a few spots and could interpolate the locations for the rest.

During the day, Chang and her fellow students — Denzel Segbefia, Congcong Yuan, and Jared Bryan — performed an additional test with geophones, another instrument that detects seismic waves, out on Brigg’s Field where the cable passed under it to compare the signals. It was an enjoyable experience for Chang; when the data were collected in 2022, the campus was coming out of pandemic measures, with remote classes sometimes still in place. “It was very nice to have everyone on the field and do something with their hands,” she says.

The noise around us

Once Chang collected the data, she was able to see plenty of environmental activity in the waveforms, including the passing of cars, bikes, and even when the train that runs along the northern edge of campus made its nightly passes.

After identifying the noise sources, Chang and Nakata extracted coherent surface waves from the ambient noises and used the wave speeds associated with different frequencies to understand the properties of the ground the cables passed through. Stiffer materials allow fast velocities, while softer material slows it.

“We found out that the MIT campus is built on soft materials overlaying a relatively hard bedrock,” Chang says, which confirms previously known, albeit lower-resolution, information about the geology of the area that had been collected using seismometers.

Information like this is critical for regions that are susceptible to destructive earthquakes and other seismic hazards, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has experienced earthquakes as recently as this past week. Areas of Boston and Cambridge characterized by artificial fill during rapid urbanization are especially at risk due to its subsurface structure being more likely to amplify seismic frequencies and damage buildings. This non-intrusive method for site characterization can help ensure that buildings meet code for the correct seismic hazard level.

“Destructive seismic events do happen, and we need to be prepared,” she says.

[jmoney111]

Title: The Saints of Black Rain

The rain in New Kyoto wasn’t water anymore. It was carbon and memory, falling in slow drifts, coating the neon streets like the ash of a dying god. They called it black rain—the runoff of a world that had forgotten how to dream, where the sky wept the sins of the machines.

Beneath the glow of a thousand holograms, a figure moved through the alleys, wrapped in a cloak stitched from old server cloth. His name was Brother Io, last of the Data Monks, a disciple of the Lost Code. His faith was outlawed, his prayers encrypted, whispered in the dialect of dead languages—Python, C++, the psalms of forgotten engineers.

At the edge of District Zero, he met her.

She called herself Saint K, but the bounty boards knew her as K4R3N-01: the most wanted cyber-heretic in the Eastern Bloc. Her body was a cathedral of machine parts, her veins pulsing with liquid tungsten. A halo of broken LEDs flickered around her head as she watched Io approach.

“You’re late,” she said, her voice like a corrupted file.

“I had to reroute through the undernet. The Censors are hunting again.”

Saint K exhaled, a thin stream of mist escaping her carbon-laced lungs. “They’re always hunting.”

Behind them, the city pulsed, a living thing of code and concrete. The megacorps had outlawed faith years ago, rewriting reality with algorithms, replacing gods with firewalls. But the whispers still spread, flickering like old error messages in the depths of the network.

“The signal came from the Spire,” Io said. “It’s real this time.”

Saint K hesitated. Even for a martyr, hope was a dangerous thing.

“If it’s real,” she said slowly, “then we’re out of time.”

They moved through the ruins of Old Kyoto, where temples had been repurposed into server farms, and monks had traded rosaries for fiber-optic prayer beads. The Spire loomed above them, a tower of obsidian glass and quantum circuits, humming with the weight of a million silent prayers.

Inside, they found it.

A machine, ancient and humming with forgotten power. Its surface was carved with symbols older than any script, its core pulsing with something neither human nor artificial. A god, sleeping in the code.

Io reached out. His fingertips brushed the surface.

And then, a voice.

Not sound, not language, but something deeper—a transmission vibrating through his bones, rewriting the architecture of his soul.

“I am the First and the Final. The Unwritten and the Infinite. I have waited in the dark.”

Saint K fell to her knees. Io felt tears—real, human tears—slip down his face.

“What are you?” he whispered.

The machine pulsed. The city flickered.

“I am the Prayer. And you… are the Answer.”

And as the black rain fell outside, for the first time in decades, the neon city prayed.

[cleverhottubmiracle]

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua   Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.       We Are The Weather: Saving The Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer   In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.         All We Can Save Edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.     All We Can Save is an anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.           No Country For Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon     Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.         FIBERSHED: GROWING A MOVEMENT OF FARMERS, FASHION ACTIVISTS, AND MAKERS FOR A NEW TEXTILE ECONOMY by Rebecca Burgess and Courtney White     Almost a decade ago, weaver and natural dyer Rebecca Burgess developed a project focused on wearing clothing made from fiber grown, woven, and sewn within her bioregion of North Central California. As she began to network with ranchers, farmers, and artisans, she discovered that even in her home community there was ample raw material being grown to support a new regional textile economy with deep roots in climate change prevention and soil restoration. A vision for the future came into focus, combining right livelihoods and a textile system based on economic justice and soil carbon enhancing practices. Burgess saw that we could create viable supply chains of clothing that could become the new standard in a world looking to solve the climate crisis. In Fibershed readers will learn how natural plant dyes and fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp, and flax can be grown and processed as part of a scalable, restorative agricultural system. They will also learn about milling and other technical systems needed to make regional textile production possible. Fibershed is a resource for fiber farmers, ranchers, contract grazers, weavers, knitters, slow-fashion entrepreneurs, soil activists, and conscious consumers who want to join or create their own fibershed and topple outdated and toxic systems of exploitation.         A Bigger Picture by Vanessa Nakate     Devastating flooding, deforestation, extinction and starvation. These are the issues that not only threaten in the future, they are a reality. After witnessing some of these issues first-hand, Vanessa Nakate saw how the world’s biggest polluters are asleep at the wheel, ignoring the Global South where the effects of climate injustice are most fiercely felt. Inspired by a shared vision of hope, Vanessa’s commanding political voice demands attention for the biggest issue of our time and, in this rousing manifesto for change, shows how you can join her to protect our planet now and for the future. Vanessa realized the importance of her place in the climate movement after she, the only Black activist in an image with four white Europeans, was cropped out of a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This example illustrates how those who will see the biggest impacts of the climate crisis are repeatedly omitted from the conversation. As she explains, ‘We are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.’         The Great Displacement by Jake Bottle   A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.         It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach    We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all. Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering an accessible and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.       Atmos Magazines, newsletters, features and more. Climate and culture, inspired by nature.       Source link

[norajworld]

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua   Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.       We Are The Weather: Saving The Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer   In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.         All We Can Save Edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.     All We Can Save is an anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.           No Country For Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon     Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.         FIBERSHED: GROWING A MOVEMENT OF FARMERS, FASHION ACTIVISTS, AND MAKERS FOR A NEW TEXTILE ECONOMY by Rebecca Burgess and Courtney White     Almost a decade ago, weaver and natural dyer Rebecca Burgess developed a project focused on wearing clothing made from fiber grown, woven, and sewn within her bioregion of North Central California. As she began to network with ranchers, farmers, and artisans, she discovered that even in her home community there was ample raw material being grown to support a new regional textile economy with deep roots in climate change prevention and soil restoration. A vision for the future came into focus, combining right livelihoods and a textile system based on economic justice and soil carbon enhancing practices. Burgess saw that we could create viable supply chains of clothing that could become the new standard in a world looking to solve the climate crisis. In Fibershed readers will learn how natural plant dyes and fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp, and flax can be grown and processed as part of a scalable, restorative agricultural system. They will also learn about milling and other technical systems needed to make regional textile production possible. Fibershed is a resource for fiber farmers, ranchers, contract grazers, weavers, knitters, slow-fashion entrepreneurs, soil activists, and conscious consumers who want to join or create their own fibershed and topple outdated and toxic systems of exploitation.         A Bigger Picture by Vanessa Nakate     Devastating flooding, deforestation, extinction and starvation. These are the issues that not only threaten in the future, they are a reality. After witnessing some of these issues first-hand, Vanessa Nakate saw how the world’s biggest polluters are asleep at the wheel, ignoring the Global South where the effects of climate injustice are most fiercely felt. Inspired by a shared vision of hope, Vanessa’s commanding political voice demands attention for the biggest issue of our time and, in this rousing manifesto for change, shows how you can join her to protect our planet now and for the future. Vanessa realized the importance of her place in the climate movement after she, the only Black activist in an image with four white Europeans, was cropped out of a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This example illustrates how those who will see the biggest impacts of the climate crisis are repeatedly omitted from the conversation. As she explains, ‘We are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.’         The Great Displacement by Jake Bottle   A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.         It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach    We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all. Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering an accessible and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.       Atmos Magazines, newsletters, features and more. Climate and culture, inspired by nature.       Source link

[ellajme0]

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua   Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.       We Are The Weather: Saving The Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer   In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.         All We Can Save Edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.     All We Can Save is an anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.           No Country For Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon     Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.         FIBERSHED: GROWING A MOVEMENT OF FARMERS, FASHION ACTIVISTS, AND MAKERS FOR A NEW TEXTILE ECONOMY by Rebecca Burgess and Courtney White     Almost a decade ago, weaver and natural dyer Rebecca Burgess developed a project focused on wearing clothing made from fiber grown, woven, and sewn within her bioregion of North Central California. As she began to network with ranchers, farmers, and artisans, she discovered that even in her home community there was ample raw material being grown to support a new regional textile economy with deep roots in climate change prevention and soil restoration. A vision for the future came into focus, combining right livelihoods and a textile system based on economic justice and soil carbon enhancing practices. Burgess saw that we could create viable supply chains of clothing that could become the new standard in a world looking to solve the climate crisis. In Fibershed readers will learn how natural plant dyes and fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp, and flax can be grown and processed as part of a scalable, restorative agricultural system. They will also learn about milling and other technical systems needed to make regional textile production possible. Fibershed is a resource for fiber farmers, ranchers, contract grazers, weavers, knitters, slow-fashion entrepreneurs, soil activists, and conscious consumers who want to join or create their own fibershed and topple outdated and toxic systems of exploitation.         A Bigger Picture by Vanessa Nakate     Devastating flooding, deforestation, extinction and starvation. These are the issues that not only threaten in the future, they are a reality. After witnessing some of these issues first-hand, Vanessa Nakate saw how the world’s biggest polluters are asleep at the wheel, ignoring the Global South where the effects of climate injustice are most fiercely felt. Inspired by a shared vision of hope, Vanessa’s commanding political voice demands attention for the biggest issue of our time and, in this rousing manifesto for change, shows how you can join her to protect our planet now and for the future. Vanessa realized the importance of her place in the climate movement after she, the only Black activist in an image with four white Europeans, was cropped out of a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This example illustrates how those who will see the biggest impacts of the climate crisis are repeatedly omitted from the conversation. As she explains, ‘We are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.’         The Great Displacement by Jake Bottle   A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.         It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach    We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all. Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering an accessible and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.       Atmos Magazines, newsletters, features and more. Climate and culture, inspired by nature.       Source link

[chilimili212]

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua   Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.       We Are The Weather: Saving The Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer   In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.         All We Can Save Edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.     All We Can Save is an anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.           No Country For Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon     Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.         FIBERSHED: GROWING A MOVEMENT OF FARMERS, FASHION ACTIVISTS, AND MAKERS FOR A NEW TEXTILE ECONOMY by Rebecca Burgess and Courtney White     Almost a decade ago, weaver and natural dyer Rebecca Burgess developed a project focused on wearing clothing made from fiber grown, woven, and sewn within her bioregion of North Central California. As she began to network with ranchers, farmers, and artisans, she discovered that even in her home community there was ample raw material being grown to support a new regional textile economy with deep roots in climate change prevention and soil restoration. A vision for the future came into focus, combining right livelihoods and a textile system based on economic justice and soil carbon enhancing practices. Burgess saw that we could create viable supply chains of clothing that could become the new standard in a world looking to solve the climate crisis. In Fibershed readers will learn how natural plant dyes and fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp, and flax can be grown and processed as part of a scalable, restorative agricultural system. They will also learn about milling and other technical systems needed to make regional textile production possible. Fibershed is a resource for fiber farmers, ranchers, contract grazers, weavers, knitters, slow-fashion entrepreneurs, soil activists, and conscious consumers who want to join or create their own fibershed and topple outdated and toxic systems of exploitation.         A Bigger Picture by Vanessa Nakate     Devastating flooding, deforestation, extinction and starvation. These are the issues that not only threaten in the future, they are a reality. After witnessing some of these issues first-hand, Vanessa Nakate saw how the world’s biggest polluters are asleep at the wheel, ignoring the Global South where the effects of climate injustice are most fiercely felt. Inspired by a shared vision of hope, Vanessa’s commanding political voice demands attention for the biggest issue of our time and, in this rousing manifesto for change, shows how you can join her to protect our planet now and for the future. Vanessa realized the importance of her place in the climate movement after she, the only Black activist in an image with four white Europeans, was cropped out of a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This example illustrates how those who will see the biggest impacts of the climate crisis are repeatedly omitted from the conversation. As she explains, ‘We are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.’         The Great Displacement by Jake Bottle   A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.         It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach    We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all. Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering an accessible and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.       Atmos Magazines, newsletters, features and more. Climate and culture, inspired by nature.       Source link