#climate. silicon

[makingcontact]

The Promise and Peril of Geoengineering

Image of Arctic Ice by Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;. As we head into a ever warming world, some experts and politicians are embracing a possible solution to climate change called geoengineering. Theoretically geoengineering could slow down climate change, stop it, and maybe even remove carbon from the air. It sounds like…

[probablyasocialecologist]

The cryptocurrency hype of the past few years already started to introduce people to these problems. Despite producing little to no tangible benefits — unless you count letting rich people make money off speculation and scams — Bitcoin consumed more energy and computer parts than medium-sized countries and crypto miners were so voracious in their energy needs that they turned shuttered coal plants back on to process crypto transactions. Even after the crypto crash, Bitcoin still used more energy in 2023 than the previous year, but some miners found a new opportunity: powering the generative AI boom. The AI tools being pushed by OpenAI, Google, and their peers are far more energy intensive than the products they aim to displace. In the days after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, Sam Altman called its computing costs “eye-watering” and several months later Alphabet chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that getting a response from Google’s chatbot would “likely cost 10 times more” than using its traditional search tools. Instead of reassessing their plans, major tech companies are doubling down and planning a massive expansion of the computing infrastructure available to them.

[...]

As the cloud took over, more computation fell into the hands of a few dominant tech companies and they made the move to what are called “hyperscale” data centers. Those facilities are usually over 10,000 square feet and hold more than 5,000 servers, but those being built today are often many times larger than that. For example, Amazon says its data centers can have up to 50,000 servers each, while Microsoft has a campus of 20 data centers in Quincy, Washington with almost half a million servers between them. By the end of 2020, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlled half of the 597 hyperscale data centres in the world, but what’s even more concerning is how rapidly that number is increasing. By mid-2023, the number of hyperscale data centres stood at 926 and Synergy Research estimates another 427 will be built in the coming years to keep up with the expansion of resource-intensive AI tools and other demands for increased computation. All those data centers come with an increasingly significant resource footprint. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global energy demand of data centers, AI, and crypto could more than double by 2026, increasing from 460 TWh in 2022 to up to 1,050 TWh — similar to the energy consumption of Japan. Meanwhile, in the United States, data center energy use could triple from 130 TWh in 2022 — about 2.5% of the country’s total — to 390 TWh by the end of the decade, accounting for a 7.5% share of total energy, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s nothing compared to Ireland, where the IEA estimates data centers, AI, and crypto could consume a third of all power in 2026, up from 17% in 2022. Water use is going up too: Google reported it used 5.2 billion gallons of water in its data centers in 2022, a jump of 20% from the previous year, while Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons in its data centers, an increase of 34% on 2021. University of California, Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren told Fortune, “It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI.” But these are not just large abstract numbers; they have real material consequences that a lot of communities are getting fed up with just as the companies seek to massively expand their data center footprints.

9 February 2024

[thedisablednaturalist]

I don't think rich people should get to play with their toys if their toys are using up the carbon emissions of entire cities (and countries!) and wreaking havoc on the earth that we all share.

[thevagueambition]

the Time three parter (eps 156-158) of Welcome To Night Vale slaps so hard man

"We must put a stop to this. We were all wrong, trying to fight death this way. To put our trust in the future as though it would be anything but some other person’s present. Carlos was right. I was wrong."

"To put our trust in the future as though it would be anything but some other person’s present."

[inkskinned]

one of the things that's the most fucking frustrating for me about arguing with climate change deniers is the sheer fucking scope of how much it matters. sweating in my father's car, thinking about how it's the "hottest summer so far," every summer. and there's this deep, roiling rage that comes over me, every time.

the stakes are wrong, is the thing. that's part of what makes it not an actual debate: the other side isn't coming to the table with anything to fucking lose.

like okay. i am obviously pro gun control. but there is a basic human part of me that can understand and empathize with someone who says, "i'm worried that would lead to the law-abiding citizens being punished while criminals now essentially have a superpower." i don't agree, but i can tell the stakes for them are also very high.

but let's say the science is wrong and i'm wrong and the visible reality is wrong and every climate disaster refugee is wrong. let's say you're right, humans aren't causing it or it's not happening or whatever else. let's just say that, for fun.

so we spend hundreds of millions of dollars making the earth cleaner, and then it turns out we didn't need to do that. oops! we cleaned the earth. our children grow up with skies full of more butterflies and bees. lawns are taken over with rich local biodiversity. we don't cry over our electric bills anymore. and, if you're staunchly capitalist and i need to speak ROI with you - we've created so many jobs in developing sectors and we have exciting new investment opportunities.

i am reminded of kodak, and how they did not make "the switch" to digital photography; how within 20 years kodak was no longer a household brand. do we, as a nation, feel comfortable watching as the world makes "the switch" while we ride the laurels of oil? this boggles me. i have heard so much propaganda about how america cannot "fall behind" other countries, but in this crucial sector - the one that could actually influence our own monopolies - suddenly we turn the other cheek. but maybe you're right! maybe it will collapse like just another silicone valley dream. but isn't that the crux of capitalism? that some economies will peter out eventually?

but let's say you're right, and i'm wrong, and we stopped fracking for no good reason. that they re-seed quarries. that we tear down unused corporate-owned buildings or at least repurpose them for communities. that we make an effort, and that effort doesn't really help. what happens then? what are the stakes. what have we lost, and what have we gained?

sometimes we take our cars through a car wash and then later, it rains. "oh," we laugh to ourselves. we gripe about it over coffee with our coworkers. what a shame! but we are also aware: the car is cleaner. is that what you are worried about? that you'll make the effort but things will resolve naturally? that it will just be "a waste"?

and what i'm right. what if we're already seeing people lose their houses and their lives. what if it is happening everywhere, not just in coastal towns or equatorial countries you don't care about. what if i'm right and you're wrong but you're yelling and rich and powerful. so we ignore all of the bellwethers and all of the indicators and all of the sirens. what if we say - well, if it happens, it's fate.

nevermind. you wouldn't even wear a mask, anyway. i know what happens when you see disaster. you think the disaster will flinch if you just shout louder. that you can toss enough lives into the storm for the storm to recognize your sacrifice and balk. you argue because it feels good to stand up against "the liberals" even when the situation should not be political. you are busy crying for jesus with a bullhorn while i am trying to usher people into a shelter. you've already locked the doors, even on the church.

the stakes are skewed. you think this is some intellectual "debate" to win, some funny banter. you fuel up your huge unmuddied truck and say suck it to every citizen of that shitbird state california. serves them right for voting blue!

and the rest of us are terrified of the entire fucking environment collapsing.

[reasonsforhope]

"It is 70 years since AT&T’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper...

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches."

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

[disteal]

The burning man debacle is rly captivating to me in the ‘convention dumpster fire poetic irony’ sense. Like ur telling me these silicon valley crystal guys are stuck in a flooding lake bed after calling the cops on climate change protestors holding up traffic into the festival? By telling the cops these unarmed protestors had a gun? Fantastic. And they’re dying from exposure- oh they’re scaring the shit out of each other with a fake ebola scare??? Of course. I’m sure they’re handling that normally. Just saw a video from a guy at the festival saying folks need to stop being ‘negative’ about the people who didn’t survive the night. And they can’t leave the flooding lake bed because nobody can move their cars- It appears Chris Rock and Diplo have escaped the lake bed by walking out, as it was only a few miles until they hit regular traffic. We do not know the state of the burning man sex plane, the plane at burning man you book to have sex in, which exists. Never before seen cataclysmic impact to the ‘white women with $5k veneers and box braids’ community.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[makingcontact]

The Ethical Dilemma of Geoengineering & Global Warming (Encore)

Image of Arctic Ice by Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons Geoengineering is defined as some emerging technologies that could manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change. Seems like the perfect solution for a consumerist society that lives on instant gratification and can’t stop polluting even at the risk of our futures, right?  Well, let’s slow down.…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Blindness to material realities, unfortunately, is not unique to Silicon Valley tycoons and billionaire cowboys. Today, all of us depend heavily on countless metaphorical “black boxes,” from phones to air-conditioning to municipal water systems, whose production and workings are mostly a mystery to us. Furthermore, writes Vaclav Smil in his 2022 book How the World Really Works, the material and energetic underpinnings of civilization are of much less interest to most people these days than “the world of information, data, and images.” Accordingly, he writes, the greatest economic rewards go to work that’s “completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.” Therefore, it’s only natural that Silicon Valley types “believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary,” and that “‘dematerialization,’ powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment.” Let them go ahead and think that, because, as my late mother would have said, “they’ve got another think comin’.”

[...]

In short, there’s no refuge from material facts. The only way that we humans can live within nature’s resource restraints and ecological boundaries is to redirect our economies toward meeting all people’s basic needs, and away from producing material overabundance. We have no choice but to converge on an equitable, modest level of energy and resource use that’s enough to provide a decent life for all.

[bookshelfdreams]

@hylianengineer sorry I had to make a new post, the answer got too long for replies :D

Ah, the dreaded "but wool is itchy!". Not something I can relate to (I really like it when yarn/fabric has a bit of grip and structure to it, I'm not one for the ultra-soft, fluffy wools) but let's see if I can say smth useful.

First, you're definitely not alone in finding wool scratchy! A lot of people have sensory issues regarding it. Whether it can be helped at all will depend on how sensitive you are; some people can't even handle unspun 17 mic chubut merino and at that point, wool just isn't for them. Which is fine, not everything is for everyone.

Rule of thumb: the higher quality your fibre, the softer the finished garment will be. If it's just listed as "wool", it might contain recycled fibre, wool from sheep breeds that don't have a super fine fleece, or even wool from dead animals, all of which lowers the quality.

Virgin wool (I think) refers to wool that is spun for the first time, so a yarn that has no recycled fibres in it. Lambswool is a sheep's first wool. It is finer and smoother than adult wool.

Another big impact is breed of sheep and origin of the fibre. Merinos are the go-to for high quality items, but are also kept all over the world, so look to where your wool comes from. Aotearoa and South America are well known for their high quality merino wools. Sheep that live in colder, harsher climates produce a sturdy, tougher fleece, especially if they're not merino breeds. Depending on where you are, regional wool might not be what you're looking for. Britain is famous for their wool, but Shetland wool won't be super soft. Try some BFL (Bluefaced Leicester) if you can get it; it is smoother than merino and not as springy.

Wool can be superwash treated by coating the individual fibres, so the scales on the hairs are covered. This means it won't felt and can be machine washed; it also makes it less scratchy. This process is very energy- and water-intensive. The fibres are coated in silicone, I think, which makes the finished yarn feel kinda plastic-y, and it also lowers the insulating and water-repelling qualities of the wool. (All in all, you might as well buy acrylic)

You can also try looking for sheep's wool mixed with other animal fibres. Cashmere, alpaca, and mohair are probably the most common and all have their own qualities (cashmere is shiny and drapey; alpaca is smooth and kind of dense; mohair is light, extremely fluffy and super warm). All are softer than sheep's wool and nicer to the skin.

Anyway, all that to say: Look for virgin wool, look at the breed you're getting if it's specified, look for mixes with softer fibres, look at the origin of the wool. Unfortunately, when you're sensitive, navigating the world of natural fibres can be a bit of a minefield, I know. If wool isn't for you, that's not a moral failing!

[gracien-system]

Hi so we follow a youtuber called NightHawkInLight who is a very talented… practical scientist? I guess? Anyway, he makes a shitload of extremely useful projects using grocery store and hardware store materials and processes that can be done in your kitchen.

His latest video is on a method to make a phase-change material which can be recharged by placing it on your basement floor for a few hours and stays at roughly 18 c (~64 f) for multiple hours on a hot day.

The material can be made in a standard pot out of 3 ingredients (sodium sulfate, table salt, and water) for extremely cheap, and can be made into ice packs by just… putting the material into a ziplock or silicone bag.

Here's the video, check it out, it might genuinely be extremely helpful for folks in hotter climates, especially if you don't have AC.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1)

[submalevolentgrace]

(yesterday i received an ask, which prompted me to write the following response. the asker has apologised for sending it and i took it down to prevent anyone from laying into them, but present is anonymously below because i like my response and want you to see it)

"Based on the fun new revelation that the world is ending before I graduate, is it even worth it to try prepping or should we all just get ready to jump into traffic come 2025?"

okay, there is, A LOT to unpack here. i'm gonna do my best to respond to this helpfully, the way i am facing it: confronting it, emotionally processing it, pragmatically preparing, and holding on to a sort of grim, dark hope.

we're talking about climate collapse and the latest IPCC report here right? first off, it's not a new revelation. maybe it is for you personally, but for humanity as a whole, we've known about the inevitable outcomes of emissions damaging the climate since like the 70's. i found out about it myself in primary school in the mid 90's, when it was still called the greenhouse effect, and i then spent 20 years on and off in various roles of support for climate activism, when i had the spoons. if you're young and just finding out about it now i know it's probably overwhelming, and especially sucks the later you've been born into this mess… but i'm pointing out that it's not new, to underline the point that it's also not sudden. yeah it's getting worse, but it's been getting worse for generations, and will keep getting worse for generations.

it's not a meteor, or a volcano. it's a creeping steady decline of habitability with sputters and bursts of natural disaster; there is no timeline or event or threshold at which the world ends here.

that 2025 "deadline" from this year's IPCC synthesis report, for instance; it's not a date that the world ends. honestly, in some ways, it's kinda meaningless. what it is, as i understand it, is that all the data says that if we want to limit global average temperature rises to 1.5C by end of century - which we do, because even 2C would be catastrophic - we need emissions to peak by 2025 and then rapidly decline. it's a vastly oversimplified agregate of incredibly complex data reduced down to the point of absurdity in a desperate attempt by scientists to get corporations to allow governments to take action to limit corporations. it's a deadline for government action to limit effects by 2100. the year will come, and pass, and the world will go on. probably with emissions still going up, probably with targets shifted again and 2C accepted as the next half hearted goal that will also be missed, but life will go on.

no end of the world. life will go on. into the 2030's, into the 2040's, into the 2100's, life will go on. it'll be hotter and colder, wetter and drier, more storms and bushfires, less food and fertile land, but life will go on. populations will starve, land will become uninhabitable, life will go on. when you hear about "the end of the world" from climate collapse, it's not a hard apocalypse that kills us all off or whatever. it's the slow creep of nature getting more harsh, and the way we do things much harder.

if you look at the serious reports from scientists and militaries, the language you see isn't "end of the world", it's "end of modern societies". that's what's really at risk: the fragile infrastructure that holds up the ruling classes of rich nations and has us all scurrying around to make it work. mass scale power grids, international supply chains and just in time logistics, silicon wafer production, year-round plastic wrapped preserved passionfruit chunks grown in thailand, packed in argentina, sold in france, profits to america, money stored on a computer in the cayman islands. i can't sugarcoat it and say that's all that's at stake; people are definitely going to starve and drown and die of exposure; but that already happens every day in most of the world, right now. there are a million rohingya at the border of bangladesh, locals fleeing khartoum as the west airlifts out is nationals, people whose civilisations were crushed under the boots of empires and land destroyed to create the farmland and factories that are killing the planet. life for them goes on.

i mean, i get it. seeing the impending collapse of your society, everything you've known for your whole life being willfully destroyed, it's fucking devastating. we want to keep sitting here on comfortable couches with our gold and cobalt plated supercomputers sharing cat gifs on the hellsite. we don't want to have our civilisation taken away from us and be forced into brutal struggle to survive. it's going to fucking suck, it will be awful, and it will be (and already is) most destructive to the people who are already the worst off, which just sucks even more… and maybe your life is already bad enough that you don't think you can handle it getting worse. i mean, i've been suicidal since i was 14 and i've been through trauma and medical torture you wouldn't believe since then. i get it. you're scared, terrified even. existentially threatened. you don't know what you can handle and maybe you donn't wanna find out.

but here's the thing: the ONLY sensible thing you can do, now and going forwards, is prepare for it.

you wanna kill yourself when it gets hard? let's say sure, i agree with that. what's the threshold then, what's the limit? when will you kill yourself? the power grid going down? sewerage backing up? supply chains failing and being unable to buy food? from the comfort of the developed world, those all feel like exit points i can imagine many people taking as their out… but how long does it have to last before you know it's carbon-monoxide-party time? a month of no power, no flush, no food? a week, a few months, or a year? because it won't start that way.

it's not a meteor or volcano, it's a slow slide. some powerlines sagged so there's rolling blackouts every now and then, a few hours or a day at a time. pipes backed up a bit so pressure is reduced for a week until repairs are done. fires and plague have closed roads so shelves are bare and stores are limiting purchases on essentials this month. there will be bumps along the road before there will be any sort of definitive cliff where you can say "this is it, now is the time to kill myself". these bumps are already happening.

i really hope you can agree, it'd be absurd to be such a fatalistic doomer that you kill yourself instantly at the first blackout, dry tap, or closed grocery store; when you can't know if it'll be back up in a few hours or tomorrow or next week. these small disruptions are already happening right now, directly as a result of climate collapse, but we're still here, still living. if we're going to talk about suicide as a pragmatic option, you need a threshold, and wherever you set it, you'll have to get through what comes before. "i'll kill myself after a month with no grid" still means you gotta be ready for a week without it. you gotta prepare, even if you plan to not survive.

and i know it's overwhelming, i know. to look around and think about what is essential to keep you going, what you can sacrifice, how you can make it through. but you're not going to be doing it alone, everyone around you is going to be doing it with you. we're all going to be struggling through it, and based on how communities have responded in the last few years to a string of once-in-a-lifetime disasters here in my home of climate-fucked australia, i am certain that when the climate collapses around a group of people, they will form a community and help each other, no matter how selfish and mean of a country bogan (translation: redneck) they are. people will help each other; people already are helping each other.

because yeah, climate collapse will probably destroy modern civilisation… but so what? it's a neoliberal capitalist hellscape quickly plunging us into technologically enforced eternal authoritarianism… and like, not to be an accelerationist or anything, but here's that dark hope i mentioned: i'm kinda relieved by the thought that the infrastructure that enables it won't last this century. that climate collapse will force us out of these horrors, and back into real, interdependent community.

so do what you can to prepare, how you can, to make the little disruptions more bearable and comfortable. there's plenty of resources still available for off grid life, camping, home agriculture, and general self sufficiency out there on the still-existant internet, and more people are getting into it all the time - not just what you imagine when you hear "prepper". any skill you can develop, anything you can do to prepare, even if it's as simple as keeping extra shelf stable food and a jug of clean water around, anything you can do will help you materially and more importantly, mentally.

having some jerry cans of water and a small solar setup has been amazing for my mental health and anxiety! and as much as i'm putting material and energy into preperations, i'm also putting them into comfort, maybe even hedonism. collecting some cool lego, got some fancy synths i didn't need, making fucked up noise music with them. enjoying the sound of the neighbours' chickens, looking forward to the day "the world ends" and i can free-range my own on the council's nature strip and share the eggs with the pottery lady down the street. once you're prepared to survive a week of grid down, maybe you'll realise a month, a year, isn't so unbearable. maybe it starts to feel nice?

because i've been there, the suicidal grief. 2018 was absolutely the worst year of my life and i was sure i'd die being tortured in hospital, and coming out of that, in 2019, both the IPCC and ADF released incredibly bleak reports on climate collapse outcomes, and it all sank in. all the spare spoons i'd sunk into helping when i could, all the decades of scientists desperately warning, it all failed. the final warnings have been coming for years, with no change in course, it's happening. and i faced the realisation that my decades were limited, my time of comfort short, and i started despairing and grieving. i turned to what support systems i had, and they failed me. when my psych asked what i was so anxious about and i started explaining the climate reports, he tensed up and started asking diagnostic questions for dilusional psychosis. i went home and cried, i was sleeping on the couch in the junk storage room of my sharehouse because i'd let my own room fill up with so much trash that there was a distinctly organic smell of growth choking the whole place out. i was fucking done, my heart and body broken, there didn't seem to be any point in anything, not without a future. it's the closest i've been to killing myself since leaving home…

so i said, fuck it. i've got a tiny pool of cash from welfare backpay, and i bought a synth i wanted. it fucking rocked, and brought me so much joy, so i bought another, and another. no future to save for, anyway. i made some cool music, i never saw that psych again, i gave up on my drive for revenge on doctors and finding answers about my fucked up nervous system, why bother when the world is ending? and i made music. i can kill myself later maybe. i started loving myself more, because what's the point starving to death hating myself? i made music and got confident and cleaned my fucking room, bought a new mattress. i met a girl and took a chance and we fucked real good and i fell in love again. i moved out somewhere new and quieter and left a home of over a decade behind me, left parts of my identity behind me, moving forward and growing for the better. i have a family now, the first family that has ever loved me without expecting anything in return, and i love them with all my heart. i listen to the chickens, and watch leaves float down the storm water drain, and make cool music. yesterday i listened to a 14 minute track i made 6 months ago and almost cried, because nobody can make music that is so perfect for my tastes except me, and i brought it into existence. on the weekend i'm gonna set up the solar panel to keep the backup battery topped up, i use it to charge my phone and laptop, which the kids would call solarpunk and i'd call cool as fuck to have a solar powered laptop.

in 2019 i stared into the void and realised there is no real future for me, for human civilisation as we know it, and i grieved and processed… i almost killed myself, but i didn't, and the years since have been the best of my life, no question.

so, no. don't kill yourself, now or in 2025 or at any point until you can't handle the torture anymore. "graduation" sounds young, real young, even if it's tertiary. i'm creeping towards 40, and the age that "graduation" conjures makes me think that you've got a hell of a lot of potential left in you, for fun and stupidity, and growing up, and finding love and heartbreak, and your version of wierd-arse synth music.

so go out there, prepare, and enjoy.

…

…..and for the love of all the false goddesses of the void, never, NEVER EVER again contact a random fucking blog on tumblr and ask if you should kill yourself. holy fuck buddy. the amount of pressure you put me under to deliver an emmaculately worded response that somehow talks you down from the ledge without lying, is way, way too much fucking pressure. i really hope you were being stupidly hyperbolic, but even then, Eris Fucking Kallisti Herself In Absurdist Pagan Blasphemy, so incredibly unacceptable to say to a stranger. i think you need a therapist, even if they do think you're catastrophising, because like. shit dude. this is abso-fucking-lutely not okay!

now go. prepare and enjoy.

[keyrey]

Synopsis: You long for a change in your life, Nanami providing it in the most mysterious of ways. An angsty, short Kento Nanami x reader. A little !papamin and mamamin!reader with a twist! Word count: 2681 Animated divider & Please support by: @cafekitsune

Circular silicone plates holding broccoli and corn remained untouched on the table, neglected and chilled. Yet the pizza rolls and applesauce you paired with it were gone as quickly as you called out dinner time. How could one not appreciate the taste of broccoli? You questioned yourself while you wiped an intrusive bead of sweat from your brow. Temper tantrums reverberated throughout the house, their intensity seemingly unending.

The nocturnal hours unfurled amidst a whirlwind of little stubbed toes, a result of unmet reprimands. Each collision elicited a sharp cry. Nights felt bleak and parched. Your body squirmed and turned as it adapted to the imminent change in climate.

You paced back and forth in the kitchen. Each uneven step solicited a sharp pain in the back of your heart. The room seemed to close in around you. Sounds around you remained amplified and distorted, making it difficult to separate your thoughts from the overwhelming noise. Your mind had tangled in a false sense of perception.

No, I am not alone. I have a husband. He is in the next room over.

You repeated the thought until you were left breathless as if doing so could somehow pull you away from the suffocating grip of reality.

Bedtime. When you retired for the night in the guest room down the hall after a brisk decision to reside in different rooms. The initial intention was not to bother your husband while he worked. You were insistent about the change when he started his job, but you soon came to regret your decision as the bed grew infinitely eerie without him.

There was no need to dress up for bed anymore, except for someone who seemed like they cared. The laundry basket in the corner of your room sat dormant filled with unused silk pajamas. On top, were old t-shirts that carried muck and scum accumulated by weeks spent at home. No need to spend an hour on makeup or doing your hair. No tickets to a fancy restaurant or a basketball game. There was no one to go with. Except there was – but he was in the next room over.

You slipped out of bed and made your way to the kitchen, desperate for a distraction and a glass of water to soothe the hoarseness of your throat. A shadowy figure laced with remembrance loomed over you like an owl perched on a pedestal. Fourteen hours, and he was finally here with you, sitting on the couch with a book in his hands.

“Ken!” you cried out in relief, padding your way toward him.

You wanted to smile, hug him, and kiss him senselessly to make up for all the time lost. But the weary expression on his face made you hesitate. The slight jolt of his actions as he turned the page, the scratching of his fingernails against the hardcover. Three coffee mugs laid out in front of him and to your dismay, every one of them was empty. It was well past eleven pm. So, this was what had been causing his sleepless nights?

“Are you okay? You look pale,” your voice brittle with worry as you spoke. “Have you been taking your medication or eating well?"

You took his frigid hand in yours, attempting to create friction against his rough palms to warm him up. A silent but breathtaking gentle squeeze of your hand and an acknowledging nod provided all of the reassurance you needed. But the moment had been a fleeting one as you felt the chill of your husband’s hand slipping out of your grasp.

He adjusted the reading lamp that was clasped onto the page. A soft cast of orange glow pronounced his baby-pink lips and sharp jawline. Kento glanced up briefly, his expression ruminating on a sense of hitting a new low.

“I’m alright. Do not worry about me, love,” he muttered, dismissively. All the caution you felt for him depleted, the sentiment replaced with hopelessness and frustration. "You have enough on your hands as is..."

“Look, Ken, all I’m trying to say is that I miss you, okay?” You try to start the dreaded conversation, light and simple. “The kids do too. I think your job might be taking a toll on you. Can’t you rest?” you pleaded. Your husband’s thoughts were redirected toward the illicit tapping of your foot on the ground which served as a testament to his patience. You observed as his gaze shifted away, his jaw tightening as he braced himself against the sofa.

You never remembered when he'd end his meetings early to take the girls to the park. You never recalled the time you caught food poisoning and were rushed to the hospital, cutting it off during a sales pitch. How he'd let your middle child doodle on a piece of his paper because drawing was her passion- Even though that paper was the most important one on the table, now filled with unicorns and rainbows. You only wanted to believe what you wanted to believe. And that was your downfall.

“I’m sorry, but you know there’s no such thing as breaks in this field. I can’t. There’s a mountain of logistics that go beyond a simple feeling of tiredness. Financial stability is never guaranteed, many hours of mulling over a resignation letter, I’d have to find myself a replacement employee, train them, then supervise them,” his voice rose like boulders crashing against the shore. “I can’t pack up my office and leave with a snap of my finger,” This only deepened the frown on your face and made the normality of ‘proper’ eye contact even more complicated.

His defensiveness was palpable, an edge in his tone that seared through the space between you. Yet, you chose to let it slide, knowing something deeper resided within. As if it were a means to convince himself that he wasn’t struggling like he wasn’t working himself like a starving canine working on a farm. Was this just part of his character, a counterbalance to the 'calm and collected' persona he wore like a thick coat of armor?

“It’s not an option I have on the ready. Not a trigger I can activate with the push of a button.” His irritation gave way to a more controlled demeanor, though the tension in the room lingered.

“And love, how can we survive if I quit?” His voice softened, becoming almost hesitant as he spoke. He looked down, tracing a pattern on the counter with his finger. “You don’t have a job and haven’t worked in years.”

As he continued, the weight of his words felt like a punch to the gut. You stared at him, like a spectator in a drama you couldn’t escape, your voice barely a whisper against the weight of his words.

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” You walked away, pretending to busy yourself by cleaning the mess off the floor. The grip on the broom was tight; you were afraid to let go. Terrified of losing your footing as you thought about your premature acquiescence.

Weekends once were a lovely respite. However, as the fifth day of the week commenced, the sixth and seventh days began, marking a recurring peak in Kento's work responsibilities. Countless, careless, clueless clientele, rampaging with their never-ending supply of wealth and power. He didn’t know who he was saving people for. The backlog of projects resulted in diminished family time and even less time for personal endeavors.

He remained locked in his study down the hall.

At last, the girls had bathed and tucked themselves into bed. The eldest had been blessed with privacy of her own while the other two sulked with their puffy and pouty lips. You sat down on the old wooden rocking chair across from them. It was once a spot where you’d nurse them when they were younger. Where you’d tirelessly read and digest parenting blogs like it was your morning coffee. Your exhausted tone had expertly been replaced by a soft one. Wishing your three little angels nothing but peace, happiness, and exemption from hardships. At least from– the knowledge of your own.

You leaned the chair forward, forcing a smile to appear upon the layers of dwindling hope within. The sight of your children rubbing their eyes with small, tender fists of love served as a balm that healed your weary soul.

"Would you like to pick out tonight’s bedtime story? Eldest’s privilege," you asked, hoping to connect with the nine-year-old. She always seemed so disconnected from you, her peers, and especially her sisters. She rarely spoke to you as is. Though a three-year difference in theory hadn’t seemed like much, her mind and body had already started to evolve. In mood, and recently the beginning of buying bras for more than just you.

“Can you read this for me, baby?” You point a finger toward the last sentence of the page as the girls shimmy around your calming presence.

“And following that day, Tiana and Prince Naveen lived happily ever after.” You let out a sigh as the story came to an end.

“Momma, where’s Dad?”

The unsuspected question made your heart swell with guilt. Where is Kento? You mustered up a response, taking your gaze off of your twirling fingers.

“He's working now, sweetheart. You know, in the next room over.”

An unexpected realization of the dismissiveness in your tone struck you. How you had reacted as if 14-hour shifts a day were normal— though you remember that in your household, they were. The girls finally took their rest as you quietly exited the room without a trace.

--- Morning. ---

The sun had barely risen when you shuffled into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and yearning for your first cup of coffee. The house was silent, the calm before the storm of another bustling day. You opened the fridge, the cold air hitting your face as you reached for the milk. That's when you saw it—a small note, neatly folded and tucked into a bag of Kento's favorite snacks.

Curiosity piqued, you took the note and unfolded it. His handwriting was unmistakable, strong and steady, yet with a touch of warmth that made your heart flutter.

Good morning, my love.

I know things have been tough lately, and I've been distant. Work has been overwhelming, and I haven't been the partner you deserve. But I want you to know that I see you, and I miss you every single day.

I left this note here because I know you always reach for my snacks. It’s a little reminder that even in the busiest moments, you’re on my mind. Let’s make time for each other tonight. I promise I’ll be home early, and we can have dinner together, just the two of us. Maybe we can even dance in the kitchen again, like old times?

I love you more than words can say.

Yours always, Kento

A smile spread across your face, warmth blooming in your chest. You tucked the note back into the bag, your heart lighter than it had been in weeks. Tonight would be different. Tonight, you would reconnect, even if just for a little while.

You stood behind him in the study, he’d let you enter on special occasions. There were no smiles, no dancing, no time for reminiscing. Your hand squeezed and kneaded your husband’s tight shoulders as you read the E-mail he’d been staring at along with him in your mind.

Esteemed workers,

I regret to inform you, that our higher-ups have made it clear. Due to the lack of materials for everyone, and the shortage of students attending Tokyo Jujutsu High throughout the school year, you have been selected as the first wave to undergo a prolonged unpaid absence, active until further notice. Each of you will mailed a one-time payment of this month’s salary. Following that, compensation will not be provided. Resignation letters must be sent to the front office if desired.

You knew, that Jujutsu Sorcery was never meant to be a full-time job, he knew it as well. Too goddamn well. Yet, the option was either he stay a Salaryman or return to sorcery. The lesser of two evils? You’re starting to think there’s no such thing. Yet, you had to be optimistic, you had to bring his spirits back up. Wasn't that your job? Something you've been neglectful about. But you are unable to avoid Kento’s shaking body.

“Hey, we’re alright, okay? We’ve still got money in the bank,” this was your attempt at convincing him? “You’re smart, you can get another job. Maybe be a baker like you always wanted, huh?”

“Bakers don’t put food on the table… I can’t,” he mumbled beneath the comfort of his palms over his mouth.

“Well… they put bread on the table, don’t they?” you couldn’t get past the irony despite the numbing situation, your eyes crinkled in amusement as you composed yourself.

Your joke wasn’t lost on him– thank god, that could’ve gone way worse. He giggled himself, though he caught his actions and cleared his throat.

“You never get serious, do you?”, it sounded like he was annoyed, but you heard the rare fondness of his tone.

“Never,” you graciously agreed.

--- One week after the other. ---

Your interactions with Kento had become limited to small fleeting touches while he searched for jobs hiring in the winter quarter. A brush of the arm while walking by or a brief accidental hand on your thigh. The most unwavering difference was your showers, your mind circled back to the way life used to be. Once a playful, unruly excuse you’d use to be together. Now, a reality. How he’d pin you against the cool confines of marble tile to merge his body with yours. No– no more thinking that way. You reprimanded yourself as you washed the dirt and grime off yourself while the man you married turned away from your direction.

His stance was uncomfortable, his shoulders hunched and his face a mask, unable to show emotion. His trademark soft blonde hair was streaked with black and light gray at the roots. You remembered how you used to joke about his future silver hair, calling him a silver fox in jest. You never thought the time would come before you. It had been months since you last saw his natural hair coloring, he always had touched it up, even having you assist him sometimes back in the day. The sight of his demeanor so changed made your heartache.

She heard Kento's breath quake and quicken, the soft splashes against his feet and the tile. Was he turning around? An arm reached forward, gently taking the worn washcloth from her hand, hoisting the duty all upon himself.

“Thank you,” you whispered in the lightest voice you could. It came out squeaky and awkward.

“You’re welcome,” his voice still shaky but less reserved.

What is he doing? Why is he waiting until now? Is this some way of buttering me up? A long-winded apology?

“How did we end up like this?” you faced him, unlike many other days.

“Do you feel it too? Is it just me?”

A soft exhale escaped Kento’s lips, accepting the situation for what it was. “I never listened to you.”

“Kento–,” you tried to interject, but he continued.

“I was so caught up in work and-- you’ve seen my hair right? I mean, it looks awful.”

You saw something shimmer in his eyes, a light that had been long gone. The corners of his mouth formed a half of a smile, one that was forced, but quietly prominent. Your smile shortly followed, yet this one was genuine and sincere.

“That’s right, but you know what?”

“What, love?”

“I think you’re cute, Kento, silver looks good on you,” you just randomly blurted out as his hands cupped the small of your back. It was uncalled for. You heard a small snort escaping the man’s nose. He used to do that whenever you’d mention things out of the blue.

“Thank you. You’re special to me.”

“You’re special to me too, Ken.”

Ah, how you’ve failed your mission once again.

Author's note #2 MC is holding onto the crumbs of nostalgia, it's why I never pushed 'your' confrontation with Kento too far. 'You' settle for what you have. Someone that makes you feel seen but only when he's close to you. And no, Kento still hasn't figured out the job situation yet. I don't see Kento as being like an amazing husband with no flaws whatsoever. Instead, I think he might become hyperfixated on things and neglect others without knowing. Or, he's aware but afraid to explain himself to MC head-on. He's human and everyone has their difficulties. He's not exempt from them just because he's some hot anime guy iykwim. Can you believe I've never been in a relationship before? 🙃😂😅💀 ha.ha. haha.

[charliejaneanders]

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