#i hate antarctic peninsula

[justgrey]

overwat🔥

[kyndaris]

2024: Fear Leads to Anger, Anger Leads to Hate, Hates Leads to Suffering

Every time when it comes to the end of the year, I'm amazed at what was crammed into just 12 short months. Yet, with two major conflicts in the world, the rising cost of living, and people looking to settle old scores, the world feels like it sits once again at a precipice. Social media, especially, has seen a resurrection of the 'us' versus 'them' discourse with outrage being the sole currency being traded on. Grace and goodness have been tossed aside. Empathy, too, is just a tool to be levied.

But what I've seen most in the headlines and news articles I've perused is an undercurrent of exhaustion. Everybody is tired.

It's a struggle for so many to just survive.

So, to distract y'all from the dismal nature of our own persona lives, here's a recap of the biggest events of the year. First up to bat? Queen Margrethe II of Denmark abdicating the crown where she is to be succeeded by her son, Frederik. Then there was an earthquake in northwest Japan!

In the Nordic regions of Europe, extremely cold weather buffeted the countries that called it home whilst floods persisted in Germany, France and the Netherlands.

In the ongoing Israel and Hamas conflict in the middle east, a deputy Hamas leader was killed in Lebanon in an alleged drone strike (don't worry, we'll return here when Israel escalates and begins targeting Hezbollah later on in the year). At least the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide was probably being carried out in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, the military junta was forced to cede control of the capital of the Kokang region in northeast Myanmar as rebels continued to fight against their oppressors.

There was violence, too, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, due to a glitch in payroll systems leading to about $100 being docked from the pay of public servants. And worse, Ecuador was plunged into chaos due to increased gang activity revolving around drugs.

Yemen's Houthi rebels also vowed retaliation against the US and the UK following strikes in the area to prevent them from attacking commercial ships trying to reach the Red Sea. And in Senegal, the government delayed their election, cut off the internet and tear-gassed protestors.

All of this was to distract from how Mother Nature, too, was rebelling against her human overlords with bird flu killing thousands of elephant seal pups in the Antarctic peninsula.

In happier news, Japan was the fifth country to land on the moon! Oh, and Greece was the first Orthodox Christian same-sex marriages!

But just to shake up the status quo, King Charles was diagnosed with cancer, there was a severe fire outbreak in the refugee camp in Cox's Bazaar, South Korean doctors resigned en masse due to being overworked and underpaid, and the Palestinian authority government resigned. Of course, a month or two after King Charles was diagnosed with cancer, Kate Middleton was also diagnosed with cancer.

And while I was hoping the Republicans would actually grow a spine, many of the other candidates pulled out of the election race leaving Trump as the sole contender. To fast forward what most people were betting on, he also soundly won the American election in November. Except, of course, Trump's opponent at the end was not incumbent Joe Biden but rather Vice President Kamala Harris (thus shattering any faith I had in humanity and relegating the US down to the bottom of countries I would like to visit in the next four years).

Putin, too, continued on as president of Russia although his hold on the country has been tenuous at best. More so when there was an attack on a Moscow concert hall courtesy of ISIS-K.

In quick succession: there was a massive bridge collapse in Baltimore when a container ship crashed into it, an earthquake in Taiwan and a massacre on Easter in Ecuador. Israel, still trying their best to tarnish whatever goodwill they still had on the world stage, killed seven aid workers trying to help those trapped on Gaza. They also exchanged missile attacks with Iran.

Closer to home for me, there was a mass stabbing at Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre. Six people were killed, including the attacker. And just to show off how big corporations consistently make misstep after misstep, Qantas' latest travel app revealed the person information for almost all their clients, as well as their flight details!

Elsewhere in the world, as we headed towards June, the Slovakia prime minister was shot and there were mass riots in New Caledonia. The Iranian president was also killed in a helicopter crash. This was later followed up by the Malawi vice president killed in a plane crash.

Further indications of another pandemic brewing on the horizon saw the avian bird flu reaching Antarctica, with even a few cases detected in Australia (leading to brief egg shortages). Oh, and there was also a landslide in the Papua New Guinea, killing hundreds.

More chaos ensued when Trump was found guilty in a hush money trial. Unfortunately, sentencing was delayed due to the Supreme Court finding presidents can be above the law (honestly, why does anyone bother anymore?) Hunter Biden, too, was found guilty of gun charges. And before I forget, the International Court of Justice further ordered Israel to stop their assault on Rafah (which was summarily ignored).

As the world tilted on its axis following the economic struggles that came from a post-pandemic world, we also saw further unrest in Argentina following the passing of radical economic reforms. Tax changes in Kenya also sparked protests. And, to the surprise of many, the Tories were finally ousted as the ruling party of the United Kingdom. Enter Sir Keir Starmer as the new prime minister.

In other parts of the world, there was a failed coup in Bolivia and Masoud Pezeshkian wins the Iran presidential election.

Closer to home, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, faced court on a tiny island in the Pacific before returning to Australia. And for the first time in a long while, Russian spies were detected stealing defence secrets from our small island nation!

As the months headed towards the latter half of the year, Donald Trump survived not one, but two, assassination attempts. With his flagging numbers and poor showing at the first debate, Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate and threw his support behind Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, it was not enough to heal a fractured United States of America that was too focused on the past to see the path forward to a better future.

And, to show just how fragile our world is without the conveniences of technology, the Cloudstrike outage had everything from airports to banks shutting down.

With the social contract fraying worldwide, we saw riots in Bangladesh, Venezuela and the United Kingdom (although these were all for different reasons). Heck, there were even protests in Israel as the people wanted their loved ones back instead of the endless back and forth between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. But as the conflict in the Middle-East deteriorated further, Lebanon, too, was drawn into it. Several people and thousands injured in pager and radio explosions. Not content to simply send a message, the Israeli Defence Force also launched a strike on Beirut.

Mother Nature, however, was not content to simply have humans duke it out with each other. Severe flooding in Japan saw thousands evacuated. In Spain, too, homes were lost. Heck, there were also two damaging hurricanes in the United States of America as well!

But it was not all doom and gloom! For, in Thailand, the government also saw fit to legalise same-sex marriage! Oh, and King Charles and Queen Camilla came to pay a visit to Australia!

To round out the year, and to show how fractious the world had become, we saw anti-government demonstrators in Pakistan, a no-confidence motion for the French Prime Minister (with Francois Bayrou being appointed after it), antagonisms between the Vice President and President of the Philippines, martial law being declared in South Korea and Syrian rebels toppling the Bashar al-Assad government. In Canada, too, there are rumblings to oust Prime Minister Justin Trudeau!

Of course, nothing else truly mattered to the people except the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO in New York outside his hotel. In a rare alliance between the left and the right (at least in America), people cheered at the prospect of finally taking the fight to the ones who have truly been keeping people down despite record-breaking profits all round.

And so closed 2024.

On a personal level, 2024 hasn't seen much change from the previous years. I've continued to enjoy my video games, read my books, share my musings on the internet and try my hand at posting the stories in my head online. The one thing that was a bit of a drastic change was nuking my personal Discord server (one I shared with my friends and was created during the pandemic) because I couldn't stomach the bad faith arguments employed by people I thought were friends. Especially when they aped comments from the anti-woke crowd for games that weren't even out yet.

While 2025 doesn't look particularly rosy, I'm hopeful people can come together. The cycles of hatred we perpetuate do nothing to improve the current state of things. And if we were to ever stop and think, would anyone who had died want a legacy built on the blood and bones of children and innocents?

That is not to say we must forget the past.

But we must also ask ourselves, what good does it do to carry around a heavy ball of iron of hate for everyone that has wronged you.

Nobody is perfect. A bad day can lead to hurtful comments that last a week, a year or a lifetime for the person you said them to even if you forget it the very next second.

Yet to tiptoe around people, fearing offence is not the solution either.

Of course, it's important to realise the consequences of one's own actions. Nobody intends to do wrong by another (usually). And yet, it happens. Why?

It should come as no surprise that what inspires us to be better people can also drag us down into the depths of depravity. To quote one of my favourite shows in 2024, "Why does anyone commit acts other deem unspeakable? For love."

So, what can we do?

For me, I believe that's slowing down our decision-making and listening. In the end, there is barely any difference between my beliefs and those of the person next to me. It is simply how we internalise the information presented to us that differs.

We, as humans, need to learn patience, resilience and tolerance.

Change takes times. Language evolves.

More importantly: "Sometimes taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind."

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 15 of ?; start; previous; next)

“What do you believe in?”

Leofe had asked the question in a friendly enough way, a few days later when they were sitting together for the midday meal. Now even at noon the sky was no more than twilight, a heartwrenchingly clear gradient of color from dark to light in the direction of the hidden sun, the far side studded with stars. The Antarctic air was impossibly clear, a continent-sized whorl of dry winds cut off from the rest of the world by the circumpolar current. Katherine simply could not get used to it.

What had they been talking about? The sky, the weather, hopes for tomorrow. And Katherine had mentioned her family, how far from home she was. Somehow that had segued into faith. She still wasn’t sure what, exactly, the Dry Valleys People believed in. Then Leofe had asked her the question, and she found herself getting defensive. She remembered her parents, her teachers, the people who pressed her on what she really believed as an adolescent. She remembered the alienation she felt when she realized she wasn’t the same as the people she grew up with. That her desire to grow beyond the confines of the world as they had presented it to them meant that she would have to go. And in the going there would be no returning.

“It’s complicated,” was all she said at the time. But the question nagged at her. She didn’t know if she could have answered it in English, let alone in the tongue of the Valleys. But there was an answer. A hard, bright answer she felt within her, warming her during the cold and starry nights.

What did the people of the Valleys believe in? Well, that was a tough one. When she had first found the gospel-book she thought she knew. A peculiar people, setting out for desolate shores, carrying religious artifacts and ancient tongues with them--traditionalists, of a kind. After all, wasn’t that what her people had been? Secessionists, as politely called them back in civilization. Those who decided that the great ecumenical riot of culture and technology and fashion and whatnot wasn’t for them. There were lots of different kinds of secessionists, not just traditionalists. New religious movements, utopians of all stripes, ultra-individualists and ultra-collectivists, artists with ideas that couldn’t be realized safely or legally in any existing top-level jurisdiction, trillionaires who thought the law shouldn’t apply to them. The pattern was familiar: you found a big pile of money somewhere, either from your followers or from a rich patron, you bought some land, you renounced your basic and you got almost unlimited sovereignty over it in return.

But that still left some questions. Like the age of the Valleys settlements, for one. If the local chronology was correct, they were almost a hundred and fifty years old, older than any other settlement in Antarctica. That meant they weren’t technically secessionists, because there was nothing here to secede from a century and a half ago. A century and a half ago, the Antarctic coast had been even colder and the ice-free portion of the Valleys even smaller. The timeline made sense in other ways--that was after the abrogation of the Antarctic Treaties, when most of the countries that used to fund scientific outposts along the coasts had pulled back in the wake of the Collapse. Before the big multinationals moved into the Peninsula a generation later. You could’ve gotten a couple hundred people to the Dry Valleys unnoticed, maybe.

When she could, Katherine tried to get a better look at their books again. Their script presented difficulties for her. On more than one occasion, she found herself muttering irritably at an imagined picture of Dr. Wright. He could have warned her, of course; he could have said, “the Dry Valleys People speak Anglo-Saxon English; here’s a list of books to take with you.” She still would have lost them in the shipwreck, but maybe she would have remembered enough from them to get started. Heck, maybe some enterprising nerd had created a module for the language. Unlikely--a good module took a shitload of funding and years of work--but not impossible.

She had asked Dr. Gordon about John, after the meeting at the conference. If this guy was so famous, how come she’d never heard of him? Dr. Gordon had sighed, sighed in the way that usually indicated byzantine university politics, but eventually she’d given up the story.

“This was all well before my time, you have to understand,” she said. “I’m getting this secondhand and thirdhand from people who were around then, and some of this is basically School of Humanities mythology at this point. But the way I understand it, Dr. Wright was the last holdout of the old English department.

“Two hundred years ago, the School of English was one of the jewels in the crown of this university. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was still doing pretty well for itself, but, well, as much as we hate to admit it to ourselves, academia is subject to trends and fashions just like the rest of the world. And despite trying to keep up with the times, most of the things they studied were hopelessly outdated. Even back then, nobody took nonsense like postmodernism or critical theory seriously anymore. A lot of the the really interesting work was starting to get usurped by departments with more rigorous methods. The Digital Humanities school was just taking off, and there was lots of interesting work going on on the other side of campus with 20th century novelists and AI, but the English faculty stuck to its old methods. Close reading, wading through dense tomes of theory, writing long analytical essays. Things that, for very good reason, we don’t make students do anymore. The university naturally had an aversion to producing graduates who were unemployable as anything other than English professors; it felt that was unfair to its students. But the more they tried to pressure the English department to update its methods, the more recalcitrant the faculty became.

“By the time Dr. Wright was approaching retirement age, they were back to teaching dead languages. You couldn’t understand the whole history of English literature, they argued, without a grounding in foundational stuff. And that foundational stuff, that ancient British literature, well, you couldn’t understand that without the context of, oh, I don’t know, whatever the Vikings spoke I suppose. Dr. Wright was by all accounts an extremely smart person. He’d done some groundbreaking work in Austronesian and South American languages as a younger man, a real giant in his field. But eventually, for reasons nobody quite understood, he’d pivoted away from the frontiers of his field--not a big field to begin with, mind you--and retreated to ground as well trodden as, well, basic arithmetic. He moved to the English department and was teaching students thousand-year-old poetry. He said it was a natural extension of his earlier work, and the university itself was happy enough to keep someone with his stature on its faculty, but to be honest most people saw him as nothing more than a useless eccentric. Rather like the whole department.

“Well, eventually the decision was made to axe their funding. There were maybe four undergraduates left to the whole department, so this wasn’t exactly a wrench, but Dr. Wright proved a sticking point. He had tenure--it’s a system that doesn’t exist anymore, but it made him basically unfireable. He had no students, and no scheduled classes, and no funding, and no departmental library anymore, but he had a right to an office, and, well. He wouldn’t go. He came in every day just the same. And twice a week, he would find an empty lecture hall, and, he’d just… lecture to anybody who showed up. And a few people did. Some were genuinely curious. Some thought it had novelty value. I guess some were lost freshers. But he kept on that way for two or three years. It annoyed the hell out of the administration. It annoyed them so much they delayed an update to the rules on retirement for six months, just so Dr. Wright hit the mandatory retirement age and got booted out. The next semester, they abolished fixed retirrment ages altogether. Of course, they didn’t offer him his job back. The official story was that he was a beloved senior member of the faculty, and he kept his dining privileges and still got invited to all the university functions where they trot out the honored former members of staff. But after that he basically disappeared. No one has seen him on campus--or anywhere in Dublin, for that matter--since.”

So at first Katherine wondered if this wasn’t Dr. Wright’s cruel joke, a way to get back at the people who pissed him off all those years ago. Let’s send the grad student out into the wastelands without any linguistic advantage. But the longer she thought about it, the more she wondered if she wasn’t being unfair.

Because what would she have said, if Dr. Wright had come up to her at that conference and said, “Oh, I hear you’re going to visit Antarctica. Here’s a book on Old English, and a copy of the Gospels, you’ll need both.” Would she have come here if she thought these were just secessionists with a penchant for historical reenactment? Probably not.

And the fact of the matter was, they weren’t secessionists. Well, not secessionists like Katherine had ever read about. The thing about being a secessionist, whether reactionary or utopian, was that no matter how much you pretended you were doing something Different, no matter how much you tried to Cut Yourself Off from the rest of the world, everything you did, everything you professed, everything you built, existed as a counterargument to that world. The rest of the world was a great shadow hanging over your whole existence, an argument which you were trying to refute. No secessionist movement on record had lasted in its original form more than two generations, because either you eventually got tired of making that argument, an argument your children would never understand for lack of context, and you inevitably rejoined the world (though perhaps with a higher-than-average local incidence of fringe political beliefs), or the whole thing fell apart in dramatic fashion due to infighting, and somebody appealed for the special status of the enclave to be revoked.

Neither had happened here. The culture of the Valleys appeared to be stable. They were more like an ancient uncontacted people, uncurious about the outside world and existing on their own terms, than those who scrupulously attempted to refute it. They spoke a dead language, but on closer examination, there the resemblance to historical reenactors ceased. The climate was wrong--they lived more like a circumpolar people, because, well, they were. But Katherine noticed they weren’t dogmatic about their refusal of technology. They relied on genegineered bryoculture--the mosses thrived in the summertime, provided you supplemented them with a little water, and kept them from freezing. They hoarded small pieces of technology they scavenged from the wastes, laser firestarters and sonic knife sharpeners, and they used these to augment their own cottage industry.

But they were sharply conservative in other ways. They did not trade. They did not explore, beyond their own well-trodden region of Victoria Land. Their society was full of symbolism and ritual and verbal formulas, their conversations looping back and forth in ways that made Katherine suspect every one had occurred a thousand times, and was expected to occur a thousand times again. They were, in short, static. Stasis was, Katherine believed, the ultimate illusion for any society. Nothing lasts forever; eventually, you change or you die. Perhaps the Dry Valleys People knew this. Perhaps, if the world tried to force them to change, they would simply die. The idea made Katherine rather sick, but it would not be the first time in history that that had happened.

* * *

And what did they believe in, when you tried to peel all this back, and expose their heart? Leofe was cagey when Katherine asked her. Leofric was laconic enough to make his sister look positively effusive by contrast. The question died on her lips when she tried to ask some of the older men and women; they responded to the question as a mountain might answer a soft breeze. Which is to say they ignored her completely. They carried with them the tokens of a lost Christianity, but these didn’t seem to be related to their core beliefs. On the very rare occasions when they waxed metaphysical, Katherine heard them speak of the garsecg, the spear-sea, the fearsome cold ocean that girdled their world. Yet on their lips the word had deep resonances “ocean” never did; it was for them the road of death, beyond which all their foremothers and forefathers dwelt; and it was the road of their beginning, over which they had come for their deliverance. And it was the outer darkness, the darkness of the sky and the long Antarctic night, and the blackness behind the stars; and the dreamless sleep.

And even more rarely, in voices so quiet Katherine could not be sure of what they said, they spoke of dragons, the dragons that lived high on the ice, whose voice was thunder and in whose belly lived a terrible fire.

[cringeynews]

New Post has been published on CringeyNews

New Post has been published on http://cringeynews.com/uncategorized/is-al-gore-the-cause-of-a-recent-antarctic-ice-sheet-fissure/

Is Al Gore The Cause Of A Recent Antarctic Ice Sheet Fissure?

Antarctica—Many believe this blurry, badly photoshopped image of former Vice President Al Gore is genuine. He appears to be digging along the edge of a giant fissure currently forming across an ice shelf in Antarctica. The picture, taken by military aircraft, has many asking: is Al Gore the cause of this fissure or is he simply trying to accelerate the impact of climate change for monetary gain? Mr. Gore is not returning our calls, which only lends credence to our theory that he’s way out on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula where cell service is notoriously sketchy.

Donald Trump has already tweeted, “What did the former Vice President shovel and when did he shovel it?” Others are already calling the affair shovel-gate.

Mr. Gore insist he was just taking ice core samples to further monitor the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere over time.  “In no way was I trying to break up Antarctica,” said Mr. Gore. “Glacial calving happens naturally and incrementally over time. It tends to occur when two large chunks of ice have irreconcilable differences and one decides to venture out to see other parts of the ocean.”

When asked about rumors that he’s working on a sequel to An Inconvienent Truth, Mr. Gore said, “Fine, you got me. I want to call it Battle Beneath The Planet Of An Inconvenient Truth, but everyone else on the team hates it. If you can come up with another title that captures the essence of my work, I’m open to suggestions. But good luck beating that one.”

When asked if anything good could come from these constantly retreating glaciers, Mr. Gore said, “Well, if we could find a way to direct these icebergs toward convenient stores and beer coolers, there would certainly be some short term benefits during the summer months.”

Source