#peak minerals

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Circular battery self-sufficiency

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun.

Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off.

As a layperson, you are far more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is great, but its role is to familiarize you with theory, not practice. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites.

Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of fun, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!):

https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book Electrify, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how fantastic an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works:

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

Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is possible. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface.

Now, this is a gigantic task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful – and massive – marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard.

But it's not impossible, let alone inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit.

Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

The promise of marshaling a very large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is infrastructure. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system.

What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials).

Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It needs to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable.

The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism – and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") – has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce.

That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will transition our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge all the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism.

Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering massive improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible).

Take copper: electrification requires a lot of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

We have just lived through a massive surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper remained flat:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense – cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI – have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real – and vital – innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring:

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

Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved – and unsolvable – problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day):

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really do want a transition and have serious questions about power storage.

If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power:

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

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency":

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf

The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that aren't optimized for recycling.

Both things are already happening. From the executive summary:

The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons.

This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.

But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil – all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote:

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates – a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns – to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will.

By contrast, this giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a bonus, not a cost. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and electric power.

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/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

[bbyboybucket]

Do you guys think that Bucky and Steve have to take vitamin and mineral supplements? Bc most the general population is deficient of several vitamins in general and can’t get enough from food sources, but a super soldier with a much higher metabolism would need even higher than the amount for a normal person. So without supplements, they’d be pretty deficient right?

[natureselements]

Silver update coming soon ✨

[earthandsunandmoon]

I was tagged by @andypartridges to list 5 songs I've been listening to lately!! Tysm <3

Grace, Too - the Tragically Hip

Midnight Sun - Redgum

The Fog - Kate Bush

As Close as This - the Mutton Birds

Blinder by the Hour - the Triffids

I tag @anynameisbetterthanmyfirstone , @preziosestelle , and @airnewzealand if you'd like :)

[hollow-knight-fights]

Round Four

[essektheylyss]

I will admit, my cosmological knowledge is honestly muddy at best, because I read every planar manual in existence in rapid succession roughly four years ago, have made up a lot of cosmological bits and bobs as needed for fic purposes, and also recently got an intensive crash course on a totally different conceptualization of the Feywild for my own D&D game, before we even touch on other non-D&D-based fictional worlds including my own that I know to varying extents and also the absolute bare minimum knowledge of parallel universe theories in real world physics and some decent exposure to philosophical theories of time, so like... as you might imagine, it is the absolute weirdest of soups in that part of my brain.

[newriverartist]

Mystery Solved

The Peaks of Otter in Fall Original Oil painting SOLD Wall Art Prints and prints on other items available with the link https://kendall-kessler.pixels.com/featured/peaks-of-otter-in-fall-kendall-kessler.html Years ago mineral spirits became a weird white rather thick liquid instead of the clear liquid it was before. I need mineral spirits to thin down the oil paint I build up in a series of…

[twiichii]

Home in Hilo, Hawaii

I had the honor of receiving a scholarship through Geological Society of America to study Hawaii Volcano Eruptions for half a week, thank you to all who support this blog 😀My venmo is here: https://account.venmo.com/u/twiichiiMy REI wishlist is here: https://www.rei.com/lists/418184695 Nearly a decade ago, I lived in Hawaii and completed my senior year of undergraduate education with a BA in…

[spacenutspod]

SpaceTime Series 27 Episode 45 *Perseverance collects its 24th sample on Mars NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has just collected its 24 geological sample from the surface of the red planet.  The drill core offers new clues about Jezero Crater and the lake it may have once held. *New date set for Starliner's first manned mission NASA has set May 6 as the opening of the launch window for the first manned flight of Boeing’s long troubled CST-100 Starliner.  The flight to the International Space Station was originally slated for this month. *Space junk slams into a Florida home NASA says it’s analyzing an object that crashed into a Florida man's home last week which is suspected of being piece of debris jettisoned from the International Space Station. *The Science Report New research shows that the warming climate will turn Australia’s soil into a net emitter of carbon dioxide. A new study claims women with a low resting heart rate had a slightly higher chance of a criminal lifestyle. Identifying criminals by airborne forensic DNA evidence. Skeptics guide to African witchcraft trials   https://spacetimewithstuartgary.com  https://bitesz.com   This week’s guests include our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics This episode is brought to you by NordPass....the password manager we use ad quite frankly couldn 't get by online without. You should really check it out. And we havea  great deal for you at the moment...plus a free trial...for all the details visit www.bitesz.com/nordpass

[nfornaomi]

Bluebird day hiking up Ha Ling Peak and Miner's Peak yesterday! Trail was packed down and thanks to crampons I thought the hike was actually easier than summer hiking as there was plenty of grip. I remember Ha Ling was steep, but had forgotten just how steep in the last section 😅 - legs are definitely feeling fatigued today.

The last picture was taken from Miner's Peak - you can see Ha Ling Peak on the right of the photo. It's the one with the straight slope up 😊.

My watch recorded 10.3km, 969m elevation gain, and just under 3 hours of moving time.

[jamesgraybooksellerworld]

....twenty-two full-paged engravings of fossils, caves, physical anomalies, artifacts monstrous births, aberrant weather and other difficult to explain occurrences; a double-paged map with contemporary coloring; two pages of the arms of the subscribers; and a portrait of the author after Faithorne. 

 The natural history of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the peak, in Derbyshire: with an account of the British, Phœnician, Armenian, Gr. and Rom. antiquities in those parts. By Charles Leigh, Doctor of Physick. 558J. Leigh, Charles. (1662-1701?)  The natural history of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the peak, in Derbyshire: with an account of the British, Phœnician, Armenian, Gr. and Rom. antiquities in…

[10thmusemoon]

The second Shen Jiu realizes he has romantic feelings for Yue Qingyuan, the system should activate like a sleeper agent and shove every ridiculous wife plot possible at them.

Why is YQY late to their weekly meeting? An aphrodisiac weed appeared in the garden outside his window that morning, apologies shidi it took a while to circulate his qi enough to burn it out.

A mirror appears in the bamboo house? Somehow it only shows the inside of the sect leader’s private quarters! How scandalous!

An Ding Peak disciples tripped carrying a massive barrel of oil! Suddenly the sect leader is on the floor ass up with his clothes sticking to him like a second skin.

Oh no! Acid rain has passed over QDP! What’s this? Only the sect leader’s robes have burned away? What bad luck!

A new qi rich mineral with restorative properties has been discovered! Mu Qingfang is eager to test it out! How funny that the most effective shape for it is precisely two nipple piercings! Yes, this Had to be announced during a peak lord meeting, MQF is very passionate about scientific innovation! Please pay no mind if the sect leader starts lactating, they haven’t found a work around to that particular side effect yet.

Did you hear? Yue Qingyuan’s long lost family has appeared and they brought his betrothed! …Shen-shixiong are you unsheathing Xiu Ya?

While retiring from visiting another sect the inn only has one bed AND Yue Qingyuan has been bit by a Gaping Hole Spider AND was hit by the pollen of a Eternal Brothers Chrysanthemum! Quick Shen-shixiong! We need to find someone zhangmen shixiong once considered a brother to fill his holes with their life essence or he’ll die!

Just increasingly terrible and specific plots that only Shen Qingqiu has any hope of solving. They hold out for a long while because Yue Qingyuan is allergic to “burdening others” and solves most of them on his own until they get especially ridiculous. By the end of it, after all the truth reveals, QiJiu are so exhausted they don’t even have it in them to be horny anymore. That’s been their default state for months. Erectile dysfunction would be a blessing.

[hcneymooners]

⋆ you pull my hair, you call me.

jinx x mermaid!f!reader. men & minors dni.

synopsis: you are a mermaid living in a hidden grotto of the undercity. one day, jinx wanders into your territory. or more accurately, the ruins of her old haunt.

cw: mermaid!reader, canon divergence!au, discussions of trauma, discussion of child loss, mental health issues, non-sexual intimacy, sfw, however, there are suggestive themes, age gap, girl you are literally thousands of years old.

notes: in these coming days, i hold on tightly to fantasies. they become stronger, more intricate. i feel it is my only way to survive. this is dedicated to @s-4pphics, the only person who makes me feel like a real life mermaid.

The water remembers everything. It's why you were born into it. Your mind is a steel trap, a lattice of love and loss.

Water does not coddle the memory, but it soothes. When your mother crawled into the reservoir to birth you, it did not coddle her naked body as it twisted and expelled you. It did nothing to lessen the sore peaks of her nipples as her breasts swelled and hardened with milk. But it soothed.

Your birth was similar to the experience of having birds flutter out of one’s chest. You came into the world with the rush of wind and at the peak of death, eyes big and your silence even larger. You were a beautiful baby with a delicately scaled face, and from the beginning your mother knew you were different.

She holds you, tells you her name—a name that means one thousand flowers. It fits her; you understand this even one minute fresh into your life. Your mother was one thousand flowers both blooming and decaying at once.

You were born in the winter, snow touching the tender skin of your forehead. It is also winter when your mother, a woman of a thousand flowers, dies.

Her body seems to flutter and pulse until it shudders into foam. The water soothes you as you sink. You stay on the ocean floor for what is close to forever. The years pass, but water remembers.

It remembers the screaming, the fire, the way the undercity shattered like a dropped mirror. The shards spun out and out. You never braved the world, then. You would come close to the surface, float backward and bent as you watched the sky smear into green gas and heat. The water—and therefore you—remember the taste of ash and gunpowder, the iron-rich flavor of blood and revenge.

But mostly, you remember her—that odd girl with chaos pumping inside of her like a second, third heart who came stumbling through the wreckage of her old workshop, trailing ghosts and grief like a burial shroud.

You've been watching her for days. Your kind has always been drawn to broken things, to the places where pain bleeds into water until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. She fascinates you with her paleness, with her long body that is painted and bared by the shoddy work of her pants and the cut of her top. You hide behind large chunks of driftwood, eye the swivel of her hips as she paces and turns. Her eyes are strange, too pale ghosts colored silvery blue. She closes them, opens, closes.

She is like a small bird, this woman. She carries destruction in her hands but cradles it like a wounded animal at times, afraid to hold too tight, afraid to let go. The first time she breaks, it's like watching a star collapse.

She falls to her knees at the water's edge, her wail echoing off the mineral-crusted walls of what was once her sanctuary. Her hands tear and tug at her braids as if she could rip the memories right out of her skull, like plucking loose the weave of a tapestry. The water around you shivers with her anguish, and your body preens; it tells you that you cannot stay hidden any longer.

You rise from the depths like a dream, your hair carrying traces of phosphorescent algae that provide a lazy glow as it swirls around your face. Her eyes fix on you, fever-bright and wild, but she doesn't run. Maybe she thinks you're a hallucination. Maybe she's just too tired to be afraid. 

You understand this.

The silence lasts for a while. The two of you exist across from one another, your face settling on your hands as you inch forward. She has yet to notice the flutter of your tail, but it's only a matter of time. You can see the light refracting off of it into a million sparks of light, dancing across the ceiling as you near her.Her mouth parts and you feel your own hinge open. You are trying to remember, trying to make yourself just like her if only to assuage her fear. Your tongue unfurls, neat and a deep blue. She blinks in surprise, which allows you to speak first.

"I am [Name]," you say, and your voice is a gentle purr like someone has stumbled over the strings of a harp. You are learning, thinking of how humans relate to one another. You don't tell her your real name, your name birthed by ocean and the melt of your mother's scale in the middle of your tongue. You are a woman of a thousand white waves, because every woman in your family has a thousand of something. "This, here, is my home."

You reach out now, because you have seen this before. Her people hug and grasp at one another in welcoming. The woman jerks, falls with a sick crunch on one of those pale hips in an effort to get away from you. You are hurt, and alarmed, and retreat further into the water. Your hand is still clawed as if to hold hers.

"Get back," she warns, voice raw and hoarse. Her eyes repeat their pattern. Close, open. Open and close. You close yours to see what she sees. Your eyelids are thin, translucent. The world can still be seen. She is right in front of you. "I'll hurt you. I'm a curse; I hurt everything.”

You open your eyes now, reach for her anyway. Your scaled hands catch hers, gentling them away from her hair. You smooth the strands, like your sister would do to you when the poachers came.

"My kind cannot be cursed," you tell her. This close she can feel the vibration, the way that your voice carries echoes of tidal pools and deep-sea trenches. "We are older than magic, older than pain. A different kind of creature."

She laughs, and it sounds like breaking glass. "Yeah? Well I bet you've never met anything like me before."

But you have. You've seen the way trauma can twist a soul, how it can make someone forget the shape of their own heart. You've watched your own kind waste away from grief and pollution, watched your bloodline dwindle to almost nothing. You recognize the look in her eyes—it's the same one you saw in your sister's before the toxic waste claimed her, before disease took your mother.

"Do not tell me what you think I know," you answer and she fidgets within your hold.

You are unsure of how to calm her, so you rummage deep inside of your long memory. You think of your mother. Now, you know. You pull her into the water with you, and she thrashes at first—all spinning limbs and desperate gasping. She is much like a fish at the end of a hook, you think. But you hold her, humming an ancient lullaby that vibrates through the water around you both.

Your singing voice, your Melody was always more unsightly than the others. So much higher and almost dissonant, like the cry of a whale during its migration. You mostly Sang alone, while others Sang together. But it winds around Jinx; maybe she is dissonant too. Slowly, so slowly, she stills.

"This is my body," you murmur, pressing close, your scales catching the ethereal light. "And this is yours." Your hands trace her tattoos like star maps, feeling the stories written in ink and scar tissue. You pause at her stomach, feeling an old grief there. You cast your Melody again, and it falls like a net over the skin underneath your fingers.

"You had a child," you say softly, and she goes rigid in your arms.

"Yes.” She admits this truth as if it hurts her. “She was not—not mine.”

“What was her name?”

“Isha,” she chokes out. “She was... I was supposed to protect her." 

“Mmm,” you say. “She was yours. I can feel it. She was yours, and you lost her.” 

You adjust your embrace, thumb at her bottom lip to reveal her blunt teeth. You have no understanding that this is not normal, that this touching and holding and avid tenderness is not of their culture. This woman, this bloodless weeping woman gazes at you. 

“Your motherhood,” you murmur, “sits inside you like a stone. It is closed, like an oyster. You must name it to begin to release the pain.” 

You press down on her lip. 

“What is your name?”

“Jinx,” she whispers.

“Good,” you tell her. “So, you are Jinx. Jinx, mother of Isha.”

The words seem to break something loose in her, and suddenly she's crying—great, heaving sobs that shake her whole body. You hold her through it, letting her tears mix with the mineral-rich water of your grotto. Strange woman, you think. She is a strange, sweet thing.

Her stomach tenses and releases, over and over. You never once stop your Song.

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼

Days blur together after that. Time moves strangely here. The two of you are a jigsaw puzzle of connection, platonic or maybe familial. You do not ask, preferring to preserve what you have. 

Jinx is shy in the first few moments, a trait you suspect is unfamiliar to her. She builds herself a nest above the waterline: a chaos of stolen furniture and salvaged tech that somehow fits the space perfectly. You watch her work, fascinated by how her hands can create as easily as they dismantle. Sometimes she catches you staring and explains things to you—human concepts that make little sense but delight you anyway.

You measure progress not in days but in small victories: the first time Jinx falls asleep with her head in your lap, fingers curled trustingly around your scales. The morning she lets you rebraid her hair, your webbed fingers gentle against her scalp as you weave strands of luminescent crystal through the blue. The day she shows you how to make paper boats and sets them afloat with tiny lights inside, until the cavern ceiling reflects a mirror image of the stars she remembers from her brief childhood.

You offer up knowledge in return. You speak the thick language of old, born of trench sand and sulfur cracks. She loves when you sing, when your mouth unhinges to show your blue tongue and slightly jagged teeth. She wades into the grotto, standing in the shallow water that barely reaches her ankles, and closes her eyes. She sways as your Melody flows over her, shivering as if touched by cold.

You usually finish the performance by swimming to her, carefully holding her ankles between your extended claws and calling directly to her. This is your favorite—a secret you keep close. You adore how she gazes down at you, how her eyes trace the curve of your slick breasts and torso as you rise to meet her.

You climb until your noses brush, and then you laugh, a sound like the gentle puff of a flute. When you laugh, your gills seize and flex, and Jinx places a hand against them, tracing them until you crook your neck and trill. (That's her favorite.)

"[Name], you can't just walk around topless all the time," she tells you one day, trying not to laugh as you examine a shirt with obvious confusion. The fabric flutters strangely in her hands. "Humans are weird about bodies."

"But they're just bodies," you say, running a webbed hand over your scales. Again, her eyes follow. She closes her eyes, thinking of how your breasts are round and soft like the moon in her hand. You reach out, drawing her closer until she's touching you. "See? This is just flesh. The body is only a  house for our soul."

She grows quiet then, thoughtful in a way that makes her look younger. "Maybe that's why I'm so messed up. My house is... kind of a disaster zone."

You pull her close, letting your tail manifest and wrap around her legs. "Then we'll build you a new one. Piece by piece."

The trust comes in fragments, in stolen quiet moments. Some days she can't bear to be touched, and you give her space, watching from the depths as she paces and talks to ghosts you can't see. Other days she's almost peaceful, letting you massage her scalp or teaching you human games with cards that always seem to explode at exactly the wrong moment.

One night, the voices in her head were particularly loud. You hear it from beneath the water—you sleep closer to the surface since meeting her—and rise to find her jolting in her sleep. You don't think, only move, remembering to rid yourself of your tail only when it scrapes against a sheet of metal jutting from the sand.

You hum agitatedly, distressed by her furrowed brow and trembling body, then take her deeper into the grotto than she's ever been before. Here, crystal formations pulse with bioluminescence, casting rainbow shadows on walls that have never known sunlight. Schools of blind fish dart around you both, their scales glowing like fallen stars.

It takes her a while to wake, but you stay suspended and curled around her. You keep watch, eyeing the murky kelp forests that tease at your fins. There are other, older ways into this grotto that never bothered you before. But now, you're too aware of all the ways someone could reach the jinx resting in your arms.

You see bubbles snort from her nose as she begins to stir, and you move quickly to pluck a shell from the rainbow-dusted walls. The inside is sticky and suctions to her mouth, threading a tendril inside to loop around her lungs and better facilitate her breathing underwater. You don't understand why it works, but you've seen the surface swimmers use it before.

Jinx makes a horrible rasping noise before the shell's work settles in, and then breathing comes easier. The shell is now translucent and attenuated. She cups your side as she shifts in your hold, her unbraided hair thick around her face.

"This is beautiful," she whispers, and for once there's no edge to her voice, no great waiting catastrophe. You know she means you.

"Thank you," you respond, smiling with all your teeth. She smiles crookedly back.

"This was my mother's sanctuary," you tell her, leading her to a cave where ancient glyphs cover the walls. You see her back bend with the water's pressure, and you slow your pace. "There used to be many of me, my bloodline. But the surface world's poisons reached even here." You trace one of the symbols—a spiky, spherical rune that you think means 'confession'. This glyph is older than you, part of a complex language no surface dweller nor merfolk of this time has spoken in millennia. "Now there are only three of us left."

She's quiet for a long moment, her hand finding yours in the glowing water. "Does it ever get easier? Being the only one who survived?"

You think of your sister's last days, of your mother's fading voice. "No," you answer honestly. "But it becomes... different. The pain changes shape, becomes something you can carry without breaking."

She leans into you at that, and you feel the tremors that always precede one of her episodes. But this time, she doesn't fight it. She lets you hold her as the chaos revisits her, trusts you to keep her head above water—in a manner of speaking—as she shakes apart and slowly, slowly comes back together.

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼

It doesn’t simply disappear. Jinx is one of the spirits’ favorite souls to torture and possess.

Most nights, the past continues to crawl up through the cracked floors of the grotto like a cadaver, its saccharine breath seeping into Jinx's dreams until she wakes screaming. And on most of these nights, you find her in her nest of blankets and broken things, her skin fever-hot and her eyes seeing horrors you cannot share.

But after you take her down, beneath the surface, it is different. Now, most nights, she comes to you.

The pattern is the same: you hear her bare feet on the stone before you see her, padding toward the water's edge like a sleepwalker. Her hair is almost always loose, falling around her face in a cascade that reminds you of the sharp stretch of evening sky across the Arctic Ocean. Then she reaches the pool's edge, but she doesn’t stop.

The water accepts her like a lover, closing over her head in a gentle baptism. You rise to meet her, your form shifting in the dipping waves. You cup the nape of her neck and insert the shell. Your skin takes on its natural sheen, scattered with scales that catch the light like opals. Your hair moves as if still underwater even when you break the surface, glistening tendrils floating around your face. Your eyes are all pupil and hold the depths of the ocean, ancient and knowing, utterly without fear. You reach for her, and, like in the beginning, she still tries to pull away; you simply shake your head.

"Your curse cannot touch me," you remind her, your voice like water over stones. "I am not of your world." Your hands move to cup her face, thumbs brushing away tears that roll from the puffy cliff’s edge of her pale eyes. "I am of the deep places, the dark waters. We recognize our own, remember?"

Remember? You always ask her this. It’s all she ever does.

You rise fully from the water then, your form shifting like light through waves until you stand on human legs, naked and gleaming. You pull Jinx to her feet and begin to undress her with the innocent purpose of a child, unbound by human conventions of modesty or shame. She allows it, trembling—not from cold or fear, but from the overwhelming sensation of being touched without consequence, of being seen. She has yet to confess how much she needs this.

"This is my body," you murmur, pressing close, your scaled hands tracing the bridge of her spine. You are reminding her. "And this is yours. We are both such difficult creatures."

"I don't understand you," she whispers, but her hands come up to trace the patterns of your scales, mapping the places where your skin shifts from human to something else entirely.

You catch her hand and press it flat against your chest, letting her feel the strange rhythm of your heart—beating in time with the tides.

"Fear is for those who have something to lose. My kind has already lost almost everything. What's left is..." You pause, searching for words in a language not made for shadowy creatures like you. "What's left is precious because it survived. I am surviving. You are surviving with me.”

Something shifts in her expression then, understanding blooming like oil across the top of a gulf. Her fingers tangle in your hair, pulling you closer until your foreheads touch.

"Show me again," she breathes, begging. Her breath smells sweet, like candy under the tongue and behind the teeth. "Please."

You take her deeper into the grotto than before, past the engraved walls and into the true heart of your domain. Here, the water is almost desperately alive, swirling with colors that have no names in any human tongue. Your tail manifests fully, lashing out. You seem to be made of living jewels. You are a terrible, beautiful monster; your body twists like a snake as you duck and dive. Jinx watches, transfixed, as you dance through the water, showing her your true way of living.

You do what your kind does when in love. You Sing. You Pull her.

"I've been trying to fix my machines," she says when your last note fades. You are shaking. You have never Sung that hard before. Your Melody has undone you, and you swim weakly back to her. She touches your face, dusts your cheeks with her pruned fingertips. "To make lights that look like this." She gestures at the bioluminescent display around you. "But I keep fucking it up. Everything I touch turns to..."

"A mess," you finish for her. These thoughts are not new. "But a mess is not always born of destruction." You guide her hand through the water, watching the way the disturbed bioluminescence creates new patterns, new constellations. "Sometimes it's just change. It is new, without guidance. You are trying again, relearning. This is only necessary disorder."

She laughs, but it's softer than usual. "Is that what I am? Disordered?"

You pull her closer, letting your tail wrap around her legs as you float together in the heart of the sea. "You are what you choose to be. Here, in these waters, you don't have to be anything but yourself." You pull back so that you can see your hands as you sign to her, curl your fingers into the symbols she’s seen on the walls.

You have changed me. You mouth the words so that she truly understands. You sign it again, across her naked chest so that she can feel the drag of your claws and the pump of her blood in response.

"I don’t feel changed, and I don’t want to ruin you. What if I am still broken?" Her voice cracks on the last word.

"Then be broken here with me," you tell her, pressing your lips to her temple. "The water remembers everything, but it also cleanses. It changes. It heals."

She turns in your arms, and for once, her eyes are clear. No fever, no muddle—just Jinx, looking at you like she’s seeing you for the first time. Her hands find your face, thumbs tracing the almost invisible scales at your temples. You raise your hands, fingers contorting as you sign once more.

We have changed each other. It is a symptom of love.

Jinx says nothing, then she moves. You forget how agile she can be at times. With a few spritely movements, she is holding your waist and treading water. One hand comes up, cradling your face. There is a pause, and you glance at her, eyes wide with confusion and anticipation. This is new. She studies you, and you belatedly realize she is waiting for something. Permission, you think.

“Yes?” you ask. She smiles; it’s the right answer.

She slips out the shell, and you startle. This is dangerous, but she doesn’t care. She stops you.

Her hand nestles thoroughly in your hair, tilting your head until your flesh is exposed to her lips. Again and again, she presses her mouth to your neck. She suckles, nips, until your tail flicks. She is kissing you. You’ve never been kissed before—not like this.

Her teeth dig in, needling at the meat of your throat until it’s mottled and bruised. Then her lips come up to yours. At first, you breathe into her mouth to give her oxygen. Jinx pulls back, grips your jaw, and shakes you slightly. Then her lips return to yours, applying pressure until you open your mouth and allow her tongue in. She licks at your teeth, tracing the points as she holds you to her.

You feel lightheaded, disoriented. You feel good; you want more of her. After a long while, she breaks the contact. Her thumb settles at the base of your throat, slipping to the side to play with your gills. You trill sharply, and she laughs. You don’t want to say it, but you know—you want it to stay this way forever.

Jinx takes her shell from where she had placed it on her stomach. She allows it back into her throat, breathing in deeply. Then she lifts her hands and signs to you—clumsy but earnest.

Yes. You have changed me. It is a symptom of love.

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼

"I used to think I had to be loud," she tells you one night, floating on her back in the shallow parts of the grotto. Her hair fans out around her head like spilled ink, and you can't help but run your fingers through it, watching the way it parts around your hands. "Had to be crazy, had to be Jinx, because if I wasn't, then I'd have to be... her. The girl I was before. And she was weak. She got left behind."

You hum softly, the crystals below resonating in harmony. "Perhaps she wasn't weak," you suggest, tracing the constellation of freckles on her shoulder. "Perhaps she was just unfinished, like a pearl before the ocean completes its formation."

She turns to look at you then, the emotion in her eyes making your heart beat in that strange double rhythm that only happens when she's near.

"Is that what you're doing?" she asks. "Finishing me?"

You shake your head, pulling her closer until she's cradled against your chest, her back to your front, both of you suspended in the gentle current. "No one can complete you but yourself. I'm just... holding the space for you to do it.”

She's quiet for so long you think she might have fallen asleep. Then: "I’m in love with you." Her voice is barely a whisper, as if the words might shatter the peace.

Instead of answering, you press your lips to her shoulder, right where a new tattoo is healing—a pattern of waves and crystals mirroring your own scales. You helped her design it, watching in fascination as she used her clever hands to create the automaton.

"For us," you tell her, "it is different. We don't fall in love the way humans do. There's less emphasis on choices. It’s more like... finding a current that matches your own, something that pulls you in the same direction for the rest of your life. I've been swimming in your current since the day you arrived. There’s a vibration you release, deep inside me. You set it off, again and again."

Your mouth works oddly around the word "belly." She smiles at your struggle, turning in your embrace to press her forehead to yours in the way she knows you love. Her hands find your face, and you press a kiss to her fingers, grazing your teeth over her thumb. She shivers, captures your mouth briefly, then tucks herself back against you. Drowsy, she begins to dream and you let her, drifting your body lazily along the stretch of water to rock her.

It is then that you hear them—footsteps on stone, careful and measured. You recognize them instantly: the heavy tread of the enforcer, the lighter step of her companion. They've been searching for months, following rumors of blue hair seen in the Undercity's depths.

Jinx doesn't hear them, not yet. She’s drifting in that peaceful place between wakefulness and sleep, her body trustingly pliant in your embrace. She’d had an episode before this—memories of fire leaving her shaking for hours. But now she's quiet, her breathing synced with the gentle lap of water against stone.

You sense her presence before you see her, a disturbance in the air that makes the algae pulse brighter. The Sister. Her presence feels much like Jinx’s but more weathered, carrying the weight of blood. It catches in your throat unpleasantly, making you want to cough. Her footsteps falter at the grotto's entrance. The other one—Caitlyn, you recall—steadies her with a touch, but neither makes a sound.

They stand frozen at the sight before them: Jinx floating in the ethereal water, her hair unbound and threaded with living light, her face peaceful in a way they've never seen. Your tail curls protectively around her legs beneath the surface, scales catching and reflecting the cavern's natural light until it seems like you're both in some unreachable heaven. You bare your teeth to shatter the fantasy.

The Sister’s sharp intake of breath echoes off the stone. Jinx stirs slightly, but you soothe her with a soft hum, reworking her lullaby until the water itself vibrates in harmony. Her fingers tighten briefly on your arms before relaxing again.

When you meet the Sister’s eyes over Jinx's shoulder, you see tears tracking silently down her face. There's recognition there, and grief, and something like hope. You see the moment she understands what you are—not just a creature of the deep but a guardian. Her sister’s keeper; her sister’s mate.

Caitlyn moves forward as if to speak, but Violet—yes, Violet—stops her with a gentle touch. They watch as you shift slightly, letting them see how Jinx's newest tattoos mirror your own patterns—not random splashes of pain and memory but flowing lines that speak of partnership, of flesh and form meant to slot into one another.

A soft noise escapes Violet’s throat, something between a sob and a laugh. Jinx stirs again, and this time you let your gaze drop deliberately to her face, your webbed hands smoothing over her shoulders in a gesture that couldn't be more clear: She is safe here. She is loved here.

You raise a hand, your eyes slipping into their true state to make your threat clear. You know the Piltover girl will understand; her home is the home of poachers. Safe, you sign. Then, Go.

The Sister nods once, tears still falling. Her hand finds Caitlyn's and squeezes hard. You watch understanding pass between them—the recognition that sometimes healing happens in strange places, that sometimes love wears unfamiliar, frightening faces.

They turn to leave, but at the last moment, Violet looks back. Her lips form words you can read even across the distance: Thank you. Only when their footsteps fade completely do you press a kiss to Jinx's temple, tasting the salt of tears that aren’t your own.

"Are they gone?" Jinx's voice is quiet, still heavy with sleep.

"Yes," you answer honestly, because you've never lied to her and won’t start now.

She turns in your embrace, pressing her face into your neck where your scales fade into skin. "I'm not ready," she whispers. "Not yet."

"You can stay here," you promise, letting your tail wrap more securely around her. "For as long as you need. But you will not lose me. I will not lose you.”

She lifts her head to look at you, and her eyes are like silver dollars. You mimic her blinking for what must be the millionth time. Open, close. Close and open. She smiles at this. You smile, hollowing your throat to coo, mimicking the call of a bird of paradise. She laughs now; you are pleased.

 "Tell me again," she murmurs. "About your promise."

Your tail flicks as you nod.

“I will never leave; I will only follow,” you begin. The words are heavy, sacred mating rites belonging solely to your tribe. “The water flows across the earth; it is immovable. It is the human that will fade, not the earth, not myself. We will both replenish. Where you go, I will be there—past death and beyond.

Jinx rises, cupping your face firmly, her touch restricting your movement.

“Promise?” she asks, her voice dipping low, laced with danger.

“I promise.”

She presses her lips to your neck, her teeth sinking in as always. You let out a high, trembling sound, your control slipping. Suddenly, you’re human, treading water. Jinx hooks an arm beneath you, lifting you effortlessly as the water renders you weightless.

“I promise.”

You repeat it, over and over.

IpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseI promiseI promise—

Jinx drags you from the grotto, positioning herself over you. Your words are still spilling out like a mantra.

“I know,” she murmurs.

Her warm, sugary lips cover yours, silencing you. She swallows you down.

© hcneymooners.

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[hollow-knight-fights]

Round 3

[bogleech]

In your general appreciation of nature, I am curious about your take on this - do you believe nature has reached "peak complexity"?

There was a time without flying animals. There was a time without land animals. There was a time without vertebrates, without segmented exoskeletons, without fur, without feathers, without complex social structures, without eyes. There was a time without plants, or any kind of photosythesis. There was a time without multicellular life.

But at this point, do you feel nature on planet Earth has evolved all "milestones" there are (and from now on, all additional complexity will have come from civilization, one way or another)?

I mean in terms of potential, assuming for a moment "nature" of some kind still exist during the next billion years or so.

Yes or No would be enough (lol), but of course spec evo ideas would be even cooler!

Nah I think there's absolutely infinite things nature could evolve some day that we can't even imagine. You really never know. Like it's 100% biochemically possible for something to "breathe fire;" there just has to be a sequence of mutations and the right competition to gradually make it happen, possibly starting with something that sprays boiling hot compounds like a bombardier beetle. I could also imagine a whole class of animals evolving like the modular people from All Tomorrows, because we already have Siphonophores. It's just a matter of something evolving to be a colony that can also come apart and keep functioning. I'm also obviously obsessed with the concept of a creature that weaponizes its own little symbiotic bugs, since I've used that a million times. Like maybe millions of years from now, a descendant of sloths will have upgraded from being full of moths to being full of tiny wasps? And then what if that's so effective they actually start diversifying like crazy and there's a whole era dominated by mammaloid wasp nest beasts ranging from grazers merely cleaned and guarded by their insects to predators who hunt with their assistance. Plant/animal physical symbiosis is also another thing that's not really taken off outside a few insects. Why shouldn't a plant some day decide it likes growing on some kind of animal's body? It's not a plant, but lichens grow on a species of weevil. It's so rare there aren't even photos, but I swear I saw video of one on BBC when I was a kid:

What if a moss adapts just to the shell of some big reptile and eventually the reptile starts to derive sustenance from it too?? Over time what if this evolves into basically real life Bulbasaurs, where the animal part can be sustained off sunlight? It'd just have to slow its animal metablism way, waaay down to meet the plant halfway. Maybe it hibernates for years and years at a time or spends decades developing like a cicada and then it emerges in pure mating mode, using up all the food it conserved as its flower finally blooms. I know most of my examples are now elaborations on something that's kind of almost already begun happening somewhere but you get the idea. Furthermore you never know if all life as we know it will die out one day while there's still a couple billion years left of the planet's physical existence. Then a whole new line of life could evolve that we can't conceive of at all, from the ground up. Like crystalline mineral trees that start talking to each other with laser light. Or maybe only bacteria are left but for some reason bacteria develop what they need to start sticking together and building a new kind of multicellular organism. What the heck would an equivalent to "animals" look like if the ancestor was a bacterium????? Holy fuck I'm mad I won't see it. Fuming and seething actually. This is the worst thing ever. Why am I doomed to die on regular animal planet with google bots and disney remakes. I wanna see salmonella animal planet. It's not fair.

[opencommunion]

"The Congo’s strategic location in the middle of Africa and its fabulous natural endowment of minerals and other resources have since 1884 ensured that it would serve as a theatre for the playing out of the economic and strategic interests of outsiders: the colonial powers during the scramble for Africa; the superpowers during the Cold War; and neighbouring African states in the post-Cold War era. To prevent a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Security Council deployed from 1960 to 1964 what was then the largest and most ambitious operation ever undertaken by the UN, with nearly 20,000 troops at its peak strength plus a large contingent of civilian personnel for nation-building tasks.

This latter aspect of the Opération des Nations unies au Congo (ONUC) was a function of the fragile political revolution ... The Congo won its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. Patrice Lumumba’s MNC-L and its coalition of radical nationalist parties had captured a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament in the pre-independence elections in May. Lumumba became prime minister and head of government, while the Abako leader Joseph Kasa-Vubu became the ceremonial head of state. The victory of a militantly nationalist leader with a strong national constituency was viewed as a major impediment to the Belgian neocolonialist strategy and a threat to the global interests of the Western alliance.

Within two weeks of the proclamation of independence, Prime Minister Lumumba was faced with both a nationwide mutiny by the army and a secessionist movement in the province of Katanga bankrolled by Western mining interests. Both revolts were instigated by the Belgians, who also intervened militarily on 10 July, a day before the Katanga secession was announced. In the hopes of obtaining the evacuation of Belgian troops and white mercenaries, and thus ending the Katanga secession, Lumumba made a successful appeal to the UN Security Council to send a UN peacekeeping force to the Congo. However, the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, interpreted the UN mandate in accordance with Western neocolonialist interests and the US Cold War imperative of preventing Soviet expansion in the Third World. This led to a bitter dispute between Lumumba and Hammarskjöld, which resulted in the US- and Belgian-led initiative to assassinate the first and democratically elected prime minister of the Congo.

... Brussels’ failure to prevent a radical nationalist such as Lumumba from becoming prime minister created a crisis for the imperialist countries, which were determined to have a decolonization favourable to their economic and strategic interests with the help of more conservative African leaders. With Belgium’s failure to transfer power in an orderly fashion to a well-groomed moderate leadership group that could be expected to advance Western interests in Central and Southern Africa, the crisis of decolonization in the Congo required US and UN interventions. Working hand in hand, Washington, New York and Brussels succeeded in eliminating Lumumba and his radical followers from the political scene."

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, 2002