#horror #writer. Stories in the British Fantasy Society, 2022 HWA Poetry Showcase, Flame Tree Press, Crystal Lake Publishing, others. Codex, HWA.

Chief architect. Co-founder of Rocky Linux and the RESF.

New England.

https://semioticstandard.com

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Except NOTHING is being accomplished by targeting individuals like this. You’re not winning people over, you’re not changing minds, you’re not effecting change. You’re protesting the wrong people. I, as an example, am a huge supporter of education and change regarding climate change. But I still have to live and work within the very system I am protesting. You’re not doing anything by attacking allies like me. Instead, you need to go after corporations, and politicians. Those are the entities that are responsible for and have the ability to influence real action.



  • I drive a large truck because I truly need and use the bed on a weekly basis. I wouldn’t be able to get by without it, being more than a convenience thing, as I have tried (and failed) for years to use my wife’s minivan. There are a lot of things that you straight up cannot do without a truck. I live on 7 acres of mostly heavily wooded land. That kind of property has a lot of maintenance needs that you really need a truck for.

    But when I go to the city, I almost never go with anything in the bed. First, I think it can be unsightly to have my bed loaded up with rotting construction material or large bulky items that need to be taken to the transfer station.

    Second, it can be dangerous, depending on what I’m hauling. The load needs to be secured. I’m more likely to get into an accident in the city, so if that happens, now in addition to whatever comes off from either vehicle, now whatever else that I was hauling is going to be all over the place, impeding traffic even further.

    If my load is heavy, as it often is (think: maybe 1,000 lbs of cord wood), that has a pretty big impact on my gas mileage.

    And if it rains? Whatever is in my bed is going to get wet and soggy and nasty.

    And then there’s the winter. I live in New England. You may have heard about the snow we get here. My driveway is 1/4 mile long, and REALLY steep. I use my truck to keep it plowed. There’s no other way we’re leaving our property when the snow falls. But obviously I don’t have my plow attached in the off-season, so it wouldn’t be obvious to you that I also use it for that.

    So for many reasons, I need a truck. It is almost never loaded when I have to go into the city. It’s not lifted, I don’t have obnoxious wheels, but it’s a big truck (they don’t seem to make them any other way these days). Now I have to also worry about people with attitudes like yours taking their misguided vigilante justice out on my vehicle because you’re not thinking beyond your nose? Do you really think that’s fair?




  • Gentle reminder to try to assume best intention of others and provide nuance where appropriate. If by ‘conservative/right wing’ this person means they’re all about what these things have morphed into lately in the US (transphobia, homophobia, and otherwise thinly-veiled hateful notions), then I completely agree. Fascists aren’t welcome here. Nazis aren’t welcome here. Beehaw is explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. But there can be honest perspectives that fall ‘to the right’ of the liberal perspective that can and should deserve consideration (they just seem to be rare these days, as political discourse has become so polarized).












  • What a nightmare scenario. Can you imagine being trapped inside, sitting on the ocean floor several miles beneath the surface, maybe having lost power? It’s dark as pitch. Control panels dead. Maybe you have some light from a cell phone. You try to control your breathing to conserve oxygen, but you’re all but certain this is where you’ll die, a fact that you have several days worth of air to contemplate. All the mistakes you’ll never get to right, the things you didn’t do, the family you’ll never see, the pets who’ll never understand why you abandoned them. Through the cold, narrow hull, you hear the gentle susurrations of the current, and that’s it. Could be you have a ring back home you were going to surprise your girlfriend with, and all you can think about is how long it’ll be after the air runs out before she finds it. Maybe someone weeps softly beside you.

    Enough oxygen until maybe Thursday. Think about that. What must it smell like inside that cramped little sub? Sweat and body odor, obviously, but what do you do when four or five people need to piss and shit for almost a week? You can’t just contain that. Maybe someone has brought bags they can go in or something, but surely not enough for everyone for that long.

    And how will everyone react? You know how you’re going to die, and make no mistake, every single person on that boat knows how horrible it is to suffocate to death, clawing at your throat for hours on end until their fingernails have broken from their nail beds. What if someone breaks? Decides they want to go out on different terms, starts fidgeting with a pocket knife or something? Do you let them? Just sit there and let it happen?

    So there you are. It’s Wednesday. Power is out. Even cell phones with their little lights are dead. It’s cold, it reeks of human waste and the filth of unwashed bodies. The air, long since gone stale, is getting thin. No one noticed in the back there that Roy quietly bled out after secretly slitting his wrists, but now he’s starting to stink. Oh god, the absolute horror of a stench a rotting corpse must be in a tight space like that. A putrescence you can taste, thick like oil—which is exactly what the fat in his skin and body is turning into. Grease.

    You’re essentially alone, in the dark, with a corpse, and the thinning oxygen is playing tricks on you. So much so in fact that you start to wonder if you hadn’t maybe heard Roy back there starting to move. What does his face look like there in the dark, blackening from bloat and rot? Are his eyes open, staring numbly into nothing, milky and dead?

    That’s where my mind goes, at least. I don’t mean to make fun. It’s a horrible situation and I hope they’re rescued.