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non sum qualis eram

@witchydarling / witchydarling.tumblr.com

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Are you looking for a blood-drenched beach read? Check out my summer camp slasher novella, EARTH CAMP!

It’s Friday the 13th… in the 27th century. Rabbit was looking forward to her last summer as a counselor at Camp Washington, despite the recent scandal that almost shut the camp down. She and her friends were supposed to spend the summer enjoying Earth’s wilderness before they return to the Moon for college. But when counselors start dropping dead, Rabbit realizes she’ll be lucky if she leaves Earth alive.

Cover art by the incredible @grendel-menz

I’m really proud of how this sculpture came out! The cat’s anatomy is exaggerated to highlight the pose and make it look more whimsical. The skull was really satisfying to sculpt, and the gold patterns were a lot of fun to paint. They are inspired by some of the carvings on old New England gravestones.

It’s been long enough since I worked at the hideously mismanaged nanotech startup that I’ve started romanticizing it. Like, yes the hydrogen explosion was scary and I’m entirely too familiar with the odor of decaborane, and yes the CEO and CTO got in a fistfight in the conference room, but nothing makes you feel alive like turning chunks of graphite on an ancient manual lathe with inadequate respiratory PPE.

Asbestosis-like lung damage via inhalation of loose airborn boron nitride nanotubes, nitrate-induced chronic migraines, and a crippling caffeine addiction build character.

Fondly remembering the day where we decided to try a nickel organometallic catalyst instead of our usual iron. The difference being that while nickel should be a better catalyst, if you get an iron carbonyl leak the room smells bad for a bit, whereas if you get a nickel carbonyl leak you’re dead before you hit the floor.

So much adrenaline! We went home wired and giddy, full to the brim with nightmares and scientific euphoria. Every day I dreaded waking up, and every day I held the raw stuff of miracles in my hands. Good times.

god lived in this box, I’m pretty sure

No. Even with such egregious safety shortcuts, they barely even scratched the surface of what was possible. Sure, they had drive and vision, but never enough for my taste. They weren’t mad. They were barely even eccentric.

And I was no mere hench! I know the process. Every single object you see in these pictures was designed and assembled by me, with my own mind and hands. And moreover, I know all the radical experiments that they were too timid to attempt. All I need is some space, a bit of cash, and a used furnace or two, and I will spin up an operation to put my erstwhile peers to shame.

For as much as they were willing to risk with our health, they were unwilling to risk the money. Honestly, I get it. People do stupid things when funding is on the line. Happens all the time. I can’t even be angry. I’m really not.

No, I’m not mad, I’m just… frustrated.

OP how does it feel to be a real life mad scientist

Ok so if you haven’t already heard of it, there’s an excellent podcast on engineering disasters (and sometimes engineering disgraces) called Well There’s Your Problem, and they have a segment at the end of every episode called Safety Third, which is listeners writing in about egregiously unsafe experiences they have had especially at their workplaces.

OP, I am BEGGING you to write in with this because I want so badly to hear their voices read your email with mounting horror as they get to the pictures of the box god probably lived in.

(Also if this is the first you’re hearing of the podcast, last week’s episode had the wonderful Maia Arson Crimew @nyancrimew to talk about cybersecurity among other things, which was excellent. On the whole, great podcast, would recommend.)

124 episodes of workplace drama?????? Holy crap, this’ll keep me occupied for a few weeks, thank you!

I am enjoying the fuck out of the notes here, most of which are variations on “I thought this was a bit and then OH MY GOD THERE WAS A PICTURE.” and look I’ve mostly worked in the corners of science that are founded in naturalistic variation with very little room for hubris and I still believed every word from OP there. I’ve seen with my own eyes a video of the time my friend genetically engineered a hamster for maximum rage, okay? I’ve seen the consequences of the horrors and the thwarted sulking of those whose hands have been slapped by IRBs or Environmental Health and Safety or IT. I have two different friends on IRBs and one of these days I’m gonna make friends with someone at EHS purely for the cocktail party stories. And that is in the relatively tame field of behavioral research, okay, I’m not fucking with the stuff of material reality here.

Also I’ve read the inimitable Derek Lowe’s Things I Won’t Work With and I have a healthy fear of applied chemists.

  • Igntion! is fantastic. Every time I read it I skip to the chapter on exotic rocket fuels and laugh at the boron chemists.
  • I read Hench cover-to-cover in a single night last year, and now it’s lodged permanently in my brain next to the Genius: The Transgression rules doc and a web serial called Fine Structure that I read in 2009.

You work as tech support for ancient supernatural beings who are trying to adapt to the modern world. It’s a frustrating - and at times dangerous - job, but at least your clients pay well.

“My Great Destroyer, Consumer of Lands, Harbinger of the Deep Seas,” you say trying to keep the exasperation from your voice, “you need to be connected to the internet to see your email.”

“{}@&_@&%(#(&@__!*_”

“Yes. Can you move the mouse to the lower right side of the screen? There should be some little bars that will tell you if you are connected to the wi-fi.”

“&%)!^*^$%^!_%_$}{|”

“No my Great and Terrible the wi-fi is not a rival god from the desert lands, it’s just the technology that let’s you see your email.”

“!*&){}|@*#”

“Good, that means you are connected to the internet. Now if you can open your browser, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or even Microsoft Edge.”

“!@^&)(&@!&&&@}|”

You mute yourself so you can swear. “Yes, you can use Internet Explorer to access your AOL email account. If I may offer a suggestion?”

“$%^&*@”

“It will be easier in the long run, I promise. But Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer a long time ago, and AOL is barely a company anymore. If you will let me walk you through some steps we can get you a modern web browser and a brand new email-”

“&^$}”

“Yes, with all of your old email.”

—-

Five hours of your life later, you’ve got the deep sea eldritch god set up with Firefox and a new email with forwarding from it’s old email. Just when you start to think that this job isn’t remotely worth it, a small crab-like creature crawls across your desk. (you can’t in good conscious call it a crab because it somehow has both too many eyes, legs, and pincers, and not enough of the same. yet your brain interprets the being as “crab”)

It’s about the size of a coffee mug and it holds something up for you, shaking one of it’s many claws at you.

You take the small thing, and crab scuttles away to where ever it came from.

The small thing in your palm seems to be a tiny treasure chest, the kind of thing that you’d put in a goldfish bowl. It feels wet and the kind of slimy something gets from being covered in seaweed.

You put it down on your desk just in time for it to rapidly expand, cracking a support on your desk and covering you in sea water.

Before you can get mad about it the chest opens revealing a small horde of gold, jewels, and a bottle of what you have to assume is pirate rum.

“Oh! Cool!” one of your coworkers say as they pop their head up over the cubicle wall. “I wish I got pirate booty once in a while.”

“Why, what did Thyrien, Emissary of the Sun, give you for helping them recover their steam library?” you ask.

“A sense of peace and calm about my life and place in the world.”

“Oh sounds nice.”

“It is. They also gave me this ceremonial headdress.” You coworker disappears for a moment and puts on a giant headdress that appears to be made from gold and platinum and has several truly giant diamonds all over it.

“Wow,” you say.

“Yeah, I’m thinking I should wear this to the next company mixer.”

augh god staff changed the layout of the mobile post/reblog

gonna have to remap my reflexes yet again