Fuck. I just. I was winding down, right? New OT, new Marcel Vos.

Then blammo. This absolutely impeccable live performance of Linkin Park's "Hands Held High" the recently-late Chester uncharacteristically doing the backing vocals, a breathtaking performance. Just devastating. Pile of goo and uncontrollable sobbing for like half an hour so far.

Just thinking about how awful it is that 13 fucking years after that performance in London, every goddamn word is still relevant.

---

It was 2007. We were so tired of war. So tired of Bush. Apprehensive about...what the hell is life gonna be but just more of the same shit for another 50 fucking years? College was going to be more high school, work (if you could even get it) was going to be more college. An endless dark tunnel stretching out into the future.

Minutes to Midnight came out, and was a good, solid album. And then this song. Not even the closing track, just in the middle as real and raw as a fucking IED.

And it was just the epitome of all our feelings about everything. It resonated with the bitterness and anger and fatigue. It was distilled millennial activist.

---

And it is a fucking sin it is still relevant to this day. Nothing changed.

Still wrecking me 15 years later. Goddamn Mike, you perfect lyricist.

It was a lot. It immediately flashes me back to that warm fall day, my teacher scrambling to turn off the classroom TV around 9am.

To the awful mid-March evening spent curled up and bawling my soul out on the bathtub floor under the shower as the buffoon in power did what we had feared for a year.

To that afternoon I came home to my folks crying at the TV, watching another American dream break up in the high atmosphere.

To the sickening night at the space, desperate to avoid the news I knew was coming but dreaded, watching the last glimmer of hope drain from Rachel Maddow's eyes on screen.

To a month ago, watching yet again as humanity fails itself. Fails to reach even the barest levels of ascendancy.

---

Fifteen years. I wish I could hope that fifteen years more we will see a difference, that this song by Mike and Chester will no longer ring true.

I truly, truly wish I could hope that much anymore.

So, hey, welcome, settle down, take a seat. This is my blog. It is little, but might eventually not be little.

It was fun putting it together; this blog runs on nikola, which is super easy to use and work with.

However, and this is a fun story for all you out there: turns out, ls and rm -rf are not the same! Who knew?

Thankfully, duplicity has been dutifully backing this machine up to Backblaze for...a long time, vigourously and with feeling, and so after about half an hour and a pint of ice cream (black raspberry and dark chocolate), I had restored my whole-ass webroot and we are back in business!

So yeah. Bye.

The LEGO BrickLive event was at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, so I went over to Jamie's place and we went to the zoo: 2021 GR Zoo BrickLive

You were a good cat. A grumpy old lady who tolerated us and the kittens. You met me back in 2008 by sitting on me while Cleo was furiously cleaning my laptop. Jasper rescued you and we eventually brought you downstate to live with us.

There was no such thing as too hard a scritch. You wanted it all.

We did our best, and you seemed to appreciate it.

Making the decision not to fight the aggressive cancer that suddenly swept over you this week was one of the worst I have ever had to make. But at the same time, I knew it was the right choice, for you and for us. You passed away quietly and quickly between us, content and purring.

We will miss you, Moxie.

"...this on? Yes! Ok. Technology is hard. Apparently you need to actually push the record button--"

"Love. You need to tell the story."

"Right! Right. Sorry. Story. Telling. Yes. So! Um. Regression review log, 2027 August 7th--wait, no, 8th. This is the first review of the Regression project, which has been deemed a, uh...fuck."

"Love. It is OK. No need to cry. You did your best."

"...sorry. Shit. Ok. The Regression project was intended to be an exploration of the new possibilities available in the WormCam from OurWorld. We had a hypothesis that, if we could enlarge the wormhole mouth and stabilize it, we could move not just light but larger matter, perhaps even molecules. The soft goal was to use it to extract living DNA from a passenger pigeon, so we could bring them back from extinction. However, another possibility became apparent early on..."

Kiara stood at the whiteboard over the hideous, sort-of-yellow couch, which had likely been old when her father went here. Marker in hand, she was rather lost in thought, distracted by a tangent spurred by the text on the board, hastily and messily written over the last four hours of fast-iteration engineering.

"Katie. Katie. Katie!"

"Yes, love?"

"What if. So. We want to move molecules. And Patrica and Genevieve are nearly done with the upgraded antimatter generator to stabilize the thing. Thing. Um. You know. Fuck! The mouth, right, so we are nearly there. So. Uh."

Katie smiled, patiently waiting for the other brunette's brain to catch up with her mouth.

"Where was I?"

Katie replied, "Molecules."

"MOLECULES! Right. Yes. Thank you. But we want to move them from the past to now. But. And do not quote me on this, because this is probably all bullshit and I just cannot see it here. But why can we not move molecules from now to the--"

"Past! No, I think you are onto something!" Katie ran a hand through her mane of dark, curly hair. "But what would you send back?"

The woman at the board blushed hard, the freckles across her nose vanishing, and her voice fails her partway through something. "...ones..."

"What? What has you so worked up?" Katie leans forward carefully on the ancient four-wheeled disaster that was a 1960s Steelcase office chair. She had had too many pitch-pole moments, kicking the chair across the room to get from desk to desk only to find the wheelbase turning to put two wheels perpendicular to her travel and the chair sending her flying into the heavily-waxed surely-by-now-not-still-asbestos tiled lab floor.

She notices the younger woman has dropped her hands to her waist (and the marker, to the floor), with the tips of her index fingers touching loosely. Behind them, a small bulge just under the hem of her skirt.

Kiara tries again, actually making a sound this time. "Hormones."

Katie suddenly feels a flush herself, and a tightening in points below. "...let me get this straight--"

"As if anything you do can be called straight--"

"SHUT UP." The woman at the board smiles through her blush. "You mean to say. What if we were to send hormone replacement therapy, back in time, to help late-decision transfolk transition?"

"Well. Um. Yeah, eventually."

"..."

"Uh. So. I was thinking maybe two. In particular. Like. Maybe even just one in particular."

"...gods you are adorable, and sexy, and I love you so much."

Kiara was not sure she could blush any harder, but her face was really trying. She dropped her gaze (eye contact, even with an intimate partner, was just so fucking hard) and worked on another phrase, the rest of her thought, and convinced it to actually come out. Her voice strained with the effort, fighting arousal and love and aphasia and anxiety to get all the words out, audible and in the right order.

"You. I want to help you. I want to help you get a better result from transition than you would if you started now. Maybe even better than mine."

Katie's face softened, filled with love. Something close to but not exactly like a word spilled from her mouth.

She composed herself, and tried again.

"You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. So. How do we do this?"

The women began to work.

A shower of cerulean sparks spewed from a scorched electrical panel, apparently not for the first or even perhaps the tenth time. The panel, seemingly held together solely by a sheer force of stubborn will and zip ties at this point, quickly got yet another dousing from a beleaguered Patricia, holding a refillable multi-class fire extinguisher.

The diminutive violet-haired woman swore profusely under her breath as the last embers succumbed to the foam.

"Your mothers be laid slick on a slab! Gorram couplers can't fucking handle the damned currents! Now, we're going to try this thing again, this time with feeling, and you'll work or I swear I'll smash every last blasted one of you into diamonds!"

She tucked an errant stray lock of exuberant hair behind one metal-laden ear, pushed her violet-rimmed glasses back up to the bridge of her nose, and began the test sequence again.

"...does she think the couplers can hear her?" Kiara asked, sotto voce.

"At this point, I think the couplers can hear her." Genevieve stretched and yawned. "Gods though, I think this is the last test for me. Some of us have classes in the morning, and it is well past the time I turn into a pumpkin."

"...can we make pie of you?" Katie quipped, entering the lab in a cloud of cardigan, skirt, and boisterous curly hair. "I could use something warm in my belly, it is godsawful out there today."

"Oh? I have not been outside in...fuck. What day is it?" Kiara searched the room for a clock or calendar, realized none of them were working at all, and turned to Katie again.

"Monday, love, around 07:15." Pulling off her cardigan and placing it on one of the hooks in the wall, Katie looked over the debris-laden tables, workbenches, ping-pong table, and floor, and sighed. "Love, how long have you three been here?"

Genevieve raised an eyebrow, "Well, I got here around midnight on Saturday, though I did go out and get the food. They were pretty settled already at that point, and each put away around 7,000 calories once they did not have to leave the lab." Chuckling, she idly scratched the back of her head along the shave, continuing, "If I had to guess, probably immediately after their last classes on Friday."

Kiara blushed and mumbled, "...Wednesday..."

Katie enveloped the taller woman in her arms, feeling her sag into the embrace with fatigue. "Love. You need to sleep. I will march you out of here into the blizzard if I have to."

"OH FUCK YEAH! Yo yo yo! Check this shit out!" whooped Patricia. Her face, flushed with exertion and filthy with grease and soot, beamed with pride as a screen filled with numbers beside her on what used to be a ping-pong table, long since converted into a work surface for the lab.

Kiara and Genevieve collided in their simultaneous efforts to traverse the room. Kiara paused and waved Genevieve through the narrow gap, amidst the strewn tools and failed components. "After you."

Genevieve shrugged and stepped gingerly over a tub of miscellaneous bolts and screws, hip-checked two dilapidated Steelcase chairs, and stood beside Patricia, ensuring that the violet-haired woman was between her and the electrical panel at all times.

Kiara attempted the same manuever and immediately went head over heels, having caught her skirt on the bucket. "'s OK. Just the robot puke reached out and grabbed me."

"Yeah, it does that. Just fucking come here already OK?" Patricia was practically bouncing with glee, ready to explode. "It. Is. WORKING."

Kiara composed herself and made it across the obstacle course, squinting at the flowing readings on the screen. She looked over at Genevieve, who nodded and said "She did it. Patricia, you are the queen technowitch of the coven. I bow before your prowess."

The brunette slowly started to smile, filling with joy and hope as the magnitude of the performance became clear. Absent-mindedly, she turned to look into the panel, seeing a pleasing blue glow flickering in regular patterns from the hastily-patched holes and scars in it. Patricia quickly intervenes.

"NO no no no. Not you again. You'll fuck this up right proper. No. You watch the screen; I'll dicker with the couplers, Kay?" The woman drew herself up to the full extent of her 130cm and glared down the woman who had over a head and a half on her. Kiara blinked, steadied herself, and sank wearily into a chair. Then immediately shot back up, having sat upon a pair of dykes. Moving those to the nearest clear-ish spot on a bench, she returned to the chair, crossed her legs, and put her fingers to her temples. She drew a handful of breaths, then looked up, wide-eyed and exuberant at the three other women.

"We did it! We successfully hacked the WormCam and got it to stabilize at almost two microns diameter! Great work. Patricia, do you think it is safe to leave open for a duration trial?"

"I'll bet my panties on it"

"...ok then. Go ahead and keep the log active, and I am going to..." catching a glare from Katie from across the former ping-pong table, the brunette continued, "...uh. I guess, like, go back home and sleep."

Katie smiled and took the younger woman's hand, gently supporting her as she gathered herself from the chair. "Love, I will take you home. Genevieve will help put this place to rights, a bit--" over the glaring protest made from that corner "--and then take herself to sleep."

Turns out, muffing with a partner is amazing in the moment, but it requires a lot of practice to avoid kind of a deep ache in your inguinal canals. Tucking tomorrow is going to be great. /s

However, if this is a price to pay for being taken to those heights by a beautiful woman, I will pay it gladly, and I look forward to the next time!