The Way Things Were

A month after they came home, the town held a party. A dance. The first dance Missy would ever go to.

Eight years ago, the war had taken the men. Six years ago, the boys. It wasn’t going well, they were told. What should have been a series of quick skirmishes somewhere far across the western ocean had turned into long, drawn battles. Men dug in on either side. Firefights. Defeat, defeat, defeat. They came for the boys. Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Even thirteen, if their parents signed. That’s what happened to little Davey Waller. His parents had been so proud.

Now they were back and none of it mattered. When they had left, it seemed they had taken fun with it. All of the dances and parties and sneaking off to drink in the fields her sister May always talked about, just gone. What was the point of dancing if there was no one to dance with? Who could bear the thought of parties when brothers and boyfriends were fighting in far-off fields?

Missy shook her head, her fresh curls swinging. She was wearing her prettiest dress, the pink one with the blue stitching. It’s all over, she told her reflection. The war had been won and the boys were back. Jeremy was back. Everything was going to be the way it was. The way it was supposed to be.

The dance hall in the middle of town was lit up and loud. It was exactly the way Missy had always wanted it. The front door were covered in streamers and balloons. People crossed each other, going one way and the other, passing, knocking into each other, laughing and yelling. A party. A real party. Not like her birthday last year. They had tried to have a party. It was in the backyard. Only a few people showed up. Then news of the war had interrupted the party music on the radio and everything was ruined.

The war ruined everything. But the war was over. Missy was grinning ear to ear as she stepped into the hall.

Kayla and Lottie were right where they promised they would be, around a little table next to the punch. They were so beautiful their dresses. Kayla in a light green and Lottie in blue and white checks. The three of them had made their dresses together, the very day news came that the boys were coming home. The same pattern, but different fabrics. They cooed over each other, running fingers through hair and begging to be told how to do makeup. Missy got them all punch, and then it was time to wait.

“Not much dancing going on,” Lottie said, and she was right. There were a few couples in the middle of the floor, swinging around to the band on stage. But mostly the floor was empty. This wasn’t right. The floor should be packed. People should be celebrating. It was her first real dance, there should be dancing.

“Everyone must still be warming up,” Kayla said, and Missy ignored the relief under her ribcage. Yes. Warming up. That must happen with all dances.

“What’s with Lenora?” Missy asked. She found the girl next to the far wall, half hiding behind a balloon arch. She was crying into a handkerchief while her two friends, Sissy and Doris, patted her back and tried to save her makeup.

“Oh,” Lottie said, dropping her voice so Kayla and Missy had to lean in. “They found Mickey at the port trying to board a dirigible.”

“What? To where?”

Lottie looked at her like she had worms for brains. “You know. Back there.”

Kayla took a long sip of her punch, as though she could erase what she knew with the fruit and the sugar, but this was the first Missy was hearing anything about it.

“He’s not the only one,” Lottie said. “Some of them made it. Burt Granger. Simon Towers. Simon sent Jessica a letter. I managed to read it before she tore it to shreds. He said he was sorry, but he met the love of his life there. Someone who ‘understood’ what he had gone through. He said none of us ‘silly girls’ here know what they’ve gone through.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Missy said, punctuating it with a giggle. “Of course we know. We’ve been learning all about it in school, haven’t we? They’ve been reporting on the news, haven’t they?”

Lottie nodded hard enough to loosen a curl from the top of her head. “That’s what I said! But some of them are still leaving.”

Missy opened her mouth and closed it again with a snap. She hadn’t seen Trevor yet. He always used to be late, she hadn’t thought anything of it. But what if he wasn’t late? What if he wasn’t coming? What if he was arrested, or on some airship crossing the ocean as they stood there? Missy stared across the dancehall at Lenora, still bawling into her handkerchief. Her friends had given up trying to save her face, and were now gently pulling her toward the door. Out the back, so no one would see.

Yes. Go out back. Don’t ruin this for the rest of us. The war is over and life will happen now. The dances and the parties. I can quit my job at the factory and stay at home. I will have a family. I will not be like May, living in the city in a woman’s house and working as a secretary. That will not be me, because the war is over and everything will go back to normal.

“Hi.”

The girls were finding excuses to leave, batting their eyelids and giggling to each other, and Missy knew she would find Trevor behind her. They had only talked once since he had come back.

This is it.

Trevor didn’t look happy. He didn’t look unhappy. But his face was neatly composed. Bland. Bags under his eyes. Missy barely noticed. She squealed and hugged him. Hard. Squeezing him. Enough to get an oof  out of him. But he didn’t push her away, didn’t say anything at all. He put his arms around her, lightly, and patted her back.

“Do you want to dance?” she asked, already taking his hand.

“Not really.”

Only a few couples were dancing. Older couples, she realized. None of the returning soldiers were on the floor. They were at the sides, talking quietly. Mostly with each other.

“Can we go?” Trevor asked.

“Go?”

“It’s loud in here. It’s giving me a headache.”

Missy wanted to dance. Missy wanted Trevor to want to dance. To get punch. To tell her about what happened. To listen to her. To laugh at her jokes. Things were supposed to be good, again.

“Okay.”

They walked out the front and away from the dance hall. Missy glanced over her shoulder sadly, hoping Trevor would notice. Maybe he did. He kept walking anyway, holding her hand, guiding her to the park. The new war memorial was still going up. A soldier with a rifle hanging his head. They had carved Davey’s name the other day.

Too quiet.

“I’m going to quit my job at the factory. They don’t need us anymore, now that the men are back, and they say if you quit they’ll give you a bonus on the way out, so I think I’m going to do that. Some of the girls are going to fight for their jobs, isn’t that crazy? Things are going to go back the way they were, they don’t need to work there anymore. The men do. Will you get a job? Or go back to school? I heard the high school is going to offer nights and weekends so you can get your diploma. That will be nice, right? You could have your diploma in a couple of years and then maybe still go to college like you wanted and-”

“I’m not staying, Missy.”

They were in the middle of the park. Same old park, just as it ever was, only now with a war memorial in the middle. It was quiet here. No one else. They were all at the dance hall. Getting back to normal. Like Missy was supposed to.

“Not staying?” she asked, pretending like the words weren’t his.

“I…can’t. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try. Will you listen?”

Missy nodded, but she was already thinking of ways to change his mind. To convince him to stay. Convince him things were normal again.

They were supposed to get married.

“…do you understand?” Trevor asked.

“Of course not,” Missy said, anger suddenly rising. She hadn’t heard what he’d said but it didn’t matter, did it? What could he possibly say to make her understand?

“Nothing’s the same, Missy.”

“But it could be. You don’t know what it’s been like here. Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. I didn’t get…I didn’t get…” She wasn’t supposed to complain like this. The things she lost were of course not the things he had lost. That didn’t change the fact that she had lost those things.

Trevor put an arm around her, pulling her close. “To be a teenager. I know. None of us did.”

Missy took his hands, pressing into his chest. “Don’t you want to go back to normal? We can make it happen. It might take some work, but we can put everything back the way it was before.”

Trevor held her the way he used to, let her press into him, and Missy could feel everything she had lost coming back to her. Until he stepped away so suddenly she almost fell.

“I don’t think we can. And I don’t know I even want to try.”

Other things were said. None of them mattered. Alone in the park, Missy thought about Lenora, and wondered if her crying was the same as hers.

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Of the Future and the Past

It was Saturday, two in the morning, and they were where Saturday two in the morning always took them: the far side of Northfield Park, close to where the state forest started but not quite in the state forest. Drinking in the state forest came with hefty fines and, at this point, probably jail time. Drinking next to the state forest came with diddly squat. After getting kicked out of the bar they’d take their truck and a couple of six packs and drive down to the park and then into the park. As long as they stayed on the east side of the wooden fence, no one ever seemed to give a shit. Here, they could be alone, and talk about all the important things they couldn’t talk about in the light of day, or around other people.

“They’re not canon,” Ray said.

“They fucking are, how can you not see this for fuck’s sake,” Lonnie said.

They both shook their heads at each other while sipping from their beers, bottles swinging back and forth against each other like some weird prop in a stage play.

“They’re books, okay?” Ray said. “Books. Written by lots of different people-”

“Oh, and the movies and shows are all written by the same fucking person?”

“-And some of them contradict each other-”

“George is just out here penning every God damned line.”

“and they’re not immediately accessible to the general fandom.”

Lonnie held his hands out, sloshing beer over the side. They had already each finished four of their six beers, although each one had gone a little slower than the last. These last two could sustain them for another hour. At least, they could if they didn’t keep spilling.

“Immediately accessible?” Lonnie asked. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

“Everyone can see a movie! They take, what, two hours at most? But books are harder. And there’s too many to keep up. Walk up to any random person on the street, ask them if they know-”

Lonnie held up a hand in a stop motion and asked Ray a single question.

“What?”

Ray frowned, trying to figure out if Lonnie had actually lost the plot or if this was some new tactic of his to win the argument. Lonnie wasn’t looking at him. Lonnie was looking over him. Up, at the sky. Ray turned to follow his gaze and felt his bowels turn to water.

The round ship hovering over the park should have made noise. Lots of noise. It was barely thirty yards away and roughly the size of a barn, if the barn was completely round and made of smooth metal. It was completely silent as it sat fifty feet over a bunch of soccer field. Despite the fact that it was a smooth metal ship with no windshield or obvious front, let alone a face, Ray and Lonnie were both convinced it was staring at them. Waiting.

Ray took a sip of his beer.

“What the fuck,” Lonnie whispered at him. “How can you drink at a time like this?”

“What?” Ray whispered back. “It’s just sitting there.”

“We are in the presence of alien life forms-”

“You don’t know that.”

Lonnie shot the back of Ray’s head such a look of incredulity it should have set his thinning hair on fire.

“I would love to know what else that could be, Raymond, if not an alien spaceship from outer space.”

Ray, keeping his eyes on the as-yet-unconfirmed alien space craft, shrugged his shoulders. “Could be one of them military ships. Something they don’t want anyone to know about yet.”

“So why the Christ would they be flying it in front of us?”

“I don’t know. Why would aliens be showing up in front of us?”

Ray had him there, but Lonnie didn’t want to admit it. He took a long swig from his beer, hoping something would happen with the ship before he Ray could say anything else.

With barely more sound than that little hiss of carbonation when a bottle was opened, three spots at the base of the round ship popped out. The spots lengthened to become landing gear, and in a matter of seconds the ship was sitting on three legs.

“If it is the government,” Ray asked, “Do you think they’re here to tell us off for parking on the grass?”

Lonnie sighed.

Another spot on the ship opened up, this one larger and a little higher up. They’d both seen movies to know what was happening – whoever was inside was finally coming out.

Stairs stretched down from the ship to the ground. Light, white and painful to look at, poured out from the new doorway, making Lonnie and Ray squint. New shadows cut through, followed by the sounds of footsteps on the stairs and across the grass.

When Ray and Lonnie dared to look up again, they were face to face with a couple of actual, living aliens.

They mostly looked human. Actually, it was terrifying how human they looked.

Real uncanny valley shit, Ray thought to himself. Like Max Headroom banged one of those high-tech sex dolls and popped out a couple of them CW teenagers. They were too tall, too muscular, their faces too pretty. Something about their face was wrong in a way Lonnie couldn’t place. Waxy, almost, but also too dry.

“Fellers,” Lonnie said, nodding his head. Ray wanted to strangle him.

“He-lo,” one of the aliens said in a stilted, new language sort of way. “I…am…Sool. This is…my…associate…Trell.”

“’meetcha,” Lonnie said. “I’m Lonnie, that’s Ray.”

“Will you stop talking to the aliens like they’re out-of-staters?” Ray asked.

“Well, what the fuck else am I suppose to do, Ray? Bow and kiss their feet?” He turned to the aliens. “Is that what you want? Bowing?”

Sool made a sound that sort of sounded like a laugh after a head injury. “No bowing. That is…uh…um…unnecessary.”

“Cool. So, what brings you to earth?”

“Lonnie, I swear to God…”

Trell smiled and Lonnie almost shit his pants. “We are…scientists…doing important work. Very important work. We need specimens. Yes, specimens.”

Ray and Lonnie gripped their bottles, cold sweat breaking out on their foreheads and neck. They knew all the stories, heard crazy Denise ranting about it back at the bar. Alien kidnappings. Probing and such. Not stuff they ever thought was real, let alone something they’d actually have to worry about. Ray started thinking about running and serpentining. Lonnie started thinking about how Ray would definitely start serpentining and that would let him get to the truck first.

Sool held up something he’d been holding the whole time. It looked sort of like a tablet, only completely transparent and glowing a color neither of the men had ever seen. If forced to identify it, Ray would have called it burnt orange-brown-purple, and Lonnie would have called it the color of stubbing your toe in the middle of the night on the exact ottoman you told yourself to put away before you went to bed and forgot. Sool tapped a few times with his unnaturally smooth fingers, and just as Ray was about to bug out, the alien held up the tablet.

Some sort of dinosaur was pictured. Ray and Lonnie didn’t know much about the things except what they had seen in those Jurassic Park movies Hollywood refused to stop making, so they didn’t know precisely which one they were looking at, but they both knew a dinosaur when they saw one.

“We are looking for these,” Trell said, pointing. “We think they are…scientifically interesting…and would like to…um…study one. Yes.”

Ray and Lonnie looked at each other.

“Dinosaurs?” Ray asked.

Sool and Trell made inhuman sounds that either indicated delight or gas.

“You know them?” Sool asked.

Lonnie shrugged. “Everyone knows the dinosaurs.”

“You will bring us to the…dinosaurs,” Trell said. “Please.”

Lonnie rubbed the back of his head. “I’m pretty plotzed to drive that far.”

“Me, too,” Ray said. “Museum’s in the city, prolly…I don’t know, two hour drive? And they won’t even be open until the morning.”

Sool deliberately blinked, perhaps noticing the way Ray and Lonnie blinked. Of course, now Ray couldn’t not notice that Sool and Trell didn’t blink at all.

“This is where they live?” Sool asked. “Museums?”

“Well, not live,” Ray said. “That’s where the bones are, though. And those dioramas they make.”

“How do you think you get a job making those, anyway?”

“Not now, Lonnie.”

“We do not understand,” Trell said. “We do not want bones. We want to see the live dinosaurs.”

Lonnie was the first one to understand, and was now faced with the unenviable task of explaining to aliens almost definitely wearing skin suits that there were no more living dinosaurs on the planet and hadn’t been for so long that the number meant literally nothing to Lonnie. He was also fairly certain these aliens were wearing human skinsuits and didn’t know how they would react to finding out that-

“The dinosaurs are all dead,” Ray said.

“Fucking hell.” Lonnie rubbed his face.

“We do not understand,” Sool said.

“Yeah, dead,” Ray said. “Long dead. Like, millions of years dead. Right, Lonnie?”

“I was going to ease them into it, Ray.”

Ray considered that that might have been the better course of action and took another sip of his beer.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to spring it on you.”

Trell shook his head and shoulders in stiff motions. “You said everyone knows the dinosaurs.”

“Yeah, and everyone knows they’re dead, too. Ancient stuff.”

Trell and Sool spoke to each other in rapid, low pitched buzzing noises that were definitely not coming from whatever human mouths they were wearing. There was a definite sound to the noises, frustrated sounds, but the human faces were completely blank and pleasant.

“This does not make sense,” Sool said after a few seconds. “We saw them on our scopes. It is why we came.”

Ray shrugged, at a loss, but Lonnie had an idea.

“Y’all got that FTL? Faster than light travel?” he explained when they didn’t recognize the acronym.

“In a way. It…what it does…it does…I do not know human words. Yes, faster than lightspeed.”

“Well, there you go,” Lonnie said, like it was obvious. Which it was. To him. The other three only stared at him with the same blank face until Lonnie sighed. “I don’t know where you’re from, but it’s obviously far enough that the light reaching you from Earth is from millions of years ago. When the dinosaurs were still alive. See? That’s, like, the whole basis of lightspeed. Or something. But then you skip on over here faster than light and end up in the present, and you’ve missed them. By a lot. Need a time machine to get back to them, I think.”

They started talking to each other in their language again, the human faces eerily still. They seemed to be getting angry, but at each other, so Ray felt like it was probably safe. Slowly, another thought bloomed in his mind.

“Y’all aren’t scientists, are you?”

The aliens stopped arguing and turned to stare at him.

“Yeah, see, I didn’t totally understand what Lonnie here was saying, but it sort of sounds right. But then I got to thinking, shouldn’t you two know about lightspeed and the past and all? You’re not scientists. Fuck, I bet you two are just kids who jacked their daddy’s ship for the weekend.”

The two aliens stared at Ray. Lonnie couldn’t decide if Ray was completely right or if they were about to be vaporized. Or both. Both could happen.

“We only wanted to see the dinosaurs,” Trell said, sounding sad.

“They looked…human word…they looked rad,” Sool said.

“Probably were. Now you’re stuck with a bunch of hairless mammals,” Ray said. “That sucks.”

“Hairless mammals with consciousness,” Lonnie added. “Super sucks.”

Ray nodded sagely. “Yeah, we’re terrible.”

Sool kicked the ground a little, his face a neutral rictus. “We should go home. Before…father…”

Without so much as a ‘bye the bye’ the two alien teenagers climbed back into their perfectly round spaceship. The ladder rose up and sealed shut, followed by the legs, and then the smooth ship rose up silently and crossed through the atmosphere. Ray and Lonnie watched until the little light blended in with the stars and winked out of existence.

“Welp,” Ray said. “No one’s going to believe that.”

Lonnie looked up to the sky again and nodded. “Really puts all our problems into perspective, don’t you think?”

Ray nodded with him , then frowned and shook his head. “What the fuck are you talking about?

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Strange Reality

SMACK

Alina shot up out of bed, the threadbare blanket falling around her ankles. The only light was the faint flashing from the billboard across the street making it in through the cracks of her window shield. The only sounds came from the street three stories below. And her heart, thudding in her chest and sending blood woosh woosh woosh-ing through her ears.

Dead asleep. Exhausted from a double shift at the docks. Drunk from the double forties she’d had on the elevo back. If someone had wanted to do a little b’n’e they could have stripped the whole phloxing place and left her in the middle of the empty floor. Why anyone would want to steal from her was a phloxing mystery, anyway. She didn’t own shit.

Her room was empty. Every direction her eyes darted to held nothing but what little she owned and a lot of darkness.

“Lights on.”

The yellowed recessed bulbs obliged and she forced herself to look around even through the pain of wide open pupils. Door lock. Windows closed. Nowhere to hide. Alina was alone.

So who the phlox has smacked her awake?

Alina took a breath. Her arms had been up in dukes since she had woken up, and she let them relax next to her. Her right arm fell to her side, a hand on her hip.

Her left arm did not. It stayed in a fist, gleaming dull in the light. No matter how much she told it to go down, it stayed there. Frozen.

It smacked her again.

“Hey!”

One step away from the bed and her foot got caught in the blanket. Alina went down heavy. Her right arm went up to protect her head from the steel floor. Her left hand tried to smack her again.

“WHY.”

Phloxing great. She was exhausted, hungover, on the floor, and now her arm was malfunctioning. She had gotten the stupid thing updated only a few days ago, too. Some buggy as phlox update. The point of the update had been totally lost on her, as had all the others, but Alina was sure it hadn’t been to install a ‘random slap’ upgrade.

Now wrestling with her own arm in the middle of the night, trying to reach the kill switch in the armpit, Alina had time to reconsider every shitty choice she had ever made in her life. Mostly she regretted drinking that second forty.

Her arm tried to smack her again and she ducked underneath. Thank the stars I never had the chains for the brain jack. It waved around, trying to jerk her across the floor, wiggle her, keep her from reaching the kill switch. But when she had finally found it and was a couple of seconds into the ten second press, it finally stopped.

It hit the floor a couple of times. Held up palm with all the fingers splayed. Then held up two fingers.

Peace.

Alina squinted an eye and released the kill switch before the ten second mark.

The hand gave her a thumbs up, and then made another motion over and over. Holding a pen. Writing something.

“What.”

Somehow this phloxing, malfunctioning arm managed to look exasperated. It opened and closed its fingers, then made the writing motion again. Then threatened to smack her.

“Okay, okay,” she told the mechanical fingers. “Phloxing thing, hold on.”

Stars, do I even have a pen? A marker? Pencil? Paper?

The answer, of course, was no. There wasn’t any reason to have any of that dreg, and if she couldn’t afford a brain jack she definitely couldn’t afford a pen.

The malfunctioning arm waved.

“I’m thinking!”

Makeup.

Her sink and cabinet were on the other side of the bed. Tucked on the little silver shelf under the sink was her bag of makeup. It had little pink pigs on it. The malfunctioning arm was not helping, so Alina had to get the bag open and the eyeliner out with one hand.

“There, there!”

Clumsily, her left hand took the eyeliner and got it in position. Still, it just waved around. Looking for something to write on.

“Eh, phlox. Uh….”

Paper, paper, she didn’t have any paper! Flyers, receipts, phlox, everything was digital now. Annoyed, confused, and wondering if she was still in the depths of a bizarre dream, she went to her little table by the window and guided her left hand to it with her right.

U NEED 2 LEAVE. NOW. THEY R COMING.

Alina blinked. Her malfunctioning mechanical arm didn’t write anymore, merely tapped on the table insistently.

“They?”

NOW.

A sound from outside her front door. Small. Unmistakable. In any other situation ignorable. Alina looked at the words smudged on the table. The sound again.

Footsteps.

It’s just a neighbor. Yeah, that’s right, it’s just Mrs. Aliskin. Wandering the halls. At two in the morning.

The window shield opened quietly enough. The window itself, which hadn’t been opened anytime in this century, not so much. Luckily for her a couple of speedpunks were racing by, revving their engines with the intent of waking the entire block and maybe winning a race, who knew, not Alina, all she knew was by the time the roar of the bikes was fading the window was open enough for her to slip out onto the grated fire escape.

Slip out of my own apartment. Running like I’m some kind of lander. This is ridiculous.

Still, she ran. Something felt wrong. She was halfway down the creaking, rusted fire escape, wearing only a thin top and shorts, arm miraculously working again (still clutching the eyeliner), and wondering if she had maybe gone completely insane in the past few hours, when from above her a new sound trumpeted out the still-open window.

Her door being blown in.

“Phlox.”

She jumped off the last landing of the fire escape. A slapped burn curdled her feet as they hit the pavement at the wrong angle, but Alina didn’t have time for that.

They were coming.

To be continued…

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The Horizon Zero Dawn Blanket: Joining It All Together

The HZD Blanket

Index of Squares

Photo Gallery

Well, here we are. The last little bit. All over except for the crying. I’ll have the specifics of the blanket over on the index page, but basically I’ve been working on this thing nonstop for fourteen months. Could someone else have done it faster? Of course. Could someone else have done it better? Definitely. Does any of that matter? Of course not! I’m the one who came up with the idea, and I set myself to do it. Now, if someone else comes along and decides they want to do the same and produces something better in the span of six months…

Then I’ll be very happy for them! I don’t own this idea. Do what you want.

Before we really get started, I wanted to include a little PSA:

Don’t Buy Fast Fashion Crochet Items

Honestly, the real PSA is ‘don’t buy fast fashion.’ Fast fashion are all those clothes from Shein, Wish, and even Amazon, Walmart, and Target. The really cheap clothes that chase fashion trends that only last for months. The clothes people buy, wear once, and then throw out or donate, which a lot of the time is just throwing it out with extra steps. Of course, as always, the damage done by the consumer is miniscule compared to the damage done by the corporations, who produce these clothes with slave labor, send them to other nations with a huge carbon footprint, and then often toss the tons of clothes they don’t sell directly into landfills. Or ‘donate’ them to African nations who have no use for several grosses of the same thin t-shirt with a pithy saying, so then all that tonnage ends up in African landfills.

What you can do to help is never buy from these brands, never buy a piece of clothing you can’t see yourself wearing for at least three years, and once you are done with a piece of clothing see if you can recycle it around the house. Oh, and vote for the people who might actually be able to stop these corporations from killing us all for profit. That’s standard, though.

Some of these fast fashion places have started to sell crochet pieces, and anyone who crochets is immediately cringing so hard their eyeballs have popped out of their skulls. People who don’t do fiber crafts often don’t understand the work and time that go into a single project. They know people will make their own clothes to save money, so they think that handmade stuff should be cheaper and never consider that the money saved is replaced with time. And while knitting can be recreated by machine, crochet can’t. Which means that someone, somewhere, spent their day in a sweatshop crocheting cardigans until their fingers cramped only for H&M to turn around and sell it for, like, ten bucks.

I have worked over four hundred hours on this blanket. If I’m getting paid federal minimum wage of $11.25 an hour, then already the blanket is worth $4,500. Meanwhile, AliExpress is advertising a ‘handmade afghan crochet blanket’ for less than a hundred dollars. Holy fuck. I know some people crochet fast, but no one is working that fast. Honestly, I wouldn’t buy crochet pieces from any major store.

Thing I Learned From this Project

You may not remember or know, but when I started this project I was still mostly a beginner. I had crocheted a few hats and scarves, and a table placement that quickly turned into a cat mat, but there were a lot techniques I still couldn’t master even after crocheting on and off for literal years. I figured a project like this would introduce me to lots of stuff, and I was right! Yay! The things I learned include:

  • Reading written instructions. Up until I started working out of The Big Book of Granny Squares I was dependent on YouTube tutorials.
  • Invisible increases and decreases
  • Corner to corner
  • Working in the round. I had done hats, but those are supposed to cup. Getting round pieces to lay flat is surprisingly hard.
  • Granny squares. Obviously.
  • Weaving in ends
  • Specialty stitches. Including lattice, front post and back post, and double treble.
  • How to join all of these squares together.

Speaking of that last one:

Joining the Squares Together

There’s a lot of techniques for this, and I went with one called zig-zag, although I kept thinking of it as braid.

There are some joins that are completely invisible, like the mattress stitch, and there are other joins that put a lot of distance between the squares, like the flat braid. Zig-zag is in the middle. It’s visible, but doesn’t add any space between the squares. I wanted something that would clearly separate the patterns, but this blanket is already so fucking big I definitely did not need any more length.

Something I noticed about this stitch that might entirely be me because I’m still not great at crocheting but I’ll mention it just in case: it can look a little wonky if the stitches of both squares aren’t lined up properly. This wasn’t a problem with my Carja and Shadow Carja squares that had been worked in rounds. But the Nora squares had all been worked in rows, and because of the patterns I had to connect them a little unevenly, so…

It also didn’t help that while all of the squares are roughly the same size, they all had a different amount of stitches on their outside. For instance, the Carja Blazon Master had twenty-eight stitches along each edge, but because the Carja Blazon had been worked with some of the biggest stitches in the blanket there were only twenty-three at each edge. When this mismatched happened, I did invisible decreases on the larger side, which is noticeable but only if you know what you’re looking for.

Like the rest of the blanket, not perfect but still my best work to date.

“How to Join Granny Squares”

I kept searching that, along with a few variations, but I kept getting results on different stitches and weaves. What I wanted was the next step: how to actually go about using the zig-zag stitch to get all the squares joined together as efficiently as possible. And by efficient I mean ‘with the least amount of ends to weave in.’ I never found it (maybe I never found the right search term?) but I figured something out on my own.

First, I stitched together the left border. In doing so, I also stitched every other square of the next row, like so:

I tried putting this picture sideways but it took on this funhouse quality and made me want to throw up.

Then, starting at the top, I went back and forth, stitching the squares in a sort of zig-zag (it’s zig-zags all the way down). Like this:

This way, I was getting all sides of the squares without having to cut the yarn repeatedly or cross my work. I had a single, unbroken piece of yarn going from top to bottom. I don’t know if it’s the best way to do it, but it worked for me.

Border

I initially wasn’t going to do a border around the blanket. I had already made a border with the blackout squares and didn’t think it would need one. I quickly realized I was wrong, for two reasons:

  1. Some of the squares end up a little lopsided next to each other, and the border smooths them out.
  2. I didn’t feel like going around and weaving in all the ends individually. The border locks them all down.

This blanket is so big a simple double crochet border around the whole thing still took me three nights.

I Don’t Know What To Do With My Hands

I’m trying to break before I start my next project but it’s like I don’t know how to live my life anymore without my hands tying yarn into knots. Do you…do you just sit there? And watch the television with idle hands? How? How? I’m trying to take a week’s break because the zig-zag join is so different from the usual way I crochet my hands are all cramped, but…I don’t know how. All I know is yarn now. It only matters for the next week, though, because come February 18th I only have my sights set on one thing.

Horizon Forbidden West

I know everyone says not to preorder games, and for, like, 99% of the time I totally agree. I was all aboard the Cyberpunk hype train but I never pre-ordered and, well…

But I was never not going to play Forbidden West, you know? Even if the reviews came out and said everything about it was terrible, bad story, janky as fuck…I would still play it. That’s how much I loved Zero Dawn. And while there’s always the chance Forbidden West could be disappointing, I doubt it’s going to be bad enough for me to be completely disappointed.

And I wanted more outfits, God damn it!

So, I’ve got my preorder. I got the PS5 (from PlayStation direct. I’d rather get kicked in the teeth than buy from a scalper). I even got the purple controller because I’m an adult and I fucking wanted one. I have taken off the following week from work. I plan on buying all the non-greasy snacks I can find, wrapping myself in my new blanket, and planting myself on the couch for the duration.

Will I make a blanket based on this game? Maybe? Definitely not for a while. You can be sure if I do, though, I’ll drag you all along with me again.

Thanks For Playing Our Game!

If you’ve been reading these since the beginning, or if you’ve just popped in, thanks for coming! My website doesn’t get a lot of traffic, so I appreciate everyone who took the time to follow me on this journey.

Happy gaming, and happy crafting!

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The Horizon Zero Dawn Blanket: Photo Gallery

The HZD Blanket

Index of Squares

Completed

Comparison to Map

Outfits

Nora Outcast
Nora Brave
Nora Survivor
Nora Protector
Nora Silent Hunter
Oseram Sparkworker
Oseram Arrow Breaker
Banuk Werak Runner
Banuk Ice Hunter
Banuk Sickness Eater
Banuk Ice Hunter Master
Carja Blazon
Carja Blazon Master
Carja Trader/Silks
Shadow Carja Stalwart

Settlement Squares

Mother’s Heart
Rost’s Home
Mother’s Crown
Free Heap
Pitchcliff
Song’s Edge
Meridian
Sunfall
Sunstone Rock

Special Squares

Tallneck
Cauldron
Metal Flower

Miscellaneous

Stacks of granny squares
Blocking
Block chain
Fat Stacks
I cover the blanket so Louis can’t eat the loose strings. Doesn’t stop them.

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Quiet Love

She was in the other room when it happened.

Love doesn’t always come with fanfare. Sometimes there is no dramatic reveal, no tearful proclamations, no trumpets sounding and heavens parting, etc., etc., you get the picture. Those moments exist, of course, as all things must, but they are shooting stars in night skies filled with dull, static twinkling. Of course, those shooting stars are nothing more than seconds of hot excitement burning quickly down to nothing. Those dull, unmoving bits are built to last.

So, while he was in his bedroom, trying to get an unruly bit of fur just in front of his left ear to lie flat and being wholly unsuccessful, she was in her own room, trying to decide which dress she should wear. It was early spring and the weather of the day was so hard to predict. At that moment the sun was streaming through her window creating pools of warmth at her feet, but what of the breeze? Would it continue to get warmer as the sun climbed, or would the temperature stay just above chilly? Clouds could roll in and bring a storm with it, the worst kind of storm with fat drops of near-freezing water and winds that swept under dresses and…well, she supposed, if it got that bad they simply wouldn’t go outside.

Finally the choice had been narrowed down to two dresses, both with heavy skirts and thin long sleeves that would be easy to throw a coat over. One dress was a red that was almost light enough to be called pink but not quite, and the other was a dark green with a fur trim. All of her choices this morning had been a struggle akin to pulling teeth from a lion who really hadn’t been in the mood for a dental appointment, but putting the almost-red dress away and preparing the green dress turned out to be as easy as getting eaten by a lion with a toothache.

“What color is that, even?” he had asked the last time she had worn it.

“It’s pink,” she had said, smoothing the skirts. She had quite liked the color, actually, but he had been looking at her like she had dressed herself in nothing more than vines and lily pads.

“It’s not, though. It’s not bright enough.”

“Then it’s red.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not dark enough to be red! It’s this color that’s stuck in the middle, like it can’t decide what it wants to be.” He raised his voice to approximate the voice of the color, barely pulling it up from its usual baritone to a tenor. “‘Maybe I’m pink, maybe I’m red! It all decides on my mood, teehee!’”

Hearing a little girl’s giggle come from a seven foot furry giant with a falsetto still deeper than her own voice had almost succeeded in breaking through her resolve, but a lifetime of successfully navigating the outspoken and often bullheaded opinions of her old village kept her face perfectly stony.

“Are you telling me you don’t like this color because it doesn’t have its shit together?”

He had spread his arms out in that way he did, that way that meant, well, am I wrong?

How on God’s green earth was she supposed to answer such a meaningless question? This had been one of the more surprising pieces of him that she had discovered, once she had worn away through the layers of sadness and resilience and betrayal. He had the tendency to climb…no, it was far more like a sprint…yes, he had the tendency to sprint to the top of some new hill and declare that he would die on top of that tiny patch of green before admitting that colors didn’t have personalities, or that horses couldn’t read minds, or that the harpsichord wasn’t a bad instrument, but it was wildly overrated.

The worst of it was, he could be terribly persuasive in his insanity. With both dresses in front of her, she found she couldn’t deny that maybe, perhaps, in some small way that really made no sense yet made all the sense in the world, that pink-red dress really was…well, weak. It was a color of weakness and one she didn’t want to wear because she wasn’t a weak woman. Maybe that had been why he had balked at it. Not only at the color, but at seeing it on her. He was a distinctly weird sort of person, but he wasn’t wrong, and-

And that was when it happened.

She looked at herself in the mirror, half in and half out of the green dress, a strong green that didn’t waffle about what color it was, and she let out a breath.

“Oh, fuck, I love him.”

These moments are quiet, and quite nonsensical, but they are as important to love as all the trumpets and all the vows and all the speeches and all the dances and all the deep passionate kisses put together. The quiet moments, when someone comes to the sudden realization that the person they have spent so much time with is deeply weird, and that realization leads to a further realization that they don’t hate it. That, in fact, the weirdness only makes their affection grow stronger, and truer, and they wouldn’t want them any other way. They wouldn’t, in fact, want anyone else, because no one else will be weird in the way this person is weird.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the castle, he had gone to find the pomade and was about to put a dab of it on that bit of fur that wouldn’t stay down (the next step being shaving the whole area and telling her some story about a fight with the hairbrush) only to step in front of the mirror and discover that the fur was already gone. Not only that little patch, but all of the fur, everywhere. He’d also lost the horns, and the tusks, and about a foot of height. All of his clothes sagged around him, and when he lifted the pants off the floor he did not find hooves, but pale toes wiggling.

He stared at those toes for precisely fifty-seven seconds. The world had been remade, something he had been desperately hoping for with every fiber of being sewn into him and onto him and around him, but it hadn’t happened the way he had been led to believe it would happen and so nothing was making sense. This was all from a simple erroneous assumption on his part. The curse that had brought his other form into being could be broken by love. He thought it would be that other form of love, with a declaration and tears and perhaps even a song. But the curse said nothing of a declaration, only that the love be present. And now it was. Perhaps if the love had arrived with an air of drama the transformation would have been made with a matching energy. As it were, her realization had been simple, and so had the transformation. Beast one moment, man the next.

“Oh, fuck, she loves me.”

This, of course, was a good thing. Not only because he had fingers again, but because he had come to the same realization about her not a few days before. They had been sitting together at breakfast, simple scrambled eggs and fruit salads. He noticed, not for the first time, that she was saving all of her blueberries. It wasn’t that she disliked blueberries, because he knew she would eat them at the end.

“Are blueberries your favorite?” he had asked. “You always save them for last.”

She had simply shrugged. “I don’t like or dislike blueberries anymore than any other sort of fruit. But they’re full of themselves and they need to know where they stand.”

He had only stared at her as she delicately tore apart the eggs and ate them bit by bit, serenely  unaware of the complete insanity that had come tumbling from her mouth only seconds before. Falling completely in love with her in that moment was as natural as a horse reading your mind.

After the near-minute of staring at his wiggling toes, he looked at the rest of him. It only took a few seconds more of study for the reality to finally fall within his grasp, and then he was running down the hall. He slipped and fell three times, unused to human feet, but eventually made it to her room. She had only just finished pulling the green dress on and was going about pulling the strings and tying the ties when a strange blond man in baggy clothes ran in screaming.

“You love me?”

Following was a scene most humorous, wherein he only realized his mistake after she had come at him with a sword he didn’t know she’d stolen from the library shortly after she’d arrived. These, really, are only hiccups in the drunken toast that is love.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone: Why the PNW is Boned

Hop on over here for a history of discovering this ticking timebomb.

What Will The Next One Look Like?

Buckle the fuck up.

As mentioned this fault is not like the San Andrea fault, with it’s two plates rubbing against each other in parallel. This is a subduction zone, where the Pacific plate is pushing the Juan de Fuca plate underneath the North American plate, but something, somewhere, has become stuck. That doesn’t stop the pushing, though. The North American plate over the Juan de Fuca plate is gradually becoming compressed at about an inch or two a year. Eventually, there will be enough built-up pressure to overcome the sticking point, and that land is going to decompress. Violently.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone has been calculated to be able to cause a Magnitude 9.2 earthquake. On the surface that doesn’t sound much worse than the 8.3 the San Andreas is capable of, but what you need to know is that earthquake magnitude is a logarithmic scale, which essentially means the worse things get, the faster they get worse. Intensity ramps up like a fight in the last two minutes of a Housewives episode and a 9.2 earthquake is roughly thirty times bigger than an 8.3. It makes The Big One look like The Manageable One. And research suggests there’s a one in ten to a one in three chance of it happening in the next fifty years.

So, let’s walk through a worst case scenario.

Your Name is Beezer

You’re a twenty-six year old sharing a house with your best friend Kyle. You love sharing a house with Kyle, but you also hate it and you’re only doing it because neither of you can afford a house on your own. It’s a two bed, two bath, with a sweet unfinished basement. In fact, that’s where the two of you are, having a jam out session.

The first thing that happens is your dog, Austin BowWowers, starts losing his mind. Barking, spinning around in circles, running around like he’s trying to find something. You don’t know it, because you and Kyle spent a week last summer putting up sound insulation to keep your stupid neighbor Mrs. Frances from complaining to the HOA again, but all the dogs in the neighborhood are having a Class Three Doggy Meltdown.

The plates have finally slipped, and sent something called a compressional wave along the ground. Humans can’t detect them, but dogs sure can, and while they don’t know what the fuck is about to happen, they do know they’re not supposed to hear them.

You don’t know any of this, because why would you? Austin BowWowers flips on you, you tell him to knock it off and toss a Milk Bone at him, and then forget about it. You never even connect it with the shaking that starts about ninety seconds later.

When it first goes off, you have no idea what it is. You’ve lived outside Portland your whole life and you’ve never experience an actual earthquake before. Your first thought is the boiler is about explode, and you take two steps toward the basement stairs before Kyle, who moved here from LA, tells you to calm down. Earthquake. Not even a big one.

Except then the shaking doesn’t stop. In fact, the shaking gets worse. And worse. Kyle stops giggling. This is more intense than everything he has ever experienced, and it just won’t end. The lights cut out. The house starts making weird groaning sounds and you swear the top half of the house is about to rock off the bottom.

It is. This is the first time you die. Nobody knew they needed to build earthquake proof buildings until, like, the nineties and since then they haven’t done a very good job of it.  Your house was built in the seventies, and when the earth pulls the foundation one way, the rest of the house stays put. And then falls in on you.

It’s the easiest way you’ll die today.

But Maybe You Weren’t in the Basement

Maybe you were out on the front porch smoking legal marijuana with Kyle. Now you hear the dogs barking but you still don’t know what the fuck is going on. Then the shaking starts. Kyle fills you in. At first, he tells you to stay near the house, but as the shaking continues and ramps up in intensity, the house behind you starts making some fucking weird noises. Kyle tells you to run into the yard. The two of you stand in the middle of your two hundred square foot patch of dead grass and hold on to the ground for dear life. The power cuts out, and transformers all around you explode in greens and purples. People are screaming. Your house collapses in on itself, as do the others on the block. They were all built at the same time, after all. The ground below starts to act more like a liquid instead of a solid and you want to run but where the hell would you even run to? The road splits behind you and Mrs. Frances Ford POS falls in. There’s an explosion. Then another. Gas lines all over the place are getting snapped in half, and it only takes a single spark.

Finally, after roughly six minutes, the shaking stops. Despite the intensity, despite the mayhem around you, the two of you are okay. The two of you start giggling because laughter is a valid emotional response to trauma and you are still high as balls. Kyle says you should stay put and see what shakes out – literally and figuratively. He’s used to earthquakes from the San Andreas Fault, after all, where the worst after-effects of an earthquake are aftershocks and fires. He says to stay, see if emergency services can come, see if there’s more shaking.

Within the next half hour you’re both dead, because there’s something about this earthquake that Kyle didn’t know was coming.

Tsunamis 101: Down, Up, Woosh

The Cascadia subduction zone is not a strike-slip fault like San Andreas. It is a subduction zone. A huge portion, hundreds of miles, of land directly under the ocean will be shoved down before rebounding back up a hundred or so feet away. The very basics of tsunami creation. One wave will be shoved out across the Pacific to inconvenience Japan in roughly ten hours. The other will have destroyed the coast of the Pacific Northwest in about thirty minutes.

The two of you are still carefully wandering around the neighborhood surveying the damage when the ocean shows up. Depending on where you are off the coast it will be anywhere from twenty to one hundred feet above your head and will be going about twelve miles an hour. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but a fully grown man can get knocked on his ass in ankle high water going only six miles an hour. And think about the miles of land it had to get to you. You don’t live near the beach. Everything is mixed in with that water. Land and dirt from landslides. Entire cars. Hell, entire buildings. This is not something you can surf to safety. This is the end.

But Maybe You Knew It Was Coming

You and Kyle like to watch National Geographic a lot. You’d seen stuff on the potential for an earthquake here. As soon as the shaking stops you both know there is only thing to do: get Austin BowWowers in your Jeep Rubicon and drive east. Hell, you even pick up Mrs. Frances as she’s stumbling away from the ruins of her house and shove her in the back with Austin BowWowers before peeling out of the driveway and around the sinkhole that ate her car.

You know your goal: Interstate 5. Everything west of the interstate is going to be completely destroyed. You have to get east of the I5, and then keep going. Now that you’re in a car, the twelve miles an hour pace of the tsunami seems easy to beat.

Except this is the part where you die, like, three dozen times. Remember, everything has already been destroyed in the worst earthquake the continental United States has ever seen ever. You get stuck in traffic with others also trying to outrun the wave. You get caught behind huge tears in the ground even your precious Ruby can’t get across, or piles of rubble that used to be buildings that the Jeep just can’t get over. You have to know exactly where you’re going, and it has to work out perfectly.

Eventually, finally, you make it past the interstate. You just keep going. You’ve survived the Cascadia Megathrust earthquake and the tsunami that followed.

Oh, and One More Thing

You have an aunt living in the middle of nowhere in eastern Washington so you just keep driving. Thank Christ you filled up two days ago because the gas stations are all mob scenes. Very few people understand what happened and everyone’s panicking. You drive straight through and have to talk down your Aunt Sheryl because she tries to blow you away with her shotgun before you can even get the door open. You and Kyle and Mrs. Frances and Austin BowWowers pile in. She’s got a generator going, and you flip on the news because what the fuck else are you supposed to do?

They’re talking about it, of course. But there’s also about a one in four chance that’s not the only thing. Looking back through the records of the previous forty-one earthquakes, scientists discovered that that the Cascadia megathrust earthquake triggered the San Andreas fault eleven separate times. So, in one of these universe where you’ve made it to Aunt Sheryl’s, you’ve done so just in time to hear that the San Andreas has finally snapped. The Big One. There will be no other tsunami when the San Andreas goes. Just those fires that Kyle was so worked up about. Good thing out of control fires aren’t really an issue in southern California.

Aunt Sheryl goes into the basement to get the emergency moonshine and the five of you watch as the destruction of the entire American west coast unfolds in real time. At least until the generator runs out.

Sources

The Cascadia Subduction Zone: The PNW Has Been Boned

The Big One

In case you missed that day in sixth grade science class when your teacher played the earthquakes episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy because he was hungover and wanted to sit in the dark while he nursed an oversized coffee mug full of Pedialyte and questioned his life choices, the crust of the earth is broken up into tectonic plates typically the size of continents and oceans.

Pictured: God surveys His mistakes, circa 1998.

These plates are floating around on molten lava, so they’re constantly jostling each other. Because the plates are made up of a bunch of broken geology mashed together, these plates often get stuck as they try to move. Pressure builds until it’s finally enough to get past the sticking point, and then the Rock shows up to punch the earth back into submission. Or something. I did watch that movie, but only as background while I played around on my phone.

Fault lines are where those plates meet, and the most famous is probably the San Andreas Fault (I’m assuming, anyway. I can’t name another fault, besides the one we’re about to talk about. If you can name another fault, please email me at goodforyou@jeopardyknowledge.com). It runs through most of California, but it’s the southern portion that will someday produce (overly dramatic drum roll)…The Big One. The northern section produced the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and the central section the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, but the southern section has been without a major earthquake for over three hundred years. Three centuries of pressure building like a forgotten beer in the freezer. This is something scientists generally refer to as ‘A Bad Thing’ and officially refer to as ‘Oh Shit, Oh Fuck, We Are So Fucking Fucked’ (see also: climate change).

There is some relatively good news. Due to the depth of the Fault and the way it’s stuck, scientists believe that it could only ever reach an 8.2 on the Richter scale and is currently primed for a 7. Because it’s almost entirely on land and, again, because of the way it will move there’s almost no chance of it causing a tsunami. Most importantly, because the Fault produces regular earthquakes of the non-city-destroying size, everyone who lives in southern and central California know that earthquakes are part of the package. No one in the San Fernando Valley is getting rocked awake at two in the morning by a 4 and thinking to themselves, ‘This wasn’t part of the advertised packaged!’ Everyone knows the Big One is coming sooner or later, and that knowledge means that a lot of people and local governments are more or less prepared.

Golly, could you imagine living on top of a massive fault line your entire life and never even knowing?

Cold Coals in the Ring of Fire

The Ring of Fire is a colloquial term given to just about every coast that touches the Pacific Ocean. Starting in New Zealand, you can trace it all the way up through the islands of the western pacific and the east coasts of Asia including all of Japan, until it crosses the northern ocean to meet Alaska and then covers the entirety of the Americas’ west coasts. Unlike a lot of other science terms, the Ring of Fire is exactly as dramatic as it sounds, describing places where shifts in tectonic plates make earthquakes and active volcanos pop off at semi-regular to constant intervals. Japan is shook by minor tremors on a close-enough-to-daily basis, and the earth tries to toss Chile into the ocean every sixty-ish years or so.

Only, there was a gap. The Pacific Northwest of the United States, specifically Washington and Oregon, wasn’t known for having major earthquakes despite being dead squat center of Earthquake Alley. There have been some, of course, but comparing the amount of earthquakes recorded in Oregon or Washington to the amount in California or Alaska is like comparing the amount of sexual partners of the average male to Wilt Chamberlain. Back before plate tectonics were understood, scientists were probably all, “I don’t know, I guess the ground ghosts don’t like to do haunts here,” but eventually scientists realized a lack of ghosts was the least of their problems.

 They figured out the next part through logic. The San Andreas Fault, with its two plates grinding against each other in parallel, is actually an outlier. Most of the plate movement around the Ring of Fire is subduction, where one plate is diving under another. In the Pacific Northwest, scientists discovered that the relatively tiny Juan de Fuca Plate is being shoved under the North American Plate by the slowly encroaching Pacific Plate. The eastern end of the Plate was melting and forming the Cascade volcanoes (including Mount St. Helens, which famously exploded sideways in 1980). The western end, near the coast, should have been setting off earthquakes as regularly as every other subduction zone along the Pacific.

It just wasn’t. There were two possibilities here: the fault was stable enough that it never produced earthquakes, at least not big enough ones to be noticed. Or the area went through cycles of stability broken up by literally earth-shattering events, and the Pacific Northwest had been in one of those stable periods the entire time white people had been there.

You can guess which one made them shit their pants.

The Ghost Forests of Washington and Oregon

I know what you’re thinking, and you can stop packing your ghost hunting shit right this second. Ghost forests are not called that because the trees are infested with ghosts, and you are not mere days away from starting your own ghost hunting and befriending adventure. Your time is soon, buddy, but not today.

No, in a ghost forest the forest is the ghost. Broken stumps jut out from unforgiving sand and surf as though pointing a finger at the sky in indignation. In the Pacific Northwest, these dead forests can be made of old spruce and cedars, and are found along the coastline. Some of these ghost forests are thousands of years old and are simply the result of time marching on. Land changes, ocean waters rush in, the trees are like, ‘I fucking hate salt,’ and they die.

Some of these ghost forests, though, are much younger. And there was something else odd about them, too. In the late 80’s a geologist named Brian Atwater was at one of these ghost forests in Washington and, being a geologist, followed his basic nature and started digging. Instead of finding evidence of a gradual death, he found the exact opposite: a layer of local grass that had been preserved under the sand, indicating that the forest he was standing in had died in a matter of a minutes. These trees hadn’t been slowly smothered to death by encroaching ocean waves. The land they had all been chilling on had, seemingly out of nowhere, dropped an entire five feet, effectively dunking the trees and their roots directly into the ocean. Imagine what would happen to your self esteem if the literal ground beneath you went, ‘You know what, fuck you lmao’ and fucking destroyed itself to also destroy you. You wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone for a month.

Because Atwater was an actual scientist and not that ‘ancient aliens’ meme guy, he understood that the only thing that could have caused that sort of damage was an earthquake followed by a tsunami and not, you know, ancient aliens (real quick fun fact: ancient aliens aren’t real and ancient alien theories are thinly veiled racism. It’s just a white dude saying, ‘It’s literally easier for me to believe that a bunch of intergalactic travelers came here for the express purpose of building a smattering of pyramid shaped buildings for unknown reasons than to admit brown people are capable of construction.’). In fact, with help of another scientist, David Yamaguchi, they were able to determine that the forest’s death wasn’t even ancient! Because trees are insanely good timekeepers (seriously, if you are even three minutes late to a tree party they will all judge you harshly long after your dead corpse has become fertilizer for their roots) they were able to pinpoint a ten month period that this possible earthquake happened: August 1699 and May 1700.

Unfortunately there are no records from that time period. Barring some lucky break, it seemed the investigation into the missing earthquakes was at an end.

Some Lucky Break: The Orphan Wave

If an earthquake had happened, and if said earthquake had shifted the face of the earth enough to kill a bunch of forests, than surely the tsunami it set off would have been massive and far-reaching. Hey, where does the word tsunami come from, anyway?

So, someone gets the idea to go searching through Japan’s records. Japan’s history with earthquakes and tsunamis is long and exhausting, and they have detailed records of close to every single one going all the way back to about 599. Various towns and prefectures had kept their own records going back centuries, and these records were collected into a single catalogue in 1899. It was through this thorough record keeping that researchers learned about the Orphan Wave.

Every tsunami in the records had come after an earthquake, except one (probably. I’m not doing a deep dive here. What I’ve looked through implies that there wasn’t any other incidence of a tsunami without an earthquake, but I did not personally go through all of the records myself). This one had seemingly gotten all liquored up and decided to start a good time on its own, crashing the party without ever being invited. The villages that the waves overran were all asleep when they showed up, because there hadn’t even been a tremor to warn them it was coming. We now know how far and how fast tsunamis can travel and still be deadly, but at the time it must have been a terrifying development. The leaders of one village referred to the wave in their record as the Orphan Wave because it had no earthquake parents.

You can already guess when the Orphan Wave struck and what it was caused by. The interesting thing is, the record of this lone tsunami is so meticulous we know precisely when it struck: midnight Japan time, January 26, 1700. A seismologist named Kenji Satake finally put all the pieces together in a 1996 article: A massive 9.0 earthquake rocked the Pacific Northwest at around 9 pm on January 26, 1700, then sent a tsunami to go wake up Japan. This was what scientists were looking for. Further research has discovered that the area experienced a cataclysmic earthquake forty-one times in the past ten thousand years, a rough average of one every two-hundred and forty-three years.

How Fucking Cool Is That?

Before moving on, I really want to make sure we’re all appreciating how cool this entire scenario is. Why hasn’t somebody made this movie yet? In the span of about thirty years, we went from ‘this area doesn’t have earthquakes,’ to ‘wait, this area should have earthquakes’ to ‘oh, Christ, this area has bad earthquakes we’ve just been lucky and that luck is going to run out,’ and we got there with the help of a bunch of dead trees, a tsunami on the other side of the world, and a whole lot of science. I keep saying ‘scientists’ not to be vague but because there were a whole lot of disciplines involved. Within half a lifetime science was able to solve a mystery we didn’t even know we had.

Thunderbird and Whale

There are no written records from the Pacific Northwest around 1700, but not because there weren’t any people. The people who lived there kept their history in an oral tradition. One of their stories is about Thunderbird and Whale.

There are a lot of variations, as there usually are in oral storytelling, but the basics are often the same. Thunderbird and Whale have a fight. Sometimes Thunderbird is the bad guy, other times Whale fucked around and found out. What is strikingly similar, in each telling of the story, are the effects of the fight. The earth bucks or trembles as Thunderbird slams Whale into the ground, and great waves come in from the ocean and wash away land, trees, animals and people as Thunderbird drags Whale through the ocean.

There were also a lot of stories floating around from great and great-great grandparents that generally dated to the time of the earthquake that just…describes the earthquake and the landslides and the tsunami.

It took the people involved in solving the mystery of this 1700 earthquake an embarrassingly, but not surprisingly, long time to think of asking the native peoples if they had any sort of record of it. By the time they did, it only served to support their theories. As always, maybe if white settlers had actually listened to the people who knew the land they had been living on for generations, we might have been able to avert disaster.

Two Hundred and Forty-Three Years Ago

Eagle-eyed and calendar owning viewers may have noticed something fun in this article! The average time between earthquakes is less than two hundred and fifty years, and 1700 was over three hundred years! Now, of course averages are not strict schedules, but scientists have a term for this sort of differential.

Fucking. Yikes.

We’ll talk about what that means for the Pacific Northwest right here.

Sources

Hot Take: Tony Stark is a Selfish Pissbaby, Actually

My God, Tony Stark is not a good person.

Like, I know he’s not supposed to be the best guy. Obviously. He’s one of those heroes with a bit of an edge. You know, a Bad Boy. Like the scraggly one from the Backstreet Boys. Kevin, I think. Tony Stark is Kevin from the Backstreet Boys. I think the MCU even tones down his character a bit because I don’t know much about the comics  but I’m pretty sure he was a full blown alcoholic there.

So, I get it. He’s not supposed to be a fucking paragon like Steve, but it seems to me that he’s a lot shittier than the movies would prefer you to believe.

Iron Man

This whole superhero business is new for everybody. Not only Tony, of course, but also SHIELD. At the end of his first movie, there are already processes in motion to keep the identity of Iron Man a secret, to protect Tony and the people he cares about and also probably SHIELD and the government? Like, Tony was literally in the Middle East blowing up terrorists on his own time and if the US government doesn’t claim they have NO IDEA who this madman is it’s going to create a fucking international incident.

He gets half a minute into the God damned cover up before blowing up the whole fucking thing. And why? Why can he not keep his fucking Iron Man in his pants? Because a lady reporter was a little salty about being pumped and dumped and was a bitch to him in front of other people, so he’s got to be a bitch right back. You can’t hurt Iron Man’s fee-fees where all the people drooling over his every word can hear or he’s going to immediately go nuclear and make everyone’s life harder including his own.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Everything is 1000% Tony Stark’s fault.

Captain America: Civil War

Tony is at MIT tossing his money around, like he likes to do – I will give him that, he does seem to like to toss money around to whoever ends up in his eyeline which is better than our actual rich people who won’t even pay their fair share of taxes – and on his way out the back he runs into a woman. Said woman had a son who died in Sokovia and she specifically blames Tony. As she should. And the fucking look on this rocket-douche’s face…not only has he apparently never even considered the possibility that innocent people could get hurt during his escapades, it’s also never occurred to him that people could dislike him. At all. This lady fucking breaks him.

Immediately after the scene where Entirely Correct Lady blames Tony for her son’s death, Steve Rogers tries to comfort Wanda by telling her this:

“This job…we try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody. But if we can’t find a way to live with that, then next time maybe nobody gets saved.”

Somebody needs to tell Tony this. Because he can’t fucking live with being confronted with killing one innocent person while trying to save the fucking world. He can’t handle it so much he runs off to Daddy, aka the Secretary of State, to take all the responsibility away from him. His life would be so much easier, you see, if someone else were making the decisions. If, when something went wrong, Tony could point up the ladder. No, no, sir, it’s not my fault the mission went wrong and innocent people ended up dead. I was told to come here by the American government, so it’s their fault. I can’t handle anything being my fault, so now it’s all theirs.

He tries to act all superior, like he’s living on some advanced plane of existence and the rest of them are too out of control to understand, but really he’s the one who can’t handle feeling bad about something for more than two seconds and decides he needs to take it out on the people he considers friends.

Also, Tony Stark is absolutely the only Avenger who would think it’s a good idea to recruit a literal fifteen year old as back-up for his shitty feud, and then feed said literal fifteen year old lies about how Steve Rogers, grown ass man, doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Jesus Christ, Tony, if you just fucking talked to Peter like the adult you’re otherwise treating him like, if you had fucking told him you treated his tip seriously and gotten the FBI involved, than that ferry wouldn’t have gotten split in half. Get therapy and learn to communicate you unhinged, selfish manbaby.

Avengers: Endgame

They could have used the infinity stones to reset reality.

They could have used the infinity stones to reset reality.

They could have used the infinity stones to reset reality.

I don’t give a flying fuck what goes on in the comics, so don’t come at me with some sort of argument based on colored dots on paper. Everything we’ve seen in the movies points to all six infinity stones essentially being the toolkit of the universe. You can do anything. Literally anything.

The movie makes it explicitly clear that they cannot reset the timeline for whatever timey-wimey bullshit rules they decided to set, but I’m not talking about resetting the timeline. I’m talking about resetting reality. Those five years happened. Thanos snapped his purple sausage fingers and half the universe’s population disappeared. Then, someone snapped their fingers and it’s 2018 again and everything is the way it was. Nobody who didn’t get snapped remembers the past five years, so for all intents and purposes, it didn’t happen. You’ve got the infinity stones. Easy peasy fuck-you squeazy.

But, no. Nope. Can’t do it. Can’t erase five years of deaths and destructions and pain and heartache and civil unrest and wars and shit. Because I might erase my daughter.

I know there’s going to be a lot of parents out there who are going to support what Tony did. “You don’t know until you have a child.” “You can’t just sacrifice your own baby.” “Baby baby child baby parent baby child? Baby baby baby!” I hear you. I don’t care.

 It’s the entire fucking universe versus a kid you could still have. The infinity stones are the cheat codes to the universe and instead of using them to erase five years of heartache Tony decides to bring everyone back just so he can keep his kid.

Or…or… fucking snap your fingers and fix the fucking universe and keep your kid. Who gives a shit if it doesn’t add up? Seriously, who would fucking care? The universe sure doesn’t. I guess the TVA would but honestly, fuck those people.

Also, how, exactly, did everyone ‘come back?’ Like what about people who were flying? Did they suddenly find themselves in a very odd situation where they were sitting on top of another passenger? Or did they snap back to some undetermined location 35,000 feet above the ocean? Were unborn babies snapped? Did they show up back in their mother’s womb and burst something or what? There’s so many holes in this fucking plan it goes well with ham and mustard. Not to mention all the people whose significant other got blipped so they moved on with their life and got remarried and now whoops, the other one is back. Do you really think the entire world is okay with a thruple situation, Tony? You inconsiderate turbo melon? The world got fucked in the face when half the population disappeared, and then fucked in the ass when they all came back. It’s a God damned Golden Gate Bridge of tragedy.

If he’d gotten over himself and snapped reality back to how it had been five years before, he could have brought back Natasha.

In Conclusion

I’m glad he’s dead.

A Plan Awry

The train station was still busy even at this hour, but the park itself was dark and quiet as they ran in from the west. They came to a stop at the fountain. Chris sat on the side to catch his breath. According to the old clock high above the train station, they were late. Chris shook his head.

“They should be here by now.”

“Give them some time,” Zeke said. His voice was tight and he was looking wildly in all directions. “It’s not like they ran out for some milk.”

Chris stood up and started walking around the fountain to see if they were coming from the other side.

Allis was in front of him. Smiling.

Chris screamed. He backpedaled fast and came inches from falling onto the ground before Enid grabbed him and pulled him back and up.

They all stepped into the thin light of the lamps above the fountain. Allis. Arcadia. Dalia. Juan. The vampires they had failed to kill so far. The vampires they were supposed to be going after now.

“You know who I want.”

With those words from Allis the other three came at them. Zeke tried to push Chris away, tried to tell him to run, but they were on him too fast. He swung blindly, hoping to connect with anyone. Someone shoved him hard. His forehead connected with the edge of the fountain on the way down. Pain poured in and his sight poured out but he forced himself to get up immediately, because otherwise he might not be able to do it at all. Immediately he was hit again. He raised an arm, against what or who, he didn’t know. Was it the hit or the surprise of them showing up that had made him so terribly confused?

Chris got three steps around the fountain before he was grabbed by the back of his shirt and thrown onto the grass. The ground underneath was hard and the sting radiated out from where the back of his head and bounced. Arcadia stood over him, the look on his face as blank as ever.

“Where are you going, darling?” Her voice was clear and easy, coming from behind him. With a glance up he could see her, behind him, over his head. Without thinking about it he found himself trying to get up and move away. Arcadia’s foot swung out into his ribs. Air left him noiselessly.

“Arcadia, no,” she said. “Bad. Don’t be mean.”

Chris tried again to rise. This time it was Allis’s foot that found his stomach.

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay down,” she said, her voice losing nothing of its pillowy sweetness. Allis knelt down next to him on the pavement.

“Do you know something, Chris? If I were to grow bored of my game and just drop you and forget you right now, even after all I’ve taken, you could still get it all back. Maybe not in this city. Maybe not for a while. But move to some other place with museums and schools and give it some time, and eventually, you’d get a new job, a new wife, a new life. Two years, three, five…eventually, it would be long enough ago that people would forget it.”

She had moved in a flash, no longer sitting next to him but on top of him, weighing down his guts. Her face was only inches from his. They were in front of the busiest train station on the coast. Where were the people? Were there really no people at this hour?

Allis’s hand caressed his cheek.

“A new life, with everything you want. Those new people would take one look at that handsome face of yours and they would just have to give you a new chance.”

She sat up again, examining him with a contemplative look. A small sigh escaped her.

“That handsome face.”

The world split in two.

Zeke had never heard a scream like Chris’s before. It was big, and loud, and made entirely out of pain and fear. Looking back, it was the thing that saved him. One more punch to the face, like the one Dalia was lining up at that exact moment, would have done him in. His nose was already broken, his lip fat, his eyes swollen. Most of what he could see was dotted with stars, and spinning faster and faster. One more hit and he’d be KO.

And then Chris screamed. Dalia got distracted. And something in Zeke’s brain finally clicked back into place.

He was in a fight. And if Zeke knew how to do anything, it was fight.

He took the half a second of Dalia’s distraction and hit her hard in the mouth. Before she had time to do anything else the stake from his jacket was in his hand and her heart. She faded away with a scream. Zeke got two steps towards Chris before Juan was on his back and a car horn was honking and honking, getting closer. Using what energy he had left, Zeke pushed Juan backwards, forcing him to land in front of the fountain.

Juan had only stood up when the car came screaming over the curb, across the grass, and directly at him. The brakes screeched, but the car went headfirst into the fountain, pinning Juan to the concrete and crushing his head against the edge. The sound of crushing metal filled the air. Zeke could see the airbags pop inside. Seconds later the airbag from the steering wheel was being beaten down and ripped out. The car switched gears and roared to life, pulling backwards from the fountain, revealing the half of Juan that had been left behind. It halted, switched gears again, and pulled up next to Zeke.

“Get in the car!”

Mindy was driving, looking just as destroyed as Zeke felt. In two swift movements Zeke flung open the door and flung himself inside

Before the door was even shut she gunned the engine and did a donut, missing Arcadia by inches. Zeke understood what she was doing and left the door open. Mindy slammed on the brakes so they were next to where Chris was still on the ground. Allis was already gone. Zeke pulled him up by his shoulders and Mindy gunned it again.

“Are they coming?” Zeke asked, closing the door.

“No,” Mindy said. She could see Allis and Arcadia standing next to the fountain, watching them drive off.

“Why the hell not?”

“Does it look like I know?”

“Well, it’s not really a good thing, is it?”

“No, it’s not…What the hell did they do to him?”

Zeke looked down at Chris, sitting on the car floor with his head on the seat between him and Mindy. His hands were covering up his face. Blood was seeping through his fingers. His shoulders were hitching in silent sobs.

“She cut him up. I can’t tell how bad it is. We need to get to the house.”

“We can’t, they’ll-”

“Chris needs stitches, I can tell that much,” Zeke said. “We can’t take him to a hospital. Caleb has that first aid kit in the kitchen. We get to the house. They might know where we live, but they won’t be able to get in.”

Mindy cut the corner at the next light hard and pointed the car in the direction of the house.

“How did this happen?”

“I don’t know.”