The Solarpunk Mammoths Novel: Part 2

So I started on January 1st posting the alpha draft of an original novel I have in progress, and I'm collecting a list of people who want to be added to the privacy filter I'll be posting under henceforth, but I figured I'd do at least one more unlocked since I've been building up the follower list and such, and more people might be interested etc. So this is the continuation of that!

What's this about, you say? Intro Post
Missed the beginning? Well, Chapter 1 part 1 is here, and will remain unlocked; if you have a friend who you think might like this, feel free to link them to it! I'm still working out how subscription filters and such work, so like uh, join me on this journey, eh? (By which I mean, let me know if you want to keep reading, and I'll add you to the filter, and we'll figure out what to do from there.)

(And there's another snippet from a side story I worked on of this 'verse, here, if you want even more background, but it's not from the storyline of the main novel.)

Yeah in hindsight I should've posted chapter 1 as one 5000-word chunk, but I didn't. Next post will be a more discrete chunk.


Chapter 1 part 2, 2500ish words, in which our heroines arrive at the city:

From her higher vantage point, Ula saw the mills sooner than the others, so she had a moment to stare at them: Huge, long buildings, several stories high, set next to the millraces where the diverted water from the waterfall coursed, turning the wheels whose geared shafts turned long belts, strung all through the huge buildings. Ula had studied them in school, too, and knew how they worked, and she’d toured the mills as a child, had been shown the terrifyingly loud machinery that the water powered, and how many different kinds of machines could be hooked up-- drills, looms, grinders, saws, anything that needed power to move.

Most of the water wheels ran machines, but at least one of the buildings, also studded with solar panels, was a power generation facility, that made electricity to run the city. Enormous bundles of power cables ran out from that one, strung along on poles a distance before vanishing underground into pipes. It wasn’t that they didn’t have electricity, out in the hills, but they didn’t have all that much of it, and lived their daily lives without any great need of it. They had a little solar bank built into the south face of the ridge near the ancestor shrine, and made do with that and kinetic banks that the kids or some of the livestock could crank up. They’d had a wind generator but it had broken and they’d gotten used to doing without it.
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buzzfeed is the devil and yet

it's too bad I kind of just mentally flounced from Tumblr because this would be a perfect post for over there. But I'm so mad at them! Argh all my photos of my bruises from 2015 when I guess I was still skating derby because of the bruises. It just grinds it into my face, how fucking craven and stupid that whole algorithm-deletion-bullshit is. My body is not fundamentally obscene! Ugh. Anyway.

I just wanted to post that I've been slowly working my way through an episode or two at a time through Buzzfeed Unsolved with Dude, which is really something because we never watch stuff together, ever since that fantastic post about it on here somewhere that I posted about.

I like it mostly because it's touching the edge of creepy stuff without ever actually being creepy itself. And Shane and Ryan mock one another ceaselessly, and are very much, like, Cis Straight Dudes, but they really are actually fairly kind to one another, and they always share a bed and it's sort of weird that that's absolutely not in any way weird? Like, they're in a hotel, surely they could get two beds? nope, they always have to share a bed, and there is literally never ever the slightest attention paid to that, there's never any grousing about it, there's never anything at all about it? They just-- do, and Shane always sleeps on the right, and snores a little, and Ryan never sleeps a goddamn wink, and they bitch about everything but they never complain about close quarters and while I don't tinhat it at all and they don't seem to particularly like touching each other, they're also not squeamish about it (or at least, none of that shit ever makes the cut into the final edit; it's possible they do the regular straight dudes bullshit and Ryan just edits it out because he groks that it's tedious as fuck). Which is sort of sadly refreshing. Like, there just isn't any real estate devoted to giving a fuck, when he's perfectly willing to include every single time he loses his shit over absolutely nothing in a dark room, which is... I mean, that's kind of the whole show, Ryan losing his mind over absolutely nothing in a dark room while Shane comes up with increasingly farfetched animations he expects Ryan to hand-draw in post.

Shane is on paper extremely similar to my dude, in that mine's six three and he's six four, and they're both light-haired and of approximate Eastern European extraction, and they have quite similar physiques (IDK Shane's stats but my fella used to be 135 lbs and now probably tips the scales near 160, I'm just saying even now he's middle-aged he is not a big guy), and they both have bone stilts as legs, but I just have to point out that compared to Shane Madej my dude is a bronzed fitness god. Christ, Madej, go the fuck outside just one time in your life.

I sort of don't want to get into a fandom about this, though. Firstly because then I'd be too selfconscious to actually ask Dude to watch episodes with me and I enjoy it more when he watches too, and secondly because you know what, I really don't need to ship real people, their relationship is hilarious enough just assuming they're coworkers. Also I still have like four seasons to get through, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Oh I've also tried the Penumbra Podcast? Alas, not a fan, not even with good headphones. Sorry, folks. I had to abruptly exit out of the first non-Juno-Steel episode, when the terrified neurotic painter woman was like "I know, I'll stop my hands from shaking by twisting them into this vise!" No fucking way, you cannot pay me to listen to that shit, I literally slid to a halt on the awful slanted icy sidewalk I was walking down and said, out loud, "No fucking way!" and fumbled my phone out of my pocket and nearly threw it onto the sidewalk jabbing at the STOP THIS NOW button. So I'm done with that. Sorry. No. Juno's character is very slightly compelling, in that he's a hard-bitten cynical type with an extremely vulnerable wounded streak and that kind of light-but-resonant voice that pings the mind of male-attracted folks as possibly belonging to an attractive person, but that's not really enough, and can't pull the weight of the rest. I can't do it! I can't do it.

Still need something to occupy me on my walks to work. More music recs, possibly. Maybe I'll try audiobooks. I really think they won't work for me, though; I can't really focus on listening to things. If words aren't written they aren't real, so I don't know that I could follow, like, a novel? Maybe though. Maybe worth a shot.

well, shit

via http://bit.ly/2CVXQMM

So when I bought my phone, I bought a reconditioned one off Amazon, and it said it came with the little adapter thing you need to transfer your data from your old phone to the new one.
It didn’t.
So I ordered one.
It arrived today. No big, right? Google says right in the setup, “don’t worry if you can’t transfer your stuff right now, we’ll leave this Finish Setup button available for a few days!”

No, it’s gone. I’m about 90% sure it was gone by the end of the first day I had this fuckin thing.

Well, ok, so, how do I go back to that?

“Reset your phone to factory settings!”

Are you fucking kidding me.
Are you fucking <i>kidding</i> me.

Well… I had so much stuff on my old phone. Literal years of text messages, that there is literally no other way to get– I’ve tried, I can’t actually access them in any way when I mount the phone as a disk to my computer.
What else? I don’t even know.

So do I erase the last couple of days, or erase several years?

I guess I erase the last couple of days. This isn’t really what I wanted to do tonight but I don’t see a choice.

(Also, <i>now</i> it tells me that it doesn’t save the images out of text messages. Great! Better manually do that, I guess.)
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