Friday, July 25th, 2025

Entry #6

Today, is the Twenty-fifth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

This week has been incredibly hectic!.. or at least it feels that way anyways. I have been settling back into the pattern of doing schoolwork over the last week since my classes began, but have found that I simply need to stay on top of the workload and cannot afford to ignore my responsibilities. Last night I had to speedrun some 400 questions about basic oceanography in less than three hours before midnight in order to receive any credit for that assignment. I got an A thankfully, but still, school is a lot. As a result I also haven't really been able to do things that personally interest me at all this week apart from watching a few interesting YouTube videos and listening my favorite albums. I did however get a new CD player with a better FM receiver and larger window to see the spinning disc so that's pretty cool! Additionally, I also finally managed to get For the Night to Control by Electric Century on vinyl this week, which is amazing as it is one of my favorite albums of all time. I also did organize some of the articles and resources I should read and familiarize myself with before I contact my prospective advisor for grad school, so I can hopefully get to work on reading those once I can better manage my time doing my assignments. Speaking of that though, I did get good scores on my American Sign Language assignments so far and I'm actually pretty pleased with my progress. I can consistently fingerspell and the more I practice the more vocabulary I'm remembering. Sign languages, as an overall concept are also just super fascinating to read about, not only ASL. In any case I'm very thankful my school offered this as an option to meet my foreign language requirement.


Lastly, I do want to say that this week in particular I have been in awe of the Earth, humanity, and all the passions of existence for really no speciifc reason. Whatever brought this on, I do have to say that learning more about 3I/ATLAS, learning about ASL, and listening to a concept album about the exploration of the idea of love, probably have something to do with it. I am enamored with humanity, the ultimate contradiction. He who must have the capacity to be a Saint, and so must thereby also have the capacity to be a savage villain. To to be learned he must also be ignorant. To adore, he must also loathe. Man is dual and he is infinite, and it's a wonderful thing to me that Mankind has is at his most fundamental a potentiality. Nothing he does is inevitable, everything that he performs was done according to his culture, his ideas, his follies and triumphs in kind. I thank my lucky stars every day that I have had the fortune to be human and to explore the human condition, and not on some distant barren moon, nor asteroid, nor solitary spacecraft wandering through the void as many will surely come to do in the centuries following mine. I have been blessed with the opportunity to do so here at the Homeworld, the origin of all the infinite. She revolves and will keep on in her endless celestial dance, as she had long before I and so will long after I am gone. It was such a beautiful act of providence that I was allowed to comprehend this Earth and all that lie strewn about the heavens, and despite it all still be here. Here, amongst the last of my kind to be firmly bound to our cradle before we sail for farther shores and claim what was once thought only the dominion of the Gods. Homo, nunc et semper. - Qal

Friday, July 18th, 2025

Entry #5

Today, is the Eighteenth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So as of yesterday I have begun my two summer courses at my university. After the conclusion of these summer courses in late August, I will begin my last and final semester of my undergraduate studies. It really hit me today that I am nearing the end of my undergraduate career and I will ring in the New Year with a shiny new B.A. degree. Other than that, today was more or less typical of my normal daily life, although I did finally get in a good listen of Love Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 by Angels and Airwaves. I don't know what in particular happened today but Behold a Pale Horse and All That We Are finally hit me in a lyrical, musical, and meaningful way... Nuclear war is bad, Love is good, humanity is amazing is all I have to really say. Oh and also I can produce my name in American Sign Language now with more vocabulary soon to follow! (It's my foreign language credit I'm taking). Lastly, as it comes to mind, I've been reading and researching in preparation to apply to the MA of Anthropology program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'll hopefully start that process formally this coming Monday. I am not deadset on a topic yet, but I know it will involve geoarchaeology and it will likely be related to the Bering Sea/Arctic Sea. - Qal

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Entry #4

Today, is the Eleventh of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Today, my favorite band, Cartel released their second single from their upcoming album, Luckie Street 2025! They have rerecorded their debut album in order to obtain the rights to the music and they are periodically releasing singles to hype the album before its official release in Septemebr. Luckie Street has always been one of my favorite songs, my favorite version still being on The Ransom EP, the band's first release. I associate it very much with winter, with long days spent on the university campus, and a sense of familiarity in places that are unfamiliar. The Ransom EP is probably my favorite EP just based on sound and aesthetic, and its afforded me a lot of comfort when in Victoria, Texas, Washington D.C., The Twin Cities, and Fairbanks and will probably continue to do so. So honestly, I really like the song. This version is probably my least favorite of the three official that exist, third out of four if you count the demo, but I still enjoy certain aspects of it, especially the steady drumbeat that begins the song's bridge, which feels a lot more substantial in this version than the others.

On another note, I managed to personally remember the order of the Zodiac and its use for astronomy, specifically in being able to determine the position of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky relative to their known position in Aquarius in 2021. This is something that others very invested in astronomy, and certainly I was capable when astronomy primarily occupied my mind, could easily recall but I consider this a personal victory because it represents that no skill or information I have learned has ever truly left me. I may have to make more of an effort to recall the information but it is still present and it tells me that I am a capable, knowledgeable person who can do incredible things with adequate discipline and dedication. I feel the need to remind myself of these things as when I am only working within one of my interests or haven't been able to purusue one of my hobbies for a considerable length of time, I can get the sense that I have lost something or am somehow diminished as a human being. Thankfully, my memory tells me that this is not the case. - Qal

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Entry #3

Today, is the Tenth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Some things in this world terrify me, I mean absolutely terrify me. For some people it is understandably things like heights or spiders, sure. I have an aversion to needles myself, but that's not what terrifies me, what actually shakes me down to my core. What horrifies me beyond meausre is the threat of the end. Not of my end, but the end, the End of the World. While it might seem far-fetched, the world, at least the human one, is very capable of ending and that ending is very easily a manmade one. See, during the Cuban Missle Crisis in late October of 1962, a man named Vasily Arkhipov was onboard the Soviet Submarine B-59. This submarine in particular, on that day, was being targeted with signaling depth charges dropped by United States Ship to force it to surface, and it also happened to be armed with a nuclear weapon and unable to contact Moscow. You can see the issue here. The two officers normally required on a submarine of its make to authorize a launch of the nuclear torpedo were both in agreement that war had begun on the surface and that they should launch the torpedo. However, because Arkhipov was present and occupied a similar command position, all three officers needed to agree to a launch on this specific submarine, and Arkhipov refused. Had he agreed... well if he had agreed I would not be writing this. Nobody would be reading this. So much just... wouldn't be, and it's a genuinely horrifying thought.

This is why I wanted to make this blogpost. I just got done reading this alternate history story centered on exactly that, what would have happened had that submarine launched its torpedo. I can't describe in words the actual raw emotion that was elicited from reading this story. Its formatted as a series of action reports with detailed timestamps over the following few days after the initial offensive nuclear detonation. Reading it, and slowly realizing the reality of the situation go from troubled, to problematic, to dire, to unthinkable, it drags you along and punches you in the gut, first with Havana being destroyed in a retalitory nuclear strike, then Key West being destroyed in a counter-strike, and then the unimaginable of Washington, Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, really nearly every great city save Berlin just... gone. This wasn't pulled from an alternate universe or anything and is just fiction, but for in that fateful moment, this was all a very real, very genuine, very probable outcome. That so many lives, that so many great things could have, would have been needlessly lost to nuclear hellfire for no other reason than geopolitical miscalculations and the flawed judgement of a single man.

So being from the 21st century, I did not live through the cold war. In fact, 12 years had passed between the dissolution of the Soviet Union and my birth. But reading that story, seeing the situation slowly develop in a way so grim and unfamiliar to what I already knew happened, it really hit me. Things aren't so bad. I think we take it for granted, or reference it jokingly, but there must have been such a deep anxiety about this existential threat that could come at any moment during the Cold War, and it was backed up by very real nuclear weapons that had the power to realize that threat. It must have been so unimaginably petrifying, psychologically scarring, hell even just exhausting, having to live with that every day. I'll say again, compared to all that, things aren't so bad. Now don't get me wrong, there is still so much wrong with this current world and the situation can seem to be devolving to pretty dire circumstances both domestically and internationally, but still. Nothing approaching the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis has happened in the 21st century yet, and frankly, I don't expect it to ever get to that point again. The Cold War geopolitical landscape was such a different, almost foreign place that's growing more distant by the day. As bad as the world seems now, I'm afforded a strange comfort in knowing that existentially, the world will be fine. I might die. My friends and family might die. Innocent civilians the world over might die. But humanity will be fine and the Earth will persevere. Its not a great comfort, but really engaging with this historical event and coming to terms with what we really avoided is a comfort that I can live with, and that I'm thankful for. - Qal

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

Entry #2

Today, is the Ninth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So technically, the events I am referencing in this post happened on the mroning of the 8th, but I dated this post as the 9th because it is post-midnight when I write this (I have a very irregular sleep schedule). Anyways, what I wanted to make this blogpost about was the fact that clouds are awesome! After making this website and specifically afetr making the weather tab and its subpages, I committed myself to being on the lookout for cloud formations that I did not personally have photographs of, in order to replace the Wikimedia Commons ones. Well, I don't know that I will include this photorgraph on that page because I can't positively identify it as any specific form of towering cumulus, but check it out!

Pretty freaking cool, huh? See, cumulus clouds can draw up warm air due to convection currents, and as the warm air rises in altitude it gets further away from the radiating heat of the Earth's surface and begins to acclimate to higher altitude temperatures. Temperature is just the description of how much energy is being emitted from a substance. If something is hot, then its atoms are in an excited state. If its cold, the opposite is true. In warm air, the atoms are excited and being jostled all around because at higher temperatures, they have more energy. When the air begins to cool though because it becomes more distant from the source of radial heat energy, the atoms become less excited and in this this case, somtimes the water vapor molecules will become so less energetic that they "escape" the gaseous air and precipitate out, as liquid water. If you get this on a large scale, you get more and more water vapor precipitating out into liquid water, but being already so high up that it can float/ be suspended in the air due to buoyancy and thus it adds to cloud climbing higher and higher. That's why when I used an Infrared sensor available online to see the temperatures of the cloud tops, the ones pictured had a temperature of -25°C and dropping! Based on my amateur estimations, this might put the altitude of those clouds at greater than 20,000 ft! Sometimes, I am genuinely taken aback at how awesome, in the sense of inspiring awe, nature can truly be. What a privilege that I get to exist at a time when clouds of life-giving water vapor can rise three miles into it the air, and that I get to understand, and record them. Usually it's the night sky or the delicate balance of ecosystems that are the parts of the natural world that inspire me, but sometimes it is as something as simple as a really tall cloud. - Qal

Friday, July 4th, 2025

Entry #1

Today, is the Fourth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Many events of great significance have occurred over the last few days ranging from those involving the United States government at large to those far more personal in nature. First off, this is the first blog post on this website! More than half of the pages are still under construction at the time of writing but I will be able to update a good portion of them in the following week with relative ease. Something else significant that has happened is that yesterday I finally got my very own personal CD player. I had one as a child, but this is a proper quality one that I bought with my own money. I am enjoying it immensely and it even came equipped with an FM radio! Finally, the last thing I'll note that has occurred is that as of July 1, 2025, mankind has identified the third object of confirmed interstellar origin! This is incredible to me as it really represents how this Solar System, how Earth is just a part of the larger universe that it can, and does interact with on a regular basis, and I am thankfully alive at a time when I have the privilege to understand that. I am looking forward to the following days and weeks when science communication channels will provide more information about this comet, 3I/ATLAS.

That's all for now. I may make a few more blogposts sporadically before I hold myself to the weekly schedule, but for now I am just glad to say this blog has officially begun! - Qal