Steve Dyer

sideshow13013:

Is this a commercial for amazon selling meth?

No comment!!!! LOL! 👻

A compilation of some of the world special effects ever to make it to the big screen. Some of these are almost too bad to believe.

(via devour)

...and he FREAKS OUT. I can't tell if he's laughing or crying or both. His reaction when he goes outside and sees green grass for the first time: "it's so pretty!"

The glasses he wears to adjust his color vision are made by EnChroma.

At approximately 7:49 a.m. ET this morning, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, after a three billion mile, nine year journey, reached as close as it will get to Pluto. The craft buzzed as close as 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers) above the surface as part of an historic journey to gather information and data about Pluto and its moons.

The image you see above is the last image taken before the Pluto flyby, taken on Monday, July 13, from a distance of 476,000 miles.

Said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden:

“The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States. Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”

NASA adds:

The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorized to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world.

“Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer’s son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.”

The New Horizons team was giddy as the craft reached its destination in the Pluto system.

You can see them celebrate in the video below at about 19:00. Science and astronomy luminaries including Bill Nye were on hand for the event.

NPR reports:

A trove of information is expected to be released Tuesday — particularly tonight, after NASA reconnects with the New Horizons craft that’s been focused on gathering information about Pluto.

In addition to a delay of more than 4 hours (due to the probe’s distance from Earth), information will trickle back to NASA at a rate that would frustrate many Internet users.

Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager, says the data rate is around 1,000 bits per second, with a maximum of around 4,0000. That’s just a fraction of the traditional 56K speed of U.S. dial-up accounts.

A key revelation that’s already come out about Pluto concerns its size — NASA says its diameter is 1,473 miles, or 2,370 kilometers, ending a debate that has raged since the planet’s discovery in 1930.

We’ll be posting any new and exciting images as they come in. Here’s a computer simulation of the Flyby posted by NASA. No doubt many more photos and videos of the event will be forthcoming.

YES! After over 9 years & 3+ billion miles, @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby was at 7:49am ET. http://t.co/Czrvonxugd pic.twitter.com/aSucgORofT

— NASA (@NASA) July 14, 2015

The post NASA Space Probe Reaches Pluto After 3 Billion Mile Journey: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad.

If Tom Hardy were your boyfriend, he would send you a selfie every day. Each one would have a dog somewhere in the background.

If Tom Hardy were your boyfriend, he would gift you a rope bracelet early on in the relationship. When you ask what it is, he would respond intensely, "This could save your life."

If Tom Hardy were your boyfriend, you would live in a lovely but sparsely decorated London flat. He would say "Fuckin' mess, innit?" every time you walked in, regardless of the actual state of it.

If Tom Hardy were your boyfriend, you would walk into the bathroom only to discover him trying on the new lipstick you bought. When he noticed your presence, he would shrug, give you a knowing smile, and say, "Not my colour." You would hear the "u" in "colour."


Read more If Tom Hardy Were Your Boyfriend at The Toast.

requested by 0n-your-knees

Two grooms in Texas got the wedding surprise of their lives after Jennifer Hudson herself decided to crash the wedding and sing a special song for the newlyweds on Wednesday.

Hudson was there at the wedding of Scott and Chris Lindsey inside the W Dallas-Victory hotel as an ambassador for the Human Rights Campaign’s Turn It Up For Change campaign partnership with W Hotels Worldwide. The two grooms work for HRC and were previously married in Canada back in 2006.

“I’m very connected to the gay community, and it’s something I’m passionate about,” Hudson told People magazine last year of the Turn It Up For Change campaign. “It only makes sense. This is my way of returning it.”

Watch Hudson dazzle the couple and audience with her performace of “I Still Love You” in the video below:

The post WATCH: Jennifer Hudson Surprises Grooms at Gay Wedding in Dallas appeared first on Towleroad.

An 87-year-old Lynchburg, Virginia man this week received a letter that was postmarked 26 years ago. The letter had been forwarded and returned many times within the U.S. Postal Service as Duane Schrock had moved around the country.

When he opened the letter Schrock realized it was a Father’s Day Card from his estranged gay son, who hoped to mend ties with his father. Schrock says that he did not agree with his son’s homosexuality but the card was a blessing to him.

Said the card:

“Dear, Dad, we haven’t been in touch for quite a while, I’m doing fine and am very happy in Richmond, I’d like to hear from you. Have a Happy Father’s Day, Love Duane.”

Unfortunately, the reconciliation never happened. Schrock’s son died of AIDS-related causes in 1995 at the age of 45.

WSET.com – ABC13

The post Man Receives Conciliatory Father’s Day Card 20 Years After his Gay Son’s Death from AIDS: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad.

robdelaney:

http://tvgd.co/1G5QH2U

“Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I’d heard nothing else my last two years in New York. ‘They have this terrific love-hate thing going,’ everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it’s going to destroy them.'”

― Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

This Times series about ruined children and their terrible electronics is… useful:

Two of my grandsons, ages 10 and 13, seem destined to suffer some of the negative effects of video-game overuse. The 10-year-old gets up half an hour earlier on school days to play computer games, and he and his brother stay plugged into their hand-held devices on the ride to and from school. “There’s no conversation anymore,” said their grandfather, who often picks them up. When the family dines out, the boys use their devices before the meal arrives and as soon as they finish eating.

“If kids are allowed to play ‘Candy Crush’ on the way to school, the car ride will be quiet, but that’s not what kids need,” Dr. Steiner-Adair said in an interview. “They need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance.”

Technology is a poor substitute for personal interaction.

Here is a professional rendering of a conversation happening between millions of people, a few paragraphs of research and structure that attempt to make sense of discussions that are unfolding in virtually any setting where multiple generations interact. Kids spend an enormous amount of time looking at a type of device that didn’t really exist ten years ago. Among some young people, looking at these devices is the central animating activity. This is weird. Truly! Younger people are cyborgs and older people are meat, more or less.

Please, @nytimes, no more alarmist, poorly researched drivel about tech from out of touch grandmas. http://t.co/ywzviqKM7n

— Kenny Z (@kennethaz) July 6, 2015

But the argument presented in the first installment is also proudly unsophisticated, and doesn’t attempt to preempt obvious criticism. Lines like “technology is a poor substitute for personal interaction,” and non-sequitur quotes from a grab-bag of experts, tee up the most common and effective response to fears of Screen Addiction: that what’s happening on all these screens is not, as the writer suggests, an endless braindead Candy Crush session, but a rich social experience of its own. That screen is full of friends, and its distraction is no less valuable or valid than the distraction of a room full of buddies or a playground full of fellow students. Screen Addiction is, in this view, nonsensical: you can no more be addicted to a screen than to windows, sounds, or the written word.

This is an argument worth making, probably. But tell it to an anxious parent or an alienated grandparent and you will sense that it is inadequate. It is correct, yes, and it addresses their stated concerns. But those concerns—that the screens are poisoning families, that they’re making kids unhealthy and sedentary, that they’re destroying curiosity—were never really the issue. Screen Addiction is a generational complaint, and generational complaints, taken individually, are rarely what they claim to be. They are fresh expressions of horrible and timeless anxieties. They are a tried and true form of advanced-age self-care. They apply to all children except your kids, who are mere victims of their degraded peers. They apply to the Snapchats and the sexting, but not to those Facetime conversations with your grandniece, who is too young to text and Twitter, or to turn away, and who is therefore perfect.

The grandparent who is persuaded that screens are not destroying human interaction, but are instead new tools for enabling fresh and flawed and modes of human interaction, is left facing a grimmer reality. Your grandchildren don’t look up from their phones because the experiences and friendships they enjoy there seem more interesting than what’s in front of them (you). Those experiences, from the outside, seem insultingly lame: text notifications, Emoji, selfies of other bratty little kids you’ve never met. But they’re urgent and real. What’s different is that they’re also right here, always, even when you thought you had an attentional claim. The moments of social captivity that gave parents power, or that gave grandparents precious access, are now compromised. The TV doesn’t turn off. The friends never go home. The grandkids can do the things they really want to be doing whenever they want, even while they’re sitting five feet away from grandma, alone, in a moving soundproof pod.

Screen Addiction is a new way for kids to be blithe and oblivious; in this sense, it is empowering to the children, who have been terrible all along. The new grandparent’s dilemma, then, is both real and horribly modern. How, without coming out and saying it, do you tell that kid that you have things you want to say to them, or to give them, and that you’re going to die someday, and that they’re going to wish they’d gotten to know you better? Is there some kind of curiosity gap trick for adults who have become suddenly conscious of their mortality?

Maybe all this makes a better world! Maybe this ends in disaster. Most likely, this state of affairs—the little rude generationally determined and exclusionary hand computers—is just an awkward intermediate phase before something that we won’t be able to talk about easily in these terms. In any case, grandma is sad for a reason. A new technology can be enriching and exciting for one group of people and create alienation for another; you don’t have to think the world is doomed to recognize that the present can be a little cruel.

Photo by Meghan Hemphill

This episode starts with Picard doing some holodecking with a strange bearded fella.

Soft lighting can only mean one thing: we’re either in a play or on the holodeck.

In this instance, it turns out to be BOTH?!

Initiate Facial Hair Program: Dirty Hippie

Dātz its supposed to be Prospero here, and I think we can all reasonably assume that at some point P-Stew (or his people) had a conversation with the producers and was like I AM NOT LEAVING THIS SHOW UNTIL SOMEONE DOES SOME GODDAMNED TEMPEST.

If only someone would shine a better light on Data’s costume.

Casino Carpeting Chic

It’s like got one foot in Dionysus and the other in a garbage dumpster. I want to talk more about what he’s wearing but where is this really bright light coming from?

Um, guys…

Remember the adage: “Lights of Three, get the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY BECAUSE IT’S A TRAAAAAAIN”

So there wasn’t a good screengrab of the train, but trust me it was a train. Fortunately, Data and Picard gtf out of there which is good for safety but better for seeing what Data is wearing.

“Both the Holodeck and my wardrobe appear to be functioning correctly, though clearly there is something wrong.”

It’s like the undergarment has been woven from the finest algae-crusted seaweed money can buy, and the vest is made from some mystical new age vomit. That mane of hair though! And that musketeer-stache! I mean, I would order this series to pilot immediately.

But whassup with that train? Data and Geords go into the Jeffries tube to “check things out,” which I’m sure has to be the start of some TNG slash fic (okay, well, I tried to find some and while I found a LOT of Geordi/Data slash, none of it seems to occur in the Jeffries Tube which to my mind is a missed opportunity).

“Boy, it gets pretty hot in these Jeffries Tubes, Data,” said Geordi, loosening… his… uh… back zipper on his uniform? “Geordi, I have noted that when the ambient temperature rises above 35 degrees, Celsius, most male humans become aroused. It appears you are helping prove this rule.” *cue saucy electric guitar*

Anyway, where are their awesome coveralls? Or were they just like “we have 4 episodes left; fuggit”?

So they find this thing.

I’m pretty sure that was for sale at the Imaginarium at the Stonestown Galleria.

Whatever this thing is, despite its soothing colors, it is really fucking things up, and somehow causing random trains on the holodeck? Let’s go investigate.

Literally on the crazy train.

I should confess here that I WISH that I had been alive during the time of fancy-schmancy train travel, so I had a LOT of expectations here, most of which weren’t met (this is the only train car we get to see).

Also there is a knight in armor there.

Computer: increase shininess of armor 30 percent.

So, like, *sigh*, I guess all of the people on this train are, like, metaphors for the parts of the ship or whatever? This dude is the shields? (Though why is he cutting paper dolls…) And this guy I guess is the weapons…

A mustache with the handliest of bars, and a cummerbund soaked in the BLOOD OF MY ENEMIES.

This guy is the … engines?

Train engineers: the predecessors of nerds

I actually like this guy’s outfit, even if it seems crazy for someone who works next to a coal engine to be wearing so many layers. There’s something of a hipster steampunk vibe going on, though I guess he is literally working with steam, so that explains that. 

Also fun fact, this actor is Thomas Kopache who has had SEVEN DIFFERENT ROLES on Star Trek. Great work.

More overalls

Also, hey, that train conductor is actually the Big Lebowski! I have no idea what the Big Lebowski represents in this train metaphor. I assume that farmer is the replicators, but I think that the writers didn’t really double down on the follow through here. Especially because we got these ladies:

Flappers represent the ship’s deepest desires.

The only thing I really want to comment on here is how closely the color of the lady on the right’s head feather matches her fur collar? Like, nature did NOT do that for you. 

Oh and these peeps are doing a puzzle which is also supposed to have meaning. Whatever.

If the outlaw with the handlebar mustache was the weapons system, then who is this guy? The ship’s attitude?

Oh and he’s just shot the engineer. But the engines still work? This metaphor is falling apart faster than the hull of a ship traveling at Warp 11, AMIRITE?

So Picard does what anyone would do when you have a computer program that won’t stop running.

Send in a shrink.

Look at that hand on her hip! Deanna is like, “I have a goddamned degree in psychology… what the hell am I doing here.”

Just when you’re ready to give up on the metaphor, a golden brick shows up.

I don’t know where the design for this train car came from, but I feel obliged to point out that there is a table lamp RIGHT BELOW a wall sconce. Also that gunslinger is not tied up tightly enough.

So the train stops and the gangster gets off with the golden brick. Where have they ended up?

Um… that’s not how trains work

Also this font nerd moment is meant almost exclusively for Anna wtf is Helvetica doing in this supposedly “Old Timey” New York. Also that is some art-department-intern-traced-this-hurriedly-slap-dash Helvetica right there. I’m assuming this is a Hollywood Backlot. It looks like the part of New York where Rory goes to stalk Jess in Season 3(?) of Gilmore Girls.

First, Data almost gets run over by a checker cab.

“I wanted to catch a cab, not for the cab to catch me! Woo-woo-woo”

There was a thing in the storm drain. I can’t really remember what it was, but spoiler alert, it wasn’t important. Meanwhile, Worf and Deanna follow the gangster to this brick wall.

You’ll never guess what happens next.

Okay, well maybe you guessed it.

Deanna though is like, DUMBFOUNDED.

Whoa.

Like… girl, you are in a fake world generated by a computer program where everything is a symbol. Stop getting caught up on the masonry. Also, how do you even know what a brick is.

Anyway.

Back on the ship (er, outside the holodeck?) Geordi has found this nonsense in a cargo bay.

Unclear whether he’s scanning or proposing. Knowing Geordi’s track record it’s probably proposing.

Again, I’m pretty sure my sister had a toy like this when she was a baby that was supposed to help her with her spatial reasoning, or like, teething.

Long story short (too late) this thing is basically trying to reproduce by taking over the Enterprise’s computer to find some molecular compound, and the train is also the metaphor for the ship, and… I’ll be honest I can’t remember. But here’s what happens in the end.

They find some galaxy or nebula with their shiz

They weird toy peaces out

And Data, Troi and Worf have a cocktail.

And judging by the look on D’s face, Worf might be getting more than just a cocktail, BOKAY.

Also I love that data is like Skeptical City, USA about this drink. Don’t worry, Data, I think Deanna will be happy to help you out.

requested by shang-rilah

“I created the Isis dildo flag at London Pride to start a dialogue, not get a laugh”

• While The Gays and their friends were priding through streets all over the world, CNN International assignment editor Lucy Pawle reported this shocking discovery at the Gay Pride in London, where she spotted a “quite distinctive man” with a quite distinctive flag:

Read more on CNN EXCLUSIVE: Beware The Flag Of Radical Islamic Dildos And Buttplugs…

Marriage Equality is here!

As Gandhi never quite said,

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. “Why are we even discussing it?”

Those were isolating  days. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.

In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.

I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.” History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward; progress comes and, just as swiftly, goes. For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.

But some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God; that their loves and lives are equally precious; that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love; and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens. In the words of Hannah Arendt:

“The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.”

This core truth is what Justice Kennedy affirmed today, for the majority: that gay people are human. I wrote the following in 1996:

Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central—more definitive—of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less. It cuts gay people off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings.

We are not disordered or sick or defective or evil – at least no more than our fellow humans in this vale of tears. We are born into family; we love; we marry; we take care of our children; we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority not just as citizens but as human beings. It took courage to embrace this fact the way the Supreme Court did today. In that 1996 essay, I analogized to the slow end to the state bans on inter-racial marriage:

The process of integration—like today’s process of “coming out”—introduced the minority to the majority, and humanized them. Slowly, white people came to look at interracial couples and see love rather than sex, stability rather than breakdown. And black people came to see interracial couples not as a threat to their identity, but as a symbol of their humanity behind the falsifying carapace of race.

It could happen again. But it is not inevitable; and it won’t happen by itself. And, maybe sooner rather than later, the people who insist upon the centrality of gay marriage to every American’s equality will come to seem less marginal, or troublemaking, or “cultural,” or bent on ghettoizing themselves. They will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it.

I think of the gay kids in the future who, when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation – and every one before mine – lived through: the pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think, more acutely, of the decades and centuries of human shame and darkness and waste and terror that defined gay people’s lives for so long. And I think of all those who supported this movement who never lived to see this day, who died in the ashes from which this phoenix of a movement emerged. This momentous achievement is their victory too – for marriage, as Kennedy argued, endures past death.

I never believed this would happen in my lifetime when I wrote my first several TNR essays and then my book, Virtually Normal, and then the anthology and the hundreds and hundreds of talks and lectures and talk-shows and call-ins and blog-posts and articles in the 1990s and 2000s. I thought the book, at least, would be something I would have to leave behind me – secure in the knowledge that its arguments were, in fact, logically irrefutable, and would endure past my own death, at least somewhere. I never for a millisecond thought I would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for everyone, everyone in America.

But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop.

Know hope.

Denial: This isn't possible. Doesn't the network know who is watching this show? Don't they understand genius? This is not possible. We have to save our show. Let's start a campaign, hashtag save my show that I and tens of other people watch.

Anger: Television is trash.

Bargaining: Maybe Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon will resurrect the show.

Depression: I will never watch television again. Thank God for books.

Read more The Five Stages of Beloved TV Show Cancellation Grief at The Toast.

“I couldn’t decide if you were the most annoying human being I’d ever met or just the best thing that ever happened,” sings Tove Lo in her new single ‘Timebomb’.

Several gay and straight couples dutifully act out that sentiment in a just-released video for the track, making up and breaking up on a simple beach set under a hazy sun.

The Swedish singer, who attended school with Icona Pop  at the same music academy which also educated Robyn, today announced a North American tour starting this fall.

The post Gay and Straight Love Affairs Take Center Stage in Tove Lo’s ‘Timebomb’ Video appeared first on Towleroad.

POTUS: Optimistic but frustrated. Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com

ICYMI, Marc Maron interviewed the president of the United States on Friday. The episode, which was posted today, covered a wide range of topics, from Obama's upbringing and racial identity to his feelings about red state/blue state politics and race relations in America.

Here are some highlights:

On the shooting in Charleston and mass shootings in general:

The grieving that the country feels is real....[but] It's not enough to feel bad. There are steps that could be taken to make events like this less likely. And one of those actions we could take would be to enhance some basic, common sense gun safety laws that the majority of gun owners support.

I don’t foresee any real action being taken until the American public feels a sufficient sense of urgency and they say to themselves, "This is not normal, this is something that we can change, and we’re going to change it."

On why he's optimistic:

The American people are overwhelmingly good, decent, generous people.

On whether things are indeed getting better:

LGBT rights have been recognized and solidified in a way that we couldn't have imagined 10 years ago.

In terms of moving the country forward... we've had a lot more hits than misses.

On criticism that he hasn't done enough, and his view of how to change things:

The trajectory of progress always happens in fits and starts... Progress in a democracy is never instantaneous and it's always partial and you can't get cyclical or frustrated because you didn't get all the way there immediately.

Right after Sandy Hook, Newtown, when 20 six-year-olds are gunned down and Congress literally does nothing? Yeah, that's the closest I came to feeling disgusted. I was pretty disgusted, but that's the exception rather than the rule in the sense that, on most fronts, I've been able to find ways to make progress, even in the face of obstruction, even in the face of resistance, even in the face of gridlock.

Do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America.... It is incontrovertible that race relations have changed significantly in my lifetime and yours... What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, that casts a long shadow and that's still part of our DNA. We're not cured of it.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

With yesterday’s summer solstice marking the year’s longest day you are now once again closer to winter than you are farther away. The ever-lengthening afternoons from which you even hours ago drew such delight are now a thing of your past, the period of brightness imperceptibly but inexorably declining as each evening comes on slightly earlier than the one before until suddenly, like all your hopes and dreams, the summer is over and you’re left alone in the cold. The oppressive heat and persistent sweat and unavoidable reek of urine may trick you into thinking, especially as August comes round with its terrible intensity, that the sun cannot be defeated, but this is a temporary delusion brought on by the fetid soup in which we all slowly swim. Do not be fooled. The darkness always wins. Winter is coming. Winter is almost here. Enjoy what light you have left, it won’t last. The days will become shorter. Your days will become shorter. All things become shorter. What’s next for you is winter. Forever.

Photo: Sean Pavone / Shutterstock.com