Day 604: more rails

Day 604:

I’ve dug far enough that I spent today extending my rail network so I don’t have to walk as far to get home.

It’s so far from where I usually am that I’m considering adding another mattress out there so that maybe I don’t have to come home every night.

I mean, ok, let’s be honest, I don’t come all the way home to where the duckens and the sheep and the cows and pigs live, every day. I already have a spare bed out about a two hour walk from there because. And another bed that’s close to Bed 2, but about eight floors down, because some days that is also a two hour walk, and it really is uphill. (The inside of the hill.)

So a third bed a two hour walk from Bed 2 would probably be good.

As it is I only go back to “home”, “the farm”, whatever I feel like calling it any given day, every few days to make sure all the animals are still alive and the crops are still growing.

So far so good.

Or when I need fancy tools I’ll head back. Or I want to store something important. The things you use a home for.

I don’t know what to call these other caverns. Camps? If so, this one’s going to be Camp UnderMountain, because I’m pretty sure that’s where I am. And that means I have a whole lot of digging straight up to do.

It’s time to build a stairwell.

Day 603: more rock rats

Day 603

Killed some rock rats today and managed to save their skins. Why sometimes the bodies fully disintegrate and sometimes they don’t I don’t understand in the least and I’m hoping it’s something simple and not “because the ones that disintegrate put something into the air that will kill you”

Not that “will kill you” isn’t a requirement of this place to begin with.

When I got home I started tanning the skins, something I’m actually pretty good at now. They’re fragile, but I’m thinking that if I poke the tines through a ducken skin (which is thin but surprisingly sturdy, based on my mattresses) then I should be able to do something to attach the ducken skin to some cards (or heck, maybe just wrap it around a brick) and then use that as a carder.

Or I’ll stab myself ten dozen times with the tines and have a giant allergic reaction and die. Hard to tell at this stage.

The Nib

The Nib is a daily comic publication and political magazine.

Okay, that doesn’t quite capture it, let me try again.

The Nib is a website that delivers a daily political comic. It also publishes a print magazine. But it’s not a words-magazine, it’s a comics-magazine.  By that I mean the whole magazine is the size of a short graphic novel, with various sections covering infographics about that issue’s topic, short comics related to the topic, feature (longer) comics about specific items, a “letters to the editor” of one-panels on a related topic or question, etc. etc.

It’s what you’d get if you converted a political magazine from strictly words and the occasional image to sequential art and then published it on a regular basis. For me, it’s about a 45 minute read per issue.

In the first three issues (I bought the back issues from Topatoco after I subscribed to the magazine), themed Death, Family, and Empire, they cover topics from how the Day of the Dead is merging with Halloween in Latino communities to the current humanitarian crisis at our borders to Filipino cheese pimento. In other words not only do these issues teach me about the politics of the world I live in, they educate me about the people I don’t see or hear from on a daily basis. And that’s pretty damn cool.

The Nib does a fantastic job of providing context to where we are and why we’re here, without being a five-thousand-word article. It makes politics approachable for young adult and adult readers. It definitely has a position, and that position is that we’re all in this together, on one earth, and families and working together and not being toxic assholes matter.

Readers can subscribe to the daily comic email for free, or become a member at a couple of different tiers.

Day 602: just digging, and contemplating

Day 602:

Digging is my top priority today so I dug and dug and dug… and got attacked by zombies and skeletons and rock rats and exploding giraffe corgis.

If there was some way to tame the exploding giraffe corgis and make them explode on command, this would be done a lot faster.

The skeletons are actually pretty handy because most of the time I can salvage arrows from them that are better than the ones I make myself… and to be honest it feels somewhat fitting to kill them with their own weapons.

The zombies have no purpose except to annoy me.

Oh, well, actually, they’re also really good at telling me that there’s a cavern in a particular direction, because they’re already in the cavern somehow yelling their fool heads off.

And the rock rats are great at biting shoelaces apart and damaging boots. But they also have sharp quill-like spines… and I’m trying to figure out if that could come in handy.

Because those quills look a lot like carding tines…

Day 601: more digging, more carding

Day 601:

Still digging, and it’s going well. I think, based on my estimates of distance, that I should be almost all the way out to the big mountain.

It helps that it turns out some of my deepest tunnels were already most of the way there. Part of the reason I know I’m close is because today I ran out of tunnel, dug straight up, and found myself nearer the mountain than I’d imagined.

It’s not as helpful that apparently mapping to scale is still not something I’m very good at.

The carding isn’t going as well. I’m still good at making nail-thickness iron, and still really bad at anything smaller. I might have to sit back and think about my technique for a day or two.