bruh
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u rite
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in unrelated news i have played content warning for the first time and i accidentally made the gimmick of our entire group that we were gay except one guy who was struggling with homophobia and then we converted him and then i killed him so he became homophobic again, it was truly a thrilling arc
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katās mind is a bizarre place
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all i really did was be super gay and then other people reacted with homosexuality (or homophobia)
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Nya
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sadly i dont think any of us meowed once
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Damn
Cringe
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nya nya purrrrr meow
ok!!! Iām not sure what specifically youād enjoy hearing about so this might be a little disjointed. Feel free to skip parts that are boring.
The first time I saw a total solar eclipse was in 2017.
I was sixteen years old, and my family went down to Kansas City, Missouri to watch it, and then drove a few hours out of town because the weather was cloudy.
We had obviously brought eclipse glasses, and stood out in a parking lot/field watching the sun get covered up, and Iād been expecting that when we reached totality it would just ā¦ be all the way covered up, like a black circle had replaced the sun? Like, when weād been doing the planning, Iād figured, sure, we might as well go see totality if we were going to make a whole trip out of it, but probably it was basically going to be like the partial eclipse.
Anyways, Iām sixteen, standing out there in a unseasonably chilly parking lot, staring up at the last little crescent of the sunā
āand then totality hits, and I take off my glasses, the sun has turned into, you know, a black circle surrounded by a ring of silvery-looking fire.
It was really, really cool.
This year, I took a bus down from Indianapolis to see it with a friend from ~uni. (We had another friend who was with us for part of the weekend, but he had to go back to grad school ā which was still in the path of totality, but he wasnāt there with us.) We had talked about maybe going to one of the eclipse events in Indianapolis, but ultimately decided they would probably be too busy/crowded (one of our Uber drivers said heād heard estimates of a million people coming in for the eclipse.) I think in hindsight it probably wouldāve been /fine/, but our Airbnb had a pretty good view of the eclipse anyways, so that was also fine.
She and I talked about it and decided we probably didnāt want to watch Literally The Entire Buildup to totality. (It took about 75 minutes to go from ābeginning of partial eclipseā to ātotality,ā and honestly a lot of that is fairly similar, + sheās physically disabled in a way that makes āstand around for over an hourā a bit of a challenge.) So we set up a board game in the living room to play while we waited.
I had downloaded a phone app to tell me the eclipse timings, but I wasnāt 100% sure it was geolocating me right (though it ended up being fine). I had an alarm on my phone for a few minutes before the start of the partial eclipse, so we took our eclipse glasses and went outside. It was a little hard to see at first, but by the time we went inside you could clearly see the slight nibble being taken out of the sun.
Around 2:30 I was like āweāre probably about halfway there, letās go look at the sun againā so we went outside and looked at it some more ā it was clearly a lot more covered up by the moon, with the glasses it kind of looked like a medium-sized orangey crescent. There were some very wispy clouds in front of the sun, but it was still totally see-able. I also tried to figure out if there was anything funky going on with our shadows but there wasnāt anything Obvious, besides that they were short (which is pretty normal for early afternoon.) We watched for a few minutes more before going back to the game (this time there were a few neighbors hanging out in the street).
Obviously, if youāre wearing eclipse glasses and looking at the sun, you can see that the eclipse is happening. If youāre not wearing your eclipse glasses, and obviously not looking directly at the sun, then partiality honestly looks a fair amount like a normal sun ā but the ground around you is darker, and the air is colder.
We had a fourth friend who was watching from Texas, which was getting it a little ahead of us, and we also spent some time messaging back and forth about it in the group chat.
We were supposed to get to totality at a little after 3:06, and so Iād set an alarm for 3, but a few minutes before that I noticed that it was starting to get dark out, and I started to suggest that we go outside after I finished my turn.
Then I noticed that the birds had stopped singing and I was like āactually letās just go now.ā (I really didnāt want to risk accidentally missing it if my app had guessed my coordinates wrong, and like, worst case scenario we get to see the eclipse a little longer.) So we went back outside.
It was noticeably cooler and darker when we got outside ā the weather before had been the warmest all trip, like 75 degrees. My phone app had been accurate about the timing, and in fact when we got back outside the birds started singing again shortly afterwards. The sun had dwindled down to a tiiiiny crescent, but it was still recognizably vaguely crescent-ish (as we got closer to totality, it started to look less definitively crescenty).
Lots of people from the neighborhood had gathered outside. Someone who lived next-door to the Airbnb was trying to look at it with sunglasses, and then (a couple minutes before totality) started to go inside. I was like ādonāt go inside! itās about to be totality and you really donāt want to miss totality,ā which is maybe a weird thing to say to a stranger but I donāt care 
. In any case, she said that she didnāt have glasses, and my friend that I was with was like ādidnāt you bring extras?ā I didnāt want to miss totality but we did still have a couple minutes left so I handed my phone and my pair of eclipse glasses and sprinted back into the house to grab the pack ā fortunately Iād left it conveniently on the table ā and then went back out to join them.
(My friend said later that sheād been thinking about not wanting that person to damage her eyes. I was totally not thinking about that, I just didnāt want her to miss out on getting to see the eclipse.)
As we got closer to the eclipse I was vaguely worried about trying to get the exact second right when I could safely look at the sun (it is safe to watch it without glasses during totality) but fortunately one of the other groups on our street had some sort of countdown timer or something, and started chanting a countdown when we got to ten seconds out.
I hadnāt been sure if weād be able to see totality through the mini cloud, but we totally could, and it was just as cool as I remembered. (I said multiple times, word for word, āthis is so cool.ā)
I honestly wasnāt paying very close attention to that much other than the sun, but it was dark like evening ā not like full night, but like sunset had already happened.
Total eclipses are really cool. I know Iāve said that a couple times already. But ā standing there, watching the ring-of-fire (for me it also had a little red sort of circle thing looping hear the top, I think this was just a visual eye-glitch?), itās easy to see why people used to sometimes take them as an omen.
My friend that I was with also thought it was really cool. I was pretty glad about that, I wouldāve felt bad if she came all the way out to Indianapolis and didnāt even enjoy it.
The fact that Earth gets this sort of total eclipse is unusual.
If our moon were a little smaller, or a little farther from Earth, it couldnāt block out the sun; if it were bigger, or closer, then it would be too big for you to get the ring-of-fire sort of deal.
But by sheer lucky coincidence, we get eclipses, and thatās awesome.
One of the things I was thinking about during this eclipse was the March 1504 lunar eclipse (though Iād misremembered some key details, such as the fact that it was a lunar eclipse.) I first learned about this from a book of vaguely math-y puzzles, and I think at the time I thought it was fictional.
The story goes that during one of Columbusās voyages, he had ticked off a bunch of Native Americans (by doing Sketchy Things ā this is not a Columbus-apologist story). Luckily for him, unluckily for them, he happened to be aware that there was an eclipse upcoming, and told them āmy god is so mad at you, heās going to take away the moon.ā
They didnāt believe him ā¦ until the moon actually disappeared, at which point they obviously were a lot more concerned.
Standing there, watching the solar eclipse, itās easy to see why people would freak out. Like, if I didnāt know what a solar eclipse was, if all Iād seen was the day getting darker and darker until suddenly the sun turned into a black circle surrounded by fire, I would freak the fuck out.
(I havenāt seen a lunar eclipse, so I imagine the dynamic would be a little different, but ā¦ the moon is not supposed to go away either.)
The first time I found out that eclipses were, like, a thing that you could just go see, I was reading a book of kidās activities that included āgo see a total solar eclipse.ā There was a list in the book, with dates + very general regional information, but this was around 2010, and seven-ish years seemed like a very long time, and I was aware that my parents were not going to let me just go to another country to see an eclipse
I have now seen two of them! This was the sort of thing that seemed totally unimaginable when I was ~nine.
The first time I saw a total eclipse I didnāt really have a community.
I was sixteen years old, about to start senior year of high school, and ā¦ I had friends, but mostly I only talked to them at school, and the main exception to that was my partner, whom Iād broken up with literally two days earlier (amicably, just because my partner was going off to college). I had other people on my gay nerds sports team, or other mock trial players, or whatever, but I didnāt really have a community in the sense that (say) FoL is a community, not in-person and not online.
So I saw the eclipse with my family, and we hung out in Missouri for another couple days, and then we went home and the school year started and that was that. It was a great thing to see, Iām glad I got to see it, but then it was over.
This time I had communities. So I talked about the sun going away with my friend who was watching it in Texas, and when I checked the internet after the eclipse I saw people in this thread talking about it and photos in my ~fanfic/RP community and more photos over in Quizbowlcord.
And the sun was basically the same, but the experience was pretty different.
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all of this was great. ty <3
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neurotypical vs neurodivergent
(idk if your friend is neurotypical but i had to make the post)
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sheās probably the most neurotypical one in the social group but thatās more a statement about the rest of us than about her
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lol
fr tho if I wasnāt all the way in arizona now it would been cool to meet up with people to see the eclipse, have never gotten to see totality in person (2017 we only got partial where we were at the time) and I bet that would be fun
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lord knows the trip to poland was a fucking blast
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on that note arctic if I ever go to the UK you are legally required to host me or I ban u
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thereās a story where a guy tries something like this with the aztecs and a solar eclipse and the aztecs pull out their eclipse calendar and sacrifice him anyway itās really funny
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The Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso used a similar plot in his short novel El eclipse , published in 1959 in Obras completas (y otros cuentos) , but with an opposite ending, sarcastic and anticolonialist.
I assume you mean this
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yeah that sounds right
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