Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

[Whispering:] But most of all, how we define them.

During which I never shook – still have not shaken – the sense that our disasters diagnose our societies. How we anticipate them, behave in them, and remember them tells you who we are.

I want to reiterate that I did not experience Haiyan/Yolanda. I saw some other thing that was, like, part of uhhh the same hyperobject I guess, but was not a storm; it did not hurt me or destroy my home. It did change how I think about organizations and leave me with a painful drive to help close some of the gaps I had seen in how the Earth observation ~*~community~*~ handled disaster response. That ended up flavoring my next five or ten years.

It did a lot to convince me that certain conversations we have about climate change, for example – about whether only large organizations with central power can address such problems, or whether we only have such giant and slippery problems because of those institutions, or both – are absolutely necessary and also probably have no satisfying answer.

I saw some institutions completely fail to function – to do the thing they were founded to do. I saw others do exactly the right thing like it wasn’t a big deal. Some of those institutions were sibling departments under the same agency or company.

The sort of thumbnail image for this whole experience in my memory is the sandbags spelling HELP in front of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in Tacloban: https://blog.maxar.com/leading-the-industry/2013/raisingawarenesstyphoonhaiyan

I remember e-mailing every civilian satellite operator, sometimes using Google Translate, to ask if they had imagery they could share. We got every kind of bad response you can imagine – patronizing ones, greedy ones, ones confused about extremely basic concepts, and so on. One company said the person who handled this kind of thing was on vacation and they would get back in a week or two. Another one gave us okay data but over sub-dialup download speeds.

I remember someone sitting next to me having to turn their laptop screen away because they had just got imagery before it hit the Hazards Data Distribution System but it was still classified so they weren’t allowed to do anything with it other than confirm that it would meet a humanitarian need. It wasn’t declassified for hours after that, and it was already late in the Philippines.

I remember sitting in the headquarters of a large institution and watching the person next to me finish tiling a map, eject the thumb drive it was on, put it in a plastic bag, and toss that into a ULD container someone was wheeling through the room on its way to Manila.

The story of Haiyan/Yolanda is very much not mine to tell. I was not in it. But what I saw on the other side of the world, of how the US NGOs and the mapping industry responded, is still stamped on my psyche. It was a very radicalizing and occasionally encouraging experience.

Was walking home with some cans of catfood ripping through a paper bag and thinking about Supertyphoon Haiyan/Yolanda when I realized I’d just missed its tenth anniversary.

I grew up in a rainier version of the climate I live in now, and it just started raining, and it’s stupendous.

Time to settle down with a big mug of herbal tea to look at some abandoned essays and remember why I abandoned them.

Time keeps sneaking up on me. It’s already November again and time to pick up a new screen light for the insect sky.

Wishing a joyous and fulfilling 1700000000 to all who celebrate. Nothing but empathy and understanding to those for whom it is a difficult occasion.

@tmcw Saw a guy in a tiktok who looked just like you.

The landlord’s on the roof and the cat is staring out the window with an ostrich in her thought balloon.

I continue to feel that:

1. The “AI” companies’ PR is based in creating sense of inevitability, and people who don’t like what they’re doing feel bulldozed.

2. This bulldozed feeling is a goal of the PR strategy, because it manifests as anti-“AI” people pitching mostly poorly thought-out and easily dismissed arguments in desperation.

I say some version of this every six weeks and every six weeks I get three polite faves and that’s it, so discount as you see fit.