The air was stifling. The kind of air that sits on you, like a hot blanket made of water. The kind of air that makes you understand that the atmosphere is heavy, in a way your high school science teacher never really conveyed. Big, heavy, hot, wet air.

It engulfed ArcticPrincess, squeezed him from all directions with it’s sticky wetness. He curled up tighter in the strange hexagonal hole he’d found in one of the walls of the airport basement. There was work to do, but he wasn’t going to do it. At least today, the world could keep spiraling towards its populist, capitalist collapse without him.

The Fiji Airways Lounge at Nadi airport, incomplete and abandoned. Once, someone had a dream of what this place could be. An architect somewhere, a vision of this space filled with wealthy travellers, the sub-elites, the smaller masses who could afford slightly better treatment while the larger masses endured the gate-surrounded food court upstairs.

Something had gone wrong. Maybe it had been corruption. Maybe the fickle will of the shareholders. Maybe it had been a boondoggle all along, a scheme for furthering the career of a junior executive who’d already moved on to their next, higher paying position. Whatever the cause, the architect’s dream sat half-built. One half elegant workstations, elegantly curving divisions between contrasting flooring styles, elegant chairs and elegant partitions. One half abandoned construction materials, unassembled couches and unfinished, purposeless rooms.

The place felt like ArcticPrincess’s life, like the lives of all the old friends he’d seen on this trip. Grand dreams in the middle of a slow motion collision with reality. In the centre of it all, a weird hexagon cut into the wall in which you could momentarily try to hide. A retreat for writing fiction in style that had also bloomed and died, for a platform whose dream of freeing social media from corporate dominance was also wilting as quickly as it had blossomed.

ArcticPrincess’s phone rang. It looked like he was going to have to help the world collapse today after all.

The claim and evidence here are not logically consistent.

It’s like saying “cyanide won’t make you dead” because, look “people still get dead from falling and crocodiles, even if there’s no cyanide around”.

Pretty sure it’s Dinosaurs, Nucleaics & Acid.

Sounds like a great way to evolve vaccine-resistant rabies

Your and his age are gonna be major variables here. Conversations and relationships work very differently at different life stages.

You sound like you’re maybe a teenager? Try asking interesting questions that require some thought to answer, but still leave room for your friend to give an easy thoughtless answer if they want to. Where do you think we’ll be in X years? What’s something you thought you wanted but as you’ve gotten okay have realised you actually don’t? What do you think we do now thar future generations will think is crazy? Listen to his answers and ask followup questions.

Personally, I’ve always been most impressed by directness, honesty, intelligence and courage.

Wow, what a terrible article. The author doesn’t engage with any of the substantive points Radiohead and Nick Cave are making, he just disparages them and insists on his obvious moral superiority. It’s dressed up in some, admittedly, very nice writing, but this is just childish name calling.

Still, interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Scientific papers are often titled “What it’s actually about: something witty.” This one is about object personification and so after the colon they personify the paper itself by giving it an emotion.

“New lab rule: no Ph.D. defences in poetry form.”

Still passed and had a grand old time.