I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
Sorry babes but as someone who lived lug around 500 cds they can die. To me lps are at least pretty and pretentious like a fine wine. Cds have no point
the point is cds are sexy as hell. sorry you dont know what sex is.
The real point is that you OWN a CD. You do NOT own anything digital you purchase.
Google Play stole hundreds of dollars worth of music I paid them for from me by forcing me to upload it to YouTube Music (or lose it entirely) which is behind a subscription paywall, requiring me now to pay more money every month if I want to listen to MY music I PAID for without constant advertising.
You do not own anything digitally purchased. It can be taken back from you at any time and it is fully legal for big corporations to do so for some reason.
CDs can’t be taken from you unless they come into your house or car in person to physically pry them out of your cold dead hands.
That’s why the resurgence. As funny as that person’s reply to you was, it’s not in fact because they look sexy. It’s because you actually own them.
Look- CDs are your friend. CD-ROMs and CD drives with the capacity to burn? Are your friends with benefits.
I’ve told this story many times and I’ll tell it again.
When it came to ITunes, I behaved for years. Like, a decade. I had around $400 total in completely legit paid-for tracks.
Then, around 50 of those suddenly became inaccessible, because they had originally been bought with my long-defunct college email address, and even though I had been faithfully changing the email connected to my appleID email every time I had to, for some reason, those tracks in particular had never “properly” transferred.
Whatever. I contacted Apple, first via chatbot, then via email, then via phone. Repeatedly.
After literal days of being bounced several times from one person and department to another, I suddenly got an email that my entire account had been compromised and “had” to be purged. Which was one version of the story. The other version of the story, told to me by one of their techs on the phone, was that my account had “accidentally” been purged by a glitch.
Either way, Hundreds of dollars in music that was still on my laptop had just been rendered completely inert by their proprietary DRM.
Well, were they gonna give me back that music if I made a new account, since I had paid for it?
Nope, sorry, we don’t have the ability to do that.
So that same night, I went and researched all the necessary steps to rip the DRM out of everything I had ever bought.
as a kid i had one of those “there’s a monster under my bed” moments except real.
every night i would cry about a ghost or something trying to scare me by knocking on my bedroom windows and walls. like, really loudly, every hour or so, every night. only at night. so my dad was like “heh okay kiddo let’s check it out :) ah see? there’s nothing here :)” and left.
until years later he admitted to me that he did in fact hear the unexplainable knocking when he slept in that room one night, and it kept him awake with fear. and suddenly felt awful for not believing little kid me.
imagine your kid being like “daddy there’s a demon in my closet” and you being like ok son lemme just check that for you :). and you open the door and there’s a demon in the closet
