![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oh thank fuck, that was The Pivotal Point. The moment, in this whole registration/orientation clusterfuck, where I have created and made accessible pretty much everything that will allow both registration and orientation to function, at least after a fashion. Guidelines are written and uploaded to a shared drive, people are recruited and trained, websites are poised to go live and have lots of people with access to them, troubles of various sorts have been shot, the whole shaky edifice has rumbled into motion and is tottering onward. If I am eaten by the cats tomorrow, or abducted by aliens, or succumb suddenly to COVID, the processes will be less efficient, and a number of people, some of whom deserve it, will have to work a lot harder to compensate, but the whole thing shouldn't fall over.
If I do suddenly disappear, incidentally, you will be able to tell it's the alien abduction from the absence not only of me but of the cats, the computers and my book collection, and also probably from the fallen placard in the back garden, the one lying forlornly amid the scorch marks on the astroturf, and reading, in Plaintive Italic, "TAKE ME AWAY FROM ALL THIS". You can imagine me waving to Perseverance and Ingenuity as we cruise past Mars, because Perseverance's adventures are making me very, very happy. (Tracy, sorry, I owe you a WhatsApp, I keep getting sidetracked by crises).
My subject line is from XKCD's Death Star theory of viral immunisation, which is an absolutely beautiful act of symbolic conflation and possibly my favourite thing to happen this year so far. (Also, the Star Wars narrative has a particular and horrible application to my twin Death Stars of registration and orientation: I kill one, then simply have to start from scratch and kill the other). If the aliens don't, in fact, abduct my willing self, and this benighted country ever gets it together to vaccinate me, every time I wander incautiously into public spaces I will fondly imagine hordes of tiny X-wings going "AAAAAAAAAAA!" and scrambling in droves to battle incoming evil.
If I do suddenly disappear, incidentally, you will be able to tell it's the alien abduction from the absence not only of me but of the cats, the computers and my book collection, and also probably from the fallen placard in the back garden, the one lying forlornly amid the scorch marks on the astroturf, and reading, in Plaintive Italic, "TAKE ME AWAY FROM ALL THIS". You can imagine me waving to Perseverance and Ingenuity as we cruise past Mars, because Perseverance's adventures are making me very, very happy. (Tracy, sorry, I owe you a WhatsApp, I keep getting sidetracked by crises).
My subject line is from XKCD's Death Star theory of viral immunisation, which is an absolutely beautiful act of symbolic conflation and possibly my favourite thing to happen this year so far. (Also, the Star Wars narrative has a particular and horrible application to my twin Death Stars of registration and orientation: I kill one, then simply have to start from scratch and kill the other). If the aliens don't, in fact, abduct my willing self, and this benighted country ever gets it together to vaccinate me, every time I wander incautiously into public spaces I will fondly imagine hordes of tiny X-wings going "AAAAAAAAAAA!" and scrambling in droves to battle incoming evil.
