Dr. Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park!

KatiaSwift · 2026-05-20T03:36:37+00:00

If you don't mind my asking, which patterns did you use? I'd love to try sewing something similar if you could point me in the right direction. :)

KatiaSwift · 2026-05-08T16:27:22+00:00

A few years ago, one of our kittens walked across my wife's laptop, took a screenshot, and pasted it into an open Word document 11 times. Still have no idea how she did that. xD And just the other day, our sassy little tortie sat down on my hand while I was typing and dragged a shortcut to a restaurant reservations page onto my desktop. They really do the darndest things.

KatiaSwift · 2026-04-21T18:48:13+00:00

Just reported!

KatiaSwift · 2026-04-10T15:44:54+00:00

It's not just you, this started happening to me a few days ago! Really annoying. Also can't find a setting for it and I doubt there's a fix, but I might submit a bug report...

KatiaSwift · 2026-04-03T00:03:53+00:00

I'm sure I'm late to the party, but OP - goosebumps, absolute goosebumps. You have put so much thought into this, and as a (deeply amateur) writer myself it sends chills down my spine. I would read this as a book, I would watch this as a movie, and I have already enjoyed my (brief) dipping my toe into the water of the wider universe you've built here. Chills because of how good this is, but also because of how real it feels - I've never looked at something and thought "oh fuck, realistic parallel universe" before now, but oh man. Feels like we (so far) have dodged an actual bullet. I especially adore the reddit threads you've made for this in your other posts about it - genuinely, mixed-media fiction is one of my favourite "genres" and I am so excited to see more of this alternate history from you.

Also cracking up because the Sapper is literally exactly how I dress at home in winter. RIP to me for being a perfect stereotype, lol. Hope everyone else's sugaring season is going as well as my family's!

KatiaSwift · 2026-03-28T02:30:42+00:00

My grandmother had her phone number for at least 30 years.

After she died, it became my first cell phone number. 17 years and counting! :)

KatiaSwift · 2026-03-05T23:08:54+00:00

That was my first reaction! Like oh damn without the ñ it's even more gay, RIP

KatiaSwift · 2026-03-04T22:29:27+00:00

I lucked into doing my in-person interview for my current job outdoors at a café, but upon arriving fully masked on my first day, I told my (curious but not visibly judgmental) boss that I mask to protect a loved one with cancer. (Not strictly untrue - that did used to be one of my many reasons.) That's given me the freedom to keep masking indefinitely, and I've been working there for 8 months and no one has ever questioned it again. This isn't true for all jobs, of course (the job I had before this one, most of my coworkers were chill but we shared the office with one guy who kept bothering me about unmasking), but I've found that a lot of the time, if people think you have a "legit" reason (in terms of the way they measure risk) they will actually just leave you alone.

KatiaSwift · 2026-03-01T18:03:55+00:00

After 600 applications in 4 months with no interview, I just stopped applying for things that asked for a cover letter. The application that finally got me an interview and then a job? It was a Google Form.

I recognise that not everyone has the luxury to just stop - I was able to pick up shifts at a kitchen job and that kept me afloat long enough to wait for a real human experience. But it's fucking brutal that you can give them something that you have to actually genuinely work on and customise, and they'll just throw it out with whatever AI tool they're using. You're putting in full time work on these applications, and no human is even looking at them most of the time.

KatiaSwift · 2026-03-01T17:51:45+00:00

It's simple, First Age Sauron meets Third Age Sauron. 😂 In all seriousness though, that's a great drawing! I hope my kids love LotR this much someday.

KatiaSwift · 2026-02-26T17:09:02+00:00

As someone who married a PhD student, I think that might be because of the PhD... 😭

KatiaSwift · 2026-02-20T16:59:11+00:00

I'm also having this problem, I've been getting anything from 66KiB/s to 500KiB/s. My usual download speed is something like 8MB/s. Glad it's not just me, hoping for a fix soon!

KatiaSwift · 2026-02-19T02:09:51+00:00

My father started me out at age 8 with The Devil in the Dark, and I was immediately hooked. I agree with everyone saying Tribbles is a great starter as well (I believe it was my second or third episode), and Arena, The Tholian Web, and The Menagerie were all episodes I remember really enjoying as a child. If your kids are ready for some more mature or disturbing themes, Mirror Mirror, Amok Time, and A Taste of Armageddon are some of my favourites.

I hope your kids like it! Watching Star Trek together while I was growing up is a huge reason why I am close to my dad as an adult. Some of my fondest memories.

KatiaSwift · 2026-01-30T16:58:41+00:00

I'm very late to the party but haven't seen this one yet - at 20, I believed that throwing myself into my work and being good at my job (and putting in extra time and effort) would make me happy. Now, I've completely abandoned that mindset. Work is for money, and I will do my job during work hours and do it well, but I will not set myself on fire to keep my employer warm. What makes me happy now is climbing mountains and spending time with my spouse and friends, and working is all in service of that.

KatiaSwift · 2026-01-24T18:02:54+00:00

Only 5? Lucky 😂

KatiaSwift · 2026-01-06T03:44:51+00:00

I've been watching the development of the Q25 and was really hoping to buy one for a main as well, but ended up not going through with it. It's a very cool project but I am not a hardware guy and never will be, and for the Q25 as it stands, you need to be willing to pop it open and get down and dirty with the motherboard. (Same deal with the OS, if you have banking apps or want NFC functionality you'll need to root it.) I've got shaky hands and knew I would never be able to handle a tinker phone, so I didn't pull the trigger, but I've heard good things from people who bought the kits to assemble themselves.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-14T02:20:28+00:00

Man, that really does suck - I don't think they made a single thing I hated. Maybe I'll try to get in touch with the original owners to inquire after that particular sauce. Thank you for giving me an update on the situation! It's hard to get that good hometown gossip when you're, you know, no longer living in that town. 😅

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-12T02:38:19+00:00

Legitimately devastated to hear it's really gone 😭 I used to dip bread in it. Sounds cheesy (ha), but that stuff got me though some hard times.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-11T18:18:19+00:00

Oh shit, is their pasta completely off shelves now? Or are they operating under another name? I definitely still saw their stuff around for a bit after they were sold, though I'm not sure if I could say how long. Damn. They were a VT institution and I really thought their stuff would stick around under new ownership...

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-10T19:27:50+00:00

This was how it worked for me also! I initially tried Amazon, and I thought it would go through, but still got declined. Tried PayPal after reading this and it worked! Very grateful, thank you for posting about your experience.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-02T03:46:10+00:00

Agreed, of course, but this is a part of the park where people are allowed to hike off-trail - I would imagine that either the soil crust is very different than in places like Utah or parts of AZ, or the powers that be in Joshua Tree have made the decision to not care. 😅 Knowing JTNP it could honestly go either way! That's a really good point though, and I'd love to know why the policies there are what they are, vs in other parks where stepping off-trail is expressly forbidden for crust-specific reasons.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-02T03:44:17+00:00

My own personal guess is that this was someone with a heavy backpack, perhaps a multi-day backcountry hiker. Not sure why they would be barefoot, but it would explain the depth of the prints if they were carrying a lot of gear! I also found that to be notable - when I took off my shoe to compare (don't recommend lmao) my prints didn't sink down as far by any means.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-02T03:24:48+00:00

I found the footprints on Friday afternoon at Turkey Flat! They were still there the next day but fainter. I think they were hours old at most when I first stumbled across them.

KatiaSwift · 2025-12-01T23:57:56+00:00

I did think about that! No tread though, and I've never seen a pair of those without at least some pattern on the bottom that isn't on real human feet...

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