So I’m super into wilderness backpacking and survivalist skills. Have been since I was a teen and too broke to buy a tent. Nowadays, I’ve tried all the fancy gear there is. And holy shit the marketing that says you need all sorts of expensive gear to go backpacking or survive in the woods? Total bullshit.
So I thought I’d post a guide to the REAL essentials, in case it’d help anyone who wants / needs to sleep outdoors for as cheap as possible.
My advice is more tailored for someone on-the-go like if you’re thru-hiking or moving camp often. So I’m prioritizing lightweight and compact gear.
And I’m from the Northeast US, so this post is focused on the 25-90°F temp range, in a wooded area with water, and a lower fire risk. If you’re looking for advice for somewhere else - hmu! I’ve road tripped the whole US with just a tent, done everything from deep snow to Death Valley, and probably have some budget tips for your climate!
Sleeping Bag ($10-$30)
OK, this one is really important, it makes such a difference compared to a blanket, and can be lifesaving. If you get nothing else, get this and a tarp.
Go on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, you can find one for $10-30. You want to look for one that’s kinda cocoon-shaped, with a pocket to put your head in.
NOT rectangular because those are usually shit, don’t cover your head, and won’t keep you warm. And if you can, find one with a temperature rating maybe 10° colder than the coldest temperature you’ll be sleeping in. It’s a comfort rating tho - so you can go below it and live.
You’ll also need a way to keep it dry when you’re not using it. A heavy duty trash bag works. You can also get waterproof stuff sacks that I think are worth it if you will be packing and unpacking often.
Also a quick way to make any sleeping bag more compact and light if you’re short? Cut off the excess at the end and sew it shut. It’ll also be warmer because you won’t have a pocket of cold at the end where your feet don’t reach. And if you’re crafty, you could make a warm vest, hat, or booties with the leftover bits.
Shelter ($10 - $60) :
For shelter, you can go with a few options, I’ll start with the cheapest:
Tarp and rope ($10-$20)- Get a large tarp that can cover you plus at least 4 feet in every direction. Then hang it over a rope like so, staking the corners into the ground with metal stakes or sticks. If it’s windy, put the broad side of the shelter to the wind to keep warm inside. If you have two tarps, you can put the second on the ground to keep your “tent” dry and clean inside. Make sure the floor tarp doesn’t extend out past the roof tarp or it will fill with water in the rain.
Tarp, hammock, and rope - Set up the tarp diagonally over your hammock. You can get a hammock for like $10-$15 on Amazon or craigslist, look for one that packs into a small bag. This is way comfier and less spidery than sleeping on the ground.
Backpacking Tent - These are the most expensive option but the best for bad weather. You can get these for $40-$60 on Facebook marketplace or Craigslist, look for one that packs down into a very small bag if you want a legit one. You want one with hollow metal poles, not fiberglass. A tent will be way more comfortable if you’re somewhere windy, rainy, or cold, and will protect you better than a tarp. Smaller ones will be way warmer because your body heat will fill them quickly.
If you have a tarp and a tent, you can hang the tarp a foot over the tent for extra protection and thermal insulation in heavy rain, wind, or snow. This is a good way to make a lighter 3-season tent usable in the winter or bad storms.
Eagle Scout from the Midwest here (and to clarify bc that leads to certain assumptions, pronouns she/her), this is all super legit advice, and I second just about all of it. You can start fires any number of ways, although lighters are probably the easiest way (personal preference for the long bois but literally any lighter will do you). A flint and steel set (or just flint if you’ve got a knife) is also pretty solid, and probably decently cheap, although likely more expensive than a cigarette lighter. You can also use a 9V battery and some steel wool if you want to be fun, but again, likely not super economical. Fire by friction is doable, and I keep a kit in my camping gear, but DO NOT rely on it. If you don’t know what you’re doing I really wouldn’t bother. It’s hard.
Wool Socks. Accept no substitute. They are so, so, so worth it, especially if you think you might get your feet wet.
Seriously no canned goods they suck balls. Instant foods are perfectly fine for backpacking, but if you aren’t backpacking and can carry excess weight in food, bring the stuff to make something a little fancier - even if it’s not much, just y'know, not college food - can help your mood out. Fancier stuff is harder with backpacking - remember, you’re carrying all your shit everywhere, and stuff is heavy - but small treats can go a long way.
Something to do is essential. If you’re with a group, bring playing cards. I like to play cribbage a lot, but that also requires a board and pegs, which is more weight. Books are great, but I wouldn’t recommend reading and hiking.
Headlight over flashlight, ngl. Having two hands free, especially if you’re on your own is very nice. Taping a flashlight to a hat should work just fine, although I might recommend taping it to the side of the hat, for weight reasons.
You can make like backpacking cook stoves from scavenged household items I’m 90% sure, but I don’t remember exactly how, so take that with some extra salt.
Sunscreen. And a good hat. Especially if you’re out on the water for whatever reason.
Trail mix is nice, you can make a decent batch with Cheerios or Cheerio adjacent cereal, raisins, optional nut of preference, and chocolate candy of preference. I like m&m’s and/or Reese’s pieces. Protein bars are also a banger, and I’m a sucker for jerky.
Some way of maintaining charge on your phone. You seriously want to be able to make contact with your folks at all times. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make sure at least one person knows where you’re going, what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, when you’re supposed to check in with them, and when you’re supposed to get back. The quicker people figure out something’s wrong, the better your chances. Give someone a route plan.
Have a map and compass, and know how to use them!!!! It might feel silly with our cell service and gps, but it’s really important to prevent getting lost and help your safety on longer trips. (And I would put the map in like a plastic sleeve or ziplock baggie or smth)
I really really recommend a multi-tool like a swiss army knife. You need a knife of some kind, but a multi-tool has other useful stuff in it
Duct tape. All hail the duct tape.
Paracord. It’s useful as shit, especially if you’re hammocking. If you’re relying on a hammock, you might not always be able to find two trees in the right spacing within the area you’ve set up camp in, and Paracord is great for that, especially if your hammock is weird and or has short straps.
Omg thanks for the added tips! You’re so right about all of it!
I so agree about the wool socks, I only got them a few years into backpacking and they made alll the difference.
And I’ve been meaning to get a good headlight - I’ve been more in the habit of putting my flashlight upside down on my water bottle to make a lantern since I love chilling in the near dark and letting my eyes adjust to the firelight. But I’ve also chipped a tooth walking around with a flashlight between my teeth soooo
I second the sunscreen, I like these or these solid sunscreen sticks since they’re all sunscreen, no water, and way lighter to carry! Plus bug spray for ticks and mosquitoes (I like bringing a tiny perfume-decanter bottle of either pure citronella oil, or pure DEET oil, it’s so concentrated that a little bit works wonders!)
And you’ve got me thinking of backpacking treats haha! These are my faves:
Loads of spices and seasonings!
Candy bars (super good crushed up and melted into instant oats)
Foraged herbs (wild onion and dandelion leaves are easy to learn to ID) in instant soup or mashed potatoes
Foraged berries and flowers (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, dandelion and violet flowers are easy to ID too) they’re soo good added into a cup of herbal tea or in breakfast oats
Instant grits with those butter packets from fast food places
Really any sauces or flavoring packets you can get from fast food places - I miss variety in my food and finding a random relish or bbq sauce packet has definitely made my day. I’ll literally collect them for camping trips.
S'mores (duhh)
Cured sausage (really good cooked over a fire)
Babybel mini cheese wheels. They’re supposed to be refrigerated but they last a few days if it’s cold. They’re so good melted into any rice or pasta. And the wax is a great fire starter. Also any kind of hard cheese, it’ll last longer than you might think outside.
Instant hot cocoa (+whiskey if you like)
“just add water” bread dough - A German friend taught me this one, it’s a tradition there to make campfire bread with little kids (they call it kinderbrot - literally kid’s bread, and despite being a bit too old for it? I’m obsessed) I use this recipe, subbing out milk for powered milk, and pre-mixing the dry ingredients. Then to cook it, you just put some water and olive oil in the ziplock of dry ingredients, let it sit to rise a bit, and then wrap the dough around a stick to roast on the fire.
Other options for the dough if you have time to kill and want to get fancy: frying it in oil and spices in the pot to make greasy dough balls / wrapping it around salami and cheese and cooking that to make savory pastries / stuffing it with cheese or sweets like foraged berries and chocolate or marshmallows and setting it to bake in the radiant heat. And probably more if you’re creative lol.
On the topic of dough: pancake batter and takeout packets of maple syrup. (Or for a lighter option, brown sugar)
Omg I forgot about the phone charger! Sooooo important if you’re using your phone for GPS!
I personally don’t really use my phone on trips - I grew up backpacking well before I got my first, so I used to only have paper maps, and had to literally meet up with my emergency contacts at a set time and place lol. And even now? I still kinda love disconnecting and using paper maps.
Plus, most places I go, there’s fuck-all cell service so I’ve never felt like I could count on my phone in an emergency - last time I got in some trouble, I literally had to hike miles, then hitchhike half an hour, to even get a bar to make a call. Still didn’t get data. Other times shit went south? Had to haul ass to back my car, and drive for a while to get coverage. I’ve been in the habit of keeping my phone off the entire time, to save battery for if I need it - but assuming I’d have a long hike and maybe drive or hitchhike ahead of me to actually get somewhere I could use it. The only times I’ve really used my phone on trips was when I wanted to quickly double check my navigation from the paper map if I was a little lost.
But anyway I always I’d caution ppl against expecting their phones will work at all - and reccomend always having a backup plan so you’re not relying on your phone. On top of generally not having service, I’ve dealt with my phones crapping out from high humidity, not turning on because of the cold, shutting off because of the heat, getting broken because I’m a clumsy dumbass, not getting a GPS fix (turns out GPS never worked on it, it just looked like it did in the city when it was triangulating cell towers to get my location lol) and I was always glad to have other maps. Maybe this is just the cynical engineer in me? But I don’t trust tech for shit.
Still it can’t hurt to bring the phone and a charging brick - if not for service at least for GPS! I always bring both in a waterproof bag! But I’m seriously thinking of getting a satellite beacon this year because that’d actually have reliable coverage and I’d be (hopefully) less likely to destroy it lol.
(P.s. extra note on maps - I reccomend at least tripling up on paper maps. I put a map in every jacket or pants pocket so it’s pretty impossible to lose them all, and if there are different maps of the same place, with different features, I’ll bring both. Plus I like laminating them with packing tape so they’re waterproof. It may be overkill to have like 5 on me but maps are light - and I like having plenty to give away, I’ve met so many people who’ve gotten lost!)
can we get a shoutout to trans girls who don’t wear makeup
i don’t need to just keep practicing I don’t need to just learn to contour or whatever the fuck else I’m 100% happy being bare-faced and the only times i ever felt compelled to do makeup was for other people’s benefit!
watch the mfs with zero reading comprehension get ahold of this and act like I’m personally attacking them for wearing makeup
Tech firms like Microsoft and Google and Meta do all that training (and inferring) on their huge computational farms. That computation requires a ton of energy, which generates heat. To remove that heat from server farms, the tech firms generally use cooling towers, where water is evaporated to send the heat out into the outside world. That evaporation? That’s how AI consumes water. It is, it’s worth noting, mostly all freshwater.
Tech firms do not publish specific stats on how much freshwater they use for different forms of computation. So the academics did some estimates. They calculated how much energy it would take to train one of the well-known large language-models (and to run inferences using it). (Here, there actually is some useful public info: As Google explained in this paper, when they created their large language-model LaMDA it required 57.7 consecutive days of training.) Then the academics used metrics of efficiency for the cooling mechanism to figure out precisely how much water would be needed.
The upshot, they figured, is that that …
Training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater, enough for producing 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles … Moreover, training GPT-3 is also responsible for an additional off-site water footprint of 2.8 million liters due to electricity usage (assuming water usage efficiency at the U.S. national average level 1.8L/kWh [32] and power usage effectiveness 1.2). Thus, combined together, this would put GPT-3’s total water footprint for training at 3.5 million liters if trained in the U.S.
And when you’re chatting with a large language-model?
ChatGPT needs to “drink” a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20–50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed.
Water consumption issues aren’t limited to OpenAI or AI models. In 2019, Google requested more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in just three states. The company currently has 14 data centers spread out across North America which it uses to power Google Search, its suite of workplace products, and more recently, its LaMDa and Bard large language models. LaMDA alone, according to the recent research paper, could require millions of liters of water to train, larger than GPT-3 because several of Google’s thirsty data centers are housed in hot states like Texas; researchers issued a caveat with this estimation, though, calling it an “approximate reference point.”
Now! This offers a civic lever we can use to impel tech firms to make their computation less energy- and water-intensive. If we, the public (via our local and state governments) are the ones selling the community-owned and -managed water, then we could strike a harder bargain here, and charge much more. Putting a stiff price on externalities is basically the only reliable way to get companies to price them into their cost of doing business.
In their defense, tech giants frequently argue that they are, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly profligate consumers of water. As Google pointed out, its 2021 use of water was comparable to golf courses …
Overall, Google’s consumption of water across the US during 2021 accounted for 3.3 billion gallons (12.4 billion liters), with “additional global locations” (ie, the rest of the world) representing an extra 971 million gallons (4.4 billion liters). This may sound like a lot (and it is), but to put it in perspective, Google claims that the total annual water consumption of its datacenter operations is comparable to the water footprint of 29 golf courses in the southwest US.
Fair enough, though I’d note that they picked a rather terrible comparison here, because a) golf is on an absolute collision course with the challenge of increasingly-scarce freshwater supplies, so it’s not exactly an example of a sustainable industry; and what’s more, b) the number of golf courses is not rapidly increasing, while the usage of AI models is.
That said, it’s entirely possible that with sufficient pressure — and again, cities and states, I’m looking at y’all and your pricing of water — tech firms could be induced to become radically more efficient in their water usage.
Fatigue is among the mostcommon and mostdisabling of long COVID’s symptoms, and a signature of similar chronic illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS). But in these diseases, fatigue is so distinct from everyday weariness that most of the people I have talked with were unprepared for how severe, multifaceted, and persistent it can be.
For a start, this fatigue isn’t really a single symptom; it has many faces. It can weigh the body down: Lisa Geiszler likens it to “wearing a lead exoskeleton on a planet with extremely high gravity, while being riddled with severe arthritis.” It can rev the body up: Many fatigued people feel “wired and tired,” paradoxically in fight-or-flight mode despite being utterly depleted. It can be cognitive: Thoughts become sluggish, incoherent, and sometimes painful—like “there’s steel wool stuck in my frontal lobe,” Gwynn Dujardin, a literary historian with ME, told me.
Fatigue turns the most mundane of tasks into an “agonizing cost-benefit analysis,” Misko said. If you do laundry, how long will you need to rest to later make a meal? If you drink water, will you be able to reach the toilet? Only a quarter of long-haulers have symptoms that severely limit their daily activities, but even those with “moderate” cases are profoundly limited. Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, still works, but washing her hair, she told me, leaves her as exhausted as the long-distance runs she used to do.
And though normal fatigue is temporary and amenable to agency—even after a marathon, you can will yourself into a shower, and you’ll feel better after sleeping—rest often fails to cure the fatigue of long COVID or ME/CFS. “I wake up fatigued,” Letícia Soares, who has long COVID, told me.
Between long COVID, ME/CFS, and other energy-limiting chronic illnesses, millions of people in the U.S. alone experience debilitating fatigue. But American society tends to equate inactivity with immorality, and productivity with worth. Faced with a condition that simply doesn’t allow people to move—even one whose deficits can be measured and explained—many doctors and loved ones default to disbelief. When Soares tells others about her illness, they usually say, “Oh yeah, I’m tired too.” When she was bedbound for days, people told her, “I need a weekend like that.” Soares’s problems are very real, and although researchers have started to figure out why so many people like her are suffering, they don’t yet know how to stop it.
…
Post-exertional malaise, or PEM, is the defining trait of ME/CFS and a common feature of long COVID. It is often portrayed as an extreme form of fatigue, but it is more correctly understood as a physiological state in which all existing symptoms burn more fiercely and new ones ignite. Beyond fatigue, people who get PEM might also feel intense radiant pain, an inflammatory burning feeling, or gastrointestinal and cognitive problems: “You feel poisoned, flu-ish, concussed,” Misko said. And where fatigue usually sets in right after exertion, PEM might strike hours or days later, and with disproportionate ferocity. Even gentle physical or mental effort might lay people out for days, weeks, months. Visiting a doctor can precipitate a crash, and so can filling out applications for disability benefits—or sensing bright lights and loud sounds, regulating body temperature on hot days, or coping with stress. And if in fatigue your batteries feel drained, in PEM they’re missing entirely. It’s the annihilation of possibility: Most people experience the desperation of being unable to move only in nightmares, Dujardin told me. “PEM is like that, but much more painful.”
Medical professionals generally don’t learn about PEM during their training. Many people doubt its existence because it is so unlike anything that healthy people endure. Mary Dimmock told me that she understood what it meant only when she saw her son, Matthew, who has ME/CFS, crash in front of her eyes. “He just melted,” Dimmock said. But most people never see such damage because PEM hides those in the midst of it from public view. And because it usually occurs after a delay, people who experience PEM might appear well to friends and colleagues who then don’t witness the exorbitant price they later pay.
…
Oller thinks this dismissal arises because PEM inverts the dogma that exercise is good for you—an adage that, for most other illnesses, is correct. “It’s not easy to change what you’ve been doing your whole career, even when I tell someone that they might be harming their patients,” she said. Indeed, many long-haulers get worse because they don’t get enough rest in their first weeks of illness, or try to exercise through their symptoms on doctors’ orders.
People with PEM are also frequently misdiagnosed. They’re told that they’re deconditioned from being too sedentary, when their inactivity is the result of frequent crashes, not the cause. They’re told that they’re depressed and unmotivated, when they are usually desperate to move and either physically incapable of doing so or using restraint to avoid crashing. Oller is part of a support group of 1,500 endurance athletes with long COVID who are well used to running, swimming, and biking through pain and tiredness. “Why would we all just stop?” she asked.
Some patients with energy-limiting illnesses argue that the names of their diseases and symptoms make them easier to discredit. Fatigue invites people to minimize severe depletion as everyday tiredness. Chronic fatigue syndrome collapses a wide-ranging disabling condition into a single symptom that is easy to trivialize. These complaints are valid, but the problem runs deeper than any name.
Dujardin, the English professor who is (very slowly) writing a cultural history of fatigue, thinks that our concept of it has been impoverished by centuries of reductionism. As the study of medicine slowly fractured into anatomical specialties, it lost an overarching sense of the systems that contribute to human energy, or its absence. The concept of energy was (and still is) central to animistic philosophies, and though once core to the Western world, too, it is now culturally associated with quackery and pseudoscience. “There are vials of ‘energy boosters’ by every cash register in the U.S.,” Dujardin said, but when the NIH convened a conference on the biology of fatigue in 2021, “specialists kept observing that no standard definition exists for fatigue, and everyone was working from different ideas of human energy.” These terms have become so unhelpfully unspecific that our concept of “fatigue” can encompass a wide array of states including PEM and idleness, and can be heavily influenced by social forces—in particular the desire to exploit the energy of others.
As the historian Emily K. Abel notes in Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, many studies of everyday fatigue at the turn of the 20th century focused on the weariness of manual laborers, and were done to find ways to make those workers more productive. During this period, fatigue was recast from a physiological limit that employers must work around into a psychological failure that individuals must work against. “Present-day society stigmatizes those who don’t Push through; keep at it; show grit,” Dujardin said, and for the sin of subverting those norms, long-haulers “are not just disbelieved but treated openly with contempt.” Fatigue is “profoundly anti-capitalistic,” Jaime Seltzer, the director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction, told me.
Energy-limiting illnesses also disproportionately affect women, who have long been portrayed as prone to idleness. Dujardin notes that in Western epics, women such as Circe and Dido were perceived harshly for averting questing heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas with the temptation of rest. Later, the onset of industrialization turned women instead into emblems of homebound idleness while men labored in public. As shirking work became a moral failure, it also remained a feminine one.
…
Some COVID long-haulers do recover. But several studies have found that, so far, most don’tfully return to their previous baseline, and many who become severely ill stay that way. This pool of persistently sick people is now mired in the same neglect that has long plagued those who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS. Research into such conditions are grossly underfunded, so no cures exist. Very few doctors in the U.S. know how to treat these conditions, and many are nearing retirement, so patients struggle to find care. Long-COVID clinics exist but vary in quality: Some know nothing about other energy-limiting illnesses, and still prescribe potentially harmful and officially discouraged treatments such as exercise. Clinicians who better understand these illnesses know that caution is crucial. When Putrino works with long-haulers to recondition their autonomic nervous system, he always starts as gently as possible to avoid triggering PEM. Such work “isn’t easy and isn’t fast,” he said, and it usually means stabilizing people instead of curing them.
—
Ed Yong’s follow up to his previous piece on post-COVID brain fog published last year:
btw ed yong has said that he has recorded an audio version of this piece that should help make it more accessible for people whose symptoms make it difficult to read long pieces, though from what i can tell i don’t think that has gone up yet.
he has also offered to personally email a copy of this piece to anyone who cannot access it
ALT
ALT
the archived versions of the article that i linked above should get around the paywall, but this still may be an option with regard to the audio version? not sure, but thought i’d include his offer in case it is helpful to anyone
The vulture capitalist hedge fund that bought and subsequently destroyed Toys R Us now owns Overdrive/Libby.
They have already begun making it worse/less usable and they have a chokepoint monopoly on the delivery method of ebooks borrowed from public libraries in the US.
A fun thing about capitalism is that rich people can buy something a lot of people love and depend on, and then destroy it for fun and profit, and there’s not really anything we can do about it.
“Brock’s nightmare did not end there. At the police station, he was forced to show a jailer his genitals after explaining that he’s trans. And despite the fact that he met their criteria and has a penis, they placed him in a women’s holding cell.”
What I like is how it is so nakedly obviously why the cop tracked him (Not stopped him, his lights were not on and he gave no lawful orders)
Brock flipped the cop the bird when he saw him harassing a woman.
This, naturally, isn’t in the report because that’s not a legal reason to arrest someone.
a tldr of this situation is that a trans man flipped off a cop as he was driving by, which is an action protected under the first amendment, the cop stalked him, pulled him over, beat him until he had a concussion, then lied about it after the fact despite the fact there was video evidence. the trans man was then charged with three bogus felonies, sexually harassed by at least one other officer, and then put in a women’s holding cell. he has lost his job and will likely have extreme difficulty finding another and the officer — who, again, lied about an event that was caught on camera — has not faced any consequences. this man’s life has, as the article states, been ruined by the heinous, though unsurprising, actions of this cop.
fuck cops. abolish the police. and stop erasing the state sanctioned violence being perpetrated against trans masculine people. this is the third story of police violence against a trans man i’ve read about this year, and it’s only been from other trans men talking about it.
Let’s all stop being weird in the notes right now, and instead shut up and put your money where your mouth is. I haven’t seen his GoFundMe link posted, but as of July 26 2023, an update has explained he’s still in need of assistance with bail+legal fees.
I’m t5t. I’m sorry if you haven’t gotten the upgrade yet
t2t over here and BOY is it a lot of work to be this way. had to get a weird download from archive dot org and now i can’t turn Microsoft Photo Manager off
That’s rough. I’ve got a friend who is still on t1t and they have to load their gender off a 5.25" floppy disk every morning.
And a couple years back I saw one of the developers of MS-GOS (Microsoft Gender Operating System) at VGF (Vintage Gender Festival) explain how, back in the day, he was working on t0t and had to toggle a gender bootloader into the front panel every day just to have a driver to load the rest of his gender off paper tape.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it’s part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators (i am not a fan of marvel. burn disney to the ground)
hello people who follow me whose interests presumably align with my own, i would like to strongly recommend to you the serial web novel Katalepsis. there’s a plot summary on that linked page if you want to take a peek, as well as content warnings, but you can also start blind here (unless you feel like you need to take a glance over the content warnings!)
very nice blend of cosmic horror/urban fantasy with a dash of lesbian romance (there are a lot of lesbians in this), generally a fun story and very worth a read. the pacing is probably the best part, i managed to carve through this one pretty quick despite its volume because it doesn’t feel like a lot to read in practice. so very enthralling and with worldbuilding that has me very intrigued
