Grateful Mutant

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

We can put magic back in the world

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@wotancore Fitness may not make you right wing but valuing it is right wing. Normgroids are simply unaware that some of their values are right wing

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@NewRightPoast Is it pozzed like the rainbow fish?

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@Scearpo The world has always been hell with enclaves of relative paradise. You’re right about trajectory but complete ashes aren’t necessary before things turn around at scale. The feudal favela situation is likely, but those enclaves will produce people of quality who can lead revival.

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@chrisyabsleydev Cool mom

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

“Call: [phone] for a good time in Mojave!”

I first discovered the number in 1976, deep in my phone-phreaking days, when the world still hummed along copper wires and every tone held a secret.

Back then, long-distance calls were adventures, not obligations.

I would chase the faint ring across the continent just to hear it ring, once, twice, a dozen times, out in the middle of nowhere.

That lone phone became my quiet obsession, a single silver thread stretched across the empty desert, promising that no matter how isolated you felt, someone, somewhere, might pick up and change everything.

By the mid-1980s I was attending Comdex in Las Vegas, the air thick with the scent of new circuit boards and cigarette smoke, the future of computing crackling on every booth.

One afternoon I slipped away from the neon sprawl, rented a beat-up sedan, and drove east into the Mojave.

The road unspooled like a ribbon of heat, and after an hour the city lights vanished behind me. There it stood: the phone, solitary and gleaming under a merciless sun, exactly as I had imagined it for years.

A few dozen people had already made camp nearby, tents pitched in the sand, campfires flickering at dusk, strangers drawn by the same myth that had pulled me there.

I joined them for a night, sharing stories under the stars, and when the phone finally rang I was the one who answered. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman driving cross-country from Maine.

She laughed when I told her my story, and for 20 minutes the desert felt smaller than my living room.

That call was only the beginning. Over the decades I dialed the number, from payphones in airports, from college dorms, from the back of tour buses and, later, from the quiet of my own office late at night.

Sometimes I would let it ring twenty, thirty times just to hear the wind answer. Other times it connected instantly, and I would talk with whoever had been lucky enough to reach it, truckers on midnight runs, teenagers daring each other, dreamers and drifters and poets.

Each conversation was a small romance, brief, unexpected, charged with the thrill of pure chance.

One voice, though, stayed with me. A man named Alex picked up one rainy evening in 1987. We talked for over an hour about circuits and code and the strange poetry of connecting people who would never otherwise meet. By the end of that call we had sketched the outlines of a business. For the next ten years we built a small business few know I had. All legal and boring but fun.

The phone taught me something profound: connection is not about proximity. It is about the promise that someone is always willing to answer.

That lesson lit a fire in me. In the late eighties I began installing payphones of my own, at one time thousands of them, scattered across the country like new constellations.

I placed them in airports where travelers needed one last good-bye, in remote mountain towns where the only signal was hope, and along lonely highways where the night felt endless.

Some of those phones still stand today, weathered but working, their receivers warm from decades of voices.

A few I have quietly upgraded with Wi-Fi hotspots, so the old copper lines now run to a Starlink station to the sky….

The desert taught me the value of keeping doors open, and I have never stopped.

Even now, decades later, I still dial that updated number [phone] was area code updated to now: [phone]. It is run by an enthusiast. He will text you:

“Booth apocalypse
Their skeletons haunt the night
Graffiti sermon”

The line may be now a party line these days, but the ethos remains.

In my mind the phone still rings out across the sand, a silver beacon under the same stars that once watched me camp beside it.

It reminds me that every great connection begins with a single, improbable ring, and sometimes the most beautiful stories start when you are willing to drive into the desert just to see who answers.

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@SteveTr3v0r @EagleZeroX He’s having fun. Can you imagine what that’s like?

[Lomez @L0m3z]

"Empathy" is often used to explain bleeding-heart liberalism, but this is exactly backwards.

It is precisely the liberal's lack of empathy, his failure to imagine the mindset of the malicious anti-social criminal, that drives his misguided politics.

Important to realize this.

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@kenzietuff Your account is a continuous white pill drip (not because of explicitly hopeful messaging)

[Wylfċen @wylfcen]

STOP saying “autistic,” which is from Greek. The native English word would be sundermood, from Old English sundor- (“separate, special”) + -mōd (“-minded”). From this we can derive sundermoodness (“autism”), sundermoddle (“to stim, to sperg,” literally ‘be autistic rapidly or repeatedly’), and the forbidden sundermeed (“to make autistic”).

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@CheshirePolly14 @Animegoy008 Please preserve!

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@CrankyPainter @ShitpostRock2 Shockingly good movie video game

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@Xenos_RIFS @SurgicalAx3 @DelusionPosting It is woke, it’s just not woke trash. See above

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

It’s magnificent art even if you don’t like their politics. My guess is they are old school libs not progs. The game has a lot of left coded themes but it’s nuanced enough that you can’t fairly dismiss it as libtarded. I’m pretty rw and I had a lot of fun considering the arguments they were making about nobility, hierarchy, etc.

The abortion quest is pretty on the nose though ngl

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@found_it_funny

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@found_it_funny Funnier with her reply

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@AuronMacintyre I love a good shepherd’s pie

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@studio_erickson @AtelierMissor_ Incredible

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@LughSummerson @nostalgicfile The nothing before time

[Grateful Mutant @MidwitLemming]

@somephono @Blergh145581 The ending wow

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

Opposing the obliteration of millennia-old civilisations is conservative, actually