Gabriel had never heard of Kala, The Suburban Mine Lady, and writing it that way makes her seem like a League of Legends champ. And shit man, maybe she is. She seems like she has an ult of some kind.

I think it was supposed to be a storm shelter at first, certainly she said so at the beginning of her channel, but at some point appears to have veered into a madness on some Khazad-dûm type shit. The author of this accurs'd warren is an engineer - not the type of engineer that makes tunnels, the type that makes software - but I have had the pleasure to know many engineers in my life and they share certain traits. In the absence of external pressure, situated deeply within their own mind palace - or a hole under their house - they can enter an "optimization spiral" if they haven't trained themselves to escape them. I don't even hate this tendency; you have to let them have fun sometimes. God only knows what they'll find. But I think it has taken root here. We also have to consider that she simply does not think and perceive the world like other people. I don't know what the current magic word is for that, but whatever it is it applies to three fourths of the people in my house.

I was just mentioning the whole thing to Grab as we were writing, the first panel (as it sometimes happens) is actually just what occurred. But literally since that moment, the whole conversation has shifted. I've been observing this phenomenon for what seems like a year, at least. Now people are just talking about whatever they were going to talk about anyway but drafting on this bizarre tale's algorithmically enforced wake.

This is incredibly common on social media, but TikTok really operationalizes the process. I'll see a video and for about the first minute I'll be like, oh, I hadn't really thought about it like that, and then they'll start talking about vibrational frequencies or the UN or something and I'll be like ohhhhhh. Okay. If the topic of the day was tunafish - the Chicken of the Sea - and you were in the throes of some fascination, you might find a way to connect this to the Directed Energy Weapons and Blue Tarps or some shit. Obviously I don't believe any of that shit, but if you do, you can and crucially will connect it to fish. Another peninsula off this fractal coast is the constant recitation of received wisdom whose origin is impossible to discern, omniprojected by an ephemeral medium whose purpose is to act as a cognitive snack. There's a lot of newly minted experts on mineral rights and no provenance for that expertise. It's not really a "footnotes" kinda place.

The one that I saw before I started writing this post was about the responsibilities we have to each other - how her neighbors might be affected by her travails below, in the dark places of the Earth. I'm completely into that. I suspect that's part of the reason her project was stopped by the authorities. Social Media has birthed many novel creatures, and one of them must certainly be the 4K HDR Criminal Self-Reporter, and there is over a year of dutiful, cleanly edited footage of everything she's done. In this case, this creator I was watching had a confident answer - that the concept of property itself should be abolished. Oh! Okay. Well, that might take a sec.

After Suburban Mine Lady's operation got put on time-out by the Town she's in, she put up one last video that is… I don't know what it is. It's a reenactment of some kind, about getting the news that she had to shut down. It has reenactors and external camera shots and stuff? Is this a psyop?! They're gonna turn me into the type of motherfucker I just complained about.  I'm gonna check out her videos, maybe see what color them tarps is.

(CW)TB out.