Friday, September 5th, 2025

Entry #12

Today, is the Fifth of September in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So for this week the primary event is my final semester beginning. Despite being relatively straightforward, due to my university honestly not being the best, changing our online learning software, long bus rides to get to my classes, and horrendous temperatures, this has been all-around pretty stressful week. I’ve spent some of my free time reading about Arctic Exploration and also had a neat encounter with a book about ghosts in the library. I am also still working on my graduate school applications, but honestly at this point I have nothing of interest to log here other than the above mentioned. If a meeting on Monday goes well though, I'll definitely have something better for next week's entry. - Qal

Sunday, August 31st, 2025

Entry #11

Today, is the Thirty-First of August in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So once again, I have failed to uphold my personal standard of posting on this blog every Friday. I will also admit, I do not have a very good reason this time. I meant to update it on Friday but never got around to it, then also neglected to do so on Saturday as well. I also not update the Archaeology tab for this website like I had proposed doing so. I did actually begin doing so and do have a format ready, but I realized that I could not do justice to my favorite subject without performing genuine research and including material traditions, artifacts, and methodologies in didactic detail. While I could definitely explain most concepts, I would be performing what I and my friends have referred to as "Vibes-based Archaeology" which while incredibly humorous, is also not befitting genuine discussion of the topic. I felt I had enough understanding of the Rio Grande Delta Peoples to include a rough outline of their material tradition to serve as the framework for all other entries, but when I next began on the Old Bering Sea culture, I realized that I couldn't actually cite specific instances of my understanding. I am familiar with the culture and its appearance in the material record, but if I can't recall where I learned this information exactly then its frankly unverifiable and therefore, vibes-based. As a result I used printing credits at the university library, given that these are the last I'll ever receive, and printed some several hundred pages worth of journal articles written about the archaeology of the Bering Sea, collecting them all in a binder and dubbing it "Project Agyalluk". I had been meaning to read some of these articles for personal research towards forming a topic of graduate study either way, so this was also something that prompted me. That, along with some problematic data transfer and backing up data has been what's been mostly occuping my time this last week.

On the subject of data backups though I have devised a clear and easy system for doing so however. Currently I have 2, 2TB External SSDs with one being plugged into my PC and another being in reserve. I have named them Alpha and Beta, with a Gamma soon to follow and all three will hold in common, redunant copies of most files on my PC amongst other things. Delta, which was just purchased yesterday, has became my primary drive and is a shielded 1TB External SSD that fits easily in the palm of my hand. Everything that I have as a creative pursuit, like writing, poetry, photography, this website, along with my university career, music library, and digital library is all consolidated and collected on this single drive. It's even password protected! I'll use this as my daily work drive, with eventually Epsilon and Zeta being reserve SSDs of Delta's contents, updated on a monthly and bimonthly basis respectively. Lastly, I'll eventually obtain Archival Grade BD-Rs which will be be burned with the contents of Delta as of the Winter Solsitice 2025 and then the Summer Solstice 2026, the collection of discs then serving as Eta and Theta. Lastly, three HDDs will also be obtained, slowly though, and be backed up with the contents of Alpha at the time, being Iota, Kappa, and Lambda respectively. Not that it would ever be practical, but Mu is reserved for a Tape Drive if I ever acquire one. I doubt I can find one that won't just steal and peddle my data, but Nu is reserved for a Cloud Storage. Xi through Psi is reserved for tertiary drives to the Alpha/Delta systems or new reliable storage mediums that will be invented later this century, and Omega is reserved for an at least 4TB SSD or HDD that can store all of my data, plus any data I have backed up from family members like photos, etc. I will note that any drive that fails will just be replaced and its contents replaced, taking on its predcessor's designation.

In a lot less dumb news, I freaking love my ereader. I finished Around the World in Eighty Days earlier this week and I loved the story! I also started reading Knud Rasmussen's Across Arctic America, although I haven't read the last few days due to fatigue or other reasons. In any case though it is genuinely so convenient and it is really promoting me reading more than my physical books can due to their size and unwieldyness in the hand on occassion. I just know my hour-long bus rides too and from class are going to be a lot less boring now. - Qal.

Friday, August 22nd, 2025

Entry #10

Today, is the Twenty-Second of August in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

L I B E R T A D has been the theme of the last few days this week. I successfully managed to complete my penultimate semester of my undergraduate education, hopefully with straight A's once again. On Saturday I managed to complete the last exam for my Introduction to Oceanography course, and beginning last Monday I began vigorously drilling and working on my sign language production and comprehension. I have been learning American Sign Language, making me arguably trilingual now, but for a number of reasons both justifed and not, I hadn't been completing my coursework with the diligence it deserved. However, I went three tutoring sessions in as many days, both for a grade and for help, and was able to complete my assignments wherein I recounted in sign famous stories in deaf culture and retold a humorous anecdote from my childhood. While I am by no means deluding myself into thinking that I am skilled in this language, it has been an interesting experiencing learning to produce a signed language as opposed to a spoken one nonetheless. Deaf culture is also a fascinating thing in the way it interacts with sign language where developments in one reshape the other, just like any other language and associated culture on Earth. I think that deaf culture largely goes unnoticed by the hearing who don't have deaf relations or friends, and that is honestly a shame as in my education so far I've been introduced to a new form and medium of poetry and the arts that isn't truly analogous to anything else. I am to continue my formal education in sign language with ASL II which I'll be starting in September, which I look forward to. Beyond that I hope to continously practice and use this language for the purposes of communication with the deaf in formal settings like the workplace and school yes, but also for the purposes of communication and cognition with the self, to be consistently aware of multiple avenues of interacting with and comprehending teh world around me.

On a related note, the fact that I am beginning my final semester of my undergraduate education as truly set in at this point. In only about 120 days from the time of writing, I will be beyond an event that once seemed incomprehensibly distant. When I was a child the thought of graduating High School seemed like an event that was so distant in the future that it might as well include me leaving the stadium in a flying car. Likewise, me attending University, let alone graduating seemed like it would take a lifetime... and yet here I am. I'm standing at the precipice and I can see a future that was inconceivable even just a few short years ago. I've been in a pretty reflexive mood about all this lately and whether or not that's a bad thing is not for me to say. I am planning accordingly though, to realize that formerly inconceivable future though and have been narrowing down my topics of study for my prospective Masters thesis at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I've long been interested in what National Geographic termed "The Peoples of the Arctic Circle" in one graphic I saw long ago. Specifically though, I have an interest in the maritime adaptations and lifeways necessary to produce thriving cultures along the frigid Bering, Beaufort, and Chukchi Seas. Those regions, and the Bering Sea in particular were not only places of unique culture adaptations in the extreme North, but also stood as a major nexus point for the exchange of people and ideas long after Beringia was inundated. Despite common assumptions, (which are also not entirely truthful but for brevity I'm omitting an explanation of how humans peopled the Americas via a primary coastal route with the Bering Land Bridge being an auxiliary route) contact was not wholly lost between the Old and New Worlds from the time of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition to the Columbian Exchange. There is clear evidence that Yupik speaking peoples crossed between Chukotka and the Alaska Coast, with an important stop along the way being St. Lawrence Island which has been continously inhabited for millennia. We can also assume that ideas such as the bow and arrow, slat armor, and even worked iron in the region all originated from exchange ultimately beginning on the Eurasian steppes, moving into the Russian Far East, being transmitted to Yupik, Inupiat-speaking peoples (and their predecessors), and beyond into the interior of the American continent. Suffice to say this was a very significant region in world history that I believe would be worthwhile studying archaeologically, and I have supposed that my focus might in some form be on the tools (ivory, lithic, and bone) utilized in this region and their successive changes in each archaeological tradition that occupied the area at one point or another. This would be combined neatly with my previous research experience with lithics in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and while obviously far different materially and in ideological terms, the principles of analysis remain the same. This will be given further thought of course, but as of now this appears as the most likely direction.

Finally, I would to note that I believe I am going to use this short break before the onset of the Fall Semester to add to and update my website where possible. In the month or so since I had to cease a lot of work on this website due to school, I have tweaked some of the HTML to display in a neater fashion but only a few pages have received this update so far. I added a proper hompage as mentioned in my last entry, but I have since also changed the font of the website from Serif to Courier New because... well frankly it looked more "Space Age" which I felt meshed better with my preferred NASA font for all the banners. I also will hopefully update the archaeology page next that way it can be continously updated, as I'm hoping to include some kind of news feed lifted from the Archaeology Magazine site and/or that I can update with interesting videos or articles manually. I'll also obviously include past and current interests related to the field. But until then... - Qal

Friday, August 15th, 2025

Entry #9

Today, is the Fifteenth of August in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

I have little to report for this week. My e-reader did arrive and I am enthusiastic about it so far. I have been using this opportunity to read Around the World in Eighty Days, which I had started multiple times but never finished for whatever reason. I have also started playing Fallout: New Vegas in a genuine playthrough over the last few days and so far the story has been pretty enjoyable. I reworked this website so now it has a genuine home page that you view when you first arrive here, and I hope to add more to it in the near future like maybe a scrolling Qalibrations banner or some animated gifs of some pixel art I would make. I might even add rotating audio tracks from my favorite songs if I can figure it out. I’m also nearly done with the Summer II session though it has been incredibly taxing in this last week. In any case, I believe that’s nearly all that’s really occcurred over this last week.

P.S. for the sake of transparency this entry was actually added to the blog on Sunday, August 17, 2025 but I had little opportunity to draft this post on Friday, when I woke up at 6pm in the afternoon, or Saturday, as both days were occupied by the aforementioned taxing schoolwork.

Saturday, August 9th, 2025

Entry #8

Today, is the Ninth of August in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So, it appears as though I've already messed up my dedicated schedule I had promised only a few weeks into the blog! Hopefully this won't be a regular occurrence but rest assured I had a really good reason... I had dedicated Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to doing my long overdue schoolwork and just got really lazy. Some important things have happened over the last week though. For one, I managed to procure a proper e-reader that should arrive by next Wednesday. It's a color e-reader and has a 7.8inch display, so in theory it will be suitable for some pdfs and definitely for all the epubs I have. Additionally, I have entered the wonderful world of using Internet Archive to "acquire" old software after having managed to get the Encarta thing working I mentioned last time. Now I've successfully managed to get a 2014 and 2015 Encyclopedia Britannica program running, Microsoft Office 2007, The old Windows Vista/7 Chess Titans, Windows XP Solitaire, and even this incredibly cool Windows 98 program called 3D World Atlas. It is amazing, but unfortunately only works upon the initial installation from the .iso, and afterwards won't open currently as it demands a CD-ROM be inserted in order to display properly. I'm working on a solution but if I can't find a reasonable one I'm sure I can extract its contents from the actual installation files somehow. On this topic though, this week has also been dedicated to me breaking free from Windows Spyware and Bloatware, freeing myself from corporate greed and demands for subscriptions, and even the crapshoot that is modern websurfing for research. I've done this in three ways, for one "acquiring" software I need. Two is debloating Windows 11 and loading it with older equivalent programs like MS Office 2007 to run smoother. Specifically, I have done this on a small HP laptop that only has 4GB of RAM that was being seriously slowed down by Windows 11. I disconnected it from the internet, optimized the OS, loaded it with all the small programs I needed like Word 2007, and now it stands as a well functioning "Digital Typewriter" as my friend calls it (I had been calling it the much more derogatory "Glorified Word Processor" but Digital Typewriter sounds kinder). Finally, three is consolidating my personal library of "acquired" books, articles, and multimedia into a navigable and transferrable digital library I have dubbed PATRIOT.

I am of the opinion that knowledge cannot be bought or sold, it may only be withheld. In that vein, I am making my knowledge and the sources where I got that knowledge freely available to whoever wants it. I'm doing this by creating Project PATRIOT, which is the effort to gather a curated series of books, journal articles, and multimedia that represent the human experience and my personal research habits. Contained within it are The Patriot Library itself, and hopefully a navigable file management program I will create so that any user can access the contents of the library without needing to file-delve. I have already created a rudimentary system using the same HTML + CSS skills I used to build this blog, and it works so long as the browser being used has the ability to display the .epub and .pdf file types. Work on Project PATRIOT will continue until December 1st, 2025 when all the contents and program will be gather and completed respectfully, at which point, Sneakernet time! The name Patriot, by the way, comes from my attitude towards knowledge and the pursuit of it, namely that I conceive of it as being the nation which I owe my alleigance to above any country, and that I am a Partiot of that nation who is willing to do what must be done to expand her borders and maintain her survival, like for instance archiving massive amounts of her dominion in a format that can be easily distributed via USBs to interested parties.

Of other relative note, I have learned this week that should everything be alright, I will become a tío to a nephew soon after I graduate with my Bachelors Degree this coming January. It has stirred a lot of introspection in me, namely how I should approach being an uncle as my mother's brother was hardly one to me growing up. I have an abundance of educational materials from when I was a young boy, toys, and now have access to a lot of the same software I used as a child too, and these could all easily be reserved for my nephew once he reaches the appropriate age. A part of me also does wonder, given that his father likely won't be involved much in his life, if I should attempt to be a male figure for him as he grows up, in addition to his grandfather (my father) and his great-grandfather (my grandfather), and what that should look like. Should I be the figure he is excited to ask when he has a question about the way the world works, like history or medicine, the way I would ask my grandfather as a boy? Should I be eager to teach him all the ways he can have fun with a computer when he grows up if my sister allows me to? Should I reserve something like a gold coin, a good pocket-knife, or a compass to give to him when he graduates High School? Like I said, I knew my uncle existed but he hardly ever filled the typical role an uncle should, a role that both of my parents had filled by their uncles during their youths. Given that now I'm not only going to be a brother, a son, and a grandson, but an uncle, I really feel like I am going to have to prepare myself for the new familial role I am going to play in this person's life. I suppose I'll have years to figure that out though, and who knows, maybe one day when he's an adult, he'll find his uncle's old blog and feel a sense of graditude that his beloved uncle was sparing him so much thought even before he was born. Hopefully anyways. - Qal

Friday, August 1st, 2025

Entry #7

Today, is the First of August in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

There is nothing much to report for this week. Things have been stressful with schoolwork piling up, personal business, and overall just not enough time and energy in the day for everything I want to do. That being said, I did resolve to work on a project involving an Archaeological Encyclopedia that will take great effort but will be very rewarding if I am able to complete it. I have also begun to consider the possibility of getting a digital keyboard/piano to play music with in a casual setting. Finally, I managed to download an old Microsoft Encyclopedia called Encarta and Encarta Kids that I intend to save and archive locally. The Encarta Kids Software was incredibly influential to me as a child and I would spend hours with it, and I want to ensure that my soon-to-be-born niece or nephew, and any potential children I might have, will have the same educational opportunities as I had to explore the Wolrd and wonders of the 21st Century. - Qal

Friday, July 25th, 2025

Entry #6

Today, is the Twenty-fifth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

This week has been incredibly hectic!.. or at least it feels that way anyways. I have been settling back into the pattern of doing schoolwork over the last week since my classes began, but have found that I simply need to stay on top of the workload and cannot afford to ignore my responsibilities. Last night I had to speedrun some 400 questions about basic oceanography in less than three hours before midnight in order to receive any credit for that assignment. I got an A thankfully, but still, school is a lot. As a result I also haven't really been able to do things that personally interest me at all this week apart from watching a few interesting YouTube videos and listening my favorite albums. I did however get a new CD player with a better FM receiver and larger window to see the spinning disc so that's pretty cool! Additionally, I also finally managed to get For the Night to Control by Electric Century on vinyl this week, which is amazing as it is one of my favorite albums of all time. I also did organize some of the articles and resources I should read and familiarize myself with before I contact my prospective advisor for grad school, so I can hopefully get to work on reading those once I can better manage my time doing my assignments. Speaking of that though, I did get good scores on my American Sign Language assignments so far and I'm actually pretty pleased with my progress. I can consistently fingerspell and the more I practice the more vocabulary I'm remembering. Sign languages, as an overall concept are also just super fascinating to read about, not only ASL. In any case I'm very thankful my school offered this as an option to meet my foreign language requirement.


Lastly, I do want to say that this week in particular I have been in awe of the Earth, humanity, and all the passions of existence for really no speciifc reason. Whatever brought this on, I do have to say that learning more about 3I/ATLAS, learning about ASL, and listening to a concept album about the exploration of the idea of love, probably have something to do with it. I am enamored with humanity, the ultimate contradiction. He who must have the capacity to be a Saint, and so must thereby also have the capacity to be a savage villain. To to be learned he must also be ignorant. To adore, he must also loathe. Man is dual and he is infinite, and it's a wonderful thing to me that Mankind has is at his most fundamental a potentiality. Nothing he does is inevitable, everything that he performs was done according to his culture, his ideas, his follies and triumphs in kind. I thank my lucky stars every day that I have had the fortune to be human and to explore the human condition, and not on some distant barren moon, nor asteroid, nor solitary spacecraft wandering through the void as many will surely come to do in the centuries following mine. I have been blessed with the opportunity to do so here at the Homeworld, the origin of all the infinite. She revolves and will keep on in her endless celestial dance, as she had long before I and so will long after I am gone. It was such a beautiful act of providence that I was allowed to comprehend this Earth and all that lie strewn about the heavens, and despite it all still be here. Here, amongst the last of my kind to be firmly bound to our cradle before we sail for farther shores and claim what was once thought only the dominion of the Gods. Homo, nunc et semper. - Qal

Friday, July 18th, 2025

Entry #5

Today, is the Eighteenth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So as of yesterday I have begun my two summer courses at my university. After the conclusion of these summer courses in late August, I will begin my last and final semester of my undergraduate studies. It really hit me today that I am nearing the end of my undergraduate career and I will ring in the New Year with a shiny new B.A. degree. Other than that, today was more or less typical of my normal daily life, although I did finally get in a good listen of Love Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 by Angels and Airwaves. I don't know what in particular happened today but Behold a Pale Horse and All That We Are finally hit me in a lyrical, musical, and meaningful way... Nuclear war is bad, Love is good, humanity is amazing is all I have to really say. Oh and also I can produce my name in American Sign Language now with more vocabulary soon to follow! (It's my foreign language credit I'm taking). Lastly, as it comes to mind, I've been reading and researching in preparation to apply to the MA of Anthropology program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'll hopefully start that process formally this coming Monday. I am not deadset on a topic yet, but I know it will involve geoarchaeology and it will likely be related to the Bering Sea/Arctic Sea. - Qal

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Entry #4

Today, is the Eleventh of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Today, my favorite band, Cartel released their second single from their upcoming album, Luckie Street 2025! They have rerecorded their debut album in order to obtain the rights to the music and they are periodically releasing singles to hype the album before its official release in Septemebr. Luckie Street has always been one of my favorite songs, my favorite version still being on The Ransom EP, the band's first release. I associate it very much with winter, with long days spent on the university campus, and a sense of familiarity in places that are unfamiliar. The Ransom EP is probably my favorite EP just based on sound and aesthetic, and its afforded me a lot of comfort when in Victoria, Texas, Washington D.C., The Twin Cities, and Fairbanks and will probably continue to do so. So honestly, I really like the song. This version is probably my least favorite of the three official that exist, third out of four if you count the demo, but I still enjoy certain aspects of it, especially the steady drumbeat that begins the song's bridge, which feels a lot more substantial in this version than the others.

On another note, I managed to personally remember the order of the Zodiac and its use for astronomy, specifically in being able to determine the position of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky relative to their known position in Aquarius in 2021. This is something that others very invested in astronomy, and certainly I was capable when astronomy primarily occupied my mind, could easily recall but I consider this a personal victory because it represents that no skill or information I have learned has ever truly left me. I may have to make more of an effort to recall the information but it is still present and it tells me that I am a capable, knowledgeable person who can do incredible things with adequate discipline and dedication. I feel the need to remind myself of these things as when I am only working within one of my interests or haven't been able to purusue one of my hobbies for a considerable length of time, I can get the sense that I have lost something or am somehow diminished as a human being. Thankfully, my memory tells me that this is not the case. - Qal

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Entry #3

Today, is the Tenth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Some things in this world terrify me, I mean absolutely terrify me. For some people it is understandably things like heights or spiders, sure. I have an aversion to needles myself, but that's not what terrifies me, what actually shakes me down to my core. What horrifies me beyond meausre is the threat of the end. Not of my end, but the end, the End of the World. While it might seem far-fetched, the world, at least the human one, is very capable of ending and that ending is very easily a manmade one. See, during the Cuban Missle Crisis in late October of 1962, a man named Vasily Arkhipov was onboard the Soviet Submarine B-59. This submarine in particular, on that day, was being targeted with signaling depth charges dropped by United States Ship to force it to surface, and it also happened to be armed with a nuclear weapon and unable to contact Moscow. You can see the issue here. The two officers normally required on a submarine of its make to authorize a launch of the nuclear torpedo were both in agreement that war had begun on the surface and that they should launch the torpedo. However, because Arkhipov was present and occupied a similar command position, all three officers needed to agree to a launch on this specific submarine, and Arkhipov refused. Had he agreed... well if he had agreed I would not be writing this. Nobody would be reading this. So much just... wouldn't be, and it's a genuinely horrifying thought.

This is why I wanted to make this blogpost. I just got done reading this alternate history story centered on exactly that, what would have happened had that submarine launched its torpedo. I can't describe in words the actual raw emotion that was elicited from reading this story. Its formatted as a series of action reports with detailed timestamps over the following few days after the initial offensive nuclear detonation. Reading it, and slowly realizing the reality of the situation go from troubled, to problematic, to dire, to unthinkable, it drags you along and punches you in the gut, first with Havana being destroyed in a retalitory nuclear strike, then Key West being destroyed in a counter-strike, and then the unimaginable of Washington, Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, really nearly every great city save Berlin just... gone. This wasn't pulled from an alternate universe or anything and is just fiction, but for in that fateful moment, this was all a very real, very genuine, very probable outcome. That so many lives, that so many great things could have, would have been needlessly lost to nuclear hellfire for no other reason than geopolitical miscalculations and the flawed judgement of a single man.

So being from the 21st century, I did not live through the cold war. In fact, 12 years had passed between the dissolution of the Soviet Union and my birth. But reading that story, seeing the situation slowly develop in a way so grim and unfamiliar to what I already knew happened, it really hit me. Things aren't so bad. I think we take it for granted, or reference it jokingly, but there must have been such a deep anxiety about this existential threat that could come at any moment during the Cold War, and it was backed up by very real nuclear weapons that had the power to realize that threat. It must have been so unimaginably petrifying, psychologically scarring, hell even just exhausting, having to live with that every day. I'll say again, compared to all that, things aren't so bad. Now don't get me wrong, there is still so much wrong with this current world and the situation can seem to be devolving to pretty dire circumstances both domestically and internationally, but still. Nothing approaching the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis has happened in the 21st century yet, and frankly, I don't expect it to ever get to that point again. The Cold War geopolitical landscape was such a different, almost foreign place that's growing more distant by the day. As bad as the world seems now, I'm afforded a strange comfort in knowing that existentially, the world will be fine. I might die. My friends and family might die. Innocent civilians the world over might die. But humanity will be fine and the Earth will persevere. Its not a great comfort, but really engaging with this historical event and coming to terms with what we really avoided is a comfort that I can live with, and that I'm thankful for. - Qal

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

Entry #2

Today, is the Ninth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

So technically, the events I am referencing in this post happened on the mroning of the 8th, but I dated this post as the 9th because it is post-midnight when I write this (I have a very irregular sleep schedule). Anyways, what I wanted to make this blogpost about was the fact that clouds are awesome! After making this website and specifically afetr making the weather tab and its subpages, I committed myself to being on the lookout for cloud formations that I did not personally have photographs of, in order to replace the Wikimedia Commons ones. Well, I don't know that I will include this photorgraph on that page because I can't positively identify it as any specific form of towering cumulus, but check it out!

Pretty freaking cool, huh? See, cumulus clouds can draw up warm air due to convection currents, and as the warm air rises in altitude it gets further away from the radiating heat of the Earth's surface and begins to acclimate to higher altitude temperatures. Temperature is just the description of how much energy is being emitted from a substance. If something is hot, then its atoms are in an excited state. If its cold, the opposite is true. In warm air, the atoms are excited and being jostled all around because at higher temperatures, they have more energy. When the air begins to cool though because it becomes more distant from the source of radial heat energy, the atoms become less excited and in this this case, somtimes the water vapor molecules will become so less energetic that they "escape" the gaseous air and precipitate out, as liquid water. If you get this on a large scale, you get more and more water vapor precipitating out into liquid water, but being already so high up that it can float/ be suspended in the air due to buoyancy and thus it adds to cloud climbing higher and higher. That's why when I used an Infrared sensor available online to see the temperatures of the cloud tops, the ones pictured had a temperature of -25°C and dropping! Based on my amateur estimations, this might put the altitude of those clouds at greater than 20,000 ft! Sometimes, I am genuinely taken aback at how awesome, in the sense of inspiring awe, nature can truly be. What a privilege that I get to exist at a time when clouds of life-giving water vapor can rise three miles into it the air, and that I get to understand, and record them. Usually it's the night sky or the delicate balance of ecosystems that are the parts of the natural world that inspire me, but sometimes it is as something as simple as a really tall cloud. - Qal

Friday, July 4th, 2025

Entry #1

Today, is the Fourth of July in the year 2025 and I am writing this from Brownsville, Texas in the United States of America.

Many events of great significance have occurred over the last few days ranging from those involving the United States government at large to those far more personal in nature. First off, this is the first blog post on this website! More than half of the pages are still under construction at the time of writing but I will be able to update a good portion of them in the following week with relative ease. Something else significant that has happened is that yesterday I finally got my very own personal CD player. I had one as a child, but this is a proper quality one that I bought with my own money. I am enjoying it immensely and it even came equipped with an FM radio! Finally, the last thing I'll note that has occurred is that as of July 1, 2025, mankind has identified the third object of confirmed interstellar origin! This is incredible to me as it really represents how this Solar System, how Earth is just a part of the larger universe that it can, and does interact with on a regular basis, and I am thankfully alive at a time when I have the privilege to understand that. I am looking forward to the following days and weeks when science communication channels will provide more information about this comet, 3I/ATLAS.

That's all for now. I may make a few more blogposts sporadically before I hold myself to the weekly schedule, but for now I am just glad to say this blog has officially begun! - Qal