Last night I decided I would rather spend time with the girl I've started seeing than go on a run, or climbing, or whatever else. I think that's about all I need to say this week.
I had an amazing idea for a hike. I want to do something for suicide awareness, and there's a charity that tries to organize mountain hikes the week of Labor Day. I think I could do the highest four peaks in New York in one day. I counted 21.5 miles today, which is a lot for me. I haven't counted elevation gain, but I assume it's 10,000'. Summits 1, 3, and 4 are near each other. Summit 2 means dropping and regaining about 3000'. But it would be something that might capture the attention of potential donors.
If you do do it, send me some details. That sounds like a great worthwhile endeavor.
If you're curious, and I'm sure you are, the route would be: Follow the pink line here from the Adirondack Loj toward Marcy. Just before the summit there's a spur leading to Haystack. There's about 800' of descent here. Ugh. Then back the same way to the Marcy summit and drop off the southwest side toward Skylight. Skylight is a wonderful climb, just an even steady gain. Then it's west to Feldspar, Uphill, and Lake Colden. There are obvious bail points here if I'm beat. The Avalanche Pass route is rugged but gorgeous. Going out via Feldspar is a pain in the ass, I hear. Shorter but some elevation gain and an underwater trail. Heading up from Lake Colden to Algonquin is a consistently steep trail. The worst day I had hiking was coming down that with an overnight pack. Never again. Up with a day pack wouldn't be as bad. Then it's a nice hike down from the summit. I estimated today by squinting at contour lines 8000' of gain. With a minor gains and losses it would probably be over 9000'. I'll keep you and hubski informed if I do it.
Demography is Destiny I'm not sure where to put this but you know, it's 9am and I feel like drinkin'. I'm down in LA and the Gini coefficient down here is off the chain compared to Seattle and the white people are oh so very much more plastic than they are where I live and it's one of those things that makes you go hmmm. And my honky brethren on the wrong side of the aisle are busy throwing children in cages because they fear change and my honky president is busy sucking up to authoritarians because you know what? They keep the colored folk from acting up. And we've got And we've got white deaths outstripping white births in 26 states, up from 17 just two years ago and we've got Fentanyl deaths up 540% from 2013-2016 And fundamentally? This is what a scared, angry, uneducated electorate looks like. Demographically, white folx are losing. They still have all sorts of advantages over non-white folx but they don't see it that way because previously, they've always been on top and the great experiment has shifted that shit. Poke around here a little bit. White opioid deaths are TEN TIMES as high as everyone else's opioid deaths. If you've got a representative sample of dead junkies in your morgue, one of them is hispanic, one of them is black, and eight of them are white. But demographically, white folx like me are gonna be fine, just fine. I've got one kid and she's in private school and I've got five figures on my mortgage and I've got a pension and like 5 IRAs and all sorts of other shit and I have the patience, time and attention span to read geopolitical newsletters and right or wrong, I have an opinion about the Bank of International Settlements. Me and my peeps are the genetic overlords from now until the sun is a cinder so long as we can keep the uppity brown folx from acting up, and so long as we can keep the uppity white folx from tearing it all down around our shoulders. You know what's funny? The rich white folx are all twitterpated over longevity research because they look at demographics and recognize there aren't enough people to pay for their dotage. They want radical life extension because they think the economy is going to crash without enough kids earning wages. WHY NOT JUST LET THE FUCKING BROWN PEOPLE IN. Stupid question, I know. I dunno, man. I'm ashamed of my people. I'm seeing silver linings around Purdue Pharma. I think we're at "anger." By the time the folx who made it to 2035 look around and see what's left, they'll be demographically done. America will be brown again. It still won't be equal because plantation owners like me will have an even greater percentage of the spoils and by then, we're going to be nearly fucking immortal bitch and it'll take something like the Peleponnesian Wars to knock us out of Sparta. I'm sorry. I didn't do this? But I'm certainly taking advantage of it. We're likely to have seven employees by the end of the year. If things pan out according to plan my wife will be one of two white people. But she will fuckin' own the place and I've got all the empathy in the world but that part ain't changin'. And that's how we got here, I guess.
I'm pathetic, like one of those drama kids who know who Tears for Fears are through Gary Jules. It's fair to say that Spahn Ranch's interpretation is lifeless and uninspired; nonetheless, in the ouvre of the band it's kind of emblematic of the point where they sorta gave up on that whole dark'n'dusky industrial thing.
The Equals were kind of formative for later British bands. They led the way for future racially integrated bands on the island. The specials and really most the 2nd wave ska bands were into them. They influenced the Clash, who covered the Equals "Police on my Back." The lead singer was Eddie Grant who you might remember from his solo hit "Electric Avenue." Eddie moved back to the Caribbean after the Equals and shook up some of the strong divisions between different Caribbean music styles, getting people from various backgrounds to record and collaborate with each other. It was almost a music revolution but not quite.
Interviewing with an Interesting Company that is Doing Good Things. Just signed the NDA, so can't say much more than that. Don't wanna jinx it, either. But this role, project, and company would be amazing. Life-affirming. The kind of shit that makes you leap out of bed in the morning, excited to go to work. --- In other news, my country is completely fucked. We decided to stop outsourcing our terrorism-inspiring efforts in other countries, and bring it home, and grow our own terrorists here. And we are starting young, by taking children and giving them the second worst possible experience they could have, after experiencing the worst possible situation they caused them to flee into our brutal arms. I'm just fucking embarrassed. --- Oh yeah. Also got a stark view of my middle-aged straight white male privilege the other day. At a gay bar. Gay dude hits on me (not an uncommon experience for me). I just barely caught myself before I uttered the words, "Thanks dude, but I'm married." In my head, I realized "I'm Married" = "I'm straight." And I realized how fucked up that is. ... still processing that one ...
Okay. Thinking out loud over here. Had a discussion with a friend the other day about principles. We have a common friend who is on some spectrum and kinda...impulsive at times. As in, making shitty/mean jokes or comments that, if this common friend would stop and think about it, would realize are at a minimum rude and at worst sexist. My friend is very principled in her action, in that she has a strict set of morals that she abides by at all times. She thinks any kind of objectifying behaviour is uncalled for and hurtful. And she does not want to be around people who she considers hurtful or toxic. And if someone acts sexist or misogynistic, this means that they probably are one or at least hold those kinds of ideas. When you combine the three, it means that she therefore does not want to be around anyone who has acted sexist / misogynistic / objectifying. Which I think is perfectly reasonable. But because she is quite strict in her moral compass, and has difficulty trusting people, she has a very low tolerance for any behaviour that doesn't jive with her principles, and she takes her principles quite far in my opinion (e.g. feeling hurt whenever someone whistles at her or looks at her with prying eyes). So in practice, and exaggerating for dramatic effect, it means she's hurt by every impulsive comment our common friend says, ergo cannot be in the same room together because she doesn't want to be around toxic people. Which has led to us deciding to break up a group so that she is no longer in the same time/place as our common friend, even though it is impulsive behaviour that in my opinion just needs time to improve. She also mentioned to me that she felt offended by a joke I made, which was basically a "that's what she said" joke about someone else's poor phrasing. And she said that it made her worry whether I might be someone to chuck in the bad-person-avoid-them-forever-bucket. (Despite us having a 2+ hour discussion of gender roles in modern society just a few days earlier.) And that puts me on edge? Because it sounds to me like such a hard line to draw in the sand, in an "you're either with us or against us" kind of way. I know enough people with far, far less favorable views of women that I don't want to be grouped with. And such a hardline position doesn't jive with my pragmatism, which puts "let's play some fun games with a large group" over "you want to avoid the occasional dick joke". On the one hand I get where she's coming from. But on the other hand I feel like her trust in me not being a bad person is razor-thin and easily bruised. I feel like I am one bad pun away from being tarred, feathered and outcast, despite her knowing me and my views for quite some while now. So I kinda think that that is her problem, not mine. But maybe I'm wrong, I dunno.
Don't divide the group to accommodate her. Invite everyone you want to invite. If she decides she doesn't want to go based on who'll be there, that's on her. It's unfair to your other friends to exclude them at her whim. You decide who you want to invite to your parties, end of story. You don't have to justify it to judge, jury, special snow- or bro-flakes. Whatever the reasons are, so long as they sit right in your heart, you're good. She's trying to snowflake you into inviting whoever she wants to your party. Fuck that shit. It's your party. Cry if you want to. But don't exclude your friend cuz she wants you to. end of story.
Your friend is ostracizing herself from you. Let her. Don't for a minute think that this has anything to do with principles. My wife has principles. She never cusses. Her moral compass is bright white neon. There are things that are right and there are things that are wrong. She is Lawful Good. I, on the other hand, are an ends-justify-the-means kinda guy. Everything has context. True story: if your car is registered to "X or Y" and you get a red light camera ticket, it comes to "X or Y." Then you have to sign an affidavit insisting you weren't driving the car. Which means either X OR Y can sign that affidavit and you weren't both driving, duh. So I sign my wife's red light tickets. Nope, totally wasn't driving. My wife signs mine. But my wife won't sign her own. She can't tell a lie, even to a robot in Texas that exists to rip you off. yet we get along, and rather well, and she loves hanging out with me, and she doesn't expect me to abide by her moral code. She's happy that I understand it, that I accommodate it, and that I don't require her to step out of her boundaries. But she won't forgive her sister who lied to her seven years ago. That's what a principled argument looks like. It's about your internal standards being assailed. It's about this person offended YOU not "they said something offensive." This whole walking-on-eggshells thing is because she's insisting that the outside world conform to her standards. She's not accepting of the world as it is and abiding by her internal compass, she's demanding that the world bends to her will. And if you give her an inch, she'll take a mile. These are people that need to spend some time alone. Why? Because they're shitty friends. They're not meeting where you are, they're not accepting you for who you are, they're not judging you based on who you are, they're friends with their ideal of you. They're looking through you and seeing some hypothetical version of you on the other side of the event horizon and it has nuthin' fuckin' to do with you, man. And maybe it's not her fault. Who knows what sort of trauma she's reeling under. But she doesn't get to spill it on everyone. She needs to learn to live in a world that hasn't been Nerfed to make her happy because the only people she can bully into behaving the way she likes are the ones who know her well and the more she acts like that the fewer of those people there are gonna be.
I would call her up and say "you know what? You've known me a long time. You know who I am. You know how I think. I'm not going to guard my language around you. I shouldn't have to. You know my heart and you can either accept me as I am or move on because I can't be friends with someone who stands ready to think the worst of me."
You are responsible for your own behavior. It sounds perfectly reasonable that she wouldn't want to hang out with your mutual friend, but from what you've written, it sounds like you ought to be extended the benefit of the doubt. Of course, she can decide whatever she wants. It's worth considering that she might be going/working through something.
She sounds like a very toxic and manipulative person. That kind of behavior can eventually lead you to isolating yourself completely and then being manipulated by hit hurt feelings. Don’t split your friend group for her selfish and snobbish reasons, that would be a grave mistake. Better to loose one manipulative friend than abandon friends because they don’t meet someone so else’s elitist standard
Went to a regional Burning Man event this weekend. Our camp served 150+ bowls of awesomely prepared ramen, it was a massive success :) My friend had a minor acid related freakout on the last night and I stayed with him during that time. He told me I did well, but I feel I could have done better if I knew what to do in such situations (or if I was more sober myself). Reading up on some resources now. Really want to do the Ranger training next time it's available.
Ranger training is AMAZING. And the info you are looking for - to better help friends when a trip goes bad - is called "green dot". Or Green Dotting. Or Green Dot Ranger. You get the idea. Congratulations on your first BM experience!! I hope it was amazing. I'm heading to Canada in about 2 hours for Otherworld... the Victoria community's regional. It's my favorite, and I expect to be completely blissed out!
Yeah, I've been reading through the green dot training for the past couple days and it's been super helpful. In retrospect I think I did well, the only thing that would have been better would have been being completely sober to be more grounded. But that was not something in my control at the time. It wasn't my first BM event, but I think I've learned more from it than from the full week at black rock city last year. Or maybe it just seems that way since it's so fresh in my mind still...
Having talked a dozen people through bad trips while tripping I can offer some advice. Have water and a snack around. Get away from any commotion if you can. Nature is good, so is walking. If they want to talk spend most your time listening. Be super fucking calm and stretch your empathy out as much as you can. Don't argue about things, discuss instead. Silence can be a good way to grind out some time. I suppose find whatever it is that they want to do that is one step down from the bad place they are at and do it. Don't aim for five steps down go for one and than look to see where the next one is. Here is something that always bothered me way more than it should have. I was walking home from a 10 hour cook shift and passed a kid freaking out on some kind of acid like drug. He was in a bad way, sweating, talking to himself, writhing around. Middle of the city, he was sure to end up in the drunk tank. I thought "I should stop and help this kid." I walked by him, dead tired and callously thinking that I'd he couldn't deal with it he shouldn't have played. I went into 7/11 to get something and while I'm in the back near the coolers the kid comes busting in, knocking down displays, throwing stuff at the nice old man who was working, just smashing the place up. Kid turns and karate kicks the plate glass door in. Cops were on the scene in no time flat, who knows maybe they already had been called. They subdue the kid, it wad rough but not unreasonable. I have always felt so much shame that I didn't help that kid when I knew I could. I pulled people I cared about through bad trips all the time back then and frankly it's exhausting work. It takes a lot of empathy to work people through a the two to five hours of the worst of it and I just couldn't find it in myself that night. I've done things that I should be ashamed of and learned to live with it, sins if commission but that sin of omission has always dug at me.
I'd love to read through the green dot training a bit. It's not something I have heard of before and sounds like useful knowledge to have on hand. I'm having a little trouble finding resources that are more than a brief description of it though. Care to share?
https://sites.google.com/site/greendottraining2016 That's the one I've been reading through :)
Everything that I want to share is buried under an NDA of one form of another. It sucks. The stuff that excites me? The NDA has an NDA. And that is not a joke on the status of American society; I literally cannot talk about the contents of the NDA other than to say I am under an NDA. To be pedantic about the situation, I cannot even name the reason, OR EVEN THE ORIGINATING ENTITY OF, the NDA only that it exists and I am held to its constraints. From what the language says, I cannot even mention WHY I am under the NDA. I'm having serious flashbacks to tech bullshit from 20 years ago. Everything else in life sucks. Been a shit month. The year has been shit for the hobby as the air is full of clouds and rain, not good for astronomy. Spring ends at 0200UTC Thursday and I've been under a starry sky 5-6 times the whole season.
... I think we might actually strike. Contract runs out Aug 1. Haven't heard anything from the union about voting on the proposal. The alternative is agreeing to extend the life of the old contract. That'd be the second time in a row. _____ On funner news, I think my long bogged down project to design a 3d printer is almost done. Just need to calibrate some tolerances. Right now I need a press to fit some of the dovetail joins together.
Finally heard something about the contract! Pretty 'meh' so far. Could be worse, but could be better. On the 3d printer project front: I think my current one just shit the bed. Might have to grab a mono price mini... :(
Weeds Sometimes I think, through sheer tenacity and stubbornness, weeds have earned their right to be a part of the garden landscape. Heck, some weeds are just prettier than some flowers, in a rugged and natural kind of way. Music I've read recently that a person's taste in music tends to calcify and stagnate when they're in their thirties and forties. I don't know how true that is, but seeing as how Dala and I like more genres than I can care to list and we're constantly finding and falling in love with new stuff all the time, I don't think that's gonna be an issue with us. That said, while I can enjoy stuff that's "jazzy" I don't think I'll ever enjoy straight up Jazz. It's just not for me. Libraries So it turns out that when a book is ordered through the inter-library loan system and is returned, it goes back to its branch of origin. Which, on the one hand, it makes sense because maybe it's easier to inventory things. On the other hand, it seems like that uses up both a lot of resources, both in shipping the books back to the library or origin and putting them on the shelves. Obviously, I'm not in charge, so I don't get a say in things, but I think I'd do things differently. Maybe. I dunno. So I went to a few other branches to see what they look like. It seems like selection is kind of weak across the board, where most of the stuff on the shelves are filler and there's maybe a handful of good books at best for any given category. I don't know what all goes into their purchasing decisions, but I feel like there's a chance they're wasting a lot of money on sub-par books. kleinbl00 is a fan of the adage "90% of everything is crap," which is debatable, but even if true, I feel like someone should be doing a better job filtering the crap out and filling the shelves with good content. It really makes me wonder what their curation process looks like, whether or not their open to feedback, and how influential that feedback is. Maybe sub par books are the weeds of the library world.
Libraries and librarians are exquisitely sensitive to their community. They have to be. That's where their money comes from. Libraries have experienced a pretty massive sea change over the past twenty years as they went from "places that people borrowed books" to "places immigrants and the poor take their kids." They've become a social work project where people who studied taxonomy at school are suddenly helping ESL families fill out paperwork, protecting vulnerable children from abuse and becoming the Third Place for the disadvantaged many. If you walk around my neighborhood, we're white. If you go to my library, we're Somali, Ethiopian and Romanian. The books that are at your library are the ones that are being checked out by the people who are using your library. There's undoubtedly good content and the librarians can probably even tell you what it is but it may not be available without an interlibrary loan because for every copy of The Joke they've got to stock 30 copies of Twilight.
This reflects what I know about libraries. My mom was a librarian and if a system is at all well run it's responding to aggregate needs and desires of it's patrons. Libraries churn through a ton of low brow fare and also do a ton if work serving immigrent communities, job seekers, kids and the elderly. There is always the chance that your library is poorly managed. My Mom fought to buy 10% less of the shit you could get from a red box to spend some dough on more thoughtful stuff. A copy of Koyaanisqatsi will circulate a few times a year, a copy of Game of thrones will be in circulation as soon as it gets on the shelf. There are two compeating theories or at least there is balance that must disatisfy some people some of the time either way you go. You can go for maximum circulation and stock mostly stuff that's hot or you can currate a broader selection. It's expensive to give the people what they want. A hot DVD is garbage after a few months, popular books won't last a year.
An interesting related blog post on library’s and scope creep https://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2018/02/08/the-homeless-and-the-future-of-libraries/
There may be a type of jazz you don't like, but I guarantee there is more jazz you like than don't like. Vince Guaraldi is fully jazz... and he wrote all the music for The Peanuts. Ornette Coleman is a freeform jazz sax player who breaks all the rules and assembles them into new shapes. You won't like him. Stan Getz is as cool as they come, and even if you hate melody, "Take Five" is a drum solo that you love, and can probably already mimic most of, because it is so woven into our culture. Al DiMeola. The Modern Jazz Quartet. Medeski, Martin & Wood. Earl Klugh. Kenny G. Spyro Gyra. And that's not even moving to the edges of Jazz, where people will argue with you whether it is even jazz or not... Dr. John, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, Frank Zappa, Nina Simone, etc, etc, etc. Something - Side B, track 3 of that one LP you really like, but it's a weird song, but you like it and find yourself humming along to it - will break the shell on Jazz for ya... and it will seep in, and one day you will realize that you actually like a lot of tracks that kinda venture into that territory... and then you'll find your particular "flavor" of jazz. But Ornette, and Parker, and Coltrane, and Miles, and ... they might always be off the plate. Who knows? :-) I don't think I'll ever enjoy straight up Jazz. It's just not for me.
I was a jazz studies major for a bit in college, which I think give me licence to make the claim that I hate way more jazz than I like. I own maybe two hundred jazz albums that I think are worthwhile. When I get a crate of records off some old guy or gal I usually toss 95% if the jazz right in the dumpster. It's roundly derivative unispired wankery. Every once in a while I'll find some Ellington or Ella but mostly it's more godamn Dave Brubeck or other white jazz bullshit, fit only for elevators or the timid elderly. Off the top of my head list of jazz musicians that have some albums that are great. Duke Ellington John and Alice Coltrane Sonny Stitt Sonny Rollins Less McCann Charlie Parker Dizzy Gillespie Eddie Harris Mose Allison Don Cherry Miles Davis Sun Ra Errol Garner Billy Cobham Branford Marsalis Wes Montgomery Charles Mingus Jaco Pastorious Ornette Colmon Nina Simone I'm running out off the top of my head pics but I like most if it. I forgive anyone that hates the general, there way more chaff than wheat.
We went to the record shop today and most of the cds I bought were Béla Fleck. Two used and one new. I call Béla Fleck and the Flecktones 'banjo jazz' sometimes when people ask me to try to describe them. It is kind of weird how sd86 and I share quite a bit of the same tastes musically but I listen to a lot more jazz and jazz-adjacent stuff than he probably ever will. Most of the stuff I have gotten from bandcamp has been British jazz, lately.
I got an address at the beginning of the month so I got a job a few days after I started looking. The Onion AV Club reminded me that third wave ska was a thing which reminded me of this story I'm going to share in hubski because I think it's damn funny: I went to a show with a couple Epitaph punk bands headlining ca. 2001. The opening act was a Christian ska band. They played a cover of Brian Adams Summer of 69. Except it was about Bible camp instead of a sex position. I once saw a live ska cover of a Brian Adams song that was rewritten to be about Christian summer camp. Reflect on that sentence. It was as bad as you can imagine. And the lead singer kept asking the sound guy to adjust things after every song. The horn section of the ska band was a trumpet. How they didn't have a bottle thrown at them in front of a bunch of punks, I have no idea. "Live Christian ska Brian Adams cover." That combination of words should not describe an event. About 100 people can claim to have seen such a thing.
Tourism in Santa Fe in the late '80s/early '90s was not the settled thing it is now. That Kokopelli fucker had yet to climb off Anasazi cave walls and onto Ocean Pacific shirts and coyotes howling at the moon were things you took a .22 to, not put a bandanna on and rendered in hammered copper. And the Santa Fe plaza was a place where you could buy shit turquoise jewelry at a ridiculous markup during the day and weed, acid and smack at night. It was the most likely place you and your drama-fag friends would go to smoke cloves, flirt with each other and buy a cappuccino and some pound cake at 11pm because there were maybe three coffee houses within 100 miles and nobody had ever heard of Starbuck's. The business community, however, had seen the writing on the wall and knew that a bunch of ruffian teenagers in black was not going to increase the rack rate at La Fonda so they got creative. At one point they gave parade rights to a bunch of Christian Crusaders to harangue us from a grandstand but the teenagers figured out that they could just apply for the parade rights in a round robin basically every night because Santa Fe law had them as free so we kept them out that way. Then they started driving around us in pickup trucks full of Jesusfreaks but then the tourists complained. Things reached their absurd limit when they brought in Christian heavy metal bands to, among other things, redo the Scorpions' "Still Lovin' You" as "He Died For You." Turns out jesusfreaks with PA equipment in moving vehicles are deathly afraid of water balloons. Who knew. I'm not sure when we lost the Battle of Santa Fe; it was after I left. I mourn that era, when the most touristy tourist district in the most touristy tourist state belonged to the batcavers after dark.
It was August 23, 1986 in Berkeley, California when I saw The Smiths on their "Queen is Dead" tour. The opening act was Phranc, a self-proclaimed lesbian folk-singer, who walked out on stage alone, in front of a sellout Smiths crowd, with nothing more than a microphone and an acoustic guitar... and completely owned that crowd!! By the end of her set, the entire crowd was on their feet, singing along with her! It was amazing. I've never seen an opening band do a an encore before. (Oh. The Smiths show was brilliant, as well.)
You kinda need to know about late nineties Epitaph punk for these names to hold weight, but the headliner of that show was Voodoo Glow Skulls and the other band was Pulley. Pulley was way less popular than VGS so you could argue Pulley was the second opener and not co headliners. Voodoo Glow Skulls' tour bus broke down and couldn't make the show which was a bummer. Until Pulley did a double set, got the crowd pumped by kicking ass and made up for the missing bigger act. And the Newsboys in fedoras. Former, and at the time current, MLB pitcher Scott Radinsky is the lead singer of Pulley and, as a White Sox fan who had maybe heard one of their songs in the days when you had to purchase physical media to hear that sort of music, I was pleasantly surprised. It ended up being one of the best shows I've ever been to. Right up there with seeing Ben Folds do a free concert in front of a crowd with a large portion of people who obviously had never heard of him where he ended the show by trying to smash the keyboard with his piano bench.
i donated mine to a cd recycling center cuz turns out, throwing hundreds of CDs directly into the trash is really bad for the environment also most of mine were, enchantingly archaically, burned copies
Done with defences and moved out. Other than that, I'm at a pleasant level of busyness without feeling frantic, possibly because I slept most of the weekend and it helped. Plus I have three job interviews. One on Friday and two next week. I'm kinda giddy about it despite all the salt from last year. Though, I'm even more excited about what will happen this weekend: GMing my Cyberpunk 2020 game! Party roster: two solos, techie/MD, netrunner and a crooked cop. Plan for the opening session: escape from a prison transport. They start with no equipment, weapons or active contacts above what they'll get/establish during the adventure. Most of their non-vital cybernetics are disabled/locked/taken away (depending on legality codes). They'll figure it out, I'm sure of it. Plus it's a good kind of cliche with clear objectives. Escape, reactivate/obtain gear and disappear.