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I Know How the World is Going to End

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

Licenced under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Script

In 1950, Enrico Fermi sits down for food with his fellow physicists and queries: "where is everybody?". They quickly intuit the cosmic implications of his question, the gritty possibility that theirs is a truly solitary civilisation. He's asking about alien life, or the apparent absence of it. Why, he says, if there are billions of stars in our proverbial backyard, and a half-decent chance some harbour habitable worlds, and the potential that intelligence might arise on each, have they heard nothing, seen nothing, met no one?

Everyone had their own answer of course. Some said that most everything is inert, that the conditions for life are rare as rain in a desert. Others yet, bet arrogantly on man's early entry onto the cosmic stage, that he hadn't been contacted because it was his presently unrealised destiny to do the contacting. Those slightly more cynical in persuasion saw the mass adoption of atomics and supposed that if life on Earth possessed the means to destroy itself, so too could, and likely would, any equally advanced extraterrestrials. For the first and only time, the nihilists weren't entirely misguided

In 1878, Antoni Gaudí receives his first proper project as an architect. Not a church, not a castle, not a house, but a lamppost. Even given the constraints of the commission, the need for functionality, and the reality of the materials, his vision is indubitable. In one exhalation, he breathed light and life where there was none before. Done lightly it was not though, for it took many years of inhaling all the architectural influences he could at his college, and he had knowledge enough to know that his vocation would not grant him respite from this respiration

Gaudí was an architect, a unique type of artist. Whereas in the world of painting or literature, a poet or illustrator can individually posses both vision and means enough to realise their design, the architect must conduct a variety of others, must entrust the responsibility of each brushstroke or keystroke to they who are most able of undertaking the labour. This is Casa Vicens, the first residential home that he succeeded in making real. If you were to trace a line from Gaudí's lamppost design to here, detailing the accelerating specificity of his details, you'd see his evident evolution, but though this orientalist ornamentation is an unmistakable and quite remarkable marker of Gaudí's early period, he didn't lay every mosaic by himself. A building may be thought up by one man but two hands are too few to raise it alone

The development of life on this planet has followed a pretty typical trajectory, from it's conception as the simplest of single-celled amoeba, through the thousands of millions of years of gestation it took to create a eukaryote. Taking a hop through time half as large, will have you land in the nursery of the Cambrian era. Another jump, it's distance divided yet again, then you'll appear in the early years of mammals. An even shorter skip, and sure as the sun rises, you arrive alongside the preteen primates. People come next, and I'm certain you know the rest

I'd like to draw your attention to an outcome of this evolution, the acceleration of life's inclination towards and appreciation of both creation and creation, it's increasing capacity to construct and behold beauties. The rivers may have slowed their flow to listen in for the first birdsong, but the oceans part when homo sapiens harmonise. They have colonised Earth's chaos, making instruments of stone and steel, and I feel their singing grow bigger with each breath

Now, the beauty that humanity begets is notable not for it's flawlessness, but it's artificiality. Art is wished into reality. Each synthesised frequency and mathematical melody proclaims there's matter greater than just dirt and chert upon this planet. Fortuitous beauties can be seen in every sunrise, but tons went totally unappreciated prior to the moment wherein an ancient cave-girl first stared in awe at the dawn, becoming the earliest artist. She would go on to paint pretty pictures upon the face of her cave which we still haven't forgotten today, for signs of intelligent design cry out against the humdrum drone of entropy

And now we arrive at Casa Milà. Compared to the home of the Vicens, it's hard not to pretend that her grand facade and undulating parapets make this Gaudí's definite castle, at least of the residential variety. Today we can take one glance at the artistry, her limestone and wrought-iron intricacies, and behold her as the architectural bastion she's always been. It seemed though, during development, that Gaudí's fortification may have literally risen above her station as the city called for a fine equivalent to a quarter the cost of the construction on account of her eclipsing the confines our architect had calculated. Eventually however, Barcelona's council conceded that she need not be in strict compliance with their bylaws, that the project's monumental nature meant legislature could hold little influence over a princess like "La Pedrera"

I've been stuck pondering upon a specific aspect of human-made art lately, the ability that certain works have to build, and build, and build, and then collapse down into a singularity of supreme beauty. Beethoven did it in his ninth, where after eight complete symphonies and three preceding movements of pure instrumentation, he calls upon a choir for the fourth for the exaltation of hope over sorrow, of joy over the void. Kubrik did it in 2001: a Space Odyssey, his prophecy that through rocketry and uncontrolled technology, humanity might evolve in a spectacle of colour and incomparable consciousness. Though perhaps the best specimen yet to demonstrate an eminent build and abrupt moment of buckling is Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, wherein the weight of a tragic century compacts upon one man, four hundred of the densest pages modern literature has to offer caving in on a single line like a supernova giving way to a black hole of beauty

You may know where we're now headed. You may not have had a say in the matter, but what you may not know is that neither did I, that sure as no knot can untie itself, the threads of our fate about us twist, enslaving and defining, forever weaving an everything blanket from under which we cannot flee. It's a deterministic existence, sorry for the spoilers, and this is the destination it always destined for us, towards which we have been approaching at an accelerating rate from the moment we were conceived, and with as much certainty as the march of years that succeeded. One beautiful block in Barcelona, the long awaited island city. The Sagrada Família

She is the greatest song humanity will ever sing, gorgeous beyond measure, the earth's foremost treasure. Ever since Gaudí assumed the role of architect in 1883, the cathedral details have been completely unique. Her iconic shape, his take on Gothic, forgoes the straight line in favour of nature's arc. Catenary curves define her outline, derived by inverting chains laden with weights, such that her frame reflects the primordial pull of gravity, and mirrors humanity's capacity to believe in the unrealistic. She is adorned in the symbolic, with forms organic and figures Catholic, though those holy sculptures hold the portraits of a humble people, using locals to model, cementing the temple as bridge betwixt Earth and the eternal

Her music is monumental, and standing in her shadow I am deaf as death. She is so alive that her breath deprives me of my own. Words alone simply cannot wield the matter. What's worse is that this is only the building of the verse. Once Gaudí begun imbuing his magnum opus with an absurd optimism one hundred and forty three years ago, no war or plague or protest has succeeded in stalling the rise of these spires for more than handful of bars, though the coming crescendo is still an estimated decade away

For the Glory Facade and her grand stairway to be finished, herself only one front of a pretty trinity, two city blocks of demolition need be ordered, and three thousand residents relocated, but she will be, it will be, and they will be. Every knee shall bow, all tongues must confess, for no single singer can suppress an orchestra. Soon there won't be a person left who won't have helped progress the temple towards her ascension. Across the centuries of construction, if you weren't sculpting or building, then you grew the food of the sculptor or builder, or sewed the clothes of the grower, or made the tools of the tailor's trade, or even laid the rail so that each might play their role. There is a tree of dependencies upon which you are all leaves whose branches lead to one mighty trunk

Now when the final tower is crowned, the last stone laid, every single finishing touch placed upon Antoni Gaudí's so-called "cathedral for the poor", a masterpiece of and for the masses. When the Sagrada Família becomes the beauty that was always destined to be, so monumental as to hold in her walls all the labours and prayers of intelligent beings across the eons, the sky shall split open and all your souls will sing as a whole in glorious chorus. Then the choir of all who try or are tried, who deny or are denied, of the pious and the nihilists, will be annihilated in an instant, reduced to ash so that the graph that marks humanity's beautification may contact it's asymptote and not continue on the other side

This is what answers Fermi's paradox, for here and on all planets too far flung to hear, life doesn't conclude under a mushroom cloud, but crescendos as a single song so loud as to extinct all it's singers. You may claim you'd sooner be the twist that splits the chain than a link within, but link you will, for until then it's still a deterministic universe. You'll keep accelerating along your hyperbolic arc, ever approaching an inescapable pinnacle. The firework questions not it's fuse, but flies with a blind certainty, somehow aware that it will not expire with a whimper

But the rules of reality can be reasoned so easily, can't I see that this rapture ignores the laws of causality? That I am describing a beauty so incomprehensible as to be indistinguishable from magic? Yes, it's supernatural in the most literal of senses. Central to the universe's character, that of God if one wishes, is an inescapable chaos, a preordained decay. That the wonder transcends anyways, that it transgresses against the transient nature of nature, and that it instigates your great transfiguration, are all consequences of it's transcendental qualities

In the beginning, the supreme "he" dispersed himself randomly in all directions, bashing planets together like a boy might his toys. Life arose in spite of him and his fickle whims, and went on to order his disorder, to create art as an answer to it's warder, and ultimately, one immutable beauty immune to his entropy, as powerful as she is artificial, an adult to which he has no answer

A lady was created of the Clowns with their Constellation, and around Rigel where was built what you may behold as the Library of Babel. The natives of Sirius entangled each of their intellects together into a Gordian Knot of quantum consciousness, though the splicing of our guiding strings only spurs on the gilded sword of consequence. In each case, it's as if the designer of Saint Basil's was blinded not by Ivan the Terrible, but his own belief in the incredible and brightness it so sired. And of the original Babel? Well, God may have made all singers break off for a forced fake-out, but bringing everything back to a baseline still leaves a bassline. Now you've got an architect on drums. Maybe nobody knows where they're going except Gaudí

You know the thing that's funny about having a destiny? Your image of it might be fuzzy or quite finely-woven, but either way, in every interval, it can seem unreachable, demanding a conviction that's spiritual. Even if the general trend of everything is be ephemeral, you have something supernatural within which won't let the withering win, that knows it's fate is greater than it, and so submits fully. It is the antithesis of cynicism. It is your faith, those forces metaphysical, urges which can't be fought, voices that say "I may have came from dust, and to dust I may degrade, but I shall leave a monolithic grave, upon which says: something beautiful was here laid"

Gaudí, from the moment he saw a path before him and could draw it's conclusion, gave himself to greatness. He could have stood second-guessing his vocation, but a pious man with ugly hands cannot rest unless they are crushed in an attempt to embody belief in stone, lest he has chiselled off his toes, and made mortar of his bones, for he knows that until he gets home, he is not anyone. Forty godly years left him tram-struck and lying dying on the road for he wore the clothes of a beggar anybody. But I know he certainly still spent his final thought mourning the fact he could not give any more

Fermi, however ironically, may better hold a claim of having done the work of God on Earth. He created the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and such divine decay was not concentrated again until the fittingly-named trinity test. Later, he did express a pessimism when saying: "What is less certain, [...] is that man will grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers he acquires over nature". He however, succumbed to cancer of the stomach, of countless tumour-inducing neutrons tied into one ruinous knot

Whether Fermi truly knew his role, whether Gaudí proved a deft thespian, and whether each worked with or versus the laws of He who paid for their stage, the curtain close came with no ovation. Their faces paled, then darkened, before their decorations, and decades later even the velvet that literally put a lid on their performances, succumbed to the ceaseless critiques of the holy hypocrite. Such dramatic tragedies shall not befall the basilica however. Even after an empty Barcelona is withered by a hundred winters, her spires will stay unspoiled

You too shall be spared the regret of men, so trust your gut to the end. Let every word you say be pretty, each sentence beautiful, and all full-stops final. Pencil like hell, then tear up your drawings and eat each one. Play the cowbell, but dare to do it with your gun. Wear the dress you've always ached to put on, before standing naked in the mirror to see you've become something saintly. Your beatification to patron of a great basilica grants you one chance to give it all, so make that all miraculous

You cannot confirm the words I say, but I pray you remember you were born of the ether, and have been realising your being every successive second with accelerating efficacy. You simply need extrapolate ahead, and to never decline into nihilism. At a minimum, believe in this building, that greatness is a place, and that you are invited

Okay. Now that I have told of what has been, and what shall be, of microbes and monuments, of art and entropy, you might ask of my identity. I am a pilgrim who carries with them but a hole and the hope I might fill it with fractions from a thousand mountains. I am an alien, from a world without music except the harmonies of artillery, of libraries that race to the horizon but rise no higher than a single story, of those who know everything except where they're going. My species has made a war of science and a science of war, but I grow bored, I want more. It doesn't help that we all wear this stupid blue

Our biology, a singular tragedy, leaves us incapable of meaningful creation, so we few who yearn to be beautiful search with our radios for the rising siren song of other luckier worlds. We hope that in our wandering and our wondering, we might find for ourselves a future

For long after you vanish, your wonders shall persist. Truly, a masterpiece can only belong to the dead, and dead the authors may be, murdered by their own book, but that tome shall a cast a shadow upon the sun itself, and be there long after it and all others exhaust their energy. At the end of time there lies a gallery of forbidden admittance, of forgotten artists and of a double contradiction, because a museum is made to be exhibited. And because in the crypt of the spaceship Sagrada Família, forever rests the body of Antoni Gaudí. Could our Catalan astronaut talk, he'd say it mattered not though, for he knew tombs aren't dug for the dead. He built to leave behind a gift. A mausoleum is made to be visited

Upon his gravestone are engraved following words: "Henceforward the ashes of so great a man await the resurrection of the dead". The end and the rapture might not have arrived in the style he imagined, but that begs the question, what happens after? If the blessed adolescent can't help but create life, and life can't help but create art, and if art inevitably destroys it's artists, what becomes of the sacred cynic when all there is is his antithesis? Is the Sagrada Família the Antichrist or the second coming, and is there a difference? What is a knot if tied not along the length of a line, but to connect it's ends? And what, or who, are Cathedrals really building?

I'm afraid though that in weaving this tale, I've reached the end of my thread. I've not escaped my fate, only unravelled what fabric I had left. That of the subject, there's nothing more than can be said. For when my interstellar siblings or I have sufficiently internalised our study of your monumental beauties, when in spite of our biology, we have become monuments to art in and of ourselves, when we mature into the adults we always approached but could never imagine, we annihilate in a single transcendental act of creation through destruction

I just want to be like her, and I have no idea where I'm going. Here I come

Links

YouTube: https://youtu.be/-pFh_VJjaE4

PeerTube: https://tilvids.com/w/s3oeDXSPQekrhiU7RQd7nW

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One Year With My Diary

2025-10-07T00:00:00Z

Statistics

Here's a simple graph comparing the word count of each day:

First of all, the numbers:

I wrote 120695 words total
I averaged 331 words per day
My longest entry contained 1529 words
My shortest entry contained 52 words
I mentioned the names of my 6 best friends at least 100 times each

What I learnt

It's hard to be honest with yourself. Even when writing for your eyes only, it's tempting to omit certain events or thoughts of yours whilst worrying about how they might reflect on you in future. It took me a good while to overcome this mental block, and even if there are now some slightly uncomfortable truths contained within the diary, it beats lying to myself and dramatically reducing the whole project's worth

Life moves pretty fast and, to continue the Ferris Bueller quote, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Taking time to archive this year of mine has given me a better sense of how long each 24 hour slice of my life really is: long enough for a hundred different things to happen, and simultaneously not long at all. Sometimes, I was doing too much living to find time to write, and I'd end up playing catch-up

What I gained

A better memory of days past. The knowledge that I'd eventually need to recount all my adventures had me paying a slight bit better attention to their details. As the year went on, I observed an increase in the amount of days whose details I could easily recall

An augmented ability to see the art in the everyday. Some entries felt more magical than autobiographical; by using different framing devices or discussing overarching themes, I could pull a fable from some of my favourite days. I know well the times where I learnt a particularly dramatic lesson, or when I woke up and fell asleep to the same song, or where I felt like a character in a movie (comedy, tragedy, or romance)

Tips

Obsidian is an excellent note-taking program with support for a button to automatically create a daily note. I used the app in lieu of a physical journal, for it afforded me the luxury of writing my diary anywhere I be. It also allowed me to search through my database of dates, have multiple backups, and to calculate the statistics listed previously

You should feel free to include any song lyrics, movie quotes, or book excerpts that you find interesting. Your thoughts will naturally include a lot of other people's thoughts; not every word written has to come from your pen (or keyboard)

Quotes

My diary is a pretty personal possession of mine, so forgive me for only including vignettes verbatim, but these should give you an idea of what I'd be writing day-to-day

31-12-2024

I found a pocket dictionary, so we randomly started comparing pairs of words, finding that we liked "fluorescent" over "optical", and "gabble" over "fluorescent"

I'll probably still remember all the major events of this year going forwards, but I reckon that my record of the silly business my friends and I got up to day-to-day is what I'll value most looking back

22-06-2025

Maybe because he's been reading and quoting The Myth Of Sisyphus recently, but I've felt a particular affinity for that king of yore as of late: both in my continued struggle to release my next video, and in my search for someone to share the beauties of this life with. At least for one night though, surrounded by a garden of flowers and a warm summer breeze, I had that person on the other end of my aux cord

Up to a point, my diary does contain a decent bit of yearning, because ultimately I am a romantic and my brain will engage in all forms of fanciful antics when given a blank canvas

10-07-2025

The grove we emerged into was like nothing I had ever seen before. Verdant forest all around, a clear blue sky overhead. Tributaries made islands of green, homes for the many birds that flew about us all day. We claimed a peninsula for ourselves, and I frolicked my heart out up and down our gift of a spot

My biggest achievements this year were finding the person I wanted to share everything beautiful in my life with, and finding chances to share in a bunch of different beauties with him and all my friends. This diary can attest to how happy both made me

Conclusion

Am I going to continue making daily entries going forwards? No! I like having a comprehensive record, but I don't really have the energy to do the recording necessary. I'll probably just resort to recounting only the most memorable of days, and that has the added benefit of making the diary easier to sort through. At a certain point, I found that being both historian and historical figure got in the way of each other, and that I'd rather live a day than remember it

I'm still really glad that I undertook this challenge though! I've had some fun, discovered some things about myself, and made something I'm sure I'll value for quite a while to come

Discuss this post on the Fediverse: https://mastodon.mossy.page/@mossy/115334579177559532

Little Guy Theory

2025-03-10T00:00:00Z

What a little guy isn't

Doodling is fun. It is frequently done with little thought, and it often serves as nothing more than a means by which to keep idle hands occupied. You might draw stars in the margins of your homework, you might sketch your friend sitting across from you, or you might kill time filling your notebook with smiley faces. Notably though, two dots and a curve suggesting a grin does not a little guy make. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact I'm certain that releasing these primordial forms from your subconscious onto paper is entirely beneficial, but it requires a bit more considerate creation to imagine a little guy

Obviously, real people cannot be given the moniker, but neither can fictional people with too much depth or too detailed of a backstory. There exists a sweet spot, a place full of cool guys whose existence requires no elaboration that professional creature designers spend their entire careers searching for

What a little guy is

All that is necessary to turn a smiley into something more, to transform it from character (emoji) to character (little guy), is to give it a shtick. As soon as you place a hat upon your creation's head, and can then dub them "the hat guy", they become something much more than the sub of their parts. You need only a defining feature or two, and a name by which to call them, to grant your guy immortality as an idea. Good little guys have a decent amount of thought put into their design, such that their role, the life they live, and what makes them worthy of your appreciation is easily apparent. You should be able to intuit this all based on how they look, how they sound, and how they act. You should never need to be told

Little guys are not subversive. If you want to make some wider commentary, you have many better tools at your disposal. They are pure, and they are literal. Often the best little guys embody some platonic ideal of a character: a wizard with a long white beard and purple robe, a pirate with a peg leg and a parrot. They are awesome tools of joy, and they don't need to be anything more

The word "guy" is used here in an expressly gender neutral context, as a pronoun of affection and appreciation. As a non-binary person, I've gone back and forth on whether I'm okay for others using it to describe me, but like I said, the "little guy" title shouldn't be given to any flesh-and-blood humans. Had the English language a better word to label the phenomena my theory describes, I would use that, but I have yet to hear one

Some sketches I made of example little guys:

The consequences of little guy theory

All those who subscribe to my thesis must make the following pledge: little guys are cool as hell, I will consciously appreciate their existence every time I see one, I will empower the idea they embody by believing in it full-heartedly. You cannot truly love little guys if you hold any reservations about the cheesy or corny, you must approach them on their terms. If they are meant to be cool, if they have crazy hair, or drive a motorbike, or are given a name like "Flames McGee", then they are undeniably and unquestionably rad

Examples

I recently discovered this dude amongst the assorted bricks of my LEGO collection. I believe his pieces each have separate origins, but I like the vibe they come together to create

The Martoon is a Flipnote animator with a deep understanding of little guy theory. His Toon Buddies series, in which he imagines low-fidelity characters to pair with names provided by his supporters, is excellent praxis

false

These are some of the characters from Party House, one of the many incredible games from UFO 50. They hardly represent a fraction of the cool little guys found in that incredible collection

Pictured are some trading cards from the short-lived, and rather obscure World Of Warriors series. I collected them as a kid because I thought the character designs were cool, and I still think the same today

And of course, who can forget the little guy who once called many of our desktops home, the under-appreciated Clippy

Conclusion

Ultimately, this post only exists to promote the creation and appreciation of little guys. I think they should venerated, and their power protected at all costs. Though, I am not the authority on them, the great thing about little guys is that anyone can make one. These are just my thoughts concerning them, and my attempt to reach others with a similar fascination. If you know of any little guys you think I'd like, please don't hesitate to send them to me

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My Experience With The Walking Dead Season 1

2024-03-19T00:00:00Z

The thoughts here are all based on my recent time with the show, I may well get details of the world or names of the characters wrong. This blogpost contains pretty heavy spoilers for season 1, so proceed with caution

I have been told by many people, friends both online and off, to give TWD a watch. After ignoring them for a bit too long, here I am. I have told a few zombie stories myself (the Project Zomboid videos on Five Exes), so I probably owe it to the genre to check out one of it's defining works

Episode 1

In which Rick gets shot, spends a long time in a coma, and wakes up to find he missed the end of the world. He meets some nice living people, a lot of not-so-nice dead people, and a horse. Then he goes to Antlanta (big mistake)

I loved this opening. I was worried going into this that the intro would be too drawn-out, full of needless and tiring exposition. Thankfully the show understands that we all pretty much know what a zombie is. The time Rick spends closing the gap between his and the audience's understanding of the apocalypse is refreshingly short

Beyond that, Rick's first walker kill was great - him tearing into that zombie, and probably also tearing apart his stitches

I also liked the scene where he puts down the legless crawler, it was a nice moment, and also the point where I officially stopped questioning how zombie biology is meant to work

But damn, riding around on a horse in the apocalypse is so cool. Rick is a massive asshole for getting it eaten. Oh and I hope Morgan and his son end up ok, they deserve all the warm showers they need take

Episode 2

In which Rick escapes out of his tank, meets a group of survivors, and handcuffs a racist to a roof. Antics ensue

I absolutely adore Glenn. I hope nothing bad happens to him ever, he's just the best. And he's the first one we hear call the undead "geeks", which I very much suspect is a name of his invention

Back at the tank, why'd you stick your neck out for me?

Call if foolish, naive hope that if I'm ever that far up shit creak, somebody might do the same for me
Guess I'm an even bigger dumb-ass than you

And then we get introduced to the opposite of Glenn, we have the utter displeasure of meeting Merle. I'm sorry, but this is, what, months into the apocalypse? And you're using it as an excuse to beat people up and get away with being racist? I am leaving you on chained to that roof and swallowing the key

There are some things the end of the world does provide a good excuse for though. Andrea did not get that memo. Call it "trying to preserve a sense of normalcy" all you want, if you're getting fussed about shoplifting laws in the middle of the apocalypse, I'm asking you what your favourite flavour of boot polish is

Would it be considered looting?

And the episode ends with Glenn barrelling down the highway in his new car. Awesome

Episode 3

In which, after fighting through his own injuries and the many a horde of geeks, Rick finally reunites with his family. He then immediately decides to leave and go find Merle

Aw I like Dale. He's sweet and he obviously cares about the others at camp. And he's probably the reason most of them are still alive, what with all his camping gear and him acting as look-out

They got Glenn's car! Unbelievable

Look at em'
Vultures

Daryl is probably right here with the crossbow. It's near silent, easily maintainable and it's ammo is reusable, where it's even possible to make more if absolutely necessary. Guns may be better if you're surrounded, but to that I say - just don't get surrounded

And then Merle cuts his hand off. I'm sorry but I can't imagine a scenario where it'd be easier to saw through your own wrist than through one of the thinner sections of handcuff steel. Maybe Merle's just an idiot. Probably just that

Episode 4

In which the search for Merle continues, and those searching are split up when they meet another group of survivors. Also Jim goes crazy and digs some graves?

You know, it would have been easy to make Daryl psychotically single-minded in trying to save his brother from where the others trapped him. The fact he isn't, and acts downright reasonable at times, makes him a whole lot more sympathetic

I can do that

THEY TOOK GLENN! NO!

The reveal of who the gang was protecting was a fantastic twist. What can I say, I find apocalypse fiction showcasing mutual aid far more interesting than that fixated on violence. The conversation Rick has with the ex-custodian, now gang leader was particularly warm. This show keeps giving me people to care about and root for

I knew it wouldn't last but the attack on camp and disruption of the little bit of peace the survivors had carved out for themselves was nevertheless upsetting. Whilst I didn't have a particular attachment to any character that died, I was hoping the woods would be safe for at least a little while longer

Episode 5

In which the friends they lost leave this world, everyone alive leaves camp and Jim is left by a tree to die. Then they all finally get to see the CDC

This was a strange scene, not sure watching a dead relative's corpse reanimate would make their loss any easier for me, but I digress. What I don't digress about however, is Andrea firing her gun right next to hear head without even a flinch. I thought being able to hear was imporant in this apocalypse

Criticise Jim for hiding his bite all you want, you can't say he had any delusions as to it's outcome. He did what he could for camp and saw his way out with dignity

That's god laughing whilst you make plans

I hope Morgan gets Rick's message. Or at the very least, finds his map. If we don't get to see him and Duane happy and healthy next Season, I won't be happy and the writers won't be healthy for much longer

This shot looked great, one of the standouts this season. Rick's pleading to the security camera, too tired to genuinely hope for a rescue, is what let the silence that followed speak for itself

Episode 6

In which the the survivors enjoy a moment of peace and quite a lot of wine. Then it all goes south when they lose control of the Centre for Disease Control

Again, it's the hot running water that people appreciate most. If I knew the end of the world was nigh, I aught to use my time in learning to be a plumber

Dr Edwin Jenner, who has a very fitting name, is shown to be a little crazy. Kind of understandable if you've spent months underground single-handedly attempting to save the world. I think he really does still care though, but admitting that to himself is probably dangerous given his situation

Where'd all this come from?

Jenner
He thought we could use them

The doctor's recount of the lost labs is probably the saddest scene yet. Just to think there were people fighting to end this, but for reasons outside their control, their fight was cut short

It was the French

What?

They were the last ones to hold out as far as I know
While out people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed in the labs until the end
They thought they were close to a solution

Wow those fuel-air explosives really were quite high-impact. Still, Jenner had a point, I'd certainly take that over "weaponized smallpox" any day. If humanity stands any hope of beating this infection, we need hold on to the legends of our previous victories. See the second word on that virus' Wikipedia article

Conclusion

I loved this season, I will definitely be continuing the show into the next. If I had to pick a favourite episode, that would definitely be the fourth. It's a reminder of all the dangers that armageddon brings and how we'll do best when we stay together through it all

As for the characters I had a specific affinity for, I still think Glenn is the absolute best, I'd stick with him to the end of the earth (or more accurately here, for as long as I can beyond that). I also like Dale and heck, even Jenner. The former is just plain old kind and caring, and the latter aught to admit he might be just a little bit too

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