Annotated 48-22
I have little to say about today’s war sequence, but I got a lot to say about the FB ad that promoted it. This page came out shortly after the solar eclipse of 2017.
My goddaughter, her mother, and I had made a journey of it. We weren’t within the path of totality, the zone where you could see the full effect of the moon totally blocking out the sun. But we were only some hours’ drive outside of it, so we got in my car and headed south. It took an overnight stay in a hotel and some juggling of driving duties, but we made it to Columbia, South Carolina, close to the center of the path of totality. (Getting out would not be as easy as getting in, but that’s another story.) We stopped near the stadium called Spirit Communications Park then (Segra Park today). A minor-league baseball game was playing there, but tickets had been sold out for weeks, and we weren’t sure we wanted to experience the eclipse in an enclosed crowd, anyway.
So we climbed a nearby hill, which gave us a magnificent view, more or less level with the top of the stadium. We could look over at the stadium on one side of it (hearing music and announcements from its PA system), and on the other side was…an abandoned mental asylum, just to lend a little extra spookiness to the experience. There was already a little danger to spice things up…we knew that if we weren’t careful with the eclipse glasses, we could do real damage to our eyes in the midst of our celebrating.
Disclaimer: the video below doesn’t really show the sight of the eclipse. Nor can it render the amazing properties of the dimming and focusing and “hardening” light all around us. I was limited by my equipment, which was not designed for such an event. But it does capture some of our excitement.
FB: If you still have your vision after yesterday, celebrate by feasting your eyes on Guilded Age!
Oh man, seeing the soldiers with their rifles and the safety ropes reminds me of the anime Last Exile!! I need to give it a re-watch because its been a long time since I’ve seen it.
Hey, I saw that eclipse in Columbia as well! And I can confirm getting out was a nightmare
I went to see an eclipse on my side of the pond, some years ago, and found the same thing: Traveling back took ages because apparently everyone was traveling back directly after the event. We ended up in a queue of over 100km length…
That would still have totally been worth it, except for that big old cloud that obscured the sun just before the moon finished doing the same, and passed just after the magic was done. Really really bad timing… oh well
We used to live just a few blocks from where Segra Field is, on the first block of Marion Street north of Elmwood. Ironically, before that we lived in a since-demolished house on Assembly and Whaley, just a few blocks from Columbia’s previous minor league stadium, which was at the big curve where Assembly turns towards the fairgrounds.
We watched the eclipse here in Atlanta, and it’s very nearly the last “at home” memory we have of Angie’s mom. She had to go back into the hospital and rehab center soon after that, and passed away on the very day they were discharging her to come home (so, yeah, good call on that discharge, guys)
Huh. That started out as a reply, but then I thought I had cancelled it and was posting it as a whole-ass comment of its own instead.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I live in a Columbia suburb. We were about 200 yards off the centerline of the path.
Oh, this is when I notice that Penk has apparently lost his drum, as was already visible two pages ago.
That and the fact that we haven’t heard anything from Best, either, means that their army has just lost a considerable bonus.
Having been in the near-totality path of an eclipse, I can agree that, even if you know exactly what’s going on, why, how, and that it is a transitory event, the actual experience – dimming of light, and how perceptibly cold it gets – are deeply impressive.
You can see how primitive shamans who had managed to work out how to predict eclipses and other astronomical events could generate powerful followings from things like this.