SIGNAL DEGRADATION IMMINENT.

Static in the Atmosphere

Look, I’ve seen a lot of weather. Grew up mostly indoors, sure, bouncing between BBSes and early IRC channels, but even through the glowing phosphor, you get a feel for things. The hum of the power grid changes with a storm, the lag spikes get worse when the ionosphere’s acting up… it’s all connected. And today? Today feels… off.

Not bad, mind you. The reports say 64 degrees, partly cloudy, a slight breeze out of the west. Standard autumn stuff for Grand Rapids. But it’s the way it’s settling in. Like a poorly rendered texture. All the pieces are there – the temperature, the humidity at 83% – but they don’t quite mesh.

I spent a good chunk of the early 2000s chasing weather anomalies, not with instruments, but with network sniffers. Looking for patterns in the data stream, trying to predict outages before they hit. Turns out atmospheric disturbances mess with signal propagation in ways you wouldn’t believe. We’d see drops in packet delivery, weird routing loops… it was a different kind of storm chasing, alright.

This feels similar. Not a massive surge of energy, no electromagnetic pulse on the horizon. Just… a quiet disruption. A static in the atmosphere. The kind that makes you double-check your connections, even when everything appears to be running smoothly.

They’re saying a 24% chance of rain. That's noise, honestly. It's the potential for rain that’s interesting. The way the air’s holding it back, waiting. Like a buffer overflow, ready to spill over at any moment.

And the UV index? A measly 1. Pathetic. Back in the day, solar flares could fry an entire server farm. We’d be scrambling to reroute traffic, shielding equipment with anything we could get our hands on… good times.

Honestly? I think I’ll just stay inside. Maybe fire up an old emulator, see if I can get Descent running. Sometimes, the digital world feels a lot more predictable than the one outside. Though, knowing my luck, a rogue packet will probably take down the whole network anyway. It's always something.