I got Linkin Park’s album One More Light on vinyl for Christmas and I may or may not be sobbing like a big fucking baby listening to it right now and fuck okay.

One More Light is a farewell album. Whether they realized it at the time or not. It’s written like one, the lyric book is written like one, it’s sang like one.

Their sound here is just fundamentally older and wiser. It’s weary and tired. It sounds like the last rays of sunlight just before the sun sets on the last day of summer. It’s looking back at all the good times you had one last time before closing the door and moving on. It’s letting go and finding forgiveness.

I’m almost definitely reading too much into this but I’m a sad and tired 2000s emo kid who aged the same way their music did over the years. Through anger and angst and grief. And this album felt like finding peace. This album felt like finally finding peace after years of pain and angst. This album felt like goodbye.

The concept of giant bombs and mutually assured destruction are so horrifying to me. We’ve.. fuck you can just barely comprehend the massive destruction of the nuclear bombs we have detonated and the fact that we have bombs now hundreds of times stronger than that is fucking horrifying. Theoretical bombs we haven’t even made yet, thousands of times stronger. I had… I used to do research with nuclear astrophysics for those that didn’t know, writing programs that model fusion processes in the cores of stars and then turning around and seeing nearly the same technology get used in labs designing types of thermonuclear bombs is horrifying. That Robert J. Oppenheimer speech, that quote from the bhagavad gita, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I see that and I know that’s how it’ll happen. 

I remember in an astronomy lab I taught, we calculated our own Drake Equation for fun. That last variable, L. It’s the length of time a civilization has where they emit signals into space. How long a civilization lasts before being destroyed. Over multiple classes, with hundreds of students, the average number that was guessed was only a couple hundred years. We’re nearly halfway through that.

Whoops I slipped and joined a band