My homegirl Kerstin is one of many of the particle physicists working at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. If you do not know what that is, do yourself a favor and look it up!

me: how's cern?
Kerstin: cern is exciting!
it's going!
i can't imagine what it feels like for some of the people who have been working on it for 20+ years
me: no shit. what has been going on exactly? like... are there now huge crazy things you all have to do and maintain? do you have to wear a lab coat?
Kerstin: hahaha
mostly i am in the control room. i work on the pixel detector, which is the innermost subdetector of ATLAS
it isn't really ready yet
it's the latest of all the subdetectors
so there is lots of work to do
then we are trying to get all the subdetectors to work together
like, with the same timing and data aquisition
at the same time, the accelerator beam people are trying to get the beams to be more stable, then to collide them, then to increase their energy
me: sheeeet
sounds awesome
like comic book awesome

Osaka Castle! Total accident that I caught this on the video. Ignore my silver nail polish.