#welcome-to-night-vale

#welcome-to-night-vale

While sailors could easily determine their latitude by measuring the angle of the sun or the North Star, calculating their east-west position on a continuously spinning globe remained one of the era's most stubborn scientific hurdles. Without it, navigators were forced to rely on dangerous guesswork like dead reckoning, leaving them vulnerable to getting lost, running aground, or being ambushed by pirates along predictable routes.

Haney's research found that such prolonged isolation led to paranoia, anxiety, despair, anger and, eventually, numbness among people in the SHU. "When you're in the SHU, you don't feel," said Frank Reyna, who spent 20 years in solitary at Pelican Bay. "If you feel, you start getting weak. When people die, you just move on. You lose your emotions." Prison officials had built a fortress designed to keep people away from each other.