Day 9: Investigation

Customer: YOU FOOL DMV: CONFRONTATIONAL Verdict: DENIED

Can I please have a cappuccino but with oat milk and a big pump of sugarfree chocolate syrup and... Lol I remember your stupid ass from 2,300 years ago. We were living in seleucis on the tigris river during the same span of summers... do you rememver a red ibis bird with beautiful plumes? Yeah U were a sort of dull brown goat that didn't train and dint make milk or kids. Yeah? No? Eventually the Zoroastrian homesteaders who owned you started feeding you contaminated barley to try and kill you lol. Maybe you remember the ergotism? Anyway. also I want one of these 🫵stupid little breads in the case

Death Becomes Her (1992) ⤷ Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton ⤷ Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp ⤷ Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman

My boss is making me work even though theres discord channels to read like morning paper?

i will come kill him with my demon blade

Sometimes I worry you like the demon blade more than you like me

i had a dream that i was reading the odyssey and when odysseus came home in disguise penelope slept with him and then he tried to like yell at her for sleeping with him and she was like you hypocrite it’s you and then i had to look it up to make sure that didn’t happen

They had this long and drawn out argument where Odysseus was like “You have shamed your husband and yourself” and Penelope countered with “You have shamed my husband by sleeping with his wife (just as Paris shamed Menelaus)” and the whole time Penelope knew it was Odysseus but she wouldn’t just say that, she wanted to win this argument first

Always adored the New Vegas billboards

The berry pickers creed

I will leave unripened berries untouched

A ripe berry need only be negotiated with, not fought

I will reasses my surroundings after every step, for my new perspective could reveal a berry patch previously hidden to me

The plant gets excited and happy when a barry is picked

The bug is not to be feared or killed, but gently celebrated, for it facilitated in the creation of the beloved berrys

I will not allow myself to be bullied by sharp thicket and I will retrieve even the most protected barry

A well-understood problem in welfare system design is the welfare trap—the perverse incentive that results when means-testing has a sharp cutoff past which no benefits are granted. Ameliorating this through progressive benefits — those where a continuous increase in means is met with a continuous (smaller) reduction in benefits—is also well-understood. What I can't understand is how otherwise compassionate and intelligent souls don't immediately cross-apply this to another well-understood societal obligation—that of helping your friends get off if they injure both hands. Surely we are obliged to tender somewhat mediocre handjobs if they have injured only one hand, or both hands only slightly?

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

What is it, and why you should read it.

(Art by purple)

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere is a currently updating webserial by author Lurina. It's one of my favorite things I've read in a long while and I'd like to convince you all to give it a chance.

My elevator pitch is this: A time-loop murder mystery directly inspired by Umineko, with a lot of similar vibes to the Locked Tomb Trilogy - partially due to it's meditations on grief and mortality and partially due to it's far-future magical sci-fi world where we follow a fucked up lesbian necromancer on a task she is determined to see through to the end. A deeply complex, unique, and believable world that plays hosts to one of the best interpersonal dynamics I've read.

In a future so far-flung that it is past the heat death of the universe, humanity has constructed a new society that is post-scarcity but not post-stratification. Utsushikome of Fusai is one amongst a class of prodigious young medical arcanists (essentially grad students) who are invited to visit a recently legitimized conclave of top-of-the-line researchers studying immortality. Accompanying Su is her best friend Ran, a fellow arcanist. Over the course of the novel we begin to slowly unravel exactly what ulterior motives have brought them to this conclave and how events in their childhoods and years of working toward their shared goal has warped their relationship into what we now see. This relationship is the crown jewel of Flower's narrative, and getting to peel back the layers of it as you read is a delight.

Like Umineko, Flower is a murder mystery that prevents itself with in-universe Rules that dictate the murders' parameters, meaning there's a lot to chew on for anyone who likes solving mysteries. For those that don't, like myself, Flower offers instead a richly developed world and plenty of open questions about the sociopolitical and metaphysical implications of its own worldbuilding.

Below the cut, I'll go into more detail about the series (without spoilers!) for those of you whose interest has been piqued.

remember, before you post, think SMART

Start discourse

Make up arguments

Ad hominem

Reading the post is for losers

Talk without thinking

rosencuntz and guildenserve are slaying

VIA Palestinian Youth Movement

Walid Daqqah left the world today due to medical neglect by Occupation Forces in Israeli prison 7/4/2024

imagine you make microwave popcorn and by wild chance every single kernel has the same exact popping point and after like a minute in the microwave the bag instantly fills up with a single earsplitting gunshot noise would that be fucked up or what

“me looking at her looking at me” by jenna gribbon