i have no mouth and i must tumbl

Happy to meet tumblr people IRL - DM me. Seattle, WA, USA

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Among the reasons I'm kinda chill about working for the benefit of abstract "shareholders" is that I can think of many instances where I spent a lot of time and (employer) money building stuff that turned out to be a bad idea or where I outright broke a giant expensive system, and they took it on the chin.

Did the shareholders make a lot more money from my work than they paid me? Well, yes, probably, but in exchange I didn't pay for any of my $X00,000 mistakes (except for the occasional sleepless night getting paged).

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Looked up what's been happening with my last employer and thought of this again.

The entire time I worked there, they were constantly blowing money trying to enter new businesses beyond their core product and failing: launching products, then shuttering them a few years later. This pattern seems to have continued since I left.

Their stock price is more or less flat (well, it's up about 50% from when I quit, but that's about what it IPOd at years ago, and it's very swingy). Their users and revenue have started to decline. Their founder finally gave up and quit as CEO.

And none of this is my problem! The shareholders paid me enough money that I will probably never run out, to spend several years doing the most technically demanding and educational work of my career to that point, and then I got to walk away and leave them to deal with the results!

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Among the reasons I'm kinda chill about working for the benefit of abstract "shareholders" is that I can think of many instances where I spent a lot of time and (employer) money building stuff that turned out to be a bad idea or where I outright broke a giant expensive system, and they took it on the chin.

Did the shareholders make a lot more money from my work than they paid me? Well, yes, probably, but in exchange I didn't pay for any of my $X00,000 mistakes (except for the occasional sleepless night getting paged).

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

Disliking Foods is Optional

Epistemic Status: Small n

If you're like most people who enjoy drinking coffee, there was a time when you didn't enjoy it at all. The first time you tried coffee, you probably thought it tasted like burned beans, because that's what it is.

But for whatever reason, you kept drinking it, and now you enjoy it, and that enjoyment isn't fake. Perhaps it was at first, but it's now a genuine enjoyment.

Acquired tastes can in fact be acquired, and most people have done so - if not for coffee, then for alcohol, or any number of other things.

I claim that the process of acquiring a taste can be done deliberately, and furthermore, that it can be done amazingly quickly. There's a simple method for doing so, which I suspect would work even for people who have never knowingly acquired a taste before.

By using this method, I can learn to like a food within the time it takes to eat one meal containing that food, and as a consequence, though I started with a pretty normal number of foods I dislike, I've now basically run out.

There are pretty much no foods I dislike now, and my life is straightforwardly better for it. I have more options, I get to have more variety in my life, more of my experiences are positive, and it's easier to have a healthy diet.

I should have kept a proper list, but here, from memory, is a partial list of foods I used to dislike that I now enjoy:

Olives

Aubergine/Eggplant

Courgette/Zucchini

Green peppers

Kale

Fennel

Parsnips

Passionfruit

Grapefruit

Concord grape

The inside of tomatoes (I still don't actively enjoy this but it's not a problem for me)

Avocado

Natto

Blue Cheese

Sauerkraut

Spinach

Celery

Coriander/Cilantro

And yes, I do have that gene that makes coriander/cilantro taste like soap, which is why I disliked it. It still tastes like soap to me! Delicious, delicious soap. Other than that I'm not psychologically unusual in any relevant way that I'm aware of.

I've taught a few people to do this, and you can learn it too. It's honestly not even hard.

If you want to try this, you can skip to The Method to learn how. If not, read on...

The Broccoli Fallacy

The main reason for not learning to like a food usually sounds something like this:

"Broccoli tastes bad. I could modify myself to think broccoli tastes good, but if I did that, I would start eating broccoli, and that would be bad, because broccoli tastes bad."

When it's laid out like that, hopefully the problem with the reasoning is clear.

There's a more sophisticated version, which is more like:

"My preferences are an important part of my identity, and I should preserve them - changing my preferences is obviously against my current preferences".

To illustrate that, consider this version:

"Murder is bad. I could modify myself to think murder is good, but if I did that, I would start murdering people, and that would be bad, because murder is bad."

I agree with that version! So what's the difference? Well, murder is bad for a lot of reasons, not just the experience of doing it. Murder would still be bad even if I really enjoyed murdering. Whereas with eating broccoli, my issue with it is purely that I don't enjoy the experience, everything else about eating broccoli is fine.

So learning to like new foods isn't a scary modification of my preferences, because I only do it for things where I endorse the change. For example, I actually still don't like coffee. I could learn to like it at any time with a cup or two, but I'm pretty sure that if I liked coffee, I would consume much more caffeine and it wouldn't be good for me, so I choose to stick to tea.

You should choose to start enjoying any foods which it would improve your life to enjoy.

The Method

Ok, hopefully you're convinced that this is a reasonable thing to want to do. How do you do it?

It's actually surprisingly simple. The idea is just to intensely observe the raw experience of eating the food, without judgement.

In practice the way you do this is, you put some of the food in your mouth, and you let yourself get really curious about the sensations and experiences which that involves. What exactly does it taste like? What does it feel like? What's the texture?

At this point part of your mind will be saying things that are judgements or evaluations, for example that "the taste is bad". Whenever that happens, you gently put the thought aside and focus on the raw sensation itself, you zoom right into the sense data you're receiving, so it's the only thing in your attention. Never mind if the taste is good or bad, what is it like? Don't try to answer in words, just directly experience the taste itself, in as much detail as you can.

Your mind says "Ugh, it's bitter", and you say "Yes, and what exactly is that bitterness like? What does it feel like? Does the bitterness have any more details, any other characteristics?", and you look more closely at the raw sensory data you're getting, to the exclusion of everything else. Never mind if I like this taste/smell/texture, what is it really like, in every detail? Does the sensation have a location? Does it have a shape? Does it have boundaries? What are they like? Is it uniform throughout or does it vary? Does it have parts? How many? What are they like?

As you go further with eating the food, your mind will keep coming up with judgements, evaluations, and analysis, and you just keep putting them aside and zooming in on the raw experience itself, and filling your attention with it.

That's it, that's the whole method. Believe it or not, it's not even unpleasant to do, if you're doing it right.

This is obviously a vaguely meditation-flavored thing to do, but you don't need to be into meditation to do it. I'm certainly not a meditator myself, my only experience there is I tried to do mindfulness meditation for a bit and found it didn't do much for me so I gave up. This method is just this single specific mental move, that you can just do if you try.

And if you keep doing this, you'll start to find after a few minutes that you can now eat the food without too much negative feeling. A little more and there's no negative feeling. A little more and you can start to notice things you like about the food. By the end of one meal, I usually like the food, and always at least don't mind it.

Try it, coward

I suggest you try this out right now. Or failing that, bookmark this post, and set an intention, right now, that the next time you're inconvenienced by not liking a food, you'll give this method a try, and remove that problem from your life forever.

And let me know how it goes!

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

yes, I do have that gene that makes coriander/cilantro taste like soap, which is why I disliked it. It still tastes like soap to me! Delicious, delicious soap.

Gotta say I'm not really sold on self-modifying to love eating soap, but I'll give this a shot with olives next time I see some.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

TIL that in C# a variable can go out of scope but remain allocated on the stack and hence be "not dead" from the perspective of the GC. In my case, it was a variable declared inside a using block inside a while loop, where the object wasn't actually getting GC'd until the next time through the loop clobbered the same stack slot.

I spent all afternoon figuring how to decode .NET memory dumps to eventually learn this!

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

I like it when games offer, early on, an impossibly huge goal. A goal your present tools offer you no realistic prospect of reaching. A megaproject where all your current might can only advance it by 0.000001% per hour. And then the whole game is about getting more powerful, figuring out ways to make that progress counter move faster.

Good example from right now: Factorio: Space Exploration has warned me that, in 24 hours, a devastating apocalypse will occur unless I advance to the next tier of technology, build a giant defensive device, and put together something like 10x - 100x my current power generation/storage capacity to run it.

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

The Shibari Game

At a conference/festival last year, there was a Shibari workshop on the schedule for some reason, although the topic of the event was prediction markets. This led to the following exchange (all names changed):

Adam (who at the time was basically a stranger to me): Hmm, "Shibari"... What is that, some kind of Jewish ritual?

Me: No, it's-

Barbara: EVERYONE SHUT UP! Ok. Nobody tell this man what shibari is.

Everyone: ...?

Barbara: We’re playing 20 questions.

Thus began what was by far the best game of 20 questions I have ever witnessed. There were... appreciably more than 20 questions.

[literally ten minutes of questions later]

Adam: Ok, so! Shibari... is a Japanese social export, it's an activity somebody does, it's in some way artistic, it does not involve drawing, it does not involve writing, it involves an inorganic object and an organic object, and... the organic object is a human, right?

Everyone: Right

Adam: And the inorganic object...

Barbara: Well...

Chris: The inanimate object

Adam: The inanimate object, which, oh, which is organic, which suggests that it's clothes... Is the inanimate object clothing?

Everyone: No

Me: To clarify, the inanimate object is always organic in terms of 'organic chemistry', but might or might not be, like, made from biological material

Adam: Ok. And so, you have an inanimate object, and you have a person... The person does not have to do anything during the... shibari activity. You are doing a manipulation to the inanimate object, with the person, for purposes that are fun... Is it for the entertainment of a group?

Barbara: Could be? ...

Adam: So it could be for the entertainment of a group, but it could be for the entertainment of the individuals?

Everyone: Right

Adam: Ok. The inanimate object - the equipment - right? It is not specialised, but is a common object, correct?

Everyone: yeah

AI

Adam: Does it have anything at all to do with AI?

Everyone: [laughter] No

Adam: I had to check. In this setting, everything turns back to AI at some point

Me: I would say no

Frank: Not yet!

Me: Right, not yet. But yeah, 'No' is definitely the answer to that one

George: I trust Rob Miles on this

Barbara: As an expert in shibari?

Frank: As an expert in AI Shibari. I think that's what it's called.

Chris: Oh, yeah it kind of is!

Can one shibari by accident?

Adam: Ok. Is it something that one might do without knowing that it is shibari?

Everyone: [cacophony of disagreement]

Me: Interesting question!

Frank: Very interesting question.

Barbara: It's totally plausible that someone would do something that would qualify as shibari without knowing the Japanese artform

Me: Yeah, and they might also have seen things about it but not know the name of it

Chatting during shibari

Adam: Does it involve talking?

Everyone: No, not necessarily

Adam: God Dammit. Agh, I thought it might be... talking using some prop or something

Barbara: For me it always involves talking, but it's...

Adam: One doesn't have to?

Barbara: It's just 'cause I don't stop talking

[laughter]

Adam: And it doesn't involve betting markets in any way?

Everyone: No

How technologically advanced is shibari equipment?

Adam: Ok. Is the object technologically difficult to make?

Everyone: No

One guy: Yes

Everyone: What? No it isn't!

Adam: Is it only available in an industrialised economy?

Everyone: No

That one guy again: Yes!

Everyone: NO!!!

The guy: No, you're right, I'm sorry... But it is difficult to make

George: Every object is difficult to make!

Barbara: Maybe you're confused about what shibari is

Ed: Yeah, you should be up there with Adam

Adam: Would it have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok. Um... is it a stick?

Everyone: It's not a stick

No cheap tricks allowed

Adam: I feel like I'm gonna get close to covering everything...

Me: I feel like we were very close just now, when you were like "Well what could this object be?"

Adam: Ok so the object is important. It's... before industrialisation... Does it begin with a letter before-

Everyone: No, no, we're not doing that. N/A

Adam: Ok so it starts with an N and an A...

[laughter]

What is this dang object?

Adam: Ok... so... is the object artificially pigmented?

Everyone: Can be, but not necessarily

Adam: Is it commonly painted?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it commonly dyed?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Ok, is it something that it's very common to dye in other purposes?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Does it involve a vegetable, of some kind?

Everyone: ...No?

Adam: Does it involve a plant?

Everyone: [confusion about what 'involve' means]

George: The object can have... some relation to a plant

Me: eehhh, that's more confusing than helpful. We already said that it can be biologically derived

Adam: But it would have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: So it's got to be something that is... around. Is it something that requires human modification to make into the form we know and love?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Uh.. does this processing require specialised skill?

Everyone: Yeah, some skill for sure

Adam: Would I be able to do it? Like, without training?

Everyone: Probably not

Ed: On a long enough time horizon you'd figure it out, but the answer is basically no

Adam: Like, you throw me in with the tools to make it and say "come out in an hour", could I...

Everyone: No, probably not

Adam: But other people would be able to make it in an hour?

Everyone: Yeah, with the right skills

It’s not a weapon

Adam: Does it involve a weapon of any kind?

Everyone: No.

George: How creative are you allowed to-

Everyone: The answer's no

What shape is the object?

[long pause]

Adam: Well... does anyone else have any questions?

Barbara: You're asking such good questions though!

Ed: Yeah you're doing a good job

Danielle: I think you should ask more questions about the shape of the object

Everyone: Oh, great suggestion

Adam: Ok, is it spherical?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it cylindrical?

Everyone: Yyeeaahh, sort of, yeah.

Adam: So it's not a pure cylinder but it's cylindrical-ish?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it an ovaloid?

Everyone: No.

Adam: Is it an ellipsoid?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it uh... hmm... But it's longer than it is wide?

Everyone: Yes!!!

[scattered applause, we're close now]

Adam: Is it a plank of wood?

Everyone: No!!!

Barbara: It still isn't that!

Frank: No, his previous guess was stick

Adam: Yeah, a plank of wood requires processing and I couldn't make it... like it fits a lot of the other questions

Barbara: No you're right, that's fair, I'm convinced. It is a plank of wood.

Where is the object?

Adam: Could I find it inside a building or outside a building?

Everyone: Yes...

Adam: Wait. I mean. Ok, can you find it in a bathroom?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Can you find it in a kitchen?

Everyone: Probably not

Adam: Can you find it lying on the ground?

Everyone: Yeah possibly

Adam: Is it something that people commonly use?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it something that people would pick up if they saw it lying there?

Everyone: Nah

It’s really not a weapon

Adam: Is it something that is dangerous at all?

Everyone: Can be, but not especially

Adam: Is any part of it sharp?

Everyone: No

Adam: Can any part of it fragment?

Everyone: [???]

Adam: Like, is it brittle?

Everyone: No

Adam: So it's firm?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it flexible?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Ok! Is it a pool noodle?

Everyone: [laughter]

Adam: Which is cylindrical, flexible, and organic, dyed but not painted...

Everyone: No, we're so proud of you, you're doing great

Me: But we did say "pre-industrial"

Pinning down the object

Adam: Ok ok. Is it a solid?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Is it any of the solid hybrids, like a colloid or a gel?

Everyone: No

Adam: Does it retain its shape after being bent?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: So it doesn't spring back with any force?

Everyone: No, it doesn't spring back

Adam: Ok... so... Is it Japanese in origin, or is it found around the world?

Everyone: [assorted contradictory statements]

Me: The origin of the practice is Japan, but the origin of the object is all over

Adam: Is the object put on a person?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Is the object... um... is the object rope?

Everyone: YES!!

[scattered applause]

Me: The object is rope!

Adam: Ok!

Me: Now bring it home

Bringing it home?

Adam: Are things hung upon the rope?

Everyone: Uuuuummmmmm. Ambiguous? No.

Adam: Is the rope itself... does the rope look good?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok! Is this putting-on... a mark of esteem?

Everyone: No?? ???

[laughter]

Adam: So the object is a rope, and you're putting the rope on somebody

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: You're... putting rope on somebody!

Everyone: Yeah!

Adam: Is that... is that not the practice?

Everyone: No, no, it is, it is!

[confused cheering. Are we done?]

We’re not done

Chris: But, no, come on, there's more to it!

Ed: You're missing something critical!

Chris: You're so close!

Adam: Ok. Do you... hang someone?

Everyone: [strongly conflicting opinions]

Barbara: Only if you're doing it extremely wrong

Adam: Ok. But you can tie knots?

Everyone: YES!

Adam: Ok! Do you tie... is it a bracelet of some-

Everyone: No!

Adam: So it's not an adornment of any kind...

Everyone: Well...

Where on the body?

Adam: Is it put on your neck?

Chris: No

Danielle: Well, can be...

Adam: On your head?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a limb?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: It's on a limb

Me: Not exclusively

Adam: On an arm?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a leg?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On... uh... I've run out of limbs...

What does it mean?

Adam: Ok, it's rope, you put it on somebody, it's Japanese in origin... does it... signify something?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Hmm. Do you tie the rope in a loop?

Everyone: ...Yeah??

Adam: I'm wondering, is it the casting of ropes upon people, like uh...

Chris: It's not a lasso, no

Frank: I like the idea of shibari as, like, a carnival game...

Barbara: I'm unclear on what the win condition is here...

Ed: I feel like there is a really important component that we haven't got yet

Everyone: Yeah, when he gets that component, he’s won

Are people into shibari?

Adam: Hmm... Did you find yourself fired by enthusiasm to do it upon being told about it?

Several people: Yes

Me: Personally no, but...

[laughter]

Adam: So it has mixed appeal?

Barbara: That is absolutely correct

Can one shibari... too hard?

Adam: Is it um, does it involve the tying of knots?

Everyone: YES

Adam: Ok. Are there knots that are peculiar to shibari?

Everyone: yeah

Adam: Is the learning of knots, or the tying of knots upon other people the important part?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: Do you tie someone up and they attempt to escape?

Everyone: Uh, not necessarily, but like, often.

Me: Yes is closer than no, I think

Adam: Ok, you tie rope on someone. Do you have to use some sort of special rope for it? Can you use any rope?

Barbara: You can use any rope, but some are better than others

Adam: So you wouldn't want to use any rough ropes, or...

Danielle: No, you do, that's actually preferred

Adam: You prefer rough ropes?

Chris: Some do

Frank: It depends

Danielle: Natural fibers tend to be rougher

Adam: Does it chafe?

Danielle: It can, but ideally not

Adam: Would you do it even if you were injured in the process of doing it?

Frank: No

Barbara: You would not want that to happen generally

Adam: Uh... Does it look cool?

Everyone: Yes!!

Origami?

Adam: So you're tying knots that look cool... is it like an origami for knots?

Everyone: [confused disagreement]

Ed: It's not about the knots

Chris: It's totally about the knots!

Frank: It's all about the cones...

Adam: Like, in origami you fold paper in ways that look cool, maybe you tie knots in ways that look cool?

Everyone: [loud disagreement]

Diagnosing the problem

[long long pause]

Chris: Ask the question in your heart!

Adam: ...Neckties?

Everyone: No?

Barbara: I keep thinking "But, he already has it", and then he asks a question that makes me say "No, he doesn't have it at all"

Frank: I think there's a question you want to ask, but you're not...

Everyone: Yeah

Chris: Yeah, ask the question that you don't want to ask

Danielle: I don't think he has the question...

Adam: Would it cause any gratification in someone?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Would it... Would it cause sexual gratification?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Is it a practice... under the category of kink?

Everyone: Yes!!!

Adam: Is it tying somebody up for bondage purposes?

Everyone: YEAH!!! [Pandemonium, hollering, applause, Adam is lifted above the cheering crowd]

After the hearty congratulations were done, I wandered off, elated from the experience, and I bumped into a group of friends.

"Friends!" I said, "I just had the funniest experience. This guy didn't know what 'shibari' was, so we-"

"Shibari?" a friend interjected, "What is that, like, a Jewish building?"

"OK EVERYONE SHUT UP" I said.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Math Experts Split the Check

Sure, but the numbers work out more cleanly if we don’t pay tax and tip. It’s a pretty small error term. Let’s not complicate things unneces

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Money is one of my favorite toys.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

I realize this sounds pretty strange and perhaps even insensitive! But let me tell you why it's such a joy for me.

Make up some stupid numbers with simple rules, and suddenly people start working hard to take care of strangers they otherwise don't care about.

Set up a bounty for emptying the dishwasher and garbage, and suddenly all the dishes are reliably put away and the trash can never overflows.

Give someone some paper representing a claim on goods you'll provide later, and suddenly you can buy an injection molding machine you could never build yourself and use it to make useful plastic widgets for your neighbors.

Make people stake some of that paper on factual disagreements, and suddenly you have high-quality forecasts of future events.

Money is a social fiction that achieves almost magical feats of coordination. Just as tinkering around with magic is (presumably) fun for wizards, so it is with money and the economically literate.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Money is one of my favorite toys.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

I went to an academic talk a couple weeks ago.

The speaker was a thirtysomething female professor. The subject of her talk: parent/tadpole bonding in a certain species of poison dart frog which pair bonds and invests a lot in caring for its beloved offspring.

She started her talk by having us all coo over pictures of her gaggle of young children and a video of a laughing baby, and told us how she loved small children and how lots of humans feel this way. And how the frogs exhibit similar powerful parent/child bonding.

Then she spent the next hour telling us all the gruesome surgical and chemical interventions she'd done to hundreds of frog parents and tadpoles to find out how to turn the bonding off and on at will.

Bit of a tonal clash.

[mentemori]

My mom left an eviction notice for the carpenter bees burrowing into our porch

[jaubaius]

Source

[bigwordsandsharpedges2]

Explosive decompression

[dumbbitchawards]

[greater-than-the-sword]

There’s no way this is the maximally efficient way to do this

[recoiloperated]

You would think, but actually it is one of the best ways. You know how there’s always a significant amount of unpopped kernels in the bottom of the bag or pan? This method pops basically all of it.

This is also the method for making puffed rice.

[mdstroup2142]

Let’s be real. You like it because it is basically a popcorn shotgun.

[recoiloperated]

I Am a simple man

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

Priests of Moloch, surprisingly, often have very mixed feelings about Moloch. In a way this is appropriate because the bargain of Moloch is "give up a little of what you value in exchange for competitive advantage" so it makes sense that those who wield His power would not do so with uncomplicated cheerfulness.

[transgenderer]

imagine a leafcutter

[unknought]

Scenario: It is The Future, and advances in translation technology have made it possible to to talk to and understand crows. There are of course plenty of human concepts that can't be explained to them (and at least a few crow concepts that are impenetrable to humans) but it is very possible to have a conversation with one.

Since human-crow communications were opened, crows have been almost unanimous in their demand: A large reduction in the nearby populations of birds of prey, which are a major source of danger for crows. This wouldn't mean driving anything to extinction (both because some birds of prey could be kept in captivity and because the crows are willing to accept a compromise where some raptors remain in the wild as long as there are a lot fewer) but it would necessitate killing a lot of birds of prey. Since it is The Future, the ecological consequences can be both accurately predicted and mitigated as necessary (for example, if this would cause an unacceptable level of overpopulation of small mammal species, those populations could be kept down by technological means).

The birds of prey, meanwhile, are not in any position to make a counterargument. We figured out how to understand everything they say but it's limited to things like "go away" and "let's fuck" and "feed me" and "love you"; they absolutely cannot hold a conversation and the issue cannot be explained to them. Though it's not like there's much doubt about what their opinion would be if they were capable of giving it.

Some of the crows' human allies have argued that we have a very low tolerance for humans being eaten by predators and now that we can talk to crows it's unclear why they should deserve any less consideration. Some of the crows, meanwhile, have started divebombing politicians until their demands are met.

What should we do?

Give the crows what they want

Leave the ecosystem as it is

Other / Show results

Voting ended onApr 7, 2025

[thestuffedalligator]

"There's no way in hell there was an actual supervillain who actually called themselves-"

"No, no, not officially - we came up with the name when we were assigned to find them, and we were kind of taking the piss, but it's still a good name. It was before your time - they had the power to-"

"I don't want to know what their power was."

"No, listen - their power was that they could summon a pie and throw it at someone."

"Oh. Oh, well, okay - that's the greatest supervillain you've ever fought? Doesn't sound like much."

"But that was the thing. They could throw a pie at someone and it would never miss. So long as they could see their target they'd hit them. We eventually found out they could throw a pie at someone who was on live broadcast, miles away."

"Jesus. Okay, I think I see the issue. But it was still, like. Pies, right?"

"Oh, for sure, it was never poison pies, and they could only summon a pie every 15 seconds so they couldn't drown someone in meringue. But - do you remember Murgatroyd Bentley?"

"Sort of, he was president when I was a little kid - something, something superhuman rights, and he was the guy who nuked Saskatchewan, right?"

"That's the guy. We found out about this guy after the Humboldt Crisis, because after that, whenever there was a live broadcast with the president - the state of the union, addressing congress, the Christmas tree lighting - a pie would splatter across his face every fifteen seconds."

"…Is that it?"

"Hon, it was everything. You haven't lived until you've seen the president try to talk about dignity while being smacked in the face with a banana cream. By the end of term, he refused to show his face in public, and he resigned in quiet disgrace. There were a few other pieings for a few years, but nowhere near the amount that took place when Bentley was president, and eventually they stopped. We never found out who or even where this person was.

"And that - more than anything - makes them the greatest supervillain I've ever had to deal with. Because they didn't do much, but they did it loudly, they did it consistently, and we never caught them."

"...How hard were you trying to catch them?"

"Not very."

"And you decided to call them Dr. Creampie?"

"We were young. The president had just bombed Saskatchewan. It was a weird time. Honestly we took what we could get for laughs."