"We're with you Monsignor Wicks. And nothing that you say, or do, is gonna change that"
"Wake Up Dead Man" seems to tell the story about a bunch of religious freaks and a murder but really, it's not religion, it's politics. It's the story of how dictators are created, what are the mechanisms behind their birth. And it doesn't end with it, as what we can also observe there is a dictatorship fall. It seems like it's a prophecy of our times, carrying universal, yet painfully real (and hopeful?) meaning.
That's what the dictatorship is made of - out of fear, out of the little triggers held against particular members of the closest circle, who justify dictator's existence, wrongdoings, and help him grow in power regardless of any monstrosities he could attempt.
The flock doesn't really believe in Wicks. In reality, they believe in raw strength instead, and that strength has to be displayed skilfully to keep them all in check. Monsignor Wicks check-mates only the newcomers, people outside the closet circle, people with no names or meaning. It allows him to display his power of getting rid of people, cancelling them, destroying their community life. It allows Wicks to control the flock through fear that's ever present but not strong enough to make them leave.
Wicks never targets the flock itself. He could, however, and the flock knows it. They know what triggers he possesses. Which confessions they shared with him during the time of trust and abundance that are now long gone. And they follow him anyway because they want to be free... From thinking.
As long as Monsignor Wicks keeps them in check and sparing them from mate, they follow, because only that absolute strength can guarantee them lives free of difficult choices. Lives where they would risk actually leaving the closet, making risky but brave attempts of change. There's no complexity, no doubt. No grey, just black and white. Just a strong man, just a check, a constant threat that shows them the way.
"I hate this place. I hate this sad flock of losers. I want to get out. And now, finally... I can"
"Retire? Do you know the power that you have on that stage?"
"I've shrunk the flock..."
"No. You've radicalised them. That is power. In four years you could be a president."
taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult
at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)
'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65
it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age
it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.
you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.
young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!
there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
The accusation I see in the comments is not that the story isn't real but that this particular story has been written by AI so no amount of proof like the ones shared above will conclude anything here. I agree with these comments - this particular post reads like AI slop. Short sentences, common usage of unusual wording. Of course I may be wrong but that's how it feels to me. I wish there would be a way to see what's the actual slop and what's not...
Now, for all of those who aren't technical or willing to change their browser settings themselves to kill switch the stupid, default AI settings - here's the remedy that I've found out about: Just The Browser
Modern web browsers are increasingly focused on features beyond the core browsing experience, many of which just end up as distractions. Chr
I haven't tried it out myself yet because most of my AI settings are already disabled manually. If you have, let me know in the comments if that project is good and working! I have high hopes that this type of tools could stop the AIpocalypse.
"objectively physically attractive but in possession of negative rizz" is one of my favorite character concepts. i think it's so great when there's an absurdly hot person who's just a complete fucking loser. the mood is unsalvageable the moment they open their mouth kind of deal. you get no bitches because you're so sucks.
Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.
Hi!!! One of my parents got meningitis when I was a kid.
They were in the hospital for nearly a month, the rest of us were all placed in medical quarantine, there were several points we thought they were gonna die, and even though they survived, it was a SUPER close call and they lost about two years of memories from the ensuing brain damage.
Like… a two-uear-long cookie-cutter pocket of thoughts and memories went missing right out of their brain. It’s an inflammation of the brain that cooks it alive.
Yes, there are actually two vaccinations against a few meningitis types. Type MenB is definitely the worst so the Bexero vacc is out there to protect from it but there are also types A, C, W and Y (in one separate vaccine).
it's been like 2 years. i havent touched it. never needed to. "you don't really have a choice," are you so swift to forget the recent past? Bitch i still use itunes to download mp3s to so i have them forever and any song i want, then my sister burns them to CDs. When boycotts rolled out my other sister got no thanks to scan what products we shouldn't buy. i still use corded headphones not because "its older" but because it's easier. a fool criticizes those who buy candles 200 years after the invention of the electric light until the power goes out. become ungovernable. you are not immune to propaganda. you've never had Chatgpt forced upon you, the only thing forced upon you is the idea that Chatgpt is forced upon you. why claim you need something today that you didn't need yesterday. little bitch.
Yeah, it's easy to say that we control what we press. However, nowadays the truth of that statement is not as obvious as it used to be. Now, in addition to controlling the clicks, we should really educate ourselves in technology. Why?
Even if you don't want to use the Chat GPT, putting any ask into the Google browser, you get the Gemini response right on the top of the results. What will you do if you don't know how to disable it? Close your eyes to not read the answer? Pretend that you haven't seen what you've just seen?
Big Techs intensively try to shove the AI pulp deep into our throats so what we need right now is not shaming, not pointing out fingers at people and blasting off about our apparent (sic!) responsibility... What we need now is EDUCATION and PATIENCE for our own mistakes.
Because yes, it's so easy to step on that shit even if you haven't planned it. And all of that has been planned in a way to do exactly that - use AI without knowing that we use it. To deceive us into using it. To introduce it to those who didn't ask for it, didn't want it, or agreed to it.
"I haven't touched it" isn't enough anymore, not if you REALLY don't want to deal with that shit. Educating ourselves is, if we're thorough.
Hallucination is another way of renaming failure so it seems more harmless.
From now on, every time you read about AI's "hallucinations", replace it in your head with the rightful "failures" word. Only this way we can step up against the galloping Big Tech propaganda.
Potentially controversial opinion but I don't think old songs should be cleaned up and censored of the worst of their lyrics if the songs are still being played and performed. Like give the whole thing or don't play it, you might not like having to go "yes, it was a different time" when the Oh Fucking Yikes lines come in, but if you don't do that, there's going to be people who weren't there and will confidently go "actually things were never like that at all", because the sources they were being exposed to decided to skip the parts that were nasty.
Like if a song about being a working class youth living an awful life in an awful place requires me to look up up what the fuck a blue shirt is to understand "my daddy was a blue shirt, my mother a madam", I'm going to question why we suddenly decided to chicken out on elaborating what the brother was doing while earning medals in Vietnam.
100%. The same goes for the fairy tales that shouldn't be censored. They were cruel for the reason. They depicted their times, different realities. Moreover, they helped children cope with fear and feel capable.
Can you defeat a witch who wants to eat you? - Yes. Will you survive if parents leave you alone in the middle of the forest? - Certainly. Will you survive hungry and with scraps of clothes? - Why not. Here's how.
Honestly, I can't sometimes when I get these glittered-pink modern children tales with no sense, no logic whatsoever. Let the children face their fears in controlled conditions, for god's sake! Screw censorship.
