Evidence: See this Blog

[spot-the-antisemitism]

I wish our culture didn’t associate feminity with oneupmanship and emasculation and didnt think forcefemming jewish men was peak humour

“haha Kafka looks like a boymoding transfem”

ooooorrrrr maybe your racialization of middle eastern and also east asian men makes you percieve us as inherently feminine and you’re being racist

You should be able to realize Shapiro is a gish galloping grifting pile of shit with several inferiority complexes without imaging him in a dress

[maester-of-spreadsheets]

Absolutely diabolical comment on a Reddit post about how some research stations in Antarctica watch The Thing the first day of winter season down there lol

[rebecca-liz]

Hey, Jumblr! Did anyone else think that the name for second teeth was "meat teeth" because the first set were "milk teeth"? Just me?

[emperorsfoot]

“Milk teeth”?? You mean BABY TEETH?

[jewishgay4il]

In hebrew they are called שני חלב which translates directly to milk teeth

[biglawbear]

Aren't they called milk teeth cuz you might be breastfeeding when they start to come in? I feel like I've heard that before and it's not just a hebrew thing

[sluglover666]

Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.

[darkladynyara]

[emfrots]

"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.

[standwithdaanes]

Rwandan genocide - Wikipedia

The Rwandan Genocide: From Colonial Roots to a Contested Future - Explaining History Podcast

In the spring of 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda was engulfed in a maelstrom of violence that saw at least 800,000 Tutsi and modera

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link:

As we have already seen in this series of articles, Rwanda’s ethnic division between Hutu (around 85 %) and Tutsi (around 14 %) had deep roots in colonial rule. Under Belgian administration, identity cards fixed ethnicity as a rigid category, and the Tutsi minority was favoured for education and government work. After independence in 1962, this hierarchy inverted, and Hutu elites consolidated control. [...] When RTLM launched in July 1993, it combined pop-culture style with extremist ideology. This hybrid made hatred sound normal, even entertaining. Music, jokes, gossip, and death threats co-existed in the same broadcast. [...] RTLM’s language fused entertainment with ideology. It mocked Tutsis as arrogant “cockroaches” (inyenzi), accused them of conspiring to enslave Hutus, and encouraged listeners to “work” to eliminate them—a euphemism for killing. Humour, music, and familiarity disguised the lethal message.

[brainscrems]

“Anything goes as long as it’s punching up” is also the central tenet of antisemitism. Leftists think Jews are the ultrawhite ruling class, worst of the worst of whiteness, and conservatives think we’re a race secretly controlling the world and pretending to be white as a plot to bring down the white race. People who believe the latter are in charge of the US government rn. The nature of antisemitism is that we serve as a misdirect for the people with real power. Whatever issues you care about, people in power will find a way to blame the Jews. I cannot remember the exact quote or who it’s from, but I will paraphrase it anyways. Depending on who you ask we’re communists, capitalists, nationalists, rootless cosmopolitans, white, least white, liberals, conservatives, fascists, anarchists, or whatever other “existential and powerful” threat one may believe exists. But what we never are to these people is human. We’re the monsters who hurt them and so it’s okay to hurt us. The truth doesn’t matter, of course, because they aren’t actually afraid of us. We’re just a safer and easier target, and the lie that hurting us is dangerous and makes a change is easier than the hard truths and dangers one must face to fight real power. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Because it is not about the truth, but having a comforting lie that you can make positive change through abusing the vulnerable.

[starlight-shadowbanned]

Another thing that happens is that white American gentiles will speak this way about Israeli Jews, because if a Palestinian said it it would be punching up, and they see themselves on some level as Palestinian because of their allyship.

However, they aren’t actually Palestinian, and they do hold power and privilege over Israeli Jews, by virtue of being white gentiles and by virtue of being American.

Plus maybe some of them believe that US military aid to Israel means that Israelis are oppressing them, I guess.

[chutzpahchesed]

Did Tens of Millions of 'New Yorkers' Watch Mamdani's Video?

New York has 8.5 million people. Someone made up the difference.

The video reached me a dozen times before I finished my coffee. Friends, followers, strangers, all sending the same two minutes and thirteen seconds: the mayor of New York behind a desk, an American flag on one side and the city’s on the other, warm cinematic lighting, an orchestral score under his voice, the caption reading “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.” The staging is an Oval Office address. The content is a municipal legal memo about a promise that cannot be kept. By Wednesday morning, it had 55 million views across platforms. Twelve hours. The coverage focused on the rhetoric. Almost no one covered what the video actually announced.

The video opens cold on the accusation. Second zero: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” The litany fills the first forty seconds. The sentence that constitutes actual news arrives at the 1:40 mark of a 2:13 video: “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” Anyone who has ever read a social video retention graph knows what that sequencing does. Most viewers are gone long before the final thirty seconds. The video is built so the accusation reaches everyone and the retreat reaches only those who stay to the end.

Zohran Mamdani promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu from the earliest days of his candidacy in 2024. He repeated the promise in the final weeks of the race. Days ago, he told the New York Times his attorneys were still reviewing it. On Monday, the president announced that Netanyahu would not be arrested anywhere in the United States. On Tuesday night, the mayor admitted his city’s Law Department had reached the same conclusion. The pledge that helped elect him is dead. The video is its funeral, staged as an offensive.

There is nothing inherently wrong about a politician criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu. The ICC warrant exists; it was issued in 2024. Israel is contesting it. The ICC prosecutor who delivered those arrest warrants, Karim Khan, may lose his job this week over accusations of sexual assault. Be that as it may, Israelis have protested Netanyahu’s government in numbers an American mayor can only envy, week after week, for years. If Tuesday’s video had been criticism, even brutal criticism, it would have been an ordinary iteration of an old argument. My quarrel isn’t with criticism. It’s with political theatrics that trade in truth for exposure.

Here is the trade. What Mamdani promised his voters was an act of government: an arrest, jurisdiction, handcuffs, the full strength of the law applied to a foreign leader. What he delivered instead was language. “War criminal.” “Architect of a horrific genocide.” A casualty figure, 73,000, recited without a word about where it comes from or whom it counts. When a politician cannot produce the act, the language inflates to cover the difference, and the more impossible the deliverable, the more extreme the words. An arrest was off the table, so the accusation had to do the work of handcuffs. “Genocide” is what a broken promise sounds like when it needs to trend.

And it trended. Fifty-five million views in twelve hours, in a city of 8.5 million people. The mayor’s words reached six times as many people as his government ever could. On X alone, the video crossed 15 million by the end of the evening. No achievement of Mamdani’s actual mayoralty, no bus route, no childcare pilot, no housing number, has moved attention within an order of magnitude of this. Every ambitious politician in America absorbed the lesson by sunrise: a broken promise wrapped in maximal accusation against Israel outperforms a kept one. Attention has replaced delivery as the unit of political success. Mamdani’s video is the best demonstration of the exchange we have yet been given.

In my recent article “What Happened to Jeremy,” I documented how state-linked networks from Iran, Russia and Qatar amplify Western content about Israel. These operations rarely invent material. They find authentic domestic content that serves their aims and push it until the algorithm concludes the whole world is speaking. A sitting American mayor accusing Israel’s prime minister of genocide, in a professionally produced video, weeks before that prime minister is expected in New York for the UN General Assembly. That’s the exact material foreign influence operations exist to amplify.

Did they touch this one? I cannot tell you. No one can, because the platforms do not publish origin or coordination data even for political content at this scale. Fifty-five million views, and no public way to know how many arrived organically and how many came from accounts that have never once posted about a pothole in Queens. I am not claiming the surge was foreign. I am telling you that no one in America is currently allowed to check, and that the networks whose fingerprints I have traced elsewhere would consider this video a gift.

There is a fix, and it is boring, which is why it might work. After 2016, public pressure forced the platforms to build political ad libraries. The same should now apply to virality itself: when a piece of political content crosses a defined threshold, the platform publishes an engagement breakdown by country of origin and account age, and accredited researchers get the underlying data. If the surge behind Tuesday’s video was 55 million Americans, the numbers will show it, and Mamdani’s supporters can claim their moral clarity honestly. If it was something else, New Yorkers deserve to know who was shouting over them.

I am writing this on the even of Tisha B’Av, the day the Jewish calendar sets aside for mourning the destruction of both Temples and the catastrophes that gathered around the same date across two thousand years. The rabbis taught that the Second Temple fell to sinat chinam, baseless hatred. They argue that the problem was slander, not mere military weakness. I don’t believe Mamdani consulted a Jewish calendar before posting; the timing is likely coincidence. But the fast lands differently this year. Jews keep a national day of mourning because we have long experience with accusations that travel faster than any correction can, and with what happens in the years after they land. Fifty-five million views in twelve hours is the largest audience such an accusation has ever found this quickly. The day exists because accusations like this one have never, in our history, stayed on the page.

In September, Netanyahu is expected in New York. The video will circulate again, the mayor will be at ribbon cuttings, and the gap between the sentence and the act will still be sitting there, unexamined, because examining it benefits no one with power. Somewhere this week, a candidate for some other office watched those numbers climb and quietly took a note. The note had nothing to do with promoting peace for Palestinians, and everything to do with exploiting Jews to gain power.

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[thekillingm00nn]

When someone said the worst thing from the world wars is that israel exists, so I lowkirkeunly have to nuke the world

Yea like the 6 million jews getting murdered, or the millions of other deaths either wasn't the bad part. Jews being safe is the bad part apparently. Same people to claim to not be antisemitic btw. Lol. Lmao even.

[penworthy]

Lately everything that happens feels like it was engineered in a lab to drive us all insane

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Well. It's the Fourth Of July. Again.

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway. In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.

Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.

This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.

Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.

If this seems harsh: There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour. Over fifty people lost their homes. Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.

The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this

-And there is! It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)

All of this spring, I've been battling Bindweed and my City Code Enforcement Officers.

The city code people have been professional, but the truth is that one of my neighbors is calling them on use because one of my housemates is transgender. It's extremely grating to get these notices, having to explain repeatedly that I *AM* working on the weed situation, I just have a heart condition and No Money. It's also deeply paranoia-inducing to know that the city is regularly coming by and photographing my house.

The Solution to the Bindweed is 1 gallon of high-concentration vinegar, half a cup of Borax, a quarter cup of salt, and a couple tablespoons of dish soap. Get one of those weed sprayers from a hardware store and mix it up in there. Spray it on your thistles, bindweed, kudzu, garlic mustard or whatever your local herbaceous invasive is on a day with bright sunlight, and in a few hours the entire part of the plant above the soil is Deceased. It's non-toxic to insects, pets and wildlife (just wait a few months before trying to plant anything in the area for the traces to wash out). The only real downside to this stuff is that it smells HEINOUS.

Sure, The Stench is nauseating, but WeedFucker 5000 is genuinely painful to inhale. Again, it wont hurt people- even my asthmatic housemates can use the stuff- but boy howdy it sure smells toxic. I've got the ingredients for about 40 gallons of WeedFucker 5000 prepared and ready to go.

I've also got a disposable hazmat suit, rubber boots and gloves, respirator, goggles and a shitty little golf cart from the free section of craigslist to haul my shit around in. I also have Business Cards!

See, the very nice officers from the City Code department left some Very Nice business cards so that I may contact them about "the fucking bindweed is gone, get off my back". So I scanned the business card into my computer, fired up Clip Studio, and made my own business cards. I've turned my City's Abstract Triangle Logo into an Eye of Providence and the slogan of "E Pluribus Unum" to "E Plurbis Anus", Changed my city's name to a dumb pun, and stated the card originates from "The Department Of Public Nuisances".

Crucially, where the name and contact information of the real city employee has been replaced with the name and business email of the neighbor who has been bragging on facebook about calling the city code department on my home because he hates my housemate :)

It looks, at a glance, very much like the business cards of city employees. If you look at it for like 5 seconds though, there's no way it could be mistaken for the real thing.

I've printed out 500 of these bad boys and will have them on hand as I, a put-upon employee, am forced to work overtime on a national holiday doing weed mitigation, because my boss can't manage deadlines for shit. You're mad about it? I've been out here since 5 AM! But if we don't finish by the deadline we lose the contract and I could get fired. You know what the economy is. Here, this is my Boss's Business card- how about you send him an email about how this has ruined your barbecue?

It's golden hour now, so I'm Suiting Up and preparing to embark on some civil service in the form of Noxious Weed Eradication, and by coincidence, Fire Mitigation.

I'll report back later Tonight🫡

(If you'd like to support your local disabled storyteller in their Acts Of Public Service, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon)

[gallusrostromegalus]

Well. It's not quite an hour into July 5th. I am very tired, may have destroyed my sense of smell, and am not sure if I'm proud of or VERY disappointed in my fellow citizens.

On one hand: FAR fewer fireworks parties this year!

- Only nine to last year's thirteen - three of them had the good sense to be firing their recreational explosives out over the local reservoir - That's far from foolproof - and really bad for the fish - also y'all are RIGHT NEXT to where the Bald Eagles are nesting - but congratulations on at least attempting some risk mitigation!

On the other hand.

Absolutely NOBODY questioned why the hell I was out spraying weeds.

- In a Hazmat Suit (technically it's a coverall for painting rooms, which is much more breathable, but looks the part) - In a Residential Area - After Dark - On a Federal Holiday

Like I'm glad I didn't get into a fight or something, but like. I was Ready. I had that conversation locked and loaded. I MADE BUSINESS CARDS.

...But instead of Very Reasonably asking What The Fuck I Was Doing, the crowds at these parties saw me (5'0" flat, potato-shaped, sweating profusely) trundling up on the slowest and least-intimidating motor vehicle in the county*, hanging a bit out the side to spray thistles and bindweed on the streets and sidewalks**, and instead of raising a rival stink, I was instead greeted by some derisive muttering and a couple of "OH COME ON!"s, but the groups dispersed and retreated indoors or at least away from the general direction of my home. *Like genuinely, I think Barbie's Dream Car has more horsepower than this golf cart. This thing doesn't have horsepower. It doesn't even have ponypower. It's running on duckpower. It waddles, something I didn't know a wheeled vehicle could do.

**Actually completely legal and a welcome community service in my city. Thank you Neighbor Barbara for telling me the exact part of city code that details what civilians are allowed to do about weeds on public roads, which is apparently "LOTS". Theoretically I could bill the city for my time tonight.

Do people not know how to Make A Scene anymore?

I was absolutely sure I was going to get filmed and shit thrown at me, or someone would call the cops. My beloved was terrified I was going to get shot. I at least had ONE woman shout "YOU'RE RUINING EVERYTHING!" at me, which isn't quite as good as being told I'm ruining Christmas, but she said it with a genuinely heartwarming anguish while gesturing to a homemade "HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!" banner, with an attempt at rendering The Evil Orange that as so enthusiastically yet talentlessly executed I almost stopped to get a picture of it. He looked like he'd been put in a wafflemaker.

I promised my beloved that I would turn around and come home at midnight, and I did, having eliminated every fireworks party and Scottish thistle in a five-block radius despite the lackadaisical maximum speed of my Steel Steed.

The complete lack of protest is honestly shocking to me. My flabbers are completely gasted. I waddled home on the golf cart in a sort of stunned silence that this HAS worked so well. The whole world is almost eerily quiet, and reeking of vinegar.

...Which is maybe why I didn't notice the cop pulling up beside me at a red light until he rolled down his window and leaned out at me.

"WHAT'RE YOU DOIN'?" He asked, in a voice that could be used as a foghorn in emergencies.

I probably would have jumped were I not currently melting into a semblance of the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot in the heat, which was the first thing that saved me. The second was the voice of my Grandfather, coming to my aid through decades of generational memory, to tell me his words of wisdom, usually spoken right before doing something wildly inadvisable:

The Age Of Miracles Is Not Yet Over.

"Weed Mitigation!" I called back. "CHRIST ON A BIKE, THEY GOT YOU GUYS WORKING THE HOLIDAY TOO?" He said, in the same fontissimo as before. Apparently Officer Foghorn just talks like this.

"Yep." I nodded.

"SHIT." He blared in solidarity. "WHEN DO YOU GET OFF?"

"Just finished."

"MOTHERFUCKER. THEY GOT ME OUT HERE UNTIL GODDAMN 5 AM." Officer Foghorn whined in THX.

"Shit." I commiserated.

The light turned green.

"ALRIGHT YOU GET HOME SAFE! GOD BLESS!" He waved, and drove off at something significantly above the speed limit, and I trundled on home.

I must have still looked shocked when I came in, because My Beloved immediately got up to hug me and ask if I was alright.

"The Age Of Miracles Is Not Yet Over." I nodded slowly as the animals all battered me about the legs for attention. "...For real though, absolutely nothing happened."

"What?" he squints, wobbling slightly as Charlie tries to shove him aside for better access to me. "That's... Is it weird to say I'm almost disappointed?"

"I mean, I confirmed that I inherited my Grandfather's supernatural ability to get out of trouble for no good reason, but we knew that from the code enforcement people." I shrugged. Selene finally noticed the smell of vinegar and retched in disapproval.

"How about a shower and some Ice cream?" My Beloved suggests.

So now it is July the 5th. - My house is not ablaze - There are four medium-sized carnivores sleeping on me - I am freshly bathed - and I have a pint of Americone Dream all to myself

Here's to you, your health and your happiness, and a reminder to go make good trouble. Goodnight all.

---

(If you enjoy reading about my adventures (and the occasional curious non-adventure) I'd appreciate it if you could tip me on Ko-Fi. Apparently my Patreon link is fucked but it's basically 1 in the morning and I can't be arsed.)

[tsarina-anadyomene]

one of my irl friends revealed that she's been a tumblr user for over a decade. devastating

[mythmagicetc]

my mutual will post “i just blocked one of my mutuals” and i’ll be reading it on my own dash with my own eyes directly from their blog thinking “it was probably me………….😔”

[loth-caatgirl]

[bunjywunjy]

Has a baleen whale ever been kept in captivity for any length of time? If so was it successfully released or did it die?

there have been several instances of young baleen whales running afoul of something and being captured for rehabilitation, yes! they were mostly gray whales.

which makes sense, gray whales are slow enough to get caught in the first place and hardy enough to not immediately stress themselves to death over being poked and put in a tank (as long as hundreds of pounds of delicious shellfish are on offer, anyway)

none of them were ever kept very long, they were rehabilitated to a healthy weight and then released. (healthy weight for a juvenile gray whale is almost 20,000 lbs. BIG baby)

[bunjywunjy]

[mtraki]

this lives in the post now

[uncahier]

[howl224tgeundying]

[miseria-fortes-viros]

man sometimes i really want to get back into welding but then i remember that the guys from the first course i took won’t be there and change my mind

[miseria-fortes-viros]

comprehensive list of things that happened to me in my welding course with The Guys:

- was the only one to get an A the first grading period. had to stop them from putting me on their shoulders

- became the official classroom mascot on account of i was the only girl. this meant i was an integral stop on any and all workshop tours. was referred to as “Our Lady Helena” on these occasions

- almost set myself on fire once bc my prof stood behind me watching me try a skill he’d just demonstrated and he shouted very suddenly very loudly. restarted my heart and asked WTF WAS THAT FOR JOHN and he called me a “goddamn wonder”. i almost got third degree burned over a compliment

- mentioned offhand ONE TIME that swords were cool. also mentioned my birthday offhand ONE TIME. one of The Guys remembered both instances and also happened to find a sword in a dumpster so he gave it to me for my birthday

- came in fifth in an arm wrestling competition

- french braided my hair in class bc i didn’t have time to do it beforehand. ended up with an audience of like 5+ guys trying to figure out how tf i was doing it

- told The Guys my college friends call me barbie. Mistake. suddenly had all 12 of them calling me Barbarian

- had some down time and made a silly little sculpture with some scraps. The Guys were endlessly intrigued by this and demanded to see some of my art school stuff. had a small crowd around my phone cheering loudly every time i swiped to a new picture

- accidentally mentioned the cafe i worked at. Mistake. several days later all 12 of them came in to bother me

- offered someone a haircut. Mistake. had to retract the offer bc suddenly Everyone wanted a haircut and it would Not Be Fair if i only did one

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

One thing I love putting in my fantasy and scifi that so many stories I read don't have is superstitions that are just wrong. Astrology type shit. Wizards being assigned an elemental type that's supposed to determine their personality just because that's how it's been done for centuries because ages ago people believed in it and these days people are like "no of course it's a silly superstition haha" but still glance knowingly at your metal type tattoo when you're being headstrong. Societies who believe that the stars determine your destiny because see, this kid was born under the star that indicated intelligence so we pushed her in school and got her special tutors so she could live up to her potential and look, she IS more academically successful than her peers born under other stars! People talking about their religion in the far future and all the side characters are like "that sounds like fucking nonsense" and they're like "no it's TRUE" and the audience is like 'no that's nonsense'. I love inventing shit for characters to just be totally wrong about.

[inbabylontheywept]

"R&D? More like R&Deez Nuts"

In a future where intelligent life had managed to break the chains of death, disease, and famine, it had yet to escape the iron grasp of bullshit corporate team building exercises.

Luckily for the R&D division of TLOB Enterprises, they had a human. His name was Earl, and he surpassed even immunity to bullshit, literally gaining strength from it like some sort of coprophilic vampire. It was almost as disgusting as it was fascinating, but the novelty of it was charming enough to keep things in the green.

The specific brand of bullshit the group was dealing with on that particular day was a “team-building laser-tag battle” pitting the three main divisions of the orbital branch against each other: Accounting, Sales, and Innovations.

To be frank, it didn’t seem like a very fair fight. Accounting was the largest branch by far at twenty-seven heads. Sales lagged behind this a great deal with seventeen members, still absolutely dwarfing R&D’s mere four.

The rules of the game were explained by a cheery corporate speaker, aided by pictures presented in something that was dishearteningly close to a power-point program.

First, each player would be given an infrared phaser, and a tag suit. The suit itself was surprisingly high tech for a toy, freezing limbs if they got hit, and paralyzing the person entirely if they were struck somewhere vital. After receiving their gear the three groups would retreat back to their offices and strategize for the next fifteen minutes. When the time was up, the station would begin to decrease its spin, lowering gravity from a comfortable one-point-two G's down to zero. The match would then proceed in the low gravity environment until two teams were eliminated, with its end being signalled by the return of gravity.

“Any questions?” the speaker finished, chromatophores flashing a nervous pink as the room remained silent.

“Haha, I’m gonna take that as a sign that I did a good job of explaining things! Alright everyone, back to your offices! And remember: We’re all part of a greater whole!”

Brisinj smirked, jagged teeth on full display. There was a moment of slow motion horror as Shiloh, Earl, and Valrose all realized that he was about to “whisper” something under his breath.

Brisinj’s equivalent of whispering was still more than enough to be heard across the room.

“Hard to. Be greater hole than. Sales. Even if. Hole is. Asshole.”

As seventeen heads swiveled towards him in disbelief he did the only thing he could that would make the situation worse.

He made eye contact with them and kept going

“BET THEY FART. LIKE. AN AIRLOCK. OPENING.”

Spittle foamed between the gaps of his jagged teeth as he forced air between them, the hiss he made literally filling the room.

And it just kept going.

And going.

And going.

Disgust morphed into disbelief as Brisinj continued to make the noise, eyes bulging, face flushed, before his lungs mercifully gave out and the hiss died with an artfully strangled gurgle.

Earl couldn’t help it. He guffawed. Shiloh’s disappointed and betrayed expression broke his heart, but he couldn’t help it. That final gurgle had been a masterpiece.

Valrose was the one that wound up taking the initiative, his hydraulic musculature giving him the strength to gently manhandle the cackling duo out of the room. Shiloh tried his best to give an apologetic wave as he followed the pseudo-crustacean out of the room, but the raucous laughter of three people behind him scorched that bridge like a leaf on the sun.

With a defeated sigh he ran to catch up to his coworkers.

---

“So… What do you think the odds are that sales decides to storm our little lab first?” Shiloh asked.

“Oh, 100%,” Earl replied offhandedly, his attention focused on rummaging through an old toolbox.

“Those are chances,” Valrose corrected, “Odds would be zero to one. But yeah, they’re definitely hitting here first.”

“I. WOULD BE. OFFENDED. IF THEY. DIDN’T.” Brisinj intoned at his standard just-below-deafening volume, “THAT HISS. WAS. PERFECT.”

Shiloh ran his claws over his scalp.

“Shit. They’re gonna slaughter us.”

Earl seemed to have found the tool he was looking for and was now rummaging through the LED drawer, gathering a collection of bulbs that he seemed promising to him. His tone was amused, even if he didn’t look up long enough for his facial expression to be read.

“Calm down. Slaughter is for real wars. Worst thing that happens here is they paralyze us and draw dicks on our faces.”

“That’s still not pleasant!” Shiloh protested.

No one argued that point.

The silence stretched on for a minute or so longer. Earl gathered his collection of bulbs before moving to the power testing lab, leaving the other three in the quiet. Valrose gave in first and pushed himself up, claws failing wildly as he got his four legs beneath him.

“So what are we gonna do? What’s our grand plan to avoid having to pretend to be dead for the next hour while the sales bastards make us into doodle boards?”

Shiloh shrugged.

“Make them work for it I guess? We could start by moving our shelving units, trying to funnel them through a choke point. Could give ourselves some cover while we were at it.”

Earl chimed in from the power lab.

“I got an idea, but I’m gonna be a little dramatic about it and make you wait to see it. Just uh… Cluster em’. The more of em’ you can pack together, the better. Even if it means making some cover on their side of the room.”

There was a slight sideways pulls as the station’s retro-thrusters activated, the rotation of the great craft gently pulling to a complete stop.

The game was starting, and Earl still hadn’t made his way back from the power lab. Brisinj was not pleased with this.

“HEY. EARL. DONE YET?”

Earl’s voice came back a few seconds later, strained but chipper.

“Almost!”

They could hear banging on the walls, the telltale sound of people launching themselves down halls in the zero gravity environment.

The noises were getting closer.

“So, uh, how ‘almost’ is that almost?” Valrose asked, his casual tone betrayed by the nervous twiddling of his manipulator claws, “Cuz I’m hearing a lot of boots hitting the walls and four wouldn’t be enough to hold them off, least of all three.”

Even without a person around to witness it, Earl still shrugged before answering.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing: Four ain’t enough. Only way we’re winning this if I can get this party trick in working order, so just... Hold the line. Alright?”

Valrose clutched his pistol tighter, still feeling exposed in the pillbox he’d made from old shelving units and cardboard. Brisinj wasn’t pleased with Earl’s absence, but even that nuisance wasn’t enough to ruin the joy he felt at even this imitation of a fight. Shiloh just kept his sights on the lone entrance to the lab, hoping he could get the timing of his first shot right.

He did.

There was the black flash of a sales rep rocketing down the hall. He landed on all fours, limbs splayed like a tree frog, when Shiloh’s beam hit him in the back. He’d been too busy absorbing the shock of impact to begin his secondary launch, and as all four limbs froze at once from the registered vital shot there was nothing he could do but await his doom.

Apparently, doom chose to wear a grey suit that day. Another sale’s colleague had been following close behind him, and simply lacked the time to change direction. With no way to change course he slammed into his paralyzed comrade with a muffled swear, the two sent spinning into the open space of the research lab.

Brisinj picked the flailing survivor off with a casual snipe. His species was adapted for hunting and he didn’t even need to use the sights of the gun, firing from the hip like an old Western. The flailing stopped, but the accusing glare remained.

The second batch of sales workers seemed to have learned from the first, recognizing the challenges of rushing the choke point. There was the sound of scuffling in the hall as they struggled to position themselves in the 3D space before the first wave launched themselves out of the blind corner.

There were five of them, and they weren’t just smarter than the frontrunners, they seemed more physically capable. There was another sharp-toothed biped of the same species as Brisinj, and the two quickly locked themselves in a duel. Brisinj’s stationary position gave him an advantage in accuracy, but the speed that the other one was moving at made him hard to hit.

Brisinj let out an involuntary hiss as one of the shots hit him in the arm. His opponent’s eyes narrowed in fury at the sound, and the moment of distraction was enough for Brisinj to swap the gun to his functioning hand and take out one of his opponent’s legs.

Unable to position his landing well, the clerk hit the next wall and glanced off, spinning. Valrose took a careful shot at his chest and the flailing of limbs stopped, giving him the appearance of a shuriken as he whirled off in the direction of the power lab.

Still, his efforts gave four of his comrades enough time to get to cover unharried. As they began to fire at the entrenched trio, they gave more of their friends time to get through the door and set up.

Valrose was able to put up the best fight here. His head barely poked out of the pillbox, the only part of him truly exposed when he fired was whatever arm happened to be holding his pistol. He simply ran through them like an assembly line, one pincer passing the pistol off to the next as his arms took hit after hit.

He managed to get a chest shot against an upper levels sales manager, but the real gains of his strategy were in the way he took fire off the other two. Brisinj’s sharpshooter accuracy had gone down to mortal levels after swapping to his non-dominant arm, but he was still able to get two cocky reptilians through the chest when they tried to leap for better positions. Shiloh himself seemed content to take limb shots, whittling the sales team down slowly. His reptilian comrades weren’t particularly good shots, but they made up for it with their default ambidexterity. It was the real sharpshooters, the mammalian bipeds and greys, that suffered the most from losing their dominant limbs. For a moment, it looked like they could manage to hold their positions indefinitely.

The moment couldn’t last.

Two shooters made a bullrush for Valrose. The first, a reptilian, was taken out easily, but Brisinj only managed to get the second’s leg before he dove in through the entrance slot. There was a muffled curse before Valrose was evicted from the box, limbs splayed.

A chest shot.

Shit.

The pillbox was positioned behind both Brisinj and Shiloh. Having it captured didn’t just mean that they’d lost their main distraction, it meant that they were about to get caught in a crossfire.

Shiloh may not have had the quickest body, but he had a lightning mind. Before Valrose was even shoved out of the slot he was launching himself out of cover. He had his knees bent in front of him like a shield, sacrificing them midflight. If he’d been aiming for a wall, he’d have hit the ground frozen, unable to push off, but he knew better: There was a water pipe hanging off the wall he could swing around like a gymnast on, repositioning his trajectory on a beeline for the power lab.

Brisinj himself realized a half second later what he needed to do, but his superior speed made up the difference nicely. He dug his clawed fingertips into the carpet, weaving serpentine down the hall, more of a climbing motion than anything else. It was working beautifully, beams of infrared traced all the places he would’ve been if he’d been foolish enough to move in a straight line. He’d almost made it the full length of the hall before a lucky shot grazed his hand, the remaining arm locking tight. Dropping the last pretense of strategy, he simply kicked as hard as he could off the wall, launching himself towards the door he’d just barely seen Shiloh disappear behind.

It worked. He barreled into the lab, just barely managing to twist enough to land feet first on the wall instead of bouncing around the room like a 140 kilo rubber bullet.

“EARL! THEY GOT. VAL. ARE YOU. DONE. YET?”

Earl turned around, a wild grin on his face. He’d built… something. There was a breadboard covered in crudely soldered chemical batteries, a handful of resistors, and most importantly, an LED. A matte black cone of plastic was wrapped around the top bulb, focusing the light from a radial burst to a much more concentrated cone.

Brisinj was good at circuits, but the whole thing was so rushed and messy he could barely tell where the on switch was. Shiloh, on the other hand, seemed to understand immediately.

“Does that LED emit in the same wavelength as the pistols?” he demanded, almost gleeful at the prospect.

“Close! We’ll see if it’s close enough to fool the sensors.”

There was no time for self-congratulating speeches. The sales team had begun to follow them down the halls, eager to finish what they’d started.

Earl braced himself by the doorway. Behind him laid his wounded teammates...before him laid destiny.

And what human would he be, if he had not laid with destiny?

He launched himself across the room, body parallel to the ground even as he fired the cone down the hallway. He didn’t have the expert precision of Brisinj, or the fast thinking of Shiloh, but he married both in a way that lent itself beautifully to movement. He only needed to be good at dodging, his homemade infrared blaster was basically miss proof.

It was a massacre. The infrared cannon froze everything in its massive, continuous cone, combining the best traits of both a machine-gun and a flamethrower. You couldn’t pray for a better room clearing device. Earl was able to clear out the entire corridor with a flick of his wrist, paralyzed salesmen drifting through the zero-gravity environment like frozen corpses after a hull breach. There was something eerily beautiful to the scene.

The effect was ruined somewhat when the drifting “corpses” started whining about rules and blatant cheating, but Earl was far too busy not listening to them to bother listening to them.

Using the floating bodies as jump-off points, he rocketed down the hall, the cone making a gentle figure-eight sweep as it cleared every point in his field of vision. Limbs froze at awkward angles, as people tried to fire from behind cover and those that tried to move for a better vantage point, desperate to make sense of the chaos, found themselves cast adrift.

It took him a little under four seconds to wipe out the remnants of sales. It took him longer than that to spot Valrose, buried as he was under a pile of four clerks.

It only took him one bounding leap to reach his friend, and two great heaving pulls to send the clerks flying off into space. Val was currently face down, and he took a moment to steel himself before turning his friend over.

No.

They’d got him. There were four dicks on his face, each from a different species, with a level of anatomical detail that Earl found both frightening and educational.

Huh. So that’s what they look like.

Val’s expression was as inscrutable as any shrimp’s, and his casual tone wasn’t helping.

“Give it to me straight Earl: How bad is it?”

Earl placed a gentle hand on Val’s shoulder. They were both men here. He deserved the truth.

“Val… There are four dicks on your face. Like, full on dicks. Dicks with veins kind of dicks.”

Val’s face twitched a little, but he kept that calm, stable tone that everyone on the station knew him for.

“I see. Earl, could I ask you a slight favor?”

It was probably the result of seeing too many cheesy war movies, but Earl didn’t think he could refuse a comrade that had, in a way, given it all in pursuit of duty.

“Anything man. Just name it.”

The temperature seemed to drop, so cold was Val’s response.

“Avenge me.”

---

R&D solved its vengeance problem the same way it solved all of its problems: By breaking its solution down into easily replicable steps and then moving on to mass production.

It took Earl only a minute to print out a halfway decent penis stamp, time that Shiloh and Brisinj spent figuring out how to act as the other’s limbs. They were far from graceful, but they could get by. With no time to lose they began clumsily navigating the open spaces, moving from body to body, a flurry of stamping, jumping, and laughter.

Earl himself spent his time getting situated in the pillbox. He wasn’t sure if he could beat the onslaught of accounting, but it was worth a shot. Even in the worst case, his goal could be to just buy time for Val’s vengeance.

There was time for two people to get stamped before the first accountant poked his head around the corner. Earl recognized his face, even if he didn’t know his name. He was a fellow intern, green as a sapling. A quick pulse of the blaster was all it took to turn him into a statue, a fate he seemed surprisingly at peace with. Even as a casualty he continued to relay information to his teammates. It seemed that he’d been chosen specifically as a sacrifice.

“Alright everyone, you’re not gonna believe this, but the lab boys actually managed to eliminate everyone in sales.”

Even muffled by the blind corner, there was still an audible wave of surprised hums. It seemed that they’d massed just out of sight, taking the slow and steady approach. Classic accountant move. Their patience and general willingness to strategize didn’t bode well for R&D.

The intern spent a few more seconds analyzing the room before relaying back even more info.

“They’re uh… they’re graffitiing the sales branch with genitalia. I can see Val, it looks like he’s been out for a while. They’ve got Brisinj and Shiloh helping each other out, but they’re both missing the use of two limbs, they’re not very combat effective. The only one that seems intact is Earl, and he’s got a little fort made at the end of the room. Hi Earl!”

Earl gave him a little wave. This was… oddly amicable. If he could pull this bit out longer, it would be a lot simpler than fighting.

“Hey! Sorry, I forgot your name. Always been bad with names. Who are you again?”

The paralyzed accountant didn’t seem very bothered by this.

“I’m Velen! The thing in your hand isn’t a phaser, so I’m assuming you made your own weapon?”

Earl’s eyes widened in alarm. Huh. Well, that element of surprise burned out real fast.

“Eh… Well… Yeah.”

He was already tucking the weapon away, but it was too late, Velen was already passing on more recon.

“Earl’s made a phaser! Lots of batteries and a large LED! It’s got a cone shaped barrel, probably covers a wide area continuously. Anyone got any ideas on how to handle that?”

Earl couldn’t hear the voices too well, but there were suggestions of various shields, ranging from using a wall of interns, to coffee tables. The winning suggestion came from a reptilian voice, recognizable by its faint lisping accent, identical to Shiloh’s.

“...I think there’s a large mirror hanging up in the lobby? We might be able to reflect the beam back at him.”

Earl considered this. If he waited here, there would be the substantial delay of them traveling down to the main docking area, then traveling back, then making their slow and steady charge. He didn’t have a good counter to it, but it would at least be a slow style of victory.

Alternatively. He could charge, right now. He might get shot immediately, he might win, hell, he might do neither and just succeed in delaying the inevitable a little more staunchly.

What the hell. He still had some fight left in him.

He braced his legs on the back of his pillbox, blasting himself out of the narrow entrance slot like an ICBM leaving a submarine.

Velen startled a little before continuing his play-by-play.

“He’s pretty fast! Hey, he’s making a run for the hall. You guys might want to pull back a little, or you’ll end up like me.”

There was the ominous banging of twenty-five points of shoes bouncing off the walls before Earl even rounded the corner. He froze, unsure of what to do, when he heard that same, old reptile speak.

“Not bad! After what happened on your colony world I thought you’d be taking things slow. War of attrition. Glad to see that you’ll gamble on victory!”

Earl launched down the hall towards the voice. The lizard that he saw was old, older than Shiloh. He’d braced himself at the edge of another blind corner, shooting a wink before launching out of line of sight.

Earl followed in hot pursuit, gun held on in front of him. The lizard was damn fast, always just a few steps ahead. Panting, he rounded a corner just in time to see a green tail whirl into the bathroom.

He grinned.

The little guy was fast, but he’d cornered himself there. Earl pushed quickly, eager to catch the lizard before he realized his mistake.

He rocketed in through the door, blaster on, and immediately realized that the lizard wasn’t the one screwing up. He was.

Mirrors.

He froze as the reflective surfaces in the room bounced the beam back at him. He drifted silently through the empty space, hoisted by his own petard, before he saw a familiar spiky head pop up from one of the stalls. Now that paralysis wasn’t on the line, the lizard’s movements were a lot more relaxed.

Earl spoke first. It was really all he could do, frozen as he was.

“I don’t actually know your name, but may I just say that you pulled this off beautifully?”

The lizard grinned.

“Ha! I’m Petrunko. I’ll take that compliment, today was probably the most I’ve used my brain in the last ten years.”

Earl tried to shrug, the suit reducing the movement to a neck twitch. He laughed at himself for trying, the excitement of the last few minutes wearing off, leaving him happy and tired.

“You sound like my boss. Get too good at your job and it gets boring, huh?”

Petrunko wiggled his hand a little, the surprisingly universal sign for kinda.

“Your job doesn’t really change, but your view of what you’re a part of does. Imagine if one of your cells became self-aware and you’ve got a good idea of what my life is like.”

Earl winced. That sounded like an existential nightmare.

Petrunko caught the expression and held up his three fingered hands placatingly.

“Whatever panic your ego has right now about feeling small and insignificant will be replaced when you get older. You’ll want to be part of something bigger than yourself. Give it time.”

Earl grinned at that. The advice was good but beyond that…

“Psh. Went from sounding like my boss to sounding like my dad.”

Petrunko crossed his arms, more amused than annoyed at the jab.

“Wonder what your dad would say about your little art project back there. Those canvases are a bit pricey for dick stencils.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, we only defaced two of them before your nerd squad showed up.”

Petrunko laughed. The noise was only cut off when a distant hum began, the ion thrusters on the hull giving some faint warning that the station was about to begun rotating again. Apparently, the other accountants apparently had seized the opportunity to finish off Brisinj and Shiloh.

The game was over. Earl felt himself gently falling to the ground, arms and legs suddenly free to move once more. Petrunko offered him a hand up, and he took it gratefully.

“Hopefully your friends got a few more with the delay you bought them. Sales has always been hard to get along with, but they’ve been mean bastards for the last four years."

Earl dusted himself off before offering a handshake. Petrunko clearly wasn’t familiar with the gesture, but he got the hang of it quickly.

“What’s it mean?”

Earl paused, processing. He was still getting used to explaining body language, to expressing so much in only words.

“It’s got a couple of meanings, but right now it means ‘You beat me, and earned my respect.’”

Petrunko concentrated for a moment, clearly trying to commit it to memory.

“I like that. I hope I get the chance to shake your hand next time, Earl.”

Earl had a moment of startling clarity: He’d just made a friend. A good one too, it seemed.

“Well, we’ll see if I can earn it. In the meantime, we should go check the other science boys. I’m curious to see how they’ve managed without me.”

Petrunko shrugged.

“I’d point out the strangeness of the newest person here trying to mother people with three, four times his expertise but… I do want to see what they managed in your absence. Come on, let’s go.”

And together they left, walking down the halls that just moments before they'd flown through.

In the companionable peace of things after the battle, Earl had one final thought:

I can't believe I wrote this off as bullshit. --- This is a loose sequel to this post: https://www.tumblr.com/inbabylontheywept/721036534229434368/so-whats-the-biggest-gun-youve-ever-made?source=share But it's not required reading. The shorts I wrote in this world aren't part of an overarching larger story, they're just borrowing characters and setting. I think the rule I'm going to follow is that hard-series get reblogs, general settings will just get notes like this at the end, showing what pieces they're attached to. I might change that later, I'm still figuring out optimal ways to use the site. Tumblr is pretty odd.

[chainmail-butch]

Hi, its me. The warmest creature in the world. I love you. Im the warmest creature in the world and I love you so much and I need to be in your lap right now. Yes, I know about the heat wave. That's okay though because I was already the warmest creature in the world so I don't mind. I love you and you need to let me sleep in your lap right now. I'm soooo warm and I love you sooo much. If you say no you'll be saying no to a thing that love you. Let me sleep in your lap. When I fall asleep I get warmer. I love you