all i want for 2026 is that gigantic rancid AI bubble to finally burst in such a catastrophic way that the consequences will be so good and i'll never have to see another AI generated image ever again
Shoutout to Costco, who's shareholders had a 98% vote to keep their DEI practices, and continues to give a giant fuck you to parties trying to pressure them to drop it, to the point of republican AGs threatening a lawsuit.
Costco's public support of DEI programs contrasts with positions taken in recent months by other big U.S. brands
Your partner came back from the dead after being missing for decades. Every one of their friends who they went with ended up dying a horrible death.
Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.
Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.
You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.
You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.
So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.
Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.
Your name is Adrian, and you kind of wants to strangle this fucking fish, statement.
Note that, on mobile at least, this DOES NOT turn off the AI Summaries feature. To turn that feature off you need to go to Summaries and toggle the separate switch:
Also eagle eyed viewers may note that if you don't turn it off it is automatically set to give you an AI summary if you shake your device which, for clumsy people like me who are constantly dropping the bitch, is like the opposite of a good feature.
Note that, on mobile at least, this DOES NOT turn off the AI Summaries feature. To turn that feature off you need to go to Summaries and toggle the separate switch:
Also eagle eyed viewers may note that if you don't turn it off it is automatically set to give you an AI summary if you shake your device which, for clumsy people like me who are constantly dropping the bitch, is like the opposite of a good feature.
So it's national Recreational Explosives, Hand Loss and Wildfire day, and unlike 2023, there is nary a drop of rain in sight.
Despite being slapped upside the head by God, my put technically inclined neighbor has acquired TWO pallets of fireworks this year.
The state is of no help: my city police department has made it pretty clear they don't intend to respond to any fireworks calls this weekend. I've sent the pictures I took to the county tipline and received and automated email reply saying that it will take several weeks to process my case. Perhaps he will get jail time later, but this does not actually you know. Stop him from setting the neighborhood ablaze. Going up to his door the week prior and very politely asking him to move- not cancel, just relocate - his celebrations was met with calling me a "nosy bitch" and "I'll set one off in your ass!".
Sometimes God needs us to make our own miracles.
My miracle comes with several layers, and plenty of opportunities to back down without losing face. We'll see how many are needed.
The first wave has already been deployed: a psyop directed at the Visiting Mother In Law of the miscreant.
I got up at 8:30 AM this morning to make sure I'd be in the front yard of my house, casually doing yardwork with Herschel. His participation was essential.
For those of you who are new here, Herschel is the world's most charming Cardigan Welsh Crime Tube, who thinks everyone in the world is his best friend and that people come to the house to see him specifically. So at 9:04 AM when the visiting mother-in-law appeared around the corner on her daily power-walk around the block, Herschel employed his natural Corgi instinct to make friends with everyone and cheerfully tossed himself on the sidewalk in front of her, belly up for expected tummy rubs.
"OH AREN'T YOU DARLING!!" My target coos, kneeling down to pat him while he makes him like snuffling noises of glee. She is at least 70. I think her bright pink leg warmers and terrycloth headband might be original from her jazzercise days.
"I'm so sorry! Herschel you're going to trip people doing that!" I apologize, going up to greet the woman. "I'm [REDACTED], I don't think we've met..?"
"No, I'm just visiting my daughter and her family- my name is Barbara. And who is this?" She asks Herschel, whose whole back end is waggling with glee.
"This is my service dog Herschel." I explain while he rolls around on the pavement. "I just wanted him to get some time outside before the pyrotechnics start."
"Oh. Yes." Barbra grumbles and I know I've got her. "My son-in-law is planning something extravagant." She says with such disdain it practically comes out of her nose. This is a woman who loves her daughter and dearly wishes she married someone, anyone else.
"Yeah, he got rained out and sick the last two years, so I think he's compensating." I agree.
"Oh he's definitely overcompensating!" Barbra spits, then shakes her whole body like a dog. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't complain. You said he's a service dog?"
I go for it.
"Yeah! I have... Neurological problems." I say and that is technically true. "I've um. Lost a lot of things, like a sense of time, or appetite, and his job is to remind me to eat or take my meds or alerts that I'm having an episode. My personal dog-tor!" I say, patting his adorable little head, and he leans on me, equally adoring.
"Oh, is that why-?" Barbra starts to ask, gesturing at the top of her head, but stops herself.
I hadn't planned this, but yesterday I'd shaved my head to deal with the heat and now only have a quarter inch of hair, which doesn't really hide the scars from when I got run over by a minivan. They're bright red with the heat and exertion of yard work.
I decide I'm okay with lying to a stranger to prevent my house from being set ablaze.
I sort of... Crumple to the ground and drop the rake I was holding, and Herschel immediately climbs into my lap to comfort me as I start to cry.
"Oh my God." Says Barbra.
"I'm sorry!" I gasp, tears streaming down my face. I've been stressed and this is honestly very cathartic. "I'm sorry to dump on you, I'm just so scared-!"
"Oh my God. It's bad." Barbra realizes.
"D- do you know what-" a pause as Herschel tries to manually clear my nostrils like a good service dog. "-oh, Herschel... It's - do you know what an astrocytoma* is?"
*An astrocytoma is a type of brain tumor.
Barbra turns white and sits down next to me. "I'm so sorry... I- one of my friends from church had one, it was agony but she's alright now!" She tries to reassure me.
"It hurts! Everything hurts all the time!" I sob. "And- and I'm scared, so he's scared and I feel bad for hi which just makes it worse and then there's the-" I gesture at the sky. "I have surgery in a month to remove as much of it as they can and do biopsies to see if I need radiation too but..."
"-but all that noise must be Hell on you and your doggy." Barbra nods.
"It'd be fine if he went down to the lake of something but, that house's driveway is like, a hundred feet from my bedroom, I can't sleep and it TERRIFIES Herschel..." I whimper pathetically.
"Well. I may be able to do something about that." Barbra decides.
"Oh no, I don't want to intrude!" I mock-protest.
"No, we're the ones intruding dear. I'll have words with him." She growls. I get the impression she's been waiting for an excuse To Have Words With Him.
"Th-thank you. Um. It's getting hot and I'm a mess, we should probably go inside..." I mutter and Barbra very kindly helps me and Herschel to the front door and tells me she'll be by later with watermelon as we wave goodbye.
From the porch, I watch her furiously power-walk back to her daughter's house, wrench open the front door, and issue a battle cry of "HEN-RY!!!" before it slams behind her.
Now I realize that this may not have been the most honest or ethical thing to do, but I figured it's more polite and ethical than the next step, which is chemical warfare, courtesy of Bath & Body Works :)
Well, they Psyop seems to have worked! That cul-de-sac, and indeed my entire block is perfectly quiet tonight!
Unfortunately I cannot say the same of the surrounding neighborhood, so it has been necessary to deploy The Stench.
The Stench is a mixture of Odoriferous chemicals meant to be discreetly poured over a surface (preferably something hot, like a sidewalk or fence in direct sunlight) to render an area temporarily uninhabitable, Similar to spraying coyote pee on your garden to discourage the rabbits. I can't give you a full recipe because I forgot to take notes, but elements include:
Spoiled beef broth, which is both rancid and unexpectedly sour (boiled to kill bacteria)
Expired milk, the most retch-inducing ingredient for me.
Several bottles of Liquid Ass
Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce
Concentrated Dog Urine
and FOUR bottles of Bath & Body Work's Cucumber Melon, which smells light and fruity when used as a light body spray, but in concentration smells like an entire fruit cart left to rot, possibly along with the carcass of the fruitseller.
The resulting solution smells like raw sewage, a fraternity dorm fridge when the power's been out for a week, and a roadkilled skunk. It's impressively vile. Herschel wanted to roll in it so bad.
I've spent the last few hours strolling the surrounding neighborhoods until I found the source of the mortars and flying explosives that are the real hazards, ingratiating myself into the parties, and discreetly dousing the lawns and fences nearby until someone goes "OH GOD!" and gags, and the party breaks up shortly thereafter. I returned home because I ran out of The Stench, despite hiding five 2L soda bottles of it in a backpack.
I will call it a success though, because while I can hear fireworks, they're all at least a mile away from me. In total:
Fire Hazard Parties derailed: 13
Screaming: 10
Crying: 13
Vomiting: 4
Fight blaming each other for causing The Stench: 5
Called the city to complain about The Stench, on the assumption it was a sewage issue, and then waited right next to their pile of illegal fireworks, for the fire department to show up: 2.
Guy who claimed to be enjoying the smell: 1
Party was partially derailed by The Stench, and partly by the fact they actually did start a fire: 1 (every human was alright, the pyro's roof, not as much)
Stray dogs caught and returned home: 2
So next year: MORE STENCH.
Until then, I have a corgi zooted on trazadone on my feet, and we bid you goodnight.
(If you would like to support a disabled storyteller and/or fund more stench research, you can donate to my Ko-fi or pre-order my Family Lore book on Patreon)
if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques
oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?
and we're still building them?
while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?
uh. okay then
(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:
While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.
If trans women had a physical advantage, wouldn't the armed forces, CIA, Men In Black, et. al., be recruiting them for scary black-ops stuff that involves really well-tailored suits, fabulous evening gowns and occasional activewear developed by an international team of designers and materials engineers to only ever get strategically torn during hand-to-hand combat -oh, and just the most anime-esque weapons you ever saw?
Unless the Department of Defense is actively funding transitions for covert and overt wartime purposes, we all know the right's bitching ain't shit. Any and every advantage that does now or has ever existed in real life, our military-industrial complex is notorious for monetizing, exploiting and putting Americans in at-risk Congressmen's districts to work supporting. The fact that we don't have, for instance, mil-spec wig caps and a Kevlar-infused shapewear industry is proof of the bad faith of their argument.
...Also, now I want more art about LGBTQIA+ spies.
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:
While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.
Heh, she’s speaking Portuguese! Here’s what she’s saying:
*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”
Luis Roberto and Jurandir are people names (Jurandir is especially a name associated with older men) so it’s extra funny that the cats are named that, heh.
...This is what 'professional development' meetings are like for teachers a lot of the time right before the schoolyear starts. They bring in very enthusiastic, bubbly young consultants who are very earnest about the new kindergarten letter-drawing, high-school scholarship tracking or middle-school arson prevention plans they've convinced the dinosaurs at Main Office to pay them for and between a third to a full half of us, depending on if they made SPED and Electives show up, are just sitting there like Luis Roberto and Jurandir. Resisting the temptation to indicate in some way that the little girls who teach actual cats are at once more productive, frequently better presenters and often have more interesting content than these hairdos who clearly didn't have the science credits to rep for Big Pharma or the math credits to shill for private equity have decided to spend their lives hawking to school districts. Their entire industry is utterly dependent on underpaid academics being too polite to collectively excuse themselves to the john and never come back.
...Though the time a first-grade teacher had morning sickness next to a sympathetic vomiter and our union rep loudly asked "Did we all eat the same breakfast?" we did EXACTLY that and it completely owned.
The real treasure was the fancy hat we found along the way.
As a rule of thumb, if you have to dig it up it's a crime, but if you can just yoink it then it's a-okay.
PS: Please note that some steps of the Troll Dance® were simplified for artistic purposes and I am not responsible for any of your characters being turned into sauce.
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