mouse unnie

[ao3commentoftheday]

By the Numbers - a short fic challenge

Write a fic with 6 puns/references/inside jokes in 7 sentences.

Write about the meaning of life, the universe, or everything in exactly 42 words.

Write a smut scene in 69 words.

Write a fic of 101 words that includes at least one dog.

Write a 10 sentence fic about why one character hates another.

Write a 666-word fic about a dark omen.

Write a fic containing substance use that is 420 words long.

Write a fic that's 404 words long about a character who can't find something.

Write a fic with a three-digit word count (100-999) that contains your AO3 user number.

Write a 314-word fic that contains a mathematical concept.

Write a new backstory in exactly 52 words.

Write a 616-word fic that takes place in our universe (for a fandom that doesn't).

Write a dystopian future!fic that is 2046 words long.

Write a fic about an evil government that is 1984 words long.

Write a fic that is 177 words long and contains the number 76 and a reference to football.

Write a fic about a hacker that is 1337 words long.

Write a fic that is 24 sentences long, formatted in 7 paragraphs, and describes a character's year.

[gloomsday]

sent this message to my coworker today and he sent me this screenshot with microsoft teams's suggested replies... incredible 10/10 no notes.

[chronictranssexuality]

"you don't owe anyone anything" You are a tar pit. Speak for yourself. I personally owe the cafe employees my dishes put away and my friends a listening ear and small scared insects a cup and a gentle trip outside. Hyperindividualism is a rancid infection borne of capitalism and willfully misinterpreted therapyspeak and I will defy it by continuing to be kind regardless of whether or not it benefits me personally

[dragon-in-a-fez]

one time I told my therapist "I tend to have issues with people who think of themselves as authority figures" and she burst out laughing and then said "I think we need to pause and reflect on how you phrased that"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

I mean, what, was I supposed to refer to them as if they actually are authority figures? those don't exist

[heedra]

In elementary school, my best friend and I had this game we would play where we were school supplies living inside a child's desk and going on slice-of-life adventures inside it. And I remember that a key component of our school supply society was a sort of religious schism that existed around the purpose and nature of the giant hand that occasionally reached in to grab different citizens, use them, and then return them, because most school supplies considered this an auspicious and enviable moment of being selected for a greater purpose and allowed a glimpse of a vast truth, but pencils considered it a horrible portent of doom because they always got sharpened during it and came back smaller and closer to death. We were third graders btw.

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[mouseunnie]

The AI generated photo makes this seem like fake news, but here’s some actual news coverage of the people’s coup against the City Council in Festus:

Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal

Residents of a St. Louis suburb turned out in droves to unseat four incumbents just days after the council approved a development agreement

[patheticperipatetic]

I wanted to see how badly they lost. Here's the results. below is just the former and new board members (in that order), out of laziness I'm not including write ins and others so the percentages won't add to 100% for that reason.

Festus Ward 1

Jim Collier: 34.46% - 112

Karl Weekly: 64.31% - 209

Festus Ward 2

Brian Wehner: 20.2% - 90

Allen McCarthy: 69.96% - 312

Festus Ward 3

Robert Venz: 17.55% - 96

Dan Moore: 49.91% - 273

Festus Ward 4

Jim Tinnin: 19.6% - 156

Rick Belleville: 65.38% - 527

I've gone back and added the actual hard number of votes they got. Cuz I wanted to show how few people vote in non-presidential elections.

In this county only 13.76% of registered voters voted.

Now that might seem low, but it is a more impressive number when compared to the previous election in April 8th 2025 -> 9.10%

They increased the amount of voters by half! In a town of 12,706 Festus' fate seems to have been altered by the efforts of a few hundred. I kinda make the assumption that the county stats are representative of the town stats, to be transparent. The election that we celebrate here took the same amount of people that visit your church's sermon or attend a packed local theatre.

Sources

Population size from the towns wiki

2025 election results for the county

2026 election results for the county

The above two pdfs were gotten from the official dot gov county website

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

"hey i invented a machine to replace your workers"

"is it cheaper than the workers?"

"it is right now"

"ok everyone's super, super fired. now what"

"well now we're raising the price"

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

possible ways this could go wrong: 0

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

"they'll never see it coming" & they fuckin DONT

[eroscestlavie]

Genuinely incredible single serve site I just found: a guy made a search tool so you can find completely empty AMC movie screenings in your area and enjoy a private or near-private theatre.

[rhythmic-idealist]

Thought I would share this here. Image is a clickable link that will take you to the account that posted it! ID in alt text. If anyone wants to pop it out, feel free.

[agentbeeswrites]

If you want to avoid Xitter, they also have a linktree

[coffeefocusrat]

you're just mad because you're hungry and tired and your legs hurt and you head hurts and you're too hot and you have depression

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[vzajemnik]

guy who needs to send an email so he completely isolates himself from the world misses out on every opportunity curls up in a ball and dies. and like 2 months later sends said email finally

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[pygmalions-selfportrait]

anyway those ICE agents are definitely not seeing their $50K bonuses and that may or may not be relevant

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[mouseunnie]

Honestly this reminds me of the $50k bonuses that ICE recruits were promised. Like either they’ll be defunded by Congress or they’ll stage another J6 or maybe both?

just not a great idea to arm a bunch of thugs with promises of wealth during a recession

[paxamericana]

[official-kircheis]

As per my last clay tablet,

[lurking-latinist]

CCing Ibbi-Ilabrat on this one just to make sure we’re all on the same page!

[ariaste]

“The sesame is visibly dying” makes me lose it every time. My sesame #mysesame

[disorientation]

Having a "stupider people have done this" attitude about the things you want to do can open so many doors