every day i walk into work and my manager says “here is the rule you must enforce” and i go “got it bossman” and i spend a couple days enforcing the rule and then my manager comes up to me and says “why are you enforcing the rule? we changed the rule yesterday and didn’t tell you” and i go “ok bossman new rule it is” and then a customer comes in asking to break the new rule and i say “sorry you can’t it’s the rule” and they say “but you don’t understand the rule doesn’t apply to me” and then my manager comes out and says “they’re right the rule doesn’t apply to them” and i ask why and my manager says “it just doesn’t.” and then the next day we get rid of the rule entirely and no one remembered it existed in the first place.
anyway this sounds like a metaphor for neurodivergence or something but it’s not this is just my fucking life
#fjsdfs #when i studied in denmark #they spent an entire class showing us simple words and how similar they were across danish #norwegian #etc. for the express purpose of ragging on how different the finnish word was #the teacher literally said ‘we can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb it’s finnish #also the delivery on this video is just delightful (via @destinyandcoins)
I find it hilarious that denmark has to stoop to ragging on the finns (instead of doing it for I guess shits and giggles like the others), because all the other nordic languages rag on them for sounding like they’re mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD
Yup! The roots of the majority of European and many nearby languages is Indo-Eropean, which is the root of everything from English to Russian to Hindi to Persian and more!
Finnish however, as you said, has its roots in a different branch than Indo-European, the Uralic languages. There aren’t many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but there’s a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.
Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.
Odysseus: Regret it why?
Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.
Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in.
*A couple of months later*
Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit.
Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure.
Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.
i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children
with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies
whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series
Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.
It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.
The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:
A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body.
She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.
A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.
A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.
A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:
A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration.
It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.
Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).
Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.
An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.
An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.
Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs.
The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see).
I should draw them sometime.
IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.
Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)
Like I said, I'm not very familiar with Canon Warrior Cats Lore, but my god is it fun to come in and play A Fucking Problem while everyone applauds you for being Such A Devastating Fucking Problem.
Yeah, a lot of those sound pretty par for the course for Warriors, actually.
A few fun tidbits from warriors canon:
Cats disembowel 'on-screen'
There actually was a cougar menacing the cats
for a while everyone thought one of the clan's leaders had rabies. Turns out he was possessed by his wife's dead stalker(I stopped reading before this happened)
Cat heaven and cat hell decided to duke it out and dragged the living cats into it
One noteable character got her face ripped off by dogs
A cat learned how to control dogs
fire
The second series was about the cats having to move because humans had decided they needed to bulldoze the forest they started in
disease outbreaks. So many disease outbreaks.
Assassinations
TNR's been alluded to
The very first main character joined the clan cats for the sake of his fireballs(IYKYK)
One of the cats travels to the past and meets a possibly eldritch cat being
Sometimes a bird snatches a cat and they just have to deal with it
Oh ok so Warrior Cats is to Gen Z what Animorphs was to millennials, EXCELLENT.
I'm honestly genuinely pleased at the level of gritty realism about the horrors of being an outdoor cat because that's the sort of thing that embeds itself in a young person's mind and makes them never let their own cats out.
Actually the RP might have been nicer than the books because the Trashcan (it was trashcan after all) was getting hit with mass death so often they literally could not afford to do Cat Bigotry, and had plenty of external threats to hate on.
I'm not sure what the timescale of WC is because I am curious about the relative death tolls of each.
There were about 12 players playing an average of 5 characters at any time, but I was called in when the average got over 8 PCs per player, so like, I'd start with a colony of 100-120 PCs and was expected to bring that number down to like, 20. Each antagonist arc I did played out over one week to three months in-game, and I think I calculated the average death rate to be a little over 21 cats per week across all of them. The Horse had the highest kill rate at 26 cats in 3 days (I was on dental surgery drugs last night and couldn't do math), but the Dogs had the highest total kill count, taking a colony of 150 cats down to 8 over the span of three months, with one session spanning one month in-game and running through 100 total/3 entire generations of cats.
My antagonists weren't meant to be defeated, they were meant to be dealt with- by leaving the area, coming to a truce, changing the way the colony operates etc. The Game Master's antagonists were meant to be killed or dealt with without as serious a death toll, but sometimes the dice would decide otherwise, which was part of the fun. She made some great ones like:
Trashclan was looking for a new home when they found this beautiful woodland area and abandoned factory thing full of slow, dim-witted prey and absolutely no humans for miles and miles. Paradise, really, except for the ghost cats that looked like rotting corpses that seemed absolutely determined to not let them settle in the area, causing disasters, possessing PCs and general terrorism. Trashclan tried to hold their ground against what they thought were cats that had been banished to cat hell, until one of the medicine cats managed to commune with one of the ghosts to ask what their fucking problem was. Best in-game use of the "This is not a place of honor" warning ever.
The game was taking place in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Like, far enough after the apocalypse that there were cities and civilization again, but there very much had been a major apocalypse.
The Moonpool develops a Carbon Monoxide leak from vegetation rotting under the mud.
Just straight-up Growltiger from Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. Years before the movie, so look up the stage musical.
Also the Great Rumpus Cat from the same musical
She used a lot of the characters from CATS as NPCs. And the lore as the basis for the afterlife lore of the American warrior cats. So rather than going to the star place, Trashclan believed they would go to the Heavyside Lair.
An Alien Invasion Force lands and the cats save Earth when they eat the 6-inch tall would-be colonizers. There were a lot of them and they had laser guns, but there were a lot of very hungry cats too. Some of the PCs developed alien mutations from eating too many aliens tho.
Not an antagonist per se, but the GM and two of the players got very, very deep into the science of feline inbreeding so they could have a realistic incest mechanic and I think one of them ended up publishing a scientific paper about it because they had done all that research, they might as well get that grant money.
Godzilla, who actually turned out to be a major boon for Trashclan because he laid waste to the city with the TNR volunteers and opened up a bunch of new territory for them. He was grated godhood and ascended to part of their panthe(r)on.
2. Guess who might be playing a next generation of the Ash River Pack?
:)
It's me
:)
Rebecca (not her real name) has apparently been continuously running this RP since 2006, and my last participation in it was in 2016. Becca manages this by having an in-game clock where players need to finish encounters/make decisions/accomplish goals by an IRL date so ten years have also passed in the Trashclan RP.
As it stands, there is some Three Houses bullshit going on where the MASSIVE Trashclan (15 players and over 200 PCs!!) is threatening to split into three smaller clans, which would make sense in-game, but none of the players actually want to do that because it's a huge logistical hassle.
So when I texted Becca earlier today, she was DELIGHTED to hear from me because "They've had it too good for too long."
:D
She's setting up a proposal for a Decimation Event, and I'm skimming the timeline channel to catch up, but there's a very real possibility that I'll get to cry havoc and release the dogs of war upon an RP server again.
Oh no. There is ONE player character left who remembers the Ash River Massacre.
Oh No. She's in dubious standing with all three factions.
OH NO. Trashclan hasn't actually *seen* a dog in over 3 years because of their magically shielded location. The majority of the current population doesn't even know what a dog looks like.
OH NOOOOO
The vote is tomorrow but I'm making up lore and rolling horrible dogs now I can feel the evil growing within me again >:D
i know most people have seen it but i cant emphasize how much this is literally my favorite breath of the wild clip of all time. also i can never fucking find this clip when i need it especially in high definition so here it is
Being an Eridian scientist has to be so funny. You train your entire life as a biologist, becoming specialized in your field, probably giving lectures or educational speeches to other Eridians, and then the star savior Rocky comes home with his weird pet dog. Your job is now to cultivate food so the weird dog who is the age of average baby doesn’t die. The dog also saved the stars. Your job is making dog food out of the dog. You also learn that you and the dog have the same job. You are the happiest scientist on Erid.
The dog knows more about how the universe works than anybody else on your planet. The dog understands how relativity works and how the universe began. The dog has access to complex machines that can store and process massive amounts of information, launching your society into a new age of scientific and technological advancement.
You later find out that these machines were originally invented because the dog's species has a memory like a sieve and struggles with primary school level maths.
A collection of strategy boards that have been shared with me. I love these neat little ephemeral pieces of art. Some are practical, some are memes, some are just plain awesome - get a look at that Bob Ross!
For non-FFXIV players, these are supposed to be for planning and sharing gameplay strategies, but have become ways to share... these, instead. Tiny canvases inside a game that I think have incredible artistic merit.
Ask and ye shall receive @thebeauregardbros! I don't have all of them still saved, but I can share Bob Ross.
Joy of Painting (Bob Ross):
[stgy:aNH6xOXLnJFvGYY1mweM2BaVyzwns7v02RtTdgAJIhYV0AF9Usa1+Cx6ovDQcWnMG5D722SKkksg5xFzxPW4w2wOYQ6WRVNY4+EZ6bFpLp9km3+VVEhCw5bIyvFxwz2nADhedUWrO4o1OpOlgYxqv+yk6XXcmO5bJReaFMMTPhEx-xXYNMf0mpX-UhczNwwcTDMMXBXTCXwxRuQxyU0JjRC5Is-AVqyre5KTdmAAUdDPBCc-NRS6PUM8axtUR814FS2U3VsIgH7b7qDevg4v+FF7NlR0BCKoVFOLGQN+QMZYQmC3mK4BYlcwMmParf2t2Q9STB7rNEHTC9y3rwOUe1kbcQIgOIt3yCYbt-+rxvZnOpZ8fri6wSP73Q65cBUdBFd0wk+hFu-qtE1-R4L9canlbDiCy2ADCSOEml1ZoUrrrpnlJb5F9rnZthBVhDpHYho-FbjF3gOSZ-ONrzJteJaGcXBfWQi9i95b63DsFTs0WHMdyY9lsI-hIiWrZ-MEJtebGl0J4cDw0P13OmLu3WCj7WDqWfTB-iSHtgqht-DWxHqjpv-0z2DyJFNQBYhZdfg3fCzjiVHkklfxVtP3GwoPbI4sB-Rd-2Q0LBjtKj2d38rCBXIMPLhpcuuhZ0S5o4DDdN2QCAf1DrEU6DzyimeMuqNjoz8keNh0j6-wkmRvUi+QZoyhesiaU8GRAN9Q7SbxuR67CVyTZvLoAd-NFfvdJigIg6WwC5PFcZYDOBSrQVSgH6VTqIm1Y2Fo-vlJG4nQYCsyo2m5Xu+1-36lIq6RavqvWI-Gf2LdRZP0bvWzFg6l8IlXrWZJ9oA6RXU5q9rWwbXX8]
And just for fun, here's a few more strategy boards!
What will one day destroy each of the 50 US States
Alabama - Absorbed by Wyoming
Alaska - Absorbed by Wyoming
Arizona - Absorbed by Wyoming
Arkansas - Absorbed by Wyoming
California - Attempts to contain the spread of Wyoming by rigging itself with nuclear bombs
Colorado - Absorbed by Wyoming
Connecticut - Absorbed by Wyoming
Delaware - Absorbed by Wyoming
Florida - Missing, presumed absorbed by Wyoming
Georgia - Absorbed by Wyoming
Hawaii - Absorbed by Wyoming after the state survived California's suicide attack and continued to grow
Idaho - Absorbed by Wyoming
Illinois - Sacrifices itself trying to give Kentucky enough time to find the lost sword
Indiana - Absorbed by Wyoming
Iowa - Absorbed by Wyoming
Kansas - Absorbed by Wyoming
Kentucky - Attempts to wield the Wyoming Slayer alone and is not strong enough
Louisiana - Absorbed by Wyoming
Maine - Absorbed by Wyoming
Maryland - Absorbed by Wyoming
Massachusetts - Attempts to wield the Wyoming Slayer alone, and is not strong enough
Michigan - Absorbed by Wyoming
Minnesota - Absorbed by Wyoming
Mississippi - Absorbed by Utah
Missouri - Begs Utah not to go down this path, and is cut down
Montana - Absorbed by Wyoming
Nebraska - Absorbed by Utah
Nevada - Tries to offer itself as a servant to Wyoming, telling it that together they could rule the world, but is absorbed
New Hampshire - Absorbed by Utah
New Jersey - Absorbed by Utah
New Mexico - Gives its energy to Utah in the hopes that it will be able to stop Wyoming
New York - Absorbed by Wyoming
North Carolina - Attempts to wield the Wyoming Slayer alone, and is not strong enough
North Dakota - Absorbed by Utah
Ohio - Absorbed by Wyoming
Oklahoma - Absorbed by Wyoming seconds after it finishes deciphering the runes on the handle of the Wyoming Slayer, managing only to croak out the word, "Too"
Oregon - Absorbed by Wyoming
Pennsylvania - Absorbed by Wyoming
Rhode Island - Absorbed by Utah
South Carolina - Sacrifices itself in order to get the Wyoming Slayer to Utah
South Dakota - Absorbed by Utah
Tennessee - Absorbed by Utah
Texas - Absorbed by Utah
Utah - Attempts to wield the Wyoming slayer and is burnt by its protective magics
Vermont- Absorbed by Wyoming
Virginia - Plunges itself into the gullet of the ever growing Wyoming to recover the sword which it ate
Washington - Absorbed by Wyoming
West Virginia - Absorbed by Wyoming
Wisconsin - Cries, "I know what Oklahoma meant!" as it readies itself for its last stand. "Not 'too'! Together! It must be used together!" then reaches its arms into the monster's mouth, and takes hold of the sword with Virginia and with all the other states that have been eaten and lends its strength to all of them for one final attack, even as Wyoming's claws dig into its farmlands
Wyoming - Stands startled for a few seconds, before beginning to crumble
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
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)
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.
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(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.)
