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Verified: Microsoft 365 gets massive 45% price hike — and it's all to do with AI tools (Tom's Guide - January 17, 2025)
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
once you learn enough about evolutionary biology you start seeing ghosts everywhere
after the end cretaceous extinction event, basically all megafaunal niches were suddenly empty; and most got filled in some way. proboscideans instead of sauropods, carnivorans instead of theropods, ungulates instead of ceratopsians and hadrosaurs etc...
but the thing is: only *most* got filled to some extent
not all
because there used to be dragons
and now their niche is just *empty*
it's like i can feel the gap they left, in everything from open grassland ecosystems to isolated islands; the world we know is shaped by the absence of a truly big flying predator
no bird could ever fill their niche, because of plain and simple anatomical constraints
because they cannot use their wings to jump
birds could never be azdarchids
they could never be dragons
there are no more dragons
but there used to be
there used to be...
Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore
Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths
A Book of Creatures by @a-book-of-creatures doesn't update these days but is another thing along these lines, really huge, fully illustrated all by the author and cites all sources
Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.
"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."
It fucking better.
Like to charge, reblog to cast?
I recently picked up an anthology of Victorian era werewolf fiction called Terrifying Transformations. I have so many short story collections and novels of that period’s supernatural horrors, but so little of that material has featured werewolves that I assumed the monster simply wasn’t as popular back then as the usual vampires and ghosts. So I was thrilled to not only find this collection, but to get caught up in its introduction which delivers a brief history lesson on the many ways the werewolf character was held up as alternate symbols of villainy, madness, and freedom by the various movements that took place within the period. Including that of the anarchists.
Case in point, this Punch comic, which is included in the book itself:
The Were-Wolf of Anarchy, a symbol of the horrid anarchists out to dismantle good polite English society!
Just as the werewolf was worn by female villains in fiction, boasting strength, individualism, sexual liberation and, gasp, devouring rather than nurturing children; the New Woman in fur.
Just as it stood for the commoners and working-class parties striving for rights and recompense against the aristocrats and nouveau riche.
Beasts abound, howling and tearing. Anarchy! This bit says it best:
I haven’t even gotten deep into the stories themselves yet, but this little opening essay has been delicious to chew on. Werewolves have always been part of the modern Other-symbolism crowd, shouldered up against the undead and the uncanny. Monsters to alternately fear within or without, or else performing as outright escapism in shedding human constraints and the collars of society.
It never occurred to me how that particular lupine flag has been waving since at least the 1800s.
Saw a solarpunk creator spreading the news of scientists in China (if I remember correctly) experimenting with making plants bioluminescent to light cities instead of using as much artificial street lighting.
The conclusion was "this must be solarpunk" and I cannot emphasize how incorrect that is.
Whether or not this particular experimentation leads to less harmful man-made lighting, it isn't solarpunk.
Solarpunk is technology and infrastructure engineered to work in harmony with nature and community.
Changing nature to better fit human wants is NOT solarpunk.
Bullshit.
Changing nature to better fit human wants and needs is fundamentally human.
Every vegetable you've ever eaten is the product of humans changing nature to better fit human wants.
I don't know that bioluminescent plants are a function solution to anything and I'm sure there are a number if very valid reasons that utmost caution should be taken with their potential implementation, but there is nothing 'not in harmony with nature' about messing with plant genetics.
Thank paleoindigeous genetic engineers from mezo/South America for the existence or corn, for example:
Zea Mays is a wholly human invention.
This.
I also want to note: I think the research OP is talking about is actually from Europe, because I am aware of both a French and a Swedish research project on this topic. And admittedly, when that Swedish one released (that was in 2018, I think) I was also not fully sold, because it felt fairly gimmicky. But in the test areas where they implemented it a bunch of things happened over the test period. Distress in wild animals went down, air quality got better, and a bunch of other stuff. And now there is a project in France testing something similar since... 2023, I think?
And, yes. The general goal of those projects is basically to say: "Here is a thing where humans are negatively influencing nature. We cannot change that we are in those areas, but we can lessen the negative influence we have. Let's try this way."
Solarpunk is not about like... going back to the neolithic. It is about developing technology in a way that we can better live with nature. And this is doing that.
I do not even get OP's issue here. Like, having poles filled with water and bioluminiscent algae or fungi is not negatively impact the algae, bacteria, or fungi. Because algae, bacteria, and fungi, for the lack of a nervous system, quite literally do not care whether they grew in the ocean or in a bioluminiscent pole. But we know that this light is less disturbing to wild animals. We have shown that. Because light pollution is right now as much of an issue in some areas as other forms of pollution. So finding ways to reduce light pollution is very important.
And it should be noted: this idea about bioluminiscence as a form to light cities has been around in Solarpunk as a genre since 2014 and then of course has been a core idea that went into Lunarpunk. So while I do not know if those scientists were inspired by it or just came to the idea independently, it definitely connects to solarpunk.
Did a cursory search for sources- the Chinese glowing plant experiments are probably referring to this:
Here, we present the first multicolored luminescent plants excited by sunlight, featuring unprecedented brightness, long afterglow, and unif
Interestingly, their approach explicitly does *not* use genetic engineering! They argue that the genetic approach makes plants that are too dim & not color-customizable enough, so they're actually injecting the plants with luminescent microparticles. Looks like something about leaf structure makes this approach more viable in succulents than in other kinds of plants.
For genetically-engineered bioluminescent plants, I think the most recent thing is these "firefly petunias"?
Scientists have revealed how to make bioluminescent plants up to 100 times brighter. Reported in Nature Methods, a team of 26 scientists, wo
This is a US-based lab, and it looks like they're pulling genes from luminescence from mushrooms!
There's a BBC article about the French marine bacteria lights here:
From deep-sea fish to fireflies, dozens of organisms use bioluminescence to help themselves be seen in the natural world. But can we harness
I have zero expertise in anything remotely bio-ethics related, but my layman's take is that as long as you follow good safety protocols to ensure that your organism isn't super toxic and/or aggressively invasive before you start pushing widespread adoption, it's probably fine? Especially if you're replacing something that is already harmful. 🤷
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
can ppl pls reblog this version
Well damn. I was also like wtf is this stupid slime tank and then I read the rest and my mind got blown
“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
Happy Smallpox Eradication Day
so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.
This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.
And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.
Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.
Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.
Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.
My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).
But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.
So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?
Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.
In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.
And they flinch every time.
Here have a newspaper comic from 1993
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
well…darn
like to charge reblog to cast financial ruin of the AI industry 🔮
originally posted August 8th, 2025.
Authors have until March 30th, 2026 (That is just 9 days as of this reblog, which I am posting on March 21st, 2026) to file their claim against Anthropic to be reimbursed up to $3,000 per work found in the list.
Updated February 18, 2026 IMPORTANT: The Claims Deadline Is March 30 Background Bartz v. Anthropic is one of the major copyright lawsuits b
Please click the above link for all of the exact details of how to file a claim and to check for your works, and share this post as far and wide as you can before March 30th, 2026!
!!!SIGNAL BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST!!!
As someone who has overcome substance abuse, I find this decade’s framing of addiction incredibly insulting.
Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”
Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.
When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.
There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.
What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.
This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.
There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.
Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.
When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.
We deserve better language. We deserve distinctions. We deserve a culture that can tell the difference between compulsion and preference, between harm and habit, between numbing out and nourishing ourselves. Not everything that holds our attention is a disorder. Not everything pleasurable is a vice. And not everything repetitive is an addiction.
PLEASE I'm begging the neopagan girlies to stop spreading misinformation online, because I've just seen someone argue in earnest that the UK government has banned swimming in the ancient geo-thermal spring at Bath due to a hatred of 'native Celtic spirituality', and completely ignoring the fact that it was closed after a girl contracted a brain-eating amoeba and fucking died
Ancient geo thermal spring at Bath perfec t size for put girlie n to n\ap! inside very Soft and Comfort woman bathe soundly put girl in Geo Thermal Spring. Put Neopagan In Spring. no problems ever in sprinng because good Amoeba and Water for girl brain weak of big girl head. Ancient geothermal spring yes a place for a person put neopagans in ancient celtic water can trust spring in Bath for giveing good love to girlie. friend amoeba.
I visited this place in the 90s and they didn't let you swim in it then. I'm kind of surprised that they started letting people swim in it again. It's an archaeological site. It does not exist in the form it did when people regularly swam in it.
Native Celtic spirituality involves swimming in Roman built baths?
Oh man, my shitpost has broken containment, so I must add some points for clarity:
the Baths have been closed since 1978; I genuinely have no idea why this became a point of discourse in the year of our lord 2026, but that's TikTok for you (or, more accurately, Instagram reels, because I will never view a single TikTok in my life, I am 33 and I cannot be doing it)
and now to the meatier point: yes, the Baths themselves are Roman, but the geo-thermal spring that forms the basis of the Baths was already a sacred site for the pre-Roman Celtic people who lived in the area. Archaeological evidence is pretty firm on this. A cool, groovy fact about the Romans is that a lot of their religion (and just their imperial tactics in general) was based on the principles of syncretism. In practice, this means incorporating beliefs, practices or deities from one religion into another. The Romans figured out that, rather than suppress all local religion, it was easier to allow the people in the areas that you've conquered to continue to worship their gods, with the caveat that you're going to really highlight the similarities between their gods and yours, and strongly suggest that their gods are really just versions of yours, because Roman superiority, or something. This is called interpretatio Romana for the Latin freaks out there. Before the Romans turned up, the springs at Bath were already a worship site for the Celtic goddess, Sulis. The Romans looked at Sulis, waved their arms about a bit, and said 'cool, so Minerva, yeah?' and built the Baths on that site, dedicated to Sulis-Minerva - a version of the Celtic Sulis which was syncretised with the Roman Minerva. The Celtic people got to keep a version of their god, the Romans got their Baths, and everyone was happy, damp, and warm. In theory, anyway. That's not really how imperialism works, but y'know.
Can't believe I had to break out my MA in Myth, Narrative and Theory for a goddamn shitpost, but that's why this site remains elite.
COMING SOON | RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY! "Habitually caught in a state of transience between the natural and the supernatural, the living and the dead, Lana’s sculptures are suffused with existential meanings, the symbols she uses creating a liminal space where she can process them: orchids and carnivorous plants, moths and bees, ghost pipes and ephemeral flames turn into moments captured forever in porcelain; recurring motifs in natural cycles of transformation, a threshold that can help her grapple with existential questions in material form."
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why do I have to pay to live in an apartment, this should be free
reblogging this because I reread my post just now and I'm right
You are right but also I thought you lived in a fishbowl or even better a cool pond.
can't afford pond the housing market is in shambles
Necromancer that doesn’t know they’re a necromancer and thinks they’re just a really good emt
That is the funniest thing i have ever read
the thing was, she wasn’t going to be able to pass the recertification exam, and she couldn’t figure out why. annabelle studied. she practiced. she pulled out every trick and shortcut she’d learned during her two years as an EMT and none of it worked. she just – she didn’t get it. it made no sense.
“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”
“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”
it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.
but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.
hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.
“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”
“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!”
hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”
“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”
he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.
-
hank switched her team.
“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”
carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”
“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”
hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.
“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”
“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.
there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse.
hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin.
she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”
she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”
“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”
-
“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”
annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”
hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly.
“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”
“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”
“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”
annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”
“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”
“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”
“no. he was dead.”
“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”
“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”
“hank, what the fuck.”
he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”
he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?
annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase.
“well shit,” annabelle said, letting the flier fall from her hands.
COMING SOON | RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY! "In traditional portraiture, Penelope notes, power resides with the viewer. We see the subject. We assess. We decide who they were. “By obscuring the identity of my girls,” she says, “I give them the power to do as they please without judgment.” The mask is not an absence but a redistribution. These girls do not need to perform legibility. They wander storms. They smoke cigarettes. They enter danger alone. There is freedom in this solitude – not rebellion for its own sake, but self-possession."
Read about @penelopeboydart and her work in the coming March issue of Beautiful Bizarre art magazine, in an essay by @andykovacic.
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