the renegade jiejie gives a striking example of how verbal recognition of yummies gives way in practice to vegetables. endless overtures are made to the principles of yumminess, of the world-historical role which delicious foods play in the struggle of the proletariat. cheap acknowledgements are made to the outward qualities of yummies - the inclusion of garlic, tasty sauces, etc., cleverly glossing over the key ingredient of the dish. and yet, amidst the flagrant sophistry which presents dinner as yummies in form, upon examination of the facts, we discover clearly the actual content of dinner, which is, irreducibly, eggplant. only this question remains: how did such a shameless detractor ever enter into the ranks of th
ever the sly opportunist, jiejie has offered an anemic rebuttal to my earlier remarks. let us address each of her points in turn:
1. "insisting that eggplant can never take on the genuine character of yumminess is vulgar materialism"
this claim rests on a premise which i did not in fact put forward. i do not argue that eggplant possesses an immutable, ahistorical tendency towards grossness; only that a real, existing dish containing eggplant, under the current historical circumstances, cannot be considered by any but the ignorant or the wholly unscrupulous to be yummies. on the frontier of scientific development, advances in genetic engineering, or the invention of new quality culinary techniques, may well lead to breakthroughs producing entirely new categories of yummies in the future. but we are not utopians, and so we make a clear distinction between such speculation, and the material conditions of the present. just as the real science of nuclear chemistry had no relevance to the false claims made by pre-modern alchemists of transmuting the elements, we should not allow the invocation of what might be possible under a higher stage of development to misguide us. for by this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, i.e., hinting coyly at a form of eggplant which, by some unknown technological process, takes on the true nature of yummies, jiejie implies thusly that the dish which is right now in front of our eyes may constitute such an instance, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary! whether eggplant could be converted into yummies in theory is entirely beside the point. the dinner of tomorrow, while a compelling topic in its own right, must not blind us to the dinner of today.
2. "it's good for you"
here, jiejie draws upon that loathsome notion of 'the healthy diet', an unscientific sham invented by bourgeois medical professionals in order to give women eating disorders,
if we can set aside attachment discourse for a moment (please) i think the jedi marriage prohibition makes sense in a âplease donât enter a complex legal, financial, social, and in some cases religious contract, the specifics of which vary wildly depending on planet and cultureâ way. the single jedi with a law degree does not have time to draft everyoneâs prenups to prevent the whole order from getting sued
#we could create so many interesting new problems if we ignore romance and make it about contracts generally#jedi prohibition on getting a loan. jedi prohibition on signing a waiver before bungee jumping. etc
"Qui-Gon didn't try to buy Anakin or the engine because there wasn't anyone in town who offered a credit exchange service" wrong. Qui-Gon gambled for Anakin under the table because after dealing with the Cyrkon Delinquency of 24850, Master Olobi, Esq, has personally promised to hang by the the toes from the highest tower of the Temple for one week any Jedi who generates any trackable legal transaction or obligation between the Order and the Hutts.
"Mario Mario" is an anachronism. He and his brother were only ever referred to by mononyms in their lifetime, like most residents of the Mushroom Kingdom at the time - multi-part names were typically reserved for members of the Toadstool dynasty, and even these were more like titles or Roman cognomina than what we would call a surname today. His putative ennoblement as founder of the "House of Mario" came centuries later as the collapsing feudal order sought additional sources of legitimacy
#mushroom kingdom folklore says that he sleeps beneath a warp pipe to arise in the time of the kingdom's greatest need #he's definitely shown up a few times but it's hard to tell if he has risen from the dead or is just in the middle of some time travel shit #historians hate him.
While the historical evidence for Mario having a younger brother is quite concrete, the name of said brother is less certain. "Luigi" is generally held to originate with a separate figure from a series of chthonic myths, who originally served as a sort of psychopomp charged with capturing spirits that escaped the underworld. The strongest case for a contemporary figure named Luigi comes from the Waffle Kingdom sagas; however, this Luigi's brother is a gladiator named Gonzales.
now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.
The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".
(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)
The later emergence of "Waluigi" is an ironic recombination of two figures from the same historical source, and may have originated as a farce parodying the Mario stories. (The name "Waluigi" is also conflated with the early Norman figure Varr Yngwi, who is generally credited with the invention of tennis.)
[id. A twitter post by @/Bennieeexyz
Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat.
Not a mistake. "Felix Martinez" - that's his full name according to his vet records.
My last name. His first name. Somehow he's a registered voter now.
Called the county clerk.
Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty.
Clerk: Is the name correct on the summons?
Me: Yes, but he's a cat.
Clerk: Is Felix Martinez a legal resident of this county?
Me: He's a legal cat.
Clerk: Sir, if the name matches our records, he needs to appear or file an exemption.
Me: He can't file anything. He has paws.
Clerk: You can file on his behalf.
Me: Under what exemption? There's no box for "is a cat."
Clerk: (pause) Check "unable to serve due to medical reasons."
Me: What's the medical reason?
Clerk: He's a cat.
Me: That's not a medical condition.
Clerk: It is if it prevents him from serving.
Sent in the form. Got rejected two weeks later.
"Insufficient documentation. Please provide medical professional's statement."
Took the letter to my vet.
Me: I need you to write that my cat can't do jury duty.
Vet: Why is your cat summoned for jury duty?
Me: Excellent question. No good answer.
Vet: This is the weirdest request I've gotten.
Me: Can you just write that he's medically unfit to serve?
Vet: On what grounds?
Me: He's a cat.
Vet: (started typing) "Patient is unable to serve due to species-related limitations including inability to speak, read, or comprehend legal proceedings."
Me: Perfect.
Sent it in. Got another rejection.
"Summons is mandatory. Failure to appear will result in contempt of court."
My roommate thought this was hilarious.
Roommate: Felix is going to jail.
Me: This is serious.
Roommate: Bring him to court. See what happens.
Decided that was actually the only option left.
Day of jury duty, put Felix in his carrier. Brought the entire paper trail of rejection letters.
Checked in at the courthouse.
Clerk: Name?
Me: Felix Martinez.
Clerk: (looked at the cat carrier) Is that Felix?
Me: Yes.
Clerk: (long stare) He's a cat.
Me: I've been saying that for six weeks.
Clerk: Why didn't you file an exemption?
Me: I filed three. All rejected.
Showed her the letters. She read through them, expression shifting from confusion to disbelief.
Clerk: Someone rejected the veterinary documentation?
Me: Twice.
Clerk: (called her supervisor over) You need to see this.
Supervisor read everything. Looked at Felix. Looked at me.
Supervisor: How did a cat get registered to vote?
Me: You tell me.
Supervisor: This is a data error.
Me: Took you six weeks to figure that out.
They dismissed Felix immediately. Apologized for the inconvenience.
Supervisor: We'll remove him from the voter registry.
Me: Appreciate it.
Supervisor: (pause) Out of curiosity, how would he have voted?
Me: Probably whatever party supports universal treats.
Got a formal apology letter a week later and a voter registration card.
For me this time. Apparently I wasn't registered, but my cat was.
Roommate: Felix committed voter fraud.
Me: Felix committed nothing. He's innocent.
Roommate: That's what they all say.
Felix is sleeping on the jury summons now.
Fitting end to his legal career.
end id]
Oh one BIG reason I think the general public in Canada especially would be extremely pro-Shane Hollander even post-outing: he imports Ilya Rozanov and he doesn't leave Canada even when the situation in Montreal goes sideways
It's honestly impossible to overstate what a big deal that is. Canada constantly losing their hockey talent to US teams and the Stanley drought...it doesn't fucking matter what went down with those French Canadians, the rest of the country is ignoring that, he's still their hero.
When Ilya steps out in a Team Canada jersey at the 2026 Olympics and they crush team USA 6-0 in the gold medal match Shane would be instantly deified as the first Canadian saint.
I actually do think thereâs a small but passionate group of die hard catholic canadian hockey fans who, following his second Stanley cup win, begin petitioning to canonize Shane Hollander and donât stop. The pope has to make a statement at some point that winning three Stanley cups, while impressive, is not technically speaking an act of god.
Looooove this and love the idea that after three more cups in Otttawa Pope Bob has to make a second statement saying "even six cups is not, technically, an act of god" (cue Catholic Canadian booing)
The Odyssey but retold as a low-stakes modern adventure of one guy out with his girlfriend leaving the bar with his buddies to do just one (1) simple thing real quick, it'll take like 15 minutes tops, he'll be right back, but then some bullshit happens and the trip keeps getting more complicated as more bullshit keeps happening while he just tries to get back to the bar because he promised his girlfriend that he'd get back and he knows that she's still there because she told him she'd wait there.
And by the time he finally gets back it's almost 3 am and the bar is about to close while she's sitting there stone cold sober, surrounded by 5 drunk guys unsuccessfully trying to convince her to give up on waiting for him and go home with one of them instead. And the guy shows up to proceed to beat the shit out of them before explaining himself to her like hey sorry bullshit kept happening, my phone fell into a storm drain and my wallet got stolen when I was trying to find someone who'd borrow me a phone so I could call and
His girlfriend had been fending off the 5 drunk guys for most of the evening by explaining that even if she was going to ditch her boyfriend, she can't possibly leave without finishing her beer, which she is keeping perpetually full via careful sleight of hand where she's just pouring it back and forth into and out of the pitcher.
However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.
That buys her another hour or so and then, finally, her boyfriend makes it back. He looks like shit, hair down and just a mess, he's wearing an entirely different jacket that he got from an alley, and barely recognizableâespecially to 5 guys who've been drunk for hours now. He lurks for a minute, finds out what's going on, and proceeds to pull off the trick shot first try. Throws the jacket off, fixes his hair with a hair tie his girlfriend lends him, finally looks like himself again, and THEN beats the shit out of them with the pool cue.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where heâs going to be a sex pest, namely: âDo you know where the term âblow jobâ comes from?â
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Manâs Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you canât just say âoh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940sâ without first explaining that âblowâ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain itâs fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. iâm sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didnât realize he wasnât looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe donât start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
A couple scenes from a little gay vampire story I was kicking around a couple years ago! I sometimes do little pencils-only scenes for things and never post them. But I was looking back at these and was like why not? They're cute!
I have a whole story for these two, but just for funsies, something to do every now and then when I need to let loose.
(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy
One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable
"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."
everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because heâs just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing
the interestesting thing about the matrix, as presented in the famous 1999 film "the matrix", is that is actually not that bad for one specific reason. the people there are real.
its telling that in the movie neo is not given close friends or family or a partner or any meaningful kind of human conection, it helps to sell the world as distant and fake and inhuman.
but the thing is that any relation you form inside the matrix... is actually a real human conection. like say you are in the matrix and you start dating this really cute, cool person who likes to play boardgames and s a fan of romantic comedies and is studying to become and architect. that is a real human who is somewhere in the rows of human cultivated fields connected to a bunch of tubes floating in goo. but when they are talking to you in the matrix they are actually talking to you. the things they say actually mean something, the love you feel for each other is real.
like, thanks morpheus, your fight for Zion is cool and all but i have a daughter, i have my best friend with whom i went to college. and morpheus might say something about how the college was fake and it never existed but the moments i had with my friend were real!
the real problem with the simulation machine is solipsism. in a premise where you ARE actually the only mind that exists and everything else was a simulation then, well, that is a lot more scary (would it? if all your friends were AIs would that mean they were not real? food for thought), but my point is that is not the premise of that movie.
i would really like a story where someone is woken up from the matrix and they are resolute to find their partner somewhere on the fields of bodies maybe to wake them up too. or maybe the partner convinces them to go back into the matrix, i dont know. there is a lot of place for drama there.
the last matrix movie sort of touches on that but i feel it doesnt really count because it does it with neo and trinity who both got to know each other outside the matrix and also they were both forcibly put back and whatever
Fundamental moral problem of the matrix, now and forever, is the question of who's in charge the Matrix.
Not unrelatedly, I've been kicking around in the back of my head for a while a quote-unquote "urban fantasy" taking place in a world where it's been kind of an open secret for a while that everyone is stuck in some kind of virtual reality, because for the past decade and change, technical debt accrued from all the spaghetti code has been causing the simulation to glitch like an out-of-date gamebryo game, and identifying reproducible exploits is a going concern for both the online counterculture and the military-industrial complex. Very few people are actually interested in escaping the virtual reality as much as they're concerned with obtaining local dominance over it; after all, it's where they live.
happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!
though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!
thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!
@joe-spookyy Ben and Socrates
@gooseontheinternet Chamomile and Beefy
@runawayy-rat Bartholomäus and Emo
@theunholystromboli Macrogryphosaurus, Xenoceratops, and Graciliraptor
@techlecticwtch Solas and Dorian
@merlyn-bane Roslyn and Rizzoli
@logictoinsanity Luna and Buttercup
@hagsthehag Orphie, Psyche, Calypso, Ariadne, and Eury
so as per various DC social media concepts Clark has a Superman twitter where he posts left-leaning but fairly safe & tame stuff e.g. happy pride from Superman. Clark Kent also has his own twitter account where he posts his actual opinion.
what happens if uh. what happens if he forgets which account he's logged into.
scenario 1: what's clearly an official Superman post pops up on some rando journalist's twitter and is noticed before he can delete it. leads to controversy when people conclude that Superman has hired this Clark Kent person to do his social media. Clark now has to deal w the fact that everyone thinks he's Superman's social media manager. employers at the Daily Planet very confused as to why he didn't tell them about his side gig
scenario 2: world wakes up to Superman tweeting about how he hates the police
Scenario 2: âworld wakes up to Superman tweeting about how he hates the policeâ and then the Shazam twitter account starts agreeing with him and thatâs how the world finds out that two of the most powerful heros both hate the police
Someone tweets if Bruce Wayne pays taxes, and Bruce accidentally replies with his Batman account with a simple "Yes", so people start to think that besides beating up villains, Batman also spends his time staring menacingly at billionaires while they fill their taxes to make sure there's no creative accounting going on
Doesnât vandal savage own wayne manor at the moment? Jason should trick him into selling it to him and then rent it back to Bruce simply to be petty.
He should convince the clown authorities (the people who run clown school, set clown code, oversee the clown make up egg system) to put a hit out on Joker at Deathstroke prices.
He should kidnap a bunch of Gothamâs most crooked cops, dump them on an island and tell them only the survivor will be allowed to leave. Afterwards heâs just like âi donât know man, they just started killing each other, itâs a beautiful paradise island, whatâs wrong with them?â
When his family have had enough and are getting too suspicious he should get really into fibre arts. Really elaborate crochet patterns that they are convinced are some kind of code system and heâs systematically distributing it across certain parts of Gotham to certain criminals, who all happen to have worked for riddler at some point in the past but they all went to the same elementary school and have middle names starting with S.
None of it means anything, heâs just filling time.
He should secretly go to law school then bring a case against Bruce Wayne for the cover up of the murder of one Jason Todd, proposing that the famed philanthropist was in fact covering for the joker.
He should build a fleet of blimps and market them as Gothamâs new ride share system, uber but with dirigibles, partly to keep batman on his toes when heâs hiding on rooftops and partly to help modernise Gothamâs public transport situation.
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