zine i made for class except i didnt know what to make it about so i just defaulted to the god-awful stores in Got Dropped into a Ghost Story, Still Gotta Work.... b/c i was rereading it for the 3rd time 😭 i think it was also when the most recent chapter was abt the Delusion Shopping Network segment.....
the gaudiest, most eye-searing beast i've ever birthed. cobbled it together in 3 days despite being given 3 weeks. guys. don't do that.
"Is cannibalism okay if it's consensual" and "would you fuck your clone" are both passe we've been over this but I'm combining them into a new question: would you eat your clone?
How do we feel
yes I want to know what I taste like
no :/
I don't want to be eaten so it wouldn't be consensual if we ate each other
Personally I'm assuming the clone is fully sentient with all of your thoughts, memories, emotions etc, but if they were just raw grown in a tube or something I can see how that could affect it
unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem
what common file types are
some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private
how to understand terms of service
(hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)
what a cookie actually is
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)
common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
how to not get a virus while pirating something
what a temporary email is and when to use one
red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)
what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous
a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps
a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)
some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
OH MY GOD whyyyy did no one tell me you’re supposed to send thank-yous after interviews?? Why would I do that???
“Thank you for this incredibly stressful 30 minutes that I have had to re-structure my entire day around and which will give me anxiety poos for the next 24 hours.”
I HATE ETIQUETTE IT’S THE MOST IMPOSSIBLE THING FOR ME TO LEARN WITHOUT SOMEONE DIRECTLY TELLING ME THIS SHIT
NO ONE TOLD YOU???? WTF! I HAVE FAILED YOU. Also: Dear ______: Thank you so much for the opportunity to sit down with you (&________) to discuss the [insert job position]. I am grateful to be considered for the position. I think I will be a great fit at [company name], especially given my experience in __________. [insert possible reference to something you talked about, something that excited you.] I look forward to hearing from you [and if you are feeling super confident: and working together in the future]. Sincerely, @mellivorinae
My brother got a really great paid internship one summer. The guy who hired him said the deciding factor was the professional thank you letter my brother sent after the interview.
Confirmed! I interviewed for a job right after arriving in NY. The interview went incredibly well, and I went home and immediately wrote a thank you letter and put it in the mail. I had a super good feeling about this interview.
I didn’t get the job.
However, a few weeks later, I was called in to interview with another editor in the same company, and I did get that job. I found out later from the initial editor (the one who didn’t hire me) that he had planned to offer me the job, but since I didn’t follow up with a thank you letter, he assumed I didn’t really want it. He offered the job to another contender–but when he got my letter in the mail shortly after the offer had already been made, he went to HR and gave me a glowing recommendation. It was based on that recommendation that I got called in for the second interview.
So: send an email thank you immediately (same day!) after the interview. If you’re feeling extra, go ahead and send a written one too. OR go immediately to a coffee shop, write the letter, and return to the office and give it to the secretary.
Pro tip: If you really want HR to develop a personal interest in your application, publicly thank them on linkedin. Just make a short post telling your network about how X recruiter really went above and beyond to make you feel welcome, or about how be accommodating and professional they were, or whatever. Make sure to use the mention feature so they’ll get a notification and see it.
Flattery will get you everywhere… and public flattery that might make its way back to their manager, doubly so.
Obligatory plug for one of FreePrintable.net’s sites: ThankYouLetter.ws. They have a whole section with interview thank you letter templates, and a page with specific tips for interview thank you letters. (There are also tons of other letter templates if you browse around a bit.)
As a former professional recruiter and recruiting manager, I confirm, especially for entry-level positions, where you are competing with oodles of people. This little thing can make a difference. Also the fact that, maybe, you took time to google the “interview etiquette”.
The post-interview thank you notes can be a good way to recover in case you got asked a question whose answer you either didn’t know or felt was super weak. So if you follow the above given template, jump in with something like “upon further thought to your question, here’s my revised answer.”
But yeah always send a thank you note after an interview. It’s a small thing but it makes a hell of a difference. And def send thank you messages to any recruiters who may have helped. And also after you get the job. Small things like that really go a long long way.
AAM is an AMAZING resource for all work-related questions. This is a good starting place—basically the Big Questions people tend to have. (And some weirdness.) Job searching, negotiating for raises, performance issues, living through toxicity, recognizing toxic situations, dealing with coworkers, managing people, helpful starting-point scripts for all of the above… Do yourself a favor and check it out!
Worldcat is my bestie and my one true love!! Not only does it tell you what library a book is at, but it also price compares different used book sites against each other for easy view! It's how I got Tarot For the Master for $10!!
Oh, and since I have your attention: z-library (books and textbooks) and sci-hub (gatekept scientific journal articles.) I just ripped a textbook for class off z-library and snatched a required reading from sci-hub. Life is good and education should be accessible at every stage and station of life.
In case anyone actually wants to know the answer: it’s the plot of Cars.
The difference is literally the plot of Cars.
Highways are usually two-to-four (at the widest) lane roads that meander the US landscape. Think Route 66, dinosaur statues, mom-and-pop diners, southern gothic. There are state-level and national-level highways. Some run for a 100 miles, some, like US HWY-17, run most of the East Coast:
That red line is US HWY 17. If you follow it, you will go through tiny towns. You may hit stoplights. I kid you not, you will see spinning cows on poles. Businesses exist along highways that you are encouraged to pull over and visit. They were designed to let you see America.
Yeah.
Now, interstates were made in the 50s and were made to get people from Point A to Point B. These suckers range from four lanes to eight lanes around big cities. They cut through everything. If you want to get to a business, you have to take an exit ramp and detour. They are great for getting places fast. You can still have weird experiences on them, but usually at night, when your eyes start playing tricks on you. Or there are deer.
I-95 is a massive corridor that runs from the Florida Keys to the Canadian Border. You can see the difference just looking at the maps.
As far as writing goes:
If you want quirky character development inside the car, you’re looking for an interstate. The majority of Americans take interstates to go on road trips.
If you want mysterious and/or supernatural hijinks, you’re looking for a highway. They are weird, weird places, and they’re surprisingly easy to wind up on if you leave the interstate.
(Even in America, no one’s really sure what a freeway is. Just ignore it.)
Freeways exist in big cities where cars are more prominent than public transport, such as LA or Atlanta. You’ve year of liminal spaces? Freeways during rush hour are a physical manifestation of hell.
A turnpike is a highway with a toll. Turnpikes are special highways where you drive really fast and it’s usually linking big cities with each other and you keep going until you hit a toll booth.
They’re called “turnpikes” because in the olden days, there were pikes or barriers up and you had to pay the toll for them to be raised or turned to let you in.
For everyone who didn’t want to know, expressways are a form of highway that connect both suburban areas and major interstates to a city
They often have both an alphanumerical name and a colloquial name
In Philly we have the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76)
Would like to add that highways and mainly interstates were made specifically so THE MILITARY could get from Point A to Point B. This combined with a post-WWII boost in the economy and car industry gave Americans the ability to tour the country on their own for the first time ever. A whole chunk of American culture was created by just expanding the road system.
Think about road systems and other systems of travel when worldbuilding!
Another note for non-USians trying to write a road trip story – if your characters would definitely be taking the interstate, but you want them on a highway in order for the supernatural shenanigans to start (or whatever), the solution is very simple: they hit a traffic jam. Could be due to construction, could be due to an accident, but traffic slows to a crawl and they say “there’s gotta be a way around this” and take the next exit. Then it turns out their cell phone has no coverage in that spot so they can’t just pull up a map, and VOILA. Into the Twilight Zone! One of the things about an interstate is that USUALLY, there’s an exit and an entrance right by each other, so you can exit, find a gas station or a place to grab lunch near the exit, then get right back on, but this is not always the case. Sometimes there’s an exit, but nowhere nearby to get back on.
I just want to add that there’s a slightly different vibe if you’re in the midwest. Because cities on the coasts are closer together, the interstate is just a super efficient point A to point B, city to city, no interruptions.
In the midwest, and I expect the southwest, to the interstate can get some real wonky vibes because YOU ARE ALONE. You are on one black strip of neverending road across hours and hours and hours of alone. You can drive very fast for a very long time and not see signs of another human being. Sometimes the alone-ness is added to by the sheer flatness of the land around you. You can see for forever and there’s nobody here. You sometimes see dead gas stations or billboards with only scraps of paper left on them.
You are in tornado ally and there is NOWHERE to hide if a blizzard or thunderstorm or twister comes for you. If it’s winter the snow is BLINDING.
It’s beautiful. But it’s horror is less small-town-gothic and more existential threat.
Seconding @leebrontide’s bit about interstates in the mid and southwest. I have Seen Things doing cross-country moves through the southwest and midwest. One experience that we refer to as “Silent Kansas” we literally went across the entire width of Kansas without seeing a single other vehicle, open gas station, or sign of life, while shrouded in a blanket-thick fog that dissipated essentially immediately upon crossing the border into Colorado. Or the time we were driving south on the I-17 in Arizona after midnight, and there was something following us for a full hour that was a pair of glowing lights that looked like headlights but, I swear it’s fucking true, was not another car. they disappeared in my rearview on a stretch with no exits just outside the Phoenix city limits, and to this day I have no idea wtf it was.
weird shit happens on interstates away from the coasts.
Highway: a high-speed and long-distance road, but without limited access. You will have occasional stop lights or stop signs, and you’ll go through small towns. Most likely place to see a cryptid. (also a generic term for all of these roads)
Expressway: a high speed road with limited access. There are no stop signs or lights. There are entrance and exit ramps. These usually cut through the landscape to a greater degree than highways.
Freeway: an expressway without tolls
Turnpike: an expressway with tolls. So called because they had a long stick (a pike) on a pivot that blocks the road until it is turned to let you through after paying the toll.
Interstate: a (usually particularly long) expressway built as part of the interstate system. Has a designation I-## (eg, I-95). There are also local expressways that are part of the interstate system that get a third digit (I-495). These generally connect Something™ to the larger two-digit interstate (so I-495 connects to I-95). 3-digit interstates are most often freeways. A two-digit interstate may be a freeway or a turnpike and will probably switch back and forth over its length.
Also, everyone will use most of these terms wrong most of the time! You can call any of them a highway and no one will bat an eye. You could call a turnpike a freeway and people will literally not notice. If you call anything an expressway you’ll sound like a nerd or a politician. We usually only say interstate to differentiate it from some other similar road. But if you call something a turnpike that doesn’t have turnpike in its name, even if it is a toll road, people will look at you funny.
Really love that these explanations, while they technically explain everything, have even left me, a born American, more lost than before. Rip in pieces, non-American writers, we did our best.
The issue is people are describing regional usages.
The person upthread who defines the Schuykill (SKOO-kill) Express as also being I-76 is correct. What they’re leaving out is I-76 is the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and it ends at the Ohio and Jersey borders. The Schuykill bit is one tiny stretch in Philadelphia, and there’s actually a bunch of regional names for small bits of the Philly road system. (There are… so many… Philly is up there with Boston for being a reason why people wanted online maps with the ability to give directions, and there are Pennsylvania businesses that TO THIS DAY have warnings on their websites to call for directions because careless use of online directions can kill) (most PA businesses that say to call for directions are on crack these days, but if you don’t know the area well enough to find the place on your own… call first, just to be safe)
Figure every single US city has 3-7 local names for roads that don’t match up with official ones, and every single local radio station that does traffic reports will have their own unique style guide for how to describe traffic and rerouting suggestions. That’s… a lot of variation, you know?
So it’s not enough to just look over a post like this, and try to steal terminology if you’re writing fiction. You’d actually need to work out where a character is from (so you know roughly what rules they grew up with), where they live now (so you know if they modify how they speak at all to communicate with people around them), and where all they’re traveling. It gets nightmarish pretty quick even for US natives to write. Oh and all this stuff changes over time! What was accurate in 1930 was not accurate in 1950 and what’s accurate in 1970 was not accurate in 1990 and… none of those are accurate now.
If you’re writing someone on the East Coast, sure. I lived in PA for a while, it can genuinely get that nightmarish and confusing.
But the further west you get, the less likely you are to have that sort of complexity.
See, the East Coast had been densely settled by white people for two centuries before the state and federal governments tried to standardize things, and the standardization was only intermittently successful. So you get all kinds of different places where the road system is wonky. But the further west you go, the fewer white people there were and the shorter time they’d been there. In 1850, Oregon had a (US citizen) population of only 12k people. In 1900, it boasted a population of 410k. By 1930, it had more than doubled to 950k, and by 1950 it was up to 1.5 million. North Dakota had 300k in 1900 and 680k in 1930. And they just hadn’t been there that long! People were still homesteading in the western edge of North Dakota into the 1910s.
Point is, when the state and federal government started building roads and trying to standardize and improve things for cars, there … wasn’t all that much road infrastructure to begin with, and most of it was fairly new. And most of the cities and towns were fairly new and small, too. So you could just figure out the most logical way to design a road network and start building, without having to care much about making it work with what was already there. Instead of trying to graft a highway (and later a freeway) system onto an already-existing network of roads, they could just create one from scratch.
So if you’re talking about the midwest, the southwest, the west, or the west coast, things are fairly simple.
1. If it’s a two lane road between towns that doesn’t continue on past town, it’s a road.
2. If it’s a two (or maybe four) lane road that runs through many towns, with no hard dividing line in the middle, and you it regularly intersects other roads and driveways and stuff, and is good for driving long distances, and you’re not likely to find a farmer moving agricultural equipment along it, it’s a highway.
3. If it’s four or more lanes, with a hard divider in the middle, and limited access*, it’s a freeway. *doesn’t intersect with other roads, it goes over or under them, so you have to take special ramps to get on or off.
If you have your characters drive through the American Southwest (Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and western Texas – basically Wile E. Coyote vs Roadrunner country) territory, they also run the risk of getting stranded due to the engine overheating and dying of dehydration! Fun times! Stephen King got an entire novel out of the concept of a family stranded in a tiny ghost town in the desert with a monster because they risked death by staying, but would definitely die if they tried to walk out!
There are signs by the interstate strongly encouraging people to fill up their gas tank and buy water before continuing, because you WILL run into the same problems as the “Silent Kansas” phenomenon described up-thread, only much worse because the ambient temperature will rise above 40 degees C. You might also see some of the most striking and alien geography in the world, but at what cost? Oh lord, at what cost?
Now, let’s talk Colorado/the Colorado Rockies specifically! Because, for the purposes of road tripping and fan fic, it gets even more complicated here.
See, there’s only about 4 ways to actually CROSS the Colorado Rockies on an actual, good highway or interstate. And it is not uncommon for at least one of them to be shut down, if not multiple. Let’s take Glenwood Canyon on I-70, for example. Major interstate road. Huge transportation and shipping artery. Think of it like the Suez Canal. It is a tiny strip of road through a narrow canyon and it is mostly an elevated roadway because there was no actual room to build a big road through there but someone had enough hubris to do it anyway.
It closes ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Sometimes its for wreaks, sometimes it’s because there was a rockfall that punched through the elevated roadway, sometimes its because of icing because the elevated roadway freezes immediately in poor weather, sometimes it’s because of flash flooding due to recent fires, sometimes there is no discernible reason at all.
And the only detour around this particular canyon? It’s six hours, at best. Now, that’s the OFFICIAL, paved roads detour. But there’s always the backroads, right? Your characters can TOTALLY find a quicker way if they just four-wheel it a little bit!
They can’t.
They will get stuck somewhere and die.
Google maps had to change their system because of people being detoured onto dangerous backroads to try and skip the detours when the canyon closed. A whole ass bus of tourists got stuck in a place I’d hesitate to take my TRUCK because the driver went up a backroad he shouldn’t have and it disabled the bus.
In another incident, I was trying to go pick up my sister on the other side of the state and had to make a DIFFERENT six hour detour because there had been a missing person/murder that had the highway I needed shut down for searching/evidence collecting.
The other problem with the highways/interstates in Colorado, in the mountains anyway, is that they will straight up kill your car. There’s the pool sized potholes every spring, of course, but the bigger threat is honestly the inclines. If your car is old/in poor condition, or you just don’t know how to handle those sorts of driving conditions, your car WILL overheat and just die when you’re going up. I stop and push people off the road all the time. I carry extra radiator fluid specifically because of the amount of times I’ve run into people who need it. You can also burn out your breaks real easy going down those inclines rather than up.
And if it’s snowing? You’re not getting across the state at all until it’s done and cleaned up. Every single highway and interstate has at least one high mountain pass and it will be snowing there even when it is snowing nowhere else. Find a hotel or hope you don’t freeze to death in your car, because you’re stuck.
The crux of the story is Brother Dean.
Brother Dean was…is…a hate preacher. Red or blue, everyone agreed on that. His origins and his motivations, those were a little more mysterious. Different groups had their own legends. I had a class with a guy that was part of the campus pro-life movement, and the tale he gave me is the one that I give the most credence to.
According to him, Brother Dean had started out as a “normal” pro-life preacher. He’d gone around campus, led parades, given speeches… And then he’d gotten punched in the face.
This led to a lawsuit against the school. Something about failing to provide adequate protection? The main result was that he got something like half a mil.
Half a mil is an incredible amount if you’re still working, but he’d tried to use the money to fund a sort of pro-life career, and it had just… trickled down. Ten years later he was running dead low on funds, and had taken to the particularly dumb strategy of trying to get punched in the face again. You know. For economic reasons.
It had become kind of a vicious cycle: He’d started off saying some objectionable shit to try and goad someone into taking the punch. The worse the shit he said was, the harder it became for him to find work doing anything else, and the harder it became for him to find work doing anything else, the less he had to lose by saying really objectionable shit. Throw in two years of living on ramen, and he was so desperate to get punched that he was quoting the Westboro Baptists. If you know, you know.
The pro-life group, to their credit, hated him the most out of anyone. They viewed him as the ultimate sellout, someone who was actively making their positions and beliefs look worse by the day, solely for his own enrichment. The other conservative groups held him in the same regard. The rest of the campus hated him for simpler reasons. It would be difficult to find anyone more detested anywhere else on site.
Brother Dean’s antithesis was the Trojan Warrior. TW was a normal student by day, but maybe once a month or so he’d don his hoplite armor and roam around, handing out free condoms. Trojan condoms. It was kind of his shtick.
Between the costume, and the whole character that he had going on, most people didn’t really recognize his alter ego. I myself am pretty good with faces, so one day I noticed he was behind me in the foodcourt and decided to thank him by paying for his smoothie. Small tangent, but if you’re looking to get good stories, buying lunches for interesting people works like magic.
TW decided that he was going to thank me for thanking him by giving me something like 10 feet of condom roll. I was mortified, aggressively single, and on SSRI’s. He was not sure how many of those were permanent. I wasn’t either. He wound up giving me just a handful, and said that if nothing else, they could probably be used as water balloons.
I accepted. Who doesn’t like water balloons?
I finished my lunch with the warrior and left, considering targets for the "balloons". I passed by Brother Dean near the main commons and had my lightbulb moment. I spent a few minutes watching him from a distance, trying to find the optimal angle to get him without getting caught on camera (he always had someone filing in the background, it was a necessary thing for his hopeful future lawsuit). The time delay was useful for helping me realize that it really wasn't worth it. The sun had been bearing down so hard that the glue in my shoes had melted, and getting him wet would be a favor that day.
So, mildly disappointed, I shelved my dream and left.
A week later the monsoons hit. I left one class and ran to a campus computer commons to try and get some shelter and study between classes. Just before I got through the door, I saw Brother Dean, umbrella in hand, setting up his speaker and mic. He wasn't technically allowed this far into campus (the commons were owned by the city) but he'd gone to where his audience was and security was probably holed up somewhere cozy. I could hardly blame them.
I made it up to the second floor and started studying when the mic picked up. All glass buildings are not very soundproof. He was loud, and he was annoying, and he was outside a library, under a balcony, and-
And I had condoms. Water balloon condoms.
And he was under a balcony.
I put my laptop away, pulled out my condom roll, and went to the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how big a condom could actually stretch, so I just kept filling it until it was about the size of basketball. Maybe a smaller watermelon?
And thus armed, I waddled my way out into the halls.
I cannot emphasize enough just how unsubtle this was. I was cradling this big, overfilled condom like some sort of phallic ghost baby, and it was so heavy that I sort of had to squat as I went. People saw me. Lots of people saw me. I passed by one room full of computer science students, all learning C++, and three of them waved at me.
And I waved back in that my-arms-are-full-but-I’m-excited-to-see-you-too way, where you jut your wrist up a little bit and flap your hand around excitedly.
I did, eventually, make it to the balcony. The building’s high ceilings made the second-floor thing kind of a misnomer: I was easily forty feet up. I scooched my way to the edge, and the view I had… it was perfect. Brother Dean was directly underneath, thank God. If he’d been even seven or eight feet out, I’m not sure if I could’ve shotput the condom-bomb far enough to hit him directly. Better yet his cameraman was only a few feet away from him, far too close to catch any action going up 40 feet above.
I managed to wrestle the payload onto the balcony, and with a gentle push, I sent it and Dean to destiny.
I realized that I’d made a mistake almost as soon as the condom began to fall. You know that sound that bombs make in cartoons, that long drawn out whistle?
The condom made that sound.
I had a second education in the seriousness of my mistake when the condom hit Dean’s umbrella. It did not pop. Of course it didn’t pop. I had no experience with condoms, I swear to you, I promise, I did not know how much they could stretch. You can fit your whole leg into them. You can fit them over whole park benches. A gallon and a half of water was nothing compared to that.
It broke Dean’s umbrella. It hit the top, and it snapped the stem like a twig, and then-
Violence. Unspeakable violence. It clipped Dean’s shoulder and stretched down to his knees before recoiling back to its original shoulder height. It did not bounce. It floated in space, no wasted energy in the collision. One hundred percent of the kinetic energy, all 3300 Joules of it, were discharged into this sad wretch of a man.
He did not collapse. There was no time for that. He rotated on his axis. It was as if the hand of God had reached down and grabbed him about his waist, only to twist. In a fraction of a second, his head filled the space where his ass had been and his ass filled the space where his head had been, and then his cheek, carried by the shuriken motion of his body, slammed into the pavement with a noise like Shaq slam dunking a porkchop. Maybe wetter.
He did not move.
I panicked.
I want to make it clear: I did not mean to assault this man. I meant to get him wet and embarrassed. But I also have to confess that this was a beating. Mike Tyson himself can only put about 1600 Joules into one of his punches, and if he hit me I would bounce off five walls before I fell. I would not wish 3300 Joules upon anyone.
I walked into the building and sat myself in the back of the C++ class. The people next to, to my immense and eternal gratitude, did not question why I was wet.
A minute later, Brother Dean stormed into the building with his microphone.
He yelled. He screamed. He hollered. He informed the entire world that he had been assaulted, with a condom, by someone on the second floor. I was ecstatic that he was alive.
Every person in that class knew who had brought this hell upon them. Every single one of them knew it was me. And if I’d done this to someone else, some Steven Crowder, some Ben Shapiro, someone would’ve thrown me to the wolves. It would have only taken one person in that room of sixty. But Brother Dean was hated by everyone, literally everyone, and so the entire class sat in silence.
Some of that silence was gleeful, and some of it was bored, and some of it, a very small amount, was directly disapproving, but even the disapproving silence carried an understanding. A note of, “Yes, yes, that was very irresponsible, and you should not do that again, but who could blame you? Something needed to happen. Not that something, but…something.”
Security could be given grace to ignore the man when it was raining, and he was just outside the building, but they were not given such grace when he was inside with a microphone. Just a few short minutes later, a golfcart pulled up, and he was summarily marched out. There was maybe a minute of silence after that before the professor announced that his class was not open to visitors.
I left. He’d made his point.
It was a few weeks before I saw Brother Dean again, and his black eye still hadn’t healed all the way when I did. He was, however, still preaching the same old things as always. Percussive maintenance works better on vacuum tubes than human brains. I will say that he definitely made a point to stay away from balconies after that. And the next time it rained, I actually went out to watch him put his speaker and his mic into the back of a wagon and wheel it off the campus.
It appeared that he’d developed some opinions about the kind of weather he was willing to preach hate in.
