The Eternal Apocalypse of the Two of Us

just call me Anakin Skywalker because boy, I'm obsessed with Obi-Wan Kenobi

[nondelphic]

writer brain is like “what if this story was a metaphor for grief”

no babes what if this story was finished first

[theotherjax]

What if the real grief was the writing we didn't do along the way

[kunosoura]

I love rocks that look extremely like someone just tested the demon blade on them

[superbeans89]

I had an idea, sorry

[beardedmrbean]

Is this from Muppet's Goncharov?

[assortedcrackers]

It is! Only the directors cut though.

[home-and-having-tea]

You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.

[quecksilvereyes]

there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore

[theropoda]

children eleven thousand years ago enjoyed jumping around in puddles made from the footprints of a giant sloth. children loved muddy puddles so long ago there were still megafauna alive

[captainlordauditor]

There’s a record of an emperor of Japan in the 9th century talking about his cat - how pretty it is, and how it stalks birds and curls up in a circle and meows mournfully for company and escaped its collar. All completely normal ordinary cat things. And then it ends with him saying “it is superior to all other cats”. I am delighted to be united across 1200 years with this fellow cat owner with exactly the same feelings about his cat that I have about mine.

[56k-modem]

[frankentimepod]

Frankenstein 2025:

[bunjywunjy]

I find the great lakes terrifying, may i have some cursed knowledge on them?

sure thing!

when you say "great lakes" and "cursed" in the same sentence, we usually think you're just talking about Lake Superior.

the great lakes are huge, sure! combined, they're roughly the size of fucking France.

but Superior is the granddaddy of them all.

the largest of the great lakes in terms of surface area, depth, and overall volume, Lake Superior contains 2,903 cubic miles of water, or 10% of the world's entire surface freshwater supply.

that's enough to cover the entire surface area of North AND South America in a solid foot of ice-cold murkish water, and probably also a bunch of confused sturgeons. yow!

but sturgeons aren't all this lake contains, by any means!

it's also full of corpses.

see, Lake Superior is just SO fucking hugebig and deep (about 1000 feet at its deepest point) that it doesn't warm up very quickly, even in the depths of summer! its northerly location and the amount of time it spends frozen over each year means that this lake reaches an average surface temperature of 46-56 degrees fahrenheit, even in the hottest months.

don't even think about the coldest months.

that's cold enough to kill you dead as a Sim with a deleted pool ladder if you fall in and can't get out! and it's ALSO cold enough that if you do die, your body will just sink into the icy depths, and stay there. you won't rot, and there isn't even anything alive down there that might consider your corpsicle a worthy feast because there's so little oxygen; you're basically just stuck down there in the world's largest meat freezer for the rest of eternity.

but you're in good company! since everyone who dies on the lake and sinks to the bottom is still there, there are an estimated 10,000 corpses lying around on the lakebed right now!

(there are a number of explorable shipwrecks in Superior that are known to still, uh, have crew on board, so to speak. divers are expected to leave them alone and treat their death sites respectfully.)

and that's not even counting the literal thousands of years humans were paddling around on the lakes in pre-colonial times either, so in all honesty that's probably lowballing it.

and that doesn't seem likely to change, anytime soon- as long as the lake exists, those corpses are just going to be stuck down there, waiting around for whatever comes next.

so uh anyway, if the concept of the eternal preservation of your mortal form bothers you, stay AWAY from that lake! and maybe just become a volcano researcher instead, I dunno.

sheesh.

[hellenhighwater]

You know, Superior has a very deserved reputation as the winter-blooded reaper of the Great Lakes (and we love that for her) but Lake Michigan is actually the statistically more deadly lake. More swimmers and the shape of the lake, with its riptides and longshore tides, means that more people drown there than in Superior. 

[hellenhighwater]

Fun related fact from your unfriendly neighborhood criminal lawyer! Michigan has this law:

At first glance, it sounds like it criminalizes this behavior:

But actually it exists specifically because of the unrotting dead in Lake Superior. See, the wreck of the Eddie Fitz was located, and dive teams took video of it in 1994. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975, with all hands, and some of them were visibly still at their posts in the documentary film made about the discovery of the site. If you do the math, that's not actually a super long time between the sinking and the discovery of it, and so there were still quite a few surviving relatives of the crew who were, understandably, upset about the airing of the footage. They also largely did not want their loved ones to be retrieved from the wreck, and so they remain. And to protect them, MCL 750.160a was passed, as well as some similar legislation in other regions that border Superior.

And so Superior keeps her dead for all the endless years to come, and when we send the living down to visit, they do so without cameras rolling.

[hellenhighwater]

Eddie Fitz day is the 10th, so I hope you're ready for lakeposting

[lucylehane]

What sort of dance do you dance so late at night?

Strictly Ballroom (1992)

[wizardarchetypes]

funniest convo ever with a guy who said 2 me "nobody uses journalism degrees" and i said "my mom has a bachelors in journalism" and he smiled like knowingly and said "yeah, but what does she do?" and i said "she runs a newspaper and publishes romance novels on the side." and he literally said "oh" and nothing else. like he ended the whole conversation there.

[wizardarchetypes]

i've just been informed he has a trombone degree. like the study of playing trombone. which is all well and good, i genuinely think we should all have the opportunity to chase our academic bliss but i do think the trombone studies guy should hesitate to judge the economic value of other people's degrees no

[wizardarchetypes]

i love the tags on this post because there’s other music/instrument majors implying niche field-specific drama like “of course it was a trombone player 😒” and then there’s trombone majors like “this was NOT me for the record”

[prokopetz]

"I can never get it tasting like my mom used to make" yeah, because your mom had a giant Costco-size bottle of a specific pre-mixed spice blend that was discontinued by its manufacturer in 1998 and spent your entire childhood putting it in every meal to use the stupid thing up faster – she doesn't know how to replicate it any more than you do.

[prokopetz]

The tragedy of culinary nostalgia is that most of the time, the flavours of your childhood aren't memories of lost secret recipes – they're the irreplicable accidents of folks tossing whatever happened to be cheap and available into the pot, and there are no recipes to recover because the people doing the cooking never knew them.

[batbetbitbotbut]

I am reminded of this reddit post and update, from a person seeking to recreate a dish their mum used to make based on not much more than "chicken, peaches, and it was beige".

I am a pretty competent cook, so don't worry about that bit. I just want to know if this dish sounds familiar, so someone can fill me in on the parts I don't remember. It's a chicken dish made with flat chicken cutlets. I think she used to hammer them a bit with a kitchen mallet, dredge them in flour, and pan fry them in a little butter so they would brown nicely. The sauce is the part I am a little lost about. She used white wine (probably chardonnay) and sour cream, that part I am sure of. There were canned peaches too, which were slightly browned and served on top. I'm sure there was something more to it than that, any thoughts? The flavor was tangy, not particularly sweet except for the peaches, and the sauce was opaque and kind of a beige color. Does this sound like a dish you are aware of? While her food was great, her dishes were usually pretty simple. It is likely that this is not something she invented herself, but it might be something that she simplified. Does anyone know what this is or what it is called so I can look it up and try and get it right? She used to serve it with grilled zucchini brushed with garlic butter. Thank you. Edit -- I am blown away with how helpful and kind you all have been. I have taken little hints from each of your posts and a lot of them have jogged my memory. I think some sort of composite from these suggestions will produce something close. I am going to try to make it when I have the chance, and I will update when I do. Thank you, reddit. <3

Update 6 days later:

My mom passed away a few years ago. I needed help trying to recreate a chicken recipe of hers that I have been craving, because I could only remember a few ingredients. You amazing people of r/recipes came through and gave me so many wonderful suggestions. With a mix of all your advice, I made it tonight. I was nervous as I was putting it together. I felt like there had to be something more to it, but I went with using just the ingredients I knew (as suggested by Ethril). I felt like there was something I was forgetting. Something about brown specks in the sauce. I went with it anyway, and figured I would know what to add at the end by taste. I took chicken cutlets and hammered them flat. Dredged in flour and sauteed in butter (high heat). I burned the butter a little. I remembered my mom saying that butter is the one thing that is ok to burn (as long as it is not smoking furiously) so I left it alone, and smiled at the memory. I was pleased to see the chicken brown to the color I remember. When I flipped the chicken I added the zucchini spears and browned those too. When the chicken was done (just a couple minutes) I set it aside and covered it in tinfoil to keep it warm, then turned the zucchini and browned the peaches in the same pan. It only took a few minutes to brown everything and when the zucchini and peaches were done I put them aside with the chicken. I deglazed the empty pan with chardonnay. My mom wasn't a big wine person, so I went with the cheapest they had. I suddenly remembered that sound the wine would make when it hit the hot pan, a huge hiss. Mom used to tell me to step back before she poured it in, because it would splash a little. I felt like I was nine years old again. I added three big dollops of sour cream and dissolved it in the hot wine. I didn't know what I was going to do next, this was all I had planned. Then I saw the little brown flecks come up. It was that burned butter! I just about cried. I tasted it, and suddenly in my mind I was standing in her kitchen as a kid watching her cook. This was it. It was that simple. I added a couple spoonfuls of the liquid from the canned peaches to take away a little of the wine's tartness, and the sauce was perfect. Just like she used to make. Keep in mind that I am no food stylist, but I assure you that this tasted 10x better than it looks: http://i.imgur.com/Qgk6u.jpg The whole thing took less than 20 minutes to make. And I fucking nailed it. Thank you so, so much reddit! You brought me back, and I love you. The smell is still lingering in the house.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

“Ugh can’t stand babies they cry so much!”

That tiny Human spirit has shat himself 4 times today if you’d shat yourself 4 times by noon you’d be in hysterics too

[asteroidtroglodyte]

He fell asleep in his bed, at home, and woke up at the goddamn grocery store with an overhead light in his face if that happened to you you’d become The Joker

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Poor guy’s only been here for like a dozen weeks he doesn’t even have a favorite show to distract him yet he’s just raw-dogging reality unfiltered with no goddamn Blorbos to rotate whatsoever

[lovlae]

u know when u drink really cold or hot drinks and u can feel it going down into ur stomach and u feel like one of those skeleton pirates in pirates of the caribbean when they’re drinking the beer

[zoesupreme]

[katestewartt]

Trinity taking shit from no one

[elodieunderglass]

i don't WANT to drink water I WANT a bard to draft a eulogy for me to criticise!!!!!!!

[slavicafire]

far from prudish but just got blazed porn of someone's pussy spread out so hard and up close like it's a map of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth and I'm king and grand duke sigismund II augustus inspecting his lands to plot defense against the swedes

[coffee-without-anesthetics]

[captainkirkk]

Superman must hear the most insane gossip every day. Do you think he has to resist the urge to get on twitter and post "Jennifer from apartment 33B on Queen Street if you're reading this....... he's cheating"

[captainkirkk]

I love that people in the tags are convinced that Clark would either:

Slip little notes in people's mail boxes, under their doors, etc.

Unleash Lois on the situation

Start an anonymous twitter account, podcast, gossip column, etc. for all of Metropolis to read

But ignoring it and staying out of the drama is NOT an opinion