New RWD Just Dropped, So

If I wrote a zombie apocalypse story, guns and ammo would be hard to come by, because all the gun nuts and survivalists and preppers looted them first thing, and hoarded them.

Most of the guns and ammo that remain are rusting away in the zombie-infested ruins of these people's compounds. Most of them made up their own little stories about where the zombies were coming from, and paid the price.

As I was driving home through the forest recently, ahead of me I saw an old pickup truck pull over onto the shoulder and put its hazard lights on. A young woman wearing handmade clothing jumped out of the truck and ran 200 feet back up the road. As I passed, I saw her scoop up a newt she'd seen crossing the road, and carry it into the forest, before running back to her truck.

This made me smile, but the redneck behind me was outraged. "Damn hippies! Bleeding heart liberal treehuggers... only on Chauncy's Island... Friggin' oughta be a law... stoppin' for a damn lizard. What about the other cars?"

I looked him in the eyes and said, quietly but firmly, "You're new around here, aren't you?"

"I been here seven whole years, so, no, I'm not new," the redneck said. "What's it to you, anyway?"

I've been here 30 years, but I didn't mention that. I just said to him, "Seven whole years you've been here, and you still act like you're brand new. That's a shame."

And everyone else laughed and clapped as the redneck drove away without saying anything more.

Every time I remember that nearly everyone, even people who have never heard of The Far Side, knows what a "thagomizer" is, my brain gets a little spritz of endorphins from the fact that something, that was part of my weirdness growing up, has breached containment and is here to stay.

The Hawt Spring

This tiny little inn is built around a magical hot spring. The spring has one simple magical property: as long as one is physically bathing in the spring, or a pool conected to it and filled with its water, they seem more than naturally physically attractive. To everyone.

The caretakers no longer allow mirrors at the Hawt Spring, and have a firm limit on how long they allow people to stay. Because otherwise, one can poison one's body image, or lose the ability to find beauty in ordinary people.

If you get on their good side, the caretakers might tell you about all the newlywed couples who would honeymoon at the Hawt Spring before there were rules, and come away ready for divorce, after getting too used to how each other looked while bathing in the Hawt Spring. They would begin to see each other's real bodies as "ugly."

Nowadays, newlyweds are banned from the Hawt Spring, by official decree.

the Guardian

US farms are forcing workers to buy inedible, expensive meals: ‘It makes you feel enslaved’

Employers hiring migrant workers through a federal program must provide food or cooking facilities. But many of those picking our fresh food

On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.

A Christmas Pop Song Rant

You see, the thing I hate isn't Christmas music as a whole. I adore carols and Christmas hymns. It's the Christmas-themed popular music I can't stand.

Maybe I should explain the difference, although I expect a lot of folks already know: while we all use the terms indiscriminately, a "Christmas carol" is technically a song that's worded and structured as either a lullaby for the newborn Jesus, or a joyous announcement of His arrival. Most carols are very old traditional songs, or started out that way, but there are a few notable modern compositions that achieve a similar feel to the traditional carols, notably "Silent Night."

A "Christmas hymn" is generally addressed to God the Father instead of Jesus, but deals with Christmas themes. It's a hymn for the Christmas season. This does overlap quite a bit with the definition of "carol," especially if you want to bring Holy Trinity semantics into it, but I think calling "O Holy Night" a Christmas hymn is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The fact that it's a great song to sing while caroling doesn't disqualify it.

Christmas popular music, on the other hand… is popular music with a secular-Christmas theme. By "popular music," though, I mean any commercial music product that was originally produced to make money, whether it's "Jingle Bells" or a modern pop megastar's latest charity-fundraiser Christmas album. These songs almost exclusively shy away from older religious elements of Christmas in favor of celebrating secularized versions like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, or generic winter traditions like snowmen, coziness, and winter sports. And, yes, there are a few weird, cursed things like "Deck the Halls" (a traditional Welsh tune repurposed in the 19th century as a Christmas pop song), and there's probably some contemporary-praise artist who tried creating a new, contemporary-praise, Christmas song instead of making pepped-up versions of old Christmas carols and hymns… almost certainly equally cursed.

I should probably clarify that I'm not denouncing the secularization of Christmas. Midwinter celebrations are far, far older than Christianity, and the modern Christmas shopping season is not only a crucial element of late-stage Capitalist society, but also a highly visible example of consumers acting neither rationally nor in their own "enlightened" self-interest, and as such, I'm not going to knock it.

What I object to is the nature of most Christmas pop music. Almost without exception, there's a strong "I heard you like Christmas, so I made you some Christmas with a Christmas, so you can Christmas your Christmas with Christmas while you Christmas the Christmas this Christmas" vibe to this music, and worse, a sense of forced cheerfulness and jollity. It reaches deep down to my hindbrain and makes all my social anxieties say, "Oh, crap, here we go again." Much of it also is obvously just thrown together with minimal effort, expense, or artistic expression, simply as shovelware for a jingle-bell-addled consumer market.

The most heinous Christmas pop songs are formulated specifically to target children. Little children, Mandrake! And despite this, we are all subjected to these songs for up to four months prior to Christmas. Can you imagine what would happen to a sporting-goods store if they habitually played "Baby Shark" and the Barney theme on their Muzak?

While I can say that most of it "just isn't very good," that's a personal opinion and I refuse to claim it's relevant. But I theorize that one more reason I find so much Christmas pop music tedious and irritating is because the concept of a safely non-religious, uncontroversial "holiday season," based almost entirely on subjective feelings and concepts, is too vague, confused, and artificial to truly inspire either artist or audience.

By contrast, most Christmas carols and Christmas hymns were products of the old Christendom society, and the creators and intended audience were shaped their whole lives by European Christendom, whether they believed or not. The subject matter and relevance were powerful to them in a way that it's hard for us to understand today.

There are some anti-Christmas songs I enjoy, but anti-Christmas songs occupy a very precarious niche in the popular music ecology. A song can only be "anti-Christmas" until the Monolithic Secular Christmas Music Juggernaut adopts and assimilates it. We need to learn from what happened to "Fairytale of New York."

there's a difference ok

The adhd modes of food

1. You ate that burger so fast. You ate that burger so fucking fast and now the whole Red Robin is staring at you god what the fuck

2. You started eating like a normal person, but then you started talking or daydreaming and now the waitress is handing you the check but you’ve still got half a plate of cold fettuccine

3. You were going to go out to eat, but then you saw a video in your YouTube recommendation that drew you towards it like moth to a flame, and now it’s 10 pm and you’ve got an empty bag of tortilla chips in your hand and shame in your heart

4. Mac And Cheese

OSP Red, over on her Tumblr blog Comicaurora, posted a brilliant and refreshingly frank analysis of "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant."

I can't believe I didn't figure out it was an allegory about death, but we all miss something sometimes, I guess.

Go read the whole post.

What if real life is the Eldritch Apocalypse, and we have all but forgotten earlier times, before The Planets Aligned, before we discovered Things Humanity Should Not Know, Dug Too Deep, and ruined our world by making it... this?

What if the true Eldritch Horror is... normativity? Conformity? Regimentation? Dullness of mind and experience?

What if we could remember what "whelming" felt like, or when cars still needed to be quarzyk-tested? What if squirrels reminded us of those times, because even though they used to also come in some of the colors that are now missing, they're pretty much the same, otherwise?