It Can Be Tempting To Live Your Life Like A Prequel. To Live As If You’re Setting Up Your Own Story.and

day 1 at the communal puzzle club: i see a puzzle with a sign next to it that says "please help with our communal puzzle" and i say to myself "don't mind if I do" and did the whole thing

one of the more bleak things to acknowledge is that if you pirate literally all of your music and then set aside a spotify subscription's worth of money each month to spend on a single pay-what-you-want album, it would almost immediately amount to you supporting those musicians more than streaming does

The Room That Doesn't Exist

art by SUIMA

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

your heart is a muscle the size of a rat

My T-shirt with the entire text of Borges' theoretical Library of Babel is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt, somewhere.

nothing can come between a girl and her emotional support misinterpretation of a mountain goats song

this but im in house of leaves and instead of going insane mapping the house i just get hyped about all the extra square footage and closet space

Kids are funny. In just one summer vacation, a child can make lifelong friends with a weird frog, be transported to a distant fantasy realm under attack by an evil magician, experience loss via the tragic sacrifice of a trusted warrior ally, and be returned to this earth, just in time to start school again in the fall. For the rest of us, we push the "snooze" button on our Slack notifications nineteen times in the same summer.

What adults are, though, is resourceful. We've figured out a long time ago that we should be taking advantage of anyone who isn't paying enough attention. The grift can never end, and if I'm scamming you, you can't be scamming me, unless you are, in which case I need to scam someone else too. So when our children started opening magical portals to fantasy realms all over the fucking place, you can't imagine we didn't see an opportunity.

First, it's the free babysitting. Sure, the deposed queen of that magical land is going to send them into some kind of kill-or-be-killed foreign war, but there's a fifty-fifty chance our government does it too. They'll learn some valuable skills, make those aforementioned friends, carry the trauma forever. And while they're gone, we can use the closets and wardrobes that they left open (and the lights left on! These kids think electricity is free!) to get rid of some stuff we don't want anymore.

Folks, if dumping nuclear waste in Narnia is wrong, then you can pay higher taxes to get rid of it. I'm charging the government a flat ten-k per barrel to chuck it through the portal, where some halflings can deal with it in their verdant, unspoiled fairyland. And if anything decides to come out, we can just kill it the way adults do: by ignoring it for several decades until it gets really bad, and then blaming each other for it. Yep, the way I see it, the political party I hate are the ones who keep releasing all those manticores. We should dump more nuclear waste in there to teach 'em a lesson.

It's 3 pm on a sunday. I could be

Playing warhammer with my boyfriend and his little bro

Painting miniatures

Constructing new miniatures

Making digital art

Drawing the stuff that's got a deadline at the end of this month

Drawing the stuff that's got a deadline tomorrow

Disassembling old clothing to make new clothing

Disassembling old accessories to make new accessories

Making evil deviled eggs

Messing with my hair

And instead I'm embedded. In my bed.