My Circadian Rhythm Is In 5/8

thinking again about vampirism as disability

spotify is raising prices again here's the apk that gives you premium for free

actually, I think spiders georg should be counted. just because he's the best at what he does doesn't mean we need to discredit him. he's part of the statistic too

Scientific question: What is your most deranged opinion on cereal

THIS IS A FUNNY QUESTION

I think it's just not very good...

It's a usually unhealthy snack that I don't even feel good eating. But this comes from a person who CANNOT eat sweet things first thing in the morning so I'm biased.

One worldbuilding thing that's always fun to do is take something you've encountered in the real world, and apply something similar with the same logic into your own. Like those sayings that have two halves, but people usually only know the first half and misunderstand the saying - like "birds of a feather flock together (until the cat comes)" or "great minds think alike (but fools rarely differ)." So I came up with a few for The Book I'm Not Writing:

Hungry dogs are loyal dogs (until someone else feeds them) - neglecting and mistreating your underlings may work as a short-term tactic for making them obey, but it's also a guarantees that they'll betray you at first chance.

The mouth of an idiot is as loose as the strings of their purse (so be there when gold may drop out) - just because nine out of ten things that someone says are completely useless doesn't mean you should dismiss them altogether. They might still know useful things, even if they can't tell it's useful.

Blood makes a foul dye (it stains, but it won't last) - here "foul" is often interpreted as "brutal" or "gruesome", when it's meant as "of low quality". Using violence as your way to establish dominance and maintain authority because it's easier than building networks of mutual trust and respect is as stupid and short-sighted as using blood to dye clothes because it's cheaper than proper pigment.

A fool will starve to death while waiting for grain to grow (but it is also a fool who'll slaughter an ewe an hour before it lambs) - Immediate problems require immediate solutions, but you'd better make sure that your drastic emergency solution is the right one.

A blind horse will go as you guide where a half-blind one dare not (both through the darkness and down a cliff) - an agent who doesn't know the purpose of their task will obey blindly, where one that knows some part of it might disobey out of distrust, but neither is as reliable as one that does see the big picture, can draw their own conclusions from the information they gather, and adjust their plans accordingly.

woah this character is so cool i wish they were covered in blood their whole body trembling with a look of absolute horror on their face as theyre struggling to breathe in panic

Doot doot

Doot??

Okay I just wrapped up the annual Over the Garden Wall rewatch and it’s late and I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate these thoughts but:

The Beast knows it’s in a story

The Beast knows it’s in a story, and it knows how people react to stories, and that’s horrifying in a series based out of folklore and fairy tales and storytelling tradition. The Beast preys on people by knowing how they’ll react to stories. The Beast acts frustrated that Greg used a honey comb for a “golden comb” and a spiderweb on a stick for a “spool of golden thread,” but it’s baiting a trap - by exploiting that same fairytale logic, Greg is going to die of exposure in the cold while he waits for the sun to “set” in a cup

Because of course Greg will wait to see the sun set into the cup. Of course the Woodsman will keep the lantern lit. That’s how the story should go. The Beast is a parasite sucking blood out of a perfectly arranged Grimm fairy tale about the martyrdom of parenthood.

The only way to properly defeat it is to actively defy the story being set out ahead of you. Over the Garden Wall says, over and over again, that Wirt will sacrifice his life for Greg. “You are responsible for you and your brother’s actions,” the show says. The original pitch bible for the series said that Wirt would sacrifice himself for Greg, that he’d die to take responsibility for Greg-

And then Wirt stops and says “Wait. That’s dumb” and immediately shatters the story that’s been set up for him, and that’s how he defeats the Beast.

Dear Sirs.

SCP-682's powers are metatextual. He's unkillable because the story says he is nearly unkillable and no solution would be satisfying. His nickname is 'the very hard to destroy reptile' for rigour's sake. You don't have to be Grant Morrison to put this together.

The solution is to alter the narrative so that there is a means of killing him that is satisfying. Unfortunately, only full-on apocalypse scenarios or the use of SCP-682 as a jobber for an even worse threat would fill that criteria.

So unless you want to unleash something even more tiresome, like the Black Moon or the Scarlet King or the Yellow Submarine or whatever other color-coded doomsday monster you have on tap, you're just wasting jumpsuit filling doing anything at all.

The easy alternative is to simply stop trying to kill him.

Just focus on holding him in the most boring, routine ways possible, rendering him increasingly less interesting and thus reducing the time between stories focused on him and thus, the resulting breaches and disasters.

Or you can do what we did. If you aren't chicken.

Ours wasn't a rotted lizard. It was a sort of mummified horse the size of a 1996 Volkswagen Harlequin, and it was a she, but otherwise same deal. Regeneration. Vat of acid. Mass casualties. Violent opposition to the use of breath mints. Endemic to all life. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

We figured out the how it worked, and we speed-ran the whole concept, hurling that vile beast through a veritable plinko-fall of thousands of extermination tests and controlled rampages until there was literally nothing left to do with the 'More-Than-One-Way-to-Fail-to-Kill-a Horse'.

And we trust the populace enough to not lie to them for 'their own good'. Because its funny? Sure. Profitable? Absolutely (don't worry, shareholders!)! But never for 'their own good.'

So we turned those experiments into a 17 season reality television program hosted by Greg Kinnear and force-fed them to a sludge-hungry populace.

There were 'More-Than-One-Way-to-Fail-to-Kill-a Horse' calendars, coffee mugs, t-shirts, two different animated spin-offs running at the same time for some reason, four movies starring Chris Pratt as the voice of the horse, an ongoing sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, 'More-Than-One-Way-to-Fail-to-Kill-a Horse' "acid bath" sour candy flavored yogurt in a tube, a series of increasingly inadequately playtested gameboy cartridges, a 27-issue limited series from Image comics, and adorable plush mummified murder-horse plushes with little suction cups on their red-felt hooves so they can stare balefully out the back of your station wagon at that ASSHOLE Kevin in his souped up Trans AM who does not understand the concept of a safe following distance, and you JUST want to run him off the road with the magno-lifters and recreate the scene from Lost Highway with Robert Loggia, but "you can't use the magno-lifters for revenge" because it's "against OSHA regulations" and "technically assault!"

And once the first shipment of 'More-Than-One-Way-to-Fail-to-Kill-a Horse' Funko Pops hit store shelves, the creature's cultural cache cratered so hard that it became a parody of itself so predictable it's "containment" is now a Universal Studios attraction with two failed executions and a containment breach each night, with double shows on Saturdays.

Now, it was a rocky ride getting there, especially for Utah (projections say you'll get those House seats back in two, maybe three, generations at most, don't you worry!) but we've proven that even if it isn't killable, you can, in fact, beat a dead horse.

Hope this helps.

Humbert, Outreach Liaison Melinoë Laboratories "Hoc non veniet ad nos mordax"