Crumbs is a house hippo that lives somewhere in your house, likes to make nests out of discarded mittens, and sleeps for up to 16 hours a day. He is also What’s Different in Canada’s newest cartoon and clothing collection! To follow his adventures, catch up with him here:
One of the vanishingly few benefits you get from living in the frozen North of Canada is that it’s simply too cold for a lot of pesky things. Valley fever? Too damn cold. Poisonous scorpions? Need to be kept above zero at all times, the losers. Subway-sized rats that can take out a schoolyard in less than fifteen minutes? Won’t get fifteen feet before a Dire Owl chucks them into the air to be flash-frozen in the troposphere.
This means that when you buy something especially sketchy from a warmer place, you don’t have to worry too much about disinfecting it. Just leave it outside for a night, and then shake it and watch a cascade of dead roaches fall out. Their pleading eyes (burst from ice forming inside their optic nerves) will look at you guiltily, yes, but it’s not your fault. It’s Mother Nature’s, and if you can’t hang with her, then get out of the kitchen. Or something like that.
Now, this phenomenon hasn’t always worked in my favour. Last summer, I was besieged by an infinite wall of pesky mosquitos. The eggs from these annoying little shitheads can somehow survive the worst of winter, and it’s boring and time-consuming to kill all of them manually, like our ancestors used to.
In a warmer region, these pests are purged by dragonflies the size of an Eaton’s and/or eaten by lizards that sneak into your house and live there, like pets but not. This is simply not possible here, but I foolishly believed I could import a small box of praying mantises sometime around May, when the permafrost covering my driveway just started to break up.
Praying mantises are, in theory, the ultimate badasses, peak predators of nature, invulnerable to anything that the world can throw at them. However, it turns out the shipping company also uses the same technique as me to disinfect packages, making my own efforts largely superfluous. When they got here, all that remained was a box of dead bugs. They didn’t stand a chance. Up here, prayers don’t get answered, because the moisture in your words freezes them solid and they smash to bits on the sidewalk.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #our home and cherished land #storytime #bugs #death tw? #unreality cw #that last line is a hell of a thing
You once said that Carrot Ironfoundersson as an anti-monarchist royal is the true essence of the Good King. Could you care to elaborate?
Well, I first elaborated on it here way back when I was a youngun, but I can do a short version here:
Carrot is, at a direct metaphysical level, the True King of Ankh-Morpork. He’s got the Magic Sword, he’s got the Prophecy, he’s got a Destiny that can literally bend reality around it.
And yet, he chooses not to become king, to permanently stop anyone who tries to make him (or anyone else) king, to literally bury the evidence of his birthright. Because “Mister Vimes wouldn’t like it,” and Carrot Ironfoundersson has imprinted on Sam Vimes as the Avatar of Justice (not law – he’s got the book for those – but justice) like a baby duck.
And what does Sam Vimes tell him about monarchy?
“But that’s not right, see? One man with the power of life and death.”
“But if he’s a good man—” Carrot began.
“What? What? OK. OK. Let’s believe he’s a good man. But his second-in-command—is he a good man too? You’d better hope so. Because he’s the supreme ruler, too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court…they’ve got to be good men. Because if just one of them’s a bad man the result is bribery and patronage.”
This only becomes clear when you extrapolate beyond Guards, Guards to Men At Arms, where it becomes clear that Carrot knows, that he’s willing to make use of it for the best interests of the city, but that he’s decided that Vetinari as Renaissance overlord is in the best interests of the city so long as Vetinari is occasionally willing to have polite chats over tea about Watch staffing issues.
Hence, anti-monarchism as the true essence of the Good King.
In my humble opinion, Discworld’s anti-monarchism is SEVERELY undercut by the development of Vetinari from “comically authoritarian dictatorautocrat OKAY FINE let’s call him Renaissance overlord” to “comically authoritarian autocrat who is somehow the best option, I mean he’s not a good man but he does have the best intentions for Ankh-Morpork, and besides he gets shit done, right? right?”
However, the above opinion is NOT informed by the sum total of Discworld books (I still haven’t read a bunch of them), so it’s entirely possible I’m off here. Honestly, I’d love to be proven wrong. And I don’t care about spoilers, so if anyone wants to argue, please go ahead and enlighten me.
Oh, I have so many thoughts on Vetinari (I wrote fanfic about them), so I hope I’m semi-coherent this early in the morning (it’s not early in the morning, it’s 3:30pm, but it’s the holidays).
The thing with Vetinari is that he is, in fact, a tyrant. An explicit one, who outright says so. And that is because Vetinari has a thesis and a project on governance. If a system has been autocratic for centuries, and the people under it believe in autocratic power, then to change that you do in fact need at least one last autocrat. Because he can change things, and no one can stop him, because he’s a tyrant and that’s pretty much the definition.
This shows up best in Night Watch, and Jingo, and a bit in the Moist Lipwig books. But if you take the Ankh Morpork books as a whole and watch what he does throughout the whole decades-long arc, you get a picture of his plan for the city.
Night Watch is particularly good because you get to see, through the marvels of time travel, what started him. The system he was coming from. The old Patricians and what they were like, and the endless cycle of revolution that just put new ones on the throne. The King Patrician is dead, long live the King Patrician. None of the engines of power around them were changed, so the Patrician himself could be good or bad or dire and all it would do is change the number who directly died of them, and not much else.
Then we get Vetinari. And we get to see what he does.
(Keep Reading because this got so long on me, I have Thoughts TM):
yesterday I was at gamestop and a man in full Data cosplay walked up to the front counter and I did a double take so hard I nearly broke my neck. So, he walks up and the cashier just casually smiles and goes “How’s it going, Data? What can I do for you?” and Data goes, “I am doing quite well. I was just wondering when you guys would have Destiny 2 in stock.” This mans……literally did not smile or emote at all. He went all in. The cashier was totally non fazed. I, however, was completely shitting my pants cos ya’ll DO NOT understand how good this dude’s cosplay was. It really looked like fuckin data teleported into the middle of game stop in rural ohio to ask about motherfucking destiny 2.
The only time he broke character was when I was stealthily trying to stare at him and thinking about asking for a pic when he was walking out.This dude. Looked at me, completely expressionless. and WINKED at me. Someone collect ya mans he wildin lmfao
The wink isn’t even really ooc I think he would totally do that
Tags:
#if this isn’t real it should be #make it so #Star Trek #TNG #cosplay #storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
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