unreality cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

You probably know someone who has checked out of the urban rat-race and gone to live on a farm. I mean, in the non-euphemism way. Your childhood dog’s not coming back, sorry. A lot of folks that I’ve worked with in the past have held various fantasies about just giving up on the entire “career” thing and living a more simple, disconnected life, ideally away from as many people as they can afford. They’re wrong. The real reason to live on a farm is that you get to buy more cool gear.

Sure, inside a city, you can get a little tiny lawn tractor, but it feels bourgeois and unnecessary. Who do you think you are that you can’t get by with a simple push mower instead? It gets you out of the house, doing a calming physical activity.

When you have half an acre, well, you gotta mow it somehow and you don’t have all day, so you can justify getting a full-on Lawnfucker 5000. The same goes for having a barn to work on shit in, a couple old pickup trucks dotting the yard. Maybe a ramshackle shed near the property line that mostly collapsed in 1975 but serves to keep the neighbours from taking a single step too far in your direction. And then there’s the tools. Chainsaws, bandsaws, tree saws… you need to cut a lot of stuff when you’re 30 minutes outside of the nearest city.

Not everyone can afford to quit their office job and move out to the boonies, however. This fantasy remains unattainable for far too many of my fellow citizens. That’s why I’ve bought a bunch of foreclosed rural property and turned it into Farmer-For-A-Day theme parks. Drive out with your family, and come try out the cool gear. Do you think your son is old enough to drive a grain thresher? Then he fucking is. There’s no cops around here, but you will have to sign this thorough series of insurance waivers first.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”Lawnfucker 5000”) #death tw #injury cw #unreality cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

Winter is always this horrific balance. On one hand, it’s too cold to wash a car. You’d have to be stupid to be out there in -20°C, running out of your house with a bucket of boiling water, trying to get to your panels before it instantly freezes solid just from touching the outside air. On the other hand, the city keeps putting road salt down like they own a dividend stake in the abstract concept of salt. You need to wash, and yet you can’t.

Now, I also know what you amateur scientists are going to say. “It can’t rust, it’s too cold for the endothermic reaction of iron oxidation to occur, you’re fine to wait to wash the car when it warms up.” Then it’ll be rusting! Do you also wait for your enemies to wake up before you stab them to death? Don’t answer that. Also, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that Mars is red because it’s made of rust, and it’s hard to get a lot colder than there, too.

Most “car people” just shrug their shoulders at this problem and buy a cheap winter beater. This vehicle is sacrificial, they say. It does not bother me that it is corroding away before my very eyes, because doing so prevents my nice Lexus from developing spots of rust as well. These people also must have a “parts kid,” just in case something happens to their firstborn, because every car is special and unique and deserves to be preserved. Plus, if they keep buying up and destroying all the $1000 rust buckets, then what am I going to drive?

Last week, I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself in possession of the answer. I would simply add a sacrificial coating to my vehicle, encasing it in an inch of bulletproof and saltproof epoxy. So far, this method has worked really well. The salt just slides right off it, and onto the car behind me. There’s just one downside: since the doors no longer open, I have to keep the window rolled down all the time so I can get in and out. You might think this is “cool,” like the Dukes of Hazzard, but Bo and Luke never had to deal with trying to get a pregnant raccoon out from the back seat of their Volare.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

togglesbloggle:

To: H.R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.  These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery.  But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.  They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.  In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.  In modern times, we do the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home.  Man’s search will not be denied.  But these men were the first, and they will remain foremost in our hearts.  For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT:

The President should phone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

———————————————

It’s a unique kind of pleasure to look back six or seven years in one’s social media history and discover that one’s younger self posted cool things, had neat opinions about unexpected subjects, and was genuinely the sort of person that one likes.  This was one of my favorite autoanthropological discoveries, although being reminded about Hildegard von Bingen was a close second.

Tags:

#moon #space #death tw #unreality cw #amnesia cw #(personally I find moments like that deeply disturbing) #(oh don’t get me wrong I enjoy re-reading my old posts) #(but while enjoyment is a large part of why I re-read old posts another part is to keep the memories fresh) #(I wish to *never* be surprised by them) #(your past self can only surprise you to the extent they aren’t part of you anymore) #(to me that’s something to mourn‚ not be delighted by) #(but anyway we’re not here for that we’re here for the alternate-universe speech)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

it’s not even subtle, as 2020 approaches my blog is full of these incredibly smug foreshadowing comments, real Pratchettarian bullshit like “don’t worry, a horrifying death is the last thing that will happen to you haha”

 

mitigatedchaos:

This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Argumate. You didn’t cause 2020 by posting, rather, you posted because 2020 would happen – it primed your brain for it.

Unfortunately this phenomenon tends only to happen in a way that can’t be used to act on the information effectively – partly because there are multiple possible futures, and the very effect of the information travelling backwards alters the future, even very minutely.

Ultimately the ability can be cultivated, but it’s really only useful for writing science fiction.

 

shieldfoss:

listen have you been committing chronofelonies again?

it’s cool you can tell me i’m not a time cop (:

 

shacklesburst:

that’s what you told us the last four loops and in each one you turned out to be a time cop :/

(see also)

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #time travel #unreality cw #covid19

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

glumshoe:

shoutout to the time the Maps app directed me to an abandoned sawmill on an isolated and very foggy mountain down a long winding road far from help in the Radio Quiet Zone while my gas was running low instead of the little motel on Route 66 I was trying to get to

good times

 

normal-horoscopes:

EVERY OTHER POST WITH THIS SHIT HOW HAVE YOU NOT BEEN STOLEN BY THE GENTRY OR EATEN BY A TALKING BIRD OR REPLACED WITH A DOPPELGANGER BY NOW

LIKE YEAH SOME PEOPLE ARE THIN BUT I SWEAR YOU ARE A SHEET OF METAPHYSICAL RICE PAPER

 

glumshoe:

I did but I got better

 

normal-horoscopes:

YOUR SIMULTANEOUS ATTRACTION OF AND COMPLETE RESISTANCE TO THE ARCANE IS LIKE WATCHING A CARTOON BABY WANDER INTO A CONSTRUCTION SITE ONLY TO NARROWLY AVOID SEVERAL CONVENIENTLY ARRANGED SETPIECES

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw #kidnapping cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

liliium:

almost-always-eventually-right:

one-time-i-dreamt:

I was drawing a bunch of pentagrams in my notebook during math class because I was bored and I think I drew 150 pentagrams in total before a devilish-looking guy wearing a red suit broke down the door of the classroom and yelled “wHAT the fUCK do you wANT?!”

this username escapes me every single time
16d5d4d947b8220ccf94d6b542126ef372539bef

i cant stop thinking about this post

Tags:

#dreams #demons #unreality cw #storytime #art #fanart #tbh I was completely willing to believe that this had happened #like not an *actual* demon #but if you drew like 150 pentagrams that gives a classmate time to notice #and quietly arrange a prank over some wireless communication method with an assistant

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

A comedian who’s billed as “politically incorrect” gets up on stage and does a twenty-minute bit about Florida’s constitutional monarchy.

 

prokopetz:

Their next performance is an extended monologue where they just wildly misunderstand the role and structure of the Supreme Court; at one point they seem to be under the impression that Chief Justice John Roberts is a werewolf.

 

prokopetz:

For an encore they deliver a lecture about the alleged political career of Ludwig van Beethoven, who they appear to regard as one of America’s Founding Fathers, in spite of his having been six years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

 

prokopetz:

(Partway through, the lecture drifts into a rant about the various historical inaccuracies of the stage musical Hamilton. The harshest condemnation is reserved for playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda’s decision to depict the title character’s infidelity as the turning point of his career, entirely omitting the far greater scandal that emerged when it was revealed that Hamilton had received uncredited lyrical assistance from Beethoven in his Congressional rap battles.)

(see also)

Tags:

#unreality cw #story ideas I will never write #home of the brave #politics cw? #puns #Hamilton