Morgan isn’t the most organized person, and while her life remains mostly unaffected by this character trait, times of stress and planning can get rough. Now packing for a vacation with her friends, it’s up in the air whether Morgan will make her flight.
To stay on track, Morgan sets her morning alarm, but once she enters the dream world things go sideways fast. She’s soon greeted by the physical manifestations of the first and second time she hit the snooze button, and suddenly Morgan is in a race against time to wake herself up and get to the airport.
It turns out the fastest route is through a hardcore, bisexual dream about these gorgeous living clocks, which will leave Morgan anything but sleepy.
This erotic tale is 4,100 words of sizzling bisexual human on physical manifestation of hitting your snooze button threesome action.
—-
we all know this classic way maybe even third or fourth snooze. pleas enjoy new tingler BISEXUALLY POUNDED BY THE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF THE FIRST AND SECOND TIME I HIT MY SNOOZE BUTTON out now here or on true buckaroo patreon tier
In 2016, a series of legal attacks secretly funded by tech mogul Peter Thiel culminated in the high-profile bankruptcy liquidation of Gawker Media Group. The company’s surviving sites, including Deadspin, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, and Jalopnik, were eventually acquired in 2019 by private equity company Great Hill Partners, who rebranded the company as G/O Media and installed former Forbes executive Jim Spanfeller to run it. As CEO, Spanfeller lurched from one blunder to another, the most notorious being the implosion of the popular and wide-ranging sports site Deadspin. Editor in Chief Megan Greenwell resigned within months, after refusing management directives to “stick to sports,” despite the site’s popularity covering lots of other topics. Not long after, Deadspin’s entire staff of 20 would defect. (G/O Media is currently winding down, having sold all its media properties with the exception of The Root.)
I was right there alongside Greenwell during all of this, as the EIC at Jezebel, Deadspin’s sister site. We became close friends and confidants. It was tragic watching the demise of our formerly successful company. But after her departure—while I was trying unsuccessfully to protect Jezebel (and my mental health) from an inevitable collapse—Greenwell was using her funemployment to research the brilliant new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, detailing for posterity how a bunch of random finance bros are transforming the landscape of capital while destroying peoples’ lives in the process.
Bad Company follows the journey of four individuals in media, healthcare, retail, and housing, telling the stories of how their careers and their futures were affected after private equity got involved. It’s structured brilliantly—the kind of narrative investigative reporting that’s exceedingly hard to pull off, though I’m not surprised that someone as talented and as caring as Greenwell could do it. (Like any sports fan, though, she will give you shit for no reason.)
We spoke about her book in the backyard of a Brooklyn dive bar in June, the day before Bad Company’s release. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You took this huge topic and divided it into the journeys of four different characters. How did you decide to divvy it up like that?
There are two components: One is the braided strands of the four characters’ stories, and the other is the before, during and after, chronological breakdown of each. It was important to me to do it chronologically, because I think that critics get themselves into trouble when they attribute too much of the root causes to private equity alone, so telling the before story—like, “here is how these industries got into this mess”—was very important. And I also didn’t want to end on a “Wow, doesn’t this shit suck?” kind of note. I’m not an activist, I’m a reporter, so I did not want to go into prescriptive mode. Finding characters who did something interesting after the private equity downfall felt important to me.
I love a narrative, right? So the hardest and also the most important part of the reporting, to me, was finding four characters that readers would be super compelled by and, like, fall a little bit in love with them.
Writing about the numbers of it is very tantalizing, because they’re kind of shocking—ten times as many private equity-owned companies enter bankruptcy proceedings, for example, in comparison with other kinds of companies. So I understand why the 10,000-foot view is important. But I also think that kind of primer only gets you so far, yeah, and doesn’t really make an impact until it’s real people.
And you wrote it for real people, which I can tell because even I didn’t fully understand private equity until I read this.
I think about the target reader for this book as being exactly who I was when I started it—which was, I have some sense that private equity is very important, and that in a lot of cases, it’s very bad. And I could not tell you a single thing about what that means, right?
I was not gonna read a primer about private equity back then. But I do think people want to understand how private equity works. They just don’t want to be like, force-fed a lecture.
And so many of the people most affected are in the working class and the middle class. I also wonder if you think any part of your upbringing kind of helped you tell these stories in the way you did.
You know, I had never thought of that until you asked, but I think it’s absolutely true. For most of their careers, both my parents were kind of itinerant workers. My dad was a flooring installer, and my mom installed window capsules. They met at work at JCPenney, when they were both in the design department, back when that was a thing that JCPenney did. And so we were constantly moving when I was a kid, because, like, job opportunities were gonna be better in X place, or because the store where one or both of them were working shut down. From a very young age I was acclimated to the idea that jobs are precarious, and the powerful people in charge can take away your parents’ job at any time. You will then have to blow up your life and move and go to some new terrible school when all you want is to be with your old, cool friends.
JCPenney was later owned by private equity, and went into bankruptcy under private equity ownership. So before my dad died, when I was first starting to work on the proposal for this book, I got him reading all about JCPenney, and he was just like, livid. He really got a fire lit under him, having known nothing about private equity, until I started paying attention to this.
It seems to me that a lot more people in the U.S. are waking up to how this extreme economic and power imbalance is making all our lives so much more precarious. But the thing that I can’t really get my head around, though, is—what do these people want? Do they realize that there will be no wealth to extract if there are no willing workers?
I just don’t think the vast majority of them think past “This is good for our bottom line.”
A thing I really appreciate about Flaming Hydra is that I have done so many media interviews, and this is a question I’ve never been asked.
I felt like you would be thoughtful about it.
I feel like you’re opening my third eye to where I’ve never gone that deep before. I’m willing to commit to saying that money was a bad idea.
Great, we’re in agreement. Even though it’s focused, your book also feels like a history of this moment when these U.S. institutions are both crumbling and shifting ever-closer to oligarchy. So do you look at this and think, “Here I am, documenting this awful moment for future generations.”
Had the book come out five years ago, I’m not sure anybody would have read it. But these issues have now kind of crossed into the public consciousness in ways I didn’t anticipate. That’s not because I’m a genius. That’s because the world got more screwed over. You can trace this history of the development of the modern private equity system in the ’60s through the ’80s to the explosion in the last 10 years. And now we’re in this moment where it could actually just swallow everything.
Do you ever think about how that might connect to the bootstraps narrative? This idea that the U.S. is built on hard work, but they’ve created a system where you can work hard at three jobs and still not even make your rent.
I thought a lot about this in particular with Liz, and the story of her career at Toys “R” Us, because she’s from Alaska. The story of Alaska itself is bootstrapping. And by any reasonable definition, Liz bootstrapped. She grew up in poverty, in an abusive environment, had to raise her younger siblings, had to drop out of high school—she had the deck stacked against her, and she was sort of like All right, I’ll just do it anyway. And she did. She moved her family from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest and was supporting a husband and three children on a retail worker’s salary. Like, if anybody bootstrapped, she did.
But obviously, when we talk about what American bootstrapping is, we’re not talking about Liz. In the book I draw this parallel between Liz and Charles Lazarus, who founded Toys “R” Us: the bootstrapping myth was created about people like him. He too was born poor, served in World War II, and then, because of the GI Bill, he got a very, very low interest loan, both to buy a house in a fancy suburb of D.C. and to start a business. He was able to become a billionaire in the classic mold of the “American success story,” in part because these opportunities were given to him that were never available to Liz. The bootstrapping ideal is obviously bullshit.
Yeah, like Liz shouldn’t have had to bootstrap; people might focus on her resilience, but actually hers is a story about institutional failure.
All four of these stories are largely about the failure of society to take care of people. So the private equity story is almost like, layered on top of that, right? These companies are just taking advantage of the shitty circumstances and the lack of any sort of structural support for people.
The anger about this system increasingly unites normal people on both sides of the aisle. And I don’t know if you know this, but there are a lot of Republicans in Wyoming. I talked with a lot of Trump supporters, and the idea that they cannot get health care in their hometown, they’re all truly baffled by the idea that that would be a political issue. Honestly, that was maybe the most hopeful thing in the entire reporting process to me. Even they were able to agree that our healthcare system is so fundamentally broken that they can see that they’re being literally abandoned by for-profit companies and the government.
That gives me some optimism. Because if you can unite Roger from the book, who is like, a pretty progressive, 80-year-old Democrat, and all of these big-time Wyoming Trumpers, that indicates to me that change to this system will be possible at some point.
FLAMING HYDRA ROUNDTABLE PODCAST! Episode 11: The Ultimate Truth of Superman
It is the way of the world that Clark Kent must periodically stand in the dock before the nerds of the world to answer a single question: is Superman a fascist?
There are two schools of thought on this matter. The first is what we might call the Alan Moore School, most recently and bluntly summarized by Moorehimself in a 2022 interview on the latest Batman movie: “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batmanmovies,” he told Sam Leith at the Guardian. “Because that kind of infantilisation—that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities—that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” According to Moore, Superman was originally “very much a New Deal American,” but was then co-opted, just as “the early spiky, anarchic Mickey Mouse was very quickly modified into a suburbanite who wears short-sleeve shirts and has two nephews.”
It must be said that there is plenty of evidence for this reading when it comes to Superman’s appearances on film. The idea is wedded, more than a little uncomfortably, to the image of Superman as Christ: the alien Messiah sent by Father Jor-El to bring Kryptonian light to the benighted humans of earth, a moment born in 1978, in the cultural yellow sun of the most solemn and portentous sequences of Richard Donner’s first Superman film—think Marlon Brando impassively intoning, “For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you: my only son.” (Let whosoever sealeth his Action Comics in mylar never see them perish but have eternal life.)
The vision of Superman as Savior has continued ever since, with similarly tedious results, from Christopher Reeve’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (wherein He is crucified upon His cross of plutonium for our sins) to the wartime Christianity of Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel, in which Superman came to bring us not peace but a slow-motion, digitally color-denuded sword). We might diagram the straight line from Nietzsche’s theories about the “herd mentality” of Christianity as contrasted with his idealized Übermensch, to the long-apparent threads connecting fascist politics with American evangelicals, and ultimately degenerating into the AI memes of Donald Trump as David Coronswet’s Superman. But if I were the type of person inclined to pursue such analyses, I would not have spent my life reading Superman comics.
But let’s go back to Nietzsche. If it’s doubtful that Superman’s creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, ever read The Joyful Science, they certainly read the sci-fi pulp stories and novels it spawned: in his unpublished autobiography, Siegel copped to having been influenced by Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator, which told the story of a farm boy endowed with strength and speed beyond those of mortal men. Wylie’s superpowered protagonist followed a conventional pattern, attempting to aid, then rule, then separate himself from lesser humans in due course. Siegel and Shuster’s dry run at a character called Superman in 1933 took the same route, presenting a stock sci-fi tyrant who uses his powers to oppress society. When, a few months later, they reconceived their character for the comics by subverting the cliche, making Superman a defender of the weak instead of their oppressor, the Cleveland teenagers made their singular contribution to pop literature.
But if Siegel and Shuster swerved clear of Superman’s authoritarian tilt, they never really eradicated it, and Moore was far from the only reader to notice. Frank Miller, author of the seminal Batman book The Dark Knight, in 1986 described both Batman and Superman as having “fascistic impulses”: Batman because he embodied the vigilante drive to exert violence over societal outsiders; Superman because, in Miller’s words, “he’s the responsible, very obedient force, but he’s equally flawed because he’s serving a horrible president in disgusting, filthy wars abroad.”
In the same year Moore explored the ersatz Supermen of Miracleman and Watchmen, both of whom used their quasi-divine authority to remold society in their own image. Ironically, both had a tacit ally in the great antagonist of the 1950’s comics industry, crank psychologist and would-be social reformer Fredric Wertham, whose Seduction of the Innocent described Superman like this:
Actually, Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and ‘foreign-looking’ people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasy themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.
We may even start to wonder if the premise of Superman is uncomfortably linked to his identity as a literal alien immigrant, walking among us as a kind of Kryptonian Manchurian Candidate while refusing in his heart to fully integrate with his new society.
This, in fact, is the implication of the second-act twist of James Gunn’s new film, in which it is revealed that Superman’s birth parents on Krypton had in fact intended him to use humankind only as simple breeding stock until such time as a new breed of Kryptonians could dominate the planet; a seemingly deliberate parody of the most paranoid sci-fi version of Great Replacement gutter racism. Gunn resolves this conflict through a stock motif common in Superman stories since the ’80s: the hero’s true humanity is affirmed through his good parenting by aw-shucks salt of the earth rural Americans.
This is what the right-wing social media is getting at when they post things like, “Superman isn’t an immigrant. He is an orphan.” He is saved from the sin of foreignness by the ritual purification of a Republican upbringing. But this cuts both ways: if, like Moore’s Miracleman, Superman fully asserts his separateness, he is a menace; if he uses his power to bolster human authorities, he is a fascist. As usual, the immigrant is damned either way.
But I said that there were two schools of thought about Superman, and the second is what we can call the Jack Kirby School. Kirby, perhaps the preeminent progenitor of Marvel Comics, is not a creator associated strongly with Superman, but when he decamped for DC Comics in 1970, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen was the first comic to which he was assigned. In 1975, he penned an essay outlining his grand thesis of the superhero:
First Issue Special #5, DC Comics, 1975
This is the superhero, not as a messiah sent down by God, but as a golem raised up by humans themselves, created from the stuff of our unmet aspirations and unrealized hopes to take on a form all the more solid and powerful for being a fiction. Like the mythical golem, this figure becomes oppressive to the culture that created it if we allow it to be. Superman traps us in the preserved values that existed in the moment of his creation, unable to evolve and adapt to our changing questions, fears, and mores.
Kirby’s signature creation at DC was the Fourth World, a cycle of interconnected comic series telling the saga of a race of New Gods which would encapsulate the divine longings and heroic struggles of everyday readers as they existed in the 1970’s. For Kirby, superheroes, being a form of mythology, could act out the dramas of the 20th century just as Odin and YHWH had done in prior millennia. As Kirby told the fanzine Comic & Crypt in 1971:
That's what the GODS are. They are just representations of ourselves. At that time, you take a crummy Viking, remove the glamour, and what the heck was he? Some poor guy in bear skins, who never took a bath. He had a beard with lice in it and he says: "Look at me, I'm a really cruddy object." And I felt the same way. The GI's feel the same way sometimes when they're sitting in some hole but suddenly he says: "What the heck am I doing? What am I a symbol of?" And then he begins to idealize the version of all the bravery that goes into the fight. Maybe he begins to see himself as Thor and his captain as Odin. Then he sees what he's fighting for. He sees why he's in that hole, why he's in the dirt, why he's dressed in that stupid uniform…And the GODS are nothing more than that. They are making us see some value in us – and we have that value.
Kirby portrayed Superman as tragic, not because he was better than us, but because he had yet to succeed in making us better than him. One issue of Kirby’s Forever People begins with Clark Ken lamenting Superman’s otherness, in the manner of Moses awaiting freedom in Egypt: “Poor Superman,” he thinks to himself, looking down on the crowded street below. “Despite his powers, he is a minority of one in a teeming world of billions! A stranger in a strange land…What does Superman mean down there to you?”
The Forever People #1, DC Comics, 1971
(The Forever People #1, DC Comics, 1971)
Given the chance to leave Earth for an otherworldly “Supertown” – a city of gods where he can at last find a home among his own kind – Superman performs his ultimate heroic act by turning away:
The Forever People #1, DC Comics, 1971
Descending to earth, Superman returns his gaze to humanity once more: he will stay with us until we are ready for him to go. There will come a day when he needs to, of course, and we’ll be left alone. But it will only come when our own human ambitions have grown too great for the pulp fiction gods to whom we entrusted them. When we no longer seek a protector from violence, because we have ceased to inflict it. When the towers of Krypton look as quaint to us as a bottled city on a cabinet shelf. Then the orphan and the alien will lift off from the ground and fly upward toward the stars again; and he won’t be alone.
AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don't belong to any particular fandom (also known as "No Fandom" tags). This post will provide an overview of some of these upcoming changes.
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During this round of updates, we began a method which streamlines creation of new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic "No Fandom" tag announcements.
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On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees allowed the Republican Trump administration to gut the Education Department, a lawless ruling that laid bare the empty politics of the Roberts court.
The was no reasoning provided by the majority, and yet, with their action, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent for the Democratic appointees, the majority “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.”
When it’s a Republican president, at least.
On May 22, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, a Biden appointee, ruled that the Trump administration’s effort to “shut down” the Education Department was likely unconstitutional and illegal. The facts, as summed up by Joun in his 88-page opinion, are pretty simple:
As Joun explained of the mass reduction-in-force (RIF) efforts:
Specifically, in addition to violating the Administrative Procedure Act, Joun addressed how the actions are likely unconstitutional:
The Executive Order’s direction to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and location communities” goes directly against Congress’s intent in creating the Department to “supplement and complement the efforts of States, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States, the private sector, public and private educational institutions, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education.” … While it may be true that the President has the power to remove executive officers, … Defendants cite to no case that this power includes the power to dismantle Congressionally created departments and programs through mass terminations.
As such, he concluded, “These actions violate the separation of powers by violating the executive’s duties to take care to faithfully execute laws enacted by Congress, as well as its duties to expend funds that Congress has authorized it to appropriate.“ Accordingly, Joun issued the preliminary injunction.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request for a stay pending appeal, itself providing a 26-page, detailed explanation for its order. Chief Judge David Barron, an Obama appointee, concluded the ruling for the unanimous three-judge panel as such:
On Monday, the Supreme Court implicitly rejected both of those courts’ decisions, issuing a stay that will allow Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to destroy the federal agency.
This provided an answer to the question left with last week’s order allowing mass-RIF planning to continue across the government. Because last week’s order was — arguably — about executive power to set priorities, and not a ruling on whether specific implementation would be allowed, it remained possible that specific RIF implementation efforts might be blocked.
Not so, the Republican appointees on the court said Monday, blocking the two lower court rulings in this case as to an agency-specific RIF in a case “replete” with evidence of the Trump administration’s lawless intent “to effectively dismantle” the Education Department without congressional authorization.
Monday’s ruling would be offensive to the rule of law in any scenario, but for Chief Justice John Roberts, in particular, to do so in a case involving the Education Department, in particular, it is little more than the Chief Justice of the United States laughing in the face of Americans and the rule of law.
It was Roberts, two short years ago, who held that then-president Joe Biden’s administration overstepped when his education secretary interpreted the “waive or modify“ language in the HEROES Act to include forgiving student loans.
That, Roberts wrote for the court’s 6-3 majority, was not allowed. Here was Roberts on June 30, 2023:
Two years and two weeks after that ruling over the word “waive,” the Roberts court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead — on the shadow docket and with no reasoning — to “effectively dismantle” the Education Department, all of the laws to the contrary be damned.
As Sotomayor put it in dissent: “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.“
For today’s Supreme Court, that is a condemnation — not a statement of principle.
A court that does not follow such a simple truism is a court that is acknowledging its lawlessness.
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A contrast in essays
Two essays published on Sunday highlighted to me the vast difference in how people left of center are experiencing this moment.
In The New York Times, David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter, wrote about surfing with his Joe Rogan-listening, vaccine-opponent brother-in-law.
Litt wrote about “a sorting into belief camps“ — highlighting, in 2025, his brother-in-law’s refusal to get the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021 — in discussing intentional cutting of family ties.
“No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for,” Litt continued. “But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.”
After discussing how he and his brother-in-line reached a closer connection while surfing, he gave this bottom-line argument:
Our differences are meaningful, but allowing them to mean everything is part of how we ended up here. When we cut off contacts, or let algorithms sort us into warring factions, we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics. Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence.
Then there was Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote in The New Yorker about the night Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil joined Ramy Youssef on stage at New York City’s Beacon Theatre.
The subhed made clear where this essay would be taking us: “What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear.”
The reality that Litt’s essay ignored was front and center — in fact, was a point — of what Abdurraqib would be telling us
Abdurraqib wrote about the people who are being shunned — and worse — by the government. This is not a question about who is invited to a holiday gathering; it is a question of whether the gathering is even possible.
Abdurraqib’s prose is art, but the story he tells is of a simple moment — a moment that powerful people wanted never to happen — at “a sold-out [comedy] show at the Beacon Theatre, in New York.”
As Ramy Youssef took the stage on June 28, Abdurraqib wrote: “Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian activist just released from ICE detention, was in the front row. To his right sat his wife, Noor Abdalla. To his left, Zohran Mamdani,” who days earlier became the Democratic Party’s nominee to be the next mayor of New York City.
Abdurraqib continued:
It was a delight to catch a glimpse of Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed—his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.
Khalil and Mamdani, Abdurraqib wrote, hadn’t met before that night. As they settled into discussion, death threats — a familiar topic to all three of them — came up.
“After this, there was a brief silence among the three of us, a beat of shared recognition of the difficulties of staying alive,“ Abdurraqib wrote, continuing:
In the lull, I found myself considering distance again—the distance that exists between two Muslim men who are navigating two distinct victories that thrust upon them similar concerns. I thought about the distance between the people who want you dead and the people who want you gone, vanished through deportation or a more mundane form of silencing. There might not be as much distance between those two groups as we’d like there to be, especially if their members are loud, have power, and are unafraid to publicly fantasize about material violence.
The “sorting into belief camps” of which Litt wrote plays out far differently when actual detention camps are the place into which the government wishes to — and does — sort you.
For more than 100 days, Khalil had no choice as to his whereabouts, let alone as to whether he should go surfing with Stephen Miller. (Litt actually wrote about this, concluding that he would “decline” to go surfing with Miller.)
Some people are not choosing who to “banish” from family events. The Trump administration wants to banish them from America.
i think it’s really fun when a rly specific trope is super popular in one particular medium but in other ones it’s just totally unheard of. it’s the time knife. visual novel players are suuuuper used to death games but many others encountered them for the first time in squid games. the other day my mom showed me all excited the summary of a super original novel she found and it was about a girl who got reincarnated as the main character in her favorite fantasy book
Hi my name is Ozy'mandias, King of Kings and I have two vast and trunkless legs of stone and a frown and wrinkled lip and a lot of people tell me I look like the Younger Memnon (a/n if you don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m a statue but my visage is shattered and lies half sunk on the sand. I’m also a colossal wreck, and I stand in the desert of an antique land where I’ve been for a really long time (I’m ancient). I’m a lifeless thing (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly the passions the sculptor read and stamped on me, which yet survive. I love sculptors and I get all my expressions from there. For example today I was wearing a sneer of cold command and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was standing in the desert. The lone and level sands were boundless and bare, which I was very happy about. A lot of mighty looked upon my works and despaired. I put my middle finger up at them.
You owe it to yourself and your country to stick around past minute four of this song for the best Korean psychedelic freakout jam since… I’m not sure there is a number two in that category but if there is, this one’s better.
Kids Fun Fact Science Corner:Silica gel is totally fine to eat. “Eating silica gel shouldn’t make you sick. Most often, it’ll pass through your body and exit without any harmful effects to you.” Silica gel just wants to visit your digestive tract for a little while, but you’re not helping. Why is that, Leon?
And that dumb three year old grew up to be: Charlie Kirk. M. Night Shyamalan you’ve done it again. Your best work since the beach that makes you old, imo.
Remember the Beach That Makes You Old? 2021 was so weird. Sometimes I remember things from 2021 and it’s like “there was a beach… that makes you old? Was that real?” And then it turns out I wrote a whole post about it four years ago. I think I could make up anything and it would turn out there was a Tabs about it from 2021, like some kind of clown-ass lathe of heaven. A whole year where we all got our concussy slonked silly style.
Nonstandard and informal are not synonyms. Dialectal and informal are not synonyms. Regional and informal are not synonyms. You can speak formally even if you're speaking a nonstandard regional dialect.
Everybody needs to stop saying that dialect words are, ipso facto, informal.
I was sort of kitchen-assistanting for both of last week's cooking ventures, with scruloose doing most of the heavy lifting, but hey.
Last weekend we made this carnitas recipe that E.K. Johnston linked to (and she mentioned mango-lime salsa, which I hadn't had before but sounded good, so I bought some of that too, and liked it a lot), and it was really, really tasty. We got three meals out of it (and between that and a two-meal HelloFresh box, that pretty much covered last week's suppers).
Later in the week we roasted strawberries basically using this method (that recipe is also how I learned you can toast sugar, which I'd like to try sometime), but the only thing we added to the berries was sugar--specifically the summer fruit sugar blend from Silk Road Spices ("a delicious blend of maple and turbinado sugars with mint, ginger and freshly ground green cardamom"). This approach involves roasting the berries in a baking dish, while others do it by spreading them out in a single layer on baking sheets. I'd like to try it that way at some point too.
I also want to try slow roasting them at some point to compare the result.
It turns out that North & South (2004) is not soothing to watch whilst stitching; I am not interested in the 1850's generally, I am in no fit state to be entertained by the Industrial Revolution and labor unrest, and the cinematography is bleak. Richard Armitage's jawline does not make up for these flaws.
The Three Sisters plot has begun giving me peas! It is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between "immature snap pea" and "mature snow pea". I should probably give up this plot next year, as the fee is almost twice as much as the one near my apartment, and getting there & back is annoying, and the plot is weed central ....but the raspberry patch! I got sour and sweet cherries at the farmer's market, which of course means that I made cherry-pit whipped cream to go with the cherry galette; it is now corn and zucchini season, which is one of my favorite seasons; I miss having a grill so much. It is absolutely perfect grilling weather.
Somehow I have three community events at the same time tonight: a embroidery meetup, a constituent outreach meeting with my city councilor, and a meeting of the neighborhood association board. ::facepalm::
If the new Superman movie had included Súperman es Ilegal (lyrics in English and Spanish in video), even just a little bit, I might've felt all the whiners were justified in saying how woke it is. It's a charming movie with compelling performances, but "woke" is a serious overstatement by people who can't handle characters who aren't white dudes doing things.
This Ma and Pa Kent were my favorite iterations of themselves outside of comics, and I fully believed that this Clark would say, "Dang."
If you like your superheroes a little too clean-cut and a lot too earnest, you, too, may enjoy this flick.
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