Branis posted:

sometimes I like to wear american flag boxers and watch JDAM videos, that way when I get a boner it's like i'm raising the flag. My own personal Iwo jima

14 BAR RIFF posted:

Perhaps not the best packaging decision.

trouser chili posted:

88h88 posted:

Is a bottle of pain just the straight route and a can of whoopass the scenic one?

I don't know what those are, but I expect they are filled with Popov vodka.

Subjunctive posted:

"For sale: baby scale, never calibrated."

quote:

If I saw a midget town and midget children were harmlessly hucking rocks at me with their awful 2-chamber peanut fingers, I'd Godzilla that motherfucker to the ground.

Enhydra lutris posted:

Cannabis no longer has a Qualitative Effect on me; I am using a Blend of Precise 50:50 Ratio (Half) Nimbin Red Rocket and Astrobella; I must perforate the Tolerance Ceiling; and explore a different Nectar; my Body is resistant to Altered States; which Species has the strongest Nectar (once distilled)? The Kangaroos eat my Saplings; they are a Pest

Enhydra lutris posted:

A Farm is necessary; the Cannabis Farmer lives Two Hundred and Twenty Kilometres (220) to the South East; in addition He Is A Prick; he has a Shanty in which his Children live; with the Dogs; Chickens; Turkey (?); he has a Southern Cross Flag in lieu of a screen door; the Property has a Smell of Rendered Fat and Petroleum. I can grow Cannabis In Peace; I control the Smell of my Property; I have a screen door. My Saplings are in a Surreptitious Bed; I purchased a Rusted Car Shell for Eighty Seven (87) Dollars; Pick Up Only; plus Reptile Aquarium (surplus to Needs); I severed the Roof with a Hand Saw; it is permeable to Light. I planted Six (6) Seeds; Four (4) developed into Seedlings; the Kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) ate them. My Question: does Tetrahydrocannibol remain psycho active following Digestion?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Enhydra lutris posted:

Why Am I Not Able To Attain Heights as previous

End Of Worlds posted:

Ola posted:

That's a short enough commute that he could trade up to this when it's in shops. or just get a bicycle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs

Phy posted:

The clock
Is a tyrant thing
And it makes
A buzzing ring
Bound
By time's demands
I drove to work with a ring of fans

Syd Midnight posted:

Chomp8645 posted:

The man trying to sneak into our base is an unstoppable mutant or an alien. There is no other explanation. I should be filled with primordial fear from this revelation but I am not.

We've shot him around a hundred times, but he lives. Every time he pops from behind the rock we light him up. He gets hit. I see the blood spatter and hear his grunts. But he spends just long enough to shoot one of us and then drop back down behind this tiny rock that I can scarcely believe covers his body. Then a few moments seconds later he comes up again. This process has repeated no less than ten times, and is still going on. Each time he is hit, and more blood splatters. The concrete behind him is soaked in what must be many gallons of blood. I can only imagine that underneath his camo he has strapped blood packs to his body from head to toe. This is an unbelievable amount of blood. He has taken no fewer than 85 bullet wounds, including several to the head, and he is unarmored. He cannot be human.

Each time he gets one of us. Our demise is certain. It is matter of time, nothing else. No force can stop this immortal being. But like Sisyphus and the rock I will excitedly shout "THERE HE IS" the next time he pops up, and fire my weapon as if it could be capable of damaging this monster. He is the unstoppable force. I will greet death smiling. There are only four of us left now.

Jenna, I love you.

Subjunctive posted:

If you're having enough booze before work to materially affect how quickly you bleed, you're probably better off calling in sick anyway.

Subjunctive posted:

True, but the post said "before work".

Aaron Burr posted:

Because the Republican party is full of rich dudes named "Fred" and whenever anybody mentions 'gay rights' the Freds think back to that spring afternoon in the Choate locker room when the freshman with the floppy hair and the blue eyes slipped a hand under the Freds' towel and gave the Freds a little smirk and said "just relax" and for just one minute everything was glorious and after that the Freds went on to jobs they hated and wives, ditto, and after twenty years they saw in the paper where the blue-eyed freshman was an ACLU attorney dying of AIDS who became free in all the ways the Freds couldn't and nothing, nothing, nothing pisses the Freds off like reminding them of that beautiful spring day at Choate.

Parrotine posted:

Someone sum up this Groverhaus thing for me, it sounds hilariously depressing. Not just the highlight reel, don't be afraid to devil in those details!

Hogge Wild posted:

posting that used to get you a ban

sweeperbravo posted:

I'll bite; what's this a reference to

This isn't an actual quote of Grover's, it's a really clever refernece to something else, right?

DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:

oh my god i would not be even slightly bothered if you all were slain by wolves

Facebook Aunt posted:

Dude has some strong opinions about Nissan.

Spiny Norman posted:

I was perusing My Documents the other day, looking specifically for a paper I did a semester ago. As usual, I found a graveyard of half-conceived ideas, stories I'd forgotten about, successful papers, failed papers, mediocre papers, and child pornography. No, wait, scratch that last part. However, while I was skimming through the bullshit, I noticed one file labeled simply "joshdig."

This confused me. What the gently caress was this? It sure didn't sound like a paper, and it sure didn't sound like a good name for a half-finished story.

My confusion was increased tenfold when I opened the file and began to read.

I have to explain what I think are the groggy circumstances of this composition. If memory serves (maybe?), I wrote this paper sometime around Christmas last year when I came down with a diabolical case of walking pnemonia. The dubious campus doctors prescribed several things that were supposed to fix it and didn't work, some things I don't think were meant for pnemonia but did work, and then finally something that worked. For example, they prescribed cough syrup with codine at first, and then amped it up to cough syrup with vicoden later.

gently caress if I've ever taken such drugs before. I had heard of them, of course, and had even had friends who mixed them with alcohol and even marijuana, but I wasn't willing to take a trip that might wind up with me losing every possible cavity's virginity I had, depending on how hard the trip was. I guess I'm just not hardcore.

I really don't remember much about how well the drugs worked, because those days are nothing but a mire of suffering and pain to me. Fundamentally, I don't know if they fixed anything, or if they were even prescribed for something.

I vaguely remember starting this paper. I think this was the first time I took the vicoden cough syrup, and I'm basing this on how the thing seems moderately plausible at first, and then degenerates into a stream of consciousness ride of utter madness and lunacy. Apparently I thought the idea of "burying" and "digging" as a hobby was downright hilarious. To be honest, isn't vicoden a sedative, so I should've been asleep by the end, and not a chimp with down syndrome?

Of course, maybe I just went literally insane for a while, and now I'm just blaming it on the drugs. Or maybe I was just plain drunk.

For the record, I wrote this when I was still in LAC, and I didn't get kicked out, I just stopped showing up. I only know Josh as a vague acquaintance, and haven't seen him in close to a year. He probably doesn't remember my name. I think he's an engineer or something, and he wouldn't even have anything to do with LAC, much less volunteer for it. Also, I'm pretty sure his hair isn't blonde, and since when are his forearms "rippling?"

And I did edit the misspelled words, grammar problems, and real names out of the thing. I think it makes it funnier, and also, there were surprisingly few. (!) But, no, his last name is not "Brewster," nor is mine actually "Norman." I should've made it something funny like "buttfuck," though.

I mean his name. Not mine.

Okay, whatever. Read at your own risk.

----------

In the Fall of 2004 I signed up for what was called the "Liberal Arts Committee," a collegiate organization of Liberal Arts students devoted to campus projects and school-wide events so that they can distract themselves from the fact that they have no useful skills to offer society whatsoever. Or at least, that was the pretense. At the time I was an idealistic young man who foolishly thought that, maybe, with the right effort, courage, and willingness to engage in devious acts on the most nefarious of levels, I would be able to maybe, just maybe, plant the seeds of my future into the fertile manure of college, and water it with daily with the fluid of dreams until it sprouted into the growth of promise, after which it would mature into leaves of success which could be smoked by the bong of retirement, and LAC seemed like just the lovely star to hitch my lovely wagon to. For you see, words like "committee" look good on a resume (or as the French call it, "the el resume"), and, if you follow Dungeons and Dragons rules, add + 4 to credibility and charisma. But then again, words like "liberal" and "arts" both subtract 3 points from reknown. But then you would be forgetting that the involvement the Liberal Arts Committee has with the Student Government adds a whopping +3 to all Universal Saving Throws. In the end, everything balances out, provided you have a respectable strength modifier and shower regularly.

Sadly, I was mistaken. LAC was not about engaging in campus events to distract ourselves from our painfully, painfully obivous worthlessness. Rather, it was a committee set up to talk about distracting ourselves from our worthlessness, and then make petty compromises about the most mundane and ridiculous of topics. Sometimes I wasn't even sure who people were arguing with. Sometimes they were arguing with themselves, making deals with their own self-worth, reducing such activites as fixing up homes for the elderly and poor to simply driving by the homes of the elderly and poor at a very high rate, and then maybe donating some petty cash to a small and dysfunctional charity, such as Debtor's Anonymous or The Molested Parrot Shelter of Greater Ohio, which would also be a pretty good band name.

Now, I am not an idealist, even though I just told you I was. That was a bold-faced lie. I also told you I was "young" and a "man," and I think I might've said thrown something in there about being the Herald of the Rapture, too. But, regardless, the truth is, I am not a determined, idealistic person. No, these here hands have spilled blood in every state from Colorado to Connecticut; sometimes my own, sometimes other people's, sometimes a mix of the two in what the Eutaw, Alabama Daily Times called "easily the most repulsive Easter Sunday in American history." But, still, I would much rather do something than just sit on my rear end talking about how I should be doing something, or sit on my rear end talking about how I am sitting on my rear end and scheduling later hours to come in and sit on my rear end and talk about doing something, which was usually the case. But that was exactly what we did all day, or at least what we were supposed to be doing. I mainly sat in the back of the room drawing pictures of monkeys in cowboy hats engaging priates in ruthless knife fights. If there's one thing those pictures taught me, it's never to trust a monkey who's skilled with a knife. Or a pirate. They truly are the scum of the earth. Also, cowboy hats are funny, especially if you add a jaunty feather.

So, towards the end of the Fall semester, I was disillusioned with the promise of success LAC had promised me. The whole thing just didn't look right to me anymore. Maybe it was the squabbling. Maybe it was the disorganization. Maybe it was the fact that I had gone legally blind from drinking too much. But either way, I would not stay. And, given the choice between either quitting or staying in for the long haul and trying to change LAC for the better, I chose option C, which was Going Down in Flames and being kicked out. I thought this was a great idea, namely because I'm too much of a coward to tell people I hate them, but never not enough of a jackass to miss out on inspiring their hatred and contempt on a massive scale. You might say that there's some flaw in that logic, or that there's just something gramatically wrong with that sentence, but then again you might also say that gravity doesn't exist and the force we perceive is just millions of invisible hands holding us down on the face of the earth every hour of every day. But if you said that, you'd be an idiot, and people probably wouldn't want to give you a home loan or something. I rest my case.

So when it came down to me to participate in interviewing new volunteers for LAC, the opportunity seemed too fat and plump to pass up, like a Wendy's or a Taco Cabana, but not like an Arby's because their roast beef is weird and they charge too much for their other sandwiches. They scheduled me to meet a Josh Brewster in one of the conference rooms in the Student Services Building. The board was set, and the pieces were moving, and there was nothing to fear but fear itself, and something about an iron curtian and drinking tea with glass in it.

"Dress nice," they said. "Act friendly. Ask personal questions. Get to know them."

Following the Geroge Costanza method of success, I showed up wearing a gin-soaked KISS ME I'M SHITFACED T-shirt and a pair of jeans a family of possums had recently vacated when conditions had become too awful for their lofty standard of living. I also stole my friend's sports coat at the last minute, just to class things up, but being that he was a giant fat guy it looked like I was wearing a very sombre circus tent. I figured that would add the perfect je ne sais quoi (German for "shattered feces") for the meeting. I took the volunteer dossier with me, along with plenty of crayons and a sharpie so I could draw a face on my hand and perform a puppet routine in front of the bathroom mirror should the whimsy take me.

As I waited, I read over the form this "Josh Brewster" had filled out. I immediately noticed the lack of headshots, and I noted this by writing "PIX PLZ" on the top of dossier and drawing arrows randomly pointing all over the paper indicating places where said pictures could conceivably go. I decided to rectify the situation myself, and made sketches of what I considered Josh Brewster might look like.

When he showed up, he immediately lost points for refusing to conform to the standards I set. Not only was he not 90 feet tall, but he also lacked the required scales, prosthetic limbs, and the ablitity to spew rich, creamy Hershey's chocolate. Instead, he was a tall, scrawny kid with golden curls, rippling forearms, and eyes you could get lost in for hours. Unstatisfactory.

"JOSH: 0," I wrote. "NORMAN: A BILLION."

"Come in," I said.

He smiled at me. What a fag.

"Are you Josh?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

Too trusting.

"Take a seat," I said. As he did so I wrote "ICHIRO SUZUKI SUCKS BALLS" in the "date" portion of the dossier.

I glanced up.

"Are you sure you want that chair?" I asked.

He blinked and smile a little. "What?" he asked.

I looked at him for a moment, letting the silence slowly pregnante, and then smiled coldly, like the smile you give a lover just as you're leaving after sex, because you know you're going to take all the pizza with you on the way out the door and then not call.

"Nothing," I said. "It's nothing."

"I WOULD LIKE SOME PIZZA," I wrote in the "major" portion.

"Is that your shirt?" I asked him.

"Um," he said. "Yes."

I smiled and nodded sagely. "Good. Cool. All right." I stared at him for a moment, letting it go on just a little too long. I counted his blinks. There were seven.

"I tell you what, Josh," I said. "Can I call you 'Josh,' Josh?"

"Uh-"

"You seem like a straight shooter, Josh, so I'm gonna shoot straight at you."

"Okay," he said.

"Great," I said. "You look like a digger," I said. "Do you dig a lot, Josh?"

"What?" he said.

"You've got digger's shoulders, right there. Well-toned triceps and meaty deltoids, yessir, that's digger's shoulders. We have a lot of need for a man who can bury things around here. I'll be honest, the last four didn't cut it. They couldn't bury a dead cat, let alone a live one. I know, I followed them around for days in my van. They don't dig for pleasure or for sport. They don't even own their own shovel. Not even a pickaxe. You know, you can tell a lot about a man by the way he buries something, Josh. It's a crucial thing."

I leaned back in my chair and took out a highlighter. I cracked it open, removed the ink filter, and proceeded to smoke it like a cigarette. It might've looked odd to old Josh, what with how my face was dripping with pink ink, but I was deep in the heart of Flavor Country, headed for the local Flavor Saloon and then, more than likely, the Flavor Brothel to nail some Flavor Whores in their Flavor Asses, and then I'd probably try and skip out paying them the Flavor Money, which is pink, like everything else is there, and on the one Flavor Dollar bill is a picture of a woodpecker, but I don't know why. Josh wouldn't understand, what with his snooty, lack-of-chocolate-spewing attitude.

"Yeah," I went on. "Every once in a while a man has to go out in the woods and bury something. Sometimes a man buries a thing, sometimes a thing buries a man. Sometimes you're the thing, and sometimes you're the man, and I suppose sometimes you're the shovel, if the digger had managed to fashion a crude shovel of some sort out of your bones. It's the circle of life, that's what it is, Josh. I suppose if you were really determined you could 'bury' your way out of the hole the thing buried you in, but wouldn't that just be digging, Josh?"

"Uh-"

"Yes, yes it would, Josh. And I will not tolerate digging here. That's one thing we have to get clear. I will not. Tolerate. Digging," I said, forcefully tapping the desk with each word.

"Didn't you just ask me-"

"No," I said. "I don't ask. I never ask. Instead, I 'put a question to you.' There's a difference. One's more aggressive. For example, what's the difference between me saying, 'I want to put the wood to you' and 'I'd like to ask you to gently caress me?' The difference, Josh, is that one doesn't translate well into Welsh, while the other is downright delightful. That's the difference, Josh, and that's what makes LAC different. You have to think outside the box, think about the tone of questions. Always think outside the box, Josh, especially if you're burying it, because the dirt's what's outside the box. Just you and the dirt and the shovel. Also, you probably don't want to look inside the box, because more than likely you were told specifically not to, and it's probably all freaky and crazy anyway. And if you do, then what do you do when that big fat Hawaiian guy finds out and comes after you by the side of the road with a beretta?"

Josh stared at me so hard I thought his eyes were going to fall out. If that happened I was going to jump over the desk and punch him right in the face, because there's no better time to punch a guy than when he's got no eyes. He won't see it coming, unless his eyes are still capable of relaying thoughts to his head even when they're separated, like they're little wireless cameras or walkie talkies or something, and that's just plain nuts.

"I'll tell you what you do, Josh," I said, "You lead him into the woods with a series of deceptive bird calls and then you wait for dark, and then you kill him with a shovel. Then you've got two things to bury, Josh. All because you wanted to look inside the box. And what did looking inside the box get you, Josh? Did knowing that that Hawaiian guy wanted to bury a severed clown's head make you a better person? Huh, did it, Josh? I don't think so. Not at all. Now, I'm not saying I have a problem with clowns, Josh. I love clowns. Do you love clowns?"

"gently caress, yes," Josh said. I noticed he was breathing hard and quivering slightly. "I love clowns."

"Hmm," I said, and wrote, "M-O-O-N, THAT SPELLS EAT poo poo" in the line that read "applicant's signature"

"I love clowns," I went on when I was done. "I love them to death. Not physically, mind you. I don't care for the greasepaint. No, I love them for the entertainment. I just think they should get taxed more than regular folk, because they terrify children, and dammit, that's my area of expertise. I don't see why they should get paid to terrify children and I shouldn't. Why, if I had my way, I would lead them all out into the woods at night with a series of deceptive bird calls and them kill them one by one, BANG!" I said, hitting the table with my fist. "RIGHT IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD!". I'm fairly certain that at that moment Josh poo poo his pants. If he didn't then, he sure did later. I demonstrated the edge and angle of the shovel with a chop of my hand. "Not a lot of people can take a shovel in the back of the head, Josh. You think a clown might be able to, what with all the big curly red hair, but that's no cushion. Maybe it would be, if the hair was made out of steel wool, but who would want that? The hair would scatch up the other clown's crotches when they sat on each other's shoulders! And that's just awful, isn't it, Josh?"

"Yes," Josh said, but his voice was very hoarse.

"Do you think you can take a shovel to the back of the head, Josh? Because I can guarantee you can't. I've had people bet me they can take a shovel to the back of the head, but they never can. They never bet me with 'words,' so to speak, but they bet me with actions. By, say, cutting me off as they merge onto the highway, or being female and fairly attractive and not giving me any attention. It's the abstracts that matter, JoshShovel. It's the abstracts that matter in life, and it's the abstracts that matter here at LAC. At least I think they matter, but to be honest, I'm not sure what LAC does. When I joined I thought it was a lifeguard training organization, or maybe an elite Burying Things Organization, but instead all they do is get all red when I yell and then they ask me to leave. I think I was supposed to ask you some questions here, Josh, so I guess I better get down to that. First off, where do you live, and how many windows does it have that are accessible from the street?"

But when I looked up, Josh was long gone. All that was visible of him was his non-scaly backside fleeing into the neon corridors, running at a full sprint. That was a shame, because I wanted him to watch my puppet show. I would've even paid him in Flavor Dollars.

Within two weeks, Josh was safely concealed in a police safehouse, and I was dead.

----

What the gently caress. I think we can all consider ourselves lucky, because parts of the thing suggest that I planned to go on much longer.

Olaf The Stout posted:

I'm partial to this part earlier also:

I leaned back in my chair and took out a highlighter. I cracked it open, removed the ink filter, and proceeded to smoke it like a cigarette. It might've looked odd to old Josh, what with how my face was dripping with pink ink, but I was deep in the heart of Flavor Country, headed for the local Flavor Saloon and then, more than likely, the Flavor Brothel to nail some Flavor Whores in their Flavor Asses, and then I'd probably try and skip out paying them the Flavor Money, which is pink, like everything else is there, and on the one Flavor Dollar bill is a picture of a woodpecker, but I don't know why. Josh wouldn't understand, what with his snooty, lack-of-chocolate-spewing attitude.

HaB posted:

request:

looking for the quote from the sick goon who is making Chicken and Rice Congee.

Anyone?

Noni posted:

I got really sick this past month and ended up eating a lot of crock-pot congee. I haven't seen a single word on congee in this thread, but the next time any of you are ill, I highly suggest it.

If someone needs a recipe, the basic one goes something like this:

Ingredients needed:
-Rice
-Salt
-Chicken or another broth. If you have duck broth, use that. Ducks are well known for their brothiness.

Optional ingredients, for when you aren't sick:
-Shredded meat, be it duck, pork, chicken, or "meat"
-Eggs
-Peanuts
-Ginger
-Shiitake mushrooms
-Green onions
-Sesame oil
-Oyster sauce
-Fish sauce
-Pepper sauce
-Soy sauce
-Picked vegetables
-Duck eggs or century eggs
-There are probably 100 other possible congee additions

Instructions:
1. Painfully wake up in your sweat-ridden bed and belch forth a solid three minutes of profanity against an impotent but vengeful god who hasn't yet been able to sack up enough juices to kill you. Your gravelly cries should be punctuated by deep, phlegmy coughs.
2. Now that you're sitting upright, it's time for the ritual clearing of holes in your head. Your idiot doctor wants a good post-sleep sputum sample. gently caress him and that "I'm not giving you antibiotics yet because I still think it's viral" crap. He might change his mind when you fill up this mayonnaise jar full of nickelodeonesque green slime and chuck it through his clinic window with a note wrapped around it: "Mostly from left lung. Right to follow."
3. Decide you should probably try to eat something.
4. Go to kitchen wearing blanket from bed. Shakily collapse on the stairs during the journey. Sit and think about how stupid stairs really are and how, now that you see them up close, you really need to vacuum them more. God drat this illness has made your IQ drop like a stone.
5. Dry heave.
6. Get to the kitchen and eat something random.
7. Wet heave.
8. As you sit on the floor in front of your toilet, ponder about eating a gentler food.
9. Look at yourself in bathroom mirror. Jesus christ. Just look at yourself. Is that thrush on your tongue? Dear god, what the hell is wrong with you. If you tossed some glitter on your face and called yourself Edward, you could easily be chest-deep in fat girl blowjobs right now.
10. In a feverish daydream where beautiful, scantily-clad women are ladling some kind of food to you, remember congee.
11. Fill a crock-pot with rice and broth (or, gently caress it, water) at a ratio of about 1:10. If you weren't sick, you'd probably add some shredded duck, pork, or chicken. Then maybe you'd add some ginger and shiitakes. You might add eggs towards the end of cooking. That's right. Eggs cooked into congee may be the only way that you'd be able to keep down any protein. Salt that poo poo. gently caress it, add MSG too. MSG never hurt a goddamn person.
12. Go back to your bedroom. Take a random smattering of the roulette-like series of medications that have been suggested, prescribed, or concocted for you over the past weeks.
13. Because light makes your head throb in and out like it's the final boss from Contra, relegate yourself to listening to a few hours of lovely, soft-voiced audiobooks on low volume.
14. When you hear the earth-shaking bass once again from your neighbor's car stereo, run outside with your pale, green skin and puke-covered robe and tell the knuckle-dragger that if he doesn't turn the stereo off, you're going to spit in his mouth, then rub vomit all over his car and poo poo diarrhea onto anything he might touch in order to ensure that he contracts this same illness. Surely, that's what you meant to say in your head, but what he and his buddies hear are the incoherent, hoarse, frog-like ramblings of a hacking madman.
15. Back inside, realize that you forgot to turn on the crock pot. Go back to step 9. Then have a serious, child-like fit. Collapse in the corner of the kitchen floor as a spent, husk of a man.
16. Reflect on your newfound, near-unemployment because you work in a building chock-full of cancer patients, which means no work until you're fully healthy.
17. Check your phone messages. Skip the messages from people who jokingly ask if you're still alive. Wonder what your doctor's nurse means when she says you should come back in at your earliest convenience.
18. Go lay in bed and contemplate if this is when you're meant to die. Drift off to yet another session of vivid, sweaty, nightmare-ridden sleep. Even in your nightmares you are somehow ill and broken. You don't even try to fight the the evil puppetmaster scientist as he puts your brain into the body of a dog and makes you watch as he sodomizes your vacant human carcass. Then you sit in a dog pound waiting to be euthanized, but all that anyone hears of you trying to speak are barks, and you don't even care to bark anymore. Even the old nightmare that you've had since you where 5 years old is ineffective. This is the one where you are shrunk to an inch of height and forgotten. Your tiny dream self just lays down and readies himself to die, not even attempting to attract the attention of the giant friends and family who tower above.
19. Awaken and go eat congee. Soy sauce is probably the only thing you'll be able to add and stomach.
20. Go back to bed with a belly full of lovely congee, which you're surprisingly not throwing up. Listen to more audiobooks, and then again drift off to sleep.
21. Wake up in the hospital. Be given a stern reprimand from doctors and nurses, as if you purposely brought this poo poo on yourself because you have a fetish for potassium drips and rear end-less gowns.
22. Hear, in so many guarded, doctorese words, that your physician hosed up. Oh well, at least now you practically have a six-pack from the coughing-based ab workout.
23. When you get to go home, make and eat lots more congee. Now that you have full-on ciprofloxacin-assisted thrush, it's pretty much the only thing that you can eat without pain.

Anyway, congee is pretty good poo poo.

U.T. Raptor posted:

InitialDave posted:

Seems like the thread to espouse my Tea Bag Engine Theory.

Now, y'all must've encountered teabags. Even those of you in the regions where "tea" is something you drink cold and sweet while contemplating how good your sister looks in those Daisy Dukes. I ain't judging (you're not wrong, she's nice), I'm just saying.

Anyway, teabags. They were invented by accident. Or "on accident" if you will insist (gently caress off back to English class). Well, anyhow. What's pertinent to this story is a chap named Thomas Sullivan. He's from New York, but we won't hold that against him. Y'see, Mr Sullivan, he recognised that when shipping relatively small quantities of tea, it being a light product, packaging was a waste of money. But you have what is effectively a premium product, and cutting down on packaging has to be done without seeming cheap.

So the solution is a light package in a classy (really classy, not "girl ordering a Babycham at a Newcastle bar in 1972" classy) material. That material? Well, what else, it's got to be silk. Ship those tea leaves out in little silk bags, and the people used to small wooden boxes won't think you're a bit of a peasant, but you still save on the shipping.

Now, you don't want to insult your customers, so we'll leave it as read that it's understood that the packaging is, well, packaging. That's a good idea, y'know, don't want to be seen to be talking down to people. Unfortunately, it wasn't "understood", and people just dunked those silk bags into hot water to release the brew held captive within. Over time, people realised that even the silk was unnecessary overengineering, and paper would last just fine for the duration of the dirty deed of dunking (that's what us big boys call "alliteration").

Which leads to InitialDave's Tea Bag Theory of Italian Automobiles.

You're really buying a beautifully engineered, premium engine. Everything else is just packaging to help you get it home, and will probably start to disintegrate when exposed to moisture.

Spanish Manlove posted:

I call bullshit on goons not being able to immediately recognize food.

mind the walrus posted:

Does anyone have that quote about some libertarian getting up in the morning and using a bunch of public utilities before going online to post about how awful and incompetent the government is?

And the companion piece about the libertarian paradise where a guy wakes up and basically runs his house like a warlord while paying for literally everything?

buddhanc posted:

i sat in my living room sipping my cup of chicory and looking out my window and pondering my choices. overhead flocks of ghang gliders soared through the soot, taking advantage of the unregulated skies to make their morning commute. i shifted, somewhat uncomfrtable. i needed to make a decision soon, before my neighbor rumbled out of his driveway in his abrams tank and the vibrations from the tearing of pavement made the decision for me

i read through the billboards on the sidewalk again. joe's sewage: faster than anyone! poo poo-b-gon [as i read the name i silently thanked z0r for the death of the nannu state and the freedom to curse in public]: no clogs! there were five others that i passed over, but i knew, that morning, i was a poo poo-b-gon man. i trotted outside and grabbed the sewage hose that sat dribbling on my lawn. where was the nearest linkup station? i jogged down the street, briefly warming my face on the fire from my neighbor's house, before i tripped on a stray corpse and fell face first onto the sidewalk. as i pushed myself up and wiped the blood [not mine ] from my hands, i saw the linkup station. after paying my thirty dollar day-fee [a small price to pay for fredom] and jogging the mile back to my house, i was soon happily doing my business. like a free man

i jammed my foot on the gas and grinned as my engine roared. it was free of catalytic converters and other emasculating controls, and at last, was the robust and mighty machine i had always known it could be. i flipped my sunglasses open and jammed them over my eyes and the cloud of black smoke behind me was witness to the power of my works. ther umble of gravel beneath me was like glorious harmony to the howl of the engine. for nearly fifteen seconds i was grinning like a maniac as the car jolted and crunched down the crumbling street. of course , i had to slow and toss my tiny cube of gold into the toll box, and wait for my neighbor to wave me past, but soon i was back to full speed, living life as free as the birds used to do before we shot them all.

i downshifted into third as i caught side of an unfamiliar barricade ahead. smoke rose in a plume behind the stacked wood and bodies. as i came to a stop a man with a cigar gritted in his teeth and a shirt soaked red and cracked sunglasses waved me to roll down my window.

"what seems to be the problem?"

"new repairs on this stretch. going to need double tolls till weve got it fixed"

i grimaced as i searched around my glove box for an extra cube. at this rate id never make the public hanging...


i run into the center of bear-baiting ring. my stomach churns as i face the beast. howls and cries from the crowd wash over me like hypodermic needles at the beach. i feint left b ut as i push off the blood-soaked earth my foot explodes throgh the my shoddily-constructed shoe. with a silent curse for whatever nameless ten-year-old sewed it i kick it off and dash to the right. thank z0r i always ccw, i think to myself as i air-somersault past the bear. the crowd of mercenaries roar at the sight of my acrobatics.

if i can win the crowd then perhaps the king of this stretch of road will let me go...good thing i have an ace up my sleeve.

make that two, i think as i pull out my twin desert eagles, locked and loaded with the finest hollow-tip bullets that our local toy/gun store carry. the recoil from both firing at once knock me back against the blood-drenched wall of the arena but i keep firing at the bear.

as it finally staggers back and crashes to the ground i air somersault forward again and kneel, crossing my arms in front of my chest and holding my guns against my shoulders and feeling the cheers of the crowd wash over me. i have won my freedom. i let only the briefest pity for the less skillful travelers wash over me, but content myself with the thought of penning a scathing letter against these mercenaries tonight. then i grin. score one for the market, motherfucker


shoeless and gasping i run down the road toward the city, dodging shards of glass and the bones of long dead children. i had paid the last toll with my car itself. once the consortium has purchased enough of sick and dying bodies from the local hospital to grind into cement, we'll have our new roads [or so the ads promise], but it's too late for my car.

i hear a faint stirring in the underbrush that stretches out toward the asphalt. with all the nimbleness of an unregulated manufacturer responding to demand, i do a three-quarters cartwheel while simultaneously firing ten shots from my dual DEs. i chuckle at the crashing and groaning from the brush in the silence after my deafening barrage. oen step closer to that new road.

i take off running again. by three p.m. i'm at the office. as i approach the elevators there's a deafening crash and smoke comes from behind the elevator doors. i note the name of the manufacturer and use my bleeding feet to write a message of warning on the floor of the hall. i ignore the moans and take the stairs to my office.

my manager scuttles toward me as i enter. "eight hours late? you're fired. and you can be sure no other company will hire your scummy rear end in the future"

my left eye twitches as i calmly respond. "you forgot one thing."

"what's that?"

"there's only one monopoly we don't tolerate. a monopoly of force." i backflip as i pull out my DEs and start firing. the screams of the dying fill the air like mercury. this is one market that just got regulated.

before i leave the office, i loot the bodies of my dead coworkers, murdered by my hand, like an irs employee mailing a 1040. i leave the office a tomb; a blood offering to the hungry god i worship now. stepping back into the stairwell is like stepping through a looking glass. i am wearing shoes ripped from the dead feet of my former boss. call it an audit.

with a ninja's grace i leap from stair to stair as i exit the building. light bulbs flicker and dim; the local smallpox epidemic is two weeks old and they've almost run out of bodies to burn for power. they're talking about charging customers one child per year as fuel. some people were upset about it but at least the government isn't behind it.

my shoulders are heaving as i crash through doors into the lobby. a pack of wolves lurk around the receptionist's desk. night is almost here. they begin to howl as i jog outside into the gathering darkness

i check my watch—6 oclock. I had meant to run a few errands before going home. Just one, actually. I run down the street until i see a dimly-lit verizon store. the salesman doesn't even blink an eye when i enter, dripping blood and gore, desert eagles jammed in my waist. then i pull out my guns and point them in his face.

he blinks.

"i paid 5 bucks more last month, you know?" i growl between gritted teeth
"so?" he says
i put the guns back in my waist. the salesman exhales in relief

then i kneel and draw my katana. with one smooth motion i behead the clerk.

"i wish to file a complaint," i say, as gouts of arterial blood spray paint the ceiling.

at last i'm home. i recline back in my babyskin chair and swirl some orange juice in a mug. as i bring the mug up to my limits i feel a sudden pain in my lip. i fish around in the juice and pull out a shard of glass. rolling my eyes i toss it on the pile in the corner.

my pet tiger pads into the room. not for the first time i offer a silent thanks that no gang of criminals can tell me not to keep it. then i see the blood dripping from its jaws.

i curse as i ease out of my chair and walk into the next room, following the blood. the corpse of my neighbor's son is still warm on the floor of the kitchen. i turn on the alarm system and set up the house defenses just in time for the doorbell to ring.

I look out my front window; my neighbor is carrying a shotgun and has a crazed look on his face. I call out:

"What do you want?"

"I want that damned tiger."

"No."

"GIVE ME THE TIGER."

"Come and get him."

My neighbor shudders as he considers his options: 1) wait to ambush me later, 2) attack now, 3) write a scathing letter and mail it to all our neighbors. He cocks his shotgun and fires it at the door.

My defense system activates. With fury and power that would warm the heart of a Blackwater soldier it reduces my neighbor to ash. As the whir of the chainguns slows i walk back to my babyskin chair. it feels soft. it feels warm. it feels like freedom.

alarms wake me from my slumber. not my house; the neighborhood coop alarms are ringing. i listen to the sound. next to me my slave girl stirs. i casually backhand her across the mouth to keep her quiet. three horns followed by a low ringing—possible outsider invasion.

i check to see that her chains are secure then lower myself out of bed. a low whistel summons my tiger. i press a button next to my bed; a slave child scurries in. i order him to bring me my katana.

wrapped in my robe and with my sword strapped across my back i slip outside into the ringing night. the noises are coming from the south. i see a neighbor across the street slap his wife in the face as she begs him not to leave and i thank z0r no slave has tempted me.

the light from torches flicker in the distance at the watch point. there are already several neighbors gathered in a circle. i can hear a low muttering but i cannot see what they have surrounded

i reach the outside of the circle with my tiger at my side. it carelessly bites one of the men in the circle on the leg. he falls to ground and i take his place and see...

it is worse than i had feared...a face as dark and soulless as the night sky looks up at me. tears stream down his face. i shudder at the thought of more of them...out in the darkness...i lope away from the circel and call my tiger to my side. tonight...we hunt


i see the fear in their eyes as i approach the campfire. i wear a chain of tiny ears around my neck and my face is spattered with blood. i grip the head of my enemy in my right hand.

ashen-faced, my neighbor asks me of the forces in the darkness

"it's a group seeking medicine for sick children," i reply. "it was." i suppress a giggle. i toss the little head into the middle of the circle.

"are you ok?" one asks

the others mumble, afraid to look me in the eyes

i look him in the eyes. he twitches. i say

"sanity is like a rule. a regulation. i am free."

i heft my katana in my right hand, then bring it to his neck

"will you question me, or will you do as i say."

it is not a question.

"a man chooses" i say.

they kneel before me. alarms wail in the distance. i see the earth soaked in a tide of blood. i finger the necklace of ears like a rosary.

"we are strong," i say. "together we are free".

they murmur in assent. one man remains quiet. i remove his head, then hand it to one of my followers.

"we are free. put it on a stake, to warn those who would oppose us."

i order the rest of the men to secure the neighborhood gold. we will keep it at my house; i will disperse it as necessary. the gold is mine...the precious...

...

i sit on a throne of skulls inside my new house. palace. i run my fingers through the head of the slave who kneels at my side. in my other hand i grip the femur of a dead enemy. a slave used a rock to hone the end of the bone to sharp points. the walls and floor are red, spattered with blood and smeared with dirt; the ceiling is black with soot. my tiger stalks outside.

when the snows come we move to the caves in the hills for warmth. i will spread my seed.

a beast stirs. i breath in the fetid air, thick with blood and death. law is dead. i am the law. the market is dead. i am the market. i scratch at my fur loincloth and crush a louse. government is dead. i am the government. god is dead. i am a god.

somewhere in the distance i hear the howl of the alarms and the chatter of guns.

and this is heaven.


But you remember one thing: if you screw up just this much, you'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog poo poo out of Hong Kong!

epilogue

the cave is dark but warm. the women huddle under furs and blankets for warmth during the day. i lead the hunting parties out in search of game but any creature larger than a chipmunk has long since been slaughtered. we hunt squirrels and rodents with our AK-47s; sometimes a scrap of meat is still left after the hail of bullets.

one of the women is heavy with my child. i alone may mate with them. the heads of the men who objected rot on stakes outside the cave mouth.

one evening after we have returned from our mighty hunt with two squirrel carcasses and a dead robin someone almost tripped on, we spy a man in the distance staggering toward the cave. we watch as he winds his way through the badlands. black snow falls, mixed with ash. his powder blue shirt is badly torn and bloody and there is no spark in his eyes.

he begs us for shelter. i explain that our food supplies are low but that there is room in our cave if he will hunt and accept my rule. he nods, exhausted, and starts to shuffle past me to the fire.

then i catch sight of the patch on his sleeve. a stylized white eagle on a field of blue. the mark of the oppressors. i grab his collar and growl in his face "you're one of them"

"what? what are you talking about"

"one of them. the patch. the eagle."

"p-p-please...i just...delivered mail"

i grip his throat in my hand and lift him and shout "A CRIMINAL!!!!!"

my tribe huddles around me.

"HE WORKED...FOR THE GOVERNMENT!!!"

i see the rage in their eyes. hooting, they jump up and down, calling for blood. i lower the man to the ground and they mutter with disappointment. i beckon for a slave to bring me my club: all sharpened bone and shattered glass. i put my mouth next to the man's ear and i grasp the club and hold it in front of his eyes. "If you want a vision of the future," I say. "Imagine my warclub, smashing a human face, forever."

then i swing it against his head, and it crunches, and he falls to the ground. "we eat meat tonight" I say with a smile. the cheers are deafening.