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But apartment complex.

It's not old or abandoned or anything, there's people living there. It's cheap and there's a heavy turnaround but there's people. Even rules they all follow not to upset the 'ghost', which is what they're calling the lack of maintenance causing things to rattle and leak.

They don't think there's actually a ghost.

Not even a big building, in a big city. But a cheap, if gated, community sprawled out in a little city, maybe two or three floors...six units at most in the building but multiple buildings spread out.

There's a park, pool, rec center maybe, all of it haunted.

"No swimming after 10PM" is a sign for safety here more than most places. The ghosts of the drowned haunt the pool at night, yanking others to the bottom to join them.

So, companies are tracking you no matter what you do, but this specifically is something I care about deeply.

Essentially, when you share a link, sometimes it has extra data that tracks where it comes from and goes.

Opening Spotify, clicking the first item, and using the share button, I get something like open.spotify.com/track/4P0f1HTaA2UwtLJGryNgJZ?si=DBvbfihOSweU1KHj9Mib8w

That ?si=...........…. is the tracker. It tells Spotify who clicks on the link and ties it to you, meaning Spotify knows who your friends are even if you never follow them.

Similarly, if on Amazon or EBay in the browser, I get something like www.ebay.com/itm/146493392451?_skw=lenovo&itmmeta=............&hash=item................&itmprp=enc..............

And, similarly, everything after the question mark is tracking you. I had to blank it out because it was so long!

There is an exception for a few things (I.E. the v=..... on YouTube, but not the si=..... on YouTube)

The general rule is delete everything after the ? and if it breaks, add something back.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

Oh, no, my friend, @aceyuurikatsuki . It’s not just that. It is so much more. Settle down and let your friendly neighborhood x-ray tech explain you a thing.

Throckmorton’s Sign, otherwise known as Throckmorton’s Principle, does in fact have to do with dicks. Because it is fairly normal for a dick to show up on a hip or pelvis x-ray. But the thing about Throckmorton’s Sign is, it’s not just that the dick is visible. It is a legitimate diagnostic tool.

Let me explain: let’s say a person equipped with a penis is in a car accident and has right leg and right side hip/pelvic pain. Their doctor will order x-rays. Unfortunately, sometimes fractures are so small that they can be missed, or, because the patient is in such bad shape and the images obtained aren’t the best quality, the radiologist can’t be sure for one reason or another if what they’re seeing is actually a fracture.

So what do they do? They look for the dick.

You heard me correctly. The dick.

Throckmorton’s Sign is when “the penis points to the area of pain.” So if the above-mentioned AMAB patient’s xray aren’t displaying a clear, obvious fracture, but their dick is pointing to the right side, 9 times out of 10, the injury or fracture is on the right hip or leg area, so then the radiologist will focus on that side while reading.

Now I know what my non-radiology followers are thinking. “Ace, this sounds like bullshit. This can’t be true. You’re lying through your teeth.” But I swear to you, it is 100% accurate. I have seen a positive Throckmorton’s Sign multiple times with my own eyes over the course of the past 7 years. Ask any x-ray tech, and they will probably agree with me.

Your dick is good for at least one thing, and that thing is helping a radiologist diagnose your upper femur, hip, or pelvic fracture.

Throckmorton your skateboarding cousin:

You get a Leafy Seadragon