Em

Of course, what was supposed to be a short term service industry job before he lived for his art has bloomed into just being his life, and life as a poor artist is never as romantic as one imagines. While the cost of living of Bikini Bottom is low enough that even a frycook can be a homeowner, it's not quite so low that he can afford the luxuries he was used to growing up.

His view of the Working Class as the downtrodden masses were rather tattered by years of living between SpongeBob and Patrick, who were not so much temporarily oppressed intellectuals as they were, well, SpongeBob and Patrick.

Still, through thick and thin he's never gone back on his decision to leave the money behind. The great irony is that he is ignorant of his greatest achievement—his superiority to Squilliam isn't turning a bunch of randos into a functioning Marching Band or turning a burger joint into a fine dining establishment, it's having the strength of character to look at all the advantages Squilliam had and choose to leave it behind.

Which is all to say, sometimes Ma has to call Clark to come and find the cow before it makes it too far down the interstate. Sometimes the cow is in other farmers’ fields looking for Clark. One time someone picked the cow up and actually took it a farm not far from the suburbs of Metropolis.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

and promptly became obsessed with chapter seven

so i HAD to illustrate it

ENJOY (pt 1)

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"because of The Curse?"

Second one, because as much as i love Hudson (a lot), i know in my heart that Shane discovered 3 in 1 at the supermarket one day as a teenager and went "oh that's so practical! No longer need to monitor different bottles for running out, especially on the road! More focus on hockey hell yeah" And then bought one (and then tried it and made his mom find one that smells ok because he just took the most generically masculine one and that shit always has musk in there or whatever which stinks let me tell you). And then he stuck to that brand and never changed it. At some point he overhears someone making fun on straight men having that and and he is like "See? I can't be gay, i am just a normal guy".

I guess it is possible he didn’t, to my knowledge the play doesn’t explicitly say whether he did beyond Hades’s line “we’ll try again next fall” in Wait for Me (Reprise). But it can reasonably be inferred, right?

Maybe things won’t get better immediately. Maybe spring and fall won’t come back immediately, and maybe when they do, they’re short, and not at all as long as they used to be, but I think Hades’s line makes clear that they are back. The gods are mending their love, and the more they mend it, the more they “try again next fall” year after year and things get better and better, so too does the world get better and better.

And I think that fact being overlooked is such a tragedy given the message of the play. “It’s an old song, it’s a sad song, but we’re gonna sing it again, in the hopes it’ll turn out this time”. When it comes to doing anything, but especially doing what this play is about which is making the world better, you are going to try, and you are going to fail, and the failure is to be expected. But you’re going to try again and again and again in the hopes that this time will be different, this time will work out. And in that process, you are inevitably going to be making tiny steps forward. You’ll fall, sure, but falling doesn’t set you back at the start— you can get back up right where you are and try again.

And that’s what happened with Orpheus. He failed ultimately, yes, but his efforts still bore fruit. He helped the gods remember their song of love, and because of that, something is going to get better, and that is a tiny step towards the overall goal of making the world the way it could be. Orpheus fell, but not before making it a few steps.

And I think that that is just as powerful as the main messaging. “It’s an old song, it’s a sad song, and we’re gonna sing it again, in the hopes it’ll turn out this time, but even if it doesn’t, we will still be one step closer.” And this works especially well when you consider the way Jack Wolfe plays Orpheus as an Orpheus that knows about his own past failures. An Orpheus that knows this path, knows, however consciously or subconsciously, he’s in a loop and he’s careening towards the same tragedy again, and yet still keeps trying. Because it still works, even though when the loop restarts, and the song starts over, the newest Orpheus has all of the past Orpheus’s behind him, and they are pushing him forward and trying to help him do what he cannot.

And just like we saw with Reeve Carney’s departure— eventually, regardless of how many times, or how far we get set back, it will work out.

i'm on the train that says, in hadestown's iteration, orpheus does not turn around because he loves eurydice, but because he has been corrupted by the hegemonic capitalist system.

consider the parallels between "wait for me" and "doubt comes in." in the latter, orpheus' melody fails to bring in a chorus or move stones or grow flowers like it did before. he repeats the. same. words. that the fates tried to break him with in the earlier song (who am i? where do i think i'm going? who am i? why am i all alone?), but back then the melody worked against them bc he still had innocence and hope. THEN he takes it a step further in the next verse and really internalizes his new experiences (who am i against him?...why would he let me win?) — & yeah he's really truly cooked atp :'(

(i read that the fates can represent the mass media and i'm so with that. they both praise and criticize the rulers, but always manipulate/bring down the poor. we know orpheus has lost when he listens to them.)

eurydice and orpheus switch places from beginning to finale with their arcs. she starts out cynical and then is the hopeful one, SHE raises up the backing vocals in "doubt comes in." he starts out optimistic, ends up cynical (last words before he turns: "i used to see the way the world could be, but now the way it is is all i see"). bc we need both optimism & a sense of reality to change the world.

hades knows he would turn around, but due to his doubt rather than his love. inside, he is sure that can not overcome his doubt for his love, and he sees this supposed inevitability take root in orpheus, too. but when the young couple full of promise dooms themselves, the older, jaded couple, seemingly hopeless, agrees to try again (they switch!).