Books and Trident

"the accuracy of the target is literally up to centimetres."

"centimetres? and this is true about zircon as well?"

"yes, zircon as well."

"so if there's a cross target, you can hit it like a sniper."

"practically, yes. if there is a five-storey building, and we target one of the entrances, if it won't hit this exact entrance, it will hit the next one for sure."

Kyiv. According to monitoring sources, Russia fired about 40 ballistic missiles—including Iskander-M, Zircon, and S-400 models—at Kyiv over the course of approximately 40 minutes, ZN.ua reports.

This is the largest number of ballistic missiles fired at the capital since the start of the full-scale war.

One person is reported dead and 13 injured. Once again, it’s the long-suffering Lukyanivka neighborhood, where my sister lives💔 It’s always terrifying to read about the Shevchenkivskyi district.

Russian forces carried out 17 strikes on Kramatorsk over the past day, 10 of which were with aerial bombs, according to the Donetsk Regional Police.

The Russians attacked Druzhkivka with a KAB-250 bomb and FPV drones.

Russian forces struck Sloviansk with a KAB-250 bomb and three UAVs. Photo: Donetsk Regional Police

A Russian drone struck a passenger train in the Zaporizhzhia region, according to Ukrzaliznytsia. Passengers were evacuated in time and will be transported to the city by bus. Preliminary reports indicate that the conductor sustained minor injuries.

Photo: Ukrzaliznytsia

The Russian Armed Forces struck Sumy with seven KAB bombs. So far, three people are known to have been injured; they have been hospitalized. At least one person may be trapped under the rubble, and a rescue operation is underway, according to Grigorov, the head of the regional military administration.

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

Pretend we didn't have the science that explain how octopi controlled camouflage, how the electric eel delivers shocks, how owls fly silently, how intelligent corvids can be. It becomes the basis of many supernatural tales and folklore.

Look at the entire mindfuck that's the fungi kingdom and, oh, parasites.

Go even further with plants, too, since it's all life.

So two things:

One, animals are capable of doing magic that doesn't match the current human framework (i.e., blood/primal magic, like how animals can track their stole kin from poachers and animal rescuers, regardless of how far they must travel, war horses praying to their great deity to be swifter and fiercer with blood and bone staining their hooves as the sacrifice to their private altar, wolves using bone carvings to weave protection spells on their dens, trees/forests developed a whole ass magic system based on their symbiotic relationships with other animals, pets who love their human so very much that they will tie their inherent skills over, like a rabbit who gifts their owner a superb talent at finding the tastiest greens or a catowner gains better night vision over time, or even sacrifice lifespan to boost their critically/terminally sick human)

It's old-fashioned. It's modern. It's butch. It's femme. It's snazzy. It's practical.

Wikipedia talks about the bloomers and the leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I'm also noticing a lot of these outfits have absolute supervillain lapels, which I also like a lot.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.

"Hyperreality", coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 essay Simulacra and Simulation, describes (essentially) a confusion of reality and representations where representations develop without actually representing something real; they become a sign with no referent, a perception without a reality, simulacra. Ajmal describes how hyperreality impacts identity online given the amount of simulacra circling on social media. This fosters identity as a performance and fragmentation in social media, shaping much of the social space online. Researchers van Kessel et al. use hyperreality to frame a discussion on media education and (mis/dis)information, arguing for giving learners a greater awareness of hyperreality online through conveying that the modern media landscape is not a direct representation of reality but "a tangled structural recurrence of cultural frames for experiencing the world".

References / Works to check out

Ajmal, S. (2024). Charting youth subcultures, identity formation, and niche aesthetics in the age of social-media.

van Kessel, C., Manriquez, J. D., & Kline, K. (2025). Baudrillard, hyperreality, and the ‘problematic’ of (mis/dis)information in social media. Theory & Research in Social Education, 53(2), 249–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2024.2439302

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.