Hanlon'sRazor

Lightning Bait

HERMES: DA FUNNY ONE

ZEUS: DA LIGHTNING (NOTE: THOUGHT HE WAS NORDIC, FATHER OF THOR)

POSEIDON: DA SEA ONE

HEPHAESTUS: DA FIRE/FORGING/STEEL ONE

APHRODITE: DA HOT ONE

KRATOS: GOD OF WAR

HADES: DA HELL ONE. ROGUE LIKE

"Smooth edges of screen fonts"

My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.

Y'all.

I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.

Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:

Then you'll see this:

TURN IT ALL OFF.

10AppsManager lets you uninstall bloatware. Winaero Tweaker lets you disable crap like Cortana/Copilot, ads, telemetry, internet search results when you search from the taskbar, and all kinds of other stuff, plus it gives you lots of other little options that are just nice to have (like, it can restore the old MS Paint program in place of Paint 3D). Both are totally free.

Oh, and check your startup programs in the Task Manager tab to make sure your computer isn't automatically starting eight million programs every time it boots. But I think people mostly know about that. (Unless this is me going "they only know one or two feldspars... and quartz of course.")

I mean, I’m allergic to my own menstrual cycle so probably. Sometimes other people’s body odor if it’s strong enough can make me wheeze so I imagine scenting and pheromones might have the same effect in that setting.

There’s probably some poor omega with MCAS in an omegaverse world right now looking at their calendar, realizing their heat is coming up, and just sighing. And also bitterly listening to their friends and coworkers complain about their heat cycles.

Like oh, how sad for you, you get inconveniently horny for a week 🙄

Meanwhile they’re eating Benadryl like tictacs and hoping their asshole alpha neighbor is wearing their scent blockers because the last thing they need is alpha stink on top of it all. They’ve never actually met them, but they can smell them.

This leads to an unlikely meetcute after the alpha next door has to stick them with an epi pen in the elevator and ends up going with them to the hospital.

When they find out the extent of what their omega neighbor is dealing with, it pings every protective instinct in their big stupid alpha brain in an entirely non-horny way.

Inexplicably they find themselves looking up low histamine recipes at 2am and showing up a few days later with hopeful offerings that won’t cause flares.

They start a fight with the landlord over the laundry facilities needing to be fragrance free and win. When people ignore the fragrance free rules (required to be upheld by ADA, btw) they start camping out in the laundry room and growling at anyone who brings a single scented bead into the space.

The instinct to protect goes so far that they show up one day with a hepa filter vacuum like “hey, do you mind if I just…” gesturing vaguely at the omegas apartment, and the omega watches in total bafflement from their allergy friendly nest as the alpha goes to absolute town on their apartment.

It’s only then that they realize they can’t smell them anymore, and realize the alpha has been wearing the strongest scent blockers on the market and the omega realizes, oh, oh, and goes all hot and squiggly all over that for once isn’t an allergic reaction.

No offense to you, I just want to see if the trans movement can actually define the term woman since I haven't been able to and I think your blog could help. I'm new to this and I'm pretty curious. Again, absolutely no offense meant and I'm sorry if you take any.

When I was a kid, I thought that nobody actually wanted to be a girl. That it's just one of those unfortunate fates you get handed, like being born with no eyes or no legs or something. That it's something miserable, that's supposed to be miserable, and everyone else is just better at sucking up and enduring it than I am. That it's supposed to hurt and you're supposed to act like it doesn't, and that's just what everyone does.

Being born in mid-90s, I was vaguely aware that trans women exist, but I was like 13 when I discovered that it goes the other way around too. Like you can transition female-to-male. And my first thought was "how hasn't everyone done this?" I thought it had to be some very well-guarded secret, because otherwise how else would they stop every woman from flocking to these things. My first initial thought was that if women knew there was an option to just stop being women, the world would run out of women.

I don't understand why anyone would want to be a woman, but it gradually came to my understanding that some women do. They actually enjoy that. So, as far as I'm concerned, the definition of "woman" is anyone who wants to be one. I don't understand why anyone does, but it's not off my plate if someone does.

Once the dwarves have been separated from each other and the situation has calmed, one of the humans asks another dwarf what that incident was about. Naturally a human woman would have been insulted too, but dwarves are so jovial about insulting each other, why was this matter different?

And the dwarf who was asked explains that there are things you can brutally insult another dwarf about, and there are things you simply do not touch. The dwarf-woman in question is from a completely different region of The Great Underground as the others, and her people have different norms about what kind of patterns men and women braid into their beards. The dwarf insulting her wasn't only insulting her appearance, he was being racist.

The human is surprised to learn that dwarves have different peoples, and the dwarf looks at them like at an idiot. Of course they do, they even look completely different from each other. And the human listens as the dwarf lists off various distinguishing clothing details too nuanced for a human to notice, and then how dwarves coming from different corners of the world have different physical traits, according to what kind of conditions their local stone types dictate.

The human spots a connection and goes oh! We have that too, though ours are not about rock types and tunnel air, but the weather aboveground. Humans' facial features vary by how hot, cold, arid or windy their ancestors' homelands were, and our skin tone varies by how much the sun shines in their native region.

The dwarf frowns at the last part, going "I thought you people just paint your skin and dye your hair for fun", and the human admits that yeah, we do that too, but not all the time, and not the whole skin. The dwarf asks, what of that tall woman the colour of dravite, her palms and the soles of her feet were lighter than the rest of her. Does that mean she paints herself dark to be more beautiful?

The human says no, that just happens naturally. Maybe it's because one's palms and feet aren't exposed to the sun as much, so they are paler.

The dwarf nods, still unsure whether this is actually legit or just the human habit of lying for fun, and proceeds to ask about the wild northman of their party. He is as pale as an olm, but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet are dark. Are they painted, or naturally that way?

A male character who is cocky and nonchalant, a flippant chaotic neutral bastard, who never really starts beef with anyone but if someone else starts it first, he will not hesitate to go all out balls deep into making sure he'll finish it. Tricksy, clever and charismatic, treating every conflict as a fun rivalry even if the enemy he's faced with is literally just flat-out trying to fucking kill him. While personally never killing an opponent - he's clever enough to evade them in a way that leaves himself unharmed, and the antagonist frustrated and humiliated and looking stupid the whole time they're doing it.

Depicted as somewhat slim and lanky, distinctly male but not in a brutish, hypermasculine way. Not exactly coded genderfluid but jumps at every opportunity to cross dress just for the fun of it, in a campy and flamboyant way, which by all rational sense shouldn't be attractive but somehow the man manages to make himself fuckable with the way he walks in heels. Not romantically or sexually attracted to men, but can, will, and has seduced men just to fuck with their heads. Has broken hearts this way.

The protagonists of this story encounter an oddly formal loner who seems creepily happy-go-lucky to be wandering alone out there all alone, and assume that this poor fellow is just flat-out insane. A lot of people lost their minds when the world collapsed. An argument is had about whether they can spare the resources to take in somebody who might be a liability, but eventually a consensus is reached that if this mf has been surviving just fine all by themselves so far, surely they're not completely off their roller.

Besides, they don't seem to be out of touch with reality, just... Weirdly cheerful about it. Like wandering around a zombie-infested wasteland is the best thing that ever happened to them. Like it's a privilege to get to eat questionable canned food, to wander from half-collapsed building to another, to argue about where the group is supposed to be going. Like it's a pleasure to be there, and they don't mean it with sarcasm.

And one time when they manage to kill an animal for food, the newcomer volunteers to butcher it like that's a totally normal task that they're used to doing. And working with sure hands and a casual smile, they offhandedly remark how interestingly different it feels to butcher an animal. Full record scratch when everyone within earshot pauses to process what the fuck they just said. How exactly is someone who's clearly that familiar with taking apart meat from bones unaccustomed to butchering animals?

Well, you know how every post-apocalyptic/zombie story seems to have that one place that seems like a clean and tidy wonderful utopia on the surface, but turns out that they're cannibals that eat people? Yeah, that guy is from there. Escaped from there, in fact, and not long before the protagonists found them. And the reason why they've been over the moon about getting to be a part of the whole post-apocalyptic roving band of survivors is the freedom. They get to choose what miserable cans to eat, what miserable ruins to sleep in for the night, what hopeless direction they will miserably trek. And the zombies? The zombies are the best part.