Dreams and Sprinkles

1. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU.

2. AND YET, THE SUN RISES EACH MORNING.

It shouldn't really have surprised anyone that he did not move on when he died. He had been the butler of the house when the family had lived there, had become its custodian during their absence, and what was the purpose of a custodian if not to wait with the house for the return of its owners? Except they never returned.

The first time she felt the ghost was when she went to clean the place up. Which is why she came back with a sensible supply of ibuprofen the next time. It was very hard to get anything done with impending migraines stabbing at her temples. The bone chilling cold that seemed to seep from the walls was harder to keep at bay, but she did not hold it against him. If she had been trapped in this place she would be kicking up more fuss than the occasional cold spot. Besides, it was a good incentive to keep busy. It's impossible to be cold while scrubbing a floor. By the time she had gotten around to restoring the fireplaces to their original marble with paint stripper and a scraper, she didn’t even feel chilly anymore.

They might have abandoned the house, but he hadn't. He had kept it tidy, well aired out, and in good repair, decade after decade. Over half a century. What was a century more? It was a good house, a fine house. It did not need “developing”, it did not need these people with grey paint and eggshell paper. They should have left the finials and weathervane in place.

The first time she heard the ghost was while looking for the kitchen door. There were bits and pieces missing of the house, her house. Someone, at some point, must have taken that door off its hinges, in a vain attempt to approach open-plan living. It was nowhere to be found, but she would find it, if only that terrible rattling and wailing would stop. It did stop, once she found the ladder that had dropped down from the attic. The attic the realtor had told her was completely inaccessible. The attic filled with ornaments and antique doorknobs, a battered weathervane, and a panelled kitchen door.

Restore... That was a quaint word. Not at all like “remodel” or “modernise”. There were a lot of words he had never heard before, he had not bothered to listen for a long time. Such a cheerful, appreciative voice.

The first time she saw the ghost was while poring over a sample book, fretting over the few scraps off wallpaper she had found behind a patched-up baseboard. The colours were too faded to make out and she did not want to get it wrong. Victorian reproductions were expensive, and the leaves and the feathers looked so much alike. She had nothing but a corner of paper to go on and she stared and stared and stared, until a hand reached out of nowhere, and turned the page to the maroon one. She barely breathed, she put the scrap of paper on the page, a perfect corner of the pattern, and smiled.

It was a fine house, a beloved house. And people came there again, not to buy and destroy it, to visit. There were people who said they wanted to buy it, people with broad smiles and greedy eyes. But that would not happen now. They were always sent away.

But the first time she met the ghost was on a pale autumn morning, stumbling from the car to the front door with her arms full bolts of damask for the curtains. She had just begun to wonder how she'd reach her keys when the fine oak door swung open, all stately hospitality, and on its doorstep, standing respectfully aside, was the same tall, well groomed man, clad all in black. He bowed and stepped aside, speaking in a hollow voice warmed by respect and satisfaction:

I'm sorry but I am so morally disoriented by the concept of 'fake cheese' that I have trouble focusing on any other aspect of your message. What is fake cheese?? You say that like it's a perfectly understandable and emotionally neutral combination of words. I feel like I've just been handed a koan.

Then you add the phrase “tiny weenies" like it's the logical next step rather than a new psychological event. From my (very French) perspective the sentence "fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in" sounds like such a unique cultural artefact in itself, like a linguistic diorama to be displayed in a vitrine. This is not meant as a negative judgment of you or your country! just my earnest ethnographic confusion as I try to grapple with the concept of "tiny weenies" from a place of "fake cheese" trauma...

I had no idea fondue was seen this way in the US—I thought we (as a species) had a collective working definition of it, a sort of global consensus like the commutative property of addition, so the idea that in some corners of the world "fondue" means “fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in” has made me remember that you can just flay language off reality like skin. There's also a non-zero chance for this phrase to have activated a sleeper agent in Lausanne and authorised targeted elimination under the Académie Française’s emergency powers.

but it's also some farmer's field.

My mom told me that while we were there, the village celebrated its millennium, its thousand-year anniversary.

Except it wasn't the millennium of the village, which was older than that but nobody really knew exactly. It was the millennium of the village church.

And it wasn't technically the millennium of the church, because that had happened three years earlier but nobody had noticed at the time.

And it was strictly local news; nobody outside the village paid any attention.

Ocean Glow - Kate Jarvik Birch 

American , b. 1977 -

there's been multiple reports of people's computers not booting properly after the windows 11 24H2 KB5063878 update due to it essentially wiping the hard drives (specifically SSDs) on computers and laptops. users have reported their SSDs aren't able to be read/recognized and unable to be seen in bios settings either.

sources: - https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/08/20/microsoft-is-investigating-windows-11-kb5063878-ssd-data-corruption-failure-issue/ - https://www.nichepcgamer.com/archives/windows11-24h2-issue-with-writing-to-the-ssd-is-this-caused-by-kb5063878-kb5062660.html

it's safe to assume all SSDs can be potentially affected by this update, so if you haven't updated yet turn off autoupdates

the bug caused by this update is seemingly triggered by installing/moving/deleting large files (50+ gb), which as simmers is what a lot of us do very pften

if you're unsure what windows version you currently have:

go to settings > system > about (at they very bottom) > and scroll down to see the current OS version

if you do currently have windows 11 24H2:

in settings, click 'Windows update' > 'Update history' > and under 'Quality Updates' check to see if the KB5063878 update is in the list of recently installed updates

don't panic, you can uninstall this update!

while in 'Update History', scroll to the very bottom and click 'Uninstall updates', and click 'Uninstall' for 'Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB5063878)'

from there, give it some time to remove the update and after pause updates for as long as possible (5 weeks is the longest i think), but it will force an update if there's a big/official update for the fix

if you've already been affected and your computer is not starting or giving errors regarding your hard drive, i recommend visiting small pc repair shops to try data recovery as some have reported placing their SSD in an enclosure seems to work to recover the data

On 27th August 2015, The Shepherd's Crown, the last book Sir Terry Pratchett completed before he died, was published. To mark the ten year anniversary, we have a message from Rob Wilkins.