owo

My house still smelled like peepee poopoo. This was after I used the money I had been saving for months to spend several hundred dollars on a deep house cleaning.

I was crying on the floor, oh my god, my dad is coming over for his birthday. I have a tumblr mutual coming to visit. Oh my god I’ll never be able to have guests over. I’ll never be able to get a roommate when I have to take a pay cut to start my PhD.

I did the only thing left I could think of. I released the raccoons.

Lammy went and hid under the couch, but Moonshine started sniffing everywhere. So I followed her around. Finally she started sniffing behind the fridge. I thought she was just eating the little pieces of cat food I hadn’t cleaned up when I moved the bowl. But once the cat food was gone, she was still sniffing.

I approached. I could smell it. The peepee poopoo. I felt like a blood hound. I could smell it coming from the top of the fridge.

Finally. I found the source of the peepee poopoo

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

nature is healing

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

me when I get home:

me the entire weekend: