Everyone is preparing for the newest addition to the colony! Tupelo helps escort Beau to the hospital, where Jut and Tokori are waiting.
Tupelo is going to be the main midwife while Tokori stands by in case of emergency, because I imagine you'd feel a lot better about giving birth if your midwife had all their fingers ready to catch a slippery newborn. Just personal preference, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lmao, poor XiaoLiang probably did NOT expect to get front-row seats to a childbirth after he picked a fight with Cora in the last update, but here we are. That's what he gets for being so eager to get into a punch-up.
AHHHH!!!! A new little girl joins the Crowley-Foxgrove clan!! Congratulations!!!
Now all that's left to do is bring the proud older siblings in to meet their baby sister, and decide on a name!!
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What is my colonists' problem with each other's foreheads?? This is AT LEAST the third time this has caused a social fight.
The bright side of this fight is that watching Tokori patch XiaoLiang up afterwards gave Kwahu the motivation to finally get over his resurrection sickness and leave the hospital. He's back on his feet! Yay!
Cora is fine, by the way. She fixed herself up immediately and went right back to gardening, with help from Dani. All's well!
... or, well... everything would be going well if Randy Random didn't decide he hates women today. Thanks a lot, Randy. 🙄
AH! There's no time to worry about a psychic drone right now, though!!! This is priority one! Get to the hospital!!!!
Tokori is pretty good at walking off his post-resurrection psychic comas at this point, so he's back to playing doctor and taking care of Kwahu as he recovers from being resurrected.
I don't think Tokori would appreciate Kwahu's little 'waste a finger' comment, and would have no qualms confronting him about it.
Also, I think that something must have bugged with Kwahu's royal title. Ivy has been his appointed heir since our very first colony, but I wonder if all the colony jumping in our search for The Archonexus has broken it somehow?
Either way, dying apparently hasn't changed the fact that The Fallen Imperium wants Kwahu in their ranks and is even willing to promote him to baron with a new (or maybe just freshly re-issued?) quest! We'll have to decide if we want to do that later, once the poor guy can actually stand on his own again.
There are four out of the five Jones boys in the hospital now, and I'm sure it is not doing anything good for poor Squashbug's stress levels. Still, they're in good hands and should recover quickly enough.
In the meantime, XiaoLiang is dragging the fifth Jones boy and our two androids into the pit gate to see if Jut, Sneer, and Thralir are alright. The three of them are a little scratched and bruised after their spat with the last of the fleshbeasts, but nothing we couldn't fix with a few well-placed bandages.
In brighter news, the only fleshbeast left in the cave system seems to be the dreadmeld! Hooray...?
While everyone else ducks out of the cave to eat, grab water, and take a quick nap, Sneer decides to stay behind and get some mining done. Observe:
Step 1
And Step 2, like five minutes later. What a champ. An admirable work ethic to be sure! Still, he should come out of the pit now. Don't want him accidentally taking on a dreadmeld by himself.
As soon as Sneer hauled himself out of the pit, he ran to hang out with his wife, and presumably gush about how much he loves mining and being underground. They're both so frickin' cute!!!!!!
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Four fingers down, six more to go. Good job, Tokori!
I had to reload the game SO MANY times because this idiot necromancer kept cutting off his thumbs. Finally got it down to an index finger, which means he now only has two fingers on his right hand. Still, it's a fair trade to make if it means we get Kwahu back <3
And then, Tokori's fiancé came to whisk him away to a hospital bed so he could sleep off his psychic coma. The Jones Family is whole once again, and now we can really turn our attention to that pit gate!
With one man down and fingerspikes still emerging from the flesh, backup arrives for Lapu and Mechi in the nick of time.
While Jut, Sneer, and Thralir take over the fight with the brisk efficiency of two trained professionals (and one dirtmole who just wants to get back to mining, dammit!), Lapu and Mechi limp out of the pit gate to get patched up and break the news about Kwahu to the rest of the colony.
Tokori's necromancer senses start to tingle the moment he sees only two out of three Joneses return from the pit...
... so he leaves the triage in Tupelo and Rita's capable hands and slips off to have a look for himself, and see if there might possibly be anything he can do to help.
The three Joneses troop into the southwestern corner of the flesh pit, looking for any interesting treasures that might be lying around. There are a few flesh sacks containing tomes, and even one with an archotech arm! Of course, we do happen upon a few unsavoury creatures, too...
...But a few monsters should be simple for three accomplished combatants (two of whom are wizards), right?
Hopefully, shouting for help in this twisting, echoey, flesh-clogged cave system works...
The other half of our exploration team is doing just fine. Sneer is having the time of his life mining for steel while his wife and father stand guard in case of any bulbfreak incidents, when all of a sudden they hear a cry for help!
... but, alas, the time it takes to sanguophage longjump/archon shortskip over is too long.
Got a very important pop-up to inform me that Lansa and Ivy were "going for a walk" together. Their idea of a "walk" is apparently chilling in the throne room and chatting. That's my favourite kind of "walk", too.
Alistair has really taken a shine to our newest pet, the Indian elephant Gouda. It won't be long before she's fully trained and ready to lend a hand (er, trunk?) around the colony!
We haven't got much to do apart from exploring the pit gate while we wait for Beau's baby and the Tokori/XiaoLiang wedding, so why not have a royal guest over? I'm sure royal gossip helps pass the time.
Ah, I forgot about the android racism thing... Hm. Keeping Acolyte Nikus' mood above 50% while Cora and Alistair are here might be trickier than originally anticipated...
Oh, well. We have more important things to deal with, like our second trip into the pit gate!
A much smaller team this time, split into two parties. Sneer wants to mine a large steel deposit next to where we heard those noises last time, so he takes his wife and his dad for melee backup just in case, while Mechi, Kwahu, and Lapu go exploring in the other direction. Hopefully we can put off discovering the source of those sounds for a little while longer, and everything goes smoothly!
hey oz! i just wanted to ask if you remember where the "sayian is not a pogo stick" tagline came from, i cant find the video covering the post anywhere.
"Satan" is not a pogo stick. and it originates from tumblr!
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Look, despite how problematic it can be trying to manage combat and exploration with a colonist who has narcolepsy, I don't think Sneer would forgive us if we went to explore the Pit Gate without him.
We took a pretty big group for this first exploratory mission because we weren't sure what to expect...
A moment to appreciate Sneer wearing sunglasses into the depths of the pit gate. #JustDirtmoleThings, I guess.
I have to say, "cavern system clogged with flesh" has to be one of the most upsetting things I've read today, but alright. I suppose the colonists probably have the worst of it since they're in the caverns clogged with flesh.
We explored around for a bit, smooshing up fleshmass and kicking fleshbeast ass, until we heard some nasty squirming sounds in a nearby mass of flesh. We decided that enough was enough, and called it a day. We'll come back after we've had a meal and a long nap, and bandaged up the scrapes and bruises from our skirmishes in the pit today.
At least now we know where to look for trouble next time we come down here...
Jut's priority is not food or sleep, by the look of things. He has his sights set on meditation, ready to summon another Black Queen. It takes a lot of psyfocus, but that shouldn't be too difficult to manage in his own private throne room. Godspeed, Jut. We'll need it for our next spelunking trip...
The Fallen Imperium has heard that our colony is in danger, and they sent a group to help us out! It looks like they sent a group of rookies, though, as they were decimated shockingly fast for a squad decked out in janissary armour.
You know what would fare better than useless imperials in shoddy armour? Our new vampire praetor with his Herald of the Black Hive psycasts and assistance from a huge, terrifying black queen. God, I love having Jut in our colony. I'm so glad he's on our side.
With help from the Black Queen (and ZERO help from the Imperials, I might add), our colony has slaughtered the fleshbeasts and cleared a path to the pit gate. There's a lot of carnage left behind, but that's what cleansweeper mechs are for.
Jut's summoned Black Queen will only stick around for a day, but in the meantime, she deserves a name thanks to her help. She shall henceforth (rather uncreatively) be known as Reine Noire! All hail the Black Queen!
I need to play with this psycasting tree more often. Very cool~
Dani and Jingjie have now officially experienced combat for the first time as adults and made it through mostly unscathed! Jingjie has a few cuts and bruises, but he'll probably be healed before the end of the day. Dani would likely have been injured (being a melee combatant) if it weren't for the fact that Jut stood squarely between her and any fleshbeasts the whole time and made sure she didn't get hit. Clearly he has a favourite child...
The pair sits down for a hearty lunch before we gear up to venture into the pit gate at last~
Gouda, the crash-landed Indian elephant from the last update, has decided she wants to live with us! That's very sweet, but we'll have to postpone the celebration until after the Pit Gate has been dealt with.
I bet the pit gate is every dirtmole's favourite void event. A big, deep sinkhole, ripe for mining and exploring? Yes please!!
Everyone is geared up and ready to fight for the colony: even our two newly-of-age combatants, Dani and Jingie!
I'm getting some nice "Battle of Helm's Deep" vibes from this fight in the dark and rainy night. Brace yourselves!
The Jones Boys continue to be very enticing despite their best efforts to the contrary. I'm shocked our relationships with the other factions aren't much worse than they are, considering how many proposals we've had to turn down.
I'd sell Paul into marriage without a second thought.
Randy Random has gifted us a new potential pet! Gouda is a very cute name for an elephant. I love her already. Do your best work to patch her up, Tokori! We've got plenty of time to nurse her back to health; there's not much going on right now, after all.
... ah. Well, there wasn't much going on. A sudden pit gate opening does make it difficult to focus on crashlanded elephants, I admit.
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It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
ANOTHER birthday???? Our Fish Boy is a Fish Man now! Can you believe it?? They grow up so fast. Too fast! Jingjie only got here, like, yesterday! He can't be a grown-up already 😭😭
poor Spike is the only child left in the colony until Baby Crowley-Foxgrove arrives :(
There are no fish in the lake that gives Steelforge Lake its name, and I don't think any of the children (or former children) who grew up here have ever actually tried fishing, but I couldn't resist the urge to give Jingjie the fisherman trait. I mean, LOOK at him!!! He's a fish man! He has to be a fisherman! It's right there!
Big tall lanky spooky fish man, my beloved <3 <3 <3
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