Krah tey, zeymah

But Elmo, after cheerfully surrendering his old toys, sees that the children who swapped toys with him are playing with his toys “wrong”! They’re imagining entirely different make believe scenarios! They’re pretending the football is a dinosaur egg instead of a rocket ship! Aaahhhhh!!!! And this is so distressing to poor Elmo that he does the unthinkable: He does swapsies-backsies and takes all his toys back!

This being Sesame Street, he learns that you can’t control how other people play pretend, but you can join in if you want to! And if you don’t want to, that’s ok, you can just play pretend your own way by yourself or with someone else who wants to play that way too. You can still be friends with people who play pretend differently than you (and aren’t being mean/harmful/etc, do not bad-faith-read this 🤨).

show: "This character is immortal. Watch as their entire destroyed body rebuilds itself via immortality." me when I have the chronic affliction: "Does immortality cure the chronic affliction? Do they come back together and the affliction is just fixed? Is that part of immortality healing?"

“Vanilla” the subjective experience can be caused by any one of dozens of aromatic organic compounds. The Vanilla Orchid seed pod (not a bean), when ripened and cured properly, contains over 200 aromatics, many of which contribute to the subjective experience of “Vanilla” to varying degrees. However, Vanilla Orchids are… well, Orchids, which means they’re precious little darlings and a pain in the ass to grow, hence the low supply of the pods. Ripe vanilla fruit accounts for less than 15% of all Vanilla consumed annually.

From whence the rest, you ask?

Enter Vanillin, so named because it is foremost of these compounds in producing the aroma and flavor of the vanilla experience. This tasty little aromatic is actually a metabolic intermediary in all sorts of plant metabolisms, including but not limited to most woody trees.

During the development of Industrial Paper manufacturing, during a step which involves taking the pulverized and pulped wood fibers and washing them of the various compounds a living tree needs but a sheet of paper does not, one of the results was a rich, brown, pleasant-smelling, organic spirit. It was discovered that Vanillin could be mass-produced from this substance, and so Artificial Vanilla was born, which makes up the remaining 5/6ths of the vanilla consumed worldwide each year.

See, here’s the thing. Humans, like most Animals, can’t smell things that have no relevancy to our lives, and there’s correlations between attraction and aversion to certain compound classes and the lived experiences of our Ancestors. Smell is a deeply chemical sense, and we wouldn’t find Vanilla pleasant unless that aroma had some sort of universal relevance to Human Survival. Our ancestral environment was riparian woodlands.

There’s Vanilla in decaying leaf litter.

There’s Vanilla in rich soil.

Old books smell good because one of the products of the decaying wood of the paper is Vanilla.

No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.

Freddie

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You know what you are so right... We have a bond, these 50 rats and I....

OH SHIT OH NO

WAIT