you lost the game

Tobias is the central tragic figure of the animorphs, even if he doesn't get as many books. He's literally so chosen one coded. He's a suicidal trans bird. He's full of hope for humanity. He is deeply alienated from his own humanity. He survived abuse and neglect. His dad's a fucking alien prince. He saved a different alien species from extinction, and became the namesake of their first free leader in like, three generations. God talks to him personally and doesn't do anything that he wants. He's the most character of all time. He's just like me for real. No one is doing it like him.

And Rachel!!!! Girl has the best character arc of the entire book series (outside the Hork Bajir Chronicles but I digress). She's a princess. She's a monster. She's the pretty one. She beat a man to death with her own severed arm. She sacrificed herself for humanity. She self-destructively followed orders to her own demise. She almost gave up her human life and became a cat forever just to comfort a crying friend. She's Satan's most specialist favorite teenager. And she was a Packard Award winning student to boot!

But together, they form the messiest, most dysfunctional situationship that any middle schooler ever read about. They love each other. They flirt with other people (or birds). Rachel cared about Tobias when everyone else thought he was some weirdo who would never amount to anything. She also wants him to stop living as his authentic self because it's inconvenient to her. Tobias thinks that Rachel is the most beautiful creature ever to grace the earth. He also enables her most self-destructive tendencies and romanticizes her for being the monster she doesn't want to become. He knows that she loves him no matter what. He was mortified that she saw him eating roadkill, and fears her judgement like death itself. She celebrates his birthday with him, even though he forgot when his birthday even was. She also, and I cannot stress this enough, thinks that he should leave the fight that gives him his only living purpose and stop living in the body that he's chosen for himself because she doesn't know how to be a bird's girlfriend (and like, fair. Not a normal situation tbh). They are doomed by the narrative. Together ❤️

Jungle Jim's International Market profiled in regional press, late October 2025

So there's this grocery store in Fairfield, Ohio, Jungle Jim's, six and a half acres under one roof, animatronic Elvis at the entrance, fake monorail that doesn't go anywhere, the whole bit, and every couple years it gets rediscovered by someone who treats it as a piece of pure American kitsch, the kind of thing you can write 800 words about without ever mentioning that the actual store is one of the largest international grocery operations in the United States and exists for reasons that go well beyond the Disneyland-on-acid frontage.

Jim Bonaminio opened the original stand in 1971, produce, that's it, the way every one of these places started, and the move from roadside fruit stand to international superstore happened because Cincinnati in the 70s and 80s was absorbing exactly the kind of population that the conventional supermarket supply chain wasn't set up to feed. Appalachian whites coming up the Hillbilly Highway, sure, but also (and this is the part nobody writes about) a substantial Indian population tied to P&G's R&D operation, a Chinese and Vietnamese wave post-1975, an Eastern European bump after the Wall came down, the Bhutanese-Nepali resettlement in the 2000s, Cincinnati for whatever reason became one of the major secondary destinations for refugee placement in the Midwest, which is its own whole infrastructure story (the role of Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services as de facto State Department contractors in the resettlement system being one of those things that nobody talks about because the people doing the talking would rather pretend the demographics happened spontaneously), and these populations all needed food, specifically food that Kroger was not stocking in 1985, and Bonaminio figured out before basically anyone in regional grocery that the play, instead of competing with Kroger on price, was to occupy the niche Kroger wouldn't touch because it required actually knowing things, like, ordering "Asian groceries" from Sysco doesn't cut it; somebody on staff has to know the difference between Thai and Vietnamese fish sauce, has to know that different South Asian communities want different specific varieties of rice and won't substitute, has to maintain relationships with importers who themselves maintain relationships with people in Guangzhou and Mumbai and Tirana, and the labor costs of knowing things are the actual moat.

The animatronic Elvis is functioning as camouflage.

And I mean it, the kitsch is camouflage that pays the rent, because the kitsch is what allows the place to be marketable to the white suburban Cincinnatians who come in to buy weird beer and Instagram the Campbell's Soup display, which generates the foot traffic that subsidizes the eight-thousand-SKU international operation that the actual immigrant communities depend on, and without the suburban tourist trade the international section would have to be priced like a specialty store rather than a grocery store, which would price out the populations it was built to serve, so the Elvis is the thing the rest of the store is hanging off of, it's the same trick as a Cracker Barrel where the front-of-house "country store" is subsidizing the restaurant by getting the bus tour to drop another forty bucks on candle holders, in inverted form: at Jungle Jim's the front-of-house tourism is subsidizing the back-of-house grocery operation that is the operative business.

And the regional press cannot see this, will not see this, every single profile of the place is "wow, what a wacky destination, look at the giant fiberglass animals, the founder rides a Harley, the bathrooms look like Porta-Potties as a joke", they cannot write the story where the joke bathrooms exist because they pull the Yelp review traffic that pays for the labor costs of stocking eleven varieties of Filipino vinegar, because to write that story you'd have to write about who actually shops there on a weekday afternoon, a demographic that sits outside the one the regional press writes for or about.

The Fairfield location, incidentally, sits not far from the old Fisher Body Fairfield plant, which closed in the early 90s, same era the international operation was scaling, so you've got the Rust Belt deindustrialization story and the immigration absorption story and the experiential-retail story all colliding in one parking lot, and the way the place gets covered is "haha, monorail."

does your job involve creative writing?

Yes and no. I teach college, specifically psychology, so I do spend a lot of time writing and reading as part of my job (it's probably my favorite part) but I'm not a magazine writer or anything. Also depends on how you define "creative," since science writing has to be strictly nonfiction or else Fraud and Bad and Prison.

Or did you take creative writing in college or something?

Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.

Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)

I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)

YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)

The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)

The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)

The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)

It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)

Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???

To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)

okay just some background. the megamorphs books consist of four companion books to the main animorphs series, and unlike most of the main series, in which each book is told from the perspective of one of the animorphs, megamorphs books are told from the perspectives of all of them. each of them get a few chapters in each book to tell their side of the story.

in the main series, there's a "narration cycle," in which the perspective characters' books go in a specific order. Jake -> Rachel -> Tobias/Ax -> Cassie -> Marco. this is true for most of the series. megamorphs books don't have a narration cycle; rather, the person most relevant to the story at that time is the one to narrate it. it's definitely a smart way to write it. it also leads to unequal perspective distribution, which I'm not dunking on at all — I actually think that in some cases it's funny.

percentages/statistics of each book's character distribution (and with all four books together) under the cut!