PandaCat says hi!

When you're looking for instructions online, it usually looks like this:

Internet hobbyist: Here are all the supplies you need to buy on your next trip to the craft store so you can keep up with the latest trends.

Working professional: Here are the complicated terms explaining the history of this craft for the past five-thousand years, and all the techniques and expensive equipment that you'll need so your product will survive the heat death of the universe.

me, an elder fandom veteran, suddenly having anne rice flashbacks:

no.

NO.

starting to rock back and fourth.

you do not understand.

you were born into an age of peace. i was there Gandalf. i was there three thousand years ago. i remember the cease and desists. i remember authors hunting fanfic writers for sport. i remember when every fic opened with a disclaimer because we genuinely thought it might protect us.

we do not charge money for the copyrighted gay wizard stories.

do not tempt fate youngling.

step away from the paywall.

that is how you summon the ancient evils.

Like, aquiring a headache during the day? Fair, understandable, many things to cause that

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

anyway we like pacing around together and ranting in the attic but sometimes instead of pacing one of us will just hang on the pole and spin, and the other person will watch on the beanbag, which makes for these really goofy conversations where the person on the bag will say something that gets the other persons goat, such as, hypothetically, that xylophones do not belong in rock music, and then the other person will go on a tirade about this, but they'll actually only be facing the Hot Take Speaker half of the time, what because of the pole, so the response will sound something like

I can't believe

you would even suggest such

a stupid opinion. You've

been to a Danny Elfman

concert! How can you

have heard Oingo Boingo

live and say with a straight face

that they alone do not justify

rock and roll xylophones

and then that person will continue until they get too dizzy, then they'll get off the pole, and by unspoken agreement, the person on the bag will get up and trade places with them to deliver their rebuttal while also spinning and it just creates this sort of crazy strip-court lawyers debating absolute nonsense for no reason kind of vibe that frankly just really does it for us.

Then I called my wife to be like, “Look, there was something by the dumpster and it was unacceptable to leave it there—“

“The painting.”

“…yes.”

“Okay but like. Where did you put it? Because the painting in question was massive.

“The garage. I promise I’ll sell it, but it has brushstrokes! It’s not a print, someone painted this!”

“I know. I knew as soon as I saw it that you’d do this. I’m not mad.”