Romancing the Universe

@stickthisbig wish granted!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes."

It's surreal realizing that I'm living during the timeline of one of my favorite science fiction stories. Anyways, if you haven't read it, There Will Come Soft Rains is set today, August 4, 2026.

Here's where you can read it.

Here's where you can listen to Leonard Nimoy reading it.

And here's my favorite adaptation of it, the Soviet cartoon. It was recolored and remastered a couple of years ago, and if you turn on the captions you'll get the English translation as an option.

That said, these tags were what I needed to hear:

we're all gonna make it

hope is a weapon, by @mumblesplash (x)

well every time i've called, the new representative has been like "i'm so sorry, but there's no ticket by that number. i have no record of you ever calling about this. i'll start a ticket for you."

finally, the fifth time i nearly burst into tears of frustration and i said "i don't want you to start a ticket for me, because it will be the sixth ticket created for this same issue. every week, one of your colleagues tells me they'll create a a new ticket for me, and then nothing happens."

they said, "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing." and i was like i KNOW. but they doooooo what is happening.

finally i got transferred to a supervisor's supervisor.

if you've ever worked in online customer service, you know that when a customer calls with a problem, you create a "ticket" that puts that issue into the system. if you can't resolve it, it goes into a ticket queue, where other people with the ability to resolve it select it, put it into their personal working queue, and resolve it.

well after 30 minutes of searching, this supervisor tells me, dumbfounded, that she's discovered a completely unique queue she's never seen before, where my tickets have been going somehow. a pocket universe queue that no one has access to or can edit or select from, not even her. she has no idea what's happening. she's like "yes, here are all your tickets, and no one can open them or comment on them or resolve them.....this is crazy......" and it's JUST my tickets in there. no one else's. of tens of thousands of customers.

all professionalism fell by the wayside. i told her i've worked with those queues before and also found that totally wild. she was like "what the hell is going on...." and talked me through everything she was seeing and how gobsmacked she was. we were both like "this is one for the books truly"

tells me she's going to have to bring this up above herself because this is a really big error on like, a coding level, that she has no idea how to resolve. tells me she will personally call me back tomorrow to update me.

four days pass with no word.

i call customer service again. random agent. explain the entire situation, including that last bit.

agent says "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing. i'll have to start a ticket for you. rest assured, it will be resolved."

i said, "no it won't be. it never will be. because they're in the special queue."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake: