Canticles and Cantrips

One night, I was working my last hour of my shift covering the Customer Service desk, which meant when I wasn't busy, I was supposed to help clean up around the cash registers, including taking back items people changed their minds about at the checkout. Earlier, I had witnessed a kid carrying thos cute plushy toy. It was a brown and white hedgehog. The kid, at the checkout, saw a remote control car and he told his dad he qanted it. The dad told him, "The plushy or the car- you can't have both" (by the way, I respect boundaries with kids and parents sticking to their guns about it), and the kid picked the car.

So, I'm cleaning up, have less than an hour left of my shift, and I see the little plushy hedgehog. Somehow, he never got put back nor had anyone else seen him and decided to buy him. He was just sitting there, slumped to the side, unattended.

It's Christmas and I'm a sentimental old sap at heart. My brain starts replaying the scene from RUDOLPH where he's on the Island of Misfot Toys, and is told a toy is never truly happy until it is loved. I picked him up and quickly took him back to the bin with the plushies but... It was empty. He was literally the last plushy toy and my boss was about to wheel the bin out. We weren't getting any more toys till November, so that meant any toys left at this point needed to sell or they'd be sent to the dump.

I brought the little hedgehog to the front, figuring someone would see him with the candy, candles, & Christmas brick-a-brack, and fall in love with him. When I finished my shift, I went to ask my manager a question and as I passed the Christmas candle display - there he sat, the sad little slumped over hedgehog plushy. No one had bought him, or even moved him.

My manager, Phillip, saw me and the hedgehog. He asked how the hedgehog got there. I told him how I'd put him there when the bin got sent back, and he was the only plushy left. Philip had kids, I figured he'd probably get sentimental and buy it for his kids. Nope. He shrugged and said he'd send it back to be disposed of.

That night, I came home with a plushy hedgehog in my passenger seat. My mom saw him and just thought he was the cutest little hedgehog and asked what I wanted to do with him. I told her the story, then added I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with him.

My mom is a child psychiatrist, specializing in children with PTSD and brain damage that results in learning problems/issues with processing their emotions. She asked if she could have the plushy hedgehog (even offered to pay me for him, she didn't expect me to just give him over), so kids could hug him when they were upset in session.

Murphy, the plushy hedgehog that still slumps a little to the left when seated, has been hugged by hundreds of kids. Little girls have held him tight while explaining about bullies, little boys have held him tight while crying over their panic attacks, younger siblings have held him to whisper secrets while elder siblings and parents talk about self-soothing techniques, teenagers have hugged Murphy while talking about the worst day of their lives. Murphy has also been hugged by kids excitedly chatting about a new friend at school, a teen girl excited to be called by her name instead of her dead-name, little kids proudly saying they've mastered their ABCs, and even staff members who just need to come chat over a case they are having trouble with.

Every now and then, my mom brings Murphy home for a weekend. He gets washed (she calls it a Spa Weekend, to her coworkers, all of them laughing), dried, and sits outside with my mom in the sunshine to get aired out, then on Monday, they are back to work. Some kids even just ask to hold Murphy while they talk, no matter their mood or what they want to talk about. They just want to hug Murphy.

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

beta bro's entire life revolves around him cultivating a certain aesthetic and persona for himself. he lives in a small bachelor style apartment in a major urban city. he's got game bro magazines around the house, cheap katanas and shurikens mounted on the walls, random skateboards on the kitchen counter. instead of tables he has wooden boards on top of cinderblock stacks and a shitty futon to crash on even though he's got the money for a loudspeaker system, expensive DJing equipment, some pretty high tech computers, a giant TV and a shit ton of gaming consoles to go with it. he performs a nonchalant "ironic" apathy towards everything, which he uses to prevent himself or dave from taking things too seriously (avoiding any discussion verging on seriousness or responsibility). he was in his 30's when sburb started, according to dave, which makes him in his 20's when he picked up dave off a dead horse after he fell out of the sky. we can also assume he didn't really grow up with any parents either, since he was born the same way himself, and no foster parents ever seem to be mentioned by the text. he might have done what alpha!dirk did and simply raised himself.

beta!bro is an adult stuck in a state of permanent adolescence. he indulges in crappy junk food and plays sick videogames and gets into daily sword fights on the rooftop (which he always wins). he covers his apartment in weird fetish porn in the form of pinup posters on the walls. the guy can kind of sew but his stitches are pretty shitty from what we've seen, and he either doesn't care to or doesn't know how to cook, seeing as how the fridge is filled with swords and the kitchen doesn't seem to be used at all except for the microwave, which is filled with smuppets.

dave said that he felt that bro hated him. in a way, i bet he did. because when dave entered his life, he suddenly had an actual responsibility he had to take care of. he suddenly had some greater purpose than himself to serve. but calling himself a dad basically would cement that responsibility onto him. there are duties, expectations, and a certain sense of maturity that comes with being a dad. you have to give up a bit of yourself as a father. you have to put someone constantly before yourself. so he decided to stick with being "bro" instead. because less is expected of you as a brother. it's not as official. instead of recognizing dave as a child with needs, he can treat him as a peer at the same level as he is (sharing the responsibility of "raising" and taking care of dave between them, and also giving a pass to bro's immaturity and allowing him to put himself at the same priority as dave). and he turned raising dave into some sick, fun game for himself (but never really got rid of that resentment). he pranks him and tries to creep him out and plays mind games and treats him like shit 'cause he can. he hurts him and throws him down the stairs and doesn't feel a slice of remorse. the guy even tried to throw his kid off a roof at some point. he "helps" him start the game, sure, but after dave enters the medium he treats his duty as done and he basically fucks off and does his own separate thing and fights monsters and looks cool. he dies like a badass and leaves dave to process everything that he's done to him instead of being left to see the consequences of his own actions.

As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.

He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.

He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.