Rosie

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

me: let's stay reasonable, okay?

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway. In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.

Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.

This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.

Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.

If this seems harsh: There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour. Over fifty people lost their homes. Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.

The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this

-And there is! It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)

On one hand: FAR fewer fireworks parties this year!

- Only nine to last year's thirteen - three of them had the good sense to be firing their recreational explosives out over the local reservoir - That's far from foolproof - and really bad for the fish - also y'all are RIGHT NEXT to where the Bald Eagles are nesting - but congratulations on at least attempting some risk mitigation!

On the other hand.

I really didn't expect the interior of this 1989 home in Woodstock, NY. 3bds, 2ba, 3,530sqft, $2.2m.

Looks like a road goes under the house. It's the longest house I've ever seen.

Like. It's a really clever show. The first season is REALLY CLEVER. The twists and turns the first season take feel earned to me. I felt clever when I guessed what would happen, and delighted when they fooled me.

The premise is that a high school girl, Maddie, wakes up having died in the school boiler room. She is ghost trapped on school grounds, along with a group of other students and at least 1 teacher who have died on school grounds over the life of the school. The problem is, she doesn't remember dying, and there's no body. The other ghosts remember how they died. Their bodies were found. But not Maddie.

So after squirming around about it trying to escape school grounds and flailing about how this isn't right, she gets to business and begins to investigate her own death. She follows her friends and family as they appear at the school. The other ghosts help her. The living cannot see them...... except Maddie is standing beside her best friend, Simon, a few days after she woke up here, looking out the same window as him... and the focus of his eyes go from staring out the window, to staring at her reflection in the window. And he turns, and he sees her.

And that's just in the first episode!!! I can't really go into the whole plot without giving away a lot of it, but there are so many threads woven together, and the characters are all fantastic.

Look at them!!

The two on the left, Yuri and Charley, are dating and also I LOVE their individual arcs so much!! Charley is one of the younger ghosts in the school, having joined in the 90s after dying from anaphylaxis, and he has been stuck there watching the young boy he loved grow up and become a teacher at the school, unable to tell him everything he'd left unsaid. He's clever but also young in a lot of how he acts compared to the others, which is GREAT because even though they're all the same approximate age in looks, some of them have clearly been growing up more over time. Yuri is The Pottery Guy that everyone is convinced is Russian and speaks no English, because he minds his own business in the art room and never acknowledges what anyone says to him as if he understands. He is not Russian, he understands everyone. He just doesn't want to be included in the drama, which is the funniest thing to me when he just starts talking to them normally at one point to get them out of his hair, and IMMEDIATELY gets dragged in ass over teakettle.

I love them Back to the group photo: The boy in green sitting on the floor is Xavier and he was Maddie's bf until she died and found out some stuff, but he takes responsibility for his actions and accepts that she is just a friend now, and a good one. The boy in red next to him is Simon, and he's in love with Maddie and also her best friend, and they would literally die for each other but also she's not interested in him like that as far as I can tell. Maddie is in the middle there, and the boy in grey behind her is Wally, a ghost she falls for that has some great character growth over the course of the seasons, I did NOT really care for him at the start but I would put claws in anyone trying to hurt him now. The girl on the couch beside Maddie is Nicole, Maddie's other best friend, and she goes through some Shit because Simon doesn't tell her about Maddie being dead and Nicole thinks she's just missing and is desperate to find her. The girl behind Nicole is Claire, Maddie's ex best friend who got involved with Xavier before Maddie died, and goes through So Much Shit and becomes Nicole's best friend, helping her start standing up for herself and Being Herself instead of being in Maddie's shadow like she was in S1.

For the group photo again: The girl in black standing beside Claire is Rhonda, another ghost and one of the oldest, who is so sick of being dead and way too traumatized to move on. Sitting in front of her is Quinn, who joins the group after S1 to help solve the riddle of the school after Rhonda yells at them to WAKE UP from the endless looping of a stuck ghost, and they end up falling for Rhonda afterward. And YES Quinn is explicitly nonbinary.

I mean c'mon, look at them please

And basically none of that is really plot, and that's not even all the characters!!! but listen I LOVE the characters. I love them. And the plot is worth not spoiling.

The Team knocks out a security guard and steals their radio. The team mimic can perfectly replicate the knocked out guard’s voice. They get caught because they pronounced the name of the company correctly.

The Team disables an alarm. The only way to do this is to rip it out of the wall and disassemble it until it physically can’t make noise anymore. This very loud process is clearly heard by the posted security guard nearby, who rolls their eyes and text their supervisor that the logistics contractors are fooling with the alarms again.

The Team breaks into the facility at night. There they meet a single security guard who is chanting potential names for NPCs in their DnD campaign out loud while they do their patrols. They encounter a fire extinguisher. They pause in their chanting to check that it is properly charged and to apply a sticker that reads, “Anal use only”. This guy is disgustingly good at their job. There’s no way around it, they’re going to catch you. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve been had by someone who has a supply of stickers that say “Anal use only” and who unironically wanted to name their NPC shopkeep Mammogrammus.

The Team attempts to bribe a security guard. This is its own post but know there’s no way in hell that would work.

The Team breaks into the high security room and disables all the alarms. Security control sends several guards to investigate why there are no alarms going off.

The Team attempts to break into the high security room but can’t because it’s randomly decided not to let anyone at all in today.

The Team steals a keycard with “””””unlimited””””” access to the facility and gets caught because the computer system that manages keycards randomly revokes access for no reason.

Please, please, PLEASE.....

✧ Magic systems with actual consequences that aren't just "ooh I'm tired now." Like your wizard gets hiccups that turn into burps of flame for three days. Your necromancer's hair falls out in clumps. Your healer has to absorb a percentage of the pain they cure and spends evenings crying in the bath.

✧ Fantasy creatures that are just... kinda mid at their designated thing. Dragons who are afraid of heights. Vampires with a garlic intolerance that's more "lactose intolerant at a pizza party" than "instant death." Werewolves who transform but just become a really anxious medium-sized dog.

✧ Prophecies that are vague because the ancient oracle genuinely had terrible handwriting. Nobody can agree if it says "the chosen one" or "the chicken coop" and honestly both are equally possible at this point.

✧ Magic schools where students are failing because the curriculum is actually hard, not because they're the chosen one having drama. Let someone flunk Potions because they can't math the ratios. Academic probation exists in fantasy too.

✧ Dark Lords with the most mundane administrative problems. Yes, he's conquering the realm, but also the castle's plumbing is a nightmare and his generals keep submitting their expense reports late.

✧ Worldbuilding that remembers disabled people exist in fantasy settings too. No, not just "magically healed." I mean fantasy wheelchairs, accessibility spells, sign language variations, service dragons, the whole deal.

✧ Taverns that aren't just quest-dispensing machines. Sometimes the innkeeper is closed for a family emergency. Sometimes there's karaoke night and it's bad. Sometimes they're out of the stew because Greg ordered all of it.

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.